Slavoj Zizek - Talk At Princeton With Cornel West
Interview · yournameislimitless ·
2024-03-21 · 2:18:10 · 18,997 words
ideologyreligion-theologypsychoanalysiscapitalismhegel-dialecticssubjectivityphilosophy-generalcinema-art-culturecommunism-socialismeveryday-life
Žižek delivers a Princeton lecture arguing that contemporary ideology functions through a paradox of decentered belief: people practice belief in their social acts while publicly disavowing it, and the site of ideological illusion is not consciousness but material social exchange, Marx's commodity fetishism. He extends this to show that both postmodern cynicism and religious fundamentalism share a pathological decline of the symbolic function, and argues for Christianity's unique value as the one religion in which God himself utters the atheist cry of abandonment on the cross. A response by Cornel West and a Q&A explore German idealism's traumatic core of subjectivity, Kierkegaard's comedic reading of incarnation, the Paulinian community as emancipatory third logic, and Christianity as anti-wisdom in contrast to pagan cosmic-justice ethics.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “the chicken in you”
Vivid phrase for the unconscious or objectified dimension of belief that persists after conscious conviction has changed, drawn from the joke of the cured patient who still fears the chicken.
The cynical attitude of playing the ideological game with fingers crossed, which today's ideology actually requires from its subjects in order to function smoothly, illustrated by Buddhist non-attachment enabling capitalist participation.
Žižek stresses Marx's formula 'they do not know it but they are doing it': ideology is not a mistaken belief about reality but an illusion operative in what people do, embodied in social exchange rather than in individual consciousness.
as “perspective of the final judgment”
Žižek's name for the theological structure within Stalinist Communism: present horrors are justified by a future moment of totalizing historical reckoning when every act will receive its proper meaning.
The Rousseau-Nietzsche concept of envy-driven desire to destroy the other's enjoyment rather than pursue one's own satisfaction, Žižek uses it to argue that Rawlsian liberal justice catastrophically ignores this logic.
Rousseau's concept that Žižek invokes to distinguish mere self-interest (benign) from the pathological desire to destroy the other's enjoyment even at the cost of one's own, the real engine of social evil and the blind spot of Rawlsian justice.
For Žižek following Marx, the illusion does not reside in people mistaking ordinary objects for magical ones but in social reality itself: people act as if commodities possess inherent value even while knowing this is a social construction.
as “ideology in acts”
Žižek's reformulation of ideology: illusion does not reside in false conscious beliefs but in the social exchange itself, people act as if fetishized commodities have inherent value even while knowing intellectually that value is a social relation.
as “objectified belief”
Belief that functions through material social acts and institutional practices even when consciously disavowed; the locus of belief is not the mind but behavior itself.
Žižek's diagnosis of a shared pathology in which both postmodern cynics and religious fundamentalists fail to take a fiction seriously as fiction; cynics reduce belief to empty ritual, fundamentalists inflate it into literal positive knowledge.
as “institutional unconscious”
A set of implicit presuppositions, desires, and beliefs inscribed into an institution's logic and unwritten rules, not in any individual's psyche, used here to explain Catholic pedophilia scandals as structural rather than accidental.
For Hegel, and Žižek insists on a materialist reading, self-consciousness is not individual inner awareness but reflexive registration through public symbolic acts: the state ritual enacts the state's self-consciousness even when all participants are thinking about private affairs.
Žižek sides with Derrida against Foucault: the Cartesian Cogito contains a trans-historical moment of madness, not a historical exclusion of unreason but an excessive, unstable kernel that German idealism then made explicit.
Schelling's and Hegel's term for the irrational, excessive dark core at the heart of subjectivity, the shift from Enlightenment (darkness invades from outside) to German idealism (darkness is the very core of the subject).
as “Paulinian materialist”
Žižek's self-description: a materialism that takes seriously the formal logic of Paul's egalitarian community of believers as an answer to historical deadlocks, without theological commitments.
The Protestant-Christian notion that salvation comes from outside, not from self-discovery or self-realization; Žižek invokes it against New Age authenticity discourses and in favor of accepting one's constitutive split.
as “the symbolic function”
The collective capacity to take a fiction seriously as fiction, what Žižek calls 'the minimum of civilization'; sustained by a knowing performative pretense (you lie sincerely) that is neither hypocrisy nor literal belief.
as “Christianity as anti-wisdom”
Žižek's characterization of Christianity as uniquely refusing the pagan ethics of cosmic balance and resignation; where all other traditions converge on wisdom (every loss is compensated), Christianity insists that truth is partial and imbalanced.
The psychoanalytic dynamic illustrated by Being There: a subject is misperceived as wise or authoritative because of the structural place they occupy, and inadvertently fulfills the role projected onto them by others.
Stories he reaches for 7
A visitor finds a horseshoe above Bohr's door and asks if he believes in superstition. Bohr replies he does not believe in it, but keeps it because he was told it works even if you don't believe in it.
“Of course I'm not an idiot, of course I do not believe in it. But I have it because I was told that it works also if you don't believe in it.”
Žižek argues that the function of canned TV laughter is not to make you laugh but to relieve you of the duty to laugh. After the show, you feel relieved as if you had laughed, the TV laughed for you and it worked.
“the TV laughed for you and it worked as if you did it”
In old Yugoslavia each ethnic group was identified by a mock-racist trait; cross-ethnic dirty jokes circulated as a mode of solidarity rather than racism. When ethnic tensions rose in the early 1980s the jokes disappeared, which Žižek reads as proof they were integrative, not racist.
“the moment we lost this, it was war”
A mental patient is cured of believing he is a grain of corn and released, but immediately returns trembling, there is a chicken outside. When told he knows he is not a grain, he replies: 'Of course I know that, but does the chicken know?' Žižek applies this to psychoanalysis, commodity fetishism, and God.
“Of course I know that, but does the chicken know?”
Žižek argues a true Christian should be horrified at the prospect of the Turin Shroud being proven authentic, because the first thought that follows would be: let's check the DNA to find out who the father really was.
“the first evil idea that comes to your mind is 'Let's look at the DNA then see who really is the father'”
In Wharton's story (and Scorsese's film) the wife (Winona Ryder) is perceived as naive about her husband's affair with Countess Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), but we learn she knew all along and pretended not to, Žižek calls this 'the innocence' and says this mode is disappearing today.
“She knew it all the time, she just pretended not to know. This is the innocence.”
Žižek cites Anne Frank's diary passage asserting belief in the fundamental divine goodness of every human person despite the Nazi horrors as exemplifying the structure of authentic belief: a crazy wager made in spite of all evidence.
“In spite of all the horrors that the Germans are doing, I still believe in essential divine goodness of every human person.”
Works invoked 22
Capital book
Marx's Capital, specifically the chapter on commodity fetishism, is quoted at length ('A commodity appears at first sight...'); central to Žižek's argument about ideology residing in social practice rather than in beliefs.
Philosophy of Right book
Hegel's text, including unpublished notes, cited for the materialist thesis that a state parade enacts the state's self-consciousness even when all participants are thinking about private affairs.
Parsifal opera
Mentioned as an example of postmodern over-historicization: Wagner's Parsifal is decoded as syphilis, contextualized to prove a Wagner-Hitler connection, while Nietzsche is inexplicably exempt from similar treatment.
Tristan und Isolde opera
Wagner's opera, specifically Act III where the mortally wounded Tristan sings for 40 minutes, is used as an analogy for the North Korean war hero text: both are operatic performances not meant to be taken literally.
Mein Kampf book
Read as evidence that Hitler's problem with Jews was that he considered himself inferior to them, illustrating Žižek's thesis that fundamentalist resentment conceals internalized inferiority.
Orthodoxy book
Chesterton's Orthodoxy is extensively quoted for the claim that at the cry of dereliction on the cross God was forsaken by God, the unique moment in Christianity where God appears to be an atheist.
The Fragile Absolute book
Žižek's own book, mentioned by Cornel West as a key text asking 'Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?'
The Age of Innocence film
Wharton's story (Scorsese's film); Žižek uses the wife's knowing pretense not to know about the husband's affair as the paradigm of the symbolic function, a sincere performative that is neither hypocrisy nor ignorance, and which is disappearing today.
Mel Gibson's film is called 'a pagan film' for missing the comedic gap of incarnation; it treats the Crucifixion as straightforward suffering spectacle rather than as the comic-monstrous event Kierkegaard describes.
Paul Veyne's study arguing Greek mythological belief was neither literal nor merely metaphorical; cited by Žižek to support his account of sincere performative belief and ritual politeness.
Leap of Faith film
Steve Martin film about a con artist faith healer who accidentally performs a real miracle and is shattered; used to illustrate that the true shock is discovering belief really works, not performing it cynically.
Being There film
Peter Sellers film about a gardener misperceived as wise through transference; Žižek admires that it resists making him warmly human, he remains monstrous to the end, which is more honest about how transference works.
Graham Greene's story (also a film with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore) about a non-believer shocked by a miracle; Žižek finds Greene's angle 'too naive' and prefers the reverse scenario.
History of Madness book
Foucault's text on the historical exclusion of madness; Žižek sides with Derrida against Foucault in the famous debate, arguing Derrida correctly identified a trans-historical kernel of madness in the Cogito.
A recent collection cited for Kierkegaard's vision of Christianity as comedy, not Dante's comedy (ends well) but the radical comedy of incarnation as a monstrous gap between divine expectation and ordinary flesh.
Documentary by Alexander Oey pairing economists on global finance with Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche; Žižek uses it as the launching pad for his critique of Buddhist ontology as virtual capitalism's perfect ideology.
Kierkegaard's text cited for the paradox that our deepest anxiety is not death but immortality; we most easily accept being a piece of dust, while the prospect of eternal existence is what is truly horrifying.
Waiting for Godot play
Beckett's play mentioned by Cornel West as exemplifying the Saturday-after-Good-Friday terrain of not knowing if Easter is coming, the space of genuine atheist uncertainty.
Anne Frank's diary, cited for the passage asserting belief in fundamental human goodness despite Nazi horrors, the paradigm of a crazy counter-factual wager, which Žižek argues is the structure of all authentic belief.
The lesser-known third part of Hegel's Encyclopedia, specifically the Anthropology section, cited for Hegel's account of how madness is inherent in the emergence of mind from animal feeling, civilization as a desperate attempt to contain this madness.
The Myth of Sisyphus book
Camus's work offering absurdist wisdom (eternal striving without hope of attainment); Žižek criticizes it as a philosophy of resignation that exemplifies the 'wisdom' he finds repellent.
Schelling's 1809 treatise, described by West (endorsed by Žižek) as the text that highlights the traumatic, monstrous core of the modern subject and shattered older German idealism before Hegel could respond.
People invoked 30
Mel Gibson negative
His Passion of the Christ is called 'a pagan film' because it misses the joke of Christianity, the comedic gap between divine expectation and ordinary human flesh; Žižek also notes its character as 'the greatest monument to Southern California sado-mazo gay community.'
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as 'my Slovene-Lacanian party member colleague'; Žižek cites her forthcoming book on Hegel and comedy for extending the chicken-joke structure to God himself.
His novels (The End of the Affair) focus on non-believers shattered by miracles; Žižek calls him 'too naive' because the real shock is the opposite, the believer (or fake healer) discovering belief really works.
Blaise Pascal positive
Pascal's 'fake it till you make it' theology (kneel and belief will come) is invoked as foundational, then reversed: Žižek argues the correct formula is 'kneel down and you will make another believe for you', ritual externalizes belief rather than internalizing it.
Jacques Derrida positive
Žižek endorses Derrida's position in the Cogito debate: the trans-historical moment of madness is in the very core of subjectivity, which German idealism subsequently exploded.
Žižek says 'I hate Friedrich Hayek' but grants him one correct observation: the contingency of market success/failure allows people to perceive their outcomes as undeserved, making inequality psychologically bearable.
Jacques Lacan positive
The unconscious is invoked as 'the chicken in you', the dimension of belief that persists after conscious re-education; transference is illustrated through Being There; psychoanalysis is described as the practice of convincing the unconscious.
John Rawls negative
His theory of justice is called 'catastrophically wrong' because it works only by suspending envy and ressentiment; the veil of ignorance produces a formula for disaster once real desire is introduced.
Tenzin Gyatso negative
Cited as exemplifying the internalization of Western standards: he justifies Tibetan Buddhism in terms of Western utilitarian pursuit of happiness and avoidance of pain, showing he has already accepted the framework he purports to offer an alternative to.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Called 'my preferred Catholic theologian'; Žižek extensively quotes his Orthodoxy on the unique Christian moment when God himself utters the atheist cry, and on God being the only divinity who has himself been in revolt.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Cited as exemplary of the postmodern selective historicization that over-contextualizes Wagner while stripping Nietzsche of his political-historical specificity.
Toussaint Louverture positive
Mentioned briefly as an example of the crazy counter-factual wager at work in radical emancipatory political projects, the Haitian Revolution as an instance of belief that acted against all evidence.
Ágnes Heller positive
Hungarian philosopher and Lukács pupil; Žižek relays her testimony from Auschwitz about displaced belief, the myth of the ethical other who remained good, and the collapse that followed discovering this other did not exist.
Called 'the best' detective novelist; mentioned in the context of a publisher's humanizing author bio ('In her free time, Miss Highsmith is gardening and taking care of her cats') which Žižek reads as the ideological production of a private-self illusion.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited approvingly on the Paulinian community of believers as a third logic of social organization beyond Roman hedonist individualism and Jewish traditional community.
Donald Davidson negative
His standard theory of rational intentional action (beliefs + desires) is criticized for making suicide terrorists look like 'ridiculous idiots' who literally believe in the promised virgins in paradise, it imposes a Western rationalist framework that misrepresents the structure of their acts.
Albert Camus negative
The Myth of Sisyphus is criticized as too close to a wisdom of resignation: accept that you will never attain the goal but keep trying. Žižek has a genetic aversion to wisdom as such.
Michel Foucault negative
Despite 'extreme finesse,' Žižek sides with Derrida against Foucault in the Cogito/History of Madness debate: Foucault historicizes madness as externally excluded from reason, while Derrida correctly locates a trans-historical moment of madness within the Cogito itself.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
His Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom is described (by West, endorsed by Žižek) as making the traumatic, monstrous core of the modern subject central; together with Hegel he develops the Night of the World concept for the irrational kernel of subjectivity.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Invoked on the comedic structure of incarnation (small dog where a king was expected), on the mask as more authentic than the 'true self,' and on the Sickness Unto Death's claim that our deepest anxiety is actually the fear of immortality, not death.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau positive
Invoked approvingly for the distinction between mere egotism (benign, easily moralizable) and the pathological amour propre (envy, wishing to destroy the other's enjoyment), the real ground of evil ignored by utilitarian and liberal theories.
Niels Bohr positive
Described as 'very intelligent also in theological matters'; the horseshoe anecdote illustrates objectified belief; his reply to Einstein ('Don't tell God what to do') is called 'the correct answer.'
Cornel West positive
Described as Žižek's 'good friend'; they share a basic orientation combining progressive political engagement with a positive appropriation of religious topics; West's response highlights Žižek's philosophical old-fashionedness and the centrality of the traumatic in his work.
Paul Veyne positive
His Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths? is invoked to illustrate the non-literal, non-metaphorical register of ancient belief, close to ritual sincerity, like a politeness formula.
Ludwig Feuerbach negative
His reading of the Incarnation, God becomes man, therefore humanity is the truth of God, is called 'simplistic and stupid'; Žižek totally rejects this anthropological reduction.
Karl Marx positive
Extensively invoked on commodity fetishism; Žižek argues Marx should still be read because his theory of commodity fetishism correctly locates ideological illusion in social reality rather than in consciousness.
Paul the Apostle positive
The Paulinian community of believers living in emergency time is cited as offering a third social logic beyond Roman individualist hedonism and Jewish traditional hierarchy, a model for emancipatory politics.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central reference throughout: on self-consciousness as reflexive social registration rather than individual awareness; on the state as self-consciousness of the people; on madness as inherent in the emergence of mind (Encyclopedia, Philosophy of Spirit); and his productive Freudian slip on the filioque which Žižek uses to argue what dies on the cross is God the Father, not the Son.
Friedrich Nietzsche negative
Žižek criticizes postmodernists (e.g., Deleuze) for selectively de-historicizing Nietzsche while over-historicizing Wagner; Nietzsche's reactionary politics, his nightmare of the Paris Commune as slave rebellion, are conveniently forgotten.
Mentioned only via his 'God does not play dice' remark, which Žižek invokes to introduce Bohr's rejoinder ('Don't tell God what to do') as the more correct theological position.
What it argues
decentered and objectified beliefcommodity fetishism as ideology in social practiceBuddhist ontology as virtual capitalism's perfect ideologydecline of the symbolic function shared by cynicism and fundamentalismChristian atheism: God's moment of self-abandonment on the crossanti-wisdom and the partiality of truththe Paulinian community as emancipatory third logic beyond liberalism and tradition
Dialectical moves 10
“The true site of ideological illusion is not in what people think but in what they do—they know very well, but they are still doing it.”
Ideology operates at the level of social practice and exchange, not at the level of conscious belief, so critique must target how reality is structured, not how people think about it.
“To really believe you have to put up an atheist front; to be skeptical you have to superficially appear as religious.”
Authentic belief and authentic skepticism both require their opposite as a mask, belief has become structurally decentered so that its true location is never where it appears.
“Far from being what makes capitalism intolerable, the very injustice of capitalism is precisely what makes it palpable for the majority.”
The perceived arbitrariness of market outcomes allows people to disclaim personal responsibility for failure, thereby rendering inequality bearable, justice itself would be more oppressive.
“The fundamentalists, who appear to believe most fervently, have already betrayed religion—for them faith is simply positive knowledge, not an existential wager.”
Apparent excess of belief is actually its disappearance; the most overtly religious position is the one from which authentic belief has been most thoroughly evacuated.
“Christianity, far from being opposed to atheism, is the only religion in which God himself seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”
The cry of dereliction on the cross is not man's alienation from God but God's alienation from himself, atheism is internal to the divine, not its external negation.
“The gap that separates man from God is transposed into God himself—it becomes part of divinity itself.”
Rather than Christianity offering reunion with God, it reveals that the very rupture between human and divine is inscribed within the divine, the problem turns into its own solution.
“Buddhism appears to critique capitalist attachment but is actually virtual capitalism's perfect ideology—it enables participation in the game with inner distance.”
The apparent counter-culture of non-attachment is structurally identical to the cynical inner distance that late capitalism requires of its subjects.
“The problem with Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is not that we consider them inferior—it is that they secretly consider themselves inferior.”
The apparent assertion of cultural superiority masks an internalization of Western standards; fundamentalism is not cultural difference but its paradoxical collapse.
“Christianity is the religion of anti-wisdom: truth is not holistic balance but partial, one-sided, imbalanced.”
Against all pagan ethics of cosmic restoration and resignation, Christianity insists that the universe can remain thrown off-balance, truth takes sides.
“What we conventionally call atheism is usually a disavowed belief; what looks like fervent religious belief is often the disappearance of authentic faith.”
The apparent opposition between belief and non-belief is reversed: real atheists are rare, and ostensibly devout fundamentalists have replaced faith with certainty, which is its negation.
Claims 17
asserts
Buddhist ontology of non-substantial reality is the perfect ideology for virtual capitalism because it licenses inner distance and non-attachment while fully participating in the speculative game.Buddhism and capitalism
asserts
The site of commodity fetishism is not people's conscious beliefs but social reality itself: the illusion is operative in what people do, not in what they think.commodity fetishism and ideology
asserts
Today ideology must not be taken seriously by its subjects in order to function; official cynical distance is itself the ideological operation.contemporary ideology
asserts
Fundamentalism is not a threat to secular scientific knowledge but to belief itself: fundamentalists treat articles of faith as positive factual knowledge rather than as an existential wager.religious fundamentalism
asserts
Islamic fundamentalist terrorists do not act from a sense of superiority; they secretly consider themselves inferior and have already internalized the Western standards against which they revolt.fundamentalist terrorism
asserts
Rawls' theory of justice is catastrophically wrong because it works only by suspending envy and ressentiment, which are in fact the dominant engines of social desire.Rawlsian justice
asserts
Capitalism is tolerable not because it is just but because of its very injustice: the contingency of market outcomes allows people to experience failure as undeserved rather than a mark of their own inadequacy.capitalism and social acceptance
asserts
Christianity is unique among world religions in that God himself utters the atheist cry—at the moment of 'Father, why hast thou forsaken me?' God is abandoned by God.Christianity and atheism
asserts
The gap between man and God is not overcome in Christ but is transposed into God himself; division is internal to divinity.Christology and the Trinity
asserts
Both postmodern cynics and fundamentalists have abandoned the symbolic function: cynics practice hollow ritual, fundamentalists replace faith with literal knowledge—they share the same pathology.fundamentalism and cynicism
asserts
Stalinist Communism is deeply religious in its structure: it operates through the theological 'perspective of the final judgment,' by which present horrors are deferred to a future moment of total historical reckoning.Stalinist Communism
asserts
Catholic pedophilia scandals are not accidents of individual priests' pathology but expressions of the institutional unconscious—obscene unwritten rules inscribed in the logic of the institution itself.Catholic institutional unconscious
asserts
The most elementary ideological statement today is 'I am not just a slave of ideology, I am also a human person'—this minimal distance is itself the purest form of ideological operation.cynical ideology and minimal distance
asserts
Ancient Greek belief in myths was neither literal nor merely metaphorical but functioned like sincere ritual politeness—a performative register in which one lies sincerely without hypocrisy.ancient Greek belief and myth
rejects
The Feuerbach reading of Christianity—God becomes man, meaning humanity is the truth of God—is simply wrong; what the Incarnation and the cross enact is a split internal to God, not a reduction of the divine to the human.Feuerbach's reading of Christianity
rejects
Camus's position of striving for unattainable knowledge (Sisyphus) is too close to wisdom of resignation, which Christianity and authentic politics must reject.Camus and absurdism
asserts
Radical emancipatory politics requires the same structure of crazy counter-factual wager as authentic belief: 'in spite of all evidence, I choose to affirm equality and dignity.'emancipatory politics and belief
Quotes 15
“This man looks as if he believes, he acts as if he believes, but this shouldn't deceive you, he really believes.”Slavoj Žižek · the shock of genuine belief in a cynical age
“I know that God doesn't exist... but does God know it, that he doesn't exist?”Slavoj Žižek · objectified belief surviving conscious disavowal
“Of course I'm not an idiot, of course I do not believe in it. But I have it because I was told that it works also if you don't believe in it.”Slavoj Žižek · the horseshoe principle: objectified belief
“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious trivial thing, but its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”Slavoj Žižek · Marx on commodity fetishism as theological structure
“They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation, only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”Slavoj Žižek · Chesterton on Christianity's unique atheist moment
“When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion but at the cry from the cross, the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.”Slavoj Žižek · Chesterton on the dereliction cry as the pivotal Christian moment
“today for an ideology in order to function, it must not be taken seriously by its subjects”Slavoj Žižek · cynical distance as contemporary ideological requirement
“the most elementary ideological statement is the statement 'But I'm not just a slave of ideology, I'm also a human person, there is something more in me'”Slavoj Žižek · minimal subjective distance as ideology's purest expression
“No wonder such Buddhism can function as the perfect ideology of today's virtual capitalism. It allows us to participate in the capitalist game with an inner distance, with our fingers crossed as it were.”Slavoj Žižek · Buddhist non-attachment as capitalist ideology
“Truth is partial. Truth is one-sided. Truth is imbalance.”Slavoj Žižek · Christian anti-wisdom versus pagan holistic ethics
“the illusion is not in what people think but in what they do”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as embedded in social practice, not consciousness
“If it were to be just, it would explode long ago. What makes it palpable is its very injustice and that we know that it's unjust.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism's injustice as condition of its social acceptance
“the problem with so-called fundamentalist terrorist is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior”Slavoj Žižek · fundamentalism as internalized inferiority, not cultural pride
“Christianity is for me the religion of anti-wisdom”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity's refusal of pagan wisdom and resignation
“In his free time, Professor Žižek is surfing the internet for child pornography and teaching his son to pull out legs of spiders”Slavoj Žižek · mock author bio as exposure of the humanizing-distance ideological trick
Transcript 37 turns
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Yeah, yeah. Good evening. My name is Andrea Sandy-Jones and I'd like to welcome you all here this evening. We'd like to thank our sponsors: the Center for the Study of Religion, the Council of the Humanities, the Departments of Anthropology, Comparative Literature, English, German, Religion, and Slavic Languages and Literature, the Graduate School, the Program in Gender and Sexuality, American Studies, European Cultural Studies, the Media and Modernity colloquium, the School of Architecture, and the University Center for Human Values. This event is the first in a two-part series, the second of which will feature Alain Badiou and Cornel West and will take place next March 28th at PM here in McCosh Please check our website at www.princeton.edu/~religion/subject-ideology for more information. And without further ado, I'd like to present the chair of this evening's discussion, Thomas Levin. He is a professor in the German Department and the Center for Media and Modernity and a philosopher, critic, curator, and theorist of technology. He is the professor introducing our two guests, Slavoj Žižek and Cornel
Yeah, yeah. Good evening. My name is Andrea Sandy-Jones and I'd like to welcome you all here this evening. We'd like to thank our sponsors: the Center for the Study of Religion, the Council of the Humanities, the Departments of Anthropology, Comparative Literature, English, German, Religion, and Slavic Languages and Literature, the Graduate School, the Program in Gender and Sexuality, American Studies, European Cultural Studies, the Media and Modernity colloquium, the School of Architecture, and the University Center for Human Values. This event is the first in a two-part series, the second of which will feature Alain Badiou and Cornel West and will take place next March 28th at PM here in McCosh Please check our website at www.princeton.edu/~religion/subject-ideology for more information. And without further ado, I'd like to present the chair of this evening's discussion, Thomas Levin. He is a professor in the German Department and the Center for Media and Modernity and a philosopher, critic, curator, and theorist of technology. He is the professor introducing our two guests, Slavoj Žižek and Cornel
Slavoj Žižek
West.
West.
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Welcome everyone. Thank you, Andrea. It's a great treat and pleasure to welcome two such extraordinarily public and engaged intellectuals to Princeton. It's a rare occasion and I'm really happy to be here with you. One of the particular side effects, benefits of introducing such well-known figures is that it makes the job of the moderator rather easy. We really don't have to tell you much about either, since you've read the books, heard them on the radio, seen the movies, and now we'll hear them tonight in an exchange that I'm looking forward to as much as you are. In order to facilitate that exchange from undue interruptions, I would ask that you turn off your cell phones or have them vibrate also quietly. The format of the evening is Slavoj Žižek will present his lecture, followed by a response by Cornel West, to which Slavoj Žižek will then respond, after which we'll open the discussion to your questions. During the question period, there will be two gentlemen with microphones running around. Please address your questions to the mic so we can all hear them and try to make them as succinct so as many people as possible can have a chance to engage tonight's presentation. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Slavoj Žižek. I don't have to press any button, it works. Okay. I hope this works. Thanks very much for this invitation. I'm especially pleased, although a little bit afraid, out of respect, that my respondent will be my good friend Cornel West because I also share his basic orientation, which is to combine progressive political engagement with certain, at least one can say, positive attitude or appropriation of religious topics, religious stance, and so on. I also think we can follow that path which makes us a minority
Welcome everyone. Thank you, Andrea. It's a great treat and pleasure to welcome two such extraordinarily public and engaged intellectuals to Princeton. It's a rare occasion and I'm really happy to be here with you. One of the particular side effects, benefits of introducing such well-known figures is that it makes the job of the moderator rather easy. We really don't have to tell you much about either, since you've read the books, heard them on the radio, seen the movies, and now we'll hear them tonight in an exchange that I'm looking forward to as much as you are. In order to facilitate that exchange from undue interruptions, I would ask that you turn off your cell phones or have them vibrate also quietly. The format of the evening is Slavoj Žižek will present his lecture, followed by a response by Cornel West, to which Slavoj Žižek will then respond, after which we'll open the discussion to your questions. During the question period, there will be two gentlemen with microphones running around. Please address your questions to the mic so we can all hear them and try to make them as succinct so as many people as possible can have a chance to engage tonight's presentation. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming Slavoj Žižek. I don't have to press any button, it works. Okay. I hope this works. Thanks very much for this invitation. I'm especially pleased, although a little bit afraid, out of respect, that my respondent will be my good friend Cornel West because I also share his basic orientation, which is to combine progressive political engagement with certain, at least one can say, positive attitude or appropriation of religious topics, religious stance, and so on. I also think we can follow that path which makes us a minority
Slavoj Žižek
maybe in today's progressive academia, but I think wait till years when we'll take power and then we'll no longer be a minority. Okay. Let's do some serious work today. I don't want to go into the direction of that unfortunate movie on me because I've only seen it once and then my idea was like, would you allow your daughter, would you allow that guy to take your daughter to a movie? No, I mean, I. Okay. So let me start. I really want to talk about belief. You will immediately learn it's not a big surprise what the chicken are from the title, no? But belief. What do we mean? What do we believe? Especially how, sorry, how do we believe today? I think that our predicament with regard to belief finds its perfect expression in a documentary that I saw recently called *Sand Castles: Buddhism and Global Finance*. It's a documentary by Alexander Oey, I'm not sure I pronounce it correctly. It's a documentary which combines commentaries from economist Arnoud Boot, sociologist Saskia Sassen, and the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. Sassen and Boot discuss the gigantic scope, power, as well as social and economic effects of global finance. Capital markets now valued at an estimated eighty-three trillion dollars exist within a system based purely on self-interest in which herd behavior, often based on rumors, can inflate or destroy the value of companies or whole economies in a matter of hours. Then, the Tibetan Buddhist counters them with ruminations about the nature of human perception, illusion, desire, and enlightenment. His statement is, "Release your attachment to something that is not there in reality but is only a perception." This statement is supposed to throw a new light on the mad dance of zillion-dollar speculations. Now, echoing the Buddhist notion that there is no self, only a stream of continuous perceptions, Saskia Sassen comments about global capital: "It's not that there are trillion. It is essentially a continuous set of movements. It disappears and it reappears." So you got the point that the ontology, as it were, that is forced on you, imposed on you, if you participate in these financial deals, in speculations on future, etc., etc., is basically the Buddhist ontology. No substantial reality, the fragility of reality, and so on. The problem here is of course, how are we to read this parallel between the Buddhist ontology and the structure of virtual capitalism's universe? The film tends towards the humanist reading. Seen through a Buddhist lens, the exuberance of global financial wealth is illusory, divorced from objective reality. The very real human suffering created by deals made on trading floors and in boardrooms is invisible to most of us. If, however, that's now my critical reaction, if one accepts the premise that the value of material wealth and one's experience of reality is subjective and that desire plays the crucial role in both daily life and neoliberal economies, is it not possible to draw from it the exact opposite conclusion? Is it not that our traditional life-world was based on the naive realist substantivist notions of external reality composed of fixed objects, while the unheard-of dynamics of virtual capitalism confronts us with the illusory nature of reality? When you see that a rumor can cause the collapse of whole economies and so on and so forth, isn't this a wonderful lesson on the fragility of our notion of reality? Again, what better proof of the non-substantial character of reality than a gigantic fortune which can dissolve into nothing in a couple of hours due to a sudden false rumor? Consequently, why complain that financial speculations with futures are divorced from objective reality when the basic premise of the Buddhist ontology is that there is no objective reality in the first place? The only critical lesson to be drawn from the Buddhist perspective about today's virtual capitalism is that one should be aware that we are dealing with a mere theater of shadows, with non-substantial virtual entities and consequently that we should not fully engage ourselves in the capitalist game, that we should play the game with an inner distance. Virtual capitalism could thus act as the first step towards liberation. It confronts us with the fact that the cause of our suffering and enslavement is not objective reality itself, there is no such thing, but our desire, our craving for material things, our excessive attachment to them. All one has to do after one gets rid of the false notion of substantivist reality is to renounce desire itself, to adopt the attitude of inner peace and distance. No wonder such Buddhism can function as the perfect ideology of today's virtual capitalism. It allows us to participate in the capitalist game with an inner distance, with our fingers crossed as it were. I hope you got my point. I'm not praising capitalism. On the contrary, I'm rather criticizing, if not Buddhism itself, at least a certain use of it. I think again that this kind of an ontology which says there is no fixed reality, it's just a flux of perception, renounce the notion of substantivist reality, there is no self, you don't exist and so on, the world is just a game, that this is the perfect attitude for today's capitalism. That is to say what? That is to say that this kind of a disbelieving attitude, don't take the game seriously, don't engage yourself fully, this is what is needed if the system is to function smoothly today. Let me give you the opposite experience. When the new Pope, the German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was elected, now I think he is Benedict XVI, some of my friends were shocked and their reproach was, "My God, but this guy really believes in that Christ incarnation and so on and so forth." I mean, and this tells us a lot about how this kind of Buddhist, Western Buddhist skeptical attitude is all around us. Like we are almost shocked if somebody, if we discover that somebody really, that somebody really believes. I don't know how it is in your country, but I know that in Europe recently there were some interesting sociological inquiries where they asked people, thousands of people, a series of questions. They started with, "Are you a Christian?" Okay, percent said yes. Then later, not immediately afterwards but like half an hour later to confuse them, they asked them the same question but in a different form, just asking a more specific question which is part of the fundamental Christian dogma, like "Do you believe that there was years ago a guy walking around Palestine who was the son of God?" percent believe it. So what did they mean by the first one? But so how does it structure? Let me be very specific here. My claim is not they don't really believe it. My claim is that this is how today belief itself is structured. We all know the Marx Brothers standard joke story: "This man looks as an idiot, he acts as an idiot, this shouldn't deceive you, he is an idiot." I think this is how the shock we discover when we see a religious person, it would be "This man looks as if he believes, he acts as if he believes, but this shouldn't deceive you, he really believes." We are always surprised when we see this. And my thesis will be that the same goes also for atheists. It's also he looks, he acts as an atheist, but it's always a shock to discover that the guy you are talking to really is an atheist. That is to say, I don't know what's your experience, but my experience is whenever I find a person, like postmodern theorists who are supposed to be atheists and so on, then I will not name names, I'm not in McCarthy business, but let me tell you that some of the very big names are on my list. You know, like they God deconstruct God, then I ask them, "But do you really accept that there is nothing, no God and so on?" Practically all of them, again I can give you almost a who's who in deconstruction theory and so on, practically all will tell me, "Of course I don't believe in institutional religion, of course I don't believe that there is somebody up there, God. But you never know, maybe I have deep respect for spirituality, there is some higher force maybe," and so on and so forth. I mean, it's very difficult to find a person who would look you straight into the eye and say, "No, I really, I really don't believe." But my other surprise is that it's similar with religious people. I mean, people who are officially religious, I like to ask them the opposite question logical, "But do you really believe?" And often I get the same, "No, it's not a matter of belief, it's more how important this is, how it makes you feel good to cut long story short, how it enriches you," and so on and so forth. So I claim that it functions, and I will later try to explain how, it functions through this split. So it is as if to really believe, to have this deep belief, you have to put up an atheist front, mask. Then, or the other way around, to be skeptical you have to superficially appear as religious. Maybe you know some plays and novels by Graham Greene, like *The End of the Affair*, where he focuses on the topic of the traumatic impact on a non-believer of a miracle. Like in *The End of the Affair*, also in one drama, you have a total non-believer who is then totally shocked, shattered when he or she, you maybe saw the movie with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore and so on, like an atheist encountering a miracle. And this, but I think that he is too naive here, Graham Greene. I think that the true example would be the one, I don't agree with him politically, I don't even like him, but it's an interesting film namely, did you see with Steve Martin *Leap of Faith*? Where you have a fake con artist of this miracle healer and so on and so forth, and then he's, he's doing tricks and so on, cheating with these magic healings, but at the end he does it and he's totally shattered. He discovers that he really can do a miracle and he's totally shattered. I think that the greatest shock for a religious person is to discover that it really works. And this is how today it functions, and it's the same with psychoanalysts. Many of my psychoanalytic friends are by nature skeptical and from time to time they are shocked. They tell me, "My God, but it really works, this interpretation." Their whole life should be, should be this, no? So this is what interests me. Belief. It is impossible to do it directly. Somehow we have to take a distance as it were, take a distance towards it. So now let me make a point clear here. My thesis is not that nobody really believes today and so on and so forth. It's much more complex. I think that just belief is not where we think it is. For example, let us take some a thing where you would think there is no belief there. Like Stalinist Communism. I think the underlying structure is deeply religious. Not in this stupid superficial sense. Communism is a new belief, they believed in paradise on earth, in historical necessity. But it's something else. For example, when you read reports on Stalinist purges, how they justified it and so on and so forth, you always get in Stalinist texts what in theology is referred to as the perspective of the final judgment. The idea is today it may appear confused to you, we are doing horrible things, killing innocent people, but at some point later when there will be communism, we will be able to look back and to recognize everything. You know, as if at some point in the future, how should I put it, there will be a kind of a final historical judgment where every event, every act will get its proper place. And I think this perspective is absolutely crucial for Stalinist Communism. That's the first thing to say. The second thing, now I want to go into a more tricky water. When we are dealing with beliefs, we should really be careful about what people believe when they say they believe and so on and so forth. Namely the problem I run into is how our Western standard liberal theory of beliefs and meaning, precisely when it tries to understand the cultural other, is usually at its most racist. What I'm referring here to is, for example, the standard theory developed among others, most systematically by Donald Davidson, the standard theory according to which human acts are rational intentional, that they are accountable in the term of beliefs and desires of the agent. You know, to simplify the idea is you do something because you have, first you desire something and then you have certain beliefs about reality, you think if I do this the result will be what I desire. Now this may appear almost a self-evident theory. But if you apply it, this theory, to so-called, so-called suicidal terrorist acts, you get a totally crazy image. For example, we end up attributing to fundamentalist terrorists the most ridiculous beliefs, as if the Arab terrorists really mean that they will get the how many of them, or virgins waiting for them in paradise, whatever and so on and so forth. I think that again, this is not, this is not the structure. This is not the structure. You don't have to believe. This very theory, which again is supposed to understand the other, like if we are to understand the terrorist we should look at their structure of beliefs, ends up making them ridiculous idiots. Let me give you an extreme example here. Recently I read a book about the Korean War. And then I found there a wonderful quote from a official North Korea communist propaganda from '52 describing one great hero and how he died for fatherland. Here is literally the quote: "The hero Kang Ho-jung was seriously wounded in both arms and both legs in the Kamak Hill battle. So, be attentive here, he couldn't move neither legs nor arms totally. So he rolled into the midst of the enemy with a hand grenade in his mouth and wiped them out, shouting 'My arms and legs were broken'—imagine, shouting but with a... 'My arms and legs are broken, but on the contrary, my retaliatory spirit against you imperialist scoundrels is now a thousand times stronger. I will show the unbending fighting will of a member of the Workers' Party of Korea and unflinching will firmly pledge to the Party and our beloved leader Kim Il Sung.'" Now okay, it's easy to make fun of this. It's non-realistic. The guy, first how could he even, how could he put the bomb, roll and make this long official proclamation and so on and so forth? However, what if we are reading this in a wrong way? What if the mistake here is the same as that of the anthropologists who impute to so-called primitive aboriginals who celebrate some animal as their ancestor the belief that they are really descended from that animal? My proposal is why not read this passage, the scene that I described, which effectively sounds operatic, like a scene from the opera in its ridiculous pathetic character, why not read it in a way similar to listening to, for example, Act III of Richard Wagner's opera *Tristan und Isolde*? Where, I mean it's easy to laugh at the other, but what happens in Act III of *Tristan* is in a way more impossible and ridiculous. If you know it, Tristan is mortally wounded and then is singing an extremely difficult aria much longer than this proclamation. It lasts about minutes, no? So okay, we all know that's not meant. But what if this scene is meant in the same way? Imagine this scene as an, as an operatic scene. As if an area sang. In other words, if you were to ask a Korean, North Korean guy, "But do you really think this happened?" he would probably say, "Are you stupid? Of course not. This is just meant to articulate our will to fight and blah blah blah," no? So again, belief is not in this sense literally a belief. This is not how it functions. And I claim especially with so-called fundamentalists. Don't make idiots of them. Another problem that I have with so-called fundamentalism is that it generated in our media, in our reaction, another great misunderstanding. I don't think that the so-called fundamentalist Islamic terror is grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization and so on and so forth. I think that, now I will say something politically incorrect and very brutal, that the problem with so-called, so-called—I have problems with this designations—fundamentalist terrorist is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. Like obviously, if you read Hitler's *Mein Kampf*, it's obvious that Hitler's problem is that he has problems with Jews, he considers himself inferior. Which is why our condescending politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more furious and feeds their ressentiment. The problem is not cultural difference, but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that they secretly already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. And this clearly goes also for for example Dalai Lama who justifies the Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of the pursuit of happiness, the avoidance of pain and so on and so forth. So paradoxically I think what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of true racist conviction into their own superiority, if you want. Another thing that should be stressed here where I think the reference to terrorism is crucial is that we should totally abandon this opposition which is forced on us as if in ethics we should oppose those who are ready to sacrifice themselves for a larger common good and utilitarians, hedonists and so on and so forth. We can learn here a lot I think already from the good old Rousseau who, Rousseau who distinguished clearly between simple egotism and the pathological *amour propre*, self-love. His idea is that there is nothing bad in simple egotism, caring for yourself, for your pleasures. The result is always good and it's even easy to generate morality out of this. The problem of evil is not hedonism, is not I want to have a good time. As he does it in a very precise way, Rousseau, he point, he demonstrates how the problem is when destroying the enemy, the problem is that of envy, when destroying the enemy preventing the other to enjoy becomes for you more important than your own enjoyment. And when you get caught into the logic of "better to ruin others' enjoyment than for me to enjoy." So the point is here that the logic of envy has nothing to do with hedonism and all this stuff. Which is why, now I will make a more concrete statement here, which is why I think John Rawls' theory of justice is catastrophically wrong. It works only on the assumption that people are simply egotists, it works only if you suspend envy and ressentiment. That is to say, you know probably Rawls' model of a just society where social inequalities are tolerated only in so far as they are based on natural inequalities which are considered contingent, not merits, and you know this Rawlsian test that the veil of ignorance test, no? You should, you should make a judgment without knowing what is your position. Or to directly formulate the result, certain inequality, some people earning more and so on, should be tolerated only if they help also the lowest, the poorest, the lowest. So that in this way you can justify it: okay, you can earn more or whatever than others, but also the lowest one will profit, will profit from it. It sounds very reasonable. So first we only get inequalities which are justified by helping also the poorest, the lowest on the, in social hierarchy, and point two, this, these privileges of some people being richer and so on are not justified through some old hierarchies or whatever but only in your natural capacities. How would this work in real life? I think it would have meant a total catastrophe. Why? Because imagine that you are the, the lowest, the poor one. You would of course be frustrated the others have more than you. But you would even be deprived of the right to protest, because it would be clear that you are less than the others because of your natural inabilities, and not only this, but the other are, others are richer than you basically in order to help you. I claim that the moment you introduce envy, the logic of envy, it explodes. It's a formula for for disaster. In other words, I think that, I don't know, probably you have the same stories, but the logic of desire, which is the logic of envy, is totally ignored here. Like there is an anecdote in my own country in Slovenia about a farmer, a peasant, who is given a choice by a good witch or a magician. He will, the magician, the God, whatever, all-powerful person, will give him, the peasant, one cow and to his neighbor two cows. Or take from him one cow and from his neighbor he will take two cows. Of course, the peasant immediately chooses the second option. Or, we in Slovenia have even a more morbid version. The witch or the magician tells the, the farmer, "I will do to you whatever you want, but I warn you, I will do it twice to your neighbor." You know what's immediately the farmer's response? "Take one of my eyes." Then you will take both the neighbor and so on. What's the lesson of this? Now don't misunderstand me. I hate Friedrich Hayek. But here he was right, where he emphasized how it is much easier to accept inequalities if one can claim that they result from an impersonal blind force. So, Hayek claims, the good thing about irrationality of the market success or failure in capitalism, you know this idea that it's not really you are intelligent whatever, there is always an element of contingency of chance of blind luck as to who fails, who succeeds on the market, is that it allows me precisely to perceive my failure or success as basically undeserved, contingent. So, the fact that capitalism is not just far from being something which makes it more intolerable is precisely what makes it palpable for the majority. Because can you imagine what horrible the situation would be for you if you would have to accept that "I fail because I am an idiot" or whatever? But if I say, "Okay, basically it's not my fault, it's market, market forces are impenetrable crazy," it makes it much easier to swallow it. So that's I think nonetheless a nice dialectical observation how the very injustice capitalism is accepted by people not because it's just, those who are more intelligent blah blah blah succeed. If it were to be just, it would explode long ago. What makes it palpable is its very injustice and that we know that it's unjust. In this sense we can, as it were, accept our own failure as something which is not our own, not our own responsibility. So much about this. Now let me return to belief. What is the, the basic, what's then the structure of belief if it's never clear what we believe, how it functions and so on and so forth? Now we come to the chicken. It's an old story, you know it, I will just give a new twist to it. You know this old classical joke story about a man who believes himself to be a grain of corn, seed, whatever. He is taken to the mental institution where doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. However, when he is cured, convinced that he is not a grain but a man, and then allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling, scared. "There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that the chicken will eat him." The doctor says, "Of course, dear fellow, you know very well that you are not a grain but a man." "Of course I know that," replies the patient, "but does the chicken know?" Now you will say that's a joke. No, I will try to prove now in the second part of that this is exactly how it works. For example, in psycho, this is what psychoanalysis is about. It's easy to convince you that, you know, your, your symptoms are just effects of your repressed traumas and so on and so forth. But the problem is to convince the unconscious which is as it were the chicken in you. How does this work even with Marxism? I think that this is what Marx was, which is why I think Marx should still be read. This is what Marx was targeting precisely, I claim this paradox of belief is what Marx was targeting in his good old-fashioned but I think we should return to it theory of so-called commodity fetishism. Let me quote you the first sentence or the first two sentences of this subdivision of the Chapter of *Capital*, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret." Quote: "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious trivial thing, but its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." Everybody reads this passage, but are you aware how strange it is? What Marx does here is exactly the opposite of what one would expect from a, well precisely a Marxist social critic. The idea is you take a mystified ideological edifice, religious fantasy whatever, and you try to reduce it to real-life phenomena, economic political processes, you try to show how even these most mystical sublime phenomena are generated by the real-life struggles, production and so on. That's the usual idea of critique of ideology, no? To show how ideological phenomena are generated by real life. But Marx is saying here almost the opposite, that the problem is not to reduce sublime phenomena to ordinary reality. The problem is to become aware of the, as it were, metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties, of the theological dimension of what appears to us as ordinary reality itself. This is for Marx commodity, commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism is not "You think you are dealing with something mystical commodity whatever, but in reality as we put it commodity is just an ordinary object, part of social exchange and so on and so forth." You think you are dealing with an ordinary object, but in reality—now that's the whole problem, in what kind of reality—there is this theological aspect of commodity. So that's my formula: when let us say a critical Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist reproach to the bourgeois subject is not, "A commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people." The actual Marxist reproach is rather, "You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations, that for example money is just a kind of voucher entitling you to a part of social product. But this is not how things really seem to you. In your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity appears to you as a magical object endowed with social powers." In other words, sorry to go back, what I just to explain this to make it absolutely clear. So we have three levels, not two. We don't simply have reality and illusion, illusory beliefs. It's not that in reality a commodity is a social product, some object becomes a commodity because of its role in social exchange, but we idiots are victims of commodity fetishism and think this is an inherent value, there is something magic in a commodity or money. No, the paradox is much nicer in Marx. Commodity is in reality just an ordinary object which functions as money, commodity, because of social relations. And this is what we think also. So our, what we think is close to reality, if you want. But the site of commodity fetishism is not our beliefs, it's our social reality itself. We act as if we embody our belief in act, in our social exchange. With, you know, it's a little bit the same as let us say your father is an idiot. Or no, let's this too obvious example. Let, let us take antisemitism, our late capitalist liberal antisemitism. Jews are people like others, and we think they are. But nonetheless, when you encounter a Jew, most of us, or not only a Jew, effective you can replace Jews with all other races and so on and so on whenever there is a racism, you, you treat them. In your social exchange itself, your antisemitic or other racist prejudices are embodied. So you got the point: in the when Marx defines ideology as *Zivissen das nicht aber sie tun es* (They do not know it, but still they are doing it), it doesn't mean the stupidity of "They don't know what they are doing, they are doing one thing but they think they misperceive what they are doing." It's that the illusion is not in what people think but in what they do. It's they don't see the illusion that they follow in what they are doing. Let us say, let us say that you are of another race. I as a white liberal, which I am not, but let us tell, "Oh, I like blacks blah blah blah." But then through some hints you get my racism. Literally, you see, I don't know, I am not aware of beliefs which I practice in my acts. That's the site of ideological illusion for Mark, of Marx. And now you got my point here, how contemporary cynicism uses this gap. Of course at the level of explicit belief, of our explicit conviction, we can be open blah blah blah. But and at that level maybe we live in a post-ideological era. What interests me is ideology which is embodied in material life itself, in social exchanges and so on and so forth. So let me go on. So we can, we can imagine a Marxist commodity fetishism version of the story about chicken. A bourgeois subject is visiting a course of Marxism where he is taught about commodity fetishism. However, after the finished course he comes back to his teacher complaining that he is still the victim of commodity fetishism. The teacher tells him, "But you know now how things stand, that commodities are only expressions of social relations, there is nothing magic about them." And then of course the pupil replies, "Of course I know that, but the commodities I'm dealing with do not know it." That's commodity fetishism. Now you will say I'm dreaming. Maybe, but Marx is dreaming with me. Here is a famous quote from *Capital* where Marx says the same thing, where he invokes this wonderful metaphor of commodities themselves talking to each other. A quote: "If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it and so on and so on." So again, the true task is not to convince people that commodities are just ordinary objects and so on, but as it were to convince the commodities. That is to say, to get rid of ideology which is embodied in our real social interaction. Not to change the way we speak about commodities, but to change the way commodities speak among themselves as it were. We can go here even a step further. My Slovene-Lacanian party member colleague Alenka Zupančič did this in a book which will appear soon on Hegel and comedy. We can repeat the same story, now I come to my central point of chicken and so on, about God. Apropos God himself. Let's imagine an enlightened revolutionary terror where a man is put in prison because he believes in God. With different measures, with kind of ideological brainwashing and so on, he is brought to knowledge that God does not exist. They convinced him. Then he is dismissed, but then soon he comes running back and he is explained that he is scared of being punished by God. Then the teacher, terrorist teacher tells him, "But what's the problem? We cured you, you know that God doesn't exist." Of course, what's the reply? You can guess it. "I know it, but does God know it, that he doesn't exist?" Now you will say I'm joking here. I'm not. Let me now give you my final point. This is why my attachment to Christian legacy—and I speak here as an atheist—it's so passionate. I follow here my preferred Catholic theologian G.K. Chesterton, who claimed that precisely and only in Christianity God does know this. At the moment of "Father, Father, you know, on the cross, why did you forsake me?" Here is a wonderful quote from Chesterton's *Orthodoxy*: "When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion but at the cry from the cross, the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionaries choose a creed from all the creeds and a God from all the Gods of the world, carefully weighing all the Gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another God who has himself been in revolt. No, the matter grows too difficult for human speech. But let the atheists themselves choose a God. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation, only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist." That's the unique element of Christianity for Chesterton. If we take seriously that "Father, why have you forsaken me?" and so on, it's not simply man are abandoned by God and so on. It's God himself is for a moment abandoned by God. That is to say, the gap between man and God is as it were reflected into God himself. And that's the difficult thing to accept. Which is why I think that Christianity in this sense is much closer to this kind of atheist position than the standard atheism which is that of all my friends, the culture atheism. Which is of course this using the cultural reference. All my Jewish friends say, I ask them, "Why don't you eat this good pork sausage?" "You know, I don't believe it, but you know it's part of my cultural inheritance and so on and so forth," you know? Like you don't do it out of belief, you say, "I just follow the traditions, the rituals and so on and so forth." Another way you can detect this decentered or whatever, decentered belief, belief which socially functions even when you deny it, would be through displacing this belief onto another. It's incredible how often people are ready, not a problem for them not to believe. But you need to have another people whom you suppose he believes. And that the critical moment is not for you to discover that you don't believe, but to discover that this other who as it were believed for you does not believe. And I'm not here making fun. I mean, this can get extremely serious. For example, maybe you heard about her, she was teaching for some time at New School, is she still there, Agnes Heller, the Hungarian Lukács pupil. She told me a wonderful story. Okay, wonderful, I mean theoretically wonderful, in reality terrifying. When she was, I mean she was in Auschwitz, she has the numbers and so on. She told me that how there in every cell, every building, there was a myth, a belief that never in your barrack but in the nearby barrack there was somebody who was not simply only keen on his or her survival, somebody who still remained even in these horrible circumstances an ethical person, sacrificed himself, helped others and so on and so on. And then she told me something interesting, that the most dangerous moment was when you discovered, as unfortunately you almost always did, that this other doesn't exist, that it's a myth. Like you in some work group you meet this other and you discover that at that, that he is like us, just a survivalist. At that point usually you broke down, you regressed to the level of "Muselmänner," of—ironically they were called Muslims, this is okay, Western racism. You know why? Because in the Western imaginary of the early 20th century, Muslim was supposed to be these people totally, totally abandoning themselves in fate, just obeying destiny. You just prayed, prayed and accepted everything. And these people who were totally broken, the living dead, they just did like this, they didn't even act. So ironically nice case of practical racism they were all got Muslims. So, but the interesting point is that you got my point that even in order to be a cruel survivalist you needed another guy to be as it were good for you. You needed to believe "I may be how should I put it, I may be evil, egotist, because another one is good for me as it were." If you, you needed that even to support your, to support your, your egotist attitude. And it's incredible how often you find this at different levels. For example, I read an interesting research recently about sexual promiscuity. How most of the people who engage in orgies and so on, they can be extremely wild doing I don't know what, but usually nonetheless they always have another one who as it were has to remain pure for them. It's usually their children or their... like, "I can do with triple penetration, name it whatever, but don't touch my son! Or but don't touch my mother!" There is somebody else who has to, who has to, who has to remain pure. So let me go on here. How then, what's the structure here? The structure of this objectified belief, that's my lesson here. How beliefs today more than ever precisely in our cynical post-ideological blah blah blah era, how beliefs are objectified. You can as it were believe without believing. You just practice belief with your acts. There is a wonderful anecdote maybe known to some of you about Niels Bohr, you know the Copenhagen the guy who I think was very intelligent also in theological matters. You know that I think that he provided a perfect answer to your own guy here, Princeton, Einstein. No, you know the famous "God doesn't play dice." But you know what Niels Bohr answered to Einstein was? "Don't tell God what to do," no? I think it's the correct answer. Okay, there is another I think even much better anecdote about Niels Bohr. Who, he a friend visited him in a countryside house and saw, it was an old farmer house, saw above the entrance the, the horseshoe on the entrance door. I don't know if it's here also, but in Europe this is kind of a superstitious object, like it brings luck, no if you have a horseshoe. Okay, so the surprised visitor asked Niels Bohr, "Why do you have that? My God, I thought you were a scientist. Do you really believe in this?" You know Niels Bohr gave a perfect answer: "Of course I'm not an idiot, of course I do not believe in it. But I have it because I was told that it works also if you don't believe in it." That's, that's, that's how it works today. We don't believe it, but it works even if you, even if you don't, even if you don't believe, no? In other words, this brings us back to my big theological reference, this notion of objectified beliefs, to Pascal. I think that Pascal, you know this Pascalian slogan, interpreted endlessly by almost all French Marxists, it is as if the entire French Marxism is a version of Pascalian theology. You know the Pascalian famous, like Pascal is basically the first theorist of Alcoholics Anonymous, this "Fake it till you make it." That is to say you don't believe, no problem. Do as if you believe, kneel down, pray and belief will come by itself. But I think that from today's experience we should turn around Pascal. It's more complex. The logic is not "Kneel down and, and kneel down and you will believe," but "Kneel down and you will make another believe, another agency or whatever believe for you." That is to say, one can say that how should I put it, the problem is not the truly traumatic thing is not not to believe but to believe seriously, too much. And I think that what ritual allows you is as it were to get rid of your belief. The idea is, are you too haunted by religious experience? Do you really believe? Is it too horrible of you, "My God, I really experience God" and so on? Not a problem. Practice a ritual and then it will get mechanized and you can think about masturbation whatever you want, you know? The ritual is doing it for you. It's the same thing as, I don't want to repeat it here, that I immensely like which I think it's one of the greatest 20th century inventions: canned laughter on TV. You know where the TV set literally laughs for you. Now I may be an idiot here, but for me it really works in the sense that let's say in the evening you come home, you are tired as a dog. You put on TV, you get a stupid show, *Friends*, whatever, *Cheers*, with canned laughter. What's the magic? The magic is I'm totally disagree with people who claim that the function of canned laughter, you know the laughter on TV soundtrack itself, is that to make, as in this idiotic imitation, to make you laugh. It's simply not true. I again, I spoke with some researchers who told me, "No, people don't laugh, it doesn't function in this way." No, the problem, the point is precisely that you are rid of even the duty to laugh. But so what's the point? That's the magic. The magic is that, maybe I'm the idiot here but I'm afraid only I'm not, is that when the show is over, you just stared as an idiot, nonetheless you are relieved as if you laughed. That's the magic of it. The TV laughed for you and it worked as if you did it. And I think that this is even the nice old Catholic manipulation with marriage, like it's too much for you to really love a partner. It's too intense. It's unbearable. You know how difficult it is truly to be in love, like it ruins your life, it's a catastrophe. I mean, the idea is get married, you have a ritual and then you can start to dream, to cheat, whatever. It's you get the minimum distance of the ritual. So my God, I have so many other things but nonetheless slowly I will conclude it. So again, to conclude, my first big thesis is that this functioning of ideology where you are even not aware of your own beliefs, that is to say it is not as in the classical idea we have of ideology: you officially believe, follow the ritual blah blah blah, but secretly you daydream about or even you are not aware how secretly you are an atheist, wild desires and so on and so no. Today I claim the situation is almost the opposite one. We are officially hedonists, we don't care and so on and so forth because we believe where? Not deep in ourselves, I'm not playing this game of deep discovery, because we believe in our acts. We practice beliefs. Which is why not only it doesn't hurt the official ideology if you don't explicitly believe. My thesis is much stronger: is that today for an ideology in order to function, it must, it must not be taken seriously by its subjects. It's too much. You must have a distance towards it. Which is why for me the most elementary ideological statement is the statement "But I'm not just a slave of ideology, I'm also a human person, there is something more in me." This, this minimal distance. Where do you find this distance? For example, this is for me one of the signs of ideology at its purest. If you buy a book of a popular author, and you know on the back side of the cover you usually get this short description of the author, "He published these books blah blah blah," and then to humanize the author, did you notice it? You have usually then two three lines about some private life. "In her," like I just now I read a detective novel, she is the best for me, of Patricia Highsmith. And it said at the end, "In her free time, Miss Highsmith is gardening and taking care of her cats," you know? This is ideology. This signal. So I tried to do it with my last book, the publisher rejected it. To twist this to just to shock people. To add, "In his free time, Professor Žižek is surfing, surfing, surfing the internet for child pornography and teaching his son, and teaching his son to pull out legs of spiders," or something like this. Just, just to show it how this is the falsity itself, this distance, this distance is it. Okay, now the final twist, the final question. If we have this cynical functioning of ideology and so on and so forth, but what about so-called fundamentalism then? Isn't nonetheless then so-called fundamentalism a good thing in the sense of "My God, they, they at least really believe"? No. Why not? Let me be very precise here. I think that fundamentalism and the utmost postmodern cynicism share something. What I call the decline of the symbolic function. What for me is the symbolic function is that you take a fiction seriously. In the sense of do you know this old story, I think it was first you find it in some Marivaux comedy, then it's quoted by Kant and later this and then it's even later you find a version with Marx Brothers. This famous anecdote of husband unexpectedly returning home, he finds his wife in bed with another man, and the wife said, "Now you have to choose. If you truly love me, there is nobody here. If you truly love me, you will believe my words, not your eyes," no? Like you have to... This is what we do. This minimum is the minimum of civilization. That even if you know belief is always an, a minimally absurd belief. Now okay, this is a ridiculous example. But let me give you a much more beautiful tragic example, okay the most kitsch one almost. You know the diaries of Anne Frank. There is a famous passage there where she says, "In spite of all the horrors that the Germans are doing, I still believe in essential divine goodness of every human person." This is a clear act of some kind of absurd wager. Belief has always the moment of this crazy decision, crazy counter-factual wager. "In spite of all the evidence, I believe it." And I think this kind of belief should be reasserted even today. Isn't the whole topic, in so far as we accept it, it's more problematic, of human rights, human equality? It's this kind of a crazy wager. "In spite of all the differences that I see, I accept it as a wager: humans are fundamentally dignified." This is, this is an article of faith. And I don't think it's anything ideological about it. What I'm claiming is that the cynical functioning of ideology where you no longer have this faith in symbolic beliefs, where you simply instrumentalized ideology and with fundamentalists, they do the same. For both of them they no longer trust this belief. Of course it's obvious in what sense cynics don't believe. They simply don't believe even if they practice beliefs. They don't believe, that's clear. But now you will tell me, but what about fundamentalists? Ah, a true fundamentalist I think literally does not believe. In what sense? No, it's not an idiot paradox. What I'm aiming at here is the difference between belief and knowledge. Namely what gave me this idea is I met some of the so-called fundamentalists and what shocked me is with what ease they—the more they are fundamentalists, the more they like modern sciences, cyberspace and so on and so forth. Why? Because for them—now I will try to be as clear as possible—for an authentic Christian to say "Christ has arisen from death" and so on, it's an absurd article of faith. For them it's a simple fact. They, you know what I mean, they don't treat it as this pathetic impossible existential wager. Which is why, for example, you know this very interesting story of the Turin Shroud. You know it was allegedly proven that it is false in 14th century, now those who claim it's true have a have another version that nonetheless there are some problems with that atomic decay how they... But I think that a true Christian should be horrified at the prospect that this may, may turn out to be true. Because my God, if it really is Christ's blood there, you have a nightmare perspective. Like the first evil idea that comes to your mind is "Let's look at the DNA then see who really is the father," no? I mean... then you will probably discover that it's some Arab servant and so on, no? And so whatever. So it's for them, but it's not only this opportunism. It's rather that they feel in a correct way, Christians, that this article of faith does is not is not a matter in this sense of knowledge. While for fundamentalists it is simply a matter of knowledge. For them there is no, there is no problem here. Religious statements are for them statements about simple positive facts. They read the Bible literally. This crazy decision of "in spite of all the facts and so on I choose to believe in human rights equality and so on and so forth," they they don't have that one. Which is why, and I think this is a much more not only funny but correct critique of so-called fundamentalism. It is not as people usually claim that fundamentalism poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge and so on and so forth. This is the superficial appearance, no, with their crazy theories against evolution blah blah blah. No, I think that the fundamental threat that they pose is the threat to belief itself. They are the, if you want to read a text where really the last traces of true authentic belief disappeared, it's the fundamentalist text. Again, we are in the field of knowledge there. Articles of faith are treated as simple positive knowledge. That's, that's the true danger. And it's a very nice paradoxical situation in a way where those who pretend to be again the most religious ones have already betrayed, have already betrayed religion. Okay, what I wanted to do is to just to report to you into what I wanted to do but I will cut it short now because I've already spoken... One thing I wanted to explore also is the structure of these disavowed materialized beliefs. How I think that we have at this level what I'm tempted to call the institutional unconscious. In the sense not in any mystical Jungian sense of collective unconscious but a set of implicit presuppositions, desires, beliefs which are disavowed by an official ideological edifice but are part of the institutional logic. And here we also enter a very painful domain for some Catholics at least because for example I'm more and more convinced that all these cases of pedophilia, pedophiliac scandals among the Catholics, prove that there is this pedophilia is not simply something which happens to Catholics to Catholic priests as a simple fact of life, in the sense of "even if I become a priest what can I do, I'm still human, so this haunts me and so on and so forth." I can even, to be extremely vicious, imagine an ordinary heterosexual guy who becomes a priest and then turns slowly into a pedophilia because it's something in the logic of the in the logic of the... it's not the private unconscious, it's the set of unwritten obscene rules inscribed into the institution itself. That's one line I wanted to pursue. Another line which is my favorite philosophical line, I don't have time for it, is to define this knowledge, this implicit knowledge that we possess without knowing it if you want, or rather sorry now I'm making mistake, I was criticizing these implicit beliefs in the Hegelian terms of self-consciousness. Namely I was surprised reading Hegel's theory of state about how precise Hegel is there. When Hegel says that the, that the, that state is a self-consciousness of the people and so on and so forth, usually Hegel is read there as kind of a ridiculous spiritualist, implying a kind of a mega-spiritual mystical spiritual subject whatever who runs the show behind. No, what Hegel means is something very materialist there. For Hegel self-consciousness simply means a refractive registration. In the sense of you don't do it, you at the same time register it reflectively as a symbolic act. What do I mean? Let me give you a totally vulgar example. Most of the people who have jeans wore jeans today or for example in Slovenia my country's many people now it's fashionable to have Land Rovers and so on and so forth. People live in the city and travel mostly from the suburb to the center but in a Land Rover. So they don't need it. So it's in order as it were to make a statement. You know what I mean? It's not just a utilitarian fact. Even or precisely when you are dealing with objects which declare themselves as pure utility, it's not fashion it's just useful, but they already declare their utility. This is for Hegel self-consciousness. It has nothing to do with individual, individual awareness. For Hegel this means that the state is not just an instrument but has to register declare its status through public rituals and so on and so forth. And Hegel is here very materialist when he emphasizes that this has nothing to do with people effectively being aware of it. Hegel in some of his notes which are only now published to his *Philosophy of Right* invokes an example of a state parade for example, state ritual, where even if all the individuals are thinking about their private affairs whatever not aware, still the ritual as such is self-consciousness of the state. In this sense, to give you an idea, in the Hegelian sense, the symptom is the subject's self-consciousness. Let us say I am convinced in something, whatever, but then through a symptom I undermine it. The, let's say I think I love my wife but I produce a symptom which embodies my secret, disavowed, I am not aware of it, hatred whatever of my wife. This symptom is in the Hegelian sense the moment of my self-consciousness. In this sense, you know what I mean, we have again a certain knowledge of which I am not aware but which exists out there, exists out there objectively. So all these paradoxes, I think again, are crucial for how ideology functions today. The reason I engaged in this way is to again to make you skeptical about this easy disposition of ideological positions today where as if the opposition is between I don't know fundamentalist belief or liberal skepticism, hedonism and so on and so on. It's not like this, I think that it's not like this. That in a way precisely cynics or hedonists are usually in their practice itself believers. So again, I think that this strange category of belief which exists objectified in our acts even if we publicly mock it, make fun of it and so on and so forth, it's the key to analyze today's society, the key to how ideology functions in a post-ideological era. I'm sorry if I was too long but on the other hand I'm not sorry because that's my nature. Thanks very much. And so it is with Brother Slavoj that he is eclectic to the core and how that one makes sense of all of these fascinating moments and epiphanic moments in which trying to weave things together. So I'm going to take this moment to be a bit pedagogical and try to say something at least that for an education in the sense of the context to grasp what you have given us. Because as a public intellectual who transgresses the disciplinary division of knowledge in our academy, and therefore there's no way that we can subsume what you have just presented under any discipline. In other words you presented a total confusion or what? Well no, it couldn't be, because some disciplines are highly confused though it might be providing certain illumination and understanding much better. Absolutely. But it also is a way of traversing various publics, that the mode of presentation, the very genre itself, brings us in and lures us in and summons us in to your discourse so that it's both academic but it's also journalistic, it's also popular culture, it's also high culture, it's anecdotal, it's full of jokes, but there's a deep sense of the comic that's operating. But what I want to highlight first and foremost is the philosophical framework. And it has so much to do with the story about the chicken. That what I've always loved about your work is that you are unabashedly old-fashioned in your philosophical orientation. And what I mean by that is that in a moment in which especially on the left people oppose Marxism, postmodern, post-psychoanalytic, you are modern to the core. But when he when he writes phrases like "German idealism is the unsurpassed horizon of our philosophical experience," so from Kant to Hegel that's where the stuff, the good stuff actually resides. You can play footsie with various postmodernist writers, but when you want substance, you're going to have to go back to the German idealism. Well what was German idealism dealing with? Well let's just look briefly at your favorite text I think, or one of your favorite texts, the great text of of Schelling's treatise on the essence of human freedom. That's the text that Heidegger says shattered Hegel's logic before Hegel published the text, undermined the older form of German idealism. Why? Precisely because like the chicken in us, it highlights the traumatic core of the modern subject. And in many ways what I see in your work is the centrality of the catastrophic, the monstrous, and the traumatic. And even Jacques Lacan is a kind of means by which you force us to come to terms with the traumatic. And postmodernist moves of cynicism and relativism and nihilism and so forth are simply modes of evasion that somehow don't want us to come to terms with that traumatic core. And what's distinctive about that text of is not only the text was written at a moment in which his wife was dying, Caroline, who was the wife of August Schlegel, whom he had seduced and after having been engaged to her daughter. And do you know very left-wing politically. After her death, Schelling turned reactionary only. That's true. That's absolutely right. But I mean I say this because it's a way of trying to historicize and concretize what we're talking about here. Because what this text is fundamentally about is what are the ways in which we talk about the traumatic, the catastrophic, the monstrous, be it in terms of our individual psyche or be it in terms of our culture and larger civilization. And I think it's no accident that the text that I would highly recommend to each and every one of you called *The Fragile Absolute*. Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? And you used various references in some ways in the in the text, and he didn't get a chance to read the whole text, he gave me a slightly different text, which I appreciate because it's just so creative. You can see your mind's forever moving, building on what you built on what I read. But in that particular text, what I also saw is how easy it is to settle for trite formulations that somehow don't somehow don't force us, don't compel us to wrestle with these very, very dark centers inside of ourselves and inside of our our society. Now what is the significance of this? Well one is is that one has to move backwards in order to move forward. That is to say, if we're going to go back to wrestling with the old problematic of German idealism: what does it really mean to be homeless? What does it mean to acknowledge the ineradicability of the non-rational? What if reality and being itself is impenetrable? What does it mean to actually confront the fact of the intractability of the unfathomable? Is that just empty rhetoric? Not at all. It means in fact that somehow we've got to either learn how to confront and cope with the traumatic or we will forever remain on the surfaces. And the move toward the 19th century toward Schelling, toward German idealism, toward wrestling with forms of alienation and the traumatic and the catastrophic, go hand-in-hand with the return to Marx. Not in any simplistic way. You can see the reading itself is sophisticated. But all the postmodernist talk that downplay class, that downplay empire, are similar modes of evasion because we don't want to deal with the traumatic core at the very center of our own lives and civilization. Now we in America have a very different religious profile as you know. percent of the fellow citizens of this country, my fellow citizens of this country, believe in God. percent believe Jesus Christ is the son of God. percent talk on intimate terms
maybe in today's progressive academia, but I think wait till years when we'll take power and then we'll no longer be a minority. Okay. Let's do some serious work today. I don't want to go into the direction of that unfortunate movie on me because I've only seen it once and then my idea was like, would you allow your daughter, would you allow that guy to take your daughter to a movie? No, I mean, I. Okay. So let me start. I really want to talk about belief. You will immediately learn it's not a big surprise what the chicken are from the title, no? But belief. What do we mean? What do we believe? Especially how, sorry, how do we believe today? I think that our predicament with regard to belief finds its perfect expression in a documentary that I saw recently called *Sand Castles: Buddhism and Global Finance*. It's a documentary by Alexander Oey, I'm not sure I pronounce it correctly. It's a documentary which combines commentaries from economist Arnoud Boot, sociologist Saskia Sassen, and the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. Sassen and Boot discuss the gigantic scope, power, as well as social and economic effects of global finance. Capital markets now valued at an estimated eighty-three trillion dollars exist within a system based purely on self-interest in which herd behavior, often based on rumors, can inflate or destroy the value of companies or whole economies in a matter of hours. Then, the Tibetan Buddhist counters them with ruminations about the nature of human perception, illusion, desire, and enlightenment. His statement is, "Release your attachment to something that is not there in reality but is only a perception." This statement is supposed to throw a new light on the mad dance of zillion-dollar speculations. Now, echoing the Buddhist notion that there is no self, only a stream of continuous perceptions, Saskia Sassen comments about global capital: "It's not that there are trillion. It is essentially a continuous set of movements. It disappears and it reappears." So you got the point that the ontology, as it were, that is forced on you, imposed on you, if you participate in these financial deals, in speculations on future, etc., etc., is basically the Buddhist ontology. No substantial reality, the fragility of reality, and so on. The problem here is of course, how are we to read this parallel between the Buddhist ontology and the structure of virtual capitalism's universe? The film tends towards the humanist reading. Seen through a Buddhist lens, the exuberance of global financial wealth is illusory, divorced from objective reality. The very real human suffering created by deals made on trading floors and in boardrooms is invisible to most of us. If, however, that's now my critical reaction, if one accepts the premise that the value of material wealth and one's experience of reality is subjective and that desire plays the crucial role in both daily life and neoliberal economies, is it not possible to draw from it the exact opposite conclusion? Is it not that our traditional life-world was based on the naive realist substantivist notions of external reality composed of fixed objects, while the unheard-of dynamics of virtual capitalism confronts us with the illusory nature of reality? When you see that a rumor can cause the collapse of whole economies and so on and so forth, isn't this a wonderful lesson on the fragility of our notion of reality? Again, what better proof of the non-substantial character of reality than a gigantic fortune which can dissolve into nothing in a couple of hours due to a sudden false rumor? Consequently, why complain that financial speculations with futures are divorced from objective reality when the basic premise of the Buddhist ontology is that there is no objective reality in the first place? The only critical lesson to be drawn from the Buddhist perspective about today's virtual capitalism is that one should be aware that we are dealing with a mere theater of shadows, with non-substantial virtual entities and consequently that we should not fully engage ourselves in the capitalist game, that we should play the game with an inner distance. Virtual capitalism could thus act as the first step towards liberation. It confronts us with the fact that the cause of our suffering and enslavement is not objective reality itself, there is no such thing, but our desire, our craving for material things, our excessive attachment to them. All one has to do after one gets rid of the false notion of substantivist reality is to renounce desire itself, to adopt the attitude of inner peace and distance. No wonder such Buddhism can function as the perfect ideology of today's virtual capitalism. It allows us to participate in the capitalist game with an inner distance, with our fingers crossed as it were. I hope you got my point. I'm not praising capitalism. On the contrary, I'm rather criticizing, if not Buddhism itself, at least a certain use of it. I think again that this kind of an ontology which says there is no fixed reality, it's just a flux of perception, renounce the notion of substantivist reality, there is no self, you don't exist and so on, the world is just a game, that this is the perfect attitude for today's capitalism. That is to say what? That is to say that this kind of a disbelieving attitude, don't take the game seriously, don't engage yourself fully, this is what is needed if the system is to function smoothly today. Let me give you the opposite experience. When the new Pope, the German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, was elected, now I think he is Benedict XVI, some of my friends were shocked and their reproach was, "My God, but this guy really believes in that Christ incarnation and so on and so forth." I mean, and this tells us a lot about how this kind of Buddhist, Western Buddhist skeptical attitude is all around us. Like we are almost shocked if somebody, if we discover that somebody really, that somebody really believes. I don't know how it is in your country, but I know that in Europe recently there were some interesting sociological inquiries where they asked people, thousands of people, a series of questions. They started with, "Are you a Christian?" Okay, percent said yes. Then later, not immediately afterwards but like half an hour later to confuse them, they asked them the same question but in a different form, just asking a more specific question which is part of the fundamental Christian dogma, like "Do you believe that there was years ago a guy walking around Palestine who was the son of God?" percent believe it. So what did they mean by the first one? But so how does it structure? Let me be very specific here. My claim is not they don't really believe it. My claim is that this is how today belief itself is structured. We all know the Marx Brothers standard joke story: "This man looks as an idiot, he acts as an idiot, this shouldn't deceive you, he is an idiot." I think this is how the shock we discover when we see a religious person, it would be "This man looks as if he believes, he acts as if he believes, but this shouldn't deceive you, he really believes." We are always surprised when we see this. And my thesis will be that the same goes also for atheists. It's also he looks, he acts as an atheist, but it's always a shock to discover that the guy you are talking to really is an atheist. That is to say, I don't know what's your experience, but my experience is whenever I find a person, like postmodern theorists who are supposed to be atheists and so on, then I will not name names, I'm not in McCarthy business, but let me tell you that some of the very big names are on my list. You know, like they God deconstruct God, then I ask them, "But do you really accept that there is nothing, no God and so on?" Practically all of them, again I can give you almost a who's who in deconstruction theory and so on, practically all will tell me, "Of course I don't believe in institutional religion, of course I don't believe that there is somebody up there, God. But you never know, maybe I have deep respect for spirituality, there is some higher force maybe," and so on and so forth. I mean, it's very difficult to find a person who would look you straight into the eye and say, "No, I really, I really don't believe." But my other surprise is that it's similar with religious people. I mean, people who are officially religious, I like to ask them the opposite question logical, "But do you really believe?" And often I get the same, "No, it's not a matter of belief, it's more how important this is, how it makes you feel good to cut long story short, how it enriches you," and so on and so forth. So I claim that it functions, and I will later try to explain how, it functions through this split. So it is as if to really believe, to have this deep belief, you have to put up an atheist front, mask. Then, or the other way around, to be skeptical you have to superficially appear as religious. Maybe you know some plays and novels by Graham Greene, like *The End of the Affair*, where he focuses on the topic of the traumatic impact on a non-believer of a miracle. Like in *The End of the Affair*, also in one drama, you have a total non-believer who is then totally shocked, shattered when he or she, you maybe saw the movie with Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore and so on, like an atheist encountering a miracle. And this, but I think that he is too naive here, Graham Greene. I think that the true example would be the one, I don't agree with him politically, I don't even like him, but it's an interesting film namely, did you see with Steve Martin *Leap of Faith*? Where you have a fake con artist of this miracle healer and so on and so forth, and then he's, he's doing tricks and so on, cheating with these magic healings, but at the end he does it and he's totally shattered. He discovers that he really can do a miracle and he's totally shattered. I think that the greatest shock for a religious person is to discover that it really works. And this is how today it functions, and it's the same with psychoanalysts. Many of my psychoanalytic friends are by nature skeptical and from time to time they are shocked. They tell me, "My God, but it really works, this interpretation." Their whole life should be, should be this, no? So this is what interests me. Belief. It is impossible to do it directly. Somehow we have to take a distance as it were, take a distance towards it. So now let me make a point clear here. My thesis is not that nobody really believes today and so on and so forth. It's much more complex. I think that just belief is not where we think it is. For example, let us take some a thing where you would think there is no belief there. Like Stalinist Communism. I think the underlying structure is deeply religious. Not in this stupid superficial sense. Communism is a new belief, they believed in paradise on earth, in historical necessity. But it's something else. For example, when you read reports on Stalinist purges, how they justified it and so on and so forth, you always get in Stalinist texts what in theology is referred to as the perspective of the final judgment. The idea is today it may appear confused to you, we are doing horrible things, killing innocent people, but at some point later when there will be communism, we will be able to look back and to recognize everything. You know, as if at some point in the future, how should I put it, there will be a kind of a final historical judgment where every event, every act will get its proper place. And I think this perspective is absolutely crucial for Stalinist Communism. That's the first thing to say. The second thing, now I want to go into a more tricky water. When we are dealing with beliefs, we should really be careful about what people believe when they say they believe and so on and so forth. Namely the problem I run into is how our Western standard liberal theory of beliefs and meaning, precisely when it tries to understand the cultural other, is usually at its most racist. What I'm referring here to is, for example, the standard theory developed among others, most systematically by Donald Davidson, the standard theory according to which human acts are rational intentional, that they are accountable in the term of beliefs and desires of the agent. You know, to simplify the idea is you do something because you have, first you desire something and then you have certain beliefs about reality, you think if I do this the result will be what I desire. Now this may appear almost a self-evident theory. But if you apply it, this theory, to so-called, so-called suicidal terrorist acts, you get a totally crazy image. For example, we end up attributing to fundamentalist terrorists the most ridiculous beliefs, as if the Arab terrorists really mean that they will get the how many of them, or virgins waiting for them in paradise, whatever and so on and so forth. I think that again, this is not, this is not the structure. This is not the structure. You don't have to believe. This very theory, which again is supposed to understand the other, like if we are to understand the terrorist we should look at their structure of beliefs, ends up making them ridiculous idiots. Let me give you an extreme example here. Recently I read a book about the Korean War. And then I found there a wonderful quote from a official North Korea communist propaganda from '52 describing one great hero and how he died for fatherland. Here is literally the quote: "The hero Kang Ho-jung was seriously wounded in both arms and both legs in the Kamak Hill battle. So, be attentive here, he couldn't move neither legs nor arms totally. So he rolled into the midst of the enemy with a hand grenade in his mouth and wiped them out, shouting 'My arms and legs were broken'—imagine, shouting but with a... 'My arms and legs are broken, but on the contrary, my retaliatory spirit against you imperialist scoundrels is now a thousand times stronger. I will show the unbending fighting will of a member of the Workers' Party of Korea and unflinching will firmly pledge to the Party and our beloved leader Kim Il Sung.'" Now okay, it's easy to make fun of this. It's non-realistic. The guy, first how could he even, how could he put the bomb, roll and make this long official proclamation and so on and so forth? However, what if we are reading this in a wrong way? What if the mistake here is the same as that of the anthropologists who impute to so-called primitive aboriginals who celebrate some animal as their ancestor the belief that they are really descended from that animal? My proposal is why not read this passage, the scene that I described, which effectively sounds operatic, like a scene from the opera in its ridiculous pathetic character, why not read it in a way similar to listening to, for example, Act III of Richard Wagner's opera *Tristan und Isolde*? Where, I mean it's easy to laugh at the other, but what happens in Act III of *Tristan* is in a way more impossible and ridiculous. If you know it, Tristan is mortally wounded and then is singing an extremely difficult aria much longer than this proclamation. It lasts about minutes, no? So okay, we all know that's not meant. But what if this scene is meant in the same way? Imagine this scene as an, as an operatic scene. As if an area sang. In other words, if you were to ask a Korean, North Korean guy, "But do you really think this happened?" he would probably say, "Are you stupid? Of course not. This is just meant to articulate our will to fight and blah blah blah," no? So again, belief is not in this sense literally a belief. This is not how it functions. And I claim especially with so-called fundamentalists. Don't make idiots of them. Another problem that I have with so-called fundamentalism is that it generated in our media, in our reaction, another great misunderstanding. I don't think that the so-called fundamentalist Islamic terror is grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization and so on and so forth. I think that, now I will say something politically incorrect and very brutal, that the problem with so-called, so-called—I have problems with this designations—fundamentalist terrorist is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. Like obviously, if you read Hitler's *Mein Kampf*, it's obvious that Hitler's problem is that he has problems with Jews, he considers himself inferior. Which is why our condescending politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more furious and feeds their ressentiment. The problem is not cultural difference, but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that they secretly already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. And this clearly goes also for for example Dalai Lama who justifies the Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of the pursuit of happiness, the avoidance of pain and so on and so forth. So paradoxically I think what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of true racist conviction into their own superiority, if you want. Another thing that should be stressed here where I think the reference to terrorism is crucial is that we should totally abandon this opposition which is forced on us as if in ethics we should oppose those who are ready to sacrifice themselves for a larger common good and utilitarians, hedonists and so on and so forth. We can learn here a lot I think already from the good old Rousseau who, Rousseau who distinguished clearly between simple egotism and the pathological *amour propre*, self-love. His idea is that there is nothing bad in simple egotism, caring for yourself, for your pleasures. The result is always good and it's even easy to generate morality out of this. The problem of evil is not hedonism, is not I want to have a good time. As he does it in a very precise way, Rousseau, he point, he demonstrates how the problem is when destroying the enemy, the problem is that of envy, when destroying the enemy preventing the other to enjoy becomes for you more important than your own enjoyment. And when you get caught into the logic of "better to ruin others' enjoyment than for me to enjoy." So the point is here that the logic of envy has nothing to do with hedonism and all this stuff. Which is why, now I will make a more concrete statement here, which is why I think John Rawls' theory of justice is catastrophically wrong. It works only on the assumption that people are simply egotists, it works only if you suspend envy and ressentiment. That is to say, you know probably Rawls' model of a just society where social inequalities are tolerated only in so far as they are based on natural inequalities which are considered contingent, not merits, and you know this Rawlsian test that the veil of ignorance test, no? You should, you should make a judgment without knowing what is your position. Or to directly formulate the result, certain inequality, some people earning more and so on, should be tolerated only if they help also the lowest, the poorest, the lowest. So that in this way you can justify it: okay, you can earn more or whatever than others, but also the lowest one will profit, will profit from it. It sounds very reasonable. So first we only get inequalities which are justified by helping also the poorest, the lowest on the, in social hierarchy, and point two, this, these privileges of some people being richer and so on are not justified through some old hierarchies or whatever but only in your natural capacities. How would this work in real life? I think it would have meant a total catastrophe. Why? Because imagine that you are the, the lowest, the poor one. You would of course be frustrated the others have more than you. But you would even be deprived of the right to protest, because it would be clear that you are less than the others because of your natural inabilities, and not only this, but the other are, others are richer than you basically in order to help you. I claim that the moment you introduce envy, the logic of envy, it explodes. It's a formula for for disaster. In other words, I think that, I don't know, probably you have the same stories, but the logic of desire, which is the logic of envy, is totally ignored here. Like there is an anecdote in my own country in Slovenia about a farmer, a peasant, who is given a choice by a good witch or a magician. He will, the magician, the God, whatever, all-powerful person, will give him, the peasant, one cow and to his neighbor two cows. Or take from him one cow and from his neighbor he will take two cows. Of course, the peasant immediately chooses the second option. Or, we in Slovenia have even a more morbid version. The witch or the magician tells the, the farmer, "I will do to you whatever you want, but I warn you, I will do it twice to your neighbor." You know what's immediately the farmer's response? "Take one of my eyes." Then you will take both the neighbor and so on. What's the lesson of this? Now don't misunderstand me. I hate Friedrich Hayek. But here he was right, where he emphasized how it is much easier to accept inequalities if one can claim that they result from an impersonal blind force. So, Hayek claims, the good thing about irrationality of the market success or failure in capitalism, you know this idea that it's not really you are intelligent whatever, there is always an element of contingency of chance of blind luck as to who fails, who succeeds on the market, is that it allows me precisely to perceive my failure or success as basically undeserved, contingent. So, the fact that capitalism is not just far from being something which makes it more intolerable is precisely what makes it palpable for the majority. Because can you imagine what horrible the situation would be for you if you would have to accept that "I fail because I am an idiot" or whatever? But if I say, "Okay, basically it's not my fault, it's market, market forces are impenetrable crazy," it makes it much easier to swallow it. So that's I think nonetheless a nice dialectical observation how the very injustice capitalism is accepted by people not because it's just, those who are more intelligent blah blah blah succeed. If it were to be just, it would explode long ago. What makes it palpable is its very injustice and that we know that it's unjust. In this sense we can, as it were, accept our own failure as something which is not our own, not our own responsibility. So much about this. Now let me return to belief. What is the, the basic, what's then the structure of belief if it's never clear what we believe, how it functions and so on and so forth? Now we come to the chicken. It's an old story, you know it, I will just give a new twist to it. You know this old classical joke story about a man who believes himself to be a grain of corn, seed, whatever. He is taken to the mental institution where doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. However, when he is cured, convinced that he is not a grain but a man, and then allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back trembling, scared. "There is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that the chicken will eat him." The doctor says, "Of course, dear fellow, you know very well that you are not a grain but a man." "Of course I know that," replies the patient, "but does the chicken know?" Now you will say that's a joke. No, I will try to prove now in the second part of that this is exactly how it works. For example, in psycho, this is what psychoanalysis is about. It's easy to convince you that, you know, your, your symptoms are just effects of your repressed traumas and so on and so forth. But the problem is to convince the unconscious which is as it were the chicken in you. How does this work even with Marxism? I think that this is what Marx was, which is why I think Marx should still be read. This is what Marx was targeting precisely, I claim this paradox of belief is what Marx was targeting in his good old-fashioned but I think we should return to it theory of so-called commodity fetishism. Let me quote you the first sentence or the first two sentences of this subdivision of the Chapter of *Capital*, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret." Quote: "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious trivial thing, but its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." Everybody reads this passage, but are you aware how strange it is? What Marx does here is exactly the opposite of what one would expect from a, well precisely a Marxist social critic. The idea is you take a mystified ideological edifice, religious fantasy whatever, and you try to reduce it to real-life phenomena, economic political processes, you try to show how even these most mystical sublime phenomena are generated by the real-life struggles, production and so on. That's the usual idea of critique of ideology, no? To show how ideological phenomena are generated by real life. But Marx is saying here almost the opposite, that the problem is not to reduce sublime phenomena to ordinary reality. The problem is to become aware of the, as it were, metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties, of the theological dimension of what appears to us as ordinary reality itself. This is for Marx commodity, commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism is not "You think you are dealing with something mystical commodity whatever, but in reality as we put it commodity is just an ordinary object, part of social exchange and so on and so forth." You think you are dealing with an ordinary object, but in reality—now that's the whole problem, in what kind of reality—there is this theological aspect of commodity. So that's my formula: when let us say a critical Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist reproach to the bourgeois subject is not, "A commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people." The actual Marxist reproach is rather, "You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations, that for example money is just a kind of voucher entitling you to a part of social product. But this is not how things really seem to you. In your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity appears to you as a magical object endowed with social powers." In other words, sorry to go back, what I just to explain this to make it absolutely clear. So we have three levels, not two. We don't simply have reality and illusion, illusory beliefs. It's not that in reality a commodity is a social product, some object becomes a commodity because of its role in social exchange, but we idiots are victims of commodity fetishism and think this is an inherent value, there is something magic in a commodity or money. No, the paradox is much nicer in Marx. Commodity is in reality just an ordinary object which functions as money, commodity, because of social relations. And this is what we think also. So our, what we think is close to reality, if you want. But the site of commodity fetishism is not our beliefs, it's our social reality itself. We act as if we embody our belief in act, in our social exchange. With, you know, it's a little bit the same as let us say your father is an idiot. Or no, let's this too obvious example. Let, let us take antisemitism, our late capitalist liberal antisemitism. Jews are people like others, and we think they are. But nonetheless, when you encounter a Jew, most of us, or not only a Jew, effective you can replace Jews with all other races and so on and so on whenever there is a racism, you, you treat them. In your social exchange itself, your antisemitic or other racist prejudices are embodied. So you got the point: in the when Marx defines ideology as *Zivissen das nicht aber sie tun es* (They do not know it, but still they are doing it), it doesn't mean the stupidity of "They don't know what they are doing, they are doing one thing but they think they misperceive what they are doing." It's that the illusion is not in what people think but in what they do. It's they don't see the illusion that they follow in what they are doing. Let us say, let us say that you are of another race. I as a white liberal, which I am not, but let us tell, "Oh, I like blacks blah blah blah." But then through some hints you get my racism. Literally, you see, I don't know, I am not aware of beliefs which I practice in my acts. That's the site of ideological illusion for Mark, of Marx. And now you got my point here, how contemporary cynicism uses this gap. Of course at the level of explicit belief, of our explicit conviction, we can be open blah blah blah. But and at that level maybe we live in a post-ideological era. What interests me is ideology which is embodied in material life itself, in social exchanges and so on and so forth. So let me go on. So we can, we can imagine a Marxist commodity fetishism version of the story about chicken. A bourgeois subject is visiting a course of Marxism where he is taught about commodity fetishism. However, after the finished course he comes back to his teacher complaining that he is still the victim of commodity fetishism. The teacher tells him, "But you know now how things stand, that commodities are only expressions of social relations, there is nothing magic about them." And then of course the pupil replies, "Of course I know that, but the commodities I'm dealing with do not know it." That's commodity fetishism. Now you will say I'm dreaming. Maybe, but Marx is dreaming with me. Here is a famous quote from *Capital* where Marx says the same thing, where he invokes this wonderful metaphor of commodities themselves talking to each other. A quote: "If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it and so on and so on." So again, the true task is not to convince people that commodities are just ordinary objects and so on, but as it were to convince the commodities. That is to say, to get rid of ideology which is embodied in our real social interaction. Not to change the way we speak about commodities, but to change the way commodities speak among themselves as it were. We can go here even a step further. My Slovene-Lacanian party member colleague Alenka Zupančič did this in a book which will appear soon on Hegel and comedy. We can repeat the same story, now I come to my central point of chicken and so on, about God. Apropos God himself. Let's imagine an enlightened revolutionary terror where a man is put in prison because he believes in God. With different measures, with kind of ideological brainwashing and so on, he is brought to knowledge that God does not exist. They convinced him. Then he is dismissed, but then soon he comes running back and he is explained that he is scared of being punished by God. Then the teacher, terrorist teacher tells him, "But what's the problem? We cured you, you know that God doesn't exist." Of course, what's the reply? You can guess it. "I know it, but does God know it, that he doesn't exist?" Now you will say I'm joking here. I'm not. Let me now give you my final point. This is why my attachment to Christian legacy—and I speak here as an atheist—it's so passionate. I follow here my preferred Catholic theologian G.K. Chesterton, who claimed that precisely and only in Christianity God does know this. At the moment of "Father, Father, you know, on the cross, why did you forsake me?" Here is a wonderful quote from Chesterton's *Orthodoxy*: "When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion but at the cry from the cross, the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionaries choose a creed from all the creeds and a God from all the Gods of the world, carefully weighing all the Gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another God who has himself been in revolt. No, the matter grows too difficult for human speech. But let the atheists themselves choose a God. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation, only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist." That's the unique element of Christianity for Chesterton. If we take seriously that "Father, why have you forsaken me?" and so on, it's not simply man are abandoned by God and so on. It's God himself is for a moment abandoned by God. That is to say, the gap between man and God is as it were reflected into God himself. And that's the difficult thing to accept. Which is why I think that Christianity in this sense is much closer to this kind of atheist position than the standard atheism which is that of all my friends, the culture atheism. Which is of course this using the cultural reference. All my Jewish friends say, I ask them, "Why don't you eat this good pork sausage?" "You know, I don't believe it, but you know it's part of my cultural inheritance and so on and so forth," you know? Like you don't do it out of belief, you say, "I just follow the traditions, the rituals and so on and so forth." Another way you can detect this decentered or whatever, decentered belief, belief which socially functions even when you deny it, would be through displacing this belief onto another. It's incredible how often people are ready, not a problem for them not to believe. But you need to have another people whom you suppose he believes. And that the critical moment is not for you to discover that you don't believe, but to discover that this other who as it were believed for you does not believe. And I'm not here making fun. I mean, this can get extremely serious. For example, maybe you heard about her, she was teaching for some time at New School, is she still there, Agnes Heller, the Hungarian Lukács pupil. She told me a wonderful story. Okay, wonderful, I mean theoretically wonderful, in reality terrifying. When she was, I mean she was in Auschwitz, she has the numbers and so on. She told me that how there in every cell, every building, there was a myth, a belief that never in your barrack but in the nearby barrack there was somebody who was not simply only keen on his or her survival, somebody who still remained even in these horrible circumstances an ethical person, sacrificed himself, helped others and so on and so on. And then she told me something interesting, that the most dangerous moment was when you discovered, as unfortunately you almost always did, that this other doesn't exist, that it's a myth. Like you in some work group you meet this other and you discover that at that, that he is like us, just a survivalist. At that point usually you broke down, you regressed to the level of "Muselmänner," of—ironically they were called Muslims, this is okay, Western racism. You know why? Because in the Western imaginary of the early 20th century, Muslim was supposed to be these people totally, totally abandoning themselves in fate, just obeying destiny. You just prayed, prayed and accepted everything. And these people who were totally broken, the living dead, they just did like this, they didn't even act. So ironically nice case of practical racism they were all got Muslims. So, but the interesting point is that you got my point that even in order to be a cruel survivalist you needed another guy to be as it were good for you. You needed to believe "I may be how should I put it, I may be evil, egotist, because another one is good for me as it were." If you, you needed that even to support your, to support your, your egotist attitude. And it's incredible how often you find this at different levels. For example, I read an interesting research recently about sexual promiscuity. How most of the people who engage in orgies and so on, they can be extremely wild doing I don't know what, but usually nonetheless they always have another one who as it were has to remain pure for them. It's usually their children or their... like, "I can do with triple penetration, name it whatever, but don't touch my son! Or but don't touch my mother!" There is somebody else who has to, who has to, who has to remain pure. So let me go on here. How then, what's the structure here? The structure of this objectified belief, that's my lesson here. How beliefs today more than ever precisely in our cynical post-ideological blah blah blah era, how beliefs are objectified. You can as it were believe without believing. You just practice belief with your acts. There is a wonderful anecdote maybe known to some of you about Niels Bohr, you know the Copenhagen the guy who I think was very intelligent also in theological matters. You know that I think that he provided a perfect answer to your own guy here, Princeton, Einstein. No, you know the famous "God doesn't play dice." But you know what Niels Bohr answered to Einstein was? "Don't tell God what to do," no? I think it's the correct answer. Okay, there is another I think even much better anecdote about Niels Bohr. Who, he a friend visited him in a countryside house and saw, it was an old farmer house, saw above the entrance the, the horseshoe on the entrance door. I don't know if it's here also, but in Europe this is kind of a superstitious object, like it brings luck, no if you have a horseshoe. Okay, so the surprised visitor asked Niels Bohr, "Why do you have that? My God, I thought you were a scientist. Do you really believe in this?" You know Niels Bohr gave a perfect answer: "Of course I'm not an idiot, of course I do not believe in it. But I have it because I was told that it works also if you don't believe in it." That's, that's, that's how it works today. We don't believe it, but it works even if you, even if you don't, even if you don't believe, no? In other words, this brings us back to my big theological reference, this notion of objectified beliefs, to Pascal. I think that Pascal, you know this Pascalian slogan, interpreted endlessly by almost all French Marxists, it is as if the entire French Marxism is a version of Pascalian theology. You know the Pascalian famous, like Pascal is basically the first theorist of Alcoholics Anonymous, this "Fake it till you make it." That is to say you don't believe, no problem. Do as if you believe, kneel down, pray and belief will come by itself. But I think that from today's experience we should turn around Pascal. It's more complex. The logic is not "Kneel down and, and kneel down and you will believe," but "Kneel down and you will make another believe, another agency or whatever believe for you." That is to say, one can say that how should I put it, the problem is not the truly traumatic thing is not not to believe but to believe seriously, too much. And I think that what ritual allows you is as it were to get rid of your belief. The idea is, are you too haunted by religious experience? Do you really believe? Is it too horrible of you, "My God, I really experience God" and so on? Not a problem. Practice a ritual and then it will get mechanized and you can think about masturbation whatever you want, you know? The ritual is doing it for you. It's the same thing as, I don't want to repeat it here, that I immensely like which I think it's one of the greatest 20th century inventions: canned laughter on TV. You know where the TV set literally laughs for you. Now I may be an idiot here, but for me it really works in the sense that let's say in the evening you come home, you are tired as a dog. You put on TV, you get a stupid show, *Friends*, whatever, *Cheers*, with canned laughter. What's the magic? The magic is I'm totally disagree with people who claim that the function of canned laughter, you know the laughter on TV soundtrack itself, is that to make, as in this idiotic imitation, to make you laugh. It's simply not true. I again, I spoke with some researchers who told me, "No, people don't laugh, it doesn't function in this way." No, the problem, the point is precisely that you are rid of even the duty to laugh. But so what's the point? That's the magic. The magic is that, maybe I'm the idiot here but I'm afraid only I'm not, is that when the show is over, you just stared as an idiot, nonetheless you are relieved as if you laughed. That's the magic of it. The TV laughed for you and it worked as if you did it. And I think that this is even the nice old Catholic manipulation with marriage, like it's too much for you to really love a partner. It's too intense. It's unbearable. You know how difficult it is truly to be in love, like it ruins your life, it's a catastrophe. I mean, the idea is get married, you have a ritual and then you can start to dream, to cheat, whatever. It's you get the minimum distance of the ritual. So my God, I have so many other things but nonetheless slowly I will conclude it. So again, to conclude, my first big thesis is that this functioning of ideology where you are even not aware of your own beliefs, that is to say it is not as in the classical idea we have of ideology: you officially believe, follow the ritual blah blah blah, but secretly you daydream about or even you are not aware how secretly you are an atheist, wild desires and so on and so no. Today I claim the situation is almost the opposite one. We are officially hedonists, we don't care and so on and so forth because we believe where? Not deep in ourselves, I'm not playing this game of deep discovery, because we believe in our acts. We practice beliefs. Which is why not only it doesn't hurt the official ideology if you don't explicitly believe. My thesis is much stronger: is that today for an ideology in order to function, it must, it must not be taken seriously by its subjects. It's too much. You must have a distance towards it. Which is why for me the most elementary ideological statement is the statement "But I'm not just a slave of ideology, I'm also a human person, there is something more in me." This, this minimal distance. Where do you find this distance? For example, this is for me one of the signs of ideology at its purest. If you buy a book of a popular author, and you know on the back side of the cover you usually get this short description of the author, "He published these books blah blah blah," and then to humanize the author, did you notice it? You have usually then two three lines about some private life. "In her," like I just now I read a detective novel, she is the best for me, of Patricia Highsmith. And it said at the end, "In her free time, Miss Highsmith is gardening and taking care of her cats," you know? This is ideology. This signal. So I tried to do it with my last book, the publisher rejected it. To twist this to just to shock people. To add, "In his free time, Professor Žižek is surfing, surfing, surfing the internet for child pornography and teaching his son, and teaching his son to pull out legs of spiders," or something like this. Just, just to show it how this is the falsity itself, this distance, this distance is it. Okay, now the final twist, the final question. If we have this cynical functioning of ideology and so on and so forth, but what about so-called fundamentalism then? Isn't nonetheless then so-called fundamentalism a good thing in the sense of "My God, they, they at least really believe"? No. Why not? Let me be very precise here. I think that fundamentalism and the utmost postmodern cynicism share something. What I call the decline of the symbolic function. What for me is the symbolic function is that you take a fiction seriously. In the sense of do you know this old story, I think it was first you find it in some Marivaux comedy, then it's quoted by Kant and later this and then it's even later you find a version with Marx Brothers. This famous anecdote of husband unexpectedly returning home, he finds his wife in bed with another man, and the wife said, "Now you have to choose. If you truly love me, there is nobody here. If you truly love me, you will believe my words, not your eyes," no? Like you have to... This is what we do. This minimum is the minimum of civilization. That even if you know belief is always an, a minimally absurd belief. Now okay, this is a ridiculous example. But let me give you a much more beautiful tragic example, okay the most kitsch one almost. You know the diaries of Anne Frank. There is a famous passage there where she says, "In spite of all the horrors that the Germans are doing, I still believe in essential divine goodness of every human person." This is a clear act of some kind of absurd wager. Belief has always the moment of this crazy decision, crazy counter-factual wager. "In spite of all the evidence, I believe it." And I think this kind of belief should be reasserted even today. Isn't the whole topic, in so far as we accept it, it's more problematic, of human rights, human equality? It's this kind of a crazy wager. "In spite of all the differences that I see, I accept it as a wager: humans are fundamentally dignified." This is, this is an article of faith. And I don't think it's anything ideological about it. What I'm claiming is that the cynical functioning of ideology where you no longer have this faith in symbolic beliefs, where you simply instrumentalized ideology and with fundamentalists, they do the same. For both of them they no longer trust this belief. Of course it's obvious in what sense cynics don't believe. They simply don't believe even if they practice beliefs. They don't believe, that's clear. But now you will tell me, but what about fundamentalists? Ah, a true fundamentalist I think literally does not believe. In what sense? No, it's not an idiot paradox. What I'm aiming at here is the difference between belief and knowledge. Namely what gave me this idea is I met some of the so-called fundamentalists and what shocked me is with what ease they—the more they are fundamentalists, the more they like modern sciences, cyberspace and so on and so forth. Why? Because for them—now I will try to be as clear as possible—for an authentic Christian to say "Christ has arisen from death" and so on, it's an absurd article of faith. For them it's a simple fact. They, you know what I mean, they don't treat it as this pathetic impossible existential wager. Which is why, for example, you know this very interesting story of the Turin Shroud. You know it was allegedly proven that it is false in 14th century, now those who claim it's true have a have another version that nonetheless there are some problems with that atomic decay how they... But I think that a true Christian should be horrified at the prospect that this may, may turn out to be true. Because my God, if it really is Christ's blood there, you have a nightmare perspective. Like the first evil idea that comes to your mind is "Let's look at the DNA then see who really is the father," no? I mean... then you will probably discover that it's some Arab servant and so on, no? And so whatever. So it's for them, but it's not only this opportunism. It's rather that they feel in a correct way, Christians, that this article of faith does is not is not a matter in this sense of knowledge. While for fundamentalists it is simply a matter of knowledge. For them there is no, there is no problem here. Religious statements are for them statements about simple positive facts. They read the Bible literally. This crazy decision of "in spite of all the facts and so on I choose to believe in human rights equality and so on and so forth," they they don't have that one. Which is why, and I think this is a much more not only funny but correct critique of so-called fundamentalism. It is not as people usually claim that fundamentalism poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge and so on and so forth. This is the superficial appearance, no, with their crazy theories against evolution blah blah blah. No, I think that the fundamental threat that they pose is the threat to belief itself. They are the, if you want to read a text where really the last traces of true authentic belief disappeared, it's the fundamentalist text. Again, we are in the field of knowledge there. Articles of faith are treated as simple positive knowledge. That's, that's the true danger. And it's a very nice paradoxical situation in a way where those who pretend to be again the most religious ones have already betrayed, have already betrayed religion. Okay, what I wanted to do is to just to report to you into what I wanted to do but I will cut it short now because I've already spoken... One thing I wanted to explore also is the structure of these disavowed materialized beliefs. How I think that we have at this level what I'm tempted to call the institutional unconscious. In the sense not in any mystical Jungian sense of collective unconscious but a set of implicit presuppositions, desires, beliefs which are disavowed by an official ideological edifice but are part of the institutional logic. And here we also enter a very painful domain for some Catholics at least because for example I'm more and more convinced that all these cases of pedophilia, pedophiliac scandals among the Catholics, prove that there is this pedophilia is not simply something which happens to Catholics to Catholic priests as a simple fact of life, in the sense of "even if I become a priest what can I do, I'm still human, so this haunts me and so on and so forth." I can even, to be extremely vicious, imagine an ordinary heterosexual guy who becomes a priest and then turns slowly into a pedophilia because it's something in the logic of the in the logic of the... it's not the private unconscious, it's the set of unwritten obscene rules inscribed into the institution itself. That's one line I wanted to pursue. Another line which is my favorite philosophical line, I don't have time for it, is to define this knowledge, this implicit knowledge that we possess without knowing it if you want, or rather sorry now I'm making mistake, I was criticizing these implicit beliefs in the Hegelian terms of self-consciousness. Namely I was surprised reading Hegel's theory of state about how precise Hegel is there. When Hegel says that the, that the, that state is a self-consciousness of the people and so on and so forth, usually Hegel is read there as kind of a ridiculous spiritualist, implying a kind of a mega-spiritual mystical spiritual subject whatever who runs the show behind. No, what Hegel means is something very materialist there. For Hegel self-consciousness simply means a refractive registration. In the sense of you don't do it, you at the same time register it reflectively as a symbolic act. What do I mean? Let me give you a totally vulgar example. Most of the people who have jeans wore jeans today or for example in Slovenia my country's many people now it's fashionable to have Land Rovers and so on and so forth. People live in the city and travel mostly from the suburb to the center but in a Land Rover. So they don't need it. So it's in order as it were to make a statement. You know what I mean? It's not just a utilitarian fact. Even or precisely when you are dealing with objects which declare themselves as pure utility, it's not fashion it's just useful, but they already declare their utility. This is for Hegel self-consciousness. It has nothing to do with individual, individual awareness. For Hegel this means that the state is not just an instrument but has to register declare its status through public rituals and so on and so forth. And Hegel is here very materialist when he emphasizes that this has nothing to do with people effectively being aware of it. Hegel in some of his notes which are only now published to his *Philosophy of Right* invokes an example of a state parade for example, state ritual, where even if all the individuals are thinking about their private affairs whatever not aware, still the ritual as such is self-consciousness of the state. In this sense, to give you an idea, in the Hegelian sense, the symptom is the subject's self-consciousness. Let us say I am convinced in something, whatever, but then through a symptom I undermine it. The, let's say I think I love my wife but I produce a symptom which embodies my secret, disavowed, I am not aware of it, hatred whatever of my wife. This symptom is in the Hegelian sense the moment of my self-consciousness. In this sense, you know what I mean, we have again a certain knowledge of which I am not aware but which exists out there, exists out there objectively. So all these paradoxes, I think again, are crucial for how ideology functions today. The reason I engaged in this way is to again to make you skeptical about this easy disposition of ideological positions today where as if the opposition is between I don't know fundamentalist belief or liberal skepticism, hedonism and so on and so on. It's not like this, I think that it's not like this. That in a way precisely cynics or hedonists are usually in their practice itself believers. So again, I think that this strange category of belief which exists objectified in our acts even if we publicly mock it, make fun of it and so on and so forth, it's the key to analyze today's society, the key to how ideology functions in a post-ideological era. I'm sorry if I was too long but on the other hand I'm not sorry because that's my nature. Thanks very much. And so it is with Brother Slavoj that he is eclectic to the core and how that one makes sense of all of these fascinating moments and epiphanic moments in which trying to weave things together. So I'm going to take this moment to be a bit pedagogical and try to say something at least that for an education in the sense of the context to grasp what you have given us. Because as a public intellectual who transgresses the disciplinary division of knowledge in our academy, and therefore there's no way that we can subsume what you have just presented under any discipline. In other words you presented a total confusion or what? Well no, it couldn't be, because some disciplines are highly confused though it might be providing certain illumination and understanding much better. Absolutely. But it also is a way of traversing various publics, that the mode of presentation, the very genre itself, brings us in and lures us in and summons us in to your discourse so that it's both academic but it's also journalistic, it's also popular culture, it's also high culture, it's anecdotal, it's full of jokes, but there's a deep sense of the comic that's operating. But what I want to highlight first and foremost is the philosophical framework. And it has so much to do with the story about the chicken. That what I've always loved about your work is that you are unabashedly old-fashioned in your philosophical orientation. And what I mean by that is that in a moment in which especially on the left people oppose Marxism, postmodern, post-psychoanalytic, you are modern to the core. But when he when he writes phrases like "German idealism is the unsurpassed horizon of our philosophical experience," so from Kant to Hegel that's where the stuff, the good stuff actually resides. You can play footsie with various postmodernist writers, but when you want substance, you're going to have to go back to the German idealism. Well what was German idealism dealing with? Well let's just look briefly at your favorite text I think, or one of your favorite texts, the great text of of Schelling's treatise on the essence of human freedom. That's the text that Heidegger says shattered Hegel's logic before Hegel published the text, undermined the older form of German idealism. Why? Precisely because like the chicken in us, it highlights the traumatic core of the modern subject. And in many ways what I see in your work is the centrality of the catastrophic, the monstrous, and the traumatic. And even Jacques Lacan is a kind of means by which you force us to come to terms with the traumatic. And postmodernist moves of cynicism and relativism and nihilism and so forth are simply modes of evasion that somehow don't want us to come to terms with that traumatic core. And what's distinctive about that text of is not only the text was written at a moment in which his wife was dying, Caroline, who was the wife of August Schlegel, whom he had seduced and after having been engaged to her daughter. And do you know very left-wing politically. After her death, Schelling turned reactionary only. That's true. That's absolutely right. But I mean I say this because it's a way of trying to historicize and concretize what we're talking about here. Because what this text is fundamentally about is what are the ways in which we talk about the traumatic, the catastrophic, the monstrous, be it in terms of our individual psyche or be it in terms of our culture and larger civilization. And I think it's no accident that the text that I would highly recommend to each and every one of you called *The Fragile Absolute*. Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? And you used various references in some ways in the in the text, and he didn't get a chance to read the whole text, he gave me a slightly different text, which I appreciate because it's just so creative. You can see your mind's forever moving, building on what you built on what I read. But in that particular text, what I also saw is how easy it is to settle for trite formulations that somehow don't somehow don't force us, don't compel us to wrestle with these very, very dark centers inside of ourselves and inside of our our society. Now what is the significance of this? Well one is is that one has to move backwards in order to move forward. That is to say, if we're going to go back to wrestling with the old problematic of German idealism: what does it really mean to be homeless? What does it mean to acknowledge the ineradicability of the non-rational? What if reality and being itself is impenetrable? What does it mean to actually confront the fact of the intractability of the unfathomable? Is that just empty rhetoric? Not at all. It means in fact that somehow we've got to either learn how to confront and cope with the traumatic or we will forever remain on the surfaces. And the move toward the 19th century toward Schelling, toward German idealism, toward wrestling with forms of alienation and the traumatic and the catastrophic, go hand-in-hand with the return to Marx. Not in any simplistic way. You can see the reading itself is sophisticated. But all the postmodernist talk that downplay class, that downplay empire, are similar modes of evasion because we don't want to deal with the traumatic core at the very center of our own lives and civilization. Now we in America have a very different religious profile as you know. percent of the fellow citizens of this country, my fellow citizens of this country, believe in God. percent believe Jesus Christ is the son of God. percent talk on intimate terms
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with God at least four times a week. Now you say well does it cut deep? Is it just objectified? Are the fundamentalists in some ways simply on the surfaces and not enacting any kind of authentic conviction? Well I don't know, when you look at the debate over abortion you see some pretty deep intensity of people who really believe. And in fact are willing to sacrifice, in fact are willing to sometimes confront their enemies, sometimes trash their enemies. Very intense. And there's a sense in which part of the liberal project is just to
with God at least four times a week. Now you say well does it cut deep? Is it just objectified? Are the fundamentalists in some ways simply on the surfaces and not enacting any kind of authentic conviction? Well I don't know, when you look at the debate over abortion you see some pretty deep intensity of people who really believe. And in fact are willing to sacrifice, in fact are willing to sometimes confront their enemies, sometimes trash their enemies. Very intense. And there's a sense in which part of the liberal project is just to
Slavoj Žižek
lower the temperature so that they don't kill each
lower the temperature so that they don't kill each
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other, so that they're not at each other's throats as it were. But at the same time, you see the the religiosity that you're talking about, so much of it market-driven as it were, so much of it obsessed with upward mobility, so much of it not really confronting the deeper traumatic core at the very beginning of this nation and in given its enactment thereafter, does I think provide some some ground for for what you're saying. I think my question to you in part would be: what would be an example, a constructive positive example of the kind of belief that you would want to promote? I know that I know that usually it's a certain kind of psychoanalytic practice and certainly it continues, it's a certain kind of anti-capitalist practice, even a sophisticated Marxist praxis. But I would want to hear a bit more about how that is enacted, where you see it at work in our society in Slovenia, in Europe, or or what have you. So that would be one question. The second question I want to raise would be the question about the about that line on the cross though, about "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Now now you know that that that's Mark that echoes the first verse of Psalm Judaism already has within it a very, very rich tradition of the dormant God, the sleeping God, the absent God, the God that seems to be far removed. In fact when you look further up further along that verse it says "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why is thou so far from my call for help, my cry for help? Why does one not hear my words soaring?" Now you see that kind of talk one does find in Pascal, the *Deus absconditus*. That's very different atheist talk. You see, that's not Psalm, that's not Psalm 14th chapter, "The fool says in his heart there is no God." That's a very, very different level of discourse. And so the question becomes whether Chesterton is misleading you in saying this is an atheist moment as opposed to very much like the 32nd chapter of Genesis, like Jacob wrestling in the darkness not knowing what way to go and enacting a level of angst which is genuine but yet not in any way atheistic. And if that's true, then maybe the atheistic moment is more of what Nietzsche thought, which is Saturday after Good Friday. The death itself. Not the words on the cross but the death itself of that God and not knowing that
other, so that they're not at each other's throats as it were. But at the same time, you see the the religiosity that you're talking about, so much of it market-driven as it were, so much of it obsessed with upward mobility, so much of it not really confronting the deeper traumatic core at the very beginning of this nation and in given its enactment thereafter, does I think provide some some ground for for what you're saying. I think my question to you in part would be: what would be an example, a constructive positive example of the kind of belief that you would want to promote? I know that I know that usually it's a certain kind of psychoanalytic practice and certainly it continues, it's a certain kind of anti-capitalist practice, even a sophisticated Marxist praxis. But I would want to hear a bit more about how that is enacted, where you see it at work in our society in Slovenia, in Europe, or or what have you. So that would be one question. The second question I want to raise would be the question about the about that line on the cross though, about "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Now now you know that that that's Mark that echoes the first verse of Psalm Judaism already has within it a very, very rich tradition of the dormant God, the sleeping God, the absent God, the God that seems to be far removed. In fact when you look further up further along that verse it says "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why is thou so far from my call for help, my cry for help? Why does one not hear my words soaring?" Now you see that kind of talk one does find in Pascal, the *Deus absconditus*. That's very different atheist talk. You see, that's not Psalm, that's not Psalm 14th chapter, "The fool says in his heart there is no God." That's a very, very different level of discourse. And so the question becomes whether Chesterton is misleading you in saying this is an atheist moment as opposed to very much like the 32nd chapter of Genesis, like Jacob wrestling in the darkness not knowing what way to go and enacting a level of angst which is genuine but yet not in any way atheistic. And if that's true, then maybe the atheistic moment is more of what Nietzsche thought, which is Saturday after Good Friday. The death itself. Not the words on the cross but the death itself of that God and not knowing that
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Easter Sunday's coming, you know, the terrain of Samuel Beckett of *Waiting for Godot* and so forth. Now if that's true then we might then have to revise what you said about the distinctive feature of the Christian faith somehow being a religion in which the atheist moment is uttered by the God and God himself, and it might actually be very close to your own hero, my hero in some ways too, Schelling. When you're talking about when you actually look at the life of God, what was it about the emergence of God that seem, the emergence of man in the life of God that seems to be grounded on a certain kind of derangement and catastrophe in which things are out of joint? Almost echoes *Hamlet* here. And having been having been harmonic since. And that's a very different space it seems to me to to reside. I think it cuts much deeper than the the Chesterton-like move that I see you following just on this on this on the second point here. Let me just end as I want to say open this up for questions and so forth. But see what I what I when I read you and listen to you and say how fascinating it is to see someone philosophically old-fashioned and politically revolutionary and culturally so playful and personally so charismatic and having significant impact here and around the world. I mean that's a very rare kind of moment. And it's a sense in which it'd be fascinating to engage in a Žižekian analysis of Žižek's praxis and try to understand the emergence of your own discourse and practice at this particular moment and what kinds of silences and what kinds of insights can be culled from what you're doing. But that's a much larger question but I just throw that out before we open it up. Okay. I will try... do we applaud to you also? I think you deserve it. I'm really grateful. The only problem I have is that my God to answer you, you know another, I will just try to mark some. First, I deeply agree with what you said about this moment of madness, monstrous. And here it's a much more detailed polemics. I cannot go now into technical details, but in the big debate, you know, about *Cogito* and *History of Madness* between Foucault and Derrida, in spite of all the extreme finesse of Foucault's reading, I basically think that Derrida was right there in detecting a kind of a trans-historical moment of madness in the very core of subjectivity in *Cogito*, Cartesian *Cogito* himself. And here we come to what you mentioned because already in Kant, but later in Fichte, in Schelling, in Hegel, this explodes again. I think the best sign index of the shift from enlightenment to German idealism is the change, fundamental change in the metaphor for the subject. For in enlightenment, the subject is the light of reason whatever and you are, when you are haunted by darkness, darkness tries to invade into you from the outside. But with German idealism, with Schelling and Hegel, explicitly they both refer to that mystical language, "Night of the World." Night, darkness is the term for the very excessive crazy core of subjectivity. And here not only Schelling but Hegel should be reread, the lesser-known Hegel. For example, if you
Easter Sunday's coming, you know, the terrain of Samuel Beckett of *Waiting for Godot* and so forth. Now if that's true then we might then have to revise what you said about the distinctive feature of the Christian faith somehow being a religion in which the atheist moment is uttered by the God and God himself, and it might actually be very close to your own hero, my hero in some ways too, Schelling. When you're talking about when you actually look at the life of God, what was it about the emergence of God that seem, the emergence of man in the life of God that seems to be grounded on a certain kind of derangement and catastrophe in which things are out of joint? Almost echoes *Hamlet* here. And having been having been harmonic since. And that's a very different space it seems to me to to reside. I think it cuts much deeper than the the Chesterton-like move that I see you following just on this on this on the second point here. Let me just end as I want to say open this up for questions and so forth. But see what I what I when I read you and listen to you and say how fascinating it is to see someone philosophically old-fashioned and politically revolutionary and culturally so playful and personally so charismatic and having significant impact here and around the world. I mean that's a very rare kind of moment. And it's a sense in which it'd be fascinating to engage in a Žižekian analysis of Žižek's praxis and try to understand the emergence of your own discourse and practice at this particular moment and what kinds of silences and what kinds of insights can be culled from what you're doing. But that's a much larger question but I just throw that out before we open it up. Okay. I will try... do we applaud to you also? I think you deserve it. I'm really grateful. The only problem I have is that my God to answer you, you know another, I will just try to mark some. First, I deeply agree with what you said about this moment of madness, monstrous. And here it's a much more detailed polemics. I cannot go now into technical details, but in the big debate, you know, about *Cogito* and *History of Madness* between Foucault and Derrida, in spite of all the extreme finesse of Foucault's reading, I basically think that Derrida was right there in detecting a kind of a trans-historical moment of madness in the very core of subjectivity in *Cogito*, Cartesian *Cogito* himself. And here we come to what you mentioned because already in Kant, but later in Fichte, in Schelling, in Hegel, this explodes again. I think the best sign index of the shift from enlightenment to German idealism is the change, fundamental change in the metaphor for the subject. For in enlightenment, the subject is the light of reason whatever and you are, when you are haunted by darkness, darkness tries to invade into you from the outside. But with German idealism, with Schelling and Hegel, explicitly they both refer to that mystical language, "Night of the World." Night, darkness is the term for the very excessive crazy core of subjectivity. And here not only Schelling but Hegel should be reread, the lesser-known Hegel. For example, if you
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look at Hegel's *Encyclopedia*, third part *Philosophy of Spirit*, things that almost nobody reads, like the very beginning, "Anthropology," where Hegel tries to develop how human mind emerges out of this almost out of this immersion into animal feeling and so on. He has there wonderful pages of notes reconstructed afterwards from his improvisations at his lecture course about how madness is inherent there and how the whole of of civilized mind language is a desperate attempt to contain this madness. We don't have time to go into this. What you mentioned about historicizing and so on, may I make a brief remark which always fascinated me. What I found always so fascinating with so-called deconstructionists, postmodern and so on, is how selective they are in their historicizing. Like, for example, Wagner-Nietzsche. Richard Wagner is over-historicized, you know. You look at *Parsifal*, of course the wound is a is historically decoded as syphilis, every statement of Wagner is put in context to prove Wagner-Hitler and so on. But then we get to Nietzsche, and it's unbelievable how the way postmodernist like Nietzsche redeem Nietzsche is by totally... I mean, we tend to forget that when Nietzsche talked about master-slave, are it totally disappeared from our view how deeply involved Nietzsche was in political happenings of his day with, to put it clearly, very reactionary political attitudes. For example, the nightmare which haunted Nietzsche was the Paris Commune. This was for him the ultimate slave rebellion. He even believed the rumor which afterwards proved false that that the rebels of Paris Commune are burning Louvre whatever, that was... So again, it's interesting how if you take Deleuze and so on, Nietzsche is totally non-historical. I mean with all others, you know, you look at every reference to the historical context to to prove whatever. Nietzsche... okay, but we don't have time for this. Let's go to that moment, I'm so sorry we don't have time to go more into it. You know, my paradox would be the following one and we agree here more than it may appear. When I say atheism, paradoxically what I try to assert is atheism as a moment in divine life itself. What I'm totally opposed to is this simplistic stupid Feuerbach reading of Christianity as "The incarnation of Christ means that really God becomes man, but in this stupid sense that you know, humanity is the truth of God, we just have to accept that that God was our fantasy and so on." I totally I totally agree with you. I totally reject it. What I found so fascinating in this story, "Father, have you forsaken me" and so on, okay you may find it before, I know all these references, but again the point is that God is saying it here. And I had three years ago an interesting debate in Vienna with some bishops even and I asked them a simple stupid vulgar question, I like these stupid questions which are embarrassing. When Christ says "Father, Father why have you forsaken me?", is he bluffing or does he mean it seriously? If he is bluffing, that is to say secretly he knows that's only the stage show to impress the humans, I will join my dad happily there, ha ha. If he knows
look at Hegel's *Encyclopedia*, third part *Philosophy of Spirit*, things that almost nobody reads, like the very beginning, "Anthropology," where Hegel tries to develop how human mind emerges out of this almost out of this immersion into animal feeling and so on. He has there wonderful pages of notes reconstructed afterwards from his improvisations at his lecture course about how madness is inherent there and how the whole of of civilized mind language is a desperate attempt to contain this madness. We don't have time to go into this. What you mentioned about historicizing and so on, may I make a brief remark which always fascinated me. What I found always so fascinating with so-called deconstructionists, postmodern and so on, is how selective they are in their historicizing. Like, for example, Wagner-Nietzsche. Richard Wagner is over-historicized, you know. You look at *Parsifal*, of course the wound is a is historically decoded as syphilis, every statement of Wagner is put in context to prove Wagner-Hitler and so on. But then we get to Nietzsche, and it's unbelievable how the way postmodernist like Nietzsche redeem Nietzsche is by totally... I mean, we tend to forget that when Nietzsche talked about master-slave, are it totally disappeared from our view how deeply involved Nietzsche was in political happenings of his day with, to put it clearly, very reactionary political attitudes. For example, the nightmare which haunted Nietzsche was the Paris Commune. This was for him the ultimate slave rebellion. He even believed the rumor which afterwards proved false that that the rebels of Paris Commune are burning Louvre whatever, that was... So again, it's interesting how if you take Deleuze and so on, Nietzsche is totally non-historical. I mean with all others, you know, you look at every reference to the historical context to to prove whatever. Nietzsche... okay, but we don't have time for this. Let's go to that moment, I'm so sorry we don't have time to go more into it. You know, my paradox would be the following one and we agree here more than it may appear. When I say atheism, paradoxically what I try to assert is atheism as a moment in divine life itself. What I'm totally opposed to is this simplistic stupid Feuerbach reading of Christianity as "The incarnation of Christ means that really God becomes man, but in this stupid sense that you know, humanity is the truth of God, we just have to accept that that God was our fantasy and so on." I totally I totally agree with you. I totally reject it. What I found so fascinating in this story, "Father, have you forsaken me" and so on, okay you may find it before, I know all these references, but again the point is that God is saying it here. And I had three years ago an interesting debate in Vienna with some bishops even and I asked them a simple stupid vulgar question, I like these stupid questions which are embarrassing. When Christ says "Father, Father why have you forsaken me?", is he bluffing or does he mean it seriously? If he is bluffing, that is to say secretly he knows that's only the stage show to impress the humans, I will join my dad happily there, ha ha. If he knows
unknown
this and he's just bluffing, then it's a fake. We are in Gnosticism and so on. But if it's serious, then literally for a moment God is lost for himself. Like you know there is a kind of a split in God which is God already... then the consequences are radical here. And here what here I tempt to agree... this is the book that I'm writing now, purely theological book, *Hegel Christianity*. My starting point is a wonderful slip of tongue, mistake by Hegel. You know the what is the distinction between what was the theological cause superficially at least which triggered the in fourth century or when fifth later the the split between Orthodox Eastern Church and Western Christianity is this how you call the question of the Son and Holy, no? For for the Orthodox who who is where does
this and he's just bluffing, then it's a fake. We are in Gnosticism and so on. But if it's serious, then literally for a moment God is lost for himself. Like you know there is a kind of a split in God which is God already... then the consequences are radical here. And here what here I tempt to agree... this is the book that I'm writing now, purely theological book, *Hegel Christianity*. My starting point is a wonderful slip of tongue, mistake by Hegel. You know the what is the distinction between what was the theological cause superficially at least which triggered the in fourth century or when fifth later the the split between Orthodox Eastern Church and Western Christianity is this how you call the question of the Son and Holy, no? For for the Orthodox who who is where does
Slavoj Žižek
the Holy Spirit originate from? For the Orthodox it's only from the Father. Both Son and Father, sorry, both Son and Holy Spirit emanate only from the Father. For Western Christians it's from Father and Son together. The East wanted the mon-absolute as they put it, theologists, to maintain the absolute monarchy of the Father. Now Hegel does something incredible, it's a truly Freudian slip. When he reports on this, he makes a mistake. He says that the distinction is that for the Orthodox the Holy Spirit originates from Father and Son and for us in the West only from the Son. I agree with Hegel. That's my point. My reading is that nonetheless Hegel is right when the point is what dies on the cross? Hegel's thesis is not the Son. It's not that God's representative dies and that what dies on the cross is Father himself. It's not simply that a, this would be the pagan reading and if you accept this reading then Christianity is just another of these old boring Osiris stupid stories, from time to time God sends a messenger, this messenger dies, returns, comes again. Christianity is not this, it's a cut, a one-time event. And what dies is the old God himself. And which is why we have then Holy Spirit which is something totally unique. So again, I agree with you we don't have time. Okay, speaking about now when you mentioned these jokes and so on, let me tell you a detail. I'm here very personal at two levels. First, recently a wonderful book was published with okay at least it's good as a collection, *Kierkegaard and Humor*. Where they point how for Kierkegaard also humor was crucial, not in the simple sense you have to be popular and to introduce Christianity blah blah blah, but Kierkegaard has this tremendous vision of Christianity as a comedy. Not comedy in the simple sense of Dante, *Divina Commedia*, comedy is what ends well. But in a more radical sense that incarnation embodiment, it's a comical event. Kierkegaard has this wonderful idea that imagine some far king is coming and then, you know this stupid elementary comical scene, and then instead of a king entering when when trumpets announce it, people looking, a small dog enters, no? Kierkegaard says, "My God, this is incarnation. You expect a big God, you get an ordinary guy there." That this gap between Christ as a poor ordinary guy and divinity, it's a comical gap. And I think this is what reactionary fundamentalists miss. The problem for me with Mel Gibson's *Passion* is that he misses the joke of Christianity. Which is why it's a pagan film I think. Okay, another thing is that of course it's the greatest monument to to Southern California sado-mazo gay community, no? But that's another story, no I mean. Okay, but what I'm saying is that another very personal moment here for me about jokes is that it's precisely my own political experience in ex-Yugoslavia. You know the terrible civil war in the first half of the nineties, you remember? My God, people killed in Europe where people I don't know why didn't expect it as if Europeans are not even worse now. But what I'm saying is that what traumatized me is the progressive, absolutely progressive I claim role of dirty political racist jokes. In what sense? In old Yugoslavia, you know five, six republics, nations, ethnic groups, whatever you call them, each was of course in the racist imaginary identified with a certain feature. Like we Slovenes were misers, Montenegro people were lazy, Bosnians were this kind of a cunning sexually obsessed and so on. And you know how this functioned? It didn't function in a racist way. We were not telling jokes about others. When I met my Serb, Bosnian, Montenegrin friends, I told them joke, it was more a kind of a solidary exchange of obscenities. Like "I tell you my dirty" and this means we are above this for me disgusting politically correct, "Oh, I admire your food, your ritual," this is for me repressed racism. No, I want to hear the dirty jokes from you, no? And a negative proof of this, incredible, is that in early from early eighties onwards when ethnic tension started to explode, very interesting, these jokes disappeared. This is for me a kind of an absolute negative proof that that they played, I think again they were not racist jokes in the sense of making... it was just... You know, isn't this also your elementary experience? If you meet a person of another race, orientation, whatever, as long as you play this game, "Oh I respect you blah blah blah," that's for me repressed racism. Only when you go at this level of how should I put it, exchanging obscenities, you are there, you are truly a friend where you do that. Now you will tell you will ask me "But how do you know that this is not nonetheless it can be misinterpreted as a racism?" Of course, but you have to take that risk. That's the leap of faith, how should I put it, no? And there are wonderful there is a wonderful logic of these jokes. For example, we Slovenes are misers in our own perspective, no? The standard Slovene joke I don't know is that an old farmer, rich farmer is dying, no? All the family is gathered around him, daughters, grandsons, and he asks, "Is everybody here?" They told him, "Yes, Grandpa." Then the farmer asks, "If everybody is here in this room with me, why is then the light on there in the corridor?" and so on and so forth. Then Montenegro are lazy people, no and they have wonderful politically incorrect dirty jokes like, you know Montenegro you must know is also an earthquake territory. So how does a Montenegro guy masturbate? He digs a hole in the earth, puts his penis in and waits for the earthquake because he is too lazy to... Bosnians are the nicest because Bosnia... ah, with Montenegro you have some very philosophically deep jokes. More interesting about their like, why does a Montenegro guy put as his table night table a full and an empty glass of water? Because he is too lazy to think if he will be thirsty or not during the night. So, but you know what's the nicety then? He has to have to mark the non-thirst also an empty glass. This is this is almost as intelligent as that George Bush one, "The tomorrow the future will look better" or what, no I mean. Some... but and Bosnians, I prefer them because in a very nice way Bosnians play with their own image which is a racist image but they gladly totally identify with it of being this kind of a obsessed with sex in this primitive cunning way. So there is a wonderful dirty story but not too incorrect, you can swallow it. You know, the only thing it's presupposed is you have to know that Beethoven piano pieces, everybody knows his composition for Eliza, *Für Elise*. You know that? Okay. Okay. So the story is that now in Bosnia they try to be modern and they have classical music teaching which is no longer this old learn by heart blah blah blah but creative, no? So there is a class and the teacher says, "Now we will talk about Beethoven. Each of you should say first some thought, image, person and then name a Beethoven composition which fits it," no? So first a girl says, "Yes, Bambi forest, what? Pastoral symphony, nature, okay." Okay, then a boy said "War, revolution, heroism, Eroica, Third Symphony." Then the Bosnian guy comes and says—now I have to be vulgar—"A prick, long hard like this." "Why?" "For Eliza," no? and so on and so on. I mean I mean I mean. That's the spirit, that's that was for me the reality of this brotherhood celebrated of you... the moment we lost this, it was war. It was war. And this is I think what sometimes we miss with this politically correct respect. Like when they I don't know when they tell me "Native Americans, you have to respect them." I don't care about their holistic attitude to life or whatever. I want to hear their dirty jokes because I I really I really like them. Just one phrase, the last one. Here I'm very traditional. When you say what would be this belief, oh yeah, I'm very simple, take any here I'm even more traditional than you think. Isn't... don't you find this crazy belief in every big emancipatory political project? Like every revolution. Wasn't such kind of a crazy belief at work in, for example, Toussaint Louverture, Haitian Revolution, this... don't you find in all of them this kind of a in all radical political projects? Here I see a parallel between... this is what interests me in for example Paul, the Paulinian community of believers. Here I agree with Alain Badiou. The Paulinian community of believers living in this emergency state at the end of time, it's not only a theological theory, it is an answer to a very precise historical deadlock. There were two models of, let's say, social logic in Paul's time. On the one hand, Romans, their decadent hedonist individualism blah blah blah, on the Empire. On the other hand, Jews, traditional Jews which were for him a kind of a traditional logic here and so on. It's basically the same alternative as today: either you play this game of individualism, hedonism or old traditional communities. And what Paul offered is a third logic of community. Community believe... community of believers is something which is neither this individualistic hedonistic assemblage of individuals nor the traditional hierarchical whatever religious community. It's a different logic, this egalitarian emergency state logic. And maybe we need a little bit of that today. But then that's why you call yourself a Paulinian materialist? Yeah, but but again but but again what do I mean by materialist and so on? Things are here I agree with you, things are here very, very complex in the sense that you know all these words, what does it mean to be atheist to believe today? I totally agree here with you that it's not as simple as now we proclaim that man is the the secret that allowed us to decode God and we do this simple reduction. This doesn't work, of course. Sorry if I was too long again. So I think we have time for a few questions. If you'd like to ask a question, please wait for the microphone. Do we have some questions or symptomatically obscene jokes? Obviously a lot of sort of the question of religion is, you know, why people think it's necessary to buy a certain culture or sort of why they gravitate towards it. And it seems to me that people kind of want an answer to some of the big questions. So I was wondering what both of you, I guess, think is... Professor Žižek, you were talking a lot about how, you know, the people that say they don't believe actually do and people that say they believe actually don't. So I was wondering what you think is sort of the cause and effects of that in terms of... like what does it do to people and why are people thinking that they believe when they don't? Like kind of what are the implications of that? This is a very good question but an extremely complex one because how should I put it, I don't think there is, my first point here would have been that I don't think there is a symmetry here in the sense that simply those who believe really don't believe, those who pretend to be atheists really believe and so on. I think the fundamental, the fundamental fact for me is what I'm trying to isolate in this way but I didn't have time to develop it in detail is what is changing today in our functioning of belief. I nonetheless claim that something fundamental is changing today in the sense of the how should I call it, paradoxically we believe more and less today. What we are less and less able I claim is to practice this purely symbolic belief. What do I mean by this? Do you perhaps know the book by Paul Veyne, *Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths?* which is a their own myths. And his answer is, in a way of course no. Ancient Greeks were not idiots to think if you climb to the top of the Mount Olympus you will there encounter Zeus and so on. But also, that's crucial, it's wrong to say that Zeus was just for them a metaphor of some force and so on and so forth. It's not like that. It's something much more mysterious and I think the closest we can get to it is politeness. Like for example, I don't know, I meet somebody who is not really my friend and I say, "Nice to meet you. How are you? Nice to meet you." We both know that I don't mean it seriously. Not only this, but did you notice how when I say "How are you?", the other is expected to say "Well." Not only this, but if the other were to take my question literally, it would be even too intrusive. My God, what right does somebody whom I barely know to ask me how am I? It's none of his business. But the whole of our cultural identity whatever resides in the fact that although you don't mean it literally, it's not hypocrisy. The psychotic is perhaps a person, a definition of psychotic is the one who thinks then it must be hypocrisy. It's possible that what you are saying is literally a lie—I don't really care how are you, I don't I'm not really glad to see you—but nonetheless it's not hypocrisy. You can lie sincerely, how should I put it. And I think that this something fundamental I think is changing at this is changing at this level. So it's not simply believe-non-believe, it's what
the Holy Spirit originate from? For the Orthodox it's only from the Father. Both Son and Father, sorry, both Son and Holy Spirit emanate only from the Father. For Western Christians it's from Father and Son together. The East wanted the mon-absolute as they put it, theologists, to maintain the absolute monarchy of the Father. Now Hegel does something incredible, it's a truly Freudian slip. When he reports on this, he makes a mistake. He says that the distinction is that for the Orthodox the Holy Spirit originates from Father and Son and for us in the West only from the Son. I agree with Hegel. That's my point. My reading is that nonetheless Hegel is right when the point is what dies on the cross? Hegel's thesis is not the Son. It's not that God's representative dies and that what dies on the cross is Father himself. It's not simply that a, this would be the pagan reading and if you accept this reading then Christianity is just another of these old boring Osiris stupid stories, from time to time God sends a messenger, this messenger dies, returns, comes again. Christianity is not this, it's a cut, a one-time event. And what dies is the old God himself. And which is why we have then Holy Spirit which is something totally unique. So again, I agree with you we don't have time. Okay, speaking about now when you mentioned these jokes and so on, let me tell you a detail. I'm here very personal at two levels. First, recently a wonderful book was published with okay at least it's good as a collection, *Kierkegaard and Humor*. Where they point how for Kierkegaard also humor was crucial, not in the simple sense you have to be popular and to introduce Christianity blah blah blah, but Kierkegaard has this tremendous vision of Christianity as a comedy. Not comedy in the simple sense of Dante, *Divina Commedia*, comedy is what ends well. But in a more radical sense that incarnation embodiment, it's a comical event. Kierkegaard has this wonderful idea that imagine some far king is coming and then, you know this stupid elementary comical scene, and then instead of a king entering when when trumpets announce it, people looking, a small dog enters, no? Kierkegaard says, "My God, this is incarnation. You expect a big God, you get an ordinary guy there." That this gap between Christ as a poor ordinary guy and divinity, it's a comical gap. And I think this is what reactionary fundamentalists miss. The problem for me with Mel Gibson's *Passion* is that he misses the joke of Christianity. Which is why it's a pagan film I think. Okay, another thing is that of course it's the greatest monument to to Southern California sado-mazo gay community, no? But that's another story, no I mean. Okay, but what I'm saying is that another very personal moment here for me about jokes is that it's precisely my own political experience in ex-Yugoslavia. You know the terrible civil war in the first half of the nineties, you remember? My God, people killed in Europe where people I don't know why didn't expect it as if Europeans are not even worse now. But what I'm saying is that what traumatized me is the progressive, absolutely progressive I claim role of dirty political racist jokes. In what sense? In old Yugoslavia, you know five, six republics, nations, ethnic groups, whatever you call them, each was of course in the racist imaginary identified with a certain feature. Like we Slovenes were misers, Montenegro people were lazy, Bosnians were this kind of a cunning sexually obsessed and so on. And you know how this functioned? It didn't function in a racist way. We were not telling jokes about others. When I met my Serb, Bosnian, Montenegrin friends, I told them joke, it was more a kind of a solidary exchange of obscenities. Like "I tell you my dirty" and this means we are above this for me disgusting politically correct, "Oh, I admire your food, your ritual," this is for me repressed racism. No, I want to hear the dirty jokes from you, no? And a negative proof of this, incredible, is that in early from early eighties onwards when ethnic tension started to explode, very interesting, these jokes disappeared. This is for me a kind of an absolute negative proof that that they played, I think again they were not racist jokes in the sense of making... it was just... You know, isn't this also your elementary experience? If you meet a person of another race, orientation, whatever, as long as you play this game, "Oh I respect you blah blah blah," that's for me repressed racism. Only when you go at this level of how should I put it, exchanging obscenities, you are there, you are truly a friend where you do that. Now you will tell you will ask me "But how do you know that this is not nonetheless it can be misinterpreted as a racism?" Of course, but you have to take that risk. That's the leap of faith, how should I put it, no? And there are wonderful there is a wonderful logic of these jokes. For example, we Slovenes are misers in our own perspective, no? The standard Slovene joke I don't know is that an old farmer, rich farmer is dying, no? All the family is gathered around him, daughters, grandsons, and he asks, "Is everybody here?" They told him, "Yes, Grandpa." Then the farmer asks, "If everybody is here in this room with me, why is then the light on there in the corridor?" and so on and so forth. Then Montenegro are lazy people, no and they have wonderful politically incorrect dirty jokes like, you know Montenegro you must know is also an earthquake territory. So how does a Montenegro guy masturbate? He digs a hole in the earth, puts his penis in and waits for the earthquake because he is too lazy to... Bosnians are the nicest because Bosnia... ah, with Montenegro you have some very philosophically deep jokes. More interesting about their like, why does a Montenegro guy put as his table night table a full and an empty glass of water? Because he is too lazy to think if he will be thirsty or not during the night. So, but you know what's the nicety then? He has to have to mark the non-thirst also an empty glass. This is this is almost as intelligent as that George Bush one, "The tomorrow the future will look better" or what, no I mean. Some... but and Bosnians, I prefer them because in a very nice way Bosnians play with their own image which is a racist image but they gladly totally identify with it of being this kind of a obsessed with sex in this primitive cunning way. So there is a wonderful dirty story but not too incorrect, you can swallow it. You know, the only thing it's presupposed is you have to know that Beethoven piano pieces, everybody knows his composition for Eliza, *Für Elise*. You know that? Okay. Okay. So the story is that now in Bosnia they try to be modern and they have classical music teaching which is no longer this old learn by heart blah blah blah but creative, no? So there is a class and the teacher says, "Now we will talk about Beethoven. Each of you should say first some thought, image, person and then name a Beethoven composition which fits it," no? So first a girl says, "Yes, Bambi forest, what? Pastoral symphony, nature, okay." Okay, then a boy said "War, revolution, heroism, Eroica, Third Symphony." Then the Bosnian guy comes and says—now I have to be vulgar—"A prick, long hard like this." "Why?" "For Eliza," no? and so on and so on. I mean I mean I mean. That's the spirit, that's that was for me the reality of this brotherhood celebrated of you... the moment we lost this, it was war. It was war. And this is I think what sometimes we miss with this politically correct respect. Like when they I don't know when they tell me "Native Americans, you have to respect them." I don't care about their holistic attitude to life or whatever. I want to hear their dirty jokes because I I really I really like them. Just one phrase, the last one. Here I'm very traditional. When you say what would be this belief, oh yeah, I'm very simple, take any here I'm even more traditional than you think. Isn't... don't you find this crazy belief in every big emancipatory political project? Like every revolution. Wasn't such kind of a crazy belief at work in, for example, Toussaint Louverture, Haitian Revolution, this... don't you find in all of them this kind of a in all radical political projects? Here I see a parallel between... this is what interests me in for example Paul, the Paulinian community of believers. Here I agree with Alain Badiou. The Paulinian community of believers living in this emergency state at the end of time, it's not only a theological theory, it is an answer to a very precise historical deadlock. There were two models of, let's say, social logic in Paul's time. On the one hand, Romans, their decadent hedonist individualism blah blah blah, on the Empire. On the other hand, Jews, traditional Jews which were for him a kind of a traditional logic here and so on. It's basically the same alternative as today: either you play this game of individualism, hedonism or old traditional communities. And what Paul offered is a third logic of community. Community believe... community of believers is something which is neither this individualistic hedonistic assemblage of individuals nor the traditional hierarchical whatever religious community. It's a different logic, this egalitarian emergency state logic. And maybe we need a little bit of that today. But then that's why you call yourself a Paulinian materialist? Yeah, but but again but but again what do I mean by materialist and so on? Things are here I agree with you, things are here very, very complex in the sense that you know all these words, what does it mean to be atheist to believe today? I totally agree here with you that it's not as simple as now we proclaim that man is the the secret that allowed us to decode God and we do this simple reduction. This doesn't work, of course. Sorry if I was too long again. So I think we have time for a few questions. If you'd like to ask a question, please wait for the microphone. Do we have some questions or symptomatically obscene jokes? Obviously a lot of sort of the question of religion is, you know, why people think it's necessary to buy a certain culture or sort of why they gravitate towards it. And it seems to me that people kind of want an answer to some of the big questions. So I was wondering what both of you, I guess, think is... Professor Žižek, you were talking a lot about how, you know, the people that say they don't believe actually do and people that say they believe actually don't. So I was wondering what you think is sort of the cause and effects of that in terms of... like what does it do to people and why are people thinking that they believe when they don't? Like kind of what are the implications of that? This is a very good question but an extremely complex one because how should I put it, I don't think there is, my first point here would have been that I don't think there is a symmetry here in the sense that simply those who believe really don't believe, those who pretend to be atheists really believe and so on. I think the fundamental, the fundamental fact for me is what I'm trying to isolate in this way but I didn't have time to develop it in detail is what is changing today in our functioning of belief. I nonetheless claim that something fundamental is changing today in the sense of the how should I call it, paradoxically we believe more and less today. What we are less and less able I claim is to practice this purely symbolic belief. What do I mean by this? Do you perhaps know the book by Paul Veyne, *Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths?* which is a their own myths. And his answer is, in a way of course no. Ancient Greeks were not idiots to think if you climb to the top of the Mount Olympus you will there encounter Zeus and so on. But also, that's crucial, it's wrong to say that Zeus was just for them a metaphor of some force and so on and so forth. It's not like that. It's something much more mysterious and I think the closest we can get to it is politeness. Like for example, I don't know, I meet somebody who is not really my friend and I say, "Nice to meet you. How are you? Nice to meet you." We both know that I don't mean it seriously. Not only this, but did you notice how when I say "How are you?", the other is expected to say "Well." Not only this, but if the other were to take my question literally, it would be even too intrusive. My God, what right does somebody whom I barely know to ask me how am I? It's none of his business. But the whole of our cultural identity whatever resides in the fact that although you don't mean it literally, it's not hypocrisy. The psychotic is perhaps a person, a definition of psychotic is the one who thinks then it must be hypocrisy. It's possible that what you are saying is literally a lie—I don't really care how are you, I don't I'm not really glad to see you—but nonetheless it's not hypocrisy. You can lie sincerely, how should I put it. And I think that this something fundamental I think is changing at this is changing at this level. So it's not simply believe-non-believe, it's what
unknown
these terms mean that
these terms mean that
Slavoj Žižek
is changing and so on. I know I didn't answer your question but I just wanted to give you this elementary background as to what is really the problem that is haunting me. To put it in another way, did you for example the the example that I like to evoke always of Edith Wharton story *Age of Innocence*. What is, who is innocent there? I'm now as a primitive barbarian talking in the movie terms. It's the Winona Ryder character, that is to say, the young wife. In what sense is
is changing and so on. I know I didn't answer your question but I just wanted to give you this elementary background as to what is really the problem that is haunting me. To put it in another way, did you for example the the example that I like to evoke always of Edith Wharton story *Age of Innocence*. What is, who is innocent there? I'm now as a primitive barbarian talking in the movie terms. It's the Winona Ryder character, that is to say, the young wife. In what sense is
unknown
she innocent? She is perceived by her husband who has the affair with Countess Olenska, Michelle Pfeiffer.
she innocent? She is perceived by her husband who has the affair with Countess Olenska, Michelle Pfeiffer.
unknown
She is
She is
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perceived as the one who is just the naive wife. At the end, as you know after she died, we learn that she knew it all the time, she just pretended not to know. This is the innocence. It's not the innocence of you don't know, it is you don't you know but pretend not to know as it were. This is and I claim that this is what is disappearing today. And here I am again paradoxically if you
perceived as the one who is just the naive wife. At the end, as you know after she died, we learn that she knew it all the time, she just pretended not to know. This is the innocence. It's not the innocence of you don't know, it is you don't you know but pretend not to know as it were. This is and I claim that this is what is disappearing today. And here I am again paradoxically if you
Slavoj Žižek
want very, very conservative. This is why I admire novels, especially late novels of Henry James where you have this kingdom of this kind of a fake innocence or whatever that people never state clearly, everything is implied and so on and so forth. So again this very fundamental question interests me, how it's not simply people believe less but it is changing what what does it mean to believe. Yeah, my question I came down I guess because I wanted to ask a big question and that's not a very good reason to come down because I was very stimulated by what you said and intellectually curious in so many ways it's hard for me to express this but I guess my question is, now at the moment in which humanity becomes aware of its inner frailty or its fragility or its tragic kind of a tragic sense of being, its when all the other maybe easy answers are stripped away... I'm sorry, like what then do we cling to? I mean couldn't that really be belief itself, that darkness there and in a sense it's the only way to express it is utter abandonment? I mean that's to say, what if real belief is not something that can be expressed? Is not something that can be because as soon as it comes out of your mouth it can be misunderstood or manipulated or destroyed. What if, what if being, what if word and deed are one in action and you just live and that's the way that you manifest your being, manifest your beliefs, not as a system, not as like a computer program but as a human being that it defies any kind of systematization of systematic definition? That's again a nice question but my God, you're asking for me too, why can't you ask me a simple question where I can answer yes, no? Because this is so complex but you know what would be my answer here? I think, I'm not sure, I got your point but here I where I feel indebted to Jewish-Christian legacy and so on is that what I didn't get in you is when you say this unity of act and so on you just live. Okay, but in what way more precisely? Because for me, how should I put it, the big opposition is: do we adopt the Gnostic way, which is truth is in you, you just have to withdraw into yourself, discover it, unearth it? Or is, to quote *X-Files*, "truth out there"? That is to say, it's traumatically encountered. And what I like—okay I like is a vulgar term here—where I deeply identify with Jewish-Christian legacy is that precisely truth is something traumatically encountered. Truth is outside. It's not that you look deep in yourself and it's your self-realization and so on and so forth. Truth is something you struggle with, which traumatizes you. Truth is something very traumatic. In this sense, what fascinated me always is precisely how how should I put it, one way to act for me, and Kierkegaard was deeply aware of this, is precisely to adopt a certain mask. Not to be yourself but quite on the contrary, to adopt a certain mask, a role and take it more seriously, how should I put it, more seriously than what you are. Right, we have to do that, everyone has to has a social persona that they have to pursue. But I'm just saying what if... Everything is vanity. I mean there's still desire. I mean it's like in Ecclesiastes when he says, "You know I had all these palaces, I had slaves, I had you know I had my handmaidens and I was fed grapes and I and I built
want very, very conservative. This is why I admire novels, especially late novels of Henry James where you have this kingdom of this kind of a fake innocence or whatever that people never state clearly, everything is implied and so on and so forth. So again this very fundamental question interests me, how it's not simply people believe less but it is changing what what does it mean to believe. Yeah, my question I came down I guess because I wanted to ask a big question and that's not a very good reason to come down because I was very stimulated by what you said and intellectually curious in so many ways it's hard for me to express this but I guess my question is, now at the moment in which humanity becomes aware of its inner frailty or its fragility or its tragic kind of a tragic sense of being, its when all the other maybe easy answers are stripped away... I'm sorry, like what then do we cling to? I mean couldn't that really be belief itself, that darkness there and in a sense it's the only way to express it is utter abandonment? I mean that's to say, what if real belief is not something that can be expressed? Is not something that can be because as soon as it comes out of your mouth it can be misunderstood or manipulated or destroyed. What if, what if being, what if word and deed are one in action and you just live and that's the way that you manifest your being, manifest your beliefs, not as a system, not as like a computer program but as a human being that it defies any kind of systematization of systematic definition? That's again a nice question but my God, you're asking for me too, why can't you ask me a simple question where I can answer yes, no? Because this is so complex but you know what would be my answer here? I think, I'm not sure, I got your point but here I where I feel indebted to Jewish-Christian legacy and so on is that what I didn't get in you is when you say this unity of act and so on you just live. Okay, but in what way more precisely? Because for me, how should I put it, the big opposition is: do we adopt the Gnostic way, which is truth is in you, you just have to withdraw into yourself, discover it, unearth it? Or is, to quote *X-Files*, "truth out there"? That is to say, it's traumatically encountered. And what I like—okay I like is a vulgar term here—where I deeply identify with Jewish-Christian legacy is that precisely truth is something traumatically encountered. Truth is outside. It's not that you look deep in yourself and it's your self-realization and so on and so forth. Truth is something you struggle with, which traumatizes you. Truth is something very traumatic. In this sense, what fascinated me always is precisely how how should I put it, one way to act for me, and Kierkegaard was deeply aware of this, is precisely to adopt a certain mask. Not to be yourself but quite on the contrary, to adopt a certain mask, a role and take it more seriously, how should I put it, more seriously than what you are. Right, we have to do that, everyone has to has a social persona that they have to pursue. But I'm just saying what if... Everything is vanity. I mean there's still desire. I mean it's like in Ecclesiastes when he says, "You know I had all these palaces, I had slaves, I had you know I had my handmaidens and I was fed grapes and I and I built
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all these Solomon's pools and you know he's living a luscious life and it was all stripped away, it's all vanity." And Wittgenstein said that "whenever I open a text and it begins as 'this text is wisdom', no matter what creed or or language it's written in, be it Sanskrit, ancient Hebrew, Arabic or or Zulu I don't know what, but um if it's labeled wisdom it's going to start out with vanity, emptiness." And what is in Ecclesiastes is that there's all these paradoxes he goes through, you know there's a time for war, a time for peace, he goes through all that. But what is left? Desire. And the desire is for immortality. The desire is for immortality and that's expressed through sexual population, you know through teaching pointing in document... I mean this is constantly there, that desire has to be expressed in a mask. Yeah, but again here I would complicate matters. First when you say desire is for immortality, maybe, but I am here closer to Kierkegaard who claimed that this is the precise meaning of Kierkegaard's *Sickness Unto Death*. It's that our deepest desire is not we are afraid of immortality, immortality is something horrible. We what is easiest for us to accept is "Okay I'm just a piece of dust" and so on and so forth. The second thing is that when you say wisdom, okay but with Christianity nonetheless for me
all these Solomon's pools and you know he's living a luscious life and it was all stripped away, it's all vanity." And Wittgenstein said that "whenever I open a text and it begins as 'this text is wisdom', no matter what creed or or language it's written in, be it Sanskrit, ancient Hebrew, Arabic or or Zulu I don't know what, but um if it's labeled wisdom it's going to start out with vanity, emptiness." And what is in Ecclesiastes is that there's all these paradoxes he goes through, you know there's a time for war, a time for peace, he goes through all that. But what is left? Desire. And the desire is for immortality. The desire is for immortality and that's expressed through sexual population, you know through teaching pointing in document... I mean this is constantly there, that desire has to be expressed in a mask. Yeah, but again here I would complicate matters. First when you say desire is for immortality, maybe, but I am here closer to Kierkegaard who claimed that this is the precise meaning of Kierkegaard's *Sickness Unto Death*. It's that our deepest desire is not we are afraid of immortality, immortality is something horrible. We what is easiest for us to accept is "Okay I'm just a piece of dust" and so on and so forth. The second thing is that when you say wisdom, okay but with Christianity nonetheless for me
Slavoj Žižek
the crucial fact is grace. Faith, grace. But grace comes from outside. Grace is not here I follow Protestantism. Grace, it's not you know this bargain with God. Grace comes from outside. It's not you deserve it, it's not for me how should I put it, all this I think that there is the whole Christian legacy it's totally foreign to this idea which is now very popular for the last years: "we are playing certain social roles, we should learn to drop them and to give the expression to your true self and so on and so forth." I think there is a deep truth in at least my experience of how those New Agers who pretend to drop off their false self, false masks and speak as what they really are, paradoxically they sound to me as total puppets, as dolls. You know then they give you this mantra "I'm at peace with myself." They are... No, I think that that's the ultimate Christian legacy, that the ultimate authentic position is that you accept this split, you accept that salvation comes, comes from outside. It's not self, it's not self-discovery. Let's let a couple of other people speak, okay? We can continue this a little bit later, okay? One more here. This I think literally, you may disagree, I think this is a I think I think... I mean who cares, I mean you you're it's just you and God, you're standing right there in front of an immortal being and you're
the crucial fact is grace. Faith, grace. But grace comes from outside. Grace is not here I follow Protestantism. Grace, it's not you know this bargain with God. Grace comes from outside. It's not you deserve it, it's not for me how should I put it, all this I think that there is the whole Christian legacy it's totally foreign to this idea which is now very popular for the last years: "we are playing certain social roles, we should learn to drop them and to give the expression to your true self and so on and so forth." I think there is a deep truth in at least my experience of how those New Agers who pretend to drop off their false self, false masks and speak as what they really are, paradoxically they sound to me as total puppets, as dolls. You know then they give you this mantra "I'm at peace with myself." They are... No, I think that that's the ultimate Christian legacy, that the ultimate authentic position is that you accept this split, you accept that salvation comes, comes from outside. It's not self, it's not self-discovery. Let's let a couple of other people speak, okay? We can continue this a little bit later, okay? One more here. This I think literally, you may disagree, I think this is a I think I think... I mean who cares, I mean you you're it's just you and God, you're standing right there in front of an immortal being and you're
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nothing, you are dust, you are whatever, but you have emotion, you have life and you're gonna kind of express it. Okay, we don't have time to go into it. My immediate answer would be that I doubt if this really is a Christian position because the Christian position is that "I don't have to go to God, God came to me." You know, that's that's the ultimate and it's very difficult to accept it for a Christian. It's Christ is not an image, a messenger of God. Christ was an ordinary dirty bad-smelling unwashed whatever you want individual flesh who was walking there. You don't meet God there in this charismatic, you met God there. You met God there. And I think this is how I read then Holy Spirit and so on. We don't need this horrible thing. God
nothing, you are dust, you are whatever, but you have emotion, you have life and you're gonna kind of express it. Okay, we don't have time to go into it. My immediate answer would be that I doubt if this really is a Christian position because the Christian position is that "I don't have to go to God, God came to me." You know, that's that's the ultimate and it's very difficult to accept it for a Christian. It's Christ is not an image, a messenger of God. Christ was an ordinary dirty bad-smelling unwashed whatever you want individual flesh who was walking there. You don't meet God there in this charismatic, you met God there. You met God there. And I think this is how I read then Holy Spirit and so on. We don't need this horrible thing. God
Slavoj Žižek
is here in the community of believers. I don't think we need all that stuff about this... I okay, I'll put it in another way. I think that this image of God, "you terrified meet God," this is the evil God. This is evil God. This is for me the definition almost of this is the God of this is the God of judgment. This is the God of judgment, the terrorizing God. Okay but my God we don't have time I'm... Let's take one question here. I think I'm going to let everyone off and ask an extra-material question, so it'll be a lot shorter. One thing I was thinking a lot about was Albert Camus' *Myth of Sisyphus*. It seems to me that he sort of provided a solution to the exact dilemma that you posed before about the decline of symbolic function. And there are two groups of people on either side who are who are the perpetrators of the decline of symbolic function: the fundamentalists on one side and the true atheist-postmodernist on the other side as far as I understood what you said. And in between there's sort of everyone else who's muddling through still believes in the symbolic function or still has some sort of remnant of it which sustained practice in which ancient times or even in our paleolithic times people
is here in the community of believers. I don't think we need all that stuff about this... I okay, I'll put it in another way. I think that this image of God, "you terrified meet God," this is the evil God. This is evil God. This is for me the definition almost of this is the God of this is the God of judgment. This is the God of judgment, the terrorizing God. Okay but my God we don't have time I'm... Let's take one question here. I think I'm going to let everyone off and ask an extra-material question, so it'll be a lot shorter. One thing I was thinking a lot about was Albert Camus' *Myth of Sisyphus*. It seems to me that he sort of provided a solution to the exact dilemma that you posed before about the decline of symbolic function. And there are two groups of people on either side who are who are the perpetrators of the decline of symbolic function: the fundamentalists on one side and the true atheist-postmodernist on the other side as far as I understood what you said. And in between there's sort of everyone else who's muddling through still believes in the symbolic function or still has some sort of remnant of it which sustained practice in which ancient times or even in our paleolithic times people
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believed
believed
Slavoj Žižek
in things symptomatic. And so essentially what you're
in things symptomatic. And so essentially what you're
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saying is that we can't take things
saying is that we can't take things
Slavoj Žižek
for we can't take things absolutely literally. That that kills how belief works, that destroys belief. That's what the people on both sides of this decline of symbolic function are doing. So Camus has one solution, which is to say that we understand that we'll never achieve knowledge, but we must eternally try to achieve that knowledge. Because that's what a certain man is, and it's in the *Myth of Sisyphus*. And that seems to be one solution. Can you offer a different solution somehow? Which is that we have to go back to what Professor West said about staring the traumatic in the face, not talking around it anymore, but looking at it directly. It seems to me that that's once again returning to taking things at face value,
for we can't take things absolutely literally. That that kills how belief works, that destroys belief. That's what the people on both sides of this decline of symbolic function are doing. So Camus has one solution, which is to say that we understand that we'll never achieve knowledge, but we must eternally try to achieve that knowledge. Because that's what a certain man is, and it's in the *Myth of Sisyphus*. And that seems to be one solution. Can you offer a different solution somehow? Which is that we have to go back to what Professor West said about staring the traumatic in the face, not talking around it anymore, but looking at it directly. It seems to me that that's once again returning to taking things at face value,
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looking at them directly. In other words, if there's a dichotomy between those who those who perpetrate the decline of symbolic function and those who retain the symbolic function, and those who perpetrate the decline are fundamentalists, aren't you just trying to make fundamentalists out of all of us? And that's my answer to your question. Maybe I didn't correctly your point. Just to return to the fragment that I think I got, about you know learn to face things and so on and so forth. Of course everything depends on what exactly do you mean by facing things and so on and so forth. Where I'm skeptical about it is I deeply agree with you this monstrous traumatic kernel and so on. But nonetheless, I don't think we should fetishize it in this in the guise of this typical postmodern myth, which is truth is horrible, there is some
looking at them directly. In other words, if there's a dichotomy between those who those who perpetrate the decline of symbolic function and those who retain the symbolic function, and those who perpetrate the decline are fundamentalists, aren't you just trying to make fundamentalists out of all of us? And that's my answer to your question. Maybe I didn't correctly your point. Just to return to the fragment that I think I got, about you know learn to face things and so on and so forth. Of course everything depends on what exactly do you mean by facing things and so on and so forth. Where I'm skeptical about it is I deeply agree with you this monstrous traumatic kernel and so on. But nonetheless, I don't think we should fetishize it in this in the guise of this typical postmodern myth, which is truth is horrible, there is some
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central horror,
central horror,
Slavoj Žižek
the thing like Edgar Allan Poe's that Maelstrom or water whatever, and then you know this Nietzschean problematic of: do we dare to face it or not? and so on. I think that what if what if... you know it's a little bit the same for me as with male chauvinist approach to women. I think that the ultimate male myth is that beneath these feminine hysteria masks and so on, there is some primordial radical woman, which can either be this sublime Goethe-like *Ewig-Weibliche* (eternal feminine) or some all-devouring Kali whatever mother and so on. But what if there is nothing? You know what I mean? The thing itself for me is a gap. It's it's it's a gap. It's not... So for me how should I put it, but this now it's too much of a pure philosophy. Again, I don't believe that all our plurality of symbolic universes and so on are attempts not to confront the thing and so on. No, I think that this thing itself is in a way the ultimate myth. That that... but again my position here is not the postmodern one, another one which would be "there is no ultimate reality, there are just multiple narratives, stories we are telling about..." No, everything is not just a narrative. But nonetheless what is more than a narrative, how should I put it, it's not some tremendous traumatic thing there. It's just a certain gap, antagonism, cut as it were in the narrative itself. And this is in a way how I read, but I don't have time to go into it now, the message of Christianity for me. It's okay, we start with this experience of Job. You say Job, the guy who blah blah blah. Who is incidentally that's for me an extremely interesting story because it's usually totally misread, like usually Job is perceived as somebody who allowed himself to be screwed by God but "you know yeah I accept everything." No, read it! He is protesting all the time, Job. No, he is I think it's an incredible... Okay but but I think that the key to it is to say that what happened to Job, this "Am I totally abandoned by God," that this gap that separates me from God is transposed into God himself. That's for me the unheard-of things of thing of Christianity. So let me be here very careful. In other religions, when you are abandoned by God, the point is how through your deifications, sacrifice, mystical education to rejoin God. Christianity has basically a different solution. When I feel totally abandoned by God, how do I rejoin God? Not by miraculously turning the thing around, "Oh but suddenly things turn better," but to accept how at that very point where I am totally abandoned by God, I identify with Christ who was also abandoned. You know what I mean? That the gap that the very gap that separates me from God is part of divinity itself. So you just as it were the how should I put it, the problem turns its own solution. And I think, at least as far as I know, that this is unique to Christianity. In all all others have this boring problematic then how to rejoin God. But in the very utmost abandonment you are already already close to God. And again I think that this is something unheard of. But when you said about Camus and so on, you know the problem again that I have there is the problem of maybe I misread Camus, but he is for me a little bit too close to wisdom. And I there is something in my nature probably genetically determined in my aversion to wisdom. Wisdom for me is, you know, "we will never get the thing but you must learn to get..." this kind of a wisdom of resignation. In the sense of "resign it." Even unfortunately some of the Lacanians buy this, as if the lesson of psychoanalysis is "the true object of desire is always lost, you must accept symbolic castration, loss." No, I think that the whole point of Christianity for me, New Testament, what are the New... Christianity is for me the religion of anti-wisdom. It's not wisdom. We all paganism ends up in wisdom: we return to dust, everything goes up and goes down and so on, this kind of a ultimately we all lose and so on and so forth. But but I don't accept this position of wisdom. Wisdom is for me always there is for me something disgusting in wisdom. Wisdom is for me best best exemplified in proverbs. And proverbs are for me the ultimate vulgarity. In the sense that anything can be covered and justified by proverbs. Let us say you have to do something which is risky. You do it, you succeed. What happens? There will be a wise guy who will tell you, "Of course, as we say, don't you have? You also must have the... We have in Slovenia a proverb which says 'only those who risk profit', like something like the... Wisdom, no? Okay. Let us then say that you take the risk and you fail. Again your wise guy will come and will tell you some version of—we have in
the thing like Edgar Allan Poe's that Maelstrom or water whatever, and then you know this Nietzschean problematic of: do we dare to face it or not? and so on. I think that what if what if... you know it's a little bit the same for me as with male chauvinist approach to women. I think that the ultimate male myth is that beneath these feminine hysteria masks and so on, there is some primordial radical woman, which can either be this sublime Goethe-like *Ewig-Weibliche* (eternal feminine) or some all-devouring Kali whatever mother and so on. But what if there is nothing? You know what I mean? The thing itself for me is a gap. It's it's it's a gap. It's not... So for me how should I put it, but this now it's too much of a pure philosophy. Again, I don't believe that all our plurality of symbolic universes and so on are attempts not to confront the thing and so on. No, I think that this thing itself is in a way the ultimate myth. That that... but again my position here is not the postmodern one, another one which would be "there is no ultimate reality, there are just multiple narratives, stories we are telling about..." No, everything is not just a narrative. But nonetheless what is more than a narrative, how should I put it, it's not some tremendous traumatic thing there. It's just a certain gap, antagonism, cut as it were in the narrative itself. And this is in a way how I read, but I don't have time to go into it now, the message of Christianity for me. It's okay, we start with this experience of Job. You say Job, the guy who blah blah blah. Who is incidentally that's for me an extremely interesting story because it's usually totally misread, like usually Job is perceived as somebody who allowed himself to be screwed by God but "you know yeah I accept everything." No, read it! He is protesting all the time, Job. No, he is I think it's an incredible... Okay but but I think that the key to it is to say that what happened to Job, this "Am I totally abandoned by God," that this gap that separates me from God is transposed into God himself. That's for me the unheard-of things of thing of Christianity. So let me be here very careful. In other religions, when you are abandoned by God, the point is how through your deifications, sacrifice, mystical education to rejoin God. Christianity has basically a different solution. When I feel totally abandoned by God, how do I rejoin God? Not by miraculously turning the thing around, "Oh but suddenly things turn better," but to accept how at that very point where I am totally abandoned by God, I identify with Christ who was also abandoned. You know what I mean? That the gap that the very gap that separates me from God is part of divinity itself. So you just as it were the how should I put it, the problem turns its own solution. And I think, at least as far as I know, that this is unique to Christianity. In all all others have this boring problematic then how to rejoin God. But in the very utmost abandonment you are already already close to God. And again I think that this is something unheard of. But when you said about Camus and so on, you know the problem again that I have there is the problem of maybe I misread Camus, but he is for me a little bit too close to wisdom. And I there is something in my nature probably genetically determined in my aversion to wisdom. Wisdom for me is, you know, "we will never get the thing but you must learn to get..." this kind of a wisdom of resignation. In the sense of "resign it." Even unfortunately some of the Lacanians buy this, as if the lesson of psychoanalysis is "the true object of desire is always lost, you must accept symbolic castration, loss." No, I think that the whole point of Christianity for me, New Testament, what are the New... Christianity is for me the religion of anti-wisdom. It's not wisdom. We all paganism ends up in wisdom: we return to dust, everything goes up and goes down and so on, this kind of a ultimately we all lose and so on and so forth. But but I don't accept this position of wisdom. Wisdom is for me always there is for me something disgusting in wisdom. Wisdom is for me best best exemplified in proverbs. And proverbs are for me the ultimate vulgarity. In the sense that anything can be covered and justified by proverbs. Let us say you have to do something which is risky. You do it, you succeed. What happens? There will be a wise guy who will tell you, "Of course, as we say, don't you have? You also must have the... We have in Slovenia a proverb which says 'only those who risk profit', like something like the... Wisdom, no? Okay. Let us then say that you take the risk and you fail. Again your wise guy will come and will tell you some version of—we have in
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Slovenia
Slovenia
Slavoj Žižek
a wonderful vulgar proverb—'you cannot urinate against the wind', like 'don't take it'." You know what I mean? This is wisdom for me. Anything can be justified and so on and so forth. I think that again the unique thing about Christianity is precisely that it's not this position of wisdom. It's in a way how should I put it... all the other pagan ethics are the ethics of cosmic justice. Something introduces an imbalance into the world, the point is then how to restore balance. It's basically a very organic ethics. It's the ethics of hubris: you want to be too much, the ethics of fighting the excess. For example, you want to be too much, but tragically you fail. But I think that Christ
a wonderful vulgar proverb—'you cannot urinate against the wind', like 'don't take it'." You know what I mean? This is wisdom for me. Anything can be justified and so on and so forth. I think that again the unique thing about Christianity is precisely that it's not this position of wisdom. It's in a way how should I put it... all the other pagan ethics are the ethics of cosmic justice. Something introduces an imbalance into the world, the point is then how to restore balance. It's basically a very organic ethics. It's the ethics of hubris: you want to be too much, the ethics of fighting the excess. For example, you want to be too much, but tragically you fail. But I think that Christ
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himself
himself
Slavoj Žižek
is an excess. The only in Christianity you have this crazy idea, which is for me in my madness I read it almost as a kind of a Leninist message then: truth is partial. Pagan ethics is always has this position of to be above differences, no? The idea is, you know you say this, I say this, truth is holistic compromise and so on. Only in Christianity you have basically this idea, "No, truth is partial. Truth is one-sided. Truth is imbalance." The universe must be thrown... But you've got that in Judaism before you even get the Christian-Judeo breakthrough. Truth is partial... effectively. Here we enter a very problematic topic. I'm not ready to go into it now because then I'm either accused of being either antisemitic or anti-Christian. You always get in trouble here, no? My favorite reply to this and to conclude maybe is another—I quoted it in one of my books—dirty joke which is for me a perfect joke because it's totally ambiguous and I ask you a question how do you read it. It's a joke about a rabbi who his son spends too much money, attacks him, horrible son, and rabbi turns to God, "Father, what do I... tell me God, what should I do with my son?" Father God answers, "Do as I did, write a New Testament," no like... Now I ask you a simple question. Is this a joke of Jews making fun of stupid Christians? Or is this a joke of Christians how "Ooh, this is only how the Jews can understand us blah blah blah"? It's unbelievable how I get whenever I almost no? And so that would be the problem here how to... We've been very patient... About what? Ah, *Being There*! I haven't seen it, it's too traumatic for me, eh? Ah, you mean that *Dead of Night*? No. *Being There*, yeah yeah. I was wondering if you might say a few words as to why that movie seemed to be [unintelligible]. No, first you mean by Peter Sellers? No, I don't get it. You mean it was on the list, where did I select that movie? As one of your favorites. I mean don't don't put too much into that. I selected, I mean I selected it because my wife wanted to see it. I mean... No but... So it's not, you know, this is an example, an example of what Lacan means "desire is the desire of the other," no? But more seriously, the reason I like the movie is nonetheless that it's clearly a movie about transference. You saw the movie I hope, with about transference, no? A guy, you remember total idiot who was all the time in that house gardener and so on, and he is misperceived as a wise guy, at the end even considered to become the president and so. How how this people you find yourself at the right place and you know this pure idea of "it's not what you really are, it's the place," this is what is called transference. But the reason I admire the movie is that it resisted a certain temptation. The temptation would have been to paint the character played by Peter Sellers, Chance the Gardener or what, to to to paint him as a guy who is just an ordinary warm human being. He remains monstrous to the end. I like this in the movie, that it's not this cheap Hollywood, you know, an ordinary guy who is misunderstood. It's this monstrosity which is maintained to the end. On the other hand, I mean... no no, I was
is an excess. The only in Christianity you have this crazy idea, which is for me in my madness I read it almost as a kind of a Leninist message then: truth is partial. Pagan ethics is always has this position of to be above differences, no? The idea is, you know you say this, I say this, truth is holistic compromise and so on. Only in Christianity you have basically this idea, "No, truth is partial. Truth is one-sided. Truth is imbalance." The universe must be thrown... But you've got that in Judaism before you even get the Christian-Judeo breakthrough. Truth is partial... effectively. Here we enter a very problematic topic. I'm not ready to go into it now because then I'm either accused of being either antisemitic or anti-Christian. You always get in trouble here, no? My favorite reply to this and to conclude maybe is another—I quoted it in one of my books—dirty joke which is for me a perfect joke because it's totally ambiguous and I ask you a question how do you read it. It's a joke about a rabbi who his son spends too much money, attacks him, horrible son, and rabbi turns to God, "Father, what do I... tell me God, what should I do with my son?" Father God answers, "Do as I did, write a New Testament," no like... Now I ask you a simple question. Is this a joke of Jews making fun of stupid Christians? Or is this a joke of Christians how "Ooh, this is only how the Jews can understand us blah blah blah"? It's unbelievable how I get whenever I almost no? And so that would be the problem here how to... We've been very patient... About what? Ah, *Being There*! I haven't seen it, it's too traumatic for me, eh? Ah, you mean that *Dead of Night*? No. *Being There*, yeah yeah. I was wondering if you might say a few words as to why that movie seemed to be [unintelligible]. No, first you mean by Peter Sellers? No, I don't get it. You mean it was on the list, where did I select that movie? As one of your favorites. I mean don't don't put too much into that. I selected, I mean I selected it because my wife wanted to see it. I mean... No but... So it's not, you know, this is an example, an example of what Lacan means "desire is the desire of the other," no? But more seriously, the reason I like the movie is nonetheless that it's clearly a movie about transference. You saw the movie I hope, with about transference, no? A guy, you remember total idiot who was all the time in that house gardener and so on, and he is misperceived as a wise guy, at the end even considered to become the president and so. How how this people you find yourself at the right place and you know this pure idea of "it's not what you really are, it's the place," this is what is called transference. But the reason I admire the movie is that it resisted a certain temptation. The temptation would have been to paint the character played by Peter Sellers, Chance the Gardener or what, to to to paint him as a guy who is just an ordinary warm human being. He remains monstrous to the end. I like this in the movie, that it's not this cheap Hollywood, you know, an ordinary guy who is misunderstood. It's this monstrosity which is maintained to the end. On the other hand, I mean... no no, I was
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looking
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Slavoj Žižek
for different
for different
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films
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Slavoj Žižek
there which unfortunately they didn't have so there are much darker secrets there. Ladies and gentlemen, join me in thanking Professor Žižek and Professor West. [Applause and end of recording]
there which unfortunately they didn't have so there are much darker secrets there. Ladies and gentlemen, join me in thanking Professor Žižek and Professor West. [Applause and end of recording]