Slavoj Žižek 一 Violence
Talk · Andrea Cirla ·
2008-01-10 · 1:45:33 · 15,974 words
ideologyrevolution-violencepoliticscinema-art-culturedemocracypsychoanalysiscommunism-socialismphilosophy-generalethicshistoryreligion-theologyfascism-populismliberalism-political-correctnessviolence
Žižek responds to criticisms of his book, particularly from Simon Critchley and the London Review of Books, defending his distinction between subjective and objective violence. He argues that 'doing nothing' can be a form of violence that sustains the status quo, contrasting this with the 'divine violence' of radical political action. Using examples from Venezuela and Bolivia, he critiques the 'obsessional' inaction of the intellectual left and advocates for a pragmatic engagement with state power to achieve genuine social change. Žižek addresses three critiques: his view on liberal tolerance (arguing for 'story-blind' justice), his critique of democracy (describing it as a system where citizens desire the appearance of decision without the burden of actual choice, citing Lippmann and Trotsky), and his defense of the term 'violence' against Arendt's distinctions. He further explores the 'communist hypothesis' as the defense of commons against privatization, and concludes by discussing the psychic consequences of modern abstract violence, referencing Catherine Malabou's critique of Freud and Lacan regarding the direct impact of external trauma. Žižek analyzes Marie-Louise Malabou’s concept of the 'Muselmann' and the 'zero-level subject' to argue that extreme trauma erases psychic continuity, leaving a 'living dead' subject defined by the death drive rather than libido. He contrasts Malabou’s view with Oliver Sacks’ humanist recuperation, defending a Lacanian reading where the death drive structures libido itself. Concluding the lecture, Žižek presents Agota Kristóf’s The Trilogy as an exemplar of 'immoral ethics': a cold, non-sentimental duty to help others that bypasses moral hypocrisy, illustrated through the twins’ actions in the novels. Žižek responds to an audience member’s query on mediocrity and violence by arguing that extreme violence is fundamentally an expression of impotence and mediocrity, citing Hannah Arendt’s 'banality of evil' and the cowardice of Hitler and Stalin. He contrasts this 'liberal deadlock' with 'emancipatory violence,' using examples from They Live and Fight Club. He then engages with the audience member’s personal political struggles, offering a critique of modern leftist inaction via a scene from Once Upon a Time in the West, before launching into a historical revision of human rights, the Catholic Church’s role, and the nature of Stalinism as a philosophical enigma. Žižek addresses the nature of violence, arguing that the visible order of liberal society is sustained by an invisible, obscene violence, contrasting this with the 'violence' of political correctness and the painful experience of true freedom. He critiques the Left's failure to self-criticize and engages in a dialectical exchange with Simon Critchley regarding the 'proliferation of rabbits' (abstract principles) versus their concrete political content. The discussion concludes with an analysis of William Vollmann’s calculus of violence, Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical 'concentration camp' as a positive ideal, and the ironic translation of Chinese gated communities as 'perfection concentration camps,' ending with a joke about British cricket.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 35
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “zero-level intellectualist ideology”
The 'zero-level' ideological belief among intellectuals that engaging with power inevitably corrupts them, leading to a safe but ineffective withdrawal.
as “violence as impotence”
The thesis that true authority does not need to explode into violence; violent outbursts reveal the impotence and panic of the perpetrator (Hitler, Stalin).
The idea that 'doing nothing' or refusing to participate in the existing game of power can be the most violent act because it disrupts the smooth functioning of the system.
Violence that is not aimed at changing the system but at maintaining the current order by preventing any real change, often through excessive, meaningless activity.
The concept that power seeks to embrace critics (clinching) to neutralize them, making criticism safe and sustaining the system rather than threatening it.
as “gap between subjective and systemic objective violence”
The distinction between the visible, intentional acts of individuals (subjective violence) and the invisible, systemic violence inherent in the economic and social order (objective/systemic violence).
as “Ghandian violence”
The strategy of using economic sabotage and mass non-cooperation to stop the functioning of the state machinery, viewed by Žižek as a form of violence.
A mode of justice that ignores the subjective narratives or 'stories' people tell about their actions, focusing instead on the objective act itself to avoid self-justification.
A term coined by Walter Lippmann (later used by Chomsky) describing how a governing class manages public opinion, which Lippmann viewed positively as necessary for order.
Žižek's metaphor for the constitutional monarch's role: formally deciding to save the appearance of sovereignty while the real work is done by others, analogous to modern democratic citizens' desire to feel they decide without the pressure of deciding.
Lacan's thesis that modernity is characterized by a disjunction where an excess of expert knowledge paralyzes the ability to make master-signifier decisions, contrasting with Foucault's equation of knowledge and power.
The mechanism in They Live where glasses reveal the hidden commands (OBEY, DON'T THINK) of capitalist ideology.
as “private use of reason”
Kant's concept referring to the role one plays within a specific institutional or state structure (e.g., a civil servant), which Žižek contrasts with the 'public use of reason' in free intellectual debate.
as “singular universality”
A concept from Badiou and Rancière where one becomes universal by withdrawing from the 'private' space of one's particular community identity.
Violence that operates through financial speculation or systemic mechanisms, appearing as a 'pseudo-natural' catastrophe or social tsunami to those affected, lacking transparent links to human lives.
as “living dead”
A subject whose past is erased by trauma, remaining as an empty form of subjectivity that lives death as a form of life.
as “Muselmann”
The figure of the 'living dead' in Nazi camps; used by Malabou to argue against Freud's tendency to find psychic resonance for trauma, highlighting the direct, meaningless destruction of the psyche.
Traumatic shocks that cannot be integrated into a pre-existing libidinal frame, resisting interpretation and destroying the psyche.
as “zero-level subject”
The residual subjectivity that remains after all past trauma and psychic content are erased; the 'horror' of being a 'living dead' subject without a past.
The argument that the death drive is not opposed to libido but is the formal structure of libido itself, where circulating around the object yields more pleasure than direct attainment.
An ethical stance devoid of moral sentimentality or self-satisfaction, where one helps others out of cold, naive necessity rather than a desire to be 'good'.
A state of mediocrity or passivity that Žižek associates with a lack of traumatic engagement with the Real, though he pivots to discuss violence.
as “transcendental a priori of subjectivity”
The structural violence or symbolic castration that constitutes the subject, which Žižek argues is often misrecognized as mere impotence.
Hannah Arendt’s concept that evil acts stem not from demonic malice but from thoughtless mediocrity and bureaucratic cowardice.
The political paralysis where violence is exclusively viewed as negative, preventing the recognition of 'emancipatory violence.'
as “emancipatory violence”
Violence that breaks ideological chains (like the glasses in They Live) or forces truth, distinguished from reactionary or impotent violence.
as “Stalinist communism as enigma”
The view that Stalinism is not just 'demonization' but a profound philosophical puzzle regarding the constitution of subjectivity and trauma.
The dominant academic belief that one cannot make universal statements about 'man' or 'humanity,' only historical discursive analyses, which Žižek rejects.
The necessity of making firm, universal statements about what it means to be human, against historicist relativism.
The shift in perspective where what appears as violence from one angle (e.g., political correctness) is revealed as the maintenance of a violent status quo from another.
The hidden, violent mechanisms that sustain the visible, non-violent social order, which must be analyzed to understand true violence.
as “freedom is a violent experience”
The claim that true existential freedom is not an inner journey but a painful, disruptive act that hurts, contrasting with comforting 'inner journey' narratives.
Critchley’s metaphor for generating endless abstract ethical principles (rabbits) without examining their concrete political implications (what kind of rabbits?).
Žižek’s reading of Agamben’s work as secretly desiring a 'good concentration camp' or Limbo, a state of pure exclusion without sin or God.
Violence that is not bound by legal or moral rules, often associated with a sovereign decision or a radical break, here linked to Benjamin and Robespierre.
Stories he reaches for 3
Žižek uses John Carpenter’s They Live, where the protagonist puts on glasses to see the ideological commands 'OBEY, DON'T THINK, PROCREATE' on advertisements, as a pure example of Marxist critique of ideology.
“When you put on the glasses, you see: OBEY, DON'T THINK, PROCREATE.”
Žižek cites the fight in Fight Club where the protagonist forces his friend to wear the glasses, describing it as 'progressive violence' or 'divine violence' against liberal claims that it is proto-fascist.
“This is what I mean by divine violence, for example.”
Uses Soros's currency speculation that caused suffering in Southeast Asia as an example of 'abstract violence', financial acts experienced by victims as pseudo-natural catastrophes.
“George Soros... engaged in speculations... thereby causing great suffering in Southeast Asia... This is today's abstract violence at its purest.”
Works invoked 30
They Live film
Used as an example of 'pure Hollywood Marxism' and 'critique of ideology' via the glasses that reveal hidden commands.
Fight Club film
Defended against liberal claims of being proto-fascist; cited as an example of 'progressive violence' or 'divine violence.'
An upcoming book by Žižek (counter-book to the current talk) which will deal with Stalinism.
Titanic film
Dismissed as 'that shit' in contrast to They Live.
Deleuze’s work, cited for its insight into the relationship between death drive and the pleasure principle.
The Fragile Absolute book
Žižek’s own book, referenced in the context of a question from Elizabeth Wright about his ethical position.
Malabou's book on Hegel, which Žižek praises for converting Derrida to Hegel.
Lacan's seminar, translated into English, which proposes four discourses and implicitly targets Foucault.
The book being discussed and criticized by Critchley; Žižek defends its thesis against Critchley's interpretation.
Havel's text, which Žižek respects for illustrating how everyday compliance sustains power.
Critchley's book, which argues for withdrawing from power; Žižek refutes its advice.
Cited for a scene illustrating the problem of the Left talking when they should act.
The Road to Terror book
By Oleg Naumov, used to argue that Stalin’s inner circle was in panic, not omnipotent.
Žižek's previous book, referenced for its title 'The Iraqi Borrowed Kettle' which illustrates enumerating contradictory arguments.
A Soviet classic by Luria, recommended by Žižek for its study of a woman who couldn't forget.
The Notebook book
The first book of Agota Kristóf’s trilogy, used to illustrate 'immoral ethics' through the twins' actions.
A Henry James character used to describe the obsessional state of the mnemonist in Luria’s book.
Fighting Dixie book
A book about the history of the anti-racist movement in the US, used to show that communists were the only group advocating for full racial equality until the late 1930s.
L'Homme aux rats book
Alain Badiou's book, quoted by Žižek, which discusses the 'communist hypothesis' and refers to Sarkozy as 'rat-man'.
Corrected by an audience member; Luria’s book about a soldier with a head wound, used to illustrate subjectivity constituted around a 'hole'.
The Mnemonist book
An audience member’s initial guess for Luria’s book, which Žižek does not know.
Musicophilia book
Oliver Sacks’ book, criticized by Žižek for being 'kitsch' and 'too humanist' in its focus on patient survival.
Malabou's new book on the traumatized personality, which Žižek says he would have added a chapter on psychological consequences to.
The Proof book
Part of Agota Kristóf’s trilogy, mentioned as available.
Rerum Novarum book
A papal encyclical from the late 19th century that Žižek cites to show the Church’s historical preference for absolute monarchy and rejection of democracy.
The article by Žižek that sparked the criticisms and letters from readers.
William Vollmann’s book on the calculus of violence; Žižek admits he hasn't read it but uses the discussion to mock the format of condensed editions.
Lorenzo Chiesa’s book, published in Žižek’s MIT series, which attacks the return of religion in Italian leftist thought and analyzes Agamben's ambiguity.
The Third Lie book
Part of Agota Kristóf’s trilogy, mentioned as available.
People invoked 51
Fidel Castro positive
Mentioned as the 'Fidel with oil' and 'Fidel with American dollars,' a mocking but sympathetic reference.
Mahatma Gandhi positive
Žižek views Gandhi as 'very violent' in his strategic use of strikes and economic sabotage to stop the British machinery.
John Carpenter positive
Described as a 'big Hollywood progressive' whose film They Live is 'pure Hollywood Marxism.'
A friend who edited a reader on Žižek and died of cancer; she asked him a 'charmingly British empiricist naive question' about his ethics.
David Graeber negative
Žižek attacks Graeber's characterization of intellectuals as 'whores to power,' arguing this is exactly the position Žižek critiques.
Ágota Kristóf positive
Her work The Trilogy is presented as the perfect exemplification of 'immoral ethics' and how Žižek would like to be.
Mentioned only to distinguish Foucault's nuanced view of knowledge/power from Comte's 'naive' sense.
Described as an 'undoubtedly honest humanitarian' who saved critical social thinking, yet used as an example of abstract violence through currency speculation.
Jacques Derrida positive
Derrida is cited as being 'converted to Hegel' by Malabou's book, which Žižek uses to validate a systematic reading of Hegel.
Antigone positive
Cited as an example of 'divine violence' and the 'sovereign ethical deed' in Critchley's review.
Sergio Leone positive
Cited for the film Once Upon a Time in the West, used to illustrate the problem of leftist inaction.
Jacques Lacan positive
Used to analyze the gap between knowledge and power in modernity and the structure of the four discourses.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Cited for his insight in Difference and Repetition that the death drive is the transcendental a priori of the pleasure principle, not its opposite.
Mentioned as the US President who allegedly viewed anti-war protests as a justification for invading Iraq.
Robert Pfaller positive
Žižek quotes Robert Faller's concept of 'clinching' in boxing to explain how power neutralizes critics.
Mentioned as a potential supporter of Žižek's 'crazy' mass movement of dropping shit.
Friedrich Schiller positive
Cited for the opposition of 'naive' and 'sentimental,' which Žižek uses to distinguish his 'immoral ethics' from moral sentimentality.
Oliver Sacks negative
Critiqued for being 'too humanist' and 'kitsch' in his focus on patient survival and beauty, ignoring the 'zero-level subject' of loss.
Oleg Naumov positive
Cited as a 'revisionist historian' whose book The Road to Terror shows Stalin’s inner circle was in panic, not in control.
Author of Rising Up and Rising Down; Žižek admits he hasn't read it and bluffs, comparing Vollmann’s condensed edition to Kant/Brandom writing introductions to themselves.
Actor in Once Upon a Time in the West, cited in a specific scene about the harmonica player.
Lorenzo Chiesa positive
A friend whose book Žižek published; Chiesa is writing a book attacking the return of religion in Italian leftist thought (Negri, Agamben, Vattimo) and developing the ambiguity of Agamben's focus.
Antonio Negri positive
Cited alongside Hardt for the concept of 'commons'.
Alain Badiou positive
Quoted extensively on the 'communist hypothesis' and the term 'rat-man' (L'Homme aux rats) for Sarkozy.
Giorgio Agamben negative
Žižek critiques Agamben’s theory of the concentration camp, arguing that Agamben’s positive vision is secretly a desire for a 'good concentration camp' or Limbo.
Walter Lippmann positive
Cited as the originator of 'manufacturing consent' in a positive sense, arguing that a specialized class must govern the 'bewildered herd' of citizens.
Nicolas Sarkozy negative
Referred to by Badiou as 'rat-man' (evoking anti-Semitic clichés) and cited as an example of ex-communists who lost courage.
George Orwell positive
Žižek quotes Orwell to support his point that leftist activity can sustain the status quo, and mentions Orwell's writings from the late 30s.
Leon Trotsky positive
Cited as editing a work where Trotsky argues democracy pacifies people too much, preventing genuine self-organization.
Alexander Luria positive
Praised as 'the greatest' brain scientist and author of The Mind of a Mnemonist, which Žižek recommends reading.
Adolf Hitler negative
Described not as a heroic madman but as a coward whose violence was impotent; Žižek argues we should not give him the dignity of a demonic figure.
Václav Havel positive
Žižek has 'great respect' for Havel's 'The Power of the Powerless' and uses it to illustrate how everyday engagement sustains power.
Cited as a ferocious anti-communist whose work, while useful for facts, ultimately relies on 'simple demonization' rather than understanding.
Hamlet positive
Cited as an example of 'doing nothing' and 'readiness is all' in Critchley's review.
Evo Morales positive
Mentioned alongside Chavez as an example of integrating excluded crowds into political space in Bolivia.
Catherine Malabou positive
Žižek considers Malabou's 'The Future of Hegel' one of the best books on Hegel and notes it converted Derrida to Hegel.
Maximilien Robespierre positive
Cited as an example of radical Jacobin violence illustrating 'divine violence' in Critchley's review.
Michel Foucault negative
The implicit target of Lacan's seminar on discourses; Žižek contrasts Lacan's view of a gap between knowledge and power with Foucault's equation of them.
Jacques Rancière positive
Cited as a theorist of 'singular universality'.
Herman Melville positive
Cited as an example of 'doing nothing' and 'refusing all commitment' in Critchley's review.
Hannah Arendt negative
Respected for her distinctions between force, power, authority, and violence, but criticized for ignoring the 'short-circuits' where authority masks violence (e.g., patriarchy).
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited as the source of the concept of 'divine violence' which Critchley attributes to Žižek.
Hugo Chávez positive
Žižek sympathizes with Chavez's attempts to combine state power with popular self-organization, despite criticizing his authoritarian methods.
Described not as an omnipotent madman but as experiencing 'total panic' and 'paranoia'; his regime is an 'enigma' regarding the constitution of subjectivity.
Noam Chomsky positive
Mentioned as having later used Lippmann's term 'manufacturing consent'.
Karl Marx positive
Cited as the source of the critique of ideology, specifically the re-reading of authority as violence.
Michael Hardt positive
Cited alongside Negri for the concept of 'commons'.
Sigmund Freud negative
Cited for the dream of 'Father, can't you see I'm burning?' and criticized by Malabou for succumbing to the 'temptation of meaning' in trauma.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited regarding the constitutional monarch 'dotting the I' and the concept of sublation (Aufhebung).
Simon Critchley negative
Critchley is Žižek's 'best friend' and they engage in a 'friendly debate,' but Žižek intellectually refutes Critchley's 'Infinitely Demanding' and his advice to withdraw from power.
Immanuel Kant positive
Cited for his distinction between private and public use of reason, which Žižek finds useful for understanding the commons.
Transcript 39 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks for coming. I would like to begin by brutally using or misusing this opportunity, since ironically we are at London Review of Books bookstore and there were some letters from the readers replying to a text of mine published some a month ago in London Review of Books, a text which somehow gives a partial view precisely on the topic of this book. I would like just briefly to reply to those criticisms, plus I would like to do something maybe considered unfair, but that’s life: in tomorrow’s Independent, my best friend Simon Critchley’s review of this book will appear. And that’s life, KGB, I got the text, so I will reply a little bit also to that one. And then I will try to do, if you will have enough patience, something which I hope will be at least minimally interesting to you. I will first, talking with my friends and so on, I noticed three, four standard criticisms of this book and more generally of my—my god, what a horrible word—political thinking of last years, like the suspicious character of my critique of democracy or, concerning this book, to put it brutally, that I didn’t do my homework, you know, in the Hannah Arendt way, distinguishing different aspects of violence, or between violence and authority, violence and power and so on. And then I would like to add something really new I haven’t yet dealt with, especially the problem which I find very interesting of what kind of psychic, psychological consequences have—have new forms of violence emerging today. I will be referring here to a book which I hope will be soon translated into English, Catherine Malabou, the one who wrote, I think, what is arguably one of the best books on Hegel ever written, The Future of Hegel, L'Avenir de Hegel. What’s so interesting is that this book, as you can see from Derrida’s forward, literally—and here you can see that Derrida was an honest guy, he admitted it—she, just before his death, Derrida’s death, single-handedly, as it were, if I simplify it a little bit, converted Derrida to Hegel. The book is a systematic reading of Hegel proving implicitly, sometimes explicitly, how in his standard criticism of Hegel, Derrida misses the point. And then Derrida, you can see, is totally intrigued by her book. Okay, she now wrote a wonderful new book, The New Wounded—sorry, my god, what stupid, you will see this, if there ever was a Freudian slip, this is it—Les Nouveaux Blessés, The New Wounded, sorry, not blessed, slight... okay, about the new traumatized personality emerging. So if I—if it would have been possible to run—to walk backwards in time and add something to this book, I would have added precisely a more systematic chapter on psychological consequences of today’s, this anonymous, quasi-natural impact of violence. So let me begin. Some of you knew that there were first three and then one, four letters attacking me for that piece, Resistance is Surrender. Maybe the first thing, if you maybe read the attacks on me, that I couldn't help noticing is that—I'm sorry to bore you with again this old story that I always repeat, it was already in the title of one of my books, you remember, The Iraqi Borrowed Kettle—that is to say, enumerating contradictory, mutually exclusive arguments. So, I wonder how, as a reply to a short text of mine, one page of this, in four letters I'm attributed—I mean, they attribute to me the following positions. First, my advice to the left is, literally, do nothing, sit in front of your TV and watch violence but do nothing, whatever you do it's wrong. Second letter attributes me a position of: abandon all non-realistic, pseudo-radical measures, become pragmatic, just realistic dealing with power and so on. Third one—the third reproach is that I support power-crazy mad dictators like Chavez and so on and so on. So isn't it interesting, like, how could it be that as a reply to the same text three positions are attributed to me which are totally exclusive: pragmatism, doing nothing, plus supporting power-mad dictators and so on. Then the fourth letter by David Graeber is even—in the last London Review of Books—is even more interesting, where—this is how he attributes, I mean, I'm just, you know, if I were to be even more than I already am, I'm aware, if I were to be in my appearance even more close to those crazy—crazy cartoons characters and so on, then you would see now me, you know, the—the eyes popping out, because look, he says describing me: when you shave away the posturing, his, mine, real message is that intellectuals have always been and always must be whores—whores like prostitutes, not horses—whores to power. He can't quite come out and say this, so he conveys it in a series of rhetorical maneuvers and so on and so on. What shocks me is that this exactly—so I'm a little bit perplexed, I must say—this exactly is what I am systematically attacking for years. Maybe I'm wrong here, but my reproach to those whom I call, maybe with a little bit of vicious irony, resistance—the Simon Critchley, this infinitely demanding resistance—is precisely that that's their implicit presupposition. As Simon says—I'm still on talking terms with him, so this is a friendly debate, even if I will shoot him, it will be like Brecht said in that poem, with a good gun, in a good earth and so on—okay, so, isn't—his thesis is precisely that—that we should withdraw for power, that power corrupts. And he even goes, as I quote him, maybe you remember, as far as saying that—that the moment you fight back to power, the moment you accept the game of power, you start to imitate it, you get caught into it and so on and so on. So quite on the contrary, I think that that’s the position that I am attacking. I think that the idea that when you start to mess with real power you prostitute yourself as an intellectual, I think that if the term ideology has any meaning, this is the zero-level intellectualist ideology of intellectuals today. This safe position, don't mess with it and so on and so on. So that's the first thing that I find slightly strange. Then, okay, not to lose power, I have other more interesting things to say. Let me go on with Critchley's critique that you can read tomorrow. It begins: Žižek concludes the book with an apology for what he calls, following Walter Benjamin, divine violence. The latter—divine violence—is understood theoretically as the heroic assumption of the solitude of the sovereign decision. This is incidentally a quote from—quote from Benjamin, not me. Practically, Žižek illustrates this with the examples of the radical Jacobin violence of Robespierre in France in the 1790s and the invasion of the dispossessed a decade or so ago, descending from the favelas in Rio de Janeiro to disturb the peace of the bourgeois neighborhoods which border on them and so on and so on. Incidentally, why doesn't he add more actual examples like Evo Morales, Chavez and so on and so on that I also quote? But what comes now it’s more interesting. I quote: But in a final twist, Žižek counsels us to do nothing in face of the objective systemic violence of the world. We should just sit and wait and have the courage to do nothing. The book ends with the words: sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do. True enough, but what can this possibly mean? At the core of Žižek's relentless, indeed manic production of books, articles and lectures is a fantasy, I think, what psychoanalysts would call an obsessional fantasy. Incidentally, I would like to find one analyst who ever used this term, okay, doesn't matter. So, that's my position. On the one hand, I quote again, the only authentic stance to take in dark times is to do nothing, to refuse all commitment, to be paralyzed like Melville's Bartleby. On the other hand, Žižek dreams of a divine violence, a cataclysmic purifying violence of the sovereign ethical deed, something like Sophocles' Antigone. And then the final judgment on me, I quote: behind its shimmering inversions, Žižek's work leaves us in a fearful and fateful deadlock. The only thing to do is to do nothing. We should just sit and wait. As the great Dane, Hamlet, says, readiness is all. But the truth is that Žižek is never ready. His work lingers in endless postponement and overproduction. He ridicules others' attempts at thinking about commitment, resistance and action. I confess we have crossed swords recently, while—and he goes on—while me doing nothing himself. What sustains his work is a dream of divine violence, cruelty and force. I hope that one day his dreams come true. Well, I hope for him then not, because then he will get a one-way ticket to Siberia. Okay, but that’s another point. Now, did you see the irony? First, I cannot just a kind of a common sense reaction. You know, how he ridicules other attempts at thinking about commitment and action while doing nothing himself. And then implying him among these others. My god, you can correct me here if I'm wrong, but was he ever—how should I put it—involved in any, like not signing academic protests and participating in safe demonstrations, but in any real commitment which brings even a little bit of danger, like a danger of losing job or whatever? So, but the thing which really bothers me is—and now I come to a theoretical point—how he falsifies my point. The quote—my quote is saying just—sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do. What do I mean by this? My god, I explain, and then you see where he is wrong, where he says on the one hand I preach do nothing, on the other hand I dream of divine violence. No, my point is that something, doing nothing, as I say in the quote itself, is the most violent thing to do. In what sense? My critique of some of the leftist protests is that they effectively are obsessional, but you know in what sense, and here I will be mockingly self-critical in a personal way. What—why is so-called obsessional activity a wrong activity, a pseudo-activity? Because you are active all the time not to achieve something but precisely so that nothing changes. That’s the paradox of an obsessional neurotic. And maybe you heard this old joke of me, I certainly accept that I am like that as a private person: I remember when I was doing analysis, as you can expect it, I was wildly talking all the time. Why? Because I was terribly afraid that if I shut up for a minute the analyst may ask me some truly troubling question, no? I was talking all the time not that something would happen, but to prevent—to prevent anything truly dangerous, traumatic from exploding. And unfortunately, and I'm not even saying here anything very revolutionary, if you want a much better formulated version of this criticism of the—of the politically correct left, you find it for example in some wonderful writings which, if I remember correctly, I quote them towards the end in the fifth chapter of the book, from George Orwell, made the same nice point already in the late 30s: how—how the radical left demands change but does it in such a way, just they demand—you know the idea is if we demand it loudly enough maybe nothing will really change, how should I put it, no? And I'm just making this simple point and all I'm saying is that we should be critically aware that often our activity, even if it is critical activity, can not only do—not only not really hurt those in power, but provide a kind of legitimation and effectively sustain them. And I'm speaking here from a—even my personal political past. For example, I remember in the early 80s, those half-dissident years in ex-Yugoslavia, when those in power, communists in power, started to—to suspect that they are losing, they terribly wanted dialogue. We got invitation from the Central Committee: please come to us, let’s debate and so on and so on. At that point to truly scare them was to do nothing. They really got into a—they were—no matter what you told them, you could criticize them: you are worse than Stalin, Yugoslav communism was more hypocritical and so on and so on. They just wanted—it’s what my good friend, the Austrian leftist philosopher Robert Faller, called the—you know in boxing you call this clinching, I think, no? When the opponent to prevent you hitting him embraces you, gets too close. That’s what power likes to do. And sometimes—this is what I mean. And I'm not saying we should just be doing this all the time. And I even think every normal leftist knows this, this—when should we be pragmatic, when should we be violent, when should we do nothing. My god, this is a matter of concrete circumstances and so on. For—no, I'm not saying we do nothing. For example, I was often criticizing Chavez, calling him even mockingly the—the Fidel with oil and so on and with American dollars. But I must say that in a way I sympathize with what he is doing now, precisely when he is accused of—of, you know, like brutally violating democratic rules and so on. This brings me to the central thesis of this book, the gap between subjective and systemic objective violence. Of course his acts are violent, non-democratic. But my god, as if—if you abstract from his acts—the situation in Venezuela is some kind of, how should I put it, objective democratic balance. My god, you know, it’s not that he has some kind of a monopoly; he has one TV station, the majority of the press is against him and so on and so on. Yes, I totally support him. You twist arms a little bit, you closed down one station, you do that, sorry, why not? The—the true problem is what he is desperately trying to do something seriously. I think everything will be decided in how he will succeed in—I'm here rather a pessimist if you ask me, but let’s hope that something will come out. Everybody knows, even there it’s no mystery, what will succeed—what will decide the fate of all of it. He tries desperately to somehow combine a strong state, even with dictatorial elements, and my god, I don't have any problems with that if he is also—if one takes into account also what he is doing on the other hand, which is trying somehow to combine state power with what we call in these old terms autonomous self-organization of the people in favelas and so on and so on, with popular self-organization. He is desperately experimenting, and this interests me much more than his, you know, big scandals which are then—which are then reported in the media, I don't know, what did he say about Bush or all that stuff. These desperate attempts at reorganize daily life, finding a new form of functioning of state power which will somehow effectively be in—even sometimes tense—dialogue with, integrate forms of what we sometimes naively called immediate democracy, local councils and so on and so on. And I think, my god, he is really doing something here. Of course, he is lucky, having the American mostly dollars, but why shouldn't he use this luck? And I think that the situation is even more interesting here in, as I wrote already about it briefly somewhere, in—in Bolivia. I think that in Bolivia this problem is even more—more—more radical. That again, what they are trying to do, Chavez, Morales and so on, is basically this: to integrate into not only state but public political space those silent, excluded crowds of people in favelas, of the native—native natives and so on and so on. I mean, my god, I totally support them here. So no, I'm definitely not saying if you are today—if you are today in—in—in Venezuela or Bolivia do nothing. I on the contrary—in the text to which all these reactions appeared, I—I refer there to Chavez, Morales and so on precisely as a test for Critchley. When Critchley writes in his book Infinitely Demanding, we should not grab state power, we should withdraw into the interstices of power. So for example, let’s brutally apply this to today's Venezuela. What would be Critchley’s advice to Chavez? No, no, power will corrupt you, you will become like them, withdraw to the interstices of power or whatever. No, when there is a chance, we should ruthlessly use it. All I'm saying is we should be ruthlessly pragmatist here. You do local democracy, you do state terror, you do whatever. Why not? I think we should reject these pseudo-moral principled debates: is it legal to do this? Everything is legal, my god, if you do it in a proper way. Okay, so—here, okay. But not to lose time here. So, I hope you got my point. I'm very specific when I say in the last sentence of the book, I think, sometimes. When is this sometimes? Sometimes—this brings us to the basic thesis of the book, which could be condensed in this way: that usually when we talk about violence, we automatically reduce violence to violent change. Like, you know, something, a situation reproduces itself, then something violently intrudes. But what about violence which should be practiced all the time not so that things change but so that they remain the way they are? I want to see that violence. And especially in what way sometimes by being active, we participate in it. This is even, my god, this is even an old liberal thesis. For example, in spite of all the stupidities he is doing now, Vaclav Havel, the Czech ex-president, I still have a great respect for his old text, The Power of the Powerless. You remember that famous figure of the grocery store seller who privately tells jokes, he is against the system, but obeys the ritual. You know, you put the slogan into the window and so on and so on. This should be the focus: how through our engagements this or that way in everyday life we sustain power. And to change that—so, let’s to conclude this introduction and then move to more serious theory—let me begin with, let me just mention that problematic point, Iraq war protests. My god, I participated in them, so it’s not that I'm saying they are wrong and so on. All I'm saying is that, and I have always this cynical criteria—criterion—that what bothered me is this smug satisfaction from all sides, you know, like: protesters were nice, oh, we showed them that people do really not support invasion of Iraq, millions are against it. And those in power were able to say, oh my god, you see how open we are, we even allow demonstrations and so on. You remember I always refer to that wonderful statement which sounds as a bad joke but unfortunately there is a truth in it: you know when they asked President Bush how he feels about that, you know what was his answer? I perfect, this is why we are going to Iraq, so that things like this could happen also in Iraq and so on and so on. The problem for me is that—is that those demonstrations didn't scare enough those in power. I'm not saying we should kill, but I think we should scare them. You—so what would I have done, people asked me? The same demonstrations but maybe in a slightly different way. I would try to be more Ghandian. I think that in the way I talk about violence, Ghandi was for me basically very violent. In what sense? Of course not in the sense of killing and so on, but all these strikes, mass movement he organized, these were not just demonstrations. Through economic sabotage and so on, he started to stop, to prevent the smooth functioning of the British machinery there. It was not just we state our opinion. He knew very well what he was doing. What I would have done, if you ask me frankly: okay, what would you have done three years ago or when? I would try to do something from totally crazy things like—if you ask me sometimes—why not start a mass movement, Ken Livingstone would maybe support it, that every family should bring—should bring a bowl of shit and drop it in front of Downing Street or Foreign Office. You know, to create some embarrassment, like can you imagine there on—on Whitehall, like hundreds of tons of shit or whatever? To—okay, from this slightly comical examples to I don't know, blocking ports or whatever, you know, just to make them afraid a little bit. Just to not killing, make them afraid. To stop the—or some kind of other boycotting or whatever. Why also, I often ask myself, the most—did it happen here or in another country? Because for example, when transport workers strike, the problem is always that you hurt the wrong guy, no? You hurt ordinary customers. But I don't know, was it this in UK, correct me if I'm wrong, I think one of—or did they do it in France, it was an excellent invention: work went on, only they didn't accept money from passengers. So of course the strike had the full support of the people and so on. You know, that you should always remember this: you don't kill, but it should hurt. It should hurt, it should scare them, those in power. So again, I'm not—I'm absolutely not saying do nothing. I'm just saying ask with your every activity: does it really scare them or it’s just that in a way even if it’s critical it reproduces. Okay, enough of this. Now we start working. The first, now critical points made to me. The first is my critique of the liberal logic of understanding the other. I think I elaborate this in one of—the second chapter, I think. You know, I mock that famous tolerant multiculturalist statement: the enemy is someone—someone whose story we didn't hear. And then I say this works abstractly when you are dealing with other races, sexual orientations, but that basically this is nonsense. In the sense of: would you also say that Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to—no. My conclusion here is—my conclusion here is in—at two levels more radical. First, I think that stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, the way we experience a situation, is not a level of truth. This is lie, we lie ourselves. So I think that justice means precisely that we should be, how should I put it, story-blind. You did this, it’s a horrible thing, and don't bring me all that shit now about how you experienced it and so on and so on. On the contrary, we should precisely ignore stories; with stories you can—you can justify whatever you want. My second point is—that I think we should reject this typical liberal blackmailing, implied in this: the enemy is someone whose story we didn't hear, about understanding. As if, you know, we have intolerance because we don't really understand the other, we should listen to others' story, understand them. Of course we cannot ever do it and this always—liberals are natural superego masochists, no? They always feel good when they have a task which they never can fully meet, like understand the other. Of course you cannot, there is always some stupid small nation or orientation that you cannot—oh, now I feel guilty, I should read more and so on. It’s totally false problematic. I'm a misanthropic person. I don't want to understand everyone, my god. I just want to live decently peacefully with people. The problem today is not to understand everybody, it’s how to live in a decent respectful way with people whom you don't understand. I mean, it’s—we should reject it. That’s the first. Second problematic point: my critique of democracy. What do I really imply here? It’s a kind of—I agree with some conservative critics but not even conservative. The first one who developed not so much this critique, this notion of, critical notion of democracy was, you know, the great icon of American journalism, Walter Lippmann already. And incidentally in his foreign political reports, he was very honest, progressive. You know that he already in the early 20s, he advocates a fair policy towards Soviet Union and so on and so on. But he had a radical theory of democracy and incidentally that's a nice irony, maybe some of you know it, maybe others not: he, Walter Lippmann, coined the term manufacturing consent, which later used by Chomsky. The irony is that he, Walter Lippmann, means it in a positive way. His theory is a very simple one. It is that a governing class must rise to face the challenge. The challenge is—here Lippmann as Plato saw the public as a great beast of or a bewildered herd—the challenge of floundering in the chaos of local opinions. So the herd of citizens must be governed by a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality. This elite class is to act as a machinery of knowledge that circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the omnipotent citizen. I think that whatever we say, de facto—that's my thesis—de facto in a large majority of cases this is how what we call in our societies democracy functions. We don't really want to decide. We want somebody, expert, whatever, to propose us a decision, we want just to save the appearance. We want to feel as if we decide but without the true pressure of deciding what there is. We want just as Hegel said about constitutional monarch to dot the I. And this is why when people are really—when this intellectual—this opinion-making elite collapses, then on the one hand we can have a genuine democratic self-organization, but more often than not we get a chaos, we get a panic. So, I am—if—so—my point is that, you know, when people say in democracy every ordinary citizen should be a king, yes, but I claim a king in a—as a king in a constitutional democracy, a king who only formally decides. No, like, you know that in democracy—the problem of monarchy and democracy. It’s a wonderful problem, they were already aware of it in early modernity, of effectively the king shouldn't decide. But the problem was how—how like how to save the appearances, how to—how to save the dignity of the king so that it appears that he or she or it whatever decides. And there were complicated rituals of saving the appearance. It’s a wonderful topic. So what I am—you get my point. My point is not that I'm criticizing democracy. My first point here is simply a descriptive one. I claim that what we call effectively today democracy is, for the majority of people, in their innermost self-experience, they don't want to decide. They want to be clearly told how to decide and to save the appearance that they are doing it. In this sense, Trotsky, which I edited, was right when he criticized democracy. His point is precisely this one: not that democracy pacifies the masses too much and then we need the leading communist party to tell them what, but on the contrary that democracy, the way it’s practiced, pacifies the people too much. And I think this crisis is exploding, especially today, so that you will not accuse me that I'm doing nothing. For example, in the Czech Republic, now two months ago, three, I was in Prague participating in some big demonstration, even addressing the people there, against this US army radars. And I was shocked what was the official accusation of the government against them. A—a government representative rejected calls for a referendum. What all these protesters demanded is simply a referendum. Should this NATO radars be installed there or not, because they claim, of course it’s true, everybody knows over of the people are against. So, the government representative said that one does not decide with voting about such a sensitive national security matter, they should be left to military experts. But if one follows this logic then what? Why shouldn't people decide about economy, shouldn't it also be left to experts and so on and so on. So what’s the problem here? I think now I move a little bit more into theory. Here we can see how Lacan is nonetheless useful in political analysis. Where? Because here Lacan proposes in his seminar which was a year ago or when translated into English on The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, about four discourses. People didn't notice, I don't know almost anyone who noticed it that the main implicit target of that seminar is Michel Foucault. That is to say, Michel Foucault's thesis of knowledge-power. Foucault more or less to simplify to the utmost equates them, you know: knowledge is power, not in this naive Auguste Comte sense, but the way you organize, the way your knowledge maps reality is always sustaining a center power, embodies power through—you know maybe some of you even much better than me. In clear contrast to Foucault, the whole thesis of Lacan is that modernity is characterized by a—on the contrary—a disjunction between knowledge and power. That we have an excess of knowledge—not of true knowledge but of what is experienced as knowledge, experts and so on—which—which prevents power in the Lacanian sense of master signifier decisions and so on and so on. I think we have a little bit of that with ecology. The problem from—from our ordinary people's perspective, it’s not that we don't know enough. In a way we even know too much, you know, the picture gets—gets so blurred, so complex, so that you simply it paralyzes you, you cannot—you cannot decide. And I think that here what this excess of knowledge gives rise to is religion. I think this is one of the main resources of religion today. What religion really promises is to somehow contain this bursting technological and so on scientific knowledge in manageable limits, no? Things will still have sense and so on and so on. Okay, let me go on. This is again my second point. Where Lacan is really useful: gap on the—not knowledge power, but there is a—there is a clivage, a—a gap, a rupture between the two in modernity. The third reproach to me is as I already mentioned it: okay, okay, but I didn’t do my homework, I use the term violence in a profuse general way ignoring precise distinctions. This is what I often hear from friends. I claim: no, first I did do my homework. In my other books I wrote already about Arendt on violence where we all know how she elaborates precise distinctions between power which is—no, sorry, force, which is simply like force of nature or force of circumstances. We have a force in society when it’s simply an—an unhumanly uncontrollable force of circumstances, while power is always a function of human relations. Then, of course, we have authority which is a specific source of power. It represents power vested in a person by virtue of their capacities, office, symbolic function whatever. And then we have violence, which is also not the same as natural catastrophes, but violence in the sense of invading our—the other space of freedom. And—of course where Hannah Arendt is at her best is how she opposes authority and violence, claiming that true authority doesn’t need violence. Violence is precisely the resource of those who do not have—who have neither power nor authority. This is a nice point incidentally to throw a new light on today’s so-called terrorist attacks and so on. Okay, we could go on here, I agree with all these distinctions. What I find problematic nonetheless in Arendt is that she leaves all too much out of consideration the necessary short-circuits between different levels, between power and social violence. For example, an economic crisis which causes devastation is experienced as uncontrollable quasi-natural force. But isn’t the whole point of critique of ideology that what appears it just happened, uncontrollable, as part of the system should be nonetheless read as violence? Or, even an example known to all of us I hope, which concerns the relationship between authority and violence. Isn’t the whole—if there is one point of feminism in spite of my often I admit it bad taste jokes about feminism, but there is one point where I totally support it. Isn't—if I think—if one can condense all of feminism into one thesis is that—is to unmask the male authority as violence. To say: no, it's not any natural authority, it's sustained by violent imposition. To see violence beneath authority. No wonder then that Arendt uses her distinctions to criticize Marx. Because I think that what we can still learn in Marx and this is maybe even one of the fundamental premises of—of critique of ideology, that when you have a figure of authority, to reinterpret, to—when does—how does a woman become a feminist? By saying to males who oppress her: no, it's not your authority, it's violence what you are doing. To re-read—it as violence. Okay. Next point mocked by some of my critics: communism. In what sense I still am a communist? I am. Let me quote you, I already used it at some colloquium, you were not there so I will quote it. This is the poetry that I like from Alain Badiou's new book, a quote on Sarkozy. I quote—I translated from French: "The communist hypothesis remains the good one. I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right." Rat-man, *L'Homme aux rats*, is incidentally Badiou's name for Sarkozy. And he was already, of course, attacked for this for anti-Semitism, my god, no? Claiming that when you call somebody a rat-man it evokes all—all old anti-Semitic clichés and so on. "The rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and state. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself." End of quote. So again, I think that today in the antagonisms which I see as pressing, I think we should preci—we can precisely discover the communist dimension. What do I mean by this? Maybe you know already my theory, I see the whole series of antagonisms. One is for example the ecology. Ecology, what’s the problem of ecology? Is precisely ecology is the problem of commons. What here I agree with Hardt and Negri: of commons. We have a space of commons, our common inheritance. The problem is how to keep it at the level of commons, not to privatize it. And of course we—I use here—I will not talk too much just briefly—well, that I use here the term private in the Kantian sense of private use of reason. I think if ever some thought, some Kant’s idea was useful, it is his idea of how he opposes private and public use of reason. Where, as I hope you know, for Kant private use of reason is precisely what most of us would spontaneously call public use of reason. Private use of reason is for Kant if you are a lawyer, state functionary, priest or whatever, part of ideological mechanisms concerned with the functioning of the state of public space and so on—sorry, of state space. While public is for Kant precisely when you are in public space, for example in free intellectual debates, where you withdraw from this private space. At that level of what theorists like Badiou, Rancière and so on would have called singular universality: that you are universal when you withdraw from the private space of your particular community. To cut a long story short. And I think that then we have the problem of today's cognitive capital, privatization of like intellectual property and so on. It’s again the problem of, you know, what in the early modernity was called especially in England it was actual so-called enclosure of commons. I think this is what is happening massively today. Even I think biogenetics basically it’s about this: isn’t our—our biogenetic inheritance our shared—aren't—isn't it our shared commons? And I think that in all these domains we are dealing with the dimension of commons. So what I would say is that at this level, again with some other further conditions of course which I will not enumerate, I stick to the—the notion of communism. Okay, now not to lose time, I would like just to finish with two new theoretical developments. First one, what I already announced, about psychic consequences of violence. Let me begin with a simple example. George Soros is an undoubtedly honest humanitarian. His Open Society Foundation, among other things, more or less single-handedly saved critical social thinking in post-communist countries. Yet, maybe some of you remember it, a decade or so ago, the same Soros engaged in speculations with the different rates between currencies and earned hundreds of millions, thereby causing great suffering in Southeast Asia and so on and so on, hundreds of thousands losing jobs with all the consequences. This I think is today's abstract violence at its purest. On the one extreme, the financial speculations going on in their own sphere with no transparent links to the reality of human lives. On the other extreme, a pseudo-natural catastrophe, suddenly you lose your job or whatever, which hits thousands like—like a kind of a social tsunami with no apparent reason at all. This is what fascinates me today: how, you know, somebody there does some speculation in this, his air-conditioned office, then something happens which is experienced as totally pseudo-natural dynamics. Now what interests me is what are the psychological consequences of it? Here I come to Catherine Malabou's book. Her starting point—now a little bit of theory—is the fatal limitation of psychoanalysis. For Freud and Lacan, according to Malabou, external shocks, brutal unexpected encounters or intrusions, owe their traumatic impact to the way they touch a pre-existing traumatic psychic reality. Recall for example Lacan's exemplary reading of the Freudian dream of "Father, can't you see I'm burning?" The contingent external encounter of the real—you know the candle collapses and so on—triggers the true real, the unbearable fantasy apparition of the dead child reproaching his father. In this way, every external trauma is sublated, in the Hegelian sense of *Aufhebung*, internalized. It owes its impact to the way a pre-existing real of psychic reality is stirred up, aroused through it. So even the most violent intrusions of the external real, say the shocking effect on the victims of bomb explosions in war, owe their traumatic effect to the resonance they find in perverse masochism, death drive, unconscious guilt feeling and so on and so on. Here in his writing about war, Freud is clear, it’s true, for him external shocking intrusions of violence, torture even rape, in itself has no psychic—it can destroy psyche but as such doesn't count. It must, as it were, find resonance in some pre-existing frame of psychic reality. Now I return to Malabou. Today however, according to her, our reality abounds with multiple versions of traumatic intrusions which are just that: meaningless, brutal interruptions which destroy the symbolic texture of subject's identity. First, there is the external physical violence: terror attacks, the US shock and awe bombing of Iraq, street violence, rape, but also natural catastrophes like earthquakes, tsunamis and so on. Then there is the irrational meaningless destruction of the material base of our inner reality: brain tumors, Alzheimer's, organic cerebral lesions and so on. They can utterly change, destroy even, the victim's personality. Finally, there are the destructive effects of socio-symbolic violence: social exclusion, family abuse and so on. So Malabou's basic reproach to Freud is that when confronted with such cases Freud succumbs to the temptation of meaning. He is not ready to accept the direct efficiency of external shocks which destroy the psyche of the victim, or at least wound it in an unredeemable way, without finding resonance in a pre-existing psychic trauma. But according to Malabou, isn't it obviously obscene to link, say, the psychic devastation of a *Muselmann*—she means *Musulman*, the living dead in a Nazi camp—to his masochism, death drive or guilt feeling? A *Muselmann*, or a victim of multiple rape or a victim of brutal torture, is not devastated by unconscious anxieties, but directly by a meaningless external shock which can in no way be hermeneutically integrated. You know, you cannot—you don't need this detour through some unconscious trauma; it’s just direct efficiency. So for the wounded brain—here is a quote from Malabou—"there is no possibility to be present at its own fragmentation or at its own wound. In contrast to castration, there is no representation, no phenomenon, no example of separation which would allow the subject to anticipate, to wait for, to fantasy what can be a break in cerebral connections. One cannot even dream, even dream about it. There is no scene for this thing which is not one. The brain in no way anticipates the possibility of its own damage. When this damage occurs, it is another self which is affected, a new self founded in misrecognition." End of quote. So again, for Freud, if external violence gets too strong, we simply exit the psychic domain proper. The choice is: either the shock is reintegrated into a pre-existing libidinal frame, or it destroys psyche and nothing is left. What Freud couldn't emphasize was that the victim, as it were, survives its own death. All different forms of traumatic encounters, independently of their specific natural, social, biological, symbolic nature, lead to the same result: a new subject emerges which survives the erasure of his, her symbolic identity. There is no continuity between this new post-traumatic subject and its previous subjectivity. And we all know from descriptions the features of this subject: lack of emotional engagement, profound indifference and detachment. It is a subject who is no longer in the world, in the Heideggerian sense of engaged embodied existence. This subject lives death as a form of life. His life is death drive embodied, a life deprived of erotic engagements. And this holds for henchman no less than for his victims. So according to Malabou, if the 20th century was the Freudian century, the century of libido, so that even the worst nightmares were read as sadomasochist vicissitudes of the libido, the 21st century will be the century of post-traumatic disengaged subject whose first emblematic figure was that of the *Muselmann* in concentration camps, and this figure is now multiplying again in the guise of refugees, terror victims, survivors of natural catastrophes and so on. The feature that runs through all these figures is that the causes of the catastrophe remain libidinally meaningless, resisting any interpretation. The last quote from Malabou: "The victims of socio-political traumas present today the same profile as the victims of natural catastrophes—tsunamis, earthquake, floods—or grave accidents—serious domestic accidents, explosions, fires. We entered a new era of political violence where politics draws its resource from the renunciation to the political sense of violence. This erasure of sense is not only discernible in countries at war, it is present everywhere as the new face of the social which bears witness to an unheard-of psychic pathology, identical in all cases and in all contexts: globalized." End of quote. So, global capitalism generates a new form of illness which is itself global. Global in the sense that it is in its appearance indifferent to even the most elementary distinctions like between nature and culture. Social conflicts are deprived of the dialectics of political struggle proper and become as anonymous as natural catastrophes. We are dealing with a weird mixture of nature and politics. Malabou is, I think, here at her theoretical best when she formulates a wonderful critique of those brain scientists, from the greatest at the beginning—and I appreciate him—Alexander Luria, the Soviet neurologist, from the big hit today, Oliver Sacks, who, these critics, insist on the necessity to supplement the naturalist description of brain lesions with the subjective description of how this biological wound not only affects the subject's particular features—loss of memory and so on—but changes his or her entire psychic structure. Like, I really advise you to read it, it’s a wonderful book, that Soviet classic from, I think, immediately after World War II, *The Mind of a Mnemonist* by Luria. It’s a study of some guy who—his pathology was that he couldn't forget anything. So, you know, in contrast to us who when you have to remember something you invent codes—you know, some meaningless series, numbers, whatever—how to remember things. He had to practice forgetting. And this—it’s a short book, pages, but he focuses in a very nice way on how this guy subjectivized this. He became a kind of obsessional where his only way to survive was to think all the time about how—he was basically *The Beast in the Jungle* character from Henry James; it’s never it, he was always expecting something to happen which never happened. So what is Malabou's critique? A wonderful one, I think. She truly is a philosopher. It’s that—and you can see this, I'm reading it now a little bit in diagonal but with pleasure, Oliver Sacks' new on *Musicophilia* new book. You have a brain lesion and then he is too humanist in what sense? In the sense that he immediately focuses on how patients nonetheless survive, and then you have all this beauty of the man who mistook his wife for a hat, how you nonetheless through the help of music you build your new universe, like you know you cannot recognize faces but if you associate them to melodies you can and so on and so on. But Malabou says but this is already recuperation. But she is very precise here. Something happens in between. There is a zero-level subject, that’s what according to her Freud refused to theorize. For example, if you are, let’s take a simple example, if you have some stupid brain lesion or whatever, you get totally disengaged, emotionally dead, you erase organically even all your past, but you are still a subject. And this zero-level subjectivity is the horror she is trying to survive. Not that—I say this in a benevolently ironic way—not that Oliver Sacks kitsch of awakening, how nonetheless through Schubert music whatever you—you find your way back. That is to say, not how you fight the loss, but the form of subjectivity which is the form of loss itself, which again, according to Malabou, cannot be accounted for in the terms of past traumas and so on. No, you are not—psychoanalysis doesn't work here, because traditional one, because the point is not to unearth some past trauma or whatever, there are none. All your entire past is literally erased. You are a living dead. And I think she is deeply right in connecting this topic to Hegel. She is for me therefore unique, she is the only person whom I know who combines a detailed knowledge and, if I may say this even in a self-mockingly ironic way, like me she is not bluffing here. She is really doing serious stuff with cognitivists, at the same time she is a, how do you call it, card-carrying Hegelian, no? So—okay, where do I not agree with her? I think that psychoanalysis can be saved here. I think that she has a totally simplified theory of death drive and so on. I think that what she simply opposes death drive as this will to—she reads death drive in a very naive way as opposed to libido, as if death drive means you want to die, disappear whatever, and libido is this active cathexis and so on. What she doesn't see is what, for example, Deleuze saw it wonderfully already in his *Difference and Repetition*: how death drive and pleasure principle are not opposed as, you know, two principle are fighting, but death drive is the transcendental a priori of pleasure principle itself. Death drive is just a kind of, how should I put it, death drive is the very formal structure of our libido. You know what does mean for Lacan death drive? It means this: you never get at your object directly, circulating around the object gives you more pleasure than going—this obstacle as inherent. So it’s the very form of our libido. In this sense I think one could say that precisely in the radical Freudian sense these the living dead are—it’s like all pathological libido content is erased, what remains is the form of death drive as such. But that’s another story. Before one does this Freud-Lacanian narcissism of criticizing her, I think one should nonetheless recognize the raw power of her—of her—of her analysis. I effectively think again that we are when we are so massively confronting, again at different levels, nature, culture, war whatever, this new subject who—literal subjects without subjectivity. Like if you have a brain lesion or total trauma, you know your past is erased, like I had this unfortunate experience, if you have it of some near to you, you know what’s so horrible is that when you have somebody with really heavy Alzheimer's or whatever, I mean the problem is that you cannot play the shitty humanist game: "oh it’s still my good old grandma." No it's not, it's a monster, it's another subject. It's not—you have to accept this. It’s totally different subjectivity. All that remains is just the empty form. And here I have a more elegant theory which I don't have time to develop now, it is that I think that something of this nature happens, is constitutive of subjectivity as such. That to become a subject means in a way to lose your substance. But that’s Hegelian speculation. Now if you allow me, just another five minutes, really five minutes, to finish, I would like to repeat something which I already did at the Birkbeck College, but since here—lecture—but since here the public is probably more mixed general, I would love to. Because the last question addressed to me almost is: okay, you play with all these paradoxes up and down, but where do you stand? In a very naive human way, what is your ethical position? Can you describe me? I mean, people often say me: okay, it’s easy for you to—to list people like, I don't know, all these big examples, Antigone, Medea and so on, no? And I admit sometimes I run into trouble here. The Elizabeth Wright, you know, the one who edited that reader on me and who tragically died of, I think, colon cancer, no? I remember talking to her two years before her death and she asked me this charmingly British empiricist naive question, reading my *Fragile Absolute* where I play all that with Medea and so on. She asked me: but I don't get it here, do you think that to be really ethical in Lacanian sense we have to kill our children or what, no? But I like naive questions. So let’s approach it in a very naive way: where do I stand? I did find a book which perfectly exemplifies how—I'm unfortunately not, I'm not perfect, but how in a perfect world I would like to be. It’s a book by a Hungarian immigrant to Switzerland—I like already the name, this is what attracted me: first I thought it’s some when a friend told me, I'm reading—I will tell you now the name—Agota Kristof. I thought because the friend was East European, you know it’s kind of a, you know, like East European mispronouncing Agatha Christie. I wanted to ask him what are you reading, *Death on the Nile* and whatever, no—no, no, no, it's Agota Kristof, not Agatha Christie. She emigrated as a girl from Hungary in '56, then worked in a watch factory, it’s like a caricature, in Switzerland and then wrote a couple of very strange books. The best one is a trilogy—trilogy—of books, *The Notebook*, *The Proof*, *The Third Lie*. They are—they are available, I think you find them even here, it’s Grove Press, New York, but I—I saw her here in Waterstone, in Foyles and so on. I think this is the best image on—not her, sorry unfortunately—this is the best exemplification of immoral ethics. But wait a second, not in this boring heroic pseudo-Nietzschean sense where morality means be kind to others, ethics is your fidelity to yourself, so you have this great Nietzschean figure who can kill others, do whatever you want, but what matters is that you are ethical, faithful to yourself. No. I mean immoral ethics in a—in a—in a different—in a—in a different sense. Along the lines of Schiller's opposition of naive and sentimental. Morals are sentimental, I think. Morality involves other, in the sense that looking at myself through others' eyes, I like myself being good. Morality is "I'm helping you, isn't it nice that I'm helping you," no? Morality is charity, you know, you get a picture from the black boy to whom you send five dollars or pounds a month and oh my god, yeah. Ethics is something much more naive in the sense of cruelty: you do it without any consideration of goodness and so on and so on. So in the first book, *The Notebook*, entitled, she tells the story of young twins living with their grandmother in a small Hungarian town during the last years of the World War II and the early years of communism. These twins, two young boys of seven, eight, are totally immoral: they lie, blackmail, kill, yet I think they stand for authentic ethical naivety. Let me give a couple of examples. A couple—one day, the two boys meet in a forest a starved deserter and bring him some things he asked them for: food, blanket and so on. Now I quote the novel: "When we come back with the food and blanket, he, the deserter, says 'You are very kind.' We say: 'We weren't trying to be kind. We’ve brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That’s all.'" If there ever was—my comment—a Christian ethical stance, this is it. No matter how weird the neighbor's demand, the twins naively tried to meet the demand. So it’s just, you know, this is what I like: I help you, no, I help you simply because you need help, not because I'm good. For example, one night the twins find themselves sleeping in the same bed with a German officer, a tormented gay masochist. Early in the morning they awake and want to leave the bed, but the officer holds them back. A quote: "'Don’t move. Keep sleeping,' he tells the boys. They answer: 'We want to urinate. We have to go.' 'Don’t go, do it here.' We ask where. He says: 'On me. Yes, don’t be afraid, piss on my face.' We do it, then we go out into the garden because the bed is all wet." You know, that’s ethics. You do what’s the problem, the guy wants to be... a true work of love, I think. Then, the twins' closest friend is the priest's housekeeper, a young voluptuous woman who washes them, plays erotic games with them and so on. Then something happens when a procession of starved Jews—starved Jews is led through their town on their way to the camp. Quote: "Right in front of us a thin arm emerges from the crowd, a dirty hand stretches out, a voice asks 'Bread.' The housekeeper smiles and pretends to offer the rest of her bread. She holds it close to the outstretched hand, then with a great laugh brings the piece of bread back to her mouth, takes a bite and says: 'I'm hungry too.'" End of quote. So the boys simply decides to punish this woman. They stole some ammunition from that "piss on my face" German officer and put it into—into this housekeeper’s kitchen stove so that when she lights fire in the morning the stove explodes and disfigures her. I would do the same, absolutely. The brothers also blackmail the local priest. They—they know that the priest has a little bit of money and they know a girl, poor girl who is disfigured and starves with her mother. So they go to the priest and—tell them—tell him that they know that she sexually molested some young girl. And the priest tell them it’s not true, and they tell him: we don't care if it's true or not, but we will tell the people, they will believe us and so on, we want money, a certain amount of money every week. Then the shocked priest asks them. Quote: "'It's monstrous. Have you any idea what you are doing?' 'Yes, sir. Blackmail.' 'At your age it’s deplorable.' Answer Marxist: 'Yes, it’s deplorable that we’ve been forced to this, but Hare-Lip, the girl, and her mother absolutely need money.'" So there is nothing personal in it. Later in the novel, they become closest friends with the—this priest while going on to blackmail him. And when the girl and her mother start—start to work and can survive on their own, they simply went to the priest and said: "Thank you very much, we no longer need your money." Quote: "'Keep it. You had given enough. We took your money when it was absolutely necessary. Now we earn enough money to give some to the girl Hare-Lip. We also—we have also taught her to work.'" So their cold serving others extends to killing them. For example, their grandmother asks them to put poison into her cup of milk because she is old. They say: "Don't cry, Grandmother. If you really want it, we'll kill you." I mean, it’s—naive as it is, I claim, such a subjective attitude in no way precludes a kind of a cold reflexive distance. One day, for example, the twins put on torn clothes and go begging. Passing persons gave them apples, biscuits and so on. One of them even strokes their hair. Then another woman offers them to come to her home and do some work for which she will give them something to eat. Then there is the dialogue, the last quote: "We answer: 'We don't want to work for you, madam. We don't—we don't want to eat your soup or your bread. We are not hungry.' She asks: 'Then why are you begging?' 'To find out what effect it has and to observe people's reactions.' She walks off shouting 'Dirty little hooligans' and impertinent too. Then the boys: On our way home we throw the apples, the biscuits, the chocolate and the coins into the tall grass by the roadside, but it is impossible to throw away the stroking on our hair." End of quote. If you ask me, this is where I stand. This is how I would love to be. An ethical monster without empathy, but doing the duty to help others with blind spontaneity while avoiding the other's disgusting proximity. With more people like this, the world would have been a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold cruel passion. I would like to be like these children. You kill if it’s needed, you blackmail, you do your good. This is ethics for me. No sentimentality. Thank you very much. [Applause] Okay. Who—who runs the show? I don't know, I... okay. You—but maybe because I'm a little bit myopic so maybe if somebody can at least pretend that he is selecting. Sorry, if anyone who has a question could wait for the microphone. Yeah, okay, there was the first. Yeah. **Audience:** I wanted to know what your—about mediocrity and violence. **Žižek:** What do you mean? **Audience:** Mediocrity and violence. Do you think there’s a violence in mediocrity? Because I think there is. **Žižek:** Mediocrity in the sense of... **Audience:** Well, you could sort of like daytime TV, sort of like newspapers, sort of like costume dramas on BBC One. **Žižek:** Yeah, it—it depends, again, because you know what I like very much. Wasn't it in one of the daily newspapers that I even maybe here I read or on the plane, I don't remember, when they said—and I like this—you know this standard cliché: violent TV generates, breeds real-life violence. Now some researches are—are proving the—the contrary, and I like this thesis that violence... **Audience:** I didn’t think—I wasn't meaning that. **Žižek:** No, I know, I know. I know, I know. Okay, I would—I will say this. First, I would have to go more in—more into what do you mean here by violence? Because if there is violence there, of course, violence is everywhere. So this book is not a critique of violence, if anything it’s a book for violence. I think that our—this typically postmodern narcissistic fear of violence, you know this politically correct against harassment, this is the worst type of ideology and it’s probably breeding a lot of violence. So that’s my point, is—when you say violence, you must be more specific... **Audience:** Yeah, I was thinking when you were talking about zero subjectivity. **Žižek:** Yeah. **Audience:** And in that sense—I wasn't thinking about the other day when I was thinking about coming here, but when you talked about zero subjectivity, that created—that’s a kind of quite a violent thing. **Žižek:** Yeah. **Audience:** And in a way mediocrity might be a kind of zero subjectivity. **Žižek:** Yeah, yeah, but here I'm a little bit too philosophical. The first thing I would say is that this kind of—there is some kind of violence like that which is for me again a kind of transcendental a priori of subjectivity itself. In psychoanalysis they tried at some point to recuperate it through terms like symbolic castration, which I agree are not adequate and so on. So that’s the—the first. The second thing, association that comes to my mind when you say mediocrity in violence, no? My obvious example here would have been of course Hannah Arendt, banality of evil and so on. And yes, here I am more or less, not quite but I don't have time to go now into it, on—on her side. That is to say, for me—what we usually perceive as violence is basically a form of impotence. In the sense of violence... wait a minute, I'm referring to you now and to me. For example, you had a father—okay, stupid question, obviously. Isn't it that didn't you feel already as a child that if the father—I hope he didn't—actively beats you, it may hurt, but for me when he did it to me, I always distinctly experienced it as his impotence. A true authority doesn't beat, he just looks at you and you tremble. Whenever this explode—a true violence, a true authority is a threat of violence, you know, like you just look, no? The moment you explode, and in this sense, I will tell you an amusing story criticizing my editor, not the British one but the American one. Originally there was a phrase in the manuscript that the problem with Hitler is that he wasn't violent enough. Now of course the Americans went bananas, no? Like, "Oh, he should have killed all of the Jews or what," no? No, my point was a very simple one: that all this explosion of anti-Semitic violence and so on was for me clearly—here I'm old-fashioned Marxist, you know—it was precisely to keep basically the capitalist relations, however we call it, he was a coward basically. I think that—and why, in what sense do I mean this? Precisely in the Hannah Arendt sense. You know, I report on this, I think this remained in the book, this was not censored, how one of the most disgusting ways to rehabilitate, not really rehabilitate but flirt with Nazism. And I was shocked it became fashionable in our part of Europe. All of a sudden three, four years ago, the ski champions, very mysteriously, don't ask me why, in Slovenia, in Croatia, started when they were asked by journalists: "How is it that—how are you prepared for tomorrow’s race?" started to use serially many of them the example like one said: "I'm ready as German army was on the 21st of June '41," no? And then when asked they said: "Of course Hitler did horrible things, I don't admire, but they were ready, they were," no? And I think that we should take even this from—from Hitler: he was a coward. We shouldn't give—this is how I read Hannah Arendt—we shouldn't give concede to them, to persons like Hitler, the dignity of some demonic figure, you know who, my god, he dared... he didn't dare. Six million Jews and millions of others had to die not because he was a heroic madman, but because he was basically a coward. And so in—here I agree again with this Arendt's thesis that—this would be for me the first association again with mediocrity and violence. That—terrible violence is always violence in this more subjective sense of violent outbursts, up to state terror, is always impotence. And the same goes for Stalinist terror. Read the new so-called revisionist historians, Oleg Naumov, *The Road to Terror*. You can see that Stalin was not a kind of a omnipotent madman, "oh why don't we kill a million of farmers there" and so on. The inner circle of Stalin experienced their situation as the one of total panic all the time: "We don't control it," total paranoia and so on. So in—in this sense, yes, I think there is even an inherent link between violence and mediocrity, how should I put it, in the—in the... although probably you meant something very specific with those... **Audience:** I meant to do with the impotence thing. **Žižek:** With the impotence. Yeah. But on the other hand you see I think that in a way in politics we should break this liberal deadlock, with this liberal deadlock where whenever you say violence it’s something horrible and so on. No, I mean, like at that Marxist and in a talk that I give at some Marxism conference at SOAS, like one mile north from here, I use that—if you want to see an example of good emancipatory violence, look at a film which no wonder it’s censored—censored in the sense that it more or less disappeared—John Carpenter’s—yeah, yeah, that guy, *Halloween*, he is a big Hollywood progressive—*They Live*. Do you know *They Live*? It’s a pure Hollywood Marxism, much better than *Titanic* and that shit, about an ordinary guy in slum, poor, who stumbles in an abandoned church on glasses—it’s the critique of ideology—when you put on the glasses, you walk around and see the true message, like you see Coke, movies, blah blah. When you put on the glasses, you see: OBEY, DON'T THINK, PROCREATE, and so on. You know, like you see the real—it’s such a beautiful naivety. And then there is the most beautiful sense where he tries to force his best friend to put on the glasses, and the two had a terrible fight. You know, to get free you must—this is or another example which I always quote, like from *Fight Club*. Did you see *Fight Club*? When he—this is progressive violence. I hate those liberals who claim this is a proto-fascist film. I think it’s a deeply progressive film. This is what I mean by divine violence, for example. Sorry if I blah blah. Okay. Please, there was there. **Audience:** Thank you very much. I've just traveled up from my hometown in Hastings just to say thank you to you. **Žižek:** Don't take me seriously, but okay, yeah. **Audience:** I know, but I mean I had no idea that I'd step into the bookshop and you'd written so many books. I find in my life, and no doubt many other people do as well, that the law takes too much interest in me. I'm not very interested in the law, but the law seems to be interested in me. It’s got things
Thanks for coming. I would like to begin by brutally using or misusing this opportunity, since ironically we are at London Review of Books bookstore and there were some letters from the readers replying to a text of mine published some a month ago in London Review of Books, a text which somehow gives a partial view precisely on the topic of this book. I would like just briefly to reply to those criticisms, plus I would like to do something maybe considered unfair, but that’s life: in tomorrow’s Independent, my best friend Simon Critchley’s review of this book will appear. And that’s life, KGB, I got the text, so I will reply a little bit also to that one. And then I will try to do, if you will have enough patience, something which I hope will be at least minimally interesting to you. I will first, talking with my friends and so on, I noticed three, four standard criticisms of this book and more generally of my—my god, what a horrible word—political thinking of last years, like the suspicious character of my critique of democracy or, concerning this book, to put it brutally, that I didn’t do my homework, you know, in the Hannah Arendt way, distinguishing different aspects of violence, or between violence and authority, violence and power and so on. And then I would like to add something really new I haven’t yet dealt with, especially the problem which I find very interesting of what kind of psychic, psychological consequences have—have new forms of violence emerging today. I will be referring here to a book which I hope will be soon translated into English, Catherine Malabou, the one who wrote, I think, what is arguably one of the best books on Hegel ever written, The Future of Hegel, L'Avenir de Hegel. What’s so interesting is that this book, as you can see from Derrida’s forward, literally—and here you can see that Derrida was an honest guy, he admitted it—she, just before his death, Derrida’s death, single-handedly, as it were, if I simplify it a little bit, converted Derrida to Hegel. The book is a systematic reading of Hegel proving implicitly, sometimes explicitly, how in his standard criticism of Hegel, Derrida misses the point. And then Derrida, you can see, is totally intrigued by her book. Okay, she now wrote a wonderful new book, The New Wounded—sorry, my god, what stupid, you will see this, if there ever was a Freudian slip, this is it—Les Nouveaux Blessés, The New Wounded, sorry, not blessed, slight... okay, about the new traumatized personality emerging. So if I—if it would have been possible to run—to walk backwards in time and add something to this book, I would have added precisely a more systematic chapter on psychological consequences of today’s, this anonymous, quasi-natural impact of violence. So let me begin. Some of you knew that there were first three and then one, four letters attacking me for that piece, Resistance is Surrender. Maybe the first thing, if you maybe read the attacks on me, that I couldn't help noticing is that—I'm sorry to bore you with again this old story that I always repeat, it was already in the title of one of my books, you remember, The Iraqi Borrowed Kettle—that is to say, enumerating contradictory, mutually exclusive arguments. So, I wonder how, as a reply to a short text of mine, one page of this, in four letters I'm attributed—I mean, they attribute to me the following positions. First, my advice to the left is, literally, do nothing, sit in front of your TV and watch violence but do nothing, whatever you do it's wrong. Second letter attributes me a position of: abandon all non-realistic, pseudo-radical measures, become pragmatic, just realistic dealing with power and so on. Third one—the third reproach is that I support power-crazy mad dictators like Chavez and so on and so on. So isn't it interesting, like, how could it be that as a reply to the same text three positions are attributed to me which are totally exclusive: pragmatism, doing nothing, plus supporting power-mad dictators and so on. Then the fourth letter by David Graeber is even—in the last London Review of Books—is even more interesting, where—this is how he attributes, I mean, I'm just, you know, if I were to be even more than I already am, I'm aware, if I were to be in my appearance even more close to those crazy—crazy cartoons characters and so on, then you would see now me, you know, the—the eyes popping out, because look, he says describing me: when you shave away the posturing, his, mine, real message is that intellectuals have always been and always must be whores—whores like prostitutes, not horses—whores to power. He can't quite come out and say this, so he conveys it in a series of rhetorical maneuvers and so on and so on. What shocks me is that this exactly—so I'm a little bit perplexed, I must say—this exactly is what I am systematically attacking for years. Maybe I'm wrong here, but my reproach to those whom I call, maybe with a little bit of vicious irony, resistance—the Simon Critchley, this infinitely demanding resistance—is precisely that that's their implicit presupposition. As Simon says—I'm still on talking terms with him, so this is a friendly debate, even if I will shoot him, it will be like Brecht said in that poem, with a good gun, in a good earth and so on—okay, so, isn't—his thesis is precisely that—that we should withdraw for power, that power corrupts. And he even goes, as I quote him, maybe you remember, as far as saying that—that the moment you fight back to power, the moment you accept the game of power, you start to imitate it, you get caught into it and so on and so on. So quite on the contrary, I think that that’s the position that I am attacking. I think that the idea that when you start to mess with real power you prostitute yourself as an intellectual, I think that if the term ideology has any meaning, this is the zero-level intellectualist ideology of intellectuals today. This safe position, don't mess with it and so on and so on. So that's the first thing that I find slightly strange. Then, okay, not to lose power, I have other more interesting things to say. Let me go on with Critchley's critique that you can read tomorrow. It begins: Žižek concludes the book with an apology for what he calls, following Walter Benjamin, divine violence. The latter—divine violence—is understood theoretically as the heroic assumption of the solitude of the sovereign decision. This is incidentally a quote from—quote from Benjamin, not me. Practically, Žižek illustrates this with the examples of the radical Jacobin violence of Robespierre in France in the 1790s and the invasion of the dispossessed a decade or so ago, descending from the favelas in Rio de Janeiro to disturb the peace of the bourgeois neighborhoods which border on them and so on and so on. Incidentally, why doesn't he add more actual examples like Evo Morales, Chavez and so on and so on that I also quote? But what comes now it’s more interesting. I quote: But in a final twist, Žižek counsels us to do nothing in face of the objective systemic violence of the world. We should just sit and wait and have the courage to do nothing. The book ends with the words: sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do. True enough, but what can this possibly mean? At the core of Žižek's relentless, indeed manic production of books, articles and lectures is a fantasy, I think, what psychoanalysts would call an obsessional fantasy. Incidentally, I would like to find one analyst who ever used this term, okay, doesn't matter. So, that's my position. On the one hand, I quote again, the only authentic stance to take in dark times is to do nothing, to refuse all commitment, to be paralyzed like Melville's Bartleby. On the other hand, Žižek dreams of a divine violence, a cataclysmic purifying violence of the sovereign ethical deed, something like Sophocles' Antigone. And then the final judgment on me, I quote: behind its shimmering inversions, Žižek's work leaves us in a fearful and fateful deadlock. The only thing to do is to do nothing. We should just sit and wait. As the great Dane, Hamlet, says, readiness is all. But the truth is that Žižek is never ready. His work lingers in endless postponement and overproduction. He ridicules others' attempts at thinking about commitment, resistance and action. I confess we have crossed swords recently, while—and he goes on—while me doing nothing himself. What sustains his work is a dream of divine violence, cruelty and force. I hope that one day his dreams come true. Well, I hope for him then not, because then he will get a one-way ticket to Siberia. Okay, but that’s another point. Now, did you see the irony? First, I cannot just a kind of a common sense reaction. You know, how he ridicules other attempts at thinking about commitment and action while doing nothing himself. And then implying him among these others. My god, you can correct me here if I'm wrong, but was he ever—how should I put it—involved in any, like not signing academic protests and participating in safe demonstrations, but in any real commitment which brings even a little bit of danger, like a danger of losing job or whatever? So, but the thing which really bothers me is—and now I come to a theoretical point—how he falsifies my point. The quote—my quote is saying just—sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do. What do I mean by this? My god, I explain, and then you see where he is wrong, where he says on the one hand I preach do nothing, on the other hand I dream of divine violence. No, my point is that something, doing nothing, as I say in the quote itself, is the most violent thing to do. In what sense? My critique of some of the leftist protests is that they effectively are obsessional, but you know in what sense, and here I will be mockingly self-critical in a personal way. What—why is so-called obsessional activity a wrong activity, a pseudo-activity? Because you are active all the time not to achieve something but precisely so that nothing changes. That’s the paradox of an obsessional neurotic. And maybe you heard this old joke of me, I certainly accept that I am like that as a private person: I remember when I was doing analysis, as you can expect it, I was wildly talking all the time. Why? Because I was terribly afraid that if I shut up for a minute the analyst may ask me some truly troubling question, no? I was talking all the time not that something would happen, but to prevent—to prevent anything truly dangerous, traumatic from exploding. And unfortunately, and I'm not even saying here anything very revolutionary, if you want a much better formulated version of this criticism of the—of the politically correct left, you find it for example in some wonderful writings which, if I remember correctly, I quote them towards the end in the fifth chapter of the book, from George Orwell, made the same nice point already in the late 30s: how—how the radical left demands change but does it in such a way, just they demand—you know the idea is if we demand it loudly enough maybe nothing will really change, how should I put it, no? And I'm just making this simple point and all I'm saying is that we should be critically aware that often our activity, even if it is critical activity, can not only do—not only not really hurt those in power, but provide a kind of legitimation and effectively sustain them. And I'm speaking here from a—even my personal political past. For example, I remember in the early 80s, those half-dissident years in ex-Yugoslavia, when those in power, communists in power, started to—to suspect that they are losing, they terribly wanted dialogue. We got invitation from the Central Committee: please come to us, let’s debate and so on and so on. At that point to truly scare them was to do nothing. They really got into a—they were—no matter what you told them, you could criticize them: you are worse than Stalin, Yugoslav communism was more hypocritical and so on and so on. They just wanted—it’s what my good friend, the Austrian leftist philosopher Robert Faller, called the—you know in boxing you call this clinching, I think, no? When the opponent to prevent you hitting him embraces you, gets too close. That’s what power likes to do. And sometimes—this is what I mean. And I'm not saying we should just be doing this all the time. And I even think every normal leftist knows this, this—when should we be pragmatic, when should we be violent, when should we do nothing. My god, this is a matter of concrete circumstances and so on. For—no, I'm not saying we do nothing. For example, I was often criticizing Chavez, calling him even mockingly the—the Fidel with oil and so on and with American dollars. But I must say that in a way I sympathize with what he is doing now, precisely when he is accused of—of, you know, like brutally violating democratic rules and so on. This brings me to the central thesis of this book, the gap between subjective and systemic objective violence. Of course his acts are violent, non-democratic. But my god, as if—if you abstract from his acts—the situation in Venezuela is some kind of, how should I put it, objective democratic balance. My god, you know, it’s not that he has some kind of a monopoly; he has one TV station, the majority of the press is against him and so on and so on. Yes, I totally support him. You twist arms a little bit, you closed down one station, you do that, sorry, why not? The—the true problem is what he is desperately trying to do something seriously. I think everything will be decided in how he will succeed in—I'm here rather a pessimist if you ask me, but let’s hope that something will come out. Everybody knows, even there it’s no mystery, what will succeed—what will decide the fate of all of it. He tries desperately to somehow combine a strong state, even with dictatorial elements, and my god, I don't have any problems with that if he is also—if one takes into account also what he is doing on the other hand, which is trying somehow to combine state power with what we call in these old terms autonomous self-organization of the people in favelas and so on and so on, with popular self-organization. He is desperately experimenting, and this interests me much more than his, you know, big scandals which are then—which are then reported in the media, I don't know, what did he say about Bush or all that stuff. These desperate attempts at reorganize daily life, finding a new form of functioning of state power which will somehow effectively be in—even sometimes tense—dialogue with, integrate forms of what we sometimes naively called immediate democracy, local councils and so on and so on. And I think, my god, he is really doing something here. Of course, he is lucky, having the American mostly dollars, but why shouldn't he use this luck? And I think that the situation is even more interesting here in, as I wrote already about it briefly somewhere, in—in Bolivia. I think that in Bolivia this problem is even more—more—more radical. That again, what they are trying to do, Chavez, Morales and so on, is basically this: to integrate into not only state but public political space those silent, excluded crowds of people in favelas, of the native—native natives and so on and so on. I mean, my god, I totally support them here. So no, I'm definitely not saying if you are today—if you are today in—in—in Venezuela or Bolivia do nothing. I on the contrary—in the text to which all these reactions appeared, I—I refer there to Chavez, Morales and so on precisely as a test for Critchley. When Critchley writes in his book Infinitely Demanding, we should not grab state power, we should withdraw into the interstices of power. So for example, let’s brutally apply this to today's Venezuela. What would be Critchley’s advice to Chavez? No, no, power will corrupt you, you will become like them, withdraw to the interstices of power or whatever. No, when there is a chance, we should ruthlessly use it. All I'm saying is we should be ruthlessly pragmatist here. You do local democracy, you do state terror, you do whatever. Why not? I think we should reject these pseudo-moral principled debates: is it legal to do this? Everything is legal, my god, if you do it in a proper way. Okay, so—here, okay. But not to lose time here. So, I hope you got my point. I'm very specific when I say in the last sentence of the book, I think, sometimes. When is this sometimes? Sometimes—this brings us to the basic thesis of the book, which could be condensed in this way: that usually when we talk about violence, we automatically reduce violence to violent change. Like, you know, something, a situation reproduces itself, then something violently intrudes. But what about violence which should be practiced all the time not so that things change but so that they remain the way they are? I want to see that violence. And especially in what way sometimes by being active, we participate in it. This is even, my god, this is even an old liberal thesis. For example, in spite of all the stupidities he is doing now, Vaclav Havel, the Czech ex-president, I still have a great respect for his old text, The Power of the Powerless. You remember that famous figure of the grocery store seller who privately tells jokes, he is against the system, but obeys the ritual. You know, you put the slogan into the window and so on and so on. This should be the focus: how through our engagements this or that way in everyday life we sustain power. And to change that—so, let’s to conclude this introduction and then move to more serious theory—let me begin with, let me just mention that problematic point, Iraq war protests. My god, I participated in them, so it’s not that I'm saying they are wrong and so on. All I'm saying is that, and I have always this cynical criteria—criterion—that what bothered me is this smug satisfaction from all sides, you know, like: protesters were nice, oh, we showed them that people do really not support invasion of Iraq, millions are against it. And those in power were able to say, oh my god, you see how open we are, we even allow demonstrations and so on. You remember I always refer to that wonderful statement which sounds as a bad joke but unfortunately there is a truth in it: you know when they asked President Bush how he feels about that, you know what was his answer? I perfect, this is why we are going to Iraq, so that things like this could happen also in Iraq and so on and so on. The problem for me is that—is that those demonstrations didn't scare enough those in power. I'm not saying we should kill, but I think we should scare them. You—so what would I have done, people asked me? The same demonstrations but maybe in a slightly different way. I would try to be more Ghandian. I think that in the way I talk about violence, Ghandi was for me basically very violent. In what sense? Of course not in the sense of killing and so on, but all these strikes, mass movement he organized, these were not just demonstrations. Through economic sabotage and so on, he started to stop, to prevent the smooth functioning of the British machinery there. It was not just we state our opinion. He knew very well what he was doing. What I would have done, if you ask me frankly: okay, what would you have done three years ago or when? I would try to do something from totally crazy things like—if you ask me sometimes—why not start a mass movement, Ken Livingstone would maybe support it, that every family should bring—should bring a bowl of shit and drop it in front of Downing Street or Foreign Office. You know, to create some embarrassment, like can you imagine there on—on Whitehall, like hundreds of tons of shit or whatever? To—okay, from this slightly comical examples to I don't know, blocking ports or whatever, you know, just to make them afraid a little bit. Just to not killing, make them afraid. To stop the—or some kind of other boycotting or whatever. Why also, I often ask myself, the most—did it happen here or in another country? Because for example, when transport workers strike, the problem is always that you hurt the wrong guy, no? You hurt ordinary customers. But I don't know, was it this in UK, correct me if I'm wrong, I think one of—or did they do it in France, it was an excellent invention: work went on, only they didn't accept money from passengers. So of course the strike had the full support of the people and so on. You know, that you should always remember this: you don't kill, but it should hurt. It should hurt, it should scare them, those in power. So again, I'm not—I'm absolutely not saying do nothing. I'm just saying ask with your every activity: does it really scare them or it’s just that in a way even if it’s critical it reproduces. Okay, enough of this. Now we start working. The first, now critical points made to me. The first is my critique of the liberal logic of understanding the other. I think I elaborate this in one of—the second chapter, I think. You know, I mock that famous tolerant multiculturalist statement: the enemy is someone—someone whose story we didn't hear. And then I say this works abstractly when you are dealing with other races, sexual orientations, but that basically this is nonsense. In the sense of: would you also say that Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to—no. My conclusion here is—my conclusion here is in—at two levels more radical. First, I think that stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, the way we experience a situation, is not a level of truth. This is lie, we lie ourselves. So I think that justice means precisely that we should be, how should I put it, story-blind. You did this, it’s a horrible thing, and don't bring me all that shit now about how you experienced it and so on and so on. On the contrary, we should precisely ignore stories; with stories you can—you can justify whatever you want. My second point is—that I think we should reject this typical liberal blackmailing, implied in this: the enemy is someone whose story we didn't hear, about understanding. As if, you know, we have intolerance because we don't really understand the other, we should listen to others' story, understand them. Of course we cannot ever do it and this always—liberals are natural superego masochists, no? They always feel good when they have a task which they never can fully meet, like understand the other. Of course you cannot, there is always some stupid small nation or orientation that you cannot—oh, now I feel guilty, I should read more and so on. It’s totally false problematic. I'm a misanthropic person. I don't want to understand everyone, my god. I just want to live decently peacefully with people. The problem today is not to understand everybody, it’s how to live in a decent respectful way with people whom you don't understand. I mean, it’s—we should reject it. That’s the first. Second problematic point: my critique of democracy. What do I really imply here? It’s a kind of—I agree with some conservative critics but not even conservative. The first one who developed not so much this critique, this notion of, critical notion of democracy was, you know, the great icon of American journalism, Walter Lippmann already. And incidentally in his foreign political reports, he was very honest, progressive. You know that he already in the early 20s, he advocates a fair policy towards Soviet Union and so on and so on. But he had a radical theory of democracy and incidentally that's a nice irony, maybe some of you know it, maybe others not: he, Walter Lippmann, coined the term manufacturing consent, which later used by Chomsky. The irony is that he, Walter Lippmann, means it in a positive way. His theory is a very simple one. It is that a governing class must rise to face the challenge. The challenge is—here Lippmann as Plato saw the public as a great beast of or a bewildered herd—the challenge of floundering in the chaos of local opinions. So the herd of citizens must be governed by a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality. This elite class is to act as a machinery of knowledge that circumvents the primary defect of democracy, the impossible ideal of the omnipotent citizen. I think that whatever we say, de facto—that's my thesis—de facto in a large majority of cases this is how what we call in our societies democracy functions. We don't really want to decide. We want somebody, expert, whatever, to propose us a decision, we want just to save the appearance. We want to feel as if we decide but without the true pressure of deciding what there is. We want just as Hegel said about constitutional monarch to dot the I. And this is why when people are really—when this intellectual—this opinion-making elite collapses, then on the one hand we can have a genuine democratic self-organization, but more often than not we get a chaos, we get a panic. So, I am—if—so—my point is that, you know, when people say in democracy every ordinary citizen should be a king, yes, but I claim a king in a—as a king in a constitutional democracy, a king who only formally decides. No, like, you know that in democracy—the problem of monarchy and democracy. It’s a wonderful problem, they were already aware of it in early modernity, of effectively the king shouldn't decide. But the problem was how—how like how to save the appearances, how to—how to save the dignity of the king so that it appears that he or she or it whatever decides. And there were complicated rituals of saving the appearance. It’s a wonderful topic. So what I am—you get my point. My point is not that I'm criticizing democracy. My first point here is simply a descriptive one. I claim that what we call effectively today democracy is, for the majority of people, in their innermost self-experience, they don't want to decide. They want to be clearly told how to decide and to save the appearance that they are doing it. In this sense, Trotsky, which I edited, was right when he criticized democracy. His point is precisely this one: not that democracy pacifies the masses too much and then we need the leading communist party to tell them what, but on the contrary that democracy, the way it’s practiced, pacifies the people too much. And I think this crisis is exploding, especially today, so that you will not accuse me that I'm doing nothing. For example, in the Czech Republic, now two months ago, three, I was in Prague participating in some big demonstration, even addressing the people there, against this US army radars. And I was shocked what was the official accusation of the government against them. A—a government representative rejected calls for a referendum. What all these protesters demanded is simply a referendum. Should this NATO radars be installed there or not, because they claim, of course it’s true, everybody knows over of the people are against. So, the government representative said that one does not decide with voting about such a sensitive national security matter, they should be left to military experts. But if one follows this logic then what? Why shouldn't people decide about economy, shouldn't it also be left to experts and so on and so on. So what’s the problem here? I think now I move a little bit more into theory. Here we can see how Lacan is nonetheless useful in political analysis. Where? Because here Lacan proposes in his seminar which was a year ago or when translated into English on The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, about four discourses. People didn't notice, I don't know almost anyone who noticed it that the main implicit target of that seminar is Michel Foucault. That is to say, Michel Foucault's thesis of knowledge-power. Foucault more or less to simplify to the utmost equates them, you know: knowledge is power, not in this naive Auguste Comte sense, but the way you organize, the way your knowledge maps reality is always sustaining a center power, embodies power through—you know maybe some of you even much better than me. In clear contrast to Foucault, the whole thesis of Lacan is that modernity is characterized by a—on the contrary—a disjunction between knowledge and power. That we have an excess of knowledge—not of true knowledge but of what is experienced as knowledge, experts and so on—which—which prevents power in the Lacanian sense of master signifier decisions and so on and so on. I think we have a little bit of that with ecology. The problem from—from our ordinary people's perspective, it’s not that we don't know enough. In a way we even know too much, you know, the picture gets—gets so blurred, so complex, so that you simply it paralyzes you, you cannot—you cannot decide. And I think that here what this excess of knowledge gives rise to is religion. I think this is one of the main resources of religion today. What religion really promises is to somehow contain this bursting technological and so on scientific knowledge in manageable limits, no? Things will still have sense and so on and so on. Okay, let me go on. This is again my second point. Where Lacan is really useful: gap on the—not knowledge power, but there is a—there is a clivage, a—a gap, a rupture between the two in modernity. The third reproach to me is as I already mentioned it: okay, okay, but I didn’t do my homework, I use the term violence in a profuse general way ignoring precise distinctions. This is what I often hear from friends. I claim: no, first I did do my homework. In my other books I wrote already about Arendt on violence where we all know how she elaborates precise distinctions between power which is—no, sorry, force, which is simply like force of nature or force of circumstances. We have a force in society when it’s simply an—an unhumanly uncontrollable force of circumstances, while power is always a function of human relations. Then, of course, we have authority which is a specific source of power. It represents power vested in a person by virtue of their capacities, office, symbolic function whatever. And then we have violence, which is also not the same as natural catastrophes, but violence in the sense of invading our—the other space of freedom. And—of course where Hannah Arendt is at her best is how she opposes authority and violence, claiming that true authority doesn’t need violence. Violence is precisely the resource of those who do not have—who have neither power nor authority. This is a nice point incidentally to throw a new light on today’s so-called terrorist attacks and so on. Okay, we could go on here, I agree with all these distinctions. What I find problematic nonetheless in Arendt is that she leaves all too much out of consideration the necessary short-circuits between different levels, between power and social violence. For example, an economic crisis which causes devastation is experienced as uncontrollable quasi-natural force. But isn’t the whole point of critique of ideology that what appears it just happened, uncontrollable, as part of the system should be nonetheless read as violence? Or, even an example known to all of us I hope, which concerns the relationship between authority and violence. Isn’t the whole—if there is one point of feminism in spite of my often I admit it bad taste jokes about feminism, but there is one point where I totally support it. Isn't—if I think—if one can condense all of feminism into one thesis is that—is to unmask the male authority as violence. To say: no, it's not any natural authority, it's sustained by violent imposition. To see violence beneath authority. No wonder then that Arendt uses her distinctions to criticize Marx. Because I think that what we can still learn in Marx and this is maybe even one of the fundamental premises of—of critique of ideology, that when you have a figure of authority, to reinterpret, to—when does—how does a woman become a feminist? By saying to males who oppress her: no, it's not your authority, it's violence what you are doing. To re-read—it as violence. Okay. Next point mocked by some of my critics: communism. In what sense I still am a communist? I am. Let me quote you, I already used it at some colloquium, you were not there so I will quote it. This is the poetry that I like from Alain Badiou's new book, a quote on Sarkozy. I quote—I translated from French: "The communist hypothesis remains the good one. I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right." Rat-man, *L'Homme aux rats*, is incidentally Badiou's name for Sarkozy. And he was already, of course, attacked for this for anti-Semitism, my god, no? Claiming that when you call somebody a rat-man it evokes all—all old anti-Semitic clichés and so on. "The rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and state. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself." End of quote. So again, I think that today in the antagonisms which I see as pressing, I think we should preci—we can precisely discover the communist dimension. What do I mean by this? Maybe you know already my theory, I see the whole series of antagonisms. One is for example the ecology. Ecology, what’s the problem of ecology? Is precisely ecology is the problem of commons. What here I agree with Hardt and Negri: of commons. We have a space of commons, our common inheritance. The problem is how to keep it at the level of commons, not to privatize it. And of course we—I use here—I will not talk too much just briefly—well, that I use here the term private in the Kantian sense of private use of reason. I think if ever some thought, some Kant’s idea was useful, it is his idea of how he opposes private and public use of reason. Where, as I hope you know, for Kant private use of reason is precisely what most of us would spontaneously call public use of reason. Private use of reason is for Kant if you are a lawyer, state functionary, priest or whatever, part of ideological mechanisms concerned with the functioning of the state of public space and so on—sorry, of state space. While public is for Kant precisely when you are in public space, for example in free intellectual debates, where you withdraw from this private space. At that level of what theorists like Badiou, Rancière and so on would have called singular universality: that you are universal when you withdraw from the private space of your particular community. To cut a long story short. And I think that then we have the problem of today's cognitive capital, privatization of like intellectual property and so on. It’s again the problem of, you know, what in the early modernity was called especially in England it was actual so-called enclosure of commons. I think this is what is happening massively today. Even I think biogenetics basically it’s about this: isn’t our—our biogenetic inheritance our shared—aren't—isn't it our shared commons? And I think that in all these domains we are dealing with the dimension of commons. So what I would say is that at this level, again with some other further conditions of course which I will not enumerate, I stick to the—the notion of communism. Okay, now not to lose time, I would like just to finish with two new theoretical developments. First one, what I already announced, about psychic consequences of violence. Let me begin with a simple example. George Soros is an undoubtedly honest humanitarian. His Open Society Foundation, among other things, more or less single-handedly saved critical social thinking in post-communist countries. Yet, maybe some of you remember it, a decade or so ago, the same Soros engaged in speculations with the different rates between currencies and earned hundreds of millions, thereby causing great suffering in Southeast Asia and so on and so on, hundreds of thousands losing jobs with all the consequences. This I think is today's abstract violence at its purest. On the one extreme, the financial speculations going on in their own sphere with no transparent links to the reality of human lives. On the other extreme, a pseudo-natural catastrophe, suddenly you lose your job or whatever, which hits thousands like—like a kind of a social tsunami with no apparent reason at all. This is what fascinates me today: how, you know, somebody there does some speculation in this, his air-conditioned office, then something happens which is experienced as totally pseudo-natural dynamics. Now what interests me is what are the psychological consequences of it? Here I come to Catherine Malabou's book. Her starting point—now a little bit of theory—is the fatal limitation of psychoanalysis. For Freud and Lacan, according to Malabou, external shocks, brutal unexpected encounters or intrusions, owe their traumatic impact to the way they touch a pre-existing traumatic psychic reality. Recall for example Lacan's exemplary reading of the Freudian dream of "Father, can't you see I'm burning?" The contingent external encounter of the real—you know the candle collapses and so on—triggers the true real, the unbearable fantasy apparition of the dead child reproaching his father. In this way, every external trauma is sublated, in the Hegelian sense of *Aufhebung*, internalized. It owes its impact to the way a pre-existing real of psychic reality is stirred up, aroused through it. So even the most violent intrusions of the external real, say the shocking effect on the victims of bomb explosions in war, owe their traumatic effect to the resonance they find in perverse masochism, death drive, unconscious guilt feeling and so on and so on. Here in his writing about war, Freud is clear, it’s true, for him external shocking intrusions of violence, torture even rape, in itself has no psychic—it can destroy psyche but as such doesn't count. It must, as it were, find resonance in some pre-existing frame of psychic reality. Now I return to Malabou. Today however, according to her, our reality abounds with multiple versions of traumatic intrusions which are just that: meaningless, brutal interruptions which destroy the symbolic texture of subject's identity. First, there is the external physical violence: terror attacks, the US shock and awe bombing of Iraq, street violence, rape, but also natural catastrophes like earthquakes, tsunamis and so on. Then there is the irrational meaningless destruction of the material base of our inner reality: brain tumors, Alzheimer's, organic cerebral lesions and so on. They can utterly change, destroy even, the victim's personality. Finally, there are the destructive effects of socio-symbolic violence: social exclusion, family abuse and so on. So Malabou's basic reproach to Freud is that when confronted with such cases Freud succumbs to the temptation of meaning. He is not ready to accept the direct efficiency of external shocks which destroy the psyche of the victim, or at least wound it in an unredeemable way, without finding resonance in a pre-existing psychic trauma. But according to Malabou, isn't it obviously obscene to link, say, the psychic devastation of a *Muselmann*—she means *Musulman*, the living dead in a Nazi camp—to his masochism, death drive or guilt feeling? A *Muselmann*, or a victim of multiple rape or a victim of brutal torture, is not devastated by unconscious anxieties, but directly by a meaningless external shock which can in no way be hermeneutically integrated. You know, you cannot—you don't need this detour through some unconscious trauma; it’s just direct efficiency. So for the wounded brain—here is a quote from Malabou—"there is no possibility to be present at its own fragmentation or at its own wound. In contrast to castration, there is no representation, no phenomenon, no example of separation which would allow the subject to anticipate, to wait for, to fantasy what can be a break in cerebral connections. One cannot even dream, even dream about it. There is no scene for this thing which is not one. The brain in no way anticipates the possibility of its own damage. When this damage occurs, it is another self which is affected, a new self founded in misrecognition." End of quote. So again, for Freud, if external violence gets too strong, we simply exit the psychic domain proper. The choice is: either the shock is reintegrated into a pre-existing libidinal frame, or it destroys psyche and nothing is left. What Freud couldn't emphasize was that the victim, as it were, survives its own death. All different forms of traumatic encounters, independently of their specific natural, social, biological, symbolic nature, lead to the same result: a new subject emerges which survives the erasure of his, her symbolic identity. There is no continuity between this new post-traumatic subject and its previous subjectivity. And we all know from descriptions the features of this subject: lack of emotional engagement, profound indifference and detachment. It is a subject who is no longer in the world, in the Heideggerian sense of engaged embodied existence. This subject lives death as a form of life. His life is death drive embodied, a life deprived of erotic engagements. And this holds for henchman no less than for his victims. So according to Malabou, if the 20th century was the Freudian century, the century of libido, so that even the worst nightmares were read as sadomasochist vicissitudes of the libido, the 21st century will be the century of post-traumatic disengaged subject whose first emblematic figure was that of the *Muselmann* in concentration camps, and this figure is now multiplying again in the guise of refugees, terror victims, survivors of natural catastrophes and so on. The feature that runs through all these figures is that the causes of the catastrophe remain libidinally meaningless, resisting any interpretation. The last quote from Malabou: "The victims of socio-political traumas present today the same profile as the victims of natural catastrophes—tsunamis, earthquake, floods—or grave accidents—serious domestic accidents, explosions, fires. We entered a new era of political violence where politics draws its resource from the renunciation to the political sense of violence. This erasure of sense is not only discernible in countries at war, it is present everywhere as the new face of the social which bears witness to an unheard-of psychic pathology, identical in all cases and in all contexts: globalized." End of quote. So, global capitalism generates a new form of illness which is itself global. Global in the sense that it is in its appearance indifferent to even the most elementary distinctions like between nature and culture. Social conflicts are deprived of the dialectics of political struggle proper and become as anonymous as natural catastrophes. We are dealing with a weird mixture of nature and politics. Malabou is, I think, here at her theoretical best when she formulates a wonderful critique of those brain scientists, from the greatest at the beginning—and I appreciate him—Alexander Luria, the Soviet neurologist, from the big hit today, Oliver Sacks, who, these critics, insist on the necessity to supplement the naturalist description of brain lesions with the subjective description of how this biological wound not only affects the subject's particular features—loss of memory and so on—but changes his or her entire psychic structure. Like, I really advise you to read it, it’s a wonderful book, that Soviet classic from, I think, immediately after World War II, *The Mind of a Mnemonist* by Luria. It’s a study of some guy who—his pathology was that he couldn't forget anything. So, you know, in contrast to us who when you have to remember something you invent codes—you know, some meaningless series, numbers, whatever—how to remember things. He had to practice forgetting. And this—it’s a short book, pages, but he focuses in a very nice way on how this guy subjectivized this. He became a kind of obsessional where his only way to survive was to think all the time about how—he was basically *The Beast in the Jungle* character from Henry James; it’s never it, he was always expecting something to happen which never happened. So what is Malabou's critique? A wonderful one, I think. She truly is a philosopher. It’s that—and you can see this, I'm reading it now a little bit in diagonal but with pleasure, Oliver Sacks' new on *Musicophilia* new book. You have a brain lesion and then he is too humanist in what sense? In the sense that he immediately focuses on how patients nonetheless survive, and then you have all this beauty of the man who mistook his wife for a hat, how you nonetheless through the help of music you build your new universe, like you know you cannot recognize faces but if you associate them to melodies you can and so on and so on. But Malabou says but this is already recuperation. But she is very precise here. Something happens in between. There is a zero-level subject, that’s what according to her Freud refused to theorize. For example, if you are, let’s take a simple example, if you have some stupid brain lesion or whatever, you get totally disengaged, emotionally dead, you erase organically even all your past, but you are still a subject. And this zero-level subjectivity is the horror she is trying to survive. Not that—I say this in a benevolently ironic way—not that Oliver Sacks kitsch of awakening, how nonetheless through Schubert music whatever you—you find your way back. That is to say, not how you fight the loss, but the form of subjectivity which is the form of loss itself, which again, according to Malabou, cannot be accounted for in the terms of past traumas and so on. No, you are not—psychoanalysis doesn't work here, because traditional one, because the point is not to unearth some past trauma or whatever, there are none. All your entire past is literally erased. You are a living dead. And I think she is deeply right in connecting this topic to Hegel. She is for me therefore unique, she is the only person whom I know who combines a detailed knowledge and, if I may say this even in a self-mockingly ironic way, like me she is not bluffing here. She is really doing serious stuff with cognitivists, at the same time she is a, how do you call it, card-carrying Hegelian, no? So—okay, where do I not agree with her? I think that psychoanalysis can be saved here. I think that she has a totally simplified theory of death drive and so on. I think that what she simply opposes death drive as this will to—she reads death drive in a very naive way as opposed to libido, as if death drive means you want to die, disappear whatever, and libido is this active cathexis and so on. What she doesn't see is what, for example, Deleuze saw it wonderfully already in his *Difference and Repetition*: how death drive and pleasure principle are not opposed as, you know, two principle are fighting, but death drive is the transcendental a priori of pleasure principle itself. Death drive is just a kind of, how should I put it, death drive is the very formal structure of our libido. You know what does mean for Lacan death drive? It means this: you never get at your object directly, circulating around the object gives you more pleasure than going—this obstacle as inherent. So it’s the very form of our libido. In this sense I think one could say that precisely in the radical Freudian sense these the living dead are—it’s like all pathological libido content is erased, what remains is the form of death drive as such. But that’s another story. Before one does this Freud-Lacanian narcissism of criticizing her, I think one should nonetheless recognize the raw power of her—of her—of her analysis. I effectively think again that we are when we are so massively confronting, again at different levels, nature, culture, war whatever, this new subject who—literal subjects without subjectivity. Like if you have a brain lesion or total trauma, you know your past is erased, like I had this unfortunate experience, if you have it of some near to you, you know what’s so horrible is that when you have somebody with really heavy Alzheimer's or whatever, I mean the problem is that you cannot play the shitty humanist game: "oh it’s still my good old grandma." No it's not, it's a monster, it's another subject. It's not—you have to accept this. It’s totally different subjectivity. All that remains is just the empty form. And here I have a more elegant theory which I don't have time to develop now, it is that I think that something of this nature happens, is constitutive of subjectivity as such. That to become a subject means in a way to lose your substance. But that’s Hegelian speculation. Now if you allow me, just another five minutes, really five minutes, to finish, I would like to repeat something which I already did at the Birkbeck College, but since here—lecture—but since here the public is probably more mixed general, I would love to. Because the last question addressed to me almost is: okay, you play with all these paradoxes up and down, but where do you stand? In a very naive human way, what is your ethical position? Can you describe me? I mean, people often say me: okay, it’s easy for you to—to list people like, I don't know, all these big examples, Antigone, Medea and so on, no? And I admit sometimes I run into trouble here. The Elizabeth Wright, you know, the one who edited that reader on me and who tragically died of, I think, colon cancer, no? I remember talking to her two years before her death and she asked me this charmingly British empiricist naive question, reading my *Fragile Absolute* where I play all that with Medea and so on. She asked me: but I don't get it here, do you think that to be really ethical in Lacanian sense we have to kill our children or what, no? But I like naive questions. So let’s approach it in a very naive way: where do I stand? I did find a book which perfectly exemplifies how—I'm unfortunately not, I'm not perfect, but how in a perfect world I would like to be. It’s a book by a Hungarian immigrant to Switzerland—I like already the name, this is what attracted me: first I thought it’s some when a friend told me, I'm reading—I will tell you now the name—Agota Kristof. I thought because the friend was East European, you know it’s kind of a, you know, like East European mispronouncing Agatha Christie. I wanted to ask him what are you reading, *Death on the Nile* and whatever, no—no, no, no, it's Agota Kristof, not Agatha Christie. She emigrated as a girl from Hungary in '56, then worked in a watch factory, it’s like a caricature, in Switzerland and then wrote a couple of very strange books. The best one is a trilogy—trilogy—of books, *The Notebook*, *The Proof*, *The Third Lie*. They are—they are available, I think you find them even here, it’s Grove Press, New York, but I—I saw her here in Waterstone, in Foyles and so on. I think this is the best image on—not her, sorry unfortunately—this is the best exemplification of immoral ethics. But wait a second, not in this boring heroic pseudo-Nietzschean sense where morality means be kind to others, ethics is your fidelity to yourself, so you have this great Nietzschean figure who can kill others, do whatever you want, but what matters is that you are ethical, faithful to yourself. No. I mean immoral ethics in a—in a—in a different—in a—in a different sense. Along the lines of Schiller's opposition of naive and sentimental. Morals are sentimental, I think. Morality involves other, in the sense that looking at myself through others' eyes, I like myself being good. Morality is "I'm helping you, isn't it nice that I'm helping you," no? Morality is charity, you know, you get a picture from the black boy to whom you send five dollars or pounds a month and oh my god, yeah. Ethics is something much more naive in the sense of cruelty: you do it without any consideration of goodness and so on and so on. So in the first book, *The Notebook*, entitled, she tells the story of young twins living with their grandmother in a small Hungarian town during the last years of the World War II and the early years of communism. These twins, two young boys of seven, eight, are totally immoral: they lie, blackmail, kill, yet I think they stand for authentic ethical naivety. Let me give a couple of examples. A couple—one day, the two boys meet in a forest a starved deserter and bring him some things he asked them for: food, blanket and so on. Now I quote the novel: "When we come back with the food and blanket, he, the deserter, says 'You are very kind.' We say: 'We weren't trying to be kind. We’ve brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That’s all.'" If there ever was—my comment—a Christian ethical stance, this is it. No matter how weird the neighbor's demand, the twins naively tried to meet the demand. So it’s just, you know, this is what I like: I help you, no, I help you simply because you need help, not because I'm good. For example, one night the twins find themselves sleeping in the same bed with a German officer, a tormented gay masochist. Early in the morning they awake and want to leave the bed, but the officer holds them back. A quote: "'Don’t move. Keep sleeping,' he tells the boys. They answer: 'We want to urinate. We have to go.' 'Don’t go, do it here.' We ask where. He says: 'On me. Yes, don’t be afraid, piss on my face.' We do it, then we go out into the garden because the bed is all wet." You know, that’s ethics. You do what’s the problem, the guy wants to be... a true work of love, I think. Then, the twins' closest friend is the priest's housekeeper, a young voluptuous woman who washes them, plays erotic games with them and so on. Then something happens when a procession of starved Jews—starved Jews is led through their town on their way to the camp. Quote: "Right in front of us a thin arm emerges from the crowd, a dirty hand stretches out, a voice asks 'Bread.' The housekeeper smiles and pretends to offer the rest of her bread. She holds it close to the outstretched hand, then with a great laugh brings the piece of bread back to her mouth, takes a bite and says: 'I'm hungry too.'" End of quote. So the boys simply decides to punish this woman. They stole some ammunition from that "piss on my face" German officer and put it into—into this housekeeper’s kitchen stove so that when she lights fire in the morning the stove explodes and disfigures her. I would do the same, absolutely. The brothers also blackmail the local priest. They—they know that the priest has a little bit of money and they know a girl, poor girl who is disfigured and starves with her mother. So they go to the priest and—tell them—tell him that they know that she sexually molested some young girl. And the priest tell them it’s not true, and they tell him: we don't care if it's true or not, but we will tell the people, they will believe us and so on, we want money, a certain amount of money every week. Then the shocked priest asks them. Quote: "'It's monstrous. Have you any idea what you are doing?' 'Yes, sir. Blackmail.' 'At your age it’s deplorable.' Answer Marxist: 'Yes, it’s deplorable that we’ve been forced to this, but Hare-Lip, the girl, and her mother absolutely need money.'" So there is nothing personal in it. Later in the novel, they become closest friends with the—this priest while going on to blackmail him. And when the girl and her mother start—start to work and can survive on their own, they simply went to the priest and said: "Thank you very much, we no longer need your money." Quote: "'Keep it. You had given enough. We took your money when it was absolutely necessary. Now we earn enough money to give some to the girl Hare-Lip. We also—we have also taught her to work.'" So their cold serving others extends to killing them. For example, their grandmother asks them to put poison into her cup of milk because she is old. They say: "Don't cry, Grandmother. If you really want it, we'll kill you." I mean, it’s—naive as it is, I claim, such a subjective attitude in no way precludes a kind of a cold reflexive distance. One day, for example, the twins put on torn clothes and go begging. Passing persons gave them apples, biscuits and so on. One of them even strokes their hair. Then another woman offers them to come to her home and do some work for which she will give them something to eat. Then there is the dialogue, the last quote: "We answer: 'We don't want to work for you, madam. We don't—we don't want to eat your soup or your bread. We are not hungry.' She asks: 'Then why are you begging?' 'To find out what effect it has and to observe people's reactions.' She walks off shouting 'Dirty little hooligans' and impertinent too. Then the boys: On our way home we throw the apples, the biscuits, the chocolate and the coins into the tall grass by the roadside, but it is impossible to throw away the stroking on our hair." End of quote. If you ask me, this is where I stand. This is how I would love to be. An ethical monster without empathy, but doing the duty to help others with blind spontaneity while avoiding the other's disgusting proximity. With more people like this, the world would have been a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold cruel passion. I would like to be like these children. You kill if it’s needed, you blackmail, you do your good. This is ethics for me. No sentimentality. Thank you very much. [Applause] Okay. Who—who runs the show? I don't know, I... okay. You—but maybe because I'm a little bit myopic so maybe if somebody can at least pretend that he is selecting. Sorry, if anyone who has a question could wait for the microphone. Yeah, okay, there was the first. Yeah. **Audience:** I wanted to know what your—about mediocrity and violence. **Žižek:** What do you mean? **Audience:** Mediocrity and violence. Do you think there’s a violence in mediocrity? Because I think there is. **Žižek:** Mediocrity in the sense of... **Audience:** Well, you could sort of like daytime TV, sort of like newspapers, sort of like costume dramas on BBC One. **Žižek:** Yeah, it—it depends, again, because you know what I like very much. Wasn't it in one of the daily newspapers that I even maybe here I read or on the plane, I don't remember, when they said—and I like this—you know this standard cliché: violent TV generates, breeds real-life violence. Now some researches are—are proving the—the contrary, and I like this thesis that violence... **Audience:** I didn’t think—I wasn't meaning that. **Žižek:** No, I know, I know. I know, I know. Okay, I would—I will say this. First, I would have to go more in—more into what do you mean here by violence? Because if there is violence there, of course, violence is everywhere. So this book is not a critique of violence, if anything it’s a book for violence. I think that our—this typically postmodern narcissistic fear of violence, you know this politically correct against harassment, this is the worst type of ideology and it’s probably breeding a lot of violence. So that’s my point, is—when you say violence, you must be more specific... **Audience:** Yeah, I was thinking when you were talking about zero subjectivity. **Žižek:** Yeah. **Audience:** And in that sense—I wasn't thinking about the other day when I was thinking about coming here, but when you talked about zero subjectivity, that created—that’s a kind of quite a violent thing. **Žižek:** Yeah. **Audience:** And in a way mediocrity might be a kind of zero subjectivity. **Žižek:** Yeah, yeah, but here I'm a little bit too philosophical. The first thing I would say is that this kind of—there is some kind of violence like that which is for me again a kind of transcendental a priori of subjectivity itself. In psychoanalysis they tried at some point to recuperate it through terms like symbolic castration, which I agree are not adequate and so on. So that’s the—the first. The second thing, association that comes to my mind when you say mediocrity in violence, no? My obvious example here would have been of course Hannah Arendt, banality of evil and so on. And yes, here I am more or less, not quite but I don't have time to go now into it, on—on her side. That is to say, for me—what we usually perceive as violence is basically a form of impotence. In the sense of violence... wait a minute, I'm referring to you now and to me. For example, you had a father—okay, stupid question, obviously. Isn't it that didn't you feel already as a child that if the father—I hope he didn't—actively beats you, it may hurt, but for me when he did it to me, I always distinctly experienced it as his impotence. A true authority doesn't beat, he just looks at you and you tremble. Whenever this explode—a true violence, a true authority is a threat of violence, you know, like you just look, no? The moment you explode, and in this sense, I will tell you an amusing story criticizing my editor, not the British one but the American one. Originally there was a phrase in the manuscript that the problem with Hitler is that he wasn't violent enough. Now of course the Americans went bananas, no? Like, "Oh, he should have killed all of the Jews or what," no? No, my point was a very simple one: that all this explosion of anti-Semitic violence and so on was for me clearly—here I'm old-fashioned Marxist, you know—it was precisely to keep basically the capitalist relations, however we call it, he was a coward basically. I think that—and why, in what sense do I mean this? Precisely in the Hannah Arendt sense. You know, I report on this, I think this remained in the book, this was not censored, how one of the most disgusting ways to rehabilitate, not really rehabilitate but flirt with Nazism. And I was shocked it became fashionable in our part of Europe. All of a sudden three, four years ago, the ski champions, very mysteriously, don't ask me why, in Slovenia, in Croatia, started when they were asked by journalists: "How is it that—how are you prepared for tomorrow’s race?" started to use serially many of them the example like one said: "I'm ready as German army was on the 21st of June '41," no? And then when asked they said: "Of course Hitler did horrible things, I don't admire, but they were ready, they were," no? And I think that we should take even this from—from Hitler: he was a coward. We shouldn't give—this is how I read Hannah Arendt—we shouldn't give concede to them, to persons like Hitler, the dignity of some demonic figure, you know who, my god, he dared... he didn't dare. Six million Jews and millions of others had to die not because he was a heroic madman, but because he was basically a coward. And so in—here I agree again with this Arendt's thesis that—this would be for me the first association again with mediocrity and violence. That—terrible violence is always violence in this more subjective sense of violent outbursts, up to state terror, is always impotence. And the same goes for Stalinist terror. Read the new so-called revisionist historians, Oleg Naumov, *The Road to Terror*. You can see that Stalin was not a kind of a omnipotent madman, "oh why don't we kill a million of farmers there" and so on. The inner circle of Stalin experienced their situation as the one of total panic all the time: "We don't control it," total paranoia and so on. So in—in this sense, yes, I think there is even an inherent link between violence and mediocrity, how should I put it, in the—in the... although probably you meant something very specific with those... **Audience:** I meant to do with the impotence thing. **Žižek:** With the impotence. Yeah. But on the other hand you see I think that in a way in politics we should break this liberal deadlock, with this liberal deadlock where whenever you say violence it’s something horrible and so on. No, I mean, like at that Marxist and in a talk that I give at some Marxism conference at SOAS, like one mile north from here, I use that—if you want to see an example of good emancipatory violence, look at a film which no wonder it’s censored—censored in the sense that it more or less disappeared—John Carpenter’s—yeah, yeah, that guy, *Halloween*, he is a big Hollywood progressive—*They Live*. Do you know *They Live*? It’s a pure Hollywood Marxism, much better than *Titanic* and that shit, about an ordinary guy in slum, poor, who stumbles in an abandoned church on glasses—it’s the critique of ideology—when you put on the glasses, you walk around and see the true message, like you see Coke, movies, blah blah. When you put on the glasses, you see: OBEY, DON'T THINK, PROCREATE, and so on. You know, like you see the real—it’s such a beautiful naivety. And then there is the most beautiful sense where he tries to force his best friend to put on the glasses, and the two had a terrible fight. You know, to get free you must—this is or another example which I always quote, like from *Fight Club*. Did you see *Fight Club*? When he—this is progressive violence. I hate those liberals who claim this is a proto-fascist film. I think it’s a deeply progressive film. This is what I mean by divine violence, for example. Sorry if I blah blah. Okay. Please, there was there. **Audience:** Thank you very much. I've just traveled up from my hometown in Hastings just to say thank you to you. **Žižek:** Don't take me seriously, but okay, yeah. **Audience:** I know, but I mean I had no idea that I'd step into the bookshop and you'd written so many books. I find in my life, and no doubt many other people do as well, that the law takes too much interest in me. I'm not very interested in the law, but the law seems to be interested in me. It’s got things
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Slavoj Žižek
I can grow and not grow on my allotment. It refuses to intervene when
I can grow and not grow on my allotment. It refuses to intervene when
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mindless people drive at excessive speed in great danger past my house. The authorities have decided to close down the maternity hospital. The authorities don't intervene sufficiently to—to defend my daughter from the violent intentions of her husband. And last week I learned that
mindless people drive at excessive speed in great danger past my house. The authorities have decided to close down the maternity hospital. The authorities don't intervene sufficiently to—to defend my daughter from the violent intentions of her husband. And last week I learned that
Slavoj Žižek
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Slavoj Žižek
going to be closed down. Ordinary political organizations don't, cannot help; they’re silent. It depends on individuals speaking in front of things like the county council, the local borough council and engage with—well engage with them, engage with politics and engage with the law. I'm not a political person but I found myself drawn into this. No author really knows where their arrows will fall, but in my case your arrows have fell on my doorstep and I find I draw sufficient—a great deal of encouragement from your... **Žižek:** Thanks, but—but I agree with what you said precisely about there going there. I think exactly what you should do is you should somehow embarrass them, you know? **Audience:** Yes. Quite. And but what it means is a sort of politics grows out of this but it’s a different sort of politics than the one I've been grown up with in the last years, and that’s being on the left. It means being much more precise. It means
going to be closed down. Ordinary political organizations don't, cannot help; they’re silent. It depends on individuals speaking in front of things like the county council, the local borough council and engage with—well engage with them, engage with politics and engage with the law. I'm not a political person but I found myself drawn into this. No author really knows where their arrows will fall, but in my case your arrows have fell on my doorstep and I find I draw sufficient—a great deal of encouragement from your... **Žižek:** Thanks, but—but I agree with what you said precisely about there going there. I think exactly what you should do is you should somehow embarrass them, you know? **Audience:** Yes. Quite. And but what it means is a sort of politics grows out of this but it’s a different sort of politics than the one I've been grown up with in the last years, and that’s being on the left. It means being much more precise. It means
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really understanding the nature of the way we are governed to be able to refine arguments, to be able to present a picture which they can listen to. And if you take your advice, it—it produces political effects. I'm astonished that you could be
really understanding the nature of the way we are governed to be able to refine arguments, to be able to present a picture which they can listen to. And if you take your advice, it—it produces political effects. I'm astonished that you could be
Slavoj Žižek
criticized for actually saying do nothing. I mean, clearly if one is politically aware there is a moment to speak and there is a moment not to speak. **Žižek:** Yeah, you put it yeah. **Audience:** And all I'm saying is—not that I've read your books or anything like that, but you’ve—you’ve struck something which is vital in the—in the in action in politics. There was just two little other points I wanted to make. One is about paradox. I—one of the pieces of legislation which seems to be of benefit to us is the Human Rights Act. I was absolutely astonished to actually just read a bit of the history of this and see that that marvelous clause which—which has got anti-discrimination meant in—entwined stems from an argument which Soviet communist lawyers had in the United Nations in and it’s there built into our political system and it’s got real leverage to it, or it appears to us as soon as I hope that it does. Which is a—a paradox. And the second point, I now actually have lost it, but all I'd like how to say is by saying thank you very much: you don't know exactly where what you say where the words fall, but they do lead to people acting and finding succor and support and thought in what you say. **Žižek:** Thanks. I would just like to—you know which formula I would then propose you? Did you see, sorry it's my typical jump to popular culture, did you see Sergio Leone's *Once Upon a Time in the West*? **Audience:** Absolutely. **Žižek:** Yeah. You remember that scene when—I think when Jason Robards, the good guy, for the first time meet that harmonica man—you know in that—in that small inn when he just mystically plays—he says: "Are you the guy who plays harmonica when you should have talked and talk when you should have better played harmonica," no? It's like this is for me the problem with today's left, no? They talk when they should act, they act when they shouldn't act, and they don't act when they should act. So the art is, as you said, when not to act or not to act, when to act, where—when not to act and so on. The second—okay, I will stop it so that I don't get lost. Thank you. Sorry, now I remember what I wanted to add. You know, also maybe we should start rewriting history. For example, what annoys me with institutions like church, liberals is what big kidnapping they accomplished when they are presenting as part of the central liberal or even Christian legacy what counts today as human rights—to education, vote for all, blah blah. But sorry, this was not at all part of early liberalism, all this was part of a long left popular struggle throughout the entire 19th century. Which is why for example it pisses me off when in my country the church, Catholic Church, tries to present itself as a beacon of, you know, freedom, democracy and so on. My god, read that famous papal encyclical *Rerum Novarum*, I don't know what, from late 19th century where they finally accept democracy. It explicitly says, in principle we still prefer absolute monarchy, it’s a compromise with times and so on. When people say the beacon of free thought, my god, you know that the Catholic Church abolished in 1960s their index of prohibited books. Make a simple experiment: try to imagine modern civilization from which all the names which were at some point on the Catholic index are absent. Everything gets lost. Practically all: Descartes, Hegel, Descartes, Kant, Sartre, Heidegger, my god, name it. **Audience:** Even de Beauvoir. **Žižek:** Ah, I was more thinking of men, not these minor women, no, yes. Okay, sorry. No, so—or another thing I learned. I'm horrified now of communist crimes and so on but in a nice book, *Fighting Dixie*, I think, about the past of—of anti-racist movement in United States, you learn that till the late 1930s the only organized group, although marginal, who—which was really simply for the racial equality, I'm sorry to tell you were the communists till late 1930s. Even the liberals, they spoke about, you know in this disgusting way, "oh my god the suffering black," you know like listening today's charity people, "oh suffering children in favelas, we need to help them education." Nobody dared to propose—dared to propose full equality. So even here you have something which today even Bush speaks about as a normal ingredient of—of the American dream. Sorry, till the late 30s it was the ingredient only of the American communist dream, no? **Audience:** You said that constituting subjectivity is like Luria’s brain man. I take it that's not *The Mnemonist*, it's the other book, *The Man with a Shattered World*, the soldier who had a hole shot through his head fighting the Germans. **Žižek:** Yes, that’s it. I'm unfortunately I don't know that one. I'm trying to get it. **Audience:** Yes, that's it. Now he didn't lose all his memories, he lost most of them. He had fragments, he had fragments of neighborhoods of his experience as a child and he desperately tried to build round that hole in his mind. Now you’re saying that’s like the constitution of
criticized for actually saying do nothing. I mean, clearly if one is politically aware there is a moment to speak and there is a moment not to speak. **Žižek:** Yeah, you put it yeah. **Audience:** And all I'm saying is—not that I've read your books or anything like that, but you’ve—you’ve struck something which is vital in the—in the in action in politics. There was just two little other points I wanted to make. One is about paradox. I—one of the pieces of legislation which seems to be of benefit to us is the Human Rights Act. I was absolutely astonished to actually just read a bit of the history of this and see that that marvelous clause which—which has got anti-discrimination meant in—entwined stems from an argument which Soviet communist lawyers had in the United Nations in and it’s there built into our political system and it’s got real leverage to it, or it appears to us as soon as I hope that it does. Which is a—a paradox. And the second point, I now actually have lost it, but all I'd like how to say is by saying thank you very much: you don't know exactly where what you say where the words fall, but they do lead to people acting and finding succor and support and thought in what you say. **Žižek:** Thanks. I would just like to—you know which formula I would then propose you? Did you see, sorry it's my typical jump to popular culture, did you see Sergio Leone's *Once Upon a Time in the West*? **Audience:** Absolutely. **Žižek:** Yeah. You remember that scene when—I think when Jason Robards, the good guy, for the first time meet that harmonica man—you know in that—in that small inn when he just mystically plays—he says: "Are you the guy who plays harmonica when you should have talked and talk when you should have better played harmonica," no? It's like this is for me the problem with today's left, no? They talk when they should act, they act when they shouldn't act, and they don't act when they should act. So the art is, as you said, when not to act or not to act, when to act, where—when not to act and so on. The second—okay, I will stop it so that I don't get lost. Thank you. Sorry, now I remember what I wanted to add. You know, also maybe we should start rewriting history. For example, what annoys me with institutions like church, liberals is what big kidnapping they accomplished when they are presenting as part of the central liberal or even Christian legacy what counts today as human rights—to education, vote for all, blah blah. But sorry, this was not at all part of early liberalism, all this was part of a long left popular struggle throughout the entire 19th century. Which is why for example it pisses me off when in my country the church, Catholic Church, tries to present itself as a beacon of, you know, freedom, democracy and so on. My god, read that famous papal encyclical *Rerum Novarum*, I don't know what, from late 19th century where they finally accept democracy. It explicitly says, in principle we still prefer absolute monarchy, it’s a compromise with times and so on. When people say the beacon of free thought, my god, you know that the Catholic Church abolished in 1960s their index of prohibited books. Make a simple experiment: try to imagine modern civilization from which all the names which were at some point on the Catholic index are absent. Everything gets lost. Practically all: Descartes, Hegel, Descartes, Kant, Sartre, Heidegger, my god, name it. **Audience:** Even de Beauvoir. **Žižek:** Ah, I was more thinking of men, not these minor women, no, yes. Okay, sorry. No, so—or another thing I learned. I'm horrified now of communist crimes and so on but in a nice book, *Fighting Dixie*, I think, about the past of—of anti-racist movement in United States, you learn that till the late 1930s the only organized group, although marginal, who—which was really simply for the racial equality, I'm sorry to tell you were the communists till late 1930s. Even the liberals, they spoke about, you know in this disgusting way, "oh my god the suffering black," you know like listening today's charity people, "oh suffering children in favelas, we need to help them education." Nobody dared to propose—dared to propose full equality. So even here you have something which today even Bush speaks about as a normal ingredient of—of the American dream. Sorry, till the late 30s it was the ingredient only of the American communist dream, no? **Audience:** You said that constituting subjectivity is like Luria’s brain man. I take it that's not *The Mnemonist*, it's the other book, *The Man with a Shattered World*, the soldier who had a hole shot through his head fighting the Germans. **Žižek:** Yes, that’s it. I'm unfortunately I don't know that one. I'm trying to get it. **Audience:** Yes, that's it. Now he didn't lose all his memories, he lost most of them. He had fragments, he had fragments of neighborhoods of his experience as a child and he desperately tried to build round that hole in his mind. Now you’re saying that’s like the constitution of
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subjectivity. So does—is it that you're claiming that the modern person is someone who has a hole in their head? Fine. And then if that's so,
subjectivity. So does—is it that you're claiming that the modern person is someone who has a hole in their head? Fine. And then if that's so,
Slavoj Žižek
what does that mean for everyday politics and in particular what
what does that mean for everyday politics and in particular what
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does it mean for the restitution of communism? **Žižek:** Okay. Now it would be—okay, now I know that one can here draw the almost bad taste ironic conclusion that in communism we can guarantee that everyone will be with the hole—with the hole in their—in their—in their head. No—what does it mean? First—it means that—it means in a general way, I think—okay, I will give you—I don't know what it means for communism and so on. I don't have any big naive ideas. I'm much more—my analysis in a way much more tragic. I see the predicament of potential catastrophes, ecological and so on. And I don't see any—it is as if something is preventing people to act. For example, you remember the last agreement, where was it, in Bali or when about ecology? Everybody says a triumph. But you know what they—they really agreed about? The—the agreement was that they will continue to talk, how should I put it, that there will be another meeting or what. So I see problems. So I cannot answer this one fully about what does it mean for communism and so on. What I am ready to say is that to take into account the way we have a hole in our head—now I take this only as a formula of
does it mean for the restitution of communism? **Žižek:** Okay. Now it would be—okay, now I know that one can here draw the almost bad taste ironic conclusion that in communism we can guarantee that everyone will be with the hole—with the hole in their—in their—in their head. No—what does it mean? First—it means that—it means in a general way, I think—okay, I will give you—I don't know what it means for communism and so on. I don't have any big naive ideas. I'm much more—my analysis in a way much more tragic. I see the predicament of potential catastrophes, ecological and so on. And I don't see any—it is as if something is preventing people to act. For example, you remember the last agreement, where was it, in Bali or when about ecology? Everybody says a triumph. But you know what they—they really agreed about? The—the agreement was that they will continue to talk, how should I put it, that there will be another meeting or what. So I see problems. So I cannot answer this one fully about what does it mean for communism and so on. What I am ready to say is that to take into account the way we have a hole in our head—now I take this only as a formula of
Slavoj Žižek
how a certain
how a certain
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tragic
tragic
Slavoj Žižek
loss predicament is inscribed into the very core of
loss predicament is inscribed into the very core of
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subjectivity and so on—helps a lot if you try to understand human subjectivity through that perspective. It helps a lot to understand what for me is still a big enigma, the functioning of Stalinism. Because, you know, as I always repeat it, Stalinism is for me still a big enigma. What again and again surprises me is how those who—the most ferocious anti-communist critics are in a way—and I find—I must emphasize this because often they accuse me of "oh you are playing flirting with Stalinism, ha ha." No, I'm trying to understand it. For example, sorry if I repeat an old example. Did you see *The Lives of Others*? Why—although it’s a very well-made film, I—with a little bit of mine communist past experience I hate it. The guy is a fanatical anti-communist, you know, he comes von—is from East German Prussian nobility and that’s his revenge, like they took my big estates there, now I will strike back. He is not evil enough. You know the basic story? A minister, evil minister, wants to seduce, sleep with big writer's, playwright's wife, so he—he organizes the detailed observation of him so that even planting something so that they will trap him, no? But this is so—everybody that I knew from the East laughs at this idea. Sorry, but something like this can happen in—in every also Western country. If you are in a position of power with secret service, of course you can try to—I can try
subjectivity and so on—helps a lot if you try to understand human subjectivity through that perspective. It helps a lot to understand what for me is still a big enigma, the functioning of Stalinism. Because, you know, as I always repeat it, Stalinism is for me still a big enigma. What again and again surprises me is how those who—the most ferocious anti-communist critics are in a way—and I find—I must emphasize this because often they accuse me of "oh you are playing flirting with Stalinism, ha ha." No, I'm trying to understand it. For example, sorry if I repeat an old example. Did you see *The Lives of Others*? Why—although it’s a very well-made film, I—with a little bit of mine communist past experience I hate it. The guy is a fanatical anti-communist, you know, he comes von—is from East German Prussian nobility and that’s his revenge, like they took my big estates there, now I will strike back. He is not evil enough. You know the basic story? A minister, evil minister, wants to seduce, sleep with big writer's, playwright's wife, so he—he organizes the detailed observation of him so that even planting something so that they will trap him, no? But this is so—everybody that I knew from the East laughs at this idea. Sorry, but something like this can happen in—in every also Western country. If you are in a position of power with secret service, of course you can try to—I can try
Slavoj Žižek
to—the what every East German ex-East German will tell you what’s wrong. If you take a figure like that writer, you are international celebrity there, you would have been under total observation even if no minister wants to screw your wife. That’s what gets lost in the film, that you don't need the evil minister; the system functioned like that. No—okay, my point of this so that I don't get lost is that for me Stalinist communism is still—is still an enigma. A much bigger enigma even than Nazism. How could that happen? Even the most ferocious anti-communists don't give an answer. They—if you read people from which you can learn a lot maybe at the level of facts, like Robert Conquest and others, they basically in the last agency it’s a kind of a simple demonization which is—they were really bad guys, how should I put it, no? Okay, but how, why? Something— something is missing there. And I think again that changing the shift into this accepting that, how should I put it, trauma is written into the very constitution of subjectivity does a lot to understand these phenomena. And to make a little bit of more propaganda: this book is part one of a—this book has a counter-book which will be called, sorry to treat, *In Defense of Lost Causes*, to appear in two months by Verso, where I will deal in detail with this problem of Stalinism, in a chapter lovingly entitled, Simon Critchley will kill me for that one, "How Did Stalin Save the Humanity of Man," something like that. No, it’s a bad joke, I mean it’s a very sad detailed analysis. So—what—and also, yeah, I was asked to do another... also if some of you are interested more in this philosophical background of violence and so on, there will be a series of conferences and so on in Leeds and Manchester between 18th and 20th of—in that Mid-England area of March, where we will debate for days all this—for days
to—the what every East German ex-East German will tell you what’s wrong. If you take a figure like that writer, you are international celebrity there, you would have been under total observation even if no minister wants to screw your wife. That’s what gets lost in the film, that you don't need the evil minister; the system functioned like that. No—okay, my point of this so that I don't get lost is that for me Stalinist communism is still—is still an enigma. A much bigger enigma even than Nazism. How could that happen? Even the most ferocious anti-communists don't give an answer. They—if you read people from which you can learn a lot maybe at the level of facts, like Robert Conquest and others, they basically in the last agency it’s a kind of a simple demonization which is—they were really bad guys, how should I put it, no? Okay, but how, why? Something— something is missing there. And I think again that changing the shift into this accepting that, how should I put it, trauma is written into the very constitution of subjectivity does a lot to understand these phenomena. And to make a little bit of more propaganda: this book is part one of a—this book has a counter-book which will be called, sorry to treat, *In Defense of Lost Causes*, to appear in two months by Verso, where I will deal in detail with this problem of Stalinism, in a chapter lovingly entitled, Simon Critchley will kill me for that one, "How Did Stalin Save the Humanity of Man," something like that. No, it’s a bad joke, I mean it’s a very sad detailed analysis. So—what—and also, yeah, I was asked to do another... also if some of you are interested more in this philosophical background of violence and so on, there will be a series of conferences and so on in Leeds and Manchester between 18th and 20th of—in that Mid-England area of March, where we will debate for days all this—for days
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all
all
Slavoj Žižek
this stuff. So in other words, to answer you now with the final just formulation—I—I think that here I agree with my good friend Alain Badiou that we should not be afraid of—we should break out of this predominant historicist ideology. We need—we should not be afraid to propose these more fundamental thesis: this is what it means to be human and so on. No, you know, I—I think that today’s predominant historicism where, first, you are not even allowed to make a firm—like it’s not allowed to say this is man. What you are only allowed to say is: the statement "man is rational" is possible only under these discursive power positions or whatever, no? So that all you can do is this historical discursive analysis. I think that this is a dangerous ideology. I think that we should risk kind of a fundamental philosophical anthropological thesis and so on. Sorry if I—I didn't answer you, but whatever I tried to do, so... **Audience:** I've
this stuff. So in other words, to answer you now with the final just formulation—I—I think that here I agree with my good friend Alain Badiou that we should not be afraid of—we should break out of this predominant historicist ideology. We need—we should not be afraid to propose these more fundamental thesis: this is what it means to be human and so on. No, you know, I—I think that today’s predominant historicism where, first, you are not even allowed to make a firm—like it’s not allowed to say this is man. What you are only allowed to say is: the statement "man is rational" is possible only under these discursive power positions or whatever, no? So that all you can do is this historical discursive analysis. I think that this is a dangerous ideology. I think that we should risk kind of a fundamental philosophical anthropological thesis and so on. Sorry if I—I didn't answer you, but whatever I tried to do, so... **Audience:** I've
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just got a question about the difference between violence and like—violence as ideology? **Žižek:** Violence and... **Audience:**
just got a question about the difference between violence and like—violence as ideology? **Žižek:** Violence and... **Audience:**
Slavoj Žižek
Violence and violence as ideology? In terms of like sort of the idea
Violence and violence as ideology? In terms of like sort of the idea
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of Critchley's of, fuck, violence in human rights and—and pacifism. And the responsibility that violence as a necessity evokes. Okay, to contextualize—just in terms of the fact that the if you—if you try and say that you're passive, then you will occlude a necessary violence which will then erupt again in terms of a death drive. Is—I guess I'm trying to track clarify what your position on
of Critchley's of, fuck, violence in human rights and—and pacifism. And the responsibility that violence as a necessity evokes. Okay, to contextualize—just in terms of the fact that the if you—if you try and say that you're passive, then you will occlude a necessary violence which will then erupt again in terms of a death drive. Is—I guess I'm trying to track clarify what your position on
Slavoj Žižek
violence is in that sense. **Žižek:** Violence as—sorry, I just didn't get the last word. You're trying to clarify my position on violence? **Audience:** Just, yeah, your position on violence. In terms of Critchley, death drive, responsibility. **Žižek:** Again, I don't know how to begin without developing the—developing the whole notion. What fascinates me, of course, it’s—the way—the very renunciation—the violent nature of the standard theories of non-violence. How you have today’s whole, for example, today’s entire—way I—I read a very disgusting depressive text recently in one—it was in my hotel room, that's how I got hold of it—some extra number of Newsweek where they report about the new lives of the super-rich. And the idea is that they are now moving not only living in this secluded gated communities, but it’s moving into a higher level now. You have now already networks of private clinics, they even don't go shopping, they make a deal that shops are opened only for them, they organize private... the entire—so I claim that, how should I put it, this would be my first point, that how—this is why I begin with that old story about—about man stealing something from the factory and so on, how the elementary dialectical twist, if there is a basic lesson of the book, it’s this one: when you perceive something as violent, it means you perceive something as disturbing, violently perturbing, whatever, a certain state of thing. And the question to ask is—this would be another topic of this, my eternal motive of parallax—what about shifting perspective and perceiving violence which is already has to go on so that that normal state of thing, which you perceive as non-violent, has to can—can reproduce itself? That’s what always fascinated me, which is why at the level of the analysis of ideology, for example, what fascinates me is not only how you construct the enemy who disturbs you, but all these, how should I call them, ideological underground of violent obscene rituals which sustain—sustain the—sustain the visible—the visible order. So again—I think that—that the first duty today is effectively to—if you want to be serious with violence—is nonetheless to take into account how—how much of violence is practiced precisely by countries where the predominant ideology is the extreme evasion of the—is the extreme fear of violence. In the guise of political correctness and so on where basically—why do I don't like political correctness? Where basically everything, I look you into the eye, you will say if you are, I hope you are not, politically correct, "visual rape." I say a dirty word, "verbal rape," and so on and so on, you know this extreme narcissistic fragility. I—I look at—I think that that’s—that’s the thing to do, to see—to see the extreme violent potential of our today's fear of violence. Now I'm not here a neo-fascist. I'm far from—far from claiming in some kind of a naive proto-fascist modern way that, you know, the redeeming character of violence and so on and so on. I'm just saying that getting—freedom—freedom to become truly free is a very violent experience. I don't believe in this inner journey stuff, you know, you look deeply into... no. Freedom is something that hurts. In a very existential way. My god, this is so stupid, no? Don't... now it looks as if I planned it as the final deep thought, you know, horror, sorry. No, but I hope that I clarified at least some things that you see, not that I have some big true positions that my friends—I don't mean now ironically this—like Simon Critchley misunderstood and so on. Is that my position is much simpler here. I openly admit it. I don't have a—like for example with Critchley I had a wonderful dialogue, no? Once, when he made a nice point. You know when I once mockingly described my position as that I'm like a magician, I have a hat—hat, in the sense of describing the situation, but I don't yet know the—the rabbit to pull out, no? And Critchley said—he can be funny sometimes in a very nice way, evil nice way—that—that no, he is for the proliferation of rabbits, do—all let's all hundreds of rabbits, no? But then I was tempted to answer him, you know: like okay, hundred rabbits, but let's take a closer look at these rabbits, you know, no like what kind of rabbits? For example, I—I asked him and then he started to withdraw: okay, you—I think I am—I like—if you follow his book Infinitely Demanding, like: okay, let’s talk about big fat rabbit called Hugo Chavez, no? Like, what would he say about that rabbit, how should I put it, no? So—how should I put it? My position is very pragmatic open. I think that we are more and more approaching almost an apocalyptic situation, ecologically, socially and so on. I effectively agree with
violence is in that sense. **Žižek:** Violence as—sorry, I just didn't get the last word. You're trying to clarify my position on violence? **Audience:** Just, yeah, your position on violence. In terms of Critchley, death drive, responsibility. **Žižek:** Again, I don't know how to begin without developing the—developing the whole notion. What fascinates me, of course, it’s—the way—the very renunciation—the violent nature of the standard theories of non-violence. How you have today’s whole, for example, today’s entire—way I—I read a very disgusting depressive text recently in one—it was in my hotel room, that's how I got hold of it—some extra number of Newsweek where they report about the new lives of the super-rich. And the idea is that they are now moving not only living in this secluded gated communities, but it’s moving into a higher level now. You have now already networks of private clinics, they even don't go shopping, they make a deal that shops are opened only for them, they organize private... the entire—so I claim that, how should I put it, this would be my first point, that how—this is why I begin with that old story about—about man stealing something from the factory and so on, how the elementary dialectical twist, if there is a basic lesson of the book, it’s this one: when you perceive something as violent, it means you perceive something as disturbing, violently perturbing, whatever, a certain state of thing. And the question to ask is—this would be another topic of this, my eternal motive of parallax—what about shifting perspective and perceiving violence which is already has to go on so that that normal state of thing, which you perceive as non-violent, has to can—can reproduce itself? That’s what always fascinated me, which is why at the level of the analysis of ideology, for example, what fascinates me is not only how you construct the enemy who disturbs you, but all these, how should I call them, ideological underground of violent obscene rituals which sustain—sustain the—sustain the visible—the visible order. So again—I think that—that the first duty today is effectively to—if you want to be serious with violence—is nonetheless to take into account how—how much of violence is practiced precisely by countries where the predominant ideology is the extreme evasion of the—is the extreme fear of violence. In the guise of political correctness and so on where basically—why do I don't like political correctness? Where basically everything, I look you into the eye, you will say if you are, I hope you are not, politically correct, "visual rape." I say a dirty word, "verbal rape," and so on and so on, you know this extreme narcissistic fragility. I—I look at—I think that that’s—that’s the thing to do, to see—to see the extreme violent potential of our today's fear of violence. Now I'm not here a neo-fascist. I'm far from—far from claiming in some kind of a naive proto-fascist modern way that, you know, the redeeming character of violence and so on and so on. I'm just saying that getting—freedom—freedom to become truly free is a very violent experience. I don't believe in this inner journey stuff, you know, you look deeply into... no. Freedom is something that hurts. In a very existential way. My god, this is so stupid, no? Don't... now it looks as if I planned it as the final deep thought, you know, horror, sorry. No, but I hope that I clarified at least some things that you see, not that I have some big true positions that my friends—I don't mean now ironically this—like Simon Critchley misunderstood and so on. Is that my position is much simpler here. I openly admit it. I don't have a—like for example with Critchley I had a wonderful dialogue, no? Once, when he made a nice point. You know when I once mockingly described my position as that I'm like a magician, I have a hat—hat, in the sense of describing the situation, but I don't yet know the—the rabbit to pull out, no? And Critchley said—he can be funny sometimes in a very nice way, evil nice way—that—that no, he is for the proliferation of rabbits, do—all let's all hundreds of rabbits, no? But then I was tempted to answer him, you know: like okay, hundred rabbits, but let's take a closer look at these rabbits, you know, no like what kind of rabbits? For example, I—I asked him and then he started to withdraw: okay, you—I think I am—I like—if you follow his book Infinitely Demanding, like: okay, let’s talk about big fat rabbit called Hugo Chavez, no? Like, what would he say about that rabbit, how should I put it, no? So—how should I put it? My position is very pragmatic open. I think that we are more and more approaching almost an apocalyptic situation, ecologically, socially and so on. I effectively agree with
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the last analysis of Wallerstein, for example, where he predicts that one possible scenario is that what goes on now in France, all these suburbs riots, that this is one possibility, that Europe will slowly develop into this kind of, how should I call it, inner civil war situation, tensions and so on. I think that at all possible levels I see explosive tensions. We are postponing them. So we will be forced to act. And that’s what I mean by I don't
the last analysis of Wallerstein, for example, where he predicts that one possible scenario is that what goes on now in France, all these suburbs riots, that this is one possibility, that Europe will slowly develop into this kind of, how should I call it, inner civil war situation, tensions and so on. I think that at all possible levels I see explosive tensions. We are postponing them. So we will be forced to act. And that’s what I mean by I don't
Slavoj Žižek
have the rabbit to pull out. I don't see a clear way. My god, I'm not
have the rabbit to pull out. I don't see a clear way. My god, I'm not
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a stupid Leninist, proletarian revolution, where, who
a stupid Leninist, proletarian revolution, where, who
Slavoj Žižek
will do it, how and so on. My—I think just that we will be pushed to act and I'm here then extremely pragmatic and we should be totally promiscuous here. In the sense of do this, do that, realistic demand, a bomb here or there, a little bit of passivity where it’s not expected and so on. That’s—I'm very open and pragmatic here. I don't have big answers. And I think that—that those who think that they have big answers, whatever they are, are effectively bluffing. I think that the left did not yet do properly its self-criticism, how should I put it, no? That they—this is what I wanted to do in that text, Resistance is Surrender, the crucial part where nobody truly attacked me, and that’s where I would love to be refuted, is in that London Review of Books text. You remember, if you saw it, the first part where I simply enumerated six, seven or even eight positions which I see and all of them more or less unsatisfactory. Show me where I am there wrong. I think I made a very honest attempt to give a kind of a non-systematic series of positions which are all, more or less unsatisfactory, so on but somehow—somehow they are not enough. Again, I see a problem here, and maybe that’s what we should do: simply admit it. **LRB Host:** I think in deference to your jet lag we’ll have two more questions, is that all right? **Žižek:** Will you give one... ah now to do something really evil. Is this yes on one condition: that you ask me a question now? **LRB Host:** No, no, no. **Žižek:** Does this already count as a first question? **LRB Host:** My—my question is can we have two more questions please? **Žižek:** Okay, sorry. Please. Okay, right. Here comes the first one. Okay, please. **Audience:** I just wanted to ask if you had an opinion on William Vollmann's book *Rising Up and Rising Down* where he tries to construct what he calls the calculus of violence by looking at people's justifications... **Žižek:** Oh that’s interesting. Thanks for telling me because to be quite open I don't have an opinion because I don't know the book, like, I mean I bluff enough so that I don't need to bluff here, no? **Audience:** There’s a seven-volume edition or there’s a one-volume edition that's condensed down. **Žižek:** Ah, did he have the same problem as—as Brandom or Kant that the first big fat version nobody wants to read it so he had to write introduction to himself, how should I... ah... **Audience:** No, he’s written a short version basically just so that people will read it. **Žižek:** Oh yeah. Yeah, so no but yeah, yeah. Okay, the second... **Audience:** Yeah, I just wanted to raise what I thought was quite a relevant example, especially when you were talking about the super-rich and the private developments. Um, I saw something in China which I thought was quite remarkable which was a huge advertisement for a private condominium community, uh right surrounding the—the new development, and it had been translated rather badly into English as "Come and live in a perfection concentration camp." Now I was just interested in hearing your reflections on that, and in the future do you think it might be true to—to coin—coin an aphorism that in the future everybody will aspire to live in a concentration camp? **Žižek:** Oh yeah, yeah. No, but that’s a very—that’s a very good point because I think this I tried to convince Agamben about it: what always shocked me with his idea of this, you know, concentration camp, I think this is absolutely what we should do. And I think this is, you know, when Agamben is asked, "Okay, apart from these vague phrases of Benjamin, violence, divine violence, what is his—to put it in brutal terms—positive vision?" The only indications he gives is to Limbo. You know, this old theological problem, Limbo, like what happens to children before they are baptized: they didn't sin so they shouldn't be sent to hell, so the idea is that of a Limbo, in a kind of eternal bliss but the punishment is they don't know God, no? They are outside. But in an eternal bliss. And he says this would be for him a happy, no? I'm not sure it would have been as happy as he thinks. I think that his positive ideal, that his secret dream is a good concentration camp. I mean, my friend who—whose book I published, Lorenzo Chiesa, you know the book in my MIT series, *The Subjectivity and Otherness*. He is now writing a very interesting book on—basically it's an attack on return of religion in contemporary Italian leftist thought: Negri, Agamben, Vattimo. They all in all of them you have and—and this he will try to develop there, of this absolute ambiguity of Agamben, like his focus on concentration it's almost that what when he writes about concentration camps, it's almost his message between the lines is what Marx says about modern industry that it’s all every—all communism is already there you just have to change the form a little bit, no?
will do it, how and so on. My—I think just that we will be pushed to act and I'm here then extremely pragmatic and we should be totally promiscuous here. In the sense of do this, do that, realistic demand, a bomb here or there, a little bit of passivity where it’s not expected and so on. That’s—I'm very open and pragmatic here. I don't have big answers. And I think that—that those who think that they have big answers, whatever they are, are effectively bluffing. I think that the left did not yet do properly its self-criticism, how should I put it, no? That they—this is what I wanted to do in that text, Resistance is Surrender, the crucial part where nobody truly attacked me, and that’s where I would love to be refuted, is in that London Review of Books text. You remember, if you saw it, the first part where I simply enumerated six, seven or even eight positions which I see and all of them more or less unsatisfactory. Show me where I am there wrong. I think I made a very honest attempt to give a kind of a non-systematic series of positions which are all, more or less unsatisfactory, so on but somehow—somehow they are not enough. Again, I see a problem here, and maybe that’s what we should do: simply admit it. **LRB Host:** I think in deference to your jet lag we’ll have two more questions, is that all right? **Žižek:** Will you give one... ah now to do something really evil. Is this yes on one condition: that you ask me a question now? **LRB Host:** No, no, no. **Žižek:** Does this already count as a first question? **LRB Host:** My—my question is can we have two more questions please? **Žižek:** Okay, sorry. Please. Okay, right. Here comes the first one. Okay, please. **Audience:** I just wanted to ask if you had an opinion on William Vollmann's book *Rising Up and Rising Down* where he tries to construct what he calls the calculus of violence by looking at people's justifications... **Žižek:** Oh that’s interesting. Thanks for telling me because to be quite open I don't have an opinion because I don't know the book, like, I mean I bluff enough so that I don't need to bluff here, no? **Audience:** There’s a seven-volume edition or there’s a one-volume edition that's condensed down. **Žižek:** Ah, did he have the same problem as—as Brandom or Kant that the first big fat version nobody wants to read it so he had to write introduction to himself, how should I... ah... **Audience:** No, he’s written a short version basically just so that people will read it. **Žižek:** Oh yeah. Yeah, so no but yeah, yeah. Okay, the second... **Audience:** Yeah, I just wanted to raise what I thought was quite a relevant example, especially when you were talking about the super-rich and the private developments. Um, I saw something in China which I thought was quite remarkable which was a huge advertisement for a private condominium community, uh right surrounding the—the new development, and it had been translated rather badly into English as "Come and live in a perfection concentration camp." Now I was just interested in hearing your reflections on that, and in the future do you think it might be true to—to coin—coin an aphorism that in the future everybody will aspire to live in a concentration camp? **Žižek:** Oh yeah, yeah. No, but that’s a very—that’s a very good point because I think this I tried to convince Agamben about it: what always shocked me with his idea of this, you know, concentration camp, I think this is absolutely what we should do. And I think this is, you know, when Agamben is asked, "Okay, apart from these vague phrases of Benjamin, violence, divine violence, what is his—to put it in brutal terms—positive vision?" The only indications he gives is to Limbo. You know, this old theological problem, Limbo, like what happens to children before they are baptized: they didn't sin so they shouldn't be sent to hell, so the idea is that of a Limbo, in a kind of eternal bliss but the punishment is they don't know God, no? They are outside. But in an eternal bliss. And he says this would be for him a happy, no? I'm not sure it would have been as happy as he thinks. I think that his positive ideal, that his secret dream is a good concentration camp. I mean, my friend who—whose book I published, Lorenzo Chiesa, you know the book in my MIT series, *The Subjectivity and Otherness*. He is now writing a very interesting book on—basically it's an attack on return of religion in contemporary Italian leftist thought: Negri, Agamben, Vattimo. They all in all of them you have and—and this he will try to develop there, of this absolute ambiguity of Agamben, like his focus on concentration it's almost that what when he writes about concentration camps, it's almost his message between the lines is what Marx says about modern industry that it’s all every—all communism is already there you just have to change the form a little bit, no?
unknown
So I think—so I take very seriously what you said and to
So I think—so I take very seriously what you said and to
Slavoj Žižek
give you another amusing example since we are here in United Kingdom. Did
give you another amusing example since we are here in United Kingdom. Did
unknown
you—I saw a TV report on it,
you—I saw a TV report on it,
Slavoj Žižek
you know what’s now
you know what’s now
unknown
the latest fashion, I know I was there in—three months ago in China, near Shanghai, you know what’s now the fashion among
the latest fashion, I know I was there in—three months ago in China, near Shanghai, you know what’s now the fashion among
Slavoj Žižek
the very rich there, and there are many of them now: to build not only a gated community but a gated community which is a perfect replica of some imagined idealized Western countryside. They build kind of a like Essex, Surrey
the very rich there, and there are many of them now: to build not only a gated community but a gated community which is a perfect replica of some imagined idealized Western countryside. They build kind of a like Essex, Surrey
unknown
and so on, a perfect small English village for the rich with everything: you have this—you have Barclays bank, you have Anglican church, you have even Tesco stores and so on, absolute copy of—and then now they are building small American towns already, they are—they are building even some Sicilian Italian small towns. It’s—it’s—it’s even— **Audience:** There’s even a Harrow School
and so on, a perfect small English village for the rich with everything: you have this—you have Barclays bank, you have Anglican church, you have even Tesco stores and so on, absolute copy of—and then now they are building small American towns already, they are—they are building even some Sicilian Italian small towns. It’s—it’s—it’s even— **Audience:** There’s even a Harrow School
Slavoj Žižek
there now. **Žižek:** Sorry? **Audience:** There is even a Harrow School there now, as in the public school. There’s an offshoot of Harrow there. **Žižek:** Ah they did—even? Ah yeah. I wonder but, okay, to conclude I will give one to you British where they cannot do it: they cannot do cricket. I claim
there now. **Žižek:** Sorry? **Audience:** There is even a Harrow School there now, as in the public school. There’s an offshoot of Harrow there. **Žižek:** Ah they did—even? Ah yeah. I wonder but, okay, to conclude I will give one to you British where they cannot do it: they cannot do cricket. I claim
unknown
that
that
Slavoj Žižek
you—only you can understand it. I was once watching three hours cricket, I did—I didn't get it. Somebody throws a ball, on the other hand somebody starts to run. Even some British men admitted to me that you cannot—that you have to be basically a—upper-middle-class homosexual and secretly KGB agent from the 30s in Oxford or what to really understand it, you know? So whatever they take from you, cricket they will not take, I think the Chinese.
you—only you can understand it. I was once watching three hours cricket, I did—I didn't get it. Somebody throws a ball, on the other hand somebody starts to run. Even some British men admitted to me that you cannot—that you have to be basically a—upper-middle-class homosexual and secretly KGB agent from the 30s in Oxford or what to really understand it, you know? So whatever they take from you, cricket they will not take, I think the Chinese.
unknown
**LRB Host:** Mr. Žižek, thank you very much indeed. [Applause] **Voiceover:**
**LRB Host:** Mr. Žižek, thank you very much indeed. [Applause] **Voiceover:**
unknown
Thank you for joining us for this London Review Bookshop event. For more, visit our website at www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk or search for the London Review Bookshop on iTunes.
Thank you for joining us for this London Review Bookshop event. For more, visit our website at www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk or search for the London Review Bookshop on iTunes.