Slavoj Zizek Zero Level of Fundamental Belief
Talk · electron media group, inc. ·
2006-05-01 · 1:59:22 · 17,826 words
ideologypsychoanalysisreligion-theologyliberalism-political-correctnessdemocracyphilosophy-generalgeopolitics-warethicsscience-physicseveryday-lifecinema-art-culturecommunism-socialismrevolution-violence
Žižek argues that modern liberal tolerance and religious fundamentalism share a 'secret solidarity' in their obsession with respect, creating a society paralyzed by the fear of offending the Other. He reinterprets belief not as subjective conviction but as an objective, institutionalized structure ('objectified belief') that operates independently of our conscious knowledge, citing Marx's commodity fetishism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Using examples like the 'chicken' joke and the 'street number' anecdote, he contends that we live in a 'post-ideological' era where the Big Other continues to believe for us, allowing for a cynical, 'false freedom' of atheism that is actually more religious than previous eras. Žižek analyzes the structure of belief, arguing that fundamentalists do not truly believe but merely 'know,' thereby reducing faith to empirical facts and destroying the ethical wager of authentic belief. He contrasts this with the 'obscene underside' of institutional beliefs, such as the Catholic Church's unconscious, and examines the role of violence in a globalized world, advocating for a 'code of discretion' and respect for limits rather than total understanding. Žižek redefines violence by distinguishing subjective violence from symbolic and objective violence, arguing that the latter is the invisible, necessary condition for social peace, illustrated by the Higgs field metaphor. He critiques Rawlsian justice for failing to account for the narcissistic need for market irrationality, using Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s critique of Rawls and Friedrich Hayek’s observations on envy. The excerpt concludes by analyzing 'political correctness' as a desire for a 'decaffeinated other' and condemning Sam Harris’s justification of torture as an ethical catastrophe that erases the terrifying proximity of the neighbor. Žižek argues that publicizing torture destroys the ethical substance of hypocrisy, which serves to contain violence, and critiques Bill Gates' humanitarianism as a false urgency that masks systemic exploitation. He concludes with a call for theory over immediate action, using a joke about 'The Perverts' to position theorists as true perverts, and analyzes Kieślowski’s anonymous witness as a passive Christ figure who needs our help, while expressing deep skepticism about current leftist alternatives like Hardt and Negri’s post-capitalism. Žižek argues that authentic emancipatory acts and freedom inherently involve terror, as they stake one's entire being, contrasting this with liberal humanitarianism. He defends Kierkegaard’s concept of Christian comedy and critiques the 'hysterical' acting out of belief, linking fundamentalist suicide bombing to a perverse logic of enjoyment rather than pure faith. He further analyzes religious texts (Dostoyevsky, Quran) to explore the ambiguity of divine commands, the nature of the super-ego, and the potential for redeeming radical political concepts like Nazism’s Volksgemeinschaft through a Hegelian lens.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 50
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The hidden structural affinity between liberal tolerance and religious fundamentalism, where both demand respect for the Other's difference, thereby immobilizing society.
as “the chicken in ourselves”
A metaphor for the symptom or the unconscious part of the subject that must be convinced of the truth, distinct from the conscious, rational self.
as “Verneinung (negation)”
A Freudian concept where a repressed idea is evoked and quickly discarded, allowing the subject to 'have his cake and eat it' by blurring out a conviction while withdrawing from it.
as “subject-supposed-to-believe”
A Lacanian concept referring to the entity (God, the Big Other, an institution) that is presumed to hold the belief or truth for the subject.
as “theological niceties of the commodity”
Žižek's reading of Marx: the commodity appears as an ordinary thing, but its analysis reveals it has 'theological niceties' (magical powers), meaning the mystification is in the appearance itself, not just the reality.
as “ideology is in acting”
The claim that ideology is not a set of false ideas in the head, but is embodied in our social practices and rituals, regardless of our conscious beliefs.
A reading of the Crucifixion ('Why have you forsaken me?') as the moment God himself undergoes an 'atheist phase,' doubting his own existence, which is unique to Christianity.
as “Jewish/Protestant/Catholic atheism”
The claim that atheisms are not uniform but carry specific theological/cultural 'flavors' (e.g., Spinoza/Freud as Jewish atheism, Heidegger as Protestant atheism) derived from their religious backgrounds.
The modern condition where individuals feel free to transgress ethical constraints because they assume the Big Other (God, the market, the law) continues to believe/order for them.
The modern inversion of Pascal's Wager: instead of acting as if you believe to generate belief, one acts as if they believe to get rid of their belief, outsourcing it to the institution.
Private, systemic convictions (like racism) that are publicly denied but functionally sustained through their negation.
as “unconscious of an institution”
The idea that institutional structures (like the Church) generate specific behaviors (like pedophilia) not just through individual failings, but as an obscene underside of the institution itself.
as “secret meta-rules”
The additional set of rules that tells one how to deal with social rules, often implying that prohibitions are secret calls to violate them discreetly.
The claim that fundamentalists reduce articles of faith to simple statements of knowledge (empirical facts), thereby losing the essence of belief.
The definition of authentic belief as a Kierkegaardian engagement that goes against all knowledge, such as Anne Frank's belief in a divine spark despite the horrors of the Nazis.
The principle of believing because it is absurd, defining authentic belief as a counter-factual, irrational wager on equality or human dignity.
The paradox that atheists may believe more radically than believers because they engage in belief without the guarantee of a Big Other or divine guarantee.
as “belief through a denial”
The mechanism by which belief is externalized into symbolic rituals or obscene unwritten convictions, allowing subjects to disavow their own subjective assumption of belief.
A proposed ethical attitude for a globalized world, involving alienation and keeping distance from others to prevent violence, rather than multiculturalist understanding.
Violence performed by visible agents (individuals, groups, states) that is the primary focus of public discourse.
The state of knowing something means something without knowing what it means; the gap of perplexity that precedes concrete determination.
A signifier that means something but whose specific meaning is unknown, creating the initial perplexity from which meaning emerges.
as “symbolic dimension of violence”
The idea that human aggressivity derives its excess from attacking a symbolic construct embodied in a person, rather than just the real person.
The invisible violence inscribed in the normal, neutral functioning of society (e.g., market mechanisms) that sustains the appearance of peace.
as “real of capitalism”
The purely virtual, abstract functioning of capital (e.g., market speculation) that has real, violent consequences on concrete lives.
A metaphor for the invisible, objective violence that sustains social peace, analogous to dark matter in physics.
Described not as tolerance, but as a mechanism to maintain distance and avoid the 'over-proximity' of the Other.
An ideological term that mystifies the distinction between concrete violence and the general fear of the Other's proximity.
as “nomadic existence”
A concept from Negri and Hardt that Žižek critiques as an ideological term blurring the distinction between voluntary travel and forced displacement.
as “abysmal neighbor”
The terrifying, intrusive dimension of the Other that exceeds simple human semblance, representing the 'monstrosity' of human proximity.
as “decaffeinated other”
The politically correct fantasy of the Other stripped of their threatening, intrusive, or 'inhuman' qualities, making them safe and distant.
Agamben’s concept, which Žižek adopts, referring to the tolerance for the inhuman, abyssal dimension of the Other rather than their humanized facade.
The optical phenomenon where the moon appears larger near the horizon; used by Sam Harris as a metaphor for correcting our 'evolutionary defect' of empathy.
A hypothetical drug that induces paralysis and misery while concealing the act of torture, allowing torturers to bypass their empathy.
as “ethico-political substance”
Hegelian concept referring to the unwritten, implicit rules of what is admissible in a society; Žižek argues these are changing dangerously when taboos are broken publicly.
as “charity activities”
Used here pejoratively to describe how subjective acts of charity (like Gates' philanthropy) function to counteract and legitimize objective violence.
A manipulative rhetorical device that demands immediate action ('do not think, act') to prevent critical theoretical reflection on systemic issues.
A figure (like in Kieślowski) who represents pure passivity and witnessing, distinct from the active neighbor or the Big Other.
as “God needs our help”
A theological inversion where God is seen as dead or impotent, requiring human action to sustain the world, rather than God saving us.
as “optimists”
Žižek's label for leftist thinkers like Hardt and Negri who believe capitalism is already transforming into communism, which he rejects as an 'easy way out'.
as “authentic free act”
A free act where one stakes their entire being, involving risk and terror, distinct from trivial choices like cake flavor.
An impatient, nervous form of belief where one acts immediately to convince oneself, indicating a lack of true trust.
as “humanitarian trap”
The liberal ideological supplement of global capitalism that focuses on charity and 'ending poverty' without addressing structural causes.
as “passage l’acte”
The psychoanalytic concept that the act itself is the proof of belief, rather than prior conviction.
as “self-criticism”
The necessary first step for the left to understand how liberal politics opens the path for right-wing authoritarianism, illustrated by Ed Norton hitting himself in Fight Club.
as “undeathness”
A state of 'living death' (as in Dostoyevsky's Bobok) where 'everything is permitted' because moral accountability to God is suspended.
as “obscene enjoyment”
The superegoic pleasure derived from transgressing moral laws, central to the logic of fundamentalist violence.
The pathological tendency to equate suffering with goodness, assuming that if it hurts, it must be ethical.
The Islamic community, interpreted by Žižek as a radical political community built without reliance on patriarchal networks, akin to an orphanhood before God.
The Nazi concept of 'people's solidarity,' which Žižek argues contains a redeemable core of solidarity that is only corrupted by its antisemitic operationalization.
Stories he reaches for 7
Physicist Niels Bohr has a horseshoe over his door for good luck. When asked why, he says he doesn't believe in it, but has it because 'it works even if one does not believe in it.'
“I have it there because I was told that it works even if one does not believe in it.”
The slogan 'every cup you drink... saves a kid' creates a false urgency that prevents thinking about the systemic causes of poverty, replacing theory with consumption.
“They appealed to you with 'every cup that you drink with us... every cup you save a kid or whatever.'”
Gore Vidal’s witty response to a journalist asking about his first sexual encounter: 'I was too polite to ask,' exemplifying the 'logic of discretion' and polite ignorance.
“You know what was his answer? 'I was too polite to ask.' That’s the spirit that we need today”
Sam Harris’s proposal for a 'truth pill' that induces paralysis and misery while concealing the torture, allowing torturers to bypass empathy, which Žižek finds horrifying.
“A drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment.”
Citing Chesterton, Žižek argues that Christianity is unique because God himself becomes an atheist at the Crucifixion ('Why have you forsaken me?'), undergoing an 'atheist phase' where he does not believe in himself.
“There is only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”
A photo of Bill Gates embracing ill children in India is described as 'pathetic' and 'disgusting,' illustrating how his wealth (objective violence) is masked by charity (subjective violence).
“If I were to pick the most disgusting photo of the last couple of years... Bill Gates visited India... embracing some in a hospital ill children.”
Using the physics concept that maintaining a system at 'zero' (absolute peace) requires energy, Žižek argues that society requires a tremendous amount of invisible violence to reproduce itself.
“to maintain a system at its zero level of absolute peace, you already have to put energy into it to work.”
Works invoked 28
Capital book
Marx's work; cited for the section on commodity fetishism, specifically the 'theological niceties' of the commodity.
Hegel's work referenced in the 'Perverts' joke (Subject, consciousness; logic of essence; absolute knowing).
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book; he recaps themes from it regarding the structure of belief.
Fight Club film
Used to illustrate the concept of self-criticism through the scene where Ed Norton hits himself.
Schindler's List film
Hated by Žižek for its 'vulgarity' in depicting Schindler's conversion.
Being and Time book
Heidegger's work; cited as one of the most 'atheist books of all time' but with a 'Protestant atheism' flavor.
The Fragile Absolute book
Žižek's own book, cited as the source for the argument that the left must engage in self-criticism.
The Ticklish Subject book
Žižek's own book; cited for the example of the Slovene politician and the street number.
The End of Faith book
Sam Harris’s bestseller, which Žižek critiques for its justification of torture and its 'chilling' logic.
Multitude book
Negri's book; cited as an example of 'Catholic atheism'.
Dennett's book; cited for the distinction between how things appear and how they really appear.
Pollock film
Hated by Žižek for its 'vulgarity' in depicting the discovery of action painting.
Decalogue tv
Kieślowski's series, specifically the character of the witness/angel, analyzed as a passive Christ figure.
The End of Belief book
An alternative title for Harris’s book, referenced by Žižek.
The Second Coming other
A poem by Yeats; Žižek uses its lines to describe the current political split but argues it fails to capture the lack of conviction in fundamentalists.
The Aristocrats film
A dirty joke/film referenced to introduce the 'Perverts' joke, contrasting its obscenity with the 'perversion' of Hegelian dialectics.
Bobok book
Dostoyevsky's short story about the living dead in a graveyard, used to analyze the logic of 'undeathness' and superego.
The Book of Virtues book
Described as 'boring' and used to illustrate William Bennett's omission of gambling.
How to Read Lacan book
A forthcoming book by Žižek (Granta Books) that explores the link between superego and Kantian sublime via Dostoyevsky.
The Silent Partner book
A book by Alenka Zupančič; cited for her text on Hegel and the paradox of God.
The Turin Shroud artwork
Used as an example of how fundamentalism reduces faith to empirical knowledge (DNA analysis).
Verneinung book
Freud's text on negation; cited to contrast Freud's view of negation with modern patient behavior.
Christian Science other
Cited as an example of a sect with 'science' in its name, illustrating the reduction of faith to knowledge.
Idea of a Future Society other
Refers to Yeats' poem about walking in dreams, which Žižek uses to illustrate the horror of the Other's proximity.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s book, which Žižek praises for its critique of Rawls and its insight into the violence of a merit-based society.
William Bennett's call-in program where the racist comment was made.
Scientology other
Cited as an example of a sect with 'science' in its name, illustrating the reduction of faith to knowledge.
Kieślowski's film (number five in Decalogue), cited for the moment the anonymous witness with a sad gaze intervenes.
People invoked 52
Lee Strasberg negative
Criticized for the 'Strasberg Studio' which ruined the art of acting through violent self-expression.
Mohammed Bouyeri negative
The killer of Theo van Gogh; his letter is cited as an example of superego logic and obscene enjoyment.
William Bennett negative
Cited as an example of someone who publicly denies racist convictions while privately sustaining them through 'Verneinung'.
Ed Harris negative
Actor in Pollock, cited for the vulgar depiction of the discovery of action painting.
Mohamed Atta negative
Referenced via 'ridiculous Muhammad Atta diaries' which Žižek dismisses as fake and irrelevant to the logic of belief.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as a 'friend' and 'very bright guy'; his book A Metaphysics of Tsunamis is used to critique Rawls.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as a 'Slovene Lacanian colleague'; cited for her text on Hegel in 'The Silent Partner' regarding the paradox of God.
Josefina positive
An audience member who quoted Žižek, prompting his response about fundamentalists.
Edward Norton positive
Actor used in the Fight Club anecdote to illustrate the need for self-criticism.
Blaise Pascal positive
Cited for his advice to non-believers to 'act as if you believe'; Žižek argues this is now used in reverse to get rid of belief.
Jacques Derrida positive
Cited for the idea that atheists are the ones who believe in the most radical way.
Friedrich Hayek positive
Žižek states he 'politically opposes' Hayek but admits he 'wasn't a total idiot' and praises his insight that market irrationality neutralizes envy.
Jimmy Swaggart negative
Cited as a 'TV preacher figure' who is not a true fundamentalist because his preaching is an 'ego trip' that undermines his message of anti-tolerance.
Žižek states he prefers Fallaci to Bush, implying a shared critical stance toward certain political figures.
Gore Vidal positive
Praised for his 'spirit' of polite ignorance, exemplified by his witty answer to a journalist about his sexual history.
John Rawls negative
Critiqued for creating a society that would explode in violence because it fails to account for narcissistic resentment regarding merit-based inequality.
Alan Dershowitz negative
Cited as the source of the line justifying torture, which Harris adopts.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Described as 'my beloved'; cited for the insight that Christianity is the only religion where God seems to be an atheist at the Crucifixion.
Wendy Brown positive
Cited for her 'wonderful analysis' of the false sense of urgency in humanitarianism.
Slavoj Žižek positive
Refers to his own book 'Fragile Absolute' as the source for the idea of leftist self-criticism.
John Brown positive
Described as 'my American hero' and a believer who treated blacks as equals immediately, contrasting with white liberals.
George W. Bush negative
Used as a punchline to illustrate that Bush is a 'divider' rather than a 'decider,' highlighting the divisive nature of language.
Daniel Dennett positive
Cited from 'Consciousness Explained' for the distinction between 'the way things appear to you' and 'the way things really appear to you,' which Žižek adopts to explain the gap in ideology.
Sam Harris negative
Critiqued for his book The End of Faith/Belief and his justification of torture via the 'truth pill,' which Žižek finds chilling and ethically catastrophic.
Antonio Negri negative
Cited alongside Hardt as 'good friends' whose concept of 'nomadic existence' Žižek critiques.
Alain Badiou positive
Referenced for the concept of 'axiomatic engagement' regarding human rights.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Cited as being 'right' about the need for 'practical anti-humanism', tolerating the inhuman dimension of the Other.
Benedictus de Spinoza positive
Cited as an example of 'Jewish atheism' due to its specific flavor.
Cited as an example of a leader (Lula in Brazil) who confronts the 'hard facts of life' after initial enthusiasm.
William Butler Yeats negative
Cited for 'The Second Coming'; Žižek uses Yeats to describe the split between liberals and fundamentalists but argues Yeats' diagnosis falls short because it misses the lack of true conviction in fundamentalists.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Disagrees with Laclau, who thinks Žižek is 'totally crazy' regarding his Hegelian redemption project.
Anne Frank positive
Cited for her statement on believing in a divine spark despite the horrors of the Nazis.
Martin Heidegger positive
Cited from 'Being and Time' as an example of 'Protestant atheism' due to themes of authentic responsibility and anxiety.
Bill Gates negative
Described as an 'icon' of ruthless abstract capitalism combined with 'heart-bleeding, warm tolerance'; his charity is seen as masking objective violence.
Gary Wills positive
A Catholic whom Žižek admires for analyzing how pedophilia is linked to the Catholic Church's institutional apparatus.
Hannah Arendt negative
Cited as an example of focusing on 'subjective violence' (Nazi executors, cold bureaucracy), which Žižek argues is too narrow.
Jean Laplanche positive
Cited for the concept of the 'enigmatic signifier,' which Žižek uses to explain the origin of meaning.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Referenced for the concept of the 'crazy wager' of faith.
Niels Bohr positive
Cited in the horseshoe anecdote to illustrate how one can have an objectified belief (the horseshoe) without subjective belief.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Disagreed with with the idea that language is originally a means of equal symmetrical communication.
Cited as an example of a leader who starts with human rights enthusiasm but is crushed by global capital.
Bono negative
Cited as an example of someone trapped in the 'humanitarian trap' of global capitalism.
Hugo Chávez negative
Cited as an example of a leftist leader who compromises with foreign oil companies (Italian/French) to avoid US interference, showing the complexity of current politics.
Steven Spielberg negative
Criticized for the 'vulgarity' of presenting Schindler's conversion via the girl in the red dress.
Noam Chomsky positive
Mentioned as someone who conceded that 'no time for theory today' is a dangerous stance, though Žižek disagrees with the conclusion.
Karl Marx positive
Remains a Marxist; Žižek highlights Marx's insight that ideology is in acting/doing, and that commodities have 'theological niceties,' rather than just being demystified illusions.
Michael Hardt negative
Cited alongside Negri as 'good friends' whose concept of 'nomadic existence' Žižek critiques as an ideological term.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for 'Verneinung' (Negation); Žižek argues Freud was 'too simple' in his analysis of negation, contrasting it with modern patients who confess in advance.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek claims Kierkegaard's critique of Hegel is a misunderstanding and seeks to 'redeem Hegel' as a conservative vision.
Immanuel Kant positive
Used as a foil for moral theory; Žižek contrasts Kantian ethics with the logic of suffering/masochism.
Referenced regarding the third essay of The Genealogy of Morals, noting that fascists have one goal, whereas the left lacks a unified plan.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky positive
Praises his short story Bobok for undermining his own formula that 'if God doesn't exist everything is permitted.'
Transcript 21 turns
unknown
I am Josefina Ayerza, the editor of Lacanian Ink. Let me thank you all for being here tonight. Hello. Oh, that’s much better now. Let me thank you all for being here tonight and a very special thanks to Jack Tilton for his genuine enthusiasm with hosting these events. For years now, Lacanian Ink has been publishing writers, philosophers, poets, painters, art critics, musicians from very different latitudes, to the point that we have a dialogue going on. This dialogue is open enough to not belong in a place, I would say, though it happens in New York City, and this is how it includes every one of us, how it is us. Lacanian Ink is taking up on the names of the father. It is not ready from the printer, so we made a dummy for you to look through the pages tonight. The Names-of-the-Father is Jacques Lacan's very succinct seminar which lasted a day. It consists of the one lesson. It doesn't have a number. As you know, we go from Seminar Anxiety, to Seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Lacan didn't want to number it. Jacques-Alain Miller in his article that directly addresses the story says, "this seminar does not exist." Do we want to say that from then on and forever there is a hole in Lacan's teaching, in the series of his seminars? Lacan liked to interpret, provoke his audience. It wasn't by chance that I couldn't give my seminar on the names of the father, as if to give that seminar would have been in some way impossible, as if there existed a curse. For Lacan, there is a correspondence between the seminar, The Names-of-the-Father, and what was happening to him at the moment, that is his excommunication. As if the bar placed in his name would necessarily be followed by another on the seminar of the Names-of-the-Father. The Name-of-the-Father divides into the theory of the father and the theory of the name. If we refer to the paternal metaphor, it is the function of metaphorizing the desire of the mother, of barring it. If to the event of naming, Kripke’s theory of dice, soon pointed out by Lacan, brings in the function of a pure signifier of the proper name to emerge in mathematical logic. Calling on the logic of the impossible, the proper name ascribes to the unmovable. Kripke called it a rigid designator, not displaceable. Say we proclaim that Slavoj Žižek is an opera singer, he will still be Slavoj Žižek, however we describe him. The possible to which Lacan refers in L'étourdit allows us to understand that if Slavoj Žižek has not been an opera singer, nothing stops us from conceiving a possible world in which he was. Here he would exist as a proper name. The proper name does not depend on the list of properties assigned to the person. Lacan introduces systematically for the first time in his writing the concept of jouissance, or how to designate the being of the subject without doing the same for the proper name. This is the lacking name which must be discovered, that is the name of jouissance, the name of my being as a being of jouissance. In the diagnostic, a subject is not designated, he rather is a clinical structure as we speak of an obsessive, an hysteric, a phobic. However, the true proper names in the clinic include the surplus of jouissance of a subject, its object a. When we refer to the Rat Man or to the Wolf Man, we give them proper names which have nothing to do with the Name-of-the-Father. Says Miller, "the unconscious repetition, transference, and drive, names we owe to Freud, are the names of the father in psychoanalysis." If S-barred, a, capital A, barred capital A, were transformed into the new names of the father, it was because of an irony to which Lacan became accustomed, without much hope that someday psychoanalysis could reach a scientific state. With Alain Badiou in his formulas of L'étourdit, the real may be designated as impossibility. I quote, "And this is why one of the synonyms for
I am Josefina Ayerza, the editor of Lacanian Ink. Let me thank you all for being here tonight. Hello. Oh, that’s much better now. Let me thank you all for being here tonight and a very special thanks to Jack Tilton for his genuine enthusiasm with hosting these events. For years now, Lacanian Ink has been publishing writers, philosophers, poets, painters, art critics, musicians from very different latitudes, to the point that we have a dialogue going on. This dialogue is open enough to not belong in a place, I would say, though it happens in New York City, and this is how it includes every one of us, how it is us. Lacanian Ink is taking up on the names of the father. It is not ready from the printer, so we made a dummy for you to look through the pages tonight. The Names-of-the-Father is Jacques Lacan's very succinct seminar which lasted a day. It consists of the one lesson. It doesn't have a number. As you know, we go from Seminar Anxiety, to Seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Lacan didn't want to number it. Jacques-Alain Miller in his article that directly addresses the story says, "this seminar does not exist." Do we want to say that from then on and forever there is a hole in Lacan's teaching, in the series of his seminars? Lacan liked to interpret, provoke his audience. It wasn't by chance that I couldn't give my seminar on the names of the father, as if to give that seminar would have been in some way impossible, as if there existed a curse. For Lacan, there is a correspondence between the seminar, The Names-of-the-Father, and what was happening to him at the moment, that is his excommunication. As if the bar placed in his name would necessarily be followed by another on the seminar of the Names-of-the-Father. The Name-of-the-Father divides into the theory of the father and the theory of the name. If we refer to the paternal metaphor, it is the function of metaphorizing the desire of the mother, of barring it. If to the event of naming, Kripke’s theory of dice, soon pointed out by Lacan, brings in the function of a pure signifier of the proper name to emerge in mathematical logic. Calling on the logic of the impossible, the proper name ascribes to the unmovable. Kripke called it a rigid designator, not displaceable. Say we proclaim that Slavoj Žižek is an opera singer, he will still be Slavoj Žižek, however we describe him. The possible to which Lacan refers in L'étourdit allows us to understand that if Slavoj Žižek has not been an opera singer, nothing stops us from conceiving a possible world in which he was. Here he would exist as a proper name. The proper name does not depend on the list of properties assigned to the person. Lacan introduces systematically for the first time in his writing the concept of jouissance, or how to designate the being of the subject without doing the same for the proper name. This is the lacking name which must be discovered, that is the name of jouissance, the name of my being as a being of jouissance. In the diagnostic, a subject is not designated, he rather is a clinical structure as we speak of an obsessive, an hysteric, a phobic. However, the true proper names in the clinic include the surplus of jouissance of a subject, its object a. When we refer to the Rat Man or to the Wolf Man, we give them proper names which have nothing to do with the Name-of-the-Father. Says Miller, "the unconscious repetition, transference, and drive, names we owe to Freud, are the names of the father in psychoanalysis." If S-barred, a, capital A, barred capital A, were transformed into the new names of the father, it was because of an irony to which Lacan became accustomed, without much hope that someday psychoanalysis could reach a scientific state. With Alain Badiou in his formulas of L'étourdit, the real may be designated as impossibility. I quote, "And this is why one of the synonyms for
unknown
up-sense in Lacan's text is up-sex-sense," the formula which says that there is no sexual relation. Mehdi Belhaj Kacem descants on Giorgio Agamben’s forthcoming Profanations. Homo Sacer is the paradox of politics, even when it is the people, the sovereign needs a sort of borderline character to set up the order of the state. The law is irrelevant to Homo Sacer. Slavoj Žižek comments the ongoing rise of religious fundamentalism. Its true danger does not reside in the fact that it poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic belief itself. In Lacan as a reader of Hegel, Žižek alludes to the analyst as the Hegelian master who adopts the stance of a passive observer, does not intervene directly into the content, but merely manipulates the scene so that the content confronted with its own inconsistencies destroys itself. Cathy Opie and I discuss the work of Catherine Opie. The Names-of-the-Father here involved with a self-portrait of mother and baby child while being fed at the breast. With you, Slavoj Žižek on Danish Pastry or the Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason. Thank you very much, I hope this works. Thank you very much, I prepared quite a long serious speech because I was informed a week or two ago that for technical reasons the other event is not happening, so this is the only appearance and so on, so I will try to squeeze everything into this one and what I want to do is something very traditional, maybe a little bit boring, to give some coordinates referring to some of my published works but giving a new reading to it, to what I refer to as to how are we to relate to belief and violence today. First, my thanks to Josefina and to Jack Tilton, he must remember we were planning this event already, it must be almost ten years now I think, so finally the letter did arrive at its destination, and thanks to all of you, I'm even tempted to thank the paintings, at least that one, that person for obvious reasons. Okay, let me start with a brief explanation of what do I mean by the title, that pastry part. When I visited the University of Champaign in Illinois a couple of years ago, I was taken to a restaurant which offered on the menu "Tuscany," like Diane Lane getting late married, you know, "Tuscany fries." Asking friends what this is, they explained it to me. The owner wanted to appear patriotic apropos the French opposition to the US attack on Iraq, so he followed the US Congress and renamed french fries "freedom fries." However, the progressive members of the faculty, majority of his customers, threatened to boycott the place if freedom fries remained on the menu. Now, the owner didn't want to lose his customers, but he also didn't want to appear non-patriotic, so he invented simply, he told me, a new name, "Tuscany fries," which sounded European plus echoing the vague idyllic films on Tuscany and so on. In a move similar to the one of the US Congress, you probably know that Iranian authorities recently ordered the bakeries to change the name of Danish pastry, because of those Muhammad caricatures, to "Roses of Muhammad." All I'm saying is that it would be nice to live in a world in which the US Congress would change the name of french fries into Muhammad’s fries and the Iranian authorities Danish pastry into freedom pastry. But the prospect of tolerance is the one in which our stores and restaurant menus unfortunately will be more and more full of different versions of Tuscany fries. Why? Because I claim we tend to perceive the problem that underlies different violent outbursts
up-sense in Lacan's text is up-sex-sense," the formula which says that there is no sexual relation. Mehdi Belhaj Kacem descants on Giorgio Agamben’s forthcoming Profanations. Homo Sacer is the paradox of politics, even when it is the people, the sovereign needs a sort of borderline character to set up the order of the state. The law is irrelevant to Homo Sacer. Slavoj Žižek comments the ongoing rise of religious fundamentalism. Its true danger does not reside in the fact that it poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic belief itself. In Lacan as a reader of Hegel, Žižek alludes to the analyst as the Hegelian master who adopts the stance of a passive observer, does not intervene directly into the content, but merely manipulates the scene so that the content confronted with its own inconsistencies destroys itself. Cathy Opie and I discuss the work of Catherine Opie. The Names-of-the-Father here involved with a self-portrait of mother and baby child while being fed at the breast. With you, Slavoj Žižek on Danish Pastry or the Euthanasia of Tolerant Reason. Thank you very much, I hope this works. Thank you very much, I prepared quite a long serious speech because I was informed a week or two ago that for technical reasons the other event is not happening, so this is the only appearance and so on, so I will try to squeeze everything into this one and what I want to do is something very traditional, maybe a little bit boring, to give some coordinates referring to some of my published works but giving a new reading to it, to what I refer to as to how are we to relate to belief and violence today. First, my thanks to Josefina and to Jack Tilton, he must remember we were planning this event already, it must be almost ten years now I think, so finally the letter did arrive at its destination, and thanks to all of you, I'm even tempted to thank the paintings, at least that one, that person for obvious reasons. Okay, let me start with a brief explanation of what do I mean by the title, that pastry part. When I visited the University of Champaign in Illinois a couple of years ago, I was taken to a restaurant which offered on the menu "Tuscany," like Diane Lane getting late married, you know, "Tuscany fries." Asking friends what this is, they explained it to me. The owner wanted to appear patriotic apropos the French opposition to the US attack on Iraq, so he followed the US Congress and renamed french fries "freedom fries." However, the progressive members of the faculty, majority of his customers, threatened to boycott the place if freedom fries remained on the menu. Now, the owner didn't want to lose his customers, but he also didn't want to appear non-patriotic, so he invented simply, he told me, a new name, "Tuscany fries," which sounded European plus echoing the vague idyllic films on Tuscany and so on. In a move similar to the one of the US Congress, you probably know that Iranian authorities recently ordered the bakeries to change the name of Danish pastry, because of those Muhammad caricatures, to "Roses of Muhammad." All I'm saying is that it would be nice to live in a world in which the US Congress would change the name of french fries into Muhammad’s fries and the Iranian authorities Danish pastry into freedom pastry. But the prospect of tolerance is the one in which our stores and restaurant menus unfortunately will be more and more full of different versions of Tuscany fries. Why? Because I claim we tend to perceive the problem that underlies different violent outbursts
Slavoj Žižek
as the one of the right measure between the respect for the other versus our own freedom of expression. And I think to conceive in this way the problem is in itself a mystification. No wonder that upon a closer analysis the two opposites reveal their secret solidarity. That is to say, on the one hand, the language of respect is the language of liberal tolerance. Respect only has a meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree. So when the offended ones demand respect for their otherness, they accept the frame of the liberal tolerant discourse. On the other hand, blasphemy is not only an attitude of hatred, of trying to strike, hit the other where it hurts. It is a strictly religious attitude. It only works within the convolutions of a religious space. So my point here is that what lurks at the horizon of this obsession with respect is a nightmarish prospect of a society regulated by a perverse pact between religious fundamentalists and the politically correct preachers of tolerance and respect for the other's beliefs. A society immobilized by the concern for not hurting the other, no matter how cruel, superstitious this other is. A society in which individuals are engaged in regular rituals of witnessing their victimization. So how are we to break this deadlock? Is the problem where does the problem reside? Does it reside where William Butler Yeats located it, when he wrote, you remember his famous line from "The Second Coming," "A blood-dimmed tide is loosed," and then as the poem goes on, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." It may appear that this is a good description of our today's split between anemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. The best are no longer able to fully engage themselves while the worst engage in racist, sexist, and so on fanaticism. However, are the so-called fundamentalists really fundamentalists in an authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature, I claim, which is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists from Tibetan Buddhists to even, why not, Amish in the United States. The absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believer's way of life. Since they really believe that they found their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers? Why should they envy them? When, for example, a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he is far from condemning him, he just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to a true fundamentalist, the pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of non-believers. One can feel that in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. So again, my first reaction, you know, it’s the same like when people, when conservatives deplore the lack of family values. My reaction is not no, this is a fundamentalist idea, what about, I don't know, homosexual marriages, open families? No, my idea is who are they to talk about family values? It’s the neoliberal economic program which, as every economist will tell you, did more than all hedonists and homosexuals together to destroy any serious meaning of the term, whatever this could mean, family values. So again, the first line of defense should be not even to admit to them that they truly are fundamentalists if this term has any full meaning. For example, look at a TV preacher figure like Jimmy Swaggart or whatever. I think it's ridiculous to call him a fundamentalist. Is he not, and people like him, a clear example of how the very way they deliver the message undermines the message? In their message they can preach against tolerance, ego trip, and so on; they stage one big ego trip in their preaching. So it is here I think that Yeats' diagnosis falls short. Passionate intensity of a violent mob or a violent fundamentalist preacher bears witness precisely to the lack of a true conviction. We do not believe where we seem to believe. We should problematize the notion of belief. How? Where is belief today? Let me recapitulate some themes from my last book, *Parallax View*. Let me begin with a joke known, I know to all of you, nonetheless I have to return to it to give an additional twist to it. You know that joke, classical joke, about a man who believed to be himself to be a grain of seed, taken to mental institution, finally convinced that he is not a grain but a man. When he is cured, he returns immediately back, trembling with scare. "There is a chicken outside and I'm afraid the chicken will eat me." The doctor says, "but you know now very well you are not a grain of seed but a man." "I know that," replies the guy, "but does the chicken know it?" I think this is what happens in psychoanalysis. It's easy, and this is where we fake with our beliefs today, it is easy to convince ourselves. The problem is to convince, if you want pathetically, the chicken in ourselves, the symptom. This is where maybe even Freud was wrong in the sense of too simple, when he quotes in his well-known short text on *Verneinung*, the negation, denial, remember that how when Freud asks a patient in whose dream a woman appears, who is that woman, the famous patient's reply, "I don't know who that woman is, but it's not my mother." I mean as my friends are telling me, today it’s practically the opposite. A typical patient would tell you if you ask him this question, "I don't know who this woman in my dream is, but I'm sure she has something to do with my mother," like we confess it in advance. But, you know, but the mother shouldn't know about it. There's the catch, there is the belief. Why is this so important? Because I claim that this same structure of a belief which is not subjectively assumed, which operates but displaced onto another, objectified belief. This kind of belief which must be minimally institutionalized, again in my other book, maybe some of you know it, *The Ticklish Subject*, I quote a nice example which happened to a friend of mine, a Slovene politician, when he was doing the usual thing in these horrible democratic elections, being friendly to voters and so on. An old lady came to him and said can he do her a favor, as a politician, that on her house the street number of her house, this old lady's house, was and she said, "I think this is bringing me bad luck," you know, every time there was a burglary in that house, a lightning, "something is wrong, can he arrange with the local authorities to change the number into, I don't know, 23A or whatever?" Then my friend told this lady, "But why don't you do it secretly, paint over and she said, "No, I tried it, it doesn't work, it must be done properly." You know, this belief in there must be an institution who will do it for us. Incidentally, this is why I don't get you Americans here. You say "In God We Trust," no you don't. Whenever I'm in a hotel, you know, you have 12th floor and then 14th. But whom are you kidding? God knows that is really I mean okay, but that's another question. Now let me go into more serious waters. The reason why I'm still a Marxist is that I claim that this structure of belief, of displaced belief, you find it in what Marx described as commodity fetishism. Here is the very beginning of the famous subdivision four of the Chapter of *Capital* on fetishism of the commodity and its secret. I quote, "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing, but its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." End of quote. Now I hope if you listened even vaguely to these lines, I hope you were a little bit surprised by them. And I think this brings us to the very core of what is still, to use these pompous words, alive in Marx, in Marxist theory. Namely, they do not do what we would expect of a critical atheist materialist thinker. Marx's thesis is not, let's take a religious myth, illusion, and let's demystify it, let's demonstrate how this spiritual formation was generated by actual life, real-life struggles and so on. Marx says the exact opposite, almost. He says here, no, not a thing may appear to you sublime, divine, but it really is just a process of real-life struggles, social alienation, whatever. He says exactly the opposite. He says a commodity appears to you an ordinary thing, nothing mysterious in it, but the analysis brings out its theological niceties, metaphysical subtleties. So as it were, in order to criticize religion, you must first discover as it were the religious dimension of everyday social life. And this I think is the complication in Marx of which even today we are not yet fully aware, how again the point of Marx is not just that of demystification, but of us becoming aware of a mystification of which we are not even aware that it determines our acts. So what, I hope you guessed the link between this paradox, which is a very nice paradox of Marx, namely the paradox which forces us to introduce a complication into the simple duality between appearance and reality. For Marx, when Marx defines ideology as false appearance, when he says in his formula for ideology, "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es," they don't know it but nonetheless they are doing it. He doesn't mean this simple stupidity, yes they don't know what they are doing, they are doing one thing but ideology means you think you are doing another thing. No, ideology is in acting. Ideology is not in what you are thinking, ideology is in what you are doing. Ideology is embodied in what you are doing. Ideology are metaphysical presuppositions, whatever, that you apply, follow in your doing. So that you see the point which I often develop in my work, referring to that wonderful Daniel Dennett's opposition which he mentions only mockingly, in a mocking way, in *Consciousness Explained*, in that book, between the way things appear to you and the way things *really* appear to you. That the gap is in appearance. It's not simply things appear to you in some way and things are really. The paradox then is that things may appear to you in a certain way and things really are like that, but you are still in ideology, because you don't know how things really appear to you. What do I mean by this? It sounds frustrating. Okay, let me take you an extremely simple example from psychoanalysis. Let's take a typical adolescent who is frustrated by his father. All the time he is trying to, when he talks to you he tells you, "my father is a jerk, an impotent coward," and so on. That's how his father appears to him. I mean, it's reasonable to suppose that his father is that, is like this. So appearance fits reality, but nonetheless it’s false. Why? Because the moment then you encounter this same boy in actual interaction with his father, you will detect a totally different attitude of some awe, fear, love even, whatever. A total, so you get the point, what he is not aware of is how his father really appears to him. And it’s the same, for example, with racism. Today we are all liberals, we like Arabs, we like Jews, we respect Islam, we respect Jehovah, whatever. And they are to be respected, you know what I mean, but in between then you have that famous "but nonetheless they get on my nerves." It’s this third level which is crucial. And okay, what has this to do with the chicken? A lot. When a critical Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, let me recapitulate, the Marxist reproach is not: the commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people. No, the reproach is rather: you may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations, and the commodity really is just an embodiment of social relations. But this is not how commodity really appears to you. In your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers and so on and so on. In other words, we can easily imagine a bourgeois subject visiting a course on Marxism where he is taught about commodity fetishism. However, after the finished course, he comes back to his teacher complaining that he is still a victim of commodity fetishism. The teacher tells him, "but you know how things stand, commodities are only expressions of social relations, there is nothing magic about it." And the pupil replies, "of course I know that, but the commodities I'm dealing with seem not to know it." It’s exactly the same logic as that of a chicken. And to refer to a wonderful text by my Slovene Lacanian colleague Alenka Zupančič, which you can find in the book which is now on sale even, I think, *The Silent Partner*, the text on Hegel, we can imagine the same paradox apropos God himself. Let’s imagine an enlightened society of terror, of revolutionary terror, where a man is put in prison because he believes in God. With different measures, but above all by means of an enlightened explanation, the man is brought to the knowledge that God doesn't exist. He is then dismissed, but he comes running back and explains that he is scared, still scared that God will punish him. The teacher said, "but now you know, you were trained in Marxism that God doesn't exist." The guy replies, "I know that, but God, does God know that, that he doesn't exist?" And this is not a joke, this is how it functions. We need, the true problem of atheism, of this belief, is not for us not to believe, is to have our chicken not to believe, how should I put it, to not to, it’s easy for us to be dissolute, whatever you want, transgressing everything. It’s much more difficult to renounce this, what in Lacanian terms we can call the subject-supposed-to-believe, that another will believe for us, believes for us. And I claim, my crazy reading, that this exactly is what happens in Christianity, that, I follow here my beloved Gilbert Keith Chesterton, that moment at the cross when Christ utters his, "Father, Father, why did you forsake me?" This is the moment where God himself does not believe in himself. I quote Chesterton: "There is only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist." It's Christianity. So in other words, the paradox here is that all other religions have atheists in the sense people who do not believe in them. Only in Christianity God himself has to go through this atheist phase, which is why it would be interesting I think apropos atheism to turn the debate into an unexpected maybe direction, and to ask a question, and this doesn't devalue atheism, namely, to differentiate different forms of atheism with regard to their religious background. And I'm an atheist, so the message is not "oh it all depends on a religion," no, but nonetheless isn't it, for example, when you take a figure like Spinoza or Freud, atheists, isn't it nonetheless clear, you smell it immediately as it were, that this is a Jewish atheism? There is a specifically Jewish flavor. If you take early Heidegger, not early, okay, *Sein und Zeit*, *Being and Time*, after his split, after he renounced his Catholicism to which he later returned, but in that period, isn't *Being and Time* clearly a work, and I think it is one of the most atheist books of all time, but it’s so clearly Protestant atheism, namely all these topics: authentic responsibility, assuming one's fate through anxiety, through awareness that we are thrown into the world, there is no external guarantee of our success, isn't this a typically Protestant atheism? One can argue then that there is also a typically Catholic atheism. For example, if you ask me, *Multitude*, Toni Negri is for me so clearly a Catholic atheist. And at some point I thought that there are no Muslim atheists. Now I discovered through conversation with my Arab friends that there are, that they even are the first who have a specific word, term for atheism, something that I was told literally means those who believe in nothing or something like that. So again, I think maybe this should be our approach, to differentiate atheisms. If we differentiate atheisms, then it’s clear to see how today's era is, I claim, not only not an atheist era, but it’s even less atheist than prior eras. We are all ready to indulge in utter skepticism, cynical distance, we accept the world without illusions and so on and so on, we are ready to violate all ethical constraints and so on and so on. But we are always protected by the silent awareness that, to use this Lacanian term, the big Other is ignorant about it. The big Other continues to believe for us. Of course, the perfect formula for this objectified belief was provided by Niels Bohr, who you probably know the story, when a friend visited him at his countryside house, saw there a horseshoe, this sign of good luck preventing evil spirits to enter the house, and surprised asked Niels Bohr, "Are you crazy? Aren't you a scientist? How can you believe in this?" Niels Bohr's answer was: "I'm not an idiot, of course I don't believe that horseshoe brings luck." He said, "I also do not believe in it, but I have it there because," then the friend asked him, "Okay, if you don't believe in it, why do you have it there?" His answer: "I have it there because I was told that it works even if one does not believe in it." That’s the catch. That's how it works today, democracy, blah blah, none of us has, you get my point, none of us has to believe in it. You just objectified the belief, as it were literally our chicken, commodities, things, institutions, they believe for us. And I think this maybe is the most dangerous belief, because it's belief with a false freedom of atheism, belief of which you are not even aware. And why I so obsessively insist in all my books on this topic? Because if nothing else, I claim that this changes the entire debate between East, not so much Far East as Arab East, Islamist us, where it's claimed they believe, we don't believe. No, the distinction is clearly within the domain of belief. Also, when we say we live in a post-ideological era, yes, if you understand with ideology, but even there I have my doubts, big systematic philosophical whatever systems. At this level we may be less ideological. But if you understand by ideology beliefs which determine our actual social reality, the way we interact with other people, then I think we believe more than ever. Here, the next step I think we should even turn around this old Pascal formula which I interpreted endlessly in my work, you know, this famous Pascal's advice to non-believers who want to believe: you cannot believe, no problem, act as if you believe, kneel down, obey the ritual, and belief will come by itself. I think that in our era we are terrified by assuming directly a belief. Which is why we use this Pascalian advice de facto in an opposite sense. It's not you do not believe, okay, follow the ritual, as Alcoholics Anonymous put it, fake it till you make it, follow the ritual, act as if then. No, it’s rather you really believe, do you find it heavy, too obsessive that you believe? No problem, act as if you believe and you will get rid of your belief, because through the ritual the institution will take over the belief. Like, you know, just go automatically repeat it or even better as some in the Orient do it, do belief through others, like put it on a that prayer, put it on a paper, turn it around in a praying wheel or whatever, and you can think about sex, whatever, but you believe through the other. And I even claim that throughout the history of Catholicism, this is how this is the secret if you want Catholic teaching on off on marriage, if you read it between the lines. It's not you have to marry this woman but you don't really love her. Okay then, do as if you love her, go through the ritual, sleep with her, and love will arrive by itself. No, it’s rather are you passionately in love with that woman or man or whatever? Do you find it too oppressive? Because, you know, there is a truth in it, it’s horrible to be really in love, believe me. It’s like all your life is destabilized, you all. Then the idea is okay, you want to get rid of your love? Marry her or him. Follow the ritual, and it’s done automatically and you can start dreaming about other things. If you have problems go to the pro, to a prostitute or whatever. I think that's the that's the secret teaching if you want, and more about this soon, of a certain Catholicism. So this is, this is, this would be almost I claim the different modalities of how we believe through a denial. One would be again this symbolic objectivization of belief. You externalize belief into a certain symbolic ritual whatever so that you no longer have to assume it fully subjectively. Another more interesting distance would have been not so much big noble beliefs but the obscene unwritten beliefs, convictions like racist, sexist convictions. The way they function is we of course publicly deny them, disavow them, even oppose them actively, but from time to time they nonetheless pop up in the censored form, in the form of the negation. We evoke them and quickly discard them. There was a wonderful example, maybe some of you remember it, of this a couple of months ago on, to be precise, September William Bennett, you know who is William Bennett, a well-known American gambler, compulsive gambler. Among other things he writes boring books, *The Book of Virtues*, but no seriously don't you know, he was indebted for half a million, which is why then people discovered that in *The Book of Virtues* gambling is significantly not mentioned among the themes there. Okay, you know what he says on the 28th of September of I quote, on his call-in program *Morning in America*—not "Morning" like melancholy but "Morning" like not the evening, no—"But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do. But your crime rate would go down." End of quote. Now of course then he immediately denied it. He says, "I didn't mean it, it was just evoked as an absurdity," and so on. But you can get it, the whole the whole pleasure was he had his cake and eat it, no, he was able to blurt out his racist conviction at the same time withdrawing from it. This is, this when he denies it, when he says "but I didn't mean it, I just," this is what Freud meant with *Verneinung*, with negation. Then we should even go a step further here. Not only we have this personal obscene, okay it's not personal, it's systematic, it's part of a racist racist collective unconscious if I may use this prohibited term, the belief that blacks like rabbits breed too much or whatever, but I think it’s even more institutionalized here. This, let's call it, the unconscious of an institution. This is why I am so interested and with all my respect for Christianity, my God I've written books about it, with this cases of priest pedophilia. I think they are a much more mysterious phenomenon than it may appear. In what sense? It is not simply as it may appear that there are not enough priests today so the church has to accept whoever is there and there may be some of them who are gay pedophiliac, so okay what can we do, people are people. No, I claim, and I spoke with some people in my country, ex-Yugoslavia—not my country, some other ex-Yugoslav republics—who did a research on it, and they told me of a couple of much more paradoxical examples where when a guy joined, when went to study theology to become a priest, he was straight, I mean in the common sense, heterosexual. Then it was that a couple of years being a priest turned turned him pedophiliac, homosexual. That is to say, it's literally the obscene underside, the unconscious of the institution itself. I think this is the question to be addressed. And I'm not here engaged in any cheap Catholic bashing and so on. This idea was approached very nicely by a guy, a Catholic whom I admire very much, Gary Wills from Chicago, who wrote a wonderful analysis of how you cannot separate these cases of pedophilia from Catholic Church institution, how the whole institutional apparatus is mobilized. So again, this would have been another thing always to bear in mind apropos of beliefs, how every belief is as it were supplemented by its obscene underside. I will not dwell too long on it because this is the eternal topic of my work, but just to give an idea what I mean by it. What fascinates me more and more, even more than already in all my books when I make this point is how not only it goes not only for beliefs but also for social rules and so on. Do you know, did you notice how how should I put it, whenever you have a certain network of social rules which regulate a certain field, you always also need to be really in an additional set of rules which tells you how to really deal with these rules? Because, you know, rules are never unambiguous. Like to be very primitive, when father tells you don't mess with girls, my God that's a big enigma for adolescent, what does he really mean? He usually means do it but do it discreetly, secret, you know what I mean. Prohibitions never mean directly what they mean. They can be a secret call, do it. They can mean do it but do it hypocritically. Very rarely they really mean just don't do it. So I think that the true integration into a certain symbolic field is precisely when you not only know the rules, but know this secret meta-rules of how are the rules to be taken, which rules are there only to be violated so that you are simply an idiot so that the safest way to be excluded is to follow the rules, to just simply follow the rules. So this is the second aspect. Okay, but now you will tell me but with all this my skepticism nobody believes, we only always believe through a displacement and so on and so on. Now you will tell me but nonetheless there are so-called fundamentalists who believe. Now I come to the point mentioned by Josefina. I claim no, they don't believe. Now you will say am I crazy, but they are ready to die for it and so on. My point is here a very simple one. They don't believe, they know. Which is why I think, as you quoted me, Josefina, they are a threat to belief. What do I mean by it? I started, when I started to read some so-called fundamentalists, what attracted me is the way they, some of them have in the in the title of their institution or whatever sect the name "science," you know, Scientology, Christian Science. First I thought it's a bad joke, but then I became convinced it was not, there is a truth in it. The truth is that what I found with all so-called fundamentalists that I know is that, to cut a long story short, they systematically reduce articles of genuine faith to simple statements of knowledge. For them, to be somewhat pathetically Christian, Christ has arisen from the death. It's not this Kierkegaardian crazy wager, "it goes against all our knowledge but in a crazy act of engagement I put my wager of it." No, for them this is the same fact as this is the DNA structure of that person and so on and so on. It's a simple, it’s simple knowledge. Which is why incidentally they don't have any problems in, and this I think is maybe a feature which identifies so-called fundamentalist at the most well fundamental level, namely that for them a direct link, continuity between science and religion is never a problem. For example, you know Turin Shroud, my favorite object. Every authentic Christian, especially Catholic, must be and is horrified by the idea that it would have proven to be authentic. Because if there were serious reasons to consider that the Turin Shroud is authentic, that is to say that the stains on it still discernible are really the stains of the blood of Jesus Christ, then with today's science means instruments of science, can you imagine the obscene possibilities? The first one is what about who is Christ's father? It becomes an empirical question, we analyze the DNA and we get it. And it’s a nightmare, you will discover it was some Egyptian slave of Mary or whatever, better not to think about it. But for a fundamental, I spoke with one fundamentalist and he told me they are not only not afraid of this, they already have an answer they told me. The answer is that Virgin Mary's DNA will be redoubled because Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit doesn't have a doesn't have a DNA or whatever. You see my point, this is for me the spirit of fundamentalism, they don't have a problem. For example, on a recent visit to Israel, friends took me to a wonderful religious group convinced in the literal truth of the Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah will come when a calf, calf with totally red hair will be born. So you know what they are doing? With all the most utmost modern science, they are doing all biogenetic intervention to have a calf with totally red hair born. This is fundamentalism, no problem, you just see simple continuity. So what gets lost here? What is for me a belief? For me a belief is a crazy ethical wager, it's in when we use the term belief in an authentic sense, it's crazy to say "I believe in it but I don't care about it." Belief is by definition an engaged belief. Let me give you one or two pathetic examples. Anne Frank when she said those wonderful lines we all maybe know them if you read the book, "Even if I see all the horrors the Nazis are doing, so many bad people, I still believe there is a divine spark in every human being." This is belief, totally counter-factual. You have there very, the least we can say about Nazis, not exactly the best people, very mean people, and nonetheless you put it. Or human rights, I claim this is an article of belief, belief in what sense? Precisely belief in what Badiou would have said a kind of axiomatic engagement. It's counter-factual, I mean you look the people around, where is the stupid equality? We are all different, one is stupid, one is ugly, the other is not and so on. Are you aware what an irrational wager this is to say "No, they all have the same human dignity," and so on and so on. This engagement is belief, and there is always something of, to use this old saying, "credo quia absurdum," I believe because it's absurd. This is authentic belief, and every if you want revolutionary act, every emancipatory act is in this sense a counter-factual belief. John Brown was a believer, my American hero. John Brown, you know the one who I think you United you came closest to my beloved European Jacobinism, you know, like politics with a little bit of terror, no, in his case which is why he is the repressed one. But for him again, the equality of the blacks, it's very interesting to read him, you can sense the difference between him and standard white liberals who had this patronizing "oh how the blacks suffer, let's create the conditions for their equality, let's educate them, let's help them." No, for John Brown it was, "Let's do it immediately. Let's immediately treat them as equals." None of that stuff. So you see my point, this ethically engaged absurd Kierkegaardian if you want aspect of belief, this is what gets lost in fundamentalism. So in this sense what Josefina quoted at the beginning, in this sense I think that the true danger of so-called fundamentalists, they are not truly a danger to secular knowledge. That debate, ridiculous as it somehow may appear, sometimes may appear with creationism and so on, nonetheless no, they argue, they it's easy for them, for fundamentalists, I claim, to accept the language of science. They are already, the moment you argue "oh but those stones prove that Earth was created only years ago," or whatever, you already accept you already speak the opponent's language. Belief is already lost there, they are the threat to belief, and belief is what is effectively threatened by fundamentalists. So these paradoxes of belief, which is why incidentally I think that not only atheists can believe, but maybe at some level at least and Derrida said somewhere this I think, atheists are the ones who believe in the most radical way. Why? Because for me to be an atheist is not not to believe, but to believe utterly without guarantee. You don't need any big guarantee, you just put fully engage yourself in your belief. So this paradox of belief also I think allows us to complicate the link between belief and violence. It is not simply that the dogmatic belief generates violence since there are no limits if you really think that the things are the way you believe, while skepticism and ironic distance constrain your violence. I think the roots of or of violence are elsewhere. Violence is a very mysterious phenomenon. It's a typically human phenomenon. You know, I don't think that animals are violent. Of course they are, I mean my God, we know all the stories, sharks and so on. But it’s not specifically human violence, it's more instrumental. What is violence? The first thing we should say is that violence, okay it's an old thing to say but it should be repeated precisely today when we had that exaggerated outcry about Muhammad caricatures and so on and so on, where there are lessons from those debates, not the usual lessons about should we be liberal, should we tolerate otherness. The first lesson is: what does this famous global informational village mean? Isn't the first lesson how we are all neighbors today, in the sense that the global village, the emergence of a global society, means in a first immediate approach, it means more conflicts, more violence? It means that when we with all our differences are all of a sudden thrown together, as it were too close to each other, violence tends to explode. Which is why I tend to agree with a German non-conservative philosopher—but as a Marxist I don't have any problem agreeing with him—when he claims that maybe we should abandon or at least neglect a little bit this multiculturalist urge to understand each other and to supplement it with the attitude of getting out of each other's way, of that we should invent a new code of discretion. Or a very nice provocative thought, maybe what we need is more of alienation. Not this urge, and I think you New Yorkers are here one of the original original sinners, you invented I think one of the most horrible institutions which ruined the art of acting, which is called that Strasberg Studio or what, you know, this earth this violent self-expression or whatever. No, I mean, are we aware how helpful this rules of code of discretion is? I remember when the last time when I visited Israel and Palestine and whatever you want there Ramallah, but I didn't see, I mean I'm an I'm a monster culturally, I I saw none of those walls and so on and whatever they have there this stuff, that's not for me. I did a much simpler thing. A friend took me to a street where on North of the center, where one side is Israeli, the Jewish, the other side is Palestinian. And I sat there in a cafe for hours, and it was a wonderful lesson of how people who hate each other, with a little bit of good old-fashioned alienation, rules of discretion, you know, what interested me is they cannot shoot each other all the way, they must have established learned some rules of discretion how you how you survive. So that would be my first lesson. I mean, why should for me it's a very positive attitude to say I don't want to another human being, I don't want to know too much about it. There are limits. It's, I don't know, maybe I'm a monster here, but when somebody, especially it happens to me in universities often, again in this country, that a student approached me, approaches me and starts telling me about his sexual troubles if I can help him and so on, first I try the usual jokes. I tell him, "Look, I'm an obviously too nervous a madman, are you crazy to to confide in me?" no, whatever, but then more seriously I tell him, "Isn't there something don't you feel something horrible when all of a sudden another human person opens up himself or herself too much to you?" Now I'm not saying this isn't nice, but it should be selective, I claim. I don't want to understand the whole world, my God. I want to understand five, six people and that's quite enough, maybe even too much. So what I want to say is that this is why also I think in ethical topics, be it good or evil or even creativity, one should respect a certain limit. The vulgar for which is why let me take let me mention two films I hate both of them: *Schindler's List* and *Pollock* with Ed Harris, you know. Why? Both of them couldn't resist the obvious vulgarity. What do you find in *Schindler's List*? You remember it couldn't, you know you have that scene when Schindler is with his mistress on a hill above Kraków and observes down there how German SS units are penetrating the ghetto, and Spielberg, I was so sad, he couldn't resist the temptation of literally presenting the moment of Schindler's conversion from okay not bad guy but a manipulator to a good guy. You remember that famous black-and-white film, girl in a red dress and so on, "ah now oh he discovered human" and so on. In *Pollock*, if you remember, it’s even my worst fears were realized. I remember, I cannot prove it to you, believe me, before seeing the film, I told a friend, "I'm sure they will do this ultimate vulgarity and try to paint the moment of the discovery of this, how do you call it, action painting." And of course they do it. Remember Ed Harris half-drunk spills over the the cup of color, "oh oh," and he he sees, "oh my God, ah that's it, I invent," you can see almost, it’s said that he doesn't say, "now I invent action painting." Couldn't they have a little bit of this reserve? This is I think again one lesson here, not because of any spiritual obscurantism or whatever, but because it's also the mystery for the other, because how should I put it, because I think the gap is here in reality itself. You you never know how you invent something. You know, it's like those magical processes like you add one one grain, one grain, and all of a sudden it’s a heap, but it’s always retroactive. All of a sudden it’s here. You should respect that limit. So that's the first thing: respect the limit. Don't try to understand everything and so on. I think often the true, if we want to talk about respect, kind of discretion, ignorance is the only appropriate respect. Second lesson: are we aware that that which gives to human aggressivity, to specifically human violence, its excess is precisely the symbolic dimension? That is to say, for example, what does a racist attack when he attacks an Arab, a Jew, a black, whomever? He does not simply attack a real person there, he attacks a symbolic construct embodied in that person. In other words, I tend more and more to disagree with this idea, Habermas, by Habermasians propagated and others, that language is originally, or rather at its most fundamental dimension, the idea is that at its most fundamental language is a means of equal symmetrical communication. I recognize you, you recognize me, that what is natural for language is symmetry, symmetry recognition, and that language becomes means of oppression, exclusion, power, domination, asymmetry, only through some kind of how should I put it secondary pathological twist when language is caught in social relations of power and so on and so on. No, I think there is an original dimension of violence in language as such. Language is not only the big unifier. It’s, okay not as Bush would like to be the big did he say "I am the big the decider" or what, no, but it's a big divider. That is to say, language is that which even if the two of us live in the same world, in the same street, even in the same apartment, we still can live in different worlds. This, here I think you can feel, you know how when you talk to a stranger, not stranger in the ethnic language sense, but somebody who is psychologically strange to you, you know this horrible shattering experience that even if you use the same words describing the same things, you know this sudden realization, but we are talking about totally different things. This is for me the original violence of language. Language is terribly twisted. Language introduces imbalance in the world. Language means we are here but we live in different worlds. And I think that this is again the next this is the dimension of violence with which we should take into account. So a more general conclusion from this: whenever we speak of violence, we always tend to focus on violence in the sense of what I'm tempted to call subjective violence. Somebody, be it an individual, a fanatical group, or an organized group—ah sorry, just one more thing about belief, which is why the my basic idea is the following one. You remember this situation, known to most of you, and they are beautiful situations almost in a poetic sense, when what is for me the zero level of meaning? It’s not when you know what it means. I claim when you know what something means meaning is already reduced to some kind of denotation, you lose it. It’s this gap when you know it means something but I don't know what it is. I claim that this is how it all begins. This perplexed, perplexed confrontation of what Jean Laplanche calls enigmatic signifier. It means something, I don't know what. And I claim that meaning comes afterwards, concrete determinate meaning. There is no meaning without this perplexity of what does it mean? But nonetheless let me go on. So we are I think all too focused on this subjective violence, again in all its variations, either this Hannah Arendtian Nazi executors, cold bureaucracy, all this sneering evil sadist, or agents, furious crowd, subjective violence, agents doing it. But I claim we should supplement it with at least two other modes of violence. The other would have been symbolic violence, not only symbolic violence in the sense of language serving as instrument of oppression and so on, but also more fundamentally language as the great divider imposing totally imposing different visions of world, constituting different worlds. In also in this sense symbolic violence. Then a third mode of violence, what in a good old Marxist way I'm tempted to call objective violence. Violence, how should I put it, violence inscribed into the very neutral functioning of society. Violence, for example to give a traditional Marxist example which is today more actual than ever, through some market speculations on futures, some rumor and so on, a whole industry goes bankrupt, a whole nation can get into economic trouble, hundreds of thousand of people lose jobs and so on and so on. That is to say, violence which is conditioned by the gap between what I call the real of capitalism, this purely virtual but nonetheless with very real effect functioning of capital in its abstract self-reproduction, and the concrete consequences. Here again we should not be too primitive materialists. The point of Marx is not when we read about Wall Street speculations we should never forget that behind this there are real people working, sweating. No, the true problem is the opposite one, that real people working, sweating, all of a sudden their their entire destiny can be totally changed by some abstract speculations, what happens in a totally virtual space. And we should never forget how to make a more general conclusion, how how should I put it, society in its normal functioning, in its apparently peaceful reproduction, already has to rely on this objective violence. When we say things just go on, this doesn't mean they just go on without violence. Violence is here. Which is why to use one of these pretentious without me really knowing what terms mean, metaphors, you know what, okay I don't know but I read about it, I think I half understand it, in quantum physics Higgs field, to simplify to the utmost the idea. The idea being that with some systems, physical systems, closed and so on, it can happen that zero costs more than something. That is to say, I simplify to the utmost, to maintain a system at its zero level of absolute peace, you already have to put energy into it to work. I think this is the best metaphor for what I'm trying to say. For a society to just reproduce itself at zero level so that nothing changes, a tremendous amount of violence has to be already has to be invested in it. This violence is literally invisible, because it’s a violence which sustains what within society is perceived as peace as such. And I think it’s very important to coordinate the visible subjective violence to this objective invisible violence. It’s really I think almost like another pretentious metaphor, matter, visible matter and dark matter, no. You have this invisible matter of violence which has to be here, and it’s crucial to see both sides. Why? Because otherwise you cannot understand the explosions of visible violence, which are mostly precisely frustrations at impotent acting out, at this irrational impenetrable objective invisible violence. But here things are even a little bit more complicated, in the sense that this gap between invisible objective violence and subjective violence, it’s not simply that it’s a bad thing in the sense that oh they should the two sides should come together. What if in our capitalist societies even this gap has a positive structural role? What do I mean by this? Recently my friend, French rational choice theorist, but he is a very bright guy, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, developed in his last book, which is an *A Metaphysics of Tsunamis* which is not yet translated into English, a wonderful critique of John Rawls. Claiming that if we only try to imagine a Rawlsian society, just society, a society structured along following the principles of Rawls, Rawls' theory of justice, that it would have been a catastrophic violent society. Why? He gives a very convincing example. You know what are Rawlsian principles? To simplify it, again. It’s that inequalities should be tolerated, allowed, but on two conditions. A, that they also help not only those who are better off but also those who are at the bottom of the social ladder. And B, that they should be based on your or mine achievements, contingent achievements, not simply on heredity or whatever. In other words, me and you, I should tolerate that you are richer than me A, if also I am a little bit better because of your wealth, at least a little bit better, and B, if you even if you were lucky in a contingent way, but nonetheless at least you earned the money as the result of your acts, not because you simply inherited it, whatever. Now, Dupuy claims such a society would immediately explode in violence. Why? And I think this is a true a deep insight into Rawls, and in a way he knows it because he admits it somewhere, it excludes resentment and envy. Namely, Rawls forgot to take a lesson from somebody whom I of course politically oppose but he wasn't a total idiot, Friedrich Hayek, who says who remarked very intelligently that the very fact that in capitalism we experience our failure or success and the other person's failure or success not simply as the result of his or her qualities of failures, but of irrationality of the market, market like fate, it was a chance. And Hayek says this obvious injustice that you succeed not because of what you did but because of pure chaotic incidents, he claims this is not an obstacle to capitalism, this is what makes it function, because it neutralizes resentment and envy. Imagine the Rawlsian society. If it’s a Rawlsian society, I would not only have to tolerate that you are richer than me, but I would have to admit it that you deserved it, and I would even have to be grateful to you for helping me a little bit. Our narcissism doesn't tolerate it. That would be an explosion of violence. It’s but you but if it’s irrational market then I can say "but I know you are an idiot, you were just lucky." This, you know, it saves my narcissism. So this is I think the first thing that we should the first thing that we should that we should take into account. The second thing to be taken into account with this violence is that things get even more tricky with how should I call it social definition of violence. What do we experience as violence? Now I'm approaching, don't be afraid, the end slowly. For example, an example from my book and then I go just a little bit into more original stuff. In my last book I develop this more in detail, how it's easy to make fun of fundamentalists, for example I always evoke this example so-called fundamentalist Taliban in Afghanistan when they were in power, you know how they prohibited women wearing metal heels. The idea is even if women are totally covered when they walk on hard, like stone, ground, the clicking of the heels can excite men too much and so on. Okay, total control, easy to laugh at this. But my God, what about our political correctness? Are we not in a same way, although with a different target, obsessed with how to control the intrusion of the other, how to keep a neighbor at a distance? The joke that I usually tell here and I verified it now, it did happen, I'm just not allowed to tell you which in Oregon, which campus, they really debated there this idea, now it's confirmed, this will be in my next book, detailed analysis, how to solve the problem of necrophiliacs, that they should develop, you know like all of do with our organs, that progressive people should make a testament, "if I die, my body should be given to a necrophiliac," and so on to enjoy. So the point is that this would be I claim politically correct sex: no harassment, dead body doesn't suffer, and so on, nobody. And that's the problem for me. Why this harassment for me again is an ambiguous word? It may appear harassment against violence and so on. But I think it's one of the clear ideological terms. What is for me an ideological term? Something very precise. Something which, to put it very simply, instead of introducing, clarifying a crucial distinction, mystifies it. Which a an ideological term is for me a term which blurs the crucial distinction by introducing as it were a wrong mis, for example, this is why in spite of all celebrations by my good friends Negri and Hardt, nomadic existence, nomadism is for me an ideological term, because it brings together the degenerate people like me who travel sometimes even business class around the world, I am very nomadic, and you know, a poor starving farmer who has to flee his country because of a civil war there and so on. Isn't there something obscene to put them put us together? It blurs the crucial distinction. I claim with harassment it's the same. On the one hand, of course there are rapes, brutal violence, there I don't have any problem: use police, torture, no problem there. But the moment you pass from this to this so-called multiculturalist tolerance where what I fear is that harassment no longer means this concrete rapes and so on, but a more general fear of the other's proximity, detectable in this, you know, I look you into the eye, visual rape, I talk too much, verbal rape, this the underlying as it were social ontology being just let us keep the other at the proper at the proper distance. This I think is what de facto tolerance today means. It means its exact opposite in our daily life. Tolerance means let's tolerate each other, let's not harass each other, which means let's not harass each other means remain at a proper distance, don't come too close to me. Which means precisely tolerance means precisely intolerance towards the other's over-proximity. And of course this goes for all humanity. This is for me one of the precious legacy of the Judeo-Islamic-Christian civilization, this idea of the neighbor not as simply another semblance, but this abyss of the neighbor, the monstrosity of another human being. The question then is of course why are we today so obsessed with this monstrosity? Why, in the same way, and I mention this in all my books, we want decaf coffee, beer without alcohol, fat-free cakes, why we also want, and that's the ultimate dream of for me politically correct multiculturalism, we want the decaffeinated other, as it were, no. Like the other who dances holistic dances and so on, not the other who drinks too much and beats his wife or whatever and so on, no. Isn't it that because something is happening at the level of the symbolic functioning of our society? I think that it is as if again we miss what I called at the beginning this logic of discretion, of politely maintaining a distance. And I think it's a reaction to this, what we are missing I think is precisely what Gore Vidal, the attitude best emphasized, best expressed for me in a wonderful answer to a vulgar journalist by Gore Vidal. You know, it's well-known he was mostly gay, but basically bisexual. And then at an in an interview, I remember reading it, a vulgar journalist ask him this stupid intrusive question, "Okay, what was your first sexual encounter? What was the partner, a man and a woman?" You know what was his answer? "I was too polite to ask." That’s the spirit. That’s the spirit that we need today, this precisely this polite this polite ignorance. The neighbor, the neighbor precisely in this inhuman dimension. Here Agamben is right. We need today practical anti-humanism, not in the sense we torture, but the true tolerance for me is precisely the tolerance for the inhuman side of the other. I don't mean sadistic other, but I mean this terrifying abyss of the other person. Again, think about when somebody declares love to you with all passion. Isn't it some admit it, even if you like it, for a split second before you say, "oh but the guy is not so ugly, I like him," there is this moment of horror to discover that you are the focus of another person's dreams? It's claustrophobic. Which is why for me one of the most terrifying poems, and if I were to be a poet, I would write a kind of negative version, reply to it, you know that again, if we were with Yeats, you know that William Butler Yeats, I mean if there is something I don't have sensitivity for is his poetry, but you know that one of the Yeats biggest hits, that "I'm a poor man so I don't have blah blah money, I only have dreams. So be careful when you walk, you are walking in my dreams," no. That's a nightmare to tell to somebody "you are walking in my dreams." It means you are totally in, you it’s suffocating. So the problem is precisely to tolerate this oppressive otherness of the other, this abyss of otherness. And here I think we can discern desperate attempts to erase this dimension, even where you wouldn't expect to find it. Now come a couple of nice concluding jokes. Did you read the book which was a big New York Times bestseller, I think the guy is Sam Harris, *The End of Faith* or *The End of Belief*? Okay, the end of whatever. Apparently a very anti-religious book and so on. But what interests me more is another aspect, is how this book tries to justify torture. It's Alan Dershowitz line, how should I put it. How? I think the logic is pretty terrifying, you should read the book. It's based on the distinction between our immediate being impressed by the suffering of others and our abstract correct insight into the other's suffering. He claims that Harris claims that when the reason that we find much more terrifying, for example, torturing a person in front of me like you, although maybe I wouldn't find it so terrifying, but that's another person, then to abstractly with a pushing the button killing, although even if you rationally know if I drop that bomb tens of thousand will die. I find it much easier than torturing a living person in front of me. And he claims in a very chilling way that this is the same epistemological mistake as that mistake of how large the moon is, no? and that we should simply learn the lesson. In the same way that we now know even if moon or sun seems small but they are really larger than earth and we act accordingly, in the same way we should take into account this gap and learn to abstract from the sympathy of the other. Here is one quote: "Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture in certain circumstances would seem to be not only permissible but necessary. Still, it does not seem any more acceptable in ethical terms than it did before. The reason for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion." So this is a chilling thought. Are you aware what he is saying, that if you find if I find now repulsive torturing you, it means kind of an evolutionary defect? It's the same I'm the same I'm morally at the same level of idiocy as the guy who thinks the moon is small. So he says, "it may be time to take out our rulers and hold them up to the sky." In other words, to learn the same lesson here. Now you will see the nightmarish for me consequence, because then in order to suspend this vulnerability to the physical display of other's suffering, Harris imagines an ideal truth pill, a torture which really I claim is an equivalent to decaffeinated coffee or diet coke, a kind of tortureless torture. A quote: "A drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment. It's really like my joke chocolate laxative, you know you have the thing and its own concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each laid down for what appeared to be an hour’s nap, only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a truth pill in the end?" End of quote. I find this pretty horrifying, why? For two reasons. One is the superficial one. Is the guy aware that I read this in a recent history of Soviet psychiatry. KGB already had it at famous Serbsky Institute. Not a pill, they injected to dissidents in the heart region a certain, don't ask me what, something which it looked just as if you are dozing, nothing horrible from outside. But it was absolute nightmare because it was some kind of a contraction where it seemed that, you know that it's pressing that you cannot breathe or whatever. That it was absolutely terrible but from outside nothing, so at least okay the guy is in good company, no? But the more horrible thing is that my thesis is to put it very simply the following one: what is really reduced, what disappears here? This is ethical catastrophe. What disappears here is simply the dimension of the neighbor, I claim. The other is the other whom you can calculate in this way, we torture him, no, in this abstract way measuring the distance like okay yes the moon up there is small but the moon is not our neighbor. Now his reply would have been "but other people are other neighbor also neighbor," no it’s those who are far away. No, it's more complex because in Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition, neighbor is not simply the one who is close to us. A neighbor is a much more refined thing. A neighbor is somebody no matter how far away he is, he is always too intrusive, too close, how should I put it? You know it's not physical proximity, it's this abyss which is always by definition threatening of another person. And again, what I claim is that what happens here is that the very dimension of the neighbor disappears. Now you will say but are these not extreme cases? Now let me just conclude with by way of replying to two other possible counter-arguments. The one is the realistic one and I'm always open to it, I don't have any problems with cruel realism. I mean I think that isn't there a time to start also to criticize Bush, I say this as a leftist, from a realistic point of view? Look, let's cut the crap. What did Bush effectively do with Iraq war? Now it's clear: he delivered de facto Iraq into the hands of pro-Iranian forces. So what about a little bit of paranoia, no? I mean, what if Bush is like somebody told me I haven't seen it that in the last installments of the president himself is the traitor and so on. I mean how could he have been so stupid? This was predictable. That's first but. So along the same lines, let's go on. What about this vulgar reasoning which is, but what's all this fuss about torturing? First we are talking about exceptional cases and point two, aren't we or they all doing it? All states where are torturing and at least we try to regulate it, we are less hypocritical. I'm opposed to this, why? Because appearances matter. What do I mean by this? Let me be extremely cruel. Let me imagine, although it's ridiculous, this scenario we all know it, that my God it's so melodramatic that it's a fake but let's play the game. I have a small daughter, I don't but let's say, who is kidnapped by bad guys who are serially raping her and I got hold of one of these guys. I know that he knows where they are holding my daughter. Okay, frankly I don't know, I definitely cannot promise you that I would not torture the guy. But everything depends on this that I should have I should, if I were to do it, it should have been done as an act of utter despair, you know what I mean. The sense of out nonetheless. Certain things are implied on condition that one doesn't talk about them. Like there are these half-open marriages where an occasional affair is tolerated on condition that the partner doesn't tell it publicly. So when the partner does tell it, then let's say my wife tells me, "oh by the way yesterday I slept with your friend." If I were to live in this kind of implicit arrangement, my point would be, "I know it, but my God what are you trying to tell me with this? Why are you telling me?" You know what I mean, there are situations where telling a thing is not neutral. It means more. Like, for example, my cynical example to take it here. You know what is the academic code for when you are at the talk like mine here and if the the speaker afterwards asks you, "was it a boring talk or an interesting talk?" If you want to say it was stupid and boring, the polite way of saying it—it’s codified—is to say, "oh it was interesting." This is a polite way to say it was stupid and boring. Now let us say I ask you afterwards and you say you think it was boring and stupid and you tell me, "it was boring and stupid." I would have the full right to be shocked. Because if you say "it was boring and stupid," you already say much more. You bring in a personal aggressivity. I would have the full right to tell you, "but if you really meant only that it was boring and stupid, why didn't you simply say that it was interesting?" You know what I mean? And it’s the same with torture. That's my fear. If they really mean it, exceptionally we have to torture people, why then are they telling us? I claim that the ominous dimension is not so much that secretly they are doing more, but to cut it to put it in a very blunt way, I claim that the very fundamental rules of etico-political, what Hegel would have called our etico-political substance, the unwritten rules of what is admissible not, are unfortunately changing today. And I by in no way putting the blame exclusively on the United States. I'm just saying that things like this, when certain things where people are no longer ashamed of publicly speaking about certain things, it’s never simply better in the sense of "oh less hypocrisy." Hypocrisy has its uses. It contains things in certain limits. So that would be my first problem, my approach. Then next things, and with this I really conclude that I would like to add is that we should also bear in mind to what extent the objective, what I called objective violence, violence caused by the functioning of today's global system itself, is in a false way counteracted by not subjective violence but subjective how should I put it charity, charity activities. Which is why for me I Bill Gates is an icon today, not so much because, you know, virtual capitalism, Microsoft, but how he combines the most ruthless abstract capitalism, you grab billions of dollars with this heart-bleeding, warm tolerance. At the most, if I were to pick the most disgusting photo of the last couple of years, it is in New York Times about a couple of months ago when Bill Gates visited India. Him and his wife in an Indian village embracing some in a hospital ill children. You should have seen that pathetic expression and so on. In other words, I claim that it's not enough today to say "oh but people are starving, we should help them." It's part of today's system to refer all the time to this threatened outside. You know, Bill Gates is saying all the time, "What does it matter all the computers if people are still unnecessarily dying of diarrhea and so on and so on?" What's the function of this humanitarianism? I'm more and more convinced to create a false sense of urgency, whose target is "do not think, act." But act so that what do I mean by this? Wendy Brown in her one of her recent essays did a wonderful analysis of this false sense of urgency. You know what I mean by this? Like if I were to say now "Are you aware that for every word that I pronounced today during my talk, ten children died of hunger in Africa? Are you aware that every minute that I was talking, a woman was beaten and raped in the United States?" I mean this is true, of course my God, but the way this kind of manipulation is false, it introduces a false sense of urgency. The opposite of it is, probably it’s not now I remember some three, four years ago in a Starbucks, Starbucks Coffee here, it was the inverted formula. They appealed to you with "every cup that you drink with us, I don't know, cents goes to the Guatemala kid and he gets an," so you know every cup you save a kid or whatever. This precisely is the is the false urgency. What what we should insist on more and more is that how should I put it, sometimes today precisely when people, even Chomsky I was told conceded to this point, "no time for theory today, the system is totally cynical, we know everything, we just have to tell the people to make them aware." No, we need theory more than ever today. I think we should not be afraid, we should not feel terrorized by this false sense of moralistic urgency, you know, "no time for theory, people are starving," and so on. My God, it’s only through theory that we will we have at least a hope to learn what to do. So to really conclude, I know a much more dirty version of the jokes on Aristocrats then I've seen the film, the one there. I would call it even by nastier name, "The Perverts." I mean imagine the same situation, the group, the family comes to the manager of a seedy hardcore nightclub and tell him, "we have a really dirty dirty performance." And the guy asks them, "okay, do it for me," and then they start to perform what? The son refers to Hegel's *Phenomenology*, the subject, consciousness; mother said, "No, you forgot about the logic of essence;" father said, "What about absolute knowing?" They go on and finally the manager explodes, "What's the title of this?" "The Perverts!" Yes, all the fist-fucking, eating shit in Aristocrats, it’s nothing compared in perverse obscene power than to one good piece of Hegelian dialectics. You have to accept this today, we need this attitude. We theorists are true big criminals, are the true perverts. All these people who do sadism, shit-eating, whatever, they are modest conservatives. Thanks very much. Okay, then some I'm not the boss here, like some debate or what's the plan? Now this is what I meant with this implicit how to obey the rule. I don't know now, is this a polite way of saying, no, you said if people want to ask the question, you know what I mean, I was perplexed for a moment, are you saying them to shut up or you really can? No, it would be an honor, you know, it would be an honor. Sorry? Okay, so please then let's use a little bit if some of you, please. Just a lot of different points, I was thinking of the character of the witness or angel in Kieślowski’s *Decalogue*. Yeah. And I was, is there do you see a connection between that that figure and the neighbor or the chicken? That's a that's a good question because I know how open the interpretations are of the first I generally I totally agree with you that if anything, especially in his Polish films, no, I much prefer them to this later new age, that Kieślowski was precisely very sensitive to this dimension, dimension of the neighbor. So no, I think I unfortunately but I tend almost to agree with those who claim that the neighbor that isn't do you think this is a kind of a Christ figure, but almost authentic one, I mean not in any mystical sense, because I tried to play the game once with friends and to locate the exact moments when this guy appears. It is usually, if I remember it correctly, at the moments of crucial decision or catastrophe. Like, if I remember it correctly, in number five, *Short Film About Killing*, just when the taxi driver goes and it’s not or the guy goes to pick up the taxi before the killing, that guy with a sad look with a sad gaze intervene. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say he is directly a neighbor. I would rather put him as a kind of a how should I put it, anonymous, the anonymous witness, not the Lacanian Big Other precisely but rather a Christ-like small other figure, this anonymous witness of witnessing of neighboring, a kind of a not directly a neighbor, it's difficult for me. What do you see in it, in him? Because the whole point is that he is pure passivity, he just looks with a kind of a, you know why I also mean Christ figure, no, because the way I read Christianity, no, it's not that Christ saved us in the sense that he did for us. I buy those theologians who claim that the only way to sustain religion after Holocaust, Gulag and so on is to turn it around: not God will help us, but God needs our help. You know that for me divine figure today is that he sees a catastrophe, this Christ figure there, but can't do anything. He is the observer, we must do it. That's how I read Christianity, it’s the other way around. We must help God. God killed himself, he he died there, no, I mean he he is dead, we we must do it. In this sense, in this sense he is, okay or to put it in another way, in more Agamben terms, he would be a pure witness. But with all also of the impotence that this implies. I'm tempted to go in this direction. And I think that something goes wrong about along these lines then later in Kieślowski, in all these heart-rending French French films or whatever, no, they are something something goes wrong there. But okay, sorry, cannot say. Yeah, please. One of the things I find interesting about what you're saying about the commodity, what is it that we should do today to contrast or oppose, you know, Bush ideology, in so far as, you know Nietzsche says in his third essay the genealogy that, you know, they have one goal, one plan, whereas our one goal, what's our one plan? How could we possibly oppose him? What is it that we would want if he were dethroned? You see all the protests all around the world, in all these countries, if they got what they wanted, what would it be? Well, here I'm, this I always disappoint my leftist friends at this level because first okay the first thing to say is that we should still, if we by "we" mean some kind of a general left, to finish to bring to the end self-criticism. I think we should start as I describe in my *Fragile Absolute* book, you know we should do like what Ed Norton does in that wonderfully uneasy scene in the *Fight Club*, you know where in front of the boss he starts hitting himself. I mean, we still didn't do properly the job of to ask really the questions in what way the liberal politics with its inconsistencies and so on opens up the path for Bush. Point two is we should nonetheless think about the global situation and I'm not celebrating this fact but I think that the contours are already clear with last visit of Chinese president and so on. I think that the American century is over. We are already quickly much faster than it appears to be approaching a more dispersed universe, where I claim the situation will be much more much more complex. For example, for me again, what is China today? It's the most tragic example of a country where we have Communist Party nominally in power and the main social function of Communist Party is de facto to crash any workers' autonomous opposition, that is to say to create the best conditions for the for the capitalist development, no. I mean things things get so confused here so that again, I think that we should still start with start with a good dosage of self-criticism, how should I put it, no. I mean, that's the true tragedy for me. But again, the problem is even more radical, radical in the sense of what are the alternatives? I'm in a very desperate phase. Why? I remain a Marxist in the sense that I sincerely don't think that the present world system can reproduce itself indefinitely. But what I fear is not so much "oh it can go on indefinitely," but that, and we are already slowly getting the contours of something even much worse than what we have today will arise. This I see here even in the West democracy being redefined, I see new the logic new apartheid logic and so on and so on. I see how even this old liberal hope that capitalism sooner or later generally leads to democracy, that you can have only this short-term authoritarian detours, I I see even that getting less and less true. I think that the rules are changing so fundamentally, and
as the one of the right measure between the respect for the other versus our own freedom of expression. And I think to conceive in this way the problem is in itself a mystification. No wonder that upon a closer analysis the two opposites reveal their secret solidarity. That is to say, on the one hand, the language of respect is the language of liberal tolerance. Respect only has a meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree. So when the offended ones demand respect for their otherness, they accept the frame of the liberal tolerant discourse. On the other hand, blasphemy is not only an attitude of hatred, of trying to strike, hit the other where it hurts. It is a strictly religious attitude. It only works within the convolutions of a religious space. So my point here is that what lurks at the horizon of this obsession with respect is a nightmarish prospect of a society regulated by a perverse pact between religious fundamentalists and the politically correct preachers of tolerance and respect for the other's beliefs. A society immobilized by the concern for not hurting the other, no matter how cruel, superstitious this other is. A society in which individuals are engaged in regular rituals of witnessing their victimization. So how are we to break this deadlock? Is the problem where does the problem reside? Does it reside where William Butler Yeats located it, when he wrote, you remember his famous line from "The Second Coming," "A blood-dimmed tide is loosed," and then as the poem goes on, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." It may appear that this is a good description of our today's split between anemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. The best are no longer able to fully engage themselves while the worst engage in racist, sexist, and so on fanaticism. However, are the so-called fundamentalists really fundamentalists in an authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature, I claim, which is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists from Tibetan Buddhists to even, why not, Amish in the United States. The absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believer's way of life. Since they really believe that they found their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers? Why should they envy them? When, for example, a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he is far from condemning him, he just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to a true fundamentalist, the pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of non-believers. One can feel that in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. So again, my first reaction, you know, it’s the same like when people, when conservatives deplore the lack of family values. My reaction is not no, this is a fundamentalist idea, what about, I don't know, homosexual marriages, open families? No, my idea is who are they to talk about family values? It’s the neoliberal economic program which, as every economist will tell you, did more than all hedonists and homosexuals together to destroy any serious meaning of the term, whatever this could mean, family values. So again, the first line of defense should be not even to admit to them that they truly are fundamentalists if this term has any full meaning. For example, look at a TV preacher figure like Jimmy Swaggart or whatever. I think it's ridiculous to call him a fundamentalist. Is he not, and people like him, a clear example of how the very way they deliver the message undermines the message? In their message they can preach against tolerance, ego trip, and so on; they stage one big ego trip in their preaching. So it is here I think that Yeats' diagnosis falls short. Passionate intensity of a violent mob or a violent fundamentalist preacher bears witness precisely to the lack of a true conviction. We do not believe where we seem to believe. We should problematize the notion of belief. How? Where is belief today? Let me recapitulate some themes from my last book, *Parallax View*. Let me begin with a joke known, I know to all of you, nonetheless I have to return to it to give an additional twist to it. You know that joke, classical joke, about a man who believed to be himself to be a grain of seed, taken to mental institution, finally convinced that he is not a grain but a man. When he is cured, he returns immediately back, trembling with scare. "There is a chicken outside and I'm afraid the chicken will eat me." The doctor says, "but you know now very well you are not a grain of seed but a man." "I know that," replies the guy, "but does the chicken know it?" I think this is what happens in psychoanalysis. It's easy, and this is where we fake with our beliefs today, it is easy to convince ourselves. The problem is to convince, if you want pathetically, the chicken in ourselves, the symptom. This is where maybe even Freud was wrong in the sense of too simple, when he quotes in his well-known short text on *Verneinung*, the negation, denial, remember that how when Freud asks a patient in whose dream a woman appears, who is that woman, the famous patient's reply, "I don't know who that woman is, but it's not my mother." I mean as my friends are telling me, today it’s practically the opposite. A typical patient would tell you if you ask him this question, "I don't know who this woman in my dream is, but I'm sure she has something to do with my mother," like we confess it in advance. But, you know, but the mother shouldn't know about it. There's the catch, there is the belief. Why is this so important? Because I claim that this same structure of a belief which is not subjectively assumed, which operates but displaced onto another, objectified belief. This kind of belief which must be minimally institutionalized, again in my other book, maybe some of you know it, *The Ticklish Subject*, I quote a nice example which happened to a friend of mine, a Slovene politician, when he was doing the usual thing in these horrible democratic elections, being friendly to voters and so on. An old lady came to him and said can he do her a favor, as a politician, that on her house the street number of her house, this old lady's house, was and she said, "I think this is bringing me bad luck," you know, every time there was a burglary in that house, a lightning, "something is wrong, can he arrange with the local authorities to change the number into, I don't know, 23A or whatever?" Then my friend told this lady, "But why don't you do it secretly, paint over and she said, "No, I tried it, it doesn't work, it must be done properly." You know, this belief in there must be an institution who will do it for us. Incidentally, this is why I don't get you Americans here. You say "In God We Trust," no you don't. Whenever I'm in a hotel, you know, you have 12th floor and then 14th. But whom are you kidding? God knows that is really I mean okay, but that's another question. Now let me go into more serious waters. The reason why I'm still a Marxist is that I claim that this structure of belief, of displaced belief, you find it in what Marx described as commodity fetishism. Here is the very beginning of the famous subdivision four of the Chapter of *Capital* on fetishism of the commodity and its secret. I quote, "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing, but its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties." End of quote. Now I hope if you listened even vaguely to these lines, I hope you were a little bit surprised by them. And I think this brings us to the very core of what is still, to use these pompous words, alive in Marx, in Marxist theory. Namely, they do not do what we would expect of a critical atheist materialist thinker. Marx's thesis is not, let's take a religious myth, illusion, and let's demystify it, let's demonstrate how this spiritual formation was generated by actual life, real-life struggles and so on. Marx says the exact opposite, almost. He says here, no, not a thing may appear to you sublime, divine, but it really is just a process of real-life struggles, social alienation, whatever. He says exactly the opposite. He says a commodity appears to you an ordinary thing, nothing mysterious in it, but the analysis brings out its theological niceties, metaphysical subtleties. So as it were, in order to criticize religion, you must first discover as it were the religious dimension of everyday social life. And this I think is the complication in Marx of which even today we are not yet fully aware, how again the point of Marx is not just that of demystification, but of us becoming aware of a mystification of which we are not even aware that it determines our acts. So what, I hope you guessed the link between this paradox, which is a very nice paradox of Marx, namely the paradox which forces us to introduce a complication into the simple duality between appearance and reality. For Marx, when Marx defines ideology as false appearance, when he says in his formula for ideology, "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es," they don't know it but nonetheless they are doing it. He doesn't mean this simple stupidity, yes they don't know what they are doing, they are doing one thing but ideology means you think you are doing another thing. No, ideology is in acting. Ideology is not in what you are thinking, ideology is in what you are doing. Ideology is embodied in what you are doing. Ideology are metaphysical presuppositions, whatever, that you apply, follow in your doing. So that you see the point which I often develop in my work, referring to that wonderful Daniel Dennett's opposition which he mentions only mockingly, in a mocking way, in *Consciousness Explained*, in that book, between the way things appear to you and the way things *really* appear to you. That the gap is in appearance. It's not simply things appear to you in some way and things are really. The paradox then is that things may appear to you in a certain way and things really are like that, but you are still in ideology, because you don't know how things really appear to you. What do I mean by this? It sounds frustrating. Okay, let me take you an extremely simple example from psychoanalysis. Let's take a typical adolescent who is frustrated by his father. All the time he is trying to, when he talks to you he tells you, "my father is a jerk, an impotent coward," and so on. That's how his father appears to him. I mean, it's reasonable to suppose that his father is that, is like this. So appearance fits reality, but nonetheless it’s false. Why? Because the moment then you encounter this same boy in actual interaction with his father, you will detect a totally different attitude of some awe, fear, love even, whatever. A total, so you get the point, what he is not aware of is how his father really appears to him. And it’s the same, for example, with racism. Today we are all liberals, we like Arabs, we like Jews, we respect Islam, we respect Jehovah, whatever. And they are to be respected, you know what I mean, but in between then you have that famous "but nonetheless they get on my nerves." It’s this third level which is crucial. And okay, what has this to do with the chicken? A lot. When a critical Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, let me recapitulate, the Marxist reproach is not: the commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people. No, the reproach is rather: you may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations, and the commodity really is just an embodiment of social relations. But this is not how commodity really appears to you. In your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as a magical object endowed with special powers and so on and so on. In other words, we can easily imagine a bourgeois subject visiting a course on Marxism where he is taught about commodity fetishism. However, after the finished course, he comes back to his teacher complaining that he is still a victim of commodity fetishism. The teacher tells him, "but you know how things stand, commodities are only expressions of social relations, there is nothing magic about it." And the pupil replies, "of course I know that, but the commodities I'm dealing with seem not to know it." It’s exactly the same logic as that of a chicken. And to refer to a wonderful text by my Slovene Lacanian colleague Alenka Zupančič, which you can find in the book which is now on sale even, I think, *The Silent Partner*, the text on Hegel, we can imagine the same paradox apropos God himself. Let’s imagine an enlightened society of terror, of revolutionary terror, where a man is put in prison because he believes in God. With different measures, but above all by means of an enlightened explanation, the man is brought to the knowledge that God doesn't exist. He is then dismissed, but he comes running back and explains that he is scared, still scared that God will punish him. The teacher said, "but now you know, you were trained in Marxism that God doesn't exist." The guy replies, "I know that, but God, does God know that, that he doesn't exist?" And this is not a joke, this is how it functions. We need, the true problem of atheism, of this belief, is not for us not to believe, is to have our chicken not to believe, how should I put it, to not to, it’s easy for us to be dissolute, whatever you want, transgressing everything. It’s much more difficult to renounce this, what in Lacanian terms we can call the subject-supposed-to-believe, that another will believe for us, believes for us. And I claim, my crazy reading, that this exactly is what happens in Christianity, that, I follow here my beloved Gilbert Keith Chesterton, that moment at the cross when Christ utters his, "Father, Father, why did you forsake me?" This is the moment where God himself does not believe in himself. I quote Chesterton: "There is only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist." It's Christianity. So in other words, the paradox here is that all other religions have atheists in the sense people who do not believe in them. Only in Christianity God himself has to go through this atheist phase, which is why it would be interesting I think apropos atheism to turn the debate into an unexpected maybe direction, and to ask a question, and this doesn't devalue atheism, namely, to differentiate different forms of atheism with regard to their religious background. And I'm an atheist, so the message is not "oh it all depends on a religion," no, but nonetheless isn't it, for example, when you take a figure like Spinoza or Freud, atheists, isn't it nonetheless clear, you smell it immediately as it were, that this is a Jewish atheism? There is a specifically Jewish flavor. If you take early Heidegger, not early, okay, *Sein und Zeit*, *Being and Time*, after his split, after he renounced his Catholicism to which he later returned, but in that period, isn't *Being and Time* clearly a work, and I think it is one of the most atheist books of all time, but it’s so clearly Protestant atheism, namely all these topics: authentic responsibility, assuming one's fate through anxiety, through awareness that we are thrown into the world, there is no external guarantee of our success, isn't this a typically Protestant atheism? One can argue then that there is also a typically Catholic atheism. For example, if you ask me, *Multitude*, Toni Negri is for me so clearly a Catholic atheist. And at some point I thought that there are no Muslim atheists. Now I discovered through conversation with my Arab friends that there are, that they even are the first who have a specific word, term for atheism, something that I was told literally means those who believe in nothing or something like that. So again, I think maybe this should be our approach, to differentiate atheisms. If we differentiate atheisms, then it’s clear to see how today's era is, I claim, not only not an atheist era, but it’s even less atheist than prior eras. We are all ready to indulge in utter skepticism, cynical distance, we accept the world without illusions and so on and so on, we are ready to violate all ethical constraints and so on and so on. But we are always protected by the silent awareness that, to use this Lacanian term, the big Other is ignorant about it. The big Other continues to believe for us. Of course, the perfect formula for this objectified belief was provided by Niels Bohr, who you probably know the story, when a friend visited him at his countryside house, saw there a horseshoe, this sign of good luck preventing evil spirits to enter the house, and surprised asked Niels Bohr, "Are you crazy? Aren't you a scientist? How can you believe in this?" Niels Bohr's answer was: "I'm not an idiot, of course I don't believe that horseshoe brings luck." He said, "I also do not believe in it, but I have it there because," then the friend asked him, "Okay, if you don't believe in it, why do you have it there?" His answer: "I have it there because I was told that it works even if one does not believe in it." That’s the catch. That's how it works today, democracy, blah blah, none of us has, you get my point, none of us has to believe in it. You just objectified the belief, as it were literally our chicken, commodities, things, institutions, they believe for us. And I think this maybe is the most dangerous belief, because it's belief with a false freedom of atheism, belief of which you are not even aware. And why I so obsessively insist in all my books on this topic? Because if nothing else, I claim that this changes the entire debate between East, not so much Far East as Arab East, Islamist us, where it's claimed they believe, we don't believe. No, the distinction is clearly within the domain of belief. Also, when we say we live in a post-ideological era, yes, if you understand with ideology, but even there I have my doubts, big systematic philosophical whatever systems. At this level we may be less ideological. But if you understand by ideology beliefs which determine our actual social reality, the way we interact with other people, then I think we believe more than ever. Here, the next step I think we should even turn around this old Pascal formula which I interpreted endlessly in my work, you know, this famous Pascal's advice to non-believers who want to believe: you cannot believe, no problem, act as if you believe, kneel down, obey the ritual, and belief will come by itself. I think that in our era we are terrified by assuming directly a belief. Which is why we use this Pascalian advice de facto in an opposite sense. It's not you do not believe, okay, follow the ritual, as Alcoholics Anonymous put it, fake it till you make it, follow the ritual, act as if then. No, it’s rather you really believe, do you find it heavy, too obsessive that you believe? No problem, act as if you believe and you will get rid of your belief, because through the ritual the institution will take over the belief. Like, you know, just go automatically repeat it or even better as some in the Orient do it, do belief through others, like put it on a that prayer, put it on a paper, turn it around in a praying wheel or whatever, and you can think about sex, whatever, but you believe through the other. And I even claim that throughout the history of Catholicism, this is how this is the secret if you want Catholic teaching on off on marriage, if you read it between the lines. It's not you have to marry this woman but you don't really love her. Okay then, do as if you love her, go through the ritual, sleep with her, and love will arrive by itself. No, it’s rather are you passionately in love with that woman or man or whatever? Do you find it too oppressive? Because, you know, there is a truth in it, it’s horrible to be really in love, believe me. It’s like all your life is destabilized, you all. Then the idea is okay, you want to get rid of your love? Marry her or him. Follow the ritual, and it’s done automatically and you can start dreaming about other things. If you have problems go to the pro, to a prostitute or whatever. I think that's the that's the secret teaching if you want, and more about this soon, of a certain Catholicism. So this is, this is, this would be almost I claim the different modalities of how we believe through a denial. One would be again this symbolic objectivization of belief. You externalize belief into a certain symbolic ritual whatever so that you no longer have to assume it fully subjectively. Another more interesting distance would have been not so much big noble beliefs but the obscene unwritten beliefs, convictions like racist, sexist convictions. The way they function is we of course publicly deny them, disavow them, even oppose them actively, but from time to time they nonetheless pop up in the censored form, in the form of the negation. We evoke them and quickly discard them. There was a wonderful example, maybe some of you remember it, of this a couple of months ago on, to be precise, September William Bennett, you know who is William Bennett, a well-known American gambler, compulsive gambler. Among other things he writes boring books, *The Book of Virtues*, but no seriously don't you know, he was indebted for half a million, which is why then people discovered that in *The Book of Virtues* gambling is significantly not mentioned among the themes there. Okay, you know what he says on the 28th of September of I quote, on his call-in program *Morning in America*—not "Morning" like melancholy but "Morning" like not the evening, no—"But I do know that it's true that if you wanted to reduce crime you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do. But your crime rate would go down." End of quote. Now of course then he immediately denied it. He says, "I didn't mean it, it was just evoked as an absurdity," and so on. But you can get it, the whole the whole pleasure was he had his cake and eat it, no, he was able to blurt out his racist conviction at the same time withdrawing from it. This is, this when he denies it, when he says "but I didn't mean it, I just," this is what Freud meant with *Verneinung*, with negation. Then we should even go a step further here. Not only we have this personal obscene, okay it's not personal, it's systematic, it's part of a racist racist collective unconscious if I may use this prohibited term, the belief that blacks like rabbits breed too much or whatever, but I think it’s even more institutionalized here. This, let's call it, the unconscious of an institution. This is why I am so interested and with all my respect for Christianity, my God I've written books about it, with this cases of priest pedophilia. I think they are a much more mysterious phenomenon than it may appear. In what sense? It is not simply as it may appear that there are not enough priests today so the church has to accept whoever is there and there may be some of them who are gay pedophiliac, so okay what can we do, people are people. No, I claim, and I spoke with some people in my country, ex-Yugoslavia—not my country, some other ex-Yugoslav republics—who did a research on it, and they told me of a couple of much more paradoxical examples where when a guy joined, when went to study theology to become a priest, he was straight, I mean in the common sense, heterosexual. Then it was that a couple of years being a priest turned turned him pedophiliac, homosexual. That is to say, it's literally the obscene underside, the unconscious of the institution itself. I think this is the question to be addressed. And I'm not here engaged in any cheap Catholic bashing and so on. This idea was approached very nicely by a guy, a Catholic whom I admire very much, Gary Wills from Chicago, who wrote a wonderful analysis of how you cannot separate these cases of pedophilia from Catholic Church institution, how the whole institutional apparatus is mobilized. So again, this would have been another thing always to bear in mind apropos of beliefs, how every belief is as it were supplemented by its obscene underside. I will not dwell too long on it because this is the eternal topic of my work, but just to give an idea what I mean by it. What fascinates me more and more, even more than already in all my books when I make this point is how not only it goes not only for beliefs but also for social rules and so on. Do you know, did you notice how how should I put it, whenever you have a certain network of social rules which regulate a certain field, you always also need to be really in an additional set of rules which tells you how to really deal with these rules? Because, you know, rules are never unambiguous. Like to be very primitive, when father tells you don't mess with girls, my God that's a big enigma for adolescent, what does he really mean? He usually means do it but do it discreetly, secret, you know what I mean. Prohibitions never mean directly what they mean. They can be a secret call, do it. They can mean do it but do it hypocritically. Very rarely they really mean just don't do it. So I think that the true integration into a certain symbolic field is precisely when you not only know the rules, but know this secret meta-rules of how are the rules to be taken, which rules are there only to be violated so that you are simply an idiot so that the safest way to be excluded is to follow the rules, to just simply follow the rules. So this is the second aspect. Okay, but now you will tell me but with all this my skepticism nobody believes, we only always believe through a displacement and so on and so on. Now you will tell me but nonetheless there are so-called fundamentalists who believe. Now I come to the point mentioned by Josefina. I claim no, they don't believe. Now you will say am I crazy, but they are ready to die for it and so on. My point is here a very simple one. They don't believe, they know. Which is why I think, as you quoted me, Josefina, they are a threat to belief. What do I mean by it? I started, when I started to read some so-called fundamentalists, what attracted me is the way they, some of them have in the in the title of their institution or whatever sect the name "science," you know, Scientology, Christian Science. First I thought it's a bad joke, but then I became convinced it was not, there is a truth in it. The truth is that what I found with all so-called fundamentalists that I know is that, to cut a long story short, they systematically reduce articles of genuine faith to simple statements of knowledge. For them, to be somewhat pathetically Christian, Christ has arisen from the death. It's not this Kierkegaardian crazy wager, "it goes against all our knowledge but in a crazy act of engagement I put my wager of it." No, for them this is the same fact as this is the DNA structure of that person and so on and so on. It's a simple, it’s simple knowledge. Which is why incidentally they don't have any problems in, and this I think is maybe a feature which identifies so-called fundamentalist at the most well fundamental level, namely that for them a direct link, continuity between science and religion is never a problem. For example, you know Turin Shroud, my favorite object. Every authentic Christian, especially Catholic, must be and is horrified by the idea that it would have proven to be authentic. Because if there were serious reasons to consider that the Turin Shroud is authentic, that is to say that the stains on it still discernible are really the stains of the blood of Jesus Christ, then with today's science means instruments of science, can you imagine the obscene possibilities? The first one is what about who is Christ's father? It becomes an empirical question, we analyze the DNA and we get it. And it’s a nightmare, you will discover it was some Egyptian slave of Mary or whatever, better not to think about it. But for a fundamental, I spoke with one fundamentalist and he told me they are not only not afraid of this, they already have an answer they told me. The answer is that Virgin Mary's DNA will be redoubled because Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit doesn't have a doesn't have a DNA or whatever. You see my point, this is for me the spirit of fundamentalism, they don't have a problem. For example, on a recent visit to Israel, friends took me to a wonderful religious group convinced in the literal truth of the Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah will come when a calf, calf with totally red hair will be born. So you know what they are doing? With all the most utmost modern science, they are doing all biogenetic intervention to have a calf with totally red hair born. This is fundamentalism, no problem, you just see simple continuity. So what gets lost here? What is for me a belief? For me a belief is a crazy ethical wager, it's in when we use the term belief in an authentic sense, it's crazy to say "I believe in it but I don't care about it." Belief is by definition an engaged belief. Let me give you one or two pathetic examples. Anne Frank when she said those wonderful lines we all maybe know them if you read the book, "Even if I see all the horrors the Nazis are doing, so many bad people, I still believe there is a divine spark in every human being." This is belief, totally counter-factual. You have there very, the least we can say about Nazis, not exactly the best people, very mean people, and nonetheless you put it. Or human rights, I claim this is an article of belief, belief in what sense? Precisely belief in what Badiou would have said a kind of axiomatic engagement. It's counter-factual, I mean you look the people around, where is the stupid equality? We are all different, one is stupid, one is ugly, the other is not and so on. Are you aware what an irrational wager this is to say "No, they all have the same human dignity," and so on and so on. This engagement is belief, and there is always something of, to use this old saying, "credo quia absurdum," I believe because it's absurd. This is authentic belief, and every if you want revolutionary act, every emancipatory act is in this sense a counter-factual belief. John Brown was a believer, my American hero. John Brown, you know the one who I think you United you came closest to my beloved European Jacobinism, you know, like politics with a little bit of terror, no, in his case which is why he is the repressed one. But for him again, the equality of the blacks, it's very interesting to read him, you can sense the difference between him and standard white liberals who had this patronizing "oh how the blacks suffer, let's create the conditions for their equality, let's educate them, let's help them." No, for John Brown it was, "Let's do it immediately. Let's immediately treat them as equals." None of that stuff. So you see my point, this ethically engaged absurd Kierkegaardian if you want aspect of belief, this is what gets lost in fundamentalism. So in this sense what Josefina quoted at the beginning, in this sense I think that the true danger of so-called fundamentalists, they are not truly a danger to secular knowledge. That debate, ridiculous as it somehow may appear, sometimes may appear with creationism and so on, nonetheless no, they argue, they it's easy for them, for fundamentalists, I claim, to accept the language of science. They are already, the moment you argue "oh but those stones prove that Earth was created only years ago," or whatever, you already accept you already speak the opponent's language. Belief is already lost there, they are the threat to belief, and belief is what is effectively threatened by fundamentalists. So these paradoxes of belief, which is why incidentally I think that not only atheists can believe, but maybe at some level at least and Derrida said somewhere this I think, atheists are the ones who believe in the most radical way. Why? Because for me to be an atheist is not not to believe, but to believe utterly without guarantee. You don't need any big guarantee, you just put fully engage yourself in your belief. So this paradox of belief also I think allows us to complicate the link between belief and violence. It is not simply that the dogmatic belief generates violence since there are no limits if you really think that the things are the way you believe, while skepticism and ironic distance constrain your violence. I think the roots of or of violence are elsewhere. Violence is a very mysterious phenomenon. It's a typically human phenomenon. You know, I don't think that animals are violent. Of course they are, I mean my God, we know all the stories, sharks and so on. But it’s not specifically human violence, it's more instrumental. What is violence? The first thing we should say is that violence, okay it's an old thing to say but it should be repeated precisely today when we had that exaggerated outcry about Muhammad caricatures and so on and so on, where there are lessons from those debates, not the usual lessons about should we be liberal, should we tolerate otherness. The first lesson is: what does this famous global informational village mean? Isn't the first lesson how we are all neighbors today, in the sense that the global village, the emergence of a global society, means in a first immediate approach, it means more conflicts, more violence? It means that when we with all our differences are all of a sudden thrown together, as it were too close to each other, violence tends to explode. Which is why I tend to agree with a German non-conservative philosopher—but as a Marxist I don't have any problem agreeing with him—when he claims that maybe we should abandon or at least neglect a little bit this multiculturalist urge to understand each other and to supplement it with the attitude of getting out of each other's way, of that we should invent a new code of discretion. Or a very nice provocative thought, maybe what we need is more of alienation. Not this urge, and I think you New Yorkers are here one of the original original sinners, you invented I think one of the most horrible institutions which ruined the art of acting, which is called that Strasberg Studio or what, you know, this earth this violent self-expression or whatever. No, I mean, are we aware how helpful this rules of code of discretion is? I remember when the last time when I visited Israel and Palestine and whatever you want there Ramallah, but I didn't see, I mean I'm an I'm a monster culturally, I I saw none of those walls and so on and whatever they have there this stuff, that's not for me. I did a much simpler thing. A friend took me to a street where on North of the center, where one side is Israeli, the Jewish, the other side is Palestinian. And I sat there in a cafe for hours, and it was a wonderful lesson of how people who hate each other, with a little bit of good old-fashioned alienation, rules of discretion, you know, what interested me is they cannot shoot each other all the way, they must have established learned some rules of discretion how you how you survive. So that would be my first lesson. I mean, why should for me it's a very positive attitude to say I don't want to another human being, I don't want to know too much about it. There are limits. It's, I don't know, maybe I'm a monster here, but when somebody, especially it happens to me in universities often, again in this country, that a student approached me, approaches me and starts telling me about his sexual troubles if I can help him and so on, first I try the usual jokes. I tell him, "Look, I'm an obviously too nervous a madman, are you crazy to to confide in me?" no, whatever, but then more seriously I tell him, "Isn't there something don't you feel something horrible when all of a sudden another human person opens up himself or herself too much to you?" Now I'm not saying this isn't nice, but it should be selective, I claim. I don't want to understand the whole world, my God. I want to understand five, six people and that's quite enough, maybe even too much. So what I want to say is that this is why also I think in ethical topics, be it good or evil or even creativity, one should respect a certain limit. The vulgar for which is why let me take let me mention two films I hate both of them: *Schindler's List* and *Pollock* with Ed Harris, you know. Why? Both of them couldn't resist the obvious vulgarity. What do you find in *Schindler's List*? You remember it couldn't, you know you have that scene when Schindler is with his mistress on a hill above Kraków and observes down there how German SS units are penetrating the ghetto, and Spielberg, I was so sad, he couldn't resist the temptation of literally presenting the moment of Schindler's conversion from okay not bad guy but a manipulator to a good guy. You remember that famous black-and-white film, girl in a red dress and so on, "ah now oh he discovered human" and so on. In *Pollock*, if you remember, it’s even my worst fears were realized. I remember, I cannot prove it to you, believe me, before seeing the film, I told a friend, "I'm sure they will do this ultimate vulgarity and try to paint the moment of the discovery of this, how do you call it, action painting." And of course they do it. Remember Ed Harris half-drunk spills over the the cup of color, "oh oh," and he he sees, "oh my God, ah that's it, I invent," you can see almost, it’s said that he doesn't say, "now I invent action painting." Couldn't they have a little bit of this reserve? This is I think again one lesson here, not because of any spiritual obscurantism or whatever, but because it's also the mystery for the other, because how should I put it, because I think the gap is here in reality itself. You you never know how you invent something. You know, it's like those magical processes like you add one one grain, one grain, and all of a sudden it’s a heap, but it’s always retroactive. All of a sudden it’s here. You should respect that limit. So that's the first thing: respect the limit. Don't try to understand everything and so on. I think often the true, if we want to talk about respect, kind of discretion, ignorance is the only appropriate respect. Second lesson: are we aware that that which gives to human aggressivity, to specifically human violence, its excess is precisely the symbolic dimension? That is to say, for example, what does a racist attack when he attacks an Arab, a Jew, a black, whomever? He does not simply attack a real person there, he attacks a symbolic construct embodied in that person. In other words, I tend more and more to disagree with this idea, Habermas, by Habermasians propagated and others, that language is originally, or rather at its most fundamental dimension, the idea is that at its most fundamental language is a means of equal symmetrical communication. I recognize you, you recognize me, that what is natural for language is symmetry, symmetry recognition, and that language becomes means of oppression, exclusion, power, domination, asymmetry, only through some kind of how should I put it secondary pathological twist when language is caught in social relations of power and so on and so on. No, I think there is an original dimension of violence in language as such. Language is not only the big unifier. It’s, okay not as Bush would like to be the big did he say "I am the big the decider" or what, no, but it's a big divider. That is to say, language is that which even if the two of us live in the same world, in the same street, even in the same apartment, we still can live in different worlds. This, here I think you can feel, you know how when you talk to a stranger, not stranger in the ethnic language sense, but somebody who is psychologically strange to you, you know this horrible shattering experience that even if you use the same words describing the same things, you know this sudden realization, but we are talking about totally different things. This is for me the original violence of language. Language is terribly twisted. Language introduces imbalance in the world. Language means we are here but we live in different worlds. And I think that this is again the next this is the dimension of violence with which we should take into account. So a more general conclusion from this: whenever we speak of violence, we always tend to focus on violence in the sense of what I'm tempted to call subjective violence. Somebody, be it an individual, a fanatical group, or an organized group—ah sorry, just one more thing about belief, which is why the my basic idea is the following one. You remember this situation, known to most of you, and they are beautiful situations almost in a poetic sense, when what is for me the zero level of meaning? It’s not when you know what it means. I claim when you know what something means meaning is already reduced to some kind of denotation, you lose it. It’s this gap when you know it means something but I don't know what it is. I claim that this is how it all begins. This perplexed, perplexed confrontation of what Jean Laplanche calls enigmatic signifier. It means something, I don't know what. And I claim that meaning comes afterwards, concrete determinate meaning. There is no meaning without this perplexity of what does it mean? But nonetheless let me go on. So we are I think all too focused on this subjective violence, again in all its variations, either this Hannah Arendtian Nazi executors, cold bureaucracy, all this sneering evil sadist, or agents, furious crowd, subjective violence, agents doing it. But I claim we should supplement it with at least two other modes of violence. The other would have been symbolic violence, not only symbolic violence in the sense of language serving as instrument of oppression and so on, but also more fundamentally language as the great divider imposing totally imposing different visions of world, constituting different worlds. In also in this sense symbolic violence. Then a third mode of violence, what in a good old Marxist way I'm tempted to call objective violence. Violence, how should I put it, violence inscribed into the very neutral functioning of society. Violence, for example to give a traditional Marxist example which is today more actual than ever, through some market speculations on futures, some rumor and so on, a whole industry goes bankrupt, a whole nation can get into economic trouble, hundreds of thousand of people lose jobs and so on and so on. That is to say, violence which is conditioned by the gap between what I call the real of capitalism, this purely virtual but nonetheless with very real effect functioning of capital in its abstract self-reproduction, and the concrete consequences. Here again we should not be too primitive materialists. The point of Marx is not when we read about Wall Street speculations we should never forget that behind this there are real people working, sweating. No, the true problem is the opposite one, that real people working, sweating, all of a sudden their their entire destiny can be totally changed by some abstract speculations, what happens in a totally virtual space. And we should never forget how to make a more general conclusion, how how should I put it, society in its normal functioning, in its apparently peaceful reproduction, already has to rely on this objective violence. When we say things just go on, this doesn't mean they just go on without violence. Violence is here. Which is why to use one of these pretentious without me really knowing what terms mean, metaphors, you know what, okay I don't know but I read about it, I think I half understand it, in quantum physics Higgs field, to simplify to the utmost the idea. The idea being that with some systems, physical systems, closed and so on, it can happen that zero costs more than something. That is to say, I simplify to the utmost, to maintain a system at its zero level of absolute peace, you already have to put energy into it to work. I think this is the best metaphor for what I'm trying to say. For a society to just reproduce itself at zero level so that nothing changes, a tremendous amount of violence has to be already has to be invested in it. This violence is literally invisible, because it’s a violence which sustains what within society is perceived as peace as such. And I think it’s very important to coordinate the visible subjective violence to this objective invisible violence. It’s really I think almost like another pretentious metaphor, matter, visible matter and dark matter, no. You have this invisible matter of violence which has to be here, and it’s crucial to see both sides. Why? Because otherwise you cannot understand the explosions of visible violence, which are mostly precisely frustrations at impotent acting out, at this irrational impenetrable objective invisible violence. But here things are even a little bit more complicated, in the sense that this gap between invisible objective violence and subjective violence, it’s not simply that it’s a bad thing in the sense that oh they should the two sides should come together. What if in our capitalist societies even this gap has a positive structural role? What do I mean by this? Recently my friend, French rational choice theorist, but he is a very bright guy, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, developed in his last book, which is an *A Metaphysics of Tsunamis* which is not yet translated into English, a wonderful critique of John Rawls. Claiming that if we only try to imagine a Rawlsian society, just society, a society structured along following the principles of Rawls, Rawls' theory of justice, that it would have been a catastrophic violent society. Why? He gives a very convincing example. You know what are Rawlsian principles? To simplify it, again. It’s that inequalities should be tolerated, allowed, but on two conditions. A, that they also help not only those who are better off but also those who are at the bottom of the social ladder. And B, that they should be based on your or mine achievements, contingent achievements, not simply on heredity or whatever. In other words, me and you, I should tolerate that you are richer than me A, if also I am a little bit better because of your wealth, at least a little bit better, and B, if you even if you were lucky in a contingent way, but nonetheless at least you earned the money as the result of your acts, not because you simply inherited it, whatever. Now, Dupuy claims such a society would immediately explode in violence. Why? And I think this is a true a deep insight into Rawls, and in a way he knows it because he admits it somewhere, it excludes resentment and envy. Namely, Rawls forgot to take a lesson from somebody whom I of course politically oppose but he wasn't a total idiot, Friedrich Hayek, who says who remarked very intelligently that the very fact that in capitalism we experience our failure or success and the other person's failure or success not simply as the result of his or her qualities of failures, but of irrationality of the market, market like fate, it was a chance. And Hayek says this obvious injustice that you succeed not because of what you did but because of pure chaotic incidents, he claims this is not an obstacle to capitalism, this is what makes it function, because it neutralizes resentment and envy. Imagine the Rawlsian society. If it’s a Rawlsian society, I would not only have to tolerate that you are richer than me, but I would have to admit it that you deserved it, and I would even have to be grateful to you for helping me a little bit. Our narcissism doesn't tolerate it. That would be an explosion of violence. It’s but you but if it’s irrational market then I can say "but I know you are an idiot, you were just lucky." This, you know, it saves my narcissism. So this is I think the first thing that we should the first thing that we should that we should take into account. The second thing to be taken into account with this violence is that things get even more tricky with how should I call it social definition of violence. What do we experience as violence? Now I'm approaching, don't be afraid, the end slowly. For example, an example from my book and then I go just a little bit into more original stuff. In my last book I develop this more in detail, how it's easy to make fun of fundamentalists, for example I always evoke this example so-called fundamentalist Taliban in Afghanistan when they were in power, you know how they prohibited women wearing metal heels. The idea is even if women are totally covered when they walk on hard, like stone, ground, the clicking of the heels can excite men too much and so on. Okay, total control, easy to laugh at this. But my God, what about our political correctness? Are we not in a same way, although with a different target, obsessed with how to control the intrusion of the other, how to keep a neighbor at a distance? The joke that I usually tell here and I verified it now, it did happen, I'm just not allowed to tell you which in Oregon, which campus, they really debated there this idea, now it's confirmed, this will be in my next book, detailed analysis, how to solve the problem of necrophiliacs, that they should develop, you know like all of do with our organs, that progressive people should make a testament, "if I die, my body should be given to a necrophiliac," and so on to enjoy. So the point is that this would be I claim politically correct sex: no harassment, dead body doesn't suffer, and so on, nobody. And that's the problem for me. Why this harassment for me again is an ambiguous word? It may appear harassment against violence and so on. But I think it's one of the clear ideological terms. What is for me an ideological term? Something very precise. Something which, to put it very simply, instead of introducing, clarifying a crucial distinction, mystifies it. Which a an ideological term is for me a term which blurs the crucial distinction by introducing as it were a wrong mis, for example, this is why in spite of all celebrations by my good friends Negri and Hardt, nomadic existence, nomadism is for me an ideological term, because it brings together the degenerate people like me who travel sometimes even business class around the world, I am very nomadic, and you know, a poor starving farmer who has to flee his country because of a civil war there and so on. Isn't there something obscene to put them put us together? It blurs the crucial distinction. I claim with harassment it's the same. On the one hand, of course there are rapes, brutal violence, there I don't have any problem: use police, torture, no problem there. But the moment you pass from this to this so-called multiculturalist tolerance where what I fear is that harassment no longer means this concrete rapes and so on, but a more general fear of the other's proximity, detectable in this, you know, I look you into the eye, visual rape, I talk too much, verbal rape, this the underlying as it were social ontology being just let us keep the other at the proper at the proper distance. This I think is what de facto tolerance today means. It means its exact opposite in our daily life. Tolerance means let's tolerate each other, let's not harass each other, which means let's not harass each other means remain at a proper distance, don't come too close to me. Which means precisely tolerance means precisely intolerance towards the other's over-proximity. And of course this goes for all humanity. This is for me one of the precious legacy of the Judeo-Islamic-Christian civilization, this idea of the neighbor not as simply another semblance, but this abyss of the neighbor, the monstrosity of another human being. The question then is of course why are we today so obsessed with this monstrosity? Why, in the same way, and I mention this in all my books, we want decaf coffee, beer without alcohol, fat-free cakes, why we also want, and that's the ultimate dream of for me politically correct multiculturalism, we want the decaffeinated other, as it were, no. Like the other who dances holistic dances and so on, not the other who drinks too much and beats his wife or whatever and so on, no. Isn't it that because something is happening at the level of the symbolic functioning of our society? I think that it is as if again we miss what I called at the beginning this logic of discretion, of politely maintaining a distance. And I think it's a reaction to this, what we are missing I think is precisely what Gore Vidal, the attitude best emphasized, best expressed for me in a wonderful answer to a vulgar journalist by Gore Vidal. You know, it's well-known he was mostly gay, but basically bisexual. And then at an in an interview, I remember reading it, a vulgar journalist ask him this stupid intrusive question, "Okay, what was your first sexual encounter? What was the partner, a man and a woman?" You know what was his answer? "I was too polite to ask." That’s the spirit. That’s the spirit that we need today, this precisely this polite this polite ignorance. The neighbor, the neighbor precisely in this inhuman dimension. Here Agamben is right. We need today practical anti-humanism, not in the sense we torture, but the true tolerance for me is precisely the tolerance for the inhuman side of the other. I don't mean sadistic other, but I mean this terrifying abyss of the other person. Again, think about when somebody declares love to you with all passion. Isn't it some admit it, even if you like it, for a split second before you say, "oh but the guy is not so ugly, I like him," there is this moment of horror to discover that you are the focus of another person's dreams? It's claustrophobic. Which is why for me one of the most terrifying poems, and if I were to be a poet, I would write a kind of negative version, reply to it, you know that again, if we were with Yeats, you know that William Butler Yeats, I mean if there is something I don't have sensitivity for is his poetry, but you know that one of the Yeats biggest hits, that "I'm a poor man so I don't have blah blah money, I only have dreams. So be careful when you walk, you are walking in my dreams," no. That's a nightmare to tell to somebody "you are walking in my dreams." It means you are totally in, you it’s suffocating. So the problem is precisely to tolerate this oppressive otherness of the other, this abyss of otherness. And here I think we can discern desperate attempts to erase this dimension, even where you wouldn't expect to find it. Now come a couple of nice concluding jokes. Did you read the book which was a big New York Times bestseller, I think the guy is Sam Harris, *The End of Faith* or *The End of Belief*? Okay, the end of whatever. Apparently a very anti-religious book and so on. But what interests me more is another aspect, is how this book tries to justify torture. It's Alan Dershowitz line, how should I put it. How? I think the logic is pretty terrifying, you should read the book. It's based on the distinction between our immediate being impressed by the suffering of others and our abstract correct insight into the other's suffering. He claims that Harris claims that when the reason that we find much more terrifying, for example, torturing a person in front of me like you, although maybe I wouldn't find it so terrifying, but that's another person, then to abstractly with a pushing the button killing, although even if you rationally know if I drop that bomb tens of thousand will die. I find it much easier than torturing a living person in front of me. And he claims in a very chilling way that this is the same epistemological mistake as that mistake of how large the moon is, no? and that we should simply learn the lesson. In the same way that we now know even if moon or sun seems small but they are really larger than earth and we act accordingly, in the same way we should take into account this gap and learn to abstract from the sympathy of the other. Here is one quote: "Given what many of us believe about the exigencies of our war on terrorism, the practice of torture in certain circumstances would seem to be not only permissible but necessary. Still, it does not seem any more acceptable in ethical terms than it did before. The reason for this are, I trust, every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion." So this is a chilling thought. Are you aware what he is saying, that if you find if I find now repulsive torturing you, it means kind of an evolutionary defect? It's the same I'm the same I'm morally at the same level of idiocy as the guy who thinks the moon is small. So he says, "it may be time to take out our rulers and hold them up to the sky." In other words, to learn the same lesson here. Now you will see the nightmarish for me consequence, because then in order to suspend this vulnerability to the physical display of other's suffering, Harris imagines an ideal truth pill, a torture which really I claim is an equivalent to decaffeinated coffee or diet coke, a kind of tortureless torture. A quote: "A drug that would deliver both the instruments of torture and the instrument of their utter concealment. It's really like my joke chocolate laxative, you know you have the thing and its own concealment. The action of the pill would be to produce transitory paralysis and transitory misery of a kind that no human being would willingly submit to a second time. Imagine how we torturers would feel if after giving this pill to captive terrorists, each laid down for what appeared to be an hour’s nap, only to arise and immediately confess everything he knows about the workings of his organization. Might we not be tempted to call it a truth pill in the end?" End of quote. I find this pretty horrifying, why? For two reasons. One is the superficial one. Is the guy aware that I read this in a recent history of Soviet psychiatry. KGB already had it at famous Serbsky Institute. Not a pill, they injected to dissidents in the heart region a certain, don't ask me what, something which it looked just as if you are dozing, nothing horrible from outside. But it was absolute nightmare because it was some kind of a contraction where it seemed that, you know that it's pressing that you cannot breathe or whatever. That it was absolutely terrible but from outside nothing, so at least okay the guy is in good company, no? But the more horrible thing is that my thesis is to put it very simply the following one: what is really reduced, what disappears here? This is ethical catastrophe. What disappears here is simply the dimension of the neighbor, I claim. The other is the other whom you can calculate in this way, we torture him, no, in this abstract way measuring the distance like okay yes the moon up there is small but the moon is not our neighbor. Now his reply would have been "but other people are other neighbor also neighbor," no it’s those who are far away. No, it's more complex because in Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition, neighbor is not simply the one who is close to us. A neighbor is a much more refined thing. A neighbor is somebody no matter how far away he is, he is always too intrusive, too close, how should I put it? You know it's not physical proximity, it's this abyss which is always by definition threatening of another person. And again, what I claim is that what happens here is that the very dimension of the neighbor disappears. Now you will say but are these not extreme cases? Now let me just conclude with by way of replying to two other possible counter-arguments. The one is the realistic one and I'm always open to it, I don't have any problems with cruel realism. I mean I think that isn't there a time to start also to criticize Bush, I say this as a leftist, from a realistic point of view? Look, let's cut the crap. What did Bush effectively do with Iraq war? Now it's clear: he delivered de facto Iraq into the hands of pro-Iranian forces. So what about a little bit of paranoia, no? I mean, what if Bush is like somebody told me I haven't seen it that in the last installments of the president himself is the traitor and so on. I mean how could he have been so stupid? This was predictable. That's first but. So along the same lines, let's go on. What about this vulgar reasoning which is, but what's all this fuss about torturing? First we are talking about exceptional cases and point two, aren't we or they all doing it? All states where are torturing and at least we try to regulate it, we are less hypocritical. I'm opposed to this, why? Because appearances matter. What do I mean by this? Let me be extremely cruel. Let me imagine, although it's ridiculous, this scenario we all know it, that my God it's so melodramatic that it's a fake but let's play the game. I have a small daughter, I don't but let's say, who is kidnapped by bad guys who are serially raping her and I got hold of one of these guys. I know that he knows where they are holding my daughter. Okay, frankly I don't know, I definitely cannot promise you that I would not torture the guy. But everything depends on this that I should have I should, if I were to do it, it should have been done as an act of utter despair, you know what I mean. The sense of out nonetheless. Certain things are implied on condition that one doesn't talk about them. Like there are these half-open marriages where an occasional affair is tolerated on condition that the partner doesn't tell it publicly. So when the partner does tell it, then let's say my wife tells me, "oh by the way yesterday I slept with your friend." If I were to live in this kind of implicit arrangement, my point would be, "I know it, but my God what are you trying to tell me with this? Why are you telling me?" You know what I mean, there are situations where telling a thing is not neutral. It means more. Like, for example, my cynical example to take it here. You know what is the academic code for when you are at the talk like mine here and if the the speaker afterwards asks you, "was it a boring talk or an interesting talk?" If you want to say it was stupid and boring, the polite way of saying it—it’s codified—is to say, "oh it was interesting." This is a polite way to say it was stupid and boring. Now let us say I ask you afterwards and you say you think it was boring and stupid and you tell me, "it was boring and stupid." I would have the full right to be shocked. Because if you say "it was boring and stupid," you already say much more. You bring in a personal aggressivity. I would have the full right to tell you, "but if you really meant only that it was boring and stupid, why didn't you simply say that it was interesting?" You know what I mean? And it’s the same with torture. That's my fear. If they really mean it, exceptionally we have to torture people, why then are they telling us? I claim that the ominous dimension is not so much that secretly they are doing more, but to cut it to put it in a very blunt way, I claim that the very fundamental rules of etico-political, what Hegel would have called our etico-political substance, the unwritten rules of what is admissible not, are unfortunately changing today. And I by in no way putting the blame exclusively on the United States. I'm just saying that things like this, when certain things where people are no longer ashamed of publicly speaking about certain things, it’s never simply better in the sense of "oh less hypocrisy." Hypocrisy has its uses. It contains things in certain limits. So that would be my first problem, my approach. Then next things, and with this I really conclude that I would like to add is that we should also bear in mind to what extent the objective, what I called objective violence, violence caused by the functioning of today's global system itself, is in a false way counteracted by not subjective violence but subjective how should I put it charity, charity activities. Which is why for me I Bill Gates is an icon today, not so much because, you know, virtual capitalism, Microsoft, but how he combines the most ruthless abstract capitalism, you grab billions of dollars with this heart-bleeding, warm tolerance. At the most, if I were to pick the most disgusting photo of the last couple of years, it is in New York Times about a couple of months ago when Bill Gates visited India. Him and his wife in an Indian village embracing some in a hospital ill children. You should have seen that pathetic expression and so on. In other words, I claim that it's not enough today to say "oh but people are starving, we should help them." It's part of today's system to refer all the time to this threatened outside. You know, Bill Gates is saying all the time, "What does it matter all the computers if people are still unnecessarily dying of diarrhea and so on and so on?" What's the function of this humanitarianism? I'm more and more convinced to create a false sense of urgency, whose target is "do not think, act." But act so that what do I mean by this? Wendy Brown in her one of her recent essays did a wonderful analysis of this false sense of urgency. You know what I mean by this? Like if I were to say now "Are you aware that for every word that I pronounced today during my talk, ten children died of hunger in Africa? Are you aware that every minute that I was talking, a woman was beaten and raped in the United States?" I mean this is true, of course my God, but the way this kind of manipulation is false, it introduces a false sense of urgency. The opposite of it is, probably it’s not now I remember some three, four years ago in a Starbucks, Starbucks Coffee here, it was the inverted formula. They appealed to you with "every cup that you drink with us, I don't know, cents goes to the Guatemala kid and he gets an," so you know every cup you save a kid or whatever. This precisely is the is the false urgency. What what we should insist on more and more is that how should I put it, sometimes today precisely when people, even Chomsky I was told conceded to this point, "no time for theory today, the system is totally cynical, we know everything, we just have to tell the people to make them aware." No, we need theory more than ever today. I think we should not be afraid, we should not feel terrorized by this false sense of moralistic urgency, you know, "no time for theory, people are starving," and so on. My God, it’s only through theory that we will we have at least a hope to learn what to do. So to really conclude, I know a much more dirty version of the jokes on Aristocrats then I've seen the film, the one there. I would call it even by nastier name, "The Perverts." I mean imagine the same situation, the group, the family comes to the manager of a seedy hardcore nightclub and tell him, "we have a really dirty dirty performance." And the guy asks them, "okay, do it for me," and then they start to perform what? The son refers to Hegel's *Phenomenology*, the subject, consciousness; mother said, "No, you forgot about the logic of essence;" father said, "What about absolute knowing?" They go on and finally the manager explodes, "What's the title of this?" "The Perverts!" Yes, all the fist-fucking, eating shit in Aristocrats, it’s nothing compared in perverse obscene power than to one good piece of Hegelian dialectics. You have to accept this today, we need this attitude. We theorists are true big criminals, are the true perverts. All these people who do sadism, shit-eating, whatever, they are modest conservatives. Thanks very much. Okay, then some I'm not the boss here, like some debate or what's the plan? Now this is what I meant with this implicit how to obey the rule. I don't know now, is this a polite way of saying, no, you said if people want to ask the question, you know what I mean, I was perplexed for a moment, are you saying them to shut up or you really can? No, it would be an honor, you know, it would be an honor. Sorry? Okay, so please then let's use a little bit if some of you, please. Just a lot of different points, I was thinking of the character of the witness or angel in Kieślowski’s *Decalogue*. Yeah. And I was, is there do you see a connection between that that figure and the neighbor or the chicken? That's a that's a good question because I know how open the interpretations are of the first I generally I totally agree with you that if anything, especially in his Polish films, no, I much prefer them to this later new age, that Kieślowski was precisely very sensitive to this dimension, dimension of the neighbor. So no, I think I unfortunately but I tend almost to agree with those who claim that the neighbor that isn't do you think this is a kind of a Christ figure, but almost authentic one, I mean not in any mystical sense, because I tried to play the game once with friends and to locate the exact moments when this guy appears. It is usually, if I remember it correctly, at the moments of crucial decision or catastrophe. Like, if I remember it correctly, in number five, *Short Film About Killing*, just when the taxi driver goes and it’s not or the guy goes to pick up the taxi before the killing, that guy with a sad look with a sad gaze intervene. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't say he is directly a neighbor. I would rather put him as a kind of a how should I put it, anonymous, the anonymous witness, not the Lacanian Big Other precisely but rather a Christ-like small other figure, this anonymous witness of witnessing of neighboring, a kind of a not directly a neighbor, it's difficult for me. What do you see in it, in him? Because the whole point is that he is pure passivity, he just looks with a kind of a, you know why I also mean Christ figure, no, because the way I read Christianity, no, it's not that Christ saved us in the sense that he did for us. I buy those theologians who claim that the only way to sustain religion after Holocaust, Gulag and so on is to turn it around: not God will help us, but God needs our help. You know that for me divine figure today is that he sees a catastrophe, this Christ figure there, but can't do anything. He is the observer, we must do it. That's how I read Christianity, it’s the other way around. We must help God. God killed himself, he he died there, no, I mean he he is dead, we we must do it. In this sense, in this sense he is, okay or to put it in another way, in more Agamben terms, he would be a pure witness. But with all also of the impotence that this implies. I'm tempted to go in this direction. And I think that something goes wrong about along these lines then later in Kieślowski, in all these heart-rending French French films or whatever, no, they are something something goes wrong there. But okay, sorry, cannot say. Yeah, please. One of the things I find interesting about what you're saying about the commodity, what is it that we should do today to contrast or oppose, you know, Bush ideology, in so far as, you know Nietzsche says in his third essay the genealogy that, you know, they have one goal, one plan, whereas our one goal, what's our one plan? How could we possibly oppose him? What is it that we would want if he were dethroned? You see all the protests all around the world, in all these countries, if they got what they wanted, what would it be? Well, here I'm, this I always disappoint my leftist friends at this level because first okay the first thing to say is that we should still, if we by "we" mean some kind of a general left, to finish to bring to the end self-criticism. I think we should start as I describe in my *Fragile Absolute* book, you know we should do like what Ed Norton does in that wonderfully uneasy scene in the *Fight Club*, you know where in front of the boss he starts hitting himself. I mean, we still didn't do properly the job of to ask really the questions in what way the liberal politics with its inconsistencies and so on opens up the path for Bush. Point two is we should nonetheless think about the global situation and I'm not celebrating this fact but I think that the contours are already clear with last visit of Chinese president and so on. I think that the American century is over. We are already quickly much faster than it appears to be approaching a more dispersed universe, where I claim the situation will be much more much more complex. For example, for me again, what is China today? It's the most tragic example of a country where we have Communist Party nominally in power and the main social function of Communist Party is de facto to crash any workers' autonomous opposition, that is to say to create the best conditions for the for the capitalist development, no. I mean things things get so confused here so that again, I think that we should still start with start with a good dosage of self-criticism, how should I put it, no. I mean, that's the true tragedy for me. But again, the problem is even more radical, radical in the sense of what are the alternatives? I'm in a very desperate phase. Why? I remain a Marxist in the sense that I sincerely don't think that the present world system can reproduce itself indefinitely. But what I fear is not so much "oh it can go on indefinitely," but that, and we are already slowly getting the contours of something even much worse than what we have today will arise. This I see here even in the West democracy being redefined, I see new the logic new apartheid logic and so on and so on. I see how even this old liberal hope that capitalism sooner or later generally leads to democracy, that you can have only this short-term authoritarian detours, I I see even that getting less and less true. I think that the rules are changing so fundamentally, and
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this
this
Slavoj Žižek
is what I meant with this final call to theory. I don't think we really know where we are. And this is my problem with what I call optimists like with all my estimation admiration for them, for example, Hardt-Negri. I mean they paint as if "oh my God, we are almost there, things are
is what I meant with this final call to theory. I don't think we really know where we are. And this is my problem with what I call optimists like with all my estimation admiration for them, for example, Hardt-Negri. I mean they paint as if "oh my God, we are almost there, things are
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happening, populism Latin America, here, there," and so on. I think it’s
happening, populism Latin America, here, there," and so on. I think it’s
Slavoj Žižek
much more ambiguous. I first I do not see this fundamental matrix repeating itself. You have a leader, then everybody is ecstatic, Mandela, Lula in Brazil, then he is given two years and he confronts as it were the hard facts of life, no? which is the message from this anonymous mythical big capital: "okay you can have your fun with human rights and so on but now we are talking business, don't mess with us," no? and then I don't see any alter even for example everybody now seems to love Chavez, no? okay okay but I mean I couldn't stop laughing when he announced now he will stop he will take care dispossessing foreign oil companies and then whom did he pick up? An Italian and a French company, you don't touch United States because he needs. So we will see, I again how should I put it I see the situation as very tragic. Not tragic in the sense that it will go on indefinitely. Something will have to be done, we will be forced to act in a utopian way. But I still don't see the concrete form, organization or whatever how it should be done. I'm here just much more skeptical than it appears, much more skeptical with regard to global I mean anti-globalism movement, much more and of course one should support them, but nonetheless one should have this minimal distance, that’s not yet it. I which is why again Negri is surprising me and Hardt how this idea that this postmodern virtual digital whatever capitalism is already practically communism, just a slight change of form is needed, so at the end Negri came now to the conclusion in one of his last interviews that we no longer even have to fight capitalism today. It's already so close to some kind of new form of communism that we are practically there. And I I don't know, I must only express I think that maybe we need a little bit of this totally desperate strategy of just undercutting these easy ways out. That’s for me always the problem of leftists, that exactly the way I described it they are ready to endorse all cynicism and so on but they need another an idealized other which then can move around the world, no. Now it's Chavez, before it was I know Cuba, here, there, wherever. There must be another country where it really happens, how should I put it, no, yeah. Wait a minute, now you now how should we do it, left right, right left, how should we do it, my God. Okay, okay I'm a leftist, left from left to right, okay. No, no, no this precisely we is the taboo that has to be broken. I mean in the sense that I think that absolutely some kind of violence, I
much more ambiguous. I first I do not see this fundamental matrix repeating itself. You have a leader, then everybody is ecstatic, Mandela, Lula in Brazil, then he is given two years and he confronts as it were the hard facts of life, no? which is the message from this anonymous mythical big capital: "okay you can have your fun with human rights and so on but now we are talking business, don't mess with us," no? and then I don't see any alter even for example everybody now seems to love Chavez, no? okay okay but I mean I couldn't stop laughing when he announced now he will stop he will take care dispossessing foreign oil companies and then whom did he pick up? An Italian and a French company, you don't touch United States because he needs. So we will see, I again how should I put it I see the situation as very tragic. Not tragic in the sense that it will go on indefinitely. Something will have to be done, we will be forced to act in a utopian way. But I still don't see the concrete form, organization or whatever how it should be done. I'm here just much more skeptical than it appears, much more skeptical with regard to global I mean anti-globalism movement, much more and of course one should support them, but nonetheless one should have this minimal distance, that’s not yet it. I which is why again Negri is surprising me and Hardt how this idea that this postmodern virtual digital whatever capitalism is already practically communism, just a slight change of form is needed, so at the end Negri came now to the conclusion in one of his last interviews that we no longer even have to fight capitalism today. It's already so close to some kind of new form of communism that we are practically there. And I I don't know, I must only express I think that maybe we need a little bit of this totally desperate strategy of just undercutting these easy ways out. That’s for me always the problem of leftists, that exactly the way I described it they are ready to endorse all cynicism and so on but they need another an idealized other which then can move around the world, no. Now it's Chavez, before it was I know Cuba, here, there, wherever. There must be another country where it really happens, how should I put it, no, yeah. Wait a minute, now you now how should we do it, left right, right left, how should we do it, my God. Okay, okay I'm a leftist, left from left to right, okay. No, no, no this precisely we is the taboo that has to be broken. I mean in the sense that I think that absolutely some kind of violence, I
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don't know, I don't want to commit myself in advance, but if there is something I'm not ready to renounce in advance is violence. I think that violence some kind of violence should be rehabilitated. And not only in this shitty leftist-liberal way that, you know, non-violence is really the most violent, no no I mean real violence even, you know. What? Cathartic. Cathartic, yes, and violence that sym... Sorry? What? All of, yeah, no
don't know, I don't want to commit myself in advance, but if there is something I'm not ready to renounce in advance is violence. I think that violence some kind of violence should be rehabilitated. And not only in this shitty leftist-liberal way that, you know, non-violence is really the most violent, no no I mean real violence even, you know. What? Cathartic. Cathartic, yes, and violence that sym... Sorry? What? All of, yeah, no
Slavoj Žižek
no I'm here like Badiou, I mean I believe in terror, how should I put it. I believe in terror. I'm a Russian. Sorry? I'm a Russian, I do too. Hey, okay, then I'm a Slav, it's in our blood, how should I put it, we look at No no, no no, seriously I believe then that in every authentic emancipatory act, you have this element of terror. And I think that there is no authentic freedom without terror. You know what I mean, authentic free act is where you stake your being. Authentic free act is not "should I have chocolate cake or cheesecake?" but you know "should I have had my my head cut off or not? What do I risk?" no. In this sense we should how should I put it terror means simply your being is your entire being is at stake. Okay, but so that I don't get lost, okay then I go then to the okay let me put it as today's politics goes, left right and then center at the end. Oh he's one of my heroes and I will tell you why, because what people often miss in him is that he’s incredibly how secretly imperceptibly he is often liberalized, in what sense? People perceive him as if he is preaching against institutionalized Christianity, this inner faith. No, faith for him is not inner. If he you must know better than me, if he despises something, it’s this attitude of inner belief, only inner. No no no, he is very much for a community and so on belief. So he knew very well how this liberal emphasis of what matters is the sincerity of inner faith and so on, that's not what he is preaching. No, I'm in this sense I'm more and more Kierkegaardian. In my last book *Parallax View*, my God I have a whole celebration, not only this aspect, but for example the whole aspect of comedy, his idea of Christian comedy, and he really means it. Not just in Dante's sense comedy means it ends well, but this idea that there is that if you conceive Christianity as tragedy, you remain at the level of the tragic pagan hero. That it's comedy, comedy it doesn't mean it’s no despair we laugh, but that how should I put it when things got get really terrifying, the gap has to appear comic. I'm even ready to establish a link between this and the fact that I always which I always repeat that all my God all good comedy all good movies about about Holocaust are necessarily comedies. If you I claim that don't you feel it if you make a tragedy of Holocaust or Gulag or other terror, you are doing an obscenity, you are doing a favor to Nazis, because you are already diminishing the despair. I mean situations were so terrible there that you cannot play, you know for a tragedy to take place a certain dignity minimal must be maintained, a certain you need a tragic dignity. In other words, no my God Kierkegaard is one of my absolute fans and I buy him in in all the details, but crazy as I am, I nonetheless claim that okay here I cannot get out of my skin, that his relationship to Hegel is much more twisted than it may appear, that his critique of Hegel is one big misunderstanding. But that's another story. So again, I have absolutely no problem with no problem with Kierkegaard at this level. Okay. Oh no my no when I said this slowing down, I I definitely didn't mean any position of wisdom in the sense of you know you keep yourself out to get an objective picture and so on. I think that the lesson that I get from Kierkegaard, from Marx, from all of them is that the universality and partiality are not mutually exclusive. The paradox for me is that universal truth, which remains universal, is accessible only from an engaged partisan position. It is not that here is one side, there is the other side to get at the universal truth you withdraw from each other, no. In this sense I think that I know this is for me the true engagement, in this sense also the true belief, also always involves a minimum of trust. Not trust in this theological sense of "oh somebody is taking care of it, it will," but trust in the sense of you should give yourself a minimum of time. In the in this sense for me this being immediately pushed into belief is for me always a kind of a hysterical acting out, which means you don't really trust yourself so to convince yourself you immediately have to do something. For me authentic belief is never over-nervous, impatient, how should I put it. You have this minimum of trust. I mean without this we are lost, we are lost I claim. Then we fall into this humanitarian trap where we at the end we end up like Bono or Bill Gates or what, you
no I'm here like Badiou, I mean I believe in terror, how should I put it. I believe in terror. I'm a Russian. Sorry? I'm a Russian, I do too. Hey, okay, then I'm a Slav, it's in our blood, how should I put it, we look at No no, no no, seriously I believe then that in every authentic emancipatory act, you have this element of terror. And I think that there is no authentic freedom without terror. You know what I mean, authentic free act is where you stake your being. Authentic free act is not "should I have chocolate cake or cheesecake?" but you know "should I have had my my head cut off or not? What do I risk?" no. In this sense we should how should I put it terror means simply your being is your entire being is at stake. Okay, but so that I don't get lost, okay then I go then to the okay let me put it as today's politics goes, left right and then center at the end. Oh he's one of my heroes and I will tell you why, because what people often miss in him is that he’s incredibly how secretly imperceptibly he is often liberalized, in what sense? People perceive him as if he is preaching against institutionalized Christianity, this inner faith. No, faith for him is not inner. If he you must know better than me, if he despises something, it’s this attitude of inner belief, only inner. No no no, he is very much for a community and so on belief. So he knew very well how this liberal emphasis of what matters is the sincerity of inner faith and so on, that's not what he is preaching. No, I'm in this sense I'm more and more Kierkegaardian. In my last book *Parallax View*, my God I have a whole celebration, not only this aspect, but for example the whole aspect of comedy, his idea of Christian comedy, and he really means it. Not just in Dante's sense comedy means it ends well, but this idea that there is that if you conceive Christianity as tragedy, you remain at the level of the tragic pagan hero. That it's comedy, comedy it doesn't mean it’s no despair we laugh, but that how should I put it when things got get really terrifying, the gap has to appear comic. I'm even ready to establish a link between this and the fact that I always which I always repeat that all my God all good comedy all good movies about about Holocaust are necessarily comedies. If you I claim that don't you feel it if you make a tragedy of Holocaust or Gulag or other terror, you are doing an obscenity, you are doing a favor to Nazis, because you are already diminishing the despair. I mean situations were so terrible there that you cannot play, you know for a tragedy to take place a certain dignity minimal must be maintained, a certain you need a tragic dignity. In other words, no my God Kierkegaard is one of my absolute fans and I buy him in in all the details, but crazy as I am, I nonetheless claim that okay here I cannot get out of my skin, that his relationship to Hegel is much more twisted than it may appear, that his critique of Hegel is one big misunderstanding. But that's another story. So again, I have absolutely no problem with no problem with Kierkegaard at this level. Okay. Oh no my no when I said this slowing down, I I definitely didn't mean any position of wisdom in the sense of you know you keep yourself out to get an objective picture and so on. I think that the lesson that I get from Kierkegaard, from Marx, from all of them is that the universality and partiality are not mutually exclusive. The paradox for me is that universal truth, which remains universal, is accessible only from an engaged partisan position. It is not that here is one side, there is the other side to get at the universal truth you withdraw from each other, no. In this sense I think that I know this is for me the true engagement, in this sense also the true belief, also always involves a minimum of trust. Not trust in this theological sense of "oh somebody is taking care of it, it will," but trust in the sense of you should give yourself a minimum of time. In the in this sense for me this being immediately pushed into belief is for me always a kind of a hysterical acting out, which means you don't really trust yourself so to convince yourself you immediately have to do something. For me authentic belief is never over-nervous, impatient, how should I put it. You have this minimum of trust. I mean without this we are lost, we are lost I claim. Then we fall into this humanitarian trap where we at the end we end up like Bono or Bill Gates or what, you
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know, "oh my
know, "oh my
Slavoj Žižek
God children dying here, children dying there." Which is I think again, I think that it would be nice for somebody to write it’s unbelievable how universal this is getting, you know it's really as if the ideological supplement of today's global capitalism this new discourse "end poverty, charity" and so on, "let's finally do something" and so on. This is I think a
God children dying here, children dying there." Which is I think again, I think that it would be nice for somebody to write it’s unbelievable how universal this is getting, you know it's really as if the ideological supplement of today's global capitalism this new discourse "end poverty, charity" and so on, "let's finally do something" and so on. This is I think a
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crucial, absolutely
crucial, absolutely
Slavoj Žižek
crucial component of today's global capitalism. And again I think it’s precisely the
crucial component of today's global capitalism. And again I think it’s precisely the
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wrong way to
wrong way to
Slavoj Žižek
approach it. But again, what is crucial for me is that how should I put it, usually people claim if you only think you doubt and to believe you have to act. Here I'm tempted to say psychoanalysis also teaches us that *passage l’acte* can also be precisely a proof of this belief. And incidentally, when I was in Ramallah, I spoke with some Palestinians there who knew some of this so-called suicide bombers, and they told me a very interesting thing, how their impression from talking with people who knew them and so on is none of those
approach it. But again, what is crucial for me is that how should I put it, usually people claim if you only think you doubt and to believe you have to act. Here I'm tempted to say psychoanalysis also teaches us that *passage l’acte* can also be precisely a proof of this belief. And incidentally, when I was in Ramallah, I spoke with some Palestinians there who knew some of this so-called suicide bombers, and they told me a very interesting thing, how their impression from talking with people who knew them and so on is none of those
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clichés, "yeah yeah they killed themselves because they were sure that you know those ridiculous virgins waiting for you" and so on. That if anything, the existential anxiety was it was a much more complex logic along the lines
clichés, "yeah yeah they killed themselves because they were sure that you know those ridiculous virgins waiting for you" and so on. That if anything, the existential anxiety was it was a much more complex logic along the lines
Slavoj Žižek
of "I'm not sure, so to convince myself that I'm sure I will kill myself to prove to myself that I really believe," how should I put it, that it's not as simple as "oh you see those jerks they really believe virgins so they kill themselves" or whatever. And I'm not even convinced now if you quote me those ridiculous Muhammad Atta diaries or what, you can fake it even there. I don't think that this proves anything about belief, all all this for me. But I don't maybe I wasn't precise enough, but I don't see here the link between super-ego and Kantian sublime. I wouldn't but if you the the way I see the link, and in a new book, short book that will be out now soon with Granta Books, *How to Read Lacan*, I went into this through reading of Dostoyevsky, *Bobok*, which is a wonderful short story about a guy who witnesses at a graveyard the scene of the living dead who are dead but not yet called to God, and in that in-between state they said to themselves "we can now be totally honest, say everything we want, all the obscenities" and so on. Which is I think a very nice self-criticism of Dostoyevsky, in the sense that there he without knowing it I think undermines his own formula "if God doesn't exist then everything is permitted." It’s clear that in a concrete situation which he imagines there, "everything is permitted" is precisely a kind of a negative theological vision of that undeathness. You know, it's it's a theologically the situation in which everything is permitted is a situation Dostoyevsky admits there imaginable only for a living death, where you have to have immortality, God and so on. And the famous letter, you find it can find it on the Internet, that the guy who killed that Dutch cinema maker, you know, Muhammad Bouyeri, that letter is for me a nice example of what I would have claimed the super-ego logic. And I think you can locate this shift from fundamentalism, where do we have super-ego in a very precise way. It's a shift from "I am
of "I'm not sure, so to convince myself that I'm sure I will kill myself to prove to myself that I really believe," how should I put it, that it's not as simple as "oh you see those jerks they really believe virgins so they kill themselves" or whatever. And I'm not even convinced now if you quote me those ridiculous Muhammad Atta diaries or what, you can fake it even there. I don't think that this proves anything about belief, all all this for me. But I don't maybe I wasn't precise enough, but I don't see here the link between super-ego and Kantian sublime. I wouldn't but if you the the way I see the link, and in a new book, short book that will be out now soon with Granta Books, *How to Read Lacan*, I went into this through reading of Dostoyevsky, *Bobok*, which is a wonderful short story about a guy who witnesses at a graveyard the scene of the living dead who are dead but not yet called to God, and in that in-between state they said to themselves "we can now be totally honest, say everything we want, all the obscenities" and so on. Which is I think a very nice self-criticism of Dostoyevsky, in the sense that there he without knowing it I think undermines his own formula "if God doesn't exist then everything is permitted." It’s clear that in a concrete situation which he imagines there, "everything is permitted" is precisely a kind of a negative theological vision of that undeathness. You know, it's it's a theologically the situation in which everything is permitted is a situation Dostoyevsky admits there imaginable only for a living death, where you have to have immortality, God and so on. And the famous letter, you find it can find it on the Internet, that the guy who killed that Dutch cinema maker, you know, Muhammad Bouyeri, that letter is for me a nice example of what I would have claimed the super-ego logic. And I think you can locate this shift from fundamentalism, where do we have super-ego in a very precise way. It's a shift from "I am
unknown
ready to die for my faith" to "I want to die to
ready to die for my faith" to "I want to die to
Slavoj Žižek
prove my faith." You know what I mean, where something that should be just a proof that you are ready to die for something, when the moment you shift from this to "I want to die actively to prove that it's truth," what I'm claiming, that's for me a pervert. Here the logic of obscene enjoyment and so on is its at stake. I mean it’s the same problem as with morality. I think that the true test of morality for a proper Kantian is not are you ready to suffer, every normal sadist, sorry masochist idiot is ready to do this. Is it are you ready to accept that while doing something ethical, you profit by it, but it doesn't affect you? How should I put it, you know? It’s very easy to suffer because this is our natural pathological moral masochism, you know like as the Protestants say, everything is permitted if you don't enjoy it. That is to say, if it suffers, it must be good, how should I put it, no? If it hurts, it must be good, no? But the point is not to which is why for me, again I don't know a lot about it but for me what usually Christians reproach to Jews as their hypocrisy is for me the proof that they are outside super-ego logic. Namely, what from the Christian perspective appears us how, you know, Jews always look for a way how to read the divine commandments literally then to find your way out, and again they are doing it. I I know wonderful examples like that famous kibbutz, a little bit north from Tel Aviv, where so I was told by reliable witnesses they raise pigs. How? Because you have God prohibits "no pigs should be raised on the land of Israel." No problem, they raised a three-feet-high plateau, no? Like now for us Christians this is obscenity, they cheat and so on. No, I mean, the whole point is really not to invest it. I mean, why should pleasure or pain should be really neutralized. It’s not pain doesn't prove anything, how should I put it, no? And even even now I'm even reading Islam and I think Islam is much more ambiguous religion. I think that as with all religions who fell down at some point, fell down in the sense that can justify horrible things, but it has its own unbelievable unbelievable greatness. For example, one thing that some leftist guys told me: do you know, is it significant that Islam never refers to God as father? They always emphasize Christians, Jews have this paternity relations.
prove my faith." You know what I mean, where something that should be just a proof that you are ready to die for something, when the moment you shift from this to "I want to die actively to prove that it's truth," what I'm claiming, that's for me a pervert. Here the logic of obscene enjoyment and so on is its at stake. I mean it’s the same problem as with morality. I think that the true test of morality for a proper Kantian is not are you ready to suffer, every normal sadist, sorry masochist idiot is ready to do this. Is it are you ready to accept that while doing something ethical, you profit by it, but it doesn't affect you? How should I put it, you know? It’s very easy to suffer because this is our natural pathological moral masochism, you know like as the Protestants say, everything is permitted if you don't enjoy it. That is to say, if it suffers, it must be good, how should I put it, no? If it hurts, it must be good, no? But the point is not to which is why for me, again I don't know a lot about it but for me what usually Christians reproach to Jews as their hypocrisy is for me the proof that they are outside super-ego logic. Namely, what from the Christian perspective appears us how, you know, Jews always look for a way how to read the divine commandments literally then to find your way out, and again they are doing it. I I know wonderful examples like that famous kibbutz, a little bit north from Tel Aviv, where so I was told by reliable witnesses they raise pigs. How? Because you have God prohibits "no pigs should be raised on the land of Israel." No problem, they raised a three-feet-high plateau, no? Like now for us Christians this is obscenity, they cheat and so on. No, I mean, the whole point is really not to invest it. I mean, why should pleasure or pain should be really neutralized. It’s not pain doesn't prove anything, how should I put it, no? And even even now I'm even reading Islam and I think Islam is much more ambiguous religion. I think that as with all religions who fell down at some point, fell down in the sense that can justify horrible things, but it has its own unbelievable unbelievable greatness. For example, one thing that some leftist guys told me: do you know, is it significant that Islam never refers to God as father? They always emphasize Christians, Jews have this paternity relations.
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Their idea is the Muslim
Their idea is the Muslim
Slavoj Žižek
believer is in a position of an orphan, and not an orphan in the sense human orphan but then God, no, even God is not a father. This is what is originally much more interesting than it appear in this famous notion which everybody thinks it's totalitarian of Ummah, Ummah like community. The problem is how to build a political community without any reliance on some already existing patriarchal network or whatever and so on and so on. So things are it’s even extreme okay you do find if you read in detail as every religion in Islam every religion cheats, I claim, in the sense that you find this and that and you can give this on that twist. So okay, you find dark premonitions like the way Islam retells in Quran I think the story of Cain and Abel, no? It’s very interesting how it’s retold there. It’s that when Cain approaches Abel with intention of killing, Abel Abel notices that Cain oscillates. And then Abel Abel tells him, "Don't oscillate, please come kill me. In this way you will wash me of my sins. I will die a martyr, you will burn even more in hell," and so on. It’s a very strange twist. On the other hand, the twist given to Abraham and Isaac in Quran retelling, it’s treated as a hermeneutic misunderstanding. That that it wasn't really the order, that wasn't really the order, so God even admonishes Isaac, sorry Abraham, and so on. I mean it’s how should I put it, you find breathtakingly modern elements, at least if we approach them from approach them from today. So so again, I think that what I'm trying to do is not what Bush is doing. I hate this, I prefer Oriana Fallaci to Bush, or whomever. You know what, I hate these people. "Oh what a big religion Muslim is Islam is just." No, it’s just that what I like to detect is this radical ambiguity: how from the best it can turn to worst or how often something that was originally a terrible thing all of a sudden there can be a redeeming quality in it. Because I think that even if you take Nazism, I mean we should never forget that Nazism is a dream which can even be an authentic dream but thwarted, turned into a nightmare. My when Nazi, Nazis speak about Volksgemeinschaft, people's solidarity, sorry but what's bad in it? Nothing. What is bad is how is it, how should I put it, operationalized. "Ah but this solidarity is ruined through Jews, blah blah, finish the Jews," and so on. But you know what I mean. I mean, I would just like to keep this openness of the situation. That only and only Hegel God. I mean it’s a very boring, everyone people say this guy is crazy, postmodern, jokes. But the joke, but the final joke is that I'm I have a very conservative vision in the sense of always obsessed with the same point: how to redeem Hegel. And I think it’s worth fighting for. And this brings me into trouble all the time, you know. For example, I don't know, Ernesto Laclau now thinks I'm totally crazy and so on, everything. But I don't want to compromise here. That's what I'm doing all the time and will be doing till the end, how should I put it. Okay, thanks very much.
believer is in a position of an orphan, and not an orphan in the sense human orphan but then God, no, even God is not a father. This is what is originally much more interesting than it appear in this famous notion which everybody thinks it's totalitarian of Ummah, Ummah like community. The problem is how to build a political community without any reliance on some already existing patriarchal network or whatever and so on and so on. So things are it’s even extreme okay you do find if you read in detail as every religion in Islam every religion cheats, I claim, in the sense that you find this and that and you can give this on that twist. So okay, you find dark premonitions like the way Islam retells in Quran I think the story of Cain and Abel, no? It’s very interesting how it’s retold there. It’s that when Cain approaches Abel with intention of killing, Abel Abel notices that Cain oscillates. And then Abel Abel tells him, "Don't oscillate, please come kill me. In this way you will wash me of my sins. I will die a martyr, you will burn even more in hell," and so on. It’s a very strange twist. On the other hand, the twist given to Abraham and Isaac in Quran retelling, it’s treated as a hermeneutic misunderstanding. That that it wasn't really the order, that wasn't really the order, so God even admonishes Isaac, sorry Abraham, and so on. I mean it’s how should I put it, you find breathtakingly modern elements, at least if we approach them from approach them from today. So so again, I think that what I'm trying to do is not what Bush is doing. I hate this, I prefer Oriana Fallaci to Bush, or whomever. You know what, I hate these people. "Oh what a big religion Muslim is Islam is just." No, it’s just that what I like to detect is this radical ambiguity: how from the best it can turn to worst or how often something that was originally a terrible thing all of a sudden there can be a redeeming quality in it. Because I think that even if you take Nazism, I mean we should never forget that Nazism is a dream which can even be an authentic dream but thwarted, turned into a nightmare. My when Nazi, Nazis speak about Volksgemeinschaft, people's solidarity, sorry but what's bad in it? Nothing. What is bad is how is it, how should I put it, operationalized. "Ah but this solidarity is ruined through Jews, blah blah, finish the Jews," and so on. But you know what I mean. I mean, I would just like to keep this openness of the situation. That only and only Hegel God. I mean it’s a very boring, everyone people say this guy is crazy, postmodern, jokes. But the joke, but the final joke is that I'm I have a very conservative vision in the sense of always obsessed with the same point: how to redeem Hegel. And I think it’s worth fighting for. And this brings me into trouble all the time, you know. For example, I don't know, Ernesto Laclau now thinks I'm totally crazy and so on, everything. But I don't want to compromise here. That's what I'm doing all the time and will be doing till the end, how should I put it. Okay, thanks very much.