The Ambiguity of Obscenity
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009 · 2:13:18 · 19,282 words
ideologycinema-art-culturepsychoanalysiscapitalismreligion-theologyhegel-dialecticssexuality-genderfascism-populismeveryday-lifehistory
Žižek delivers a lecture-style seminar analyzing how Hollywood cinema operates on two simultaneous narrative levels, an official surface story and a libidinal undercurrent involving the couple, incest, and desire, using Titanic, Armageddon, Deep Impact, Enigma, and Casablanca as case studies. He then extends this structural 'split' to the broader functioning of ideology, showing how official norms always require an obscene supplement (military hazing, communist political jokes, Ku Klux Klan rituals) that is not simply subversive but constitutive of the system. The talk moves through carnival theory (critiquing Bakhtin), the Fritzl case as literal architectural enactment of the paternal fantasy-split, fundamentalism as covert permissivity, and the ideological operations of late/post-'68 capitalism, culminating in Starbucks's 'coffee karma' advertisement as the paradigm of compassionate consumerist ideology.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 25
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “production of the couple”
Žižek's label for the basic Hollywood formula by which the official story of catastrophe functions as cover for, or resolution of, a underlying romantic/sexual problem.
The structural method Žižek applies to Hollywood films: every story must be read simultaneously at the level of the official plot and at the level of the hidden libidinal narrative that gives it its emotional power.
Žižek's reading of certain catastrophes, the Titanic sinking, the Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague, as preserving an ideal (true love, the dream of socialism) by preventing its prosaic realization.
A figure (e.g. Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack in Titanic) who serves only to restore or revitalize the subject and then disappears once his function is complete; borrowed from Fredric Jameson but applied here to class dynamics in cinema.
as “surplus enjoyment (plus-de-jouir)”
Žižek uses the Lacanian plus-de-jouir to name the extra libidinal gain Hollywood films provide by embedding a secret love/incest subplot beneath the official catastrophe narrative.
as “obscene exchange of solidarity”
Žižek's claim that genuine inter-group friendship is cemented not by polite cultural appreciation but by an exchange of mutual obscenity, the token transgression that establishes real community.
as “true transgression”
Žižek's paradox: the real act of exclusion in a community is not violating the official explicit rules but violating the implicit obscene supplementary rules (e.g., denouncing KKK to police in the American South).
as “carnivalesque suspension”
Bakhtin's concept of ritual inversion of social hierarchy, which Žižek refuses to celebrate as liberating: he argues carnival can equally serve as the medium of power (Stalinist purges, gang rape, Auschwitz).
The unofficial, non-public but communally shared transgressive underside of any official ideological order, military hazing chants, political jokes, Ku Klux Klan rituals, which does not subvert but constitutively sustains the system.
as “Urvater (primordial father)”
Freud's myth of the all-possessing father, which Žižek reads not as a prehistoric fact but as the phantasmatic supplement to the symbolic father, enacted literally by Fritzl.
The fantasmatic supplement that underlies and sustains every official social structure, the obscene dream of absolute paternal power beneath respectable fatherhood, or the dirty jouissance beneath Hollywood Puritanism.
Žižek's distinction between the benevolent paternal law and the hidden superego-fantasy of omnipotent possession; the Fritzl case is read as the literal architectural realization of this split.
Žižek's psychoanalytically-grounded argument that acknowledging a victim's unconscious fantasy-participation in their violation does not mitigate the crime but, if anything, makes the trauma worse.
as “Hegel's Absolute Knowing as radical limitation”
Žižek endorses Pinkard's reading that Hegel's Absolutes Wissen is not megalomaniacal omniscience but the admission of a certain irreducible limitation, a closure rather than a completion.
as “Christianity as theological form of atheism”
Žižek's Hegelian reading: in the crucifixion God the Father, the transcendent guarantor, genuinely dies; Holy Spirit is just the community of believers, with no big Other behind it.
as “fundamentalism as covert permissivity”
Žižek's inversion of the standard reading: religious or nationalist fundamentalism is not a refuge from permissive modernity but a secret license to transgress, rape, kill, steal, under the cover of higher devotion.
Kant's concept of a structurally necessary illusion (not merely a correctable mistake), which Žižek connects to Marx's theory of ideology as an inescapable operative fiction.
as “ideology inscribed in practice”
Žižek's reformulation of Marx: ideology is not a false consciousness that overlays reality but an illusion operative in what people actually do, constitutive of social reality itself.
The Marxian point that ideology is not just a false representation but an illusion operative in practice itself: the illusion is constitutive of social reality, not merely superimposed upon it.
Marx's concept that ideology is not merely a misperception but inscribed into actual social practice, we treat commodities as magical objects in our social exchange even while knowing rationally they are not.
as “depoliticization through charity”
Žižek's claim that contemporary charity functions ideologically to make individuals feel they are 'doing something' while preventing structural political thinking about capitalism's causes of suffering.
as “compassionate/cultural capitalism”
Žižek's label for post-'68 capitalism that integrates ethical, ecological, and community concerns directly into the commodity form (Starbucks, organic food), making consumption an act of social conscience.
as “experience-level publicity”
A new dominant mode of advertising that sells not real product qualities or symbolic status but the subjective experience/feeling the product will deliver, alienation solved through consumption.
Boltanski and Chiapello's concept (adopted by Žižek) of post-'68 capitalism that recuperated the anti-alienation, authenticity, and anti-hierarchy rhetoric of the Left into its own self-justification.
Used in the Althusserian sense: how society addresses and constitutes subjects; Žižek argues today's interpellation is no longer a grand ideological cause but a vaguely spiritualized call to authentic self-realization.
Stories he reaches for 13
In Carpenter's film, the protagonist must put on special glasses to see billboard slogans' true ideological messages (OBEY, CONSUME). Žižek inverts the usual enlightenment metaphor: we are naturally in ideology; we need to be forced, even beaten, to see the truth.
“You need glasses, you need you have to be forced to see the truth. The truth hurts.”
Himmler told SS officers at Posen (Poznań) in 1943 that any idiot can sacrifice his life for his country but it takes a truly great patriot to do a bad thing, to kill, torture, suppressing even moral sentiment, for his country. The trick is to present your natural ethical resistance as narcissistic self-indulgence to be overcome.
“It takes a truly great patriot to do a bad thing for your country... to crush even your elementary moral sentiment.”
Žižek describes his Yugoslav army experience: the barracks were aggressively homophobic against openly gay soldiers, yet daily speech was saturated with joking homosexual undertones (morning greetings with sexual obscenities). He uses this to argue that homophobia and latent homosexuality are not simply opposites but co-constitutive.
“I never was in a community where all the daily expressions had a kind of a joking homosexual undertone”
Žižek reads Karadžić's poem ('Nothing is forbidden in my faith, there is loving and drinking and looking at the sun') as a candid statement of how nationalist/religious fundamentalism functions: not as a demand for sacrifice but as an invitation to lawless pleasure under a higher banner.
“I offer you inclemency and wine... nothing is forbidden in my faith. There is loving and drinking and looking at the sun as long as you want.”
A Montenegrin man masturbates by digging a hole and waiting for an earthquake, too lazy to move. Illustrates the Montenegrin national stereotype of laziness, deployed as an example of self-deprecating inter-Yugoslav obscene solidarity.
“He digs a hole in the earth and puts the penis in, he's even too lazy to move, he waits for the earthquake.”
Levi describes the Auschwitz 'selection' ritual: prisoners must run naked past an SS doctor in two-three seconds who decides their fate; they learn tricks to appear healthy. Žižek identifies something 'almost comic' in this, not to laugh, but because the horror is so total it exceeds tragedy.
“I'm sorry to tell you but there is something not to laugh, isn't there something almost I'm tempted to say comic about it.”
Téa Leoni's character is furious at her father for abandoning her mother; at the film's climax she embraces him alone on the beach as the tidal wave kills them both, a happy incestuous ending.
“she joins her father alone on a beach, the big wave is approaching, she embraces him says, oh daddy, oh dad and bang they are dead. It's as happy an ending as you can get.”
Bruce Willis's father-figure resists his daughter's suitor; the asteroid materializes his incestuous fury, the moment he accepts his daughter's romance, the asteroid is defeated.
“you can really read it as a simple Oedipal incestuous story where again the father's fury the asteroid just materializes”
Primo Levi reports a recurring dream: liberated from Auschwitz, he tells his family about his horrors at dinner, and they begin to yawn and leave. He awakens, preferring Auschwitz to this dismissal. Žižek uses this to illustrate that the trauma of rape/atrocity survivors' suicides often occur not at the violation but when they discover no symbolic space exists to receive their testimony.
“he is set free, he goes back visits his family and then he is telling his family gathered around dinner about his horrible experience in Auschwitz and then they start to yawn”
Yugoslav communist censors left The Sound of Music intact but cut only 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain', the Mother Superior's song urging Maria to return to the Baron. Žižek argues they were right: the song exposes the zero-level formula of Catholicism as 'pretend to renounce and you can have all you want.'
“this song describes the zero-level formula of how Catholicism really functions. It's not renounce, it's pretend to renounce and you can have all you want.”
The ship hits the iceberg not simply after the couple makes love, but precisely at the moment Rose declares she will leave her class and live with Jack, the catastrophe forestalls the 'true catastrophe' of their mundane life together.
“the catastrophe occurs to prevent the true catastrophe. The true catastrophe would have been of course the two of them landing in New York”
Žižek quotes Serb journalist Aleksandar Tijanić: Milošević suited the Serbs because he turned daily life into a permanent holiday, abolished work time, allowed weapons, car theft, insults to world leaders, freeing people from all constraint. This illustrates how authoritarian power works through covert permissivity.
“Milošević changed the daily life of Serbs into one great holiday and enabled us all to feel like high school pupils on a graduation trip, which means that nothing, but really nothing of what you do can be punishable.”
An old Slovenian farmer on his deathbed confirms all family members are present, then asks why the light is still on in the corridor, illustrating the Slovenian national stereotype of miserliness.
“are you all here, my granddaughter, my son? Yeah, we are all here. Then he said but if you are all here, why is then light on there in the corridor?”
Works invoked 26
Žižek endorses the 'Spirit' (Miller) translation over Baillie's 'Mind' translation, arguing that Geist is collective and that 'mind is always already spirit' is Hegel's central point.
They Live film
Žižek praises this Carpenter film as 'pure leftist paranoia' and a useful if naive model for ideology critique; inverts the film's logic to argue we are naturally in ideology and need glasses (force) to see the truth.
Fight Club film
The self-beating scene is compared to the ten-minute fight in They Live where the hero forces his friend to put on the glasses, both illustrate the violence required to force acceptance of uncomfortable truth.
Žižek mentions his own first book in passing, noting he cited the novel Futility (the Titanic precursor) in it.
Casablanca film
The airport-tower scene is Žižek's paradigm example of Hollywood's ideological double-address: simultaneous clues of sex and non-sex allow the spectator to enjoy the forbidden while maintaining moral innocence.
If This Is a Man book
Žižek draws on Levi's selekcja description and the recurring dream of being ignored to argue about Holocaust representation and the structure of traumatic testimony.
The Idiot (novel) book
Dostoevsky's novel cited for the scene where Prince Myshkin throws money in the fire, used as an example of carnivalesque suspension within dialogic literature.
The Sound of Music film
Žižek finds the film embarrassing (especially 'Auf Wiedersehen' and 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain') but uses it extensively: the Nazis are visually coded as corrupt Jews, the Austrians as organic fascists, and 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain' reveals Catholicism's hidden permissivity.
Titanic film
Žižek says he 'really hates' the film for its 'Hollywood Marxism' and reactionary myth, yet uses it extensively as the paradigmatic illustration of Hollywood's two-level narrative structure.
The obscene Marines marching chant ('Eskimo pussies are rather cold') is cited as the military's obscene supplement, not subversion but constitutive of military functioning.
The Act of Killing film
Described as 'maybe the most depressing documentary' Žižek has seen; used to illustrate the extreme case where the obscene supplement is made fully public, Indonesian perpetrators boasting about rape-murder on state TV.
Armageddon film
Used as a case study for the Oedipal/incest reading: the asteroid materializes the father's (Bruce Willis) fury at his daughter's suitor.
Deep Impact film
Used to illustrate the 'opposite' incest case: daughter's incestuous fury at her father finds happy resolution in their joint death on the beach as the tidal wave hits.
Preferred over Life is Beautiful as a Holocaust film: it provides comedy without redemption, ending in total despair, much more adequate to the horror.
Captains Courageous book
Kipling's novel identified as the source of the 'reactionary myth' underlying Titanic: upper-class youth revitalized by contact with lower-class figure who then disappears.
A Theory of Justice book
Cited as the paradigm 'unread classic', Žižek knows scholars who wrote books on Rawls without reading it fully.
Wild at Heart film
The scene where Dafoe coerces Dern into saying 'fuck me' then declines illustrates the maximum psychological humiliation of having one's innermost fantasy thrown back at oneself.
A Few Good Men film
The 'Code Red', unofficially permitted beating of soldiers, illustrates the obscene supplement to official military rules.
The beach love-scene (Deborah Kerr / Burt Lancaster) with small waves is compared to Deep Impact's tidal wave: extramarital affair = small waves, incestuous reunion = much bigger wave.
Žižek's main theoretical source for the post-'68 capitalist recuperation thesis; calls it a 'classic that nobody reads' but uses its central argument extensively.
Enigma film
Called stupid and tasteless, yet used as an example of Hollywood at its purest: the dual enigma structure (German code + woman's desire) made explicit within the film itself.
Bezhin Meadow film
Described as what would have been Eisenstein's best film, unfortunately destroyed; the scene of Komsomols destroying a church is cited as a genuine carnivalesque but liberating destruction, distinct from the murderous carnival of power.
The color sequence with the oprichniki's murderous Kabuki-Hollywood dance is cited as 'absolutely breathtaking', the paradigm of murderous carnival, distinct from liberating violence.
Post-Theory (volume) book
A volume directed against psychoanalysis that nonetheless contains Tom Moldby's excellent analysis of the Casablanca airport scene, which Žižek endorses.
Revolutionary Road film
Mentioned approvingly as 'not bad'; Žižek reads Kate Winslet's character's decision to abort as an authentic Lacanian ethical act.
Endorsed by Žižek when raised by an audience member as a Holocaust text that does not falsely humanize.
People invoked 37
Primo Levi positive
Žižek draws on If This Is a Man twice: the 'selekcja' scene to argue for comedy over tragedy in Holocaust representation, and Levi's recurring dream of being ignored by his family to illustrate the structure of testimonial trauma.
Roberto Benigni negative
Žižek criticizes Life is Beautiful for being too humanizing, the trickster hero retains dignity and the comedy is sublimated into tearful redemption at the end, avoiding the true horror.
Cited (via Tijanić) as an example of how authoritarian rule functions through covert permissivity, converting citizens into 'high school pupils on a graduation trip' for whom nothing is punishable.
Tadeusz Borowski positive
Author of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, cited by an audience member and endorsed by Žižek as an example of Holocaust writing that avoids false humanization.
John Carpenter positive
Žižek identifies Carpenter as a genuine Hollywood leftist, citing They Live as a 'pure leftist paranoia' that stages a naive but useful critique of ideology.
Žižek reads Karadžić's poem as an inadvertent but accurate description of how nationalist fundamentalism operates as covert permissivity.
Robert Pippin positive
Named as Žižek's favorite American Hegelian, though Žižek qualifies this by disagreeing with Pippin's anti-ontological, modest (non-metaphysical) reading of Hegel.
Mentioned as a Pittsburgh Hegelian whose major work (Making It Explicit) is a long classic that people cite without reading.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Žižek invokes Adorno's analysis of Nazi pogroms as carnivalesque suspension approvingly, though notes Adorno had regrettable traces of homophobia in his analysis of Nazism as homosexual in power.
Aleksandar Tijanić positive
Serb journalist whose description of Milošević's Serbia as a 'permanent holiday' where nothing was punishable Žižek quotes as an illuminating illustration of authoritarian permissivity.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek invokes Lacan's plus-de-jouir (surplus enjoyment) to analyze Hollywood's double narrative level; references Lacanian terminology (the Real, big Other, act) throughout as his primary theoretical frame.
Mentioned as a paradigm case of the 'unread classic', Žižek knows scholars who wrote books on Rawls without reading A Theory of Justice fully.
Steven Weinberg positive
Quantum physicist cited approvingly for the claim that religion makes good people do bad things, inverting the common view that religion makes bad people good.
Louis Althusser positive
Concept of interpellation invoked in the Althusserian sense: what society addresses you as, the social superego expectation; Žižek argues today's interpellation is vaguely spiritualized self-actualization rather than a grand ideological cause.
Mikhail Bakhtin negative
Žižek credits Bakhtin with genuine insights on dialogism and carnival but polemicizes against celebratory readings of carnival as liberating; cites Boris Groys's suggestion that Stalinist purges were Bakhtin's actual model for carnival.
David Lynch positive
Wild at Heart cited as an example of the humiliation achieved when a victim's aroused fantasy is thrown back at her, used to illustrate the psychoanalytic point about innermost fantasies.
Daniel Dennett positive
Žižek cites Dennett's distinction between how things appear and how things really appear to support the point that we are not aware of the depth of our ideological immersion.
Ève Chiapello positive
Co-author with Boltanski of The New Spirit of Capitalism, Žižek's main source for the thesis about post-'68 capitalist recuperation.
Tom Stoppard negative
Žižek notes with mild surprise that the 'stupid and tasteless' Hollywood screenplay for Enigma was written by Stoppard, supposedly a serious playwright.
Paul Claudel positive
Conservative Catholic writer cited for the radical theological claim that the message of the Crucifixion is 'God has to trust us' / 'God cannot do anything without us', used to support Žižek's Hegelian reading of Christianity as divine abdication.
Luc Boltanski positive
Co-author with Chiapello of The New Spirit of Capitalism, which Žižek uses as a key theoretical reference for how post-'68 capitalism absorbed the protest movements' demands.
Nicolas Sarkozy negative
Žižek cites the irony that Sarkozy, who wanted to rid France of the memory of '68, is himself only possible as a product of '68's cultural changes.
Captains Courageous identified as the first version of the reactionary myth underlying Titanic: upper-class youth revitalized by lower-class contact, then able to drop the lower-class figure.
Žižek analyzes Himmler's 1943 Posen speech to SS officers as the clearest formulation of the trick of presenting moral transgression (killing, torture) as heroic sacrifice, used critically to explain how totalitarianism overcomes ethical resistance.
Bill Gates negative
Cited as paradigmatic of today's charitable depoliticization: Gates and similar figures repeat the mantra that we should forget ideology and just do something together through private capital and charity.
Gary Wills positive
American Catholic writer cited for his study of Catholic pedophilia scandals, showing the scope of abuse and the Church's protective reaction, and how priests used religious ritual to facilitate abuse.
Boris Groys positive
Žižek cites Groys's (theoretically disputed but empirically interesting) claim from Bakhtin's manuscripts that Stalinist purges were the real model for Bakhtin's carnival theory.
Mentioned sympathetically: Žižek notes the film Enigma heterosexualizes Turing, that his life was ruined by the British discovering he was gay, and that the Turing test's first version was about distinguishing a woman from a man.
Referenced as the classic source for status-based theories of consumption, now superseded (in Žižek's account) by experience-level advertising.
Cited briefly as an example of a thick classic that is widely referenced but rarely fully read.
Sergei Eisenstein positive
Žižek praises Eisenstein's ability to distinguish murderous carnival (Ivan the Terrible Part II's oprichniki dance) from liberating destructive violence (October's sailors in the Winter Palace); notes Eisenstein consciously imitated Hollywood.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek defends and elaborates Marx's theory of commodity fetishism as the key insight that ideology is inscribed in practice, not just consciousness; argues Marx remains current.
Sigmund Freud positive
Žižek defends Freud's Urvater concept against ridicule, reading it not as primitive history but as a fantasy supplement to the symbolic father; also defends the psychoanalytic concept that fantasies are by definition dirty and embarrassing.
Terry Pinkard positive
Žižek approves of Pinkard's anti-theological, non-omniscient reading of Hegel's Absolute Knowing, but disagrees with his pantheist reading of Spirit and his anti-ontological, merely discourse-theoretic approach to Hegel.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek endorses Hegel's reading of Christianity as atheism, defends the concept of Absolute Knowing as radical limitation, and argues for an anti-theological materialist reading; also endorses the 'Spirit' (not 'Mind') translation of Geist.
Immanuel Kant positive
Žižek credits Kant with being the first to formulate the notion of a structurally necessary illusion (transcendental illusion) that cannot be simply corrected, connecting it to Marx's theory of ideology.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky negative
Žižek explicitly inverts Dostoevsky's claim that 'if God doesn't exist, everything is permitted,' arguing the opposite: secular permissiveness generates prohibitions, while God's existence licenses fundamentalist violence.
What it argues
the two-level structure of Hollywood narrative (surface plot vs. libidinal undercurrent)ideology's dependence on its own obscene supplementcarnival as power-sustaining transgression, not liberationfundamentalism as covert permissivitycommodity fetishism and the new spirit of post-'68 capitalismthe paternal fantasy beneath symbolic authoritytrauma, fantasy, and the impossible reception of testimony
Dialectical moves 10
“The true catastrophe would have been the two of them landing in New York — the actual catastrophe occurs to prevent the true catastrophe and save the idea of true love.”
The literal disaster in Titanic is a blessing that preserves the romantic ideal by foreclosing its prosaic actualization.
“Far from being a subversion, the obscene supplement — dirty jokes, hazing chants, implicit transgressive rules — is strictly part of the system; ideology is the two of them together.”
What appears to be resistance or subversion from below is in fact constitutive of the ideological order it seems to mock.
“The true transgression is not violating the explicit official rules but violating the implicit obscene rules — denouncing the KKK to the police would get you killed, not merely excluded.”
Group identity is cemented by participation in shared transgression; real exclusion comes from refusing the implicit rules, not the official ones.
“If God does not exist, everything is prohibited; if God does exist, everything is permitted.”
The inversion of Dostoevsky: secular permissive society produces obsessive self-regulation, while religious fundamentalism licenses unlimited violence in God's name.
“Fundamentalism is not a flight from permissive modernity but is itself an extreme form of permissivity — it offers what no one else has offered: you can rape, kill, whatever, you are freed from political correctness.”
What looks like harsh religious restriction is in fact the most radical license to transgress, disguised as devotion.
“Ideology is not a misperception of reality but an illusion inscribed in reality itself — not how you think about what you do, but in what you actually do.”
Marx's commodity fetishism shows that ideology is operative in social practice, not merely in false consciousness.
“The moment you put the glasses on [in They Live], you see the truth — but this means naturally we are in ideology; you need to be forced, even beaten, to see it.”
Truth is not a default natural state but requires a violent intervention, ideological glasses are our natural condition, not what we need to remove.
“What appears as an act of charity — buying Starbucks, organic food — is the form in which ideology reproduces itself today: the very act of consumption becomes an ethical act.”
Post-'68 capitalism turns the critique of alienation into a new commodity, so that resistance is absorbed at the moment of purchase.
“The Sound of Music's explicit message is anti-Nazi resistance, but the actual message delivered by its texture is: small honest fascists resisting Jewish corruption.”
The film's ideological operation is the inversion of its official politics, the Nazis are visually coded as stereotypical Jews, the Austrians as an organic fascist community.
“What Fritzl did was simply realize the phantasmatic background that is all the time here as a kind of supplement of paternal authority — he is not an exception but the literal enactment of what is always already there.”
The monstrous is not external to normal paternal law but its constitutive fantasmatic underside made concrete.
Claims 20
asserts
Hollywood films function by operating simultaneously on two levels: an official catastrophe or adventure plot, and a hidden libidinal narrative about the couple, incest, or desire, and it is precisely this combination that gives them their emotional power.Hollywood narrative structure
asserts
The Titanic sinking in the film occurs not merely after the couple makes love but precisely at the moment Rose declares she will abandon her class to live with Jack — the catastrophe saves the idea of true love by preventing its prosaic realization.Titanic (film)
asserts
Titanic's apparent Hollywood Marxism (sympathy for the lower classes) conceals a deeply reactionary myth: the upper-class subject exploits contact with the lower-class figure as a 'vanishing mediator' for ego-restoration, then discards him.class ideology in Titanic
asserts
The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 paradoxically kept the dream of democratic socialism alive by preventing its inevitable compromise or dissolution.Prague Spring and Soviet intervention
asserts
Ideology requires its obscene supplement — unofficial transgressive rules, dirty jokes, military hazing chants — not as a subversion of the official order but as a constitutive part of its reproduction.structure of ideology
asserts
Political jokes in communist countries were not genuine subversion but a mechanism integrated into the system to let steam off and reproduce ideological compliance.communist political jokes and ideology
rejects
Bakhtin's carnival is not inherently liberating; it can equally function as the form of power itself — Stalinist purges, gang rape, Nazi pogroms all have a 'carnivalesque' structure.Bakhtinian carnival as liberation
asserts
What Fritzl did was not an Austrian anomaly but the literal architectural enactment of the phantasmatic supplement that underlies all paternal symbolic authority.the Fritzl case and paternal fantasy
asserts
The Sound of Music's explicit anti-Nazi Austrian nationalism conceals a narrative in which the Nazis are coded as corrupted Jews and the Austrians as a small fascist organic community, inverting the film's ostensible political message.The Sound of Music (film)
asserts
Religious and nationalist fundamentalism is not a flight from permissive modernity's overregulation but a covert license to transgress — to rape, kill, steal — under the cover of higher devotion.fundamentalism
reframes
The Dostoevskian formula 'if God does not exist, everything is permitted' must be inverted: when God does not exist (permissive hedonist society) everything is prohibited; when God does exist fundamentalists claim license to do anything on His behalf.Dostoevsky's God and permissivity
asserts
Ideology for Marx is not a misperception superimposed on reality but an illusion operative in social practice itself — commodity fetishism demonstrates that we know money is not magical but treat it as such in our actual exchange.Marx and commodity fetishism
asserts
Contemporary charity functions ideologically to depoliticize global suffering: it offers individuals an easy way out ('a cup of coffee makes a difference') that prevents structural political thinking.charity and ideology
asserts
After 1968, capitalism successfully recuperated the anti-alienation and authenticity demands of the protest movements, integrating them into a new 'cultural compassionate capitalism' that is more ideologically potent than the old Fordist model.post-'68 capitalism
asserts
Today's dominant form of publicity no longer sells real product properties or symbolic status but the experiential feeling the product provides — and Starbucks exemplifies this by selling 'coffee karma' as participation in an ethical community.contemporary advertising and ideology
asserts
It is almost impossible to make a successful tragic film about the Holocaust because tragedy requires a minimal space of dignified victimhood, which the Nazi system was designed to obliterate — hence all tolerable Holocaust films are comedies.Holocaust representation in cinema
rejects
Life is Beautiful fails as a Holocaust film because Benigni's trickster hero is too humanizing and its comedy is sublimated into permitted weeping at the end, rather than sustaining the unbearable horror.Life is Beautiful (film)
asserts
Hegel's Christianity is the theological form of atheism: what dies on the cross is not just the Son but God the Father as transcendent guarantor — the Holy Spirit is simply the community of believers with no big Other behind it.Hegel and Christianity
asserts
Acknowledging a victim's unconscious fantasy-participation in their violation does not diminish the crime but makes it worse, because having one's innermost fantasy brutally imposed from outside is maximally traumatic.rape, fantasy, and psychoanalysis
asserts
Religion does not make bad people good; it makes good people do bad things by enabling them to experience overcoming their moral resistance to killing and torture as a heroic sacrifice for a higher cause.religion and violence
Quotes 18
“The true catastrophe would have been of course the two of them landing in New York... It's as if the catastrophe occurs to save the idea of true love.”Slavoj Žižek · catastrophe preserves the ideal
“He is literally a vanishing mediator. It's not even a love so it's this very reactionary myth of upper class, you know when you get too sterile in your isolated existence you need a little bit of contact with lower class.”Slavoj Žižek · Titanic's class-exploitation reading
“Ideology is the two of them together.”Slavoj Žižek · official norms + obscene supplement = ideology
“What accounts for the group identity is precisely this participation in the common transgression.”Slavoj Žižek · community cemented by shared transgression
“The greatest sacrifice, the greatest cultural loss, of the fall of socialism was that these jokes disappeared.”Slavoj Žižek · communist political jokes as cultural form
“You need glasses, you need you have to be forced to see the truth. The truth hurts.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as natural condition requiring violent rupture to see through
“If God doesn't exist, everything is prohibited. On the other hand, if God does exist, everything is permitted. That's the lesson of so-called fundamentalists.”Slavoj Žižek · inversion of Dostoevsky on God and permissivity
“Without religion good people do good things, bad people do bad things. But you need religion to make good people do bad things as a sacrifice for the higher cause.”Slavoj Žižek · religion as enabler of atrocity
“This song describes the zero-level formula of how Catholicism really functions. It's not renounce, it's pretend to renounce and you can have all you want.”Slavoj Žižek · Catholicism's hidden permissivity
“Ideology for Marx is not simply a misperception of reality. It's inscribed into reality itself.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as operative in practice not just consciousness
“The message of charity is always let's depoliticize it... Let's do something so that we don't think about it.”Slavoj Žižek · charity as depoliticization
“Nothing, but really nothing of what you do can be punishable. [Milošević's Serbia as permanent holiday]”Slavoj Žižek · authoritarian permissivity
“What he simply enacted what is all the time here as a kind of a phantasmatic background of the paternal authority.”Slavoj Žižek · Fritzl as enactment of paternal fantasy supplement
“It takes a truly great patriot to do a bad thing for your country. That a true greatness is that any idiot can sacrifice even his life for his country.”Slavoj Žižek · Himmler's formula: moral transgression as heroism
“I think today ideology no longer functions in this simple way of mystification... the ruling ideology all the time reminds us of that. That's how it functions today.”Slavoj Žižek · contemporary ideology works through awareness not concealment
“The moment you exchange an obscenity, how should I put it, no? At that point it begins.”Slavoj Žižek · obscenity as foundation of genuine friendship
“What Hegel calls absolute knowing is a certain closure. It's rather the admission of a certain radical limitation.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's Absolute Knowing as limit not omniscience
“God has to trust us. The message of crucifixion for these radical Christians is not 'God will redeem us' is 'God abdicates, it's up to you humanity.'”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's Christianity: divine abdication
Transcript 36 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Since yesterday we were talking too much, I propose to start working today but nonetheless to take it a little bit simpler, a couple of movie analyses and then moving a little bit towards ideological mechanisms. So it's a kind of passage towards serious stuff. Okay. To give you an elementary idea of how I see that ideology functions in cinema, especially in Hollywood, I want to take an example which I don't think I have already used here, namely what I want to draw your attention to and I've already written about it is this most elementary mechanism of the basic Hollywood formula, usually referred to as the production of the couple. That is to say how, to put it in simplistic terms, even if that the story is in order to understand properly the story and we do it even if we are not aware of it, the story had to be read at two levels. At one level it's the official story, usually about some big it can be World War II, global catastrophe, asteroid hitting the Earth and so on. But if you look at it closely, and I think this is the Hollywood what if I may use the Lacanian term plus-de-jouir, surplus enjoyment, is that you can also always read the story as a story about either creating the couple, incestuous problem or whatever, so that then you can also interpret the big catastrophe as a kind of a metaphor or a clue or related to the love couple. And okay, maybe you know then so I will just briefly resume then this is my I already repeated it so many times I'm embarrassed, hope all of you already don't know it. This is my reading of, and here I'm really sorry that I don't have the clips but these are such stupid movies, Titanic. You saw the last one I hope with and so on. Although I must say that did you see I didn't but I will write about it definitely, this Revolutionary Road. I mean my association was because it's the same two actors, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, no? And I think this is a rather interesting movie, it's not bad. Her decision to do the abortion, the suicidal decision at the end, this is as close as you can get to in Lacanian terms an act, authentic ethical act. Okay, but let's go to Titanic. Officially it's the catastrophe the the ship hitting the iceberg and so on. But the first thing that should make you suspicious, if you remember Titanic the movie is when exactly does the the ship Titanic hit the ice, the iceberg? Do you remember when? It's precisely after the couple makes love. You know they down there beneath the deck in a car, I think, they make love then they go up, boom. So okay, this would be the most primitive reading that the movie plays on our, although we pretend to be liberals, permissive, we still have in our unconscious this implicit guilt feelings and two standard prohibitions were violated: A, an illegitimate affair, extramarital sex, and B, social barrier: upper-class girl, lower-class guy. So then the idea would be to read this as a kind of a punishment, symbolic whatever punishment for a transgression. But then you should look at it closely, more close, and you discover another thing. Look at even more precisely at the moment when iceberg hits, when the ship ship rather hits the iceberg. It's not just after they made love. It's they go up onto the deck and she, Kate Winslet, tells him, listen, I've decided now I'm sick of my corrupted rich life, I will simply tomorrow morning when we arrive to New York, I will drop my family, I will live with you, even if we were poor we would be poor, even if we will be poor we will blah blah blah all that stuff, like triumph of authentic love, even if poor we will live together happily. At that point exactly it happens. This is already a more cynical but I think more adequate reading. It's a kind of a very romantic reading that really the catastrophe occurs to prevent the true catastrophe. The true catastrophe would have been of course the two of them landing in New York and doing, you can imagine how a week or two after. You know and then so it's as if the catastrophe occurs to save the to save the idea of true love. And catastrophes often should be read in this way as blessings in disguise. It may be a trauma. For example, if some of you are naive leftists, to shock you. I think that the Soviet invasion, or rather Warsaw Pact, you remember in '68 to crush the so-called Prague Spring in August '68. And I can tell you, I was there. By pure surprise, I arrived to Prague on the 20th on the 20th or 21st of August. And then I awakened in a student hostel, I was and I thought I heard some shooting, I wasn't sure, I went on sleeping. Okay, but I think it was the same type of catastrophe. Why? Because let's play a cynical game. What were really to happen without Soviet intervention? I don't think and everybody agrees with me here that there really was a chance of some authentic democratic socialism and so on. One of the two things would have happened. Either either the demand for freedom would have gone further and further and simply Czechoslovakia would have joined Western, it would become what they are today, a kind of a normal Western democracy. Or the party, liberal as it was under Dubček, would have to reign and establish some kind of control and you would just have this ordinary rhythm in socialist countries: you allow a little bit of liberalization then, no? And I think that it's so it's precisely the Soviet intervention I claim which kept the dream alive. Oh my God what kind of possibility and so on and so on. Often things often things function like that, that it's the catastrophe itself which kept the dream alive. So okay, that would be the second reading. But I think we should go even further. There is another scene which fascinated me so much, I noticed this detail already the first time when I saw the film Titanic. And again, if you have it on DVD, if you don't believe it to me check it. Remember when Leonardo DiCaprio is dying, freezing in water. She she is in water, freezing, she is up on that piece of wood. Okay, and then what happens exactly? The first thing that you should be attentive to is that the conversation between the two of them is a very strange one. It doesn't sound as lovers' conversation. It sounds more as a kind of a priest advisor giving her, Kate Winslet, orders, advices you know like be true to yourself, live a good life etc. This is how a priest is talking to you in a last conversation. Second thing, absolutely crucial. It's so shocking that I the first time I couldn't even believe it so I checked it repeatedly. When Kate Winslet notices that he is dead, she starts to shout, I will never go, I will never let you go. While she is shouting this, she is pushing him away. So I think these clues are to be read in the following way that beneath the love story there is another story told here. It's the story, the first version of which is as far as I can judge Rudyard Kipling's Captains Courageous. This, incidentally, very reactionary myth of an upper-class kid who gets kind of caught in some kind of sterile existence and needs a contact with lower classes to get in a vampire-like way to suck the blood of life energy and then when you get revitalized you can drop the guy. And that's precisely I think what's the function of Leonardo DiCaprio at this level. Remember she is a girl in a life crisis, desperate, confused, and what he does is he quite literally restores her ego image. You remember how he paints literally, and that's what remains in that safe, he paints the portrait and so on. Once he restores her, he can disappear. He is literally a vanishing mediator. It's not even a love so it's this very reactionary myth of upper class, you know when you get too sterile in your in your isolated existence you need a little bit of contact with lower class so that then you can revitalize, return to upper class. So that's the real story and I'm not saying the movie is inconsistent. I'm saying that precisely all these levels, one above the other, is how the movie should be read. Of course now you will say but the big fascination of course is, you know all the special effects, the ship going slowly down. I know I know I know. I'm not saying simply that that the ship is that that's not important. I'm just saying that what accounts for the let's call it naively emotional ideological impact of the film is the combination of these two levels. Because we can imagine a film as simply the story of a catastrophe. And there were some earlier versions like this. The most interesting one I can advise you look at it, it's not so bad. Do you know that in '43, '42, '43 German under Goebbels, Nazis, made a Titanic, which was very anti-British, you know the corrupted English captain and so on and it's a pretty good version made German version of Titanic. Sorry, yes? Is it true that it was also a book ten years before it was a movie? Yeah I quote it in my first book, yes, in my Sublime Object. Yes, this is very mysterious. Yes, exactly the same story: a big transatlantic ship supposed to be unsinkable sinks. The only difference, haha big one, is that in the book published years before it happens it was called Titan, not Titanic but Titan. It's one of these mysterious but that's the mystery of this event, how although it was a shock, somehow it did fit the imaginary. That's why I think it had some impact. Not only because you know true traumas are not simply
Since yesterday we were talking too much, I propose to start working today but nonetheless to take it a little bit simpler, a couple of movie analyses and then moving a little bit towards ideological mechanisms. So it's a kind of passage towards serious stuff. Okay. To give you an elementary idea of how I see that ideology functions in cinema, especially in Hollywood, I want to take an example which I don't think I have already used here, namely what I want to draw your attention to and I've already written about it is this most elementary mechanism of the basic Hollywood formula, usually referred to as the production of the couple. That is to say how, to put it in simplistic terms, even if that the story is in order to understand properly the story and we do it even if we are not aware of it, the story had to be read at two levels. At one level it's the official story, usually about some big it can be World War II, global catastrophe, asteroid hitting the Earth and so on. But if you look at it closely, and I think this is the Hollywood what if I may use the Lacanian term plus-de-jouir, surplus enjoyment, is that you can also always read the story as a story about either creating the couple, incestuous problem or whatever, so that then you can also interpret the big catastrophe as a kind of a metaphor or a clue or related to the love couple. And okay, maybe you know then so I will just briefly resume then this is my I already repeated it so many times I'm embarrassed, hope all of you already don't know it. This is my reading of, and here I'm really sorry that I don't have the clips but these are such stupid movies, Titanic. You saw the last one I hope with and so on. Although I must say that did you see I didn't but I will write about it definitely, this Revolutionary Road. I mean my association was because it's the same two actors, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, no? And I think this is a rather interesting movie, it's not bad. Her decision to do the abortion, the suicidal decision at the end, this is as close as you can get to in Lacanian terms an act, authentic ethical act. Okay, but let's go to Titanic. Officially it's the catastrophe the the ship hitting the iceberg and so on. But the first thing that should make you suspicious, if you remember Titanic the movie is when exactly does the the ship Titanic hit the ice, the iceberg? Do you remember when? It's precisely after the couple makes love. You know they down there beneath the deck in a car, I think, they make love then they go up, boom. So okay, this would be the most primitive reading that the movie plays on our, although we pretend to be liberals, permissive, we still have in our unconscious this implicit guilt feelings and two standard prohibitions were violated: A, an illegitimate affair, extramarital sex, and B, social barrier: upper-class girl, lower-class guy. So then the idea would be to read this as a kind of a punishment, symbolic whatever punishment for a transgression. But then you should look at it closely, more close, and you discover another thing. Look at even more precisely at the moment when iceberg hits, when the ship ship rather hits the iceberg. It's not just after they made love. It's they go up onto the deck and she, Kate Winslet, tells him, listen, I've decided now I'm sick of my corrupted rich life, I will simply tomorrow morning when we arrive to New York, I will drop my family, I will live with you, even if we were poor we would be poor, even if we will be poor we will blah blah blah all that stuff, like triumph of authentic love, even if poor we will live together happily. At that point exactly it happens. This is already a more cynical but I think more adequate reading. It's a kind of a very romantic reading that really the catastrophe occurs to prevent the true catastrophe. The true catastrophe would have been of course the two of them landing in New York and doing, you can imagine how a week or two after. You know and then so it's as if the catastrophe occurs to save the to save the idea of true love. And catastrophes often should be read in this way as blessings in disguise. It may be a trauma. For example, if some of you are naive leftists, to shock you. I think that the Soviet invasion, or rather Warsaw Pact, you remember in '68 to crush the so-called Prague Spring in August '68. And I can tell you, I was there. By pure surprise, I arrived to Prague on the 20th on the 20th or 21st of August. And then I awakened in a student hostel, I was and I thought I heard some shooting, I wasn't sure, I went on sleeping. Okay, but I think it was the same type of catastrophe. Why? Because let's play a cynical game. What were really to happen without Soviet intervention? I don't think and everybody agrees with me here that there really was a chance of some authentic democratic socialism and so on. One of the two things would have happened. Either either the demand for freedom would have gone further and further and simply Czechoslovakia would have joined Western, it would become what they are today, a kind of a normal Western democracy. Or the party, liberal as it was under Dubček, would have to reign and establish some kind of control and you would just have this ordinary rhythm in socialist countries: you allow a little bit of liberalization then, no? And I think that it's so it's precisely the Soviet intervention I claim which kept the dream alive. Oh my God what kind of possibility and so on and so on. Often things often things function like that, that it's the catastrophe itself which kept the dream alive. So okay, that would be the second reading. But I think we should go even further. There is another scene which fascinated me so much, I noticed this detail already the first time when I saw the film Titanic. And again, if you have it on DVD, if you don't believe it to me check it. Remember when Leonardo DiCaprio is dying, freezing in water. She she is in water, freezing, she is up on that piece of wood. Okay, and then what happens exactly? The first thing that you should be attentive to is that the conversation between the two of them is a very strange one. It doesn't sound as lovers' conversation. It sounds more as a kind of a priest advisor giving her, Kate Winslet, orders, advices you know like be true to yourself, live a good life etc. This is how a priest is talking to you in a last conversation. Second thing, absolutely crucial. It's so shocking that I the first time I couldn't even believe it so I checked it repeatedly. When Kate Winslet notices that he is dead, she starts to shout, I will never go, I will never let you go. While she is shouting this, she is pushing him away. So I think these clues are to be read in the following way that beneath the love story there is another story told here. It's the story, the first version of which is as far as I can judge Rudyard Kipling's Captains Courageous. This, incidentally, very reactionary myth of an upper-class kid who gets kind of caught in some kind of sterile existence and needs a contact with lower classes to get in a vampire-like way to suck the blood of life energy and then when you get revitalized you can drop the guy. And that's precisely I think what's the function of Leonardo DiCaprio at this level. Remember she is a girl in a life crisis, desperate, confused, and what he does is he quite literally restores her ego image. You remember how he paints literally, and that's what remains in that safe, he paints the portrait and so on. Once he restores her, he can disappear. He is literally a vanishing mediator. It's not even a love so it's this very reactionary myth of upper class, you know when you get too sterile in your in your isolated existence you need a little bit of contact with lower class so that then you can revitalize, return to upper class. So that's the real story and I'm not saying the movie is inconsistent. I'm saying that precisely all these levels, one above the other, is how the movie should be read. Of course now you will say but the big fascination of course is, you know all the special effects, the ship going slowly down. I know I know I know. I'm not saying simply that that the ship is that that's not important. I'm just saying that what accounts for the let's call it naively emotional ideological impact of the film is the combination of these two levels. Because we can imagine a film as simply the story of a catastrophe. And there were some earlier versions like this. The most interesting one I can advise you look at it, it's not so bad. Do you know that in '43, '42, '43 German under Goebbels, Nazis, made a Titanic, which was very anti-British, you know the corrupted English captain and so on and it's a pretty good version made German version of Titanic. Sorry, yes? Is it true that it was also a book ten years before it was a movie? Yeah I quote it in my first book, yes, in my Sublime Object. Yes, this is very mysterious. Yes, exactly the same story: a big transatlantic ship supposed to be unsinkable sinks. The only difference, haha big one, is that in the book published years before it happens it was called Titan, not Titanic but Titan. It's one of these mysterious but that's the mystery of this event, how although it was a shock, somehow it did fit the imaginary. That's why I think it had some impact. Not only because you know true traumas are not simply
unknown
traumas which happen out of nowhere. They surprise us but how should I put it, in our fantasies there was already a a place for them. Okay, so this is why just to go for a minute back to Titanic,
traumas which happen out of nowhere. They surprise us but how should I put it, in our fantasies there was already a a place for them. Okay, so this is why just to go for a minute back to Titanic,
Slavoj Žižek
this is why I really hate the movie. Because I because it's the most dangerous, now I speak as a Stalinist ideologically, because it pretends to be even ironically it's referred to as an example of Hollywood Marxism. You know this ridiculous patronizing sympathy for lower classes. You know how it's all rich guys with one two exceptions like maybe the captain, the engineer. Rich guys are evil, then the more you go low the more they are kind of authentic community blah blah. But what I'm trying to tell you is that beneath this patronizing admiration of the authenticity of lower classes it's a very reactionary myth. And we should be here very sensitive. Remember I claim that the standard idealizing of the poor, as you know they are poor but they live authentic lives and so on is it's only rich people who think like that. It's the same in architecture. I was at an architecture meeting in Australia where a guy who wanted to be politically ideologically correct presented on behalf of an architectural group from Australia their project which was he showed two pictures, photos as the two poles: on the one hand a kitschy golden how to call it, tape water pipe or whatever. Tap. Tap yeah, golden kitschy. And on the other hand a kind of a pure innocent water pump, purely functional. And he said that's to avoid this pure modest functionality just to help people, you know this proverbial manipulations: some tribe in Africa who doesn't have they don't have drinking water or. But what he didn't get is that and everybody knows this, even I spoke with some publicity people that how should I put it today at least rich people like ascetic modesty, poor people like excessive kitsch. I ask these people were they ever in a favela. I was once, friends, you know this is pretty disgusting but okay we live in disgusting life times, I did it. I visited some favelas as part of this favela tourism in in Brazil. And you can see in favelas it's not this modest, no they are as kitschy as they can be. It's rich this is rich people's dream, this pure modest functionality and so on and so on. I mean when poor people perceive each other, they don't perceive themselves as you know this kind of poor but authentic life. No, they perceive themselves as evil, we try to exploit each other as much as possible and so on and so on. So okay, but let me go on. So that's what I hate about Titanic. But what I wanted to say nonetheless, to go back to the main line. What we should bear in mind is how again it's not a simple inconsistency and weakness these multiple levels at which we can read the story. That is this is what accounts for the strength of the story. So again, let's imagine Titanic only at the spectacular level: a big ship sinking and so on. Frankly it would have been boring. Okay you would have interesting special effects but nothing that surplus enjoyment, that surplus cause of desire to sustain your desire it wouldn't have worked. The interesting thing is that the opposite story would also have been pretty boring. Imagine no catastrophe. Just the story of the destiny of a couple of people on a rich transatlantic voyage, it would also have been boring. I think that it's precisely the combination of these two levels. And this is again I claim how Hollywood left works. Let me give you a couple of other improvisations here before which I already used in some of my old texts. For example, did you see I quite like them, they can be disgusting, I will mention to you two big catastrophe films. One with Liv Tyler, Bruce Willis, and who Ben Affleck I think, how do you pronounce it in English? Armageddon, yeah, yeah. Did you notice how although it's officially the story about the big asteroid hitting the Earth, it has an incestuous background? This human interest story is Bruce Willis, father, who doesn't want his daughter to go and so at this more elementary libidinal level you can read the catastrophe as father's wrath, incestuous fury: no, that guy will not screw my daughter and so on, as the material because it's the this is why the moment the father sacrifices, the moment the father accepts the amorous liaison of his daughter, he succeeds, the the the asteroid explodes and so on and so on. You can really read you can read it as a simple Oedipal incestuous story where again the father's fury the asteroid just materializes the father's incestuous fury. The opposite case, did you read the one did you see the movie it's called Deep Impact? It's again incest. It's again about asteroid hitting the Earth. But did you note the story is there how is the the girl called who played Téa Leoni, the same incestuous story. She is furious at her father who at the beginning of the film drops her mother and marries a young girl like her. It's simply incestuous fury: if he drops my mom why didn't he pick up me and and you can really read the whole story as just acting out of her incestuous fury which is why this is the only way to account for the culmination of the film. You remember when the asteroid is approaching Earth, she joins her father alone on a beach, the big wave is approaching, she embraces him says, oh daddy, oh dad and bang they are dead. It's as happy an ending as you can get. In one of my books I even made a comparison between this you remember the famous love on the beach with waves from this was the big revolution early '50s, From Here to Eternity, where Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster, there you have an ordinary extramarital affair so you have just small waves. Here you have a more serious incestuous affair, so the wave is a little bit bigger, no like. No but so you see my point, that's what accounts for the reverberation libidinal of the movie, the combination of these two levels: catastrophe and and so on and so on. Now we can go even further here and to give you another example that I quite like although it's a shitty movie. Did you see Michael Apted's from Enigma? The one about that Bletchley Park group of cryptoanalysts, you know who were tried to who were trying to crack the the cipher, the German Enigma. Again this is Hollywood at its purest. Even if I noticed that the scenario was done by Tom Stoppard who is supposed to be the serious playwright. But what's the story? Again the official focus of the film is the team is trying to crack the enigma, there is a German spy, whatever, that's the story. But then the key is that the the central figure, mathematician called Tom Jericho, tries who is split between the two women: one called Claire, a fatal suicidal beauty and an ordinary girl played incidentally by Kate Winslet from Titanic again. And they are so stupid and tasteless in the film that somewhere half into the movie they even openly formulate provide the formula of the film, namely at some point one of them says that it's easy to crack even if they are I don't know how elaborate the enigma of the German secret code, but there is the enigma of the woman, what the woman wanted which we can never crack and so on and so on. So again the whole movie explicitly plays on this duality of enigmas: the literal enigma to crack the code and the enigma of that mysterious femme fatale and so on and so on. Sorry you. There is another strange enigma in this in that the person who really did crack the code was a Pole and Alan Turing, who who was gay. No no, I know I have it here written I didn't want to go too far. I know, this is how ideology also works: how they they heterosexuallize him and so on, no? Yeah, well he was his life was ruined when they the British ruined his life when they found out that he was gay. No no, I know I I know all that story. Which and it's even more ironic in that you know that that you know that that my Alan Turing, yes, you know that when he made a test, when he made that famous test. Turing Test. Turing test, but you know that the official version of the test is if you can talk with the blah blah blah and if you cannot guess distinguish if it's human or not then the. A computer can convince a computer that it. Yeah but do you know that this is the second version of the test? Do you know that his first version was that if you cannot distinguish if you cannot distinguish if it's a woman or a man. The first version interestingly enough was the sexual difference, only then. But again what I wanted to tell you here very briefly is that how again beware of these two levels. Now let's go a step further here. Okay, we have these two levels but these two levels here we have the elementary form where the second level is not some psychoanalytic obscene mystery whatever, it's just some apparently marginal love interest story but although it appears marginal it's crucial for how the story works. Because you can imagine the same movie Enigma without this the enigma of a woman love interest. I mean they were doing films like this in ex-socialist countries, Soviet block, which is why they were so boring, how should I put it, no? You need this two levels interaction. And let's go further. I here I really I was already did it in the couple past years here I would really like to show you, I didn't bring it to me but maybe you know it, another clip to show you how this works. You saw of course Casablanca. You remember a wonderful scene which I think embodies like in seconds you can learn basically how Hollywood works, this ambiguity of censorship. The scene two-thirds into the film where in the middle of the night Ingrid Bergman, Ilsa or whatever she's called, comes to Humphrey Bogart to Rick's Cafe asking him for that those famous papers, visa whatever and they had a conversation, then they embrace, fade out and then you see for three seconds the tower of the Casablanca airport, the light turning around, then you return to the room, the two of them conversation going on. Of course every
this is why I really hate the movie. Because I because it's the most dangerous, now I speak as a Stalinist ideologically, because it pretends to be even ironically it's referred to as an example of Hollywood Marxism. You know this ridiculous patronizing sympathy for lower classes. You know how it's all rich guys with one two exceptions like maybe the captain, the engineer. Rich guys are evil, then the more you go low the more they are kind of authentic community blah blah. But what I'm trying to tell you is that beneath this patronizing admiration of the authenticity of lower classes it's a very reactionary myth. And we should be here very sensitive. Remember I claim that the standard idealizing of the poor, as you know they are poor but they live authentic lives and so on is it's only rich people who think like that. It's the same in architecture. I was at an architecture meeting in Australia where a guy who wanted to be politically ideologically correct presented on behalf of an architectural group from Australia their project which was he showed two pictures, photos as the two poles: on the one hand a kitschy golden how to call it, tape water pipe or whatever. Tap. Tap yeah, golden kitschy. And on the other hand a kind of a pure innocent water pump, purely functional. And he said that's to avoid this pure modest functionality just to help people, you know this proverbial manipulations: some tribe in Africa who doesn't have they don't have drinking water or. But what he didn't get is that and everybody knows this, even I spoke with some publicity people that how should I put it today at least rich people like ascetic modesty, poor people like excessive kitsch. I ask these people were they ever in a favela. I was once, friends, you know this is pretty disgusting but okay we live in disgusting life times, I did it. I visited some favelas as part of this favela tourism in in Brazil. And you can see in favelas it's not this modest, no they are as kitschy as they can be. It's rich this is rich people's dream, this pure modest functionality and so on and so on. I mean when poor people perceive each other, they don't perceive themselves as you know this kind of poor but authentic life. No, they perceive themselves as evil, we try to exploit each other as much as possible and so on and so on. So okay, but let me go on. So that's what I hate about Titanic. But what I wanted to say nonetheless, to go back to the main line. What we should bear in mind is how again it's not a simple inconsistency and weakness these multiple levels at which we can read the story. That is this is what accounts for the strength of the story. So again, let's imagine Titanic only at the spectacular level: a big ship sinking and so on. Frankly it would have been boring. Okay you would have interesting special effects but nothing that surplus enjoyment, that surplus cause of desire to sustain your desire it wouldn't have worked. The interesting thing is that the opposite story would also have been pretty boring. Imagine no catastrophe. Just the story of the destiny of a couple of people on a rich transatlantic voyage, it would also have been boring. I think that it's precisely the combination of these two levels. And this is again I claim how Hollywood left works. Let me give you a couple of other improvisations here before which I already used in some of my old texts. For example, did you see I quite like them, they can be disgusting, I will mention to you two big catastrophe films. One with Liv Tyler, Bruce Willis, and who Ben Affleck I think, how do you pronounce it in English? Armageddon, yeah, yeah. Did you notice how although it's officially the story about the big asteroid hitting the Earth, it has an incestuous background? This human interest story is Bruce Willis, father, who doesn't want his daughter to go and so at this more elementary libidinal level you can read the catastrophe as father's wrath, incestuous fury: no, that guy will not screw my daughter and so on, as the material because it's the this is why the moment the father sacrifices, the moment the father accepts the amorous liaison of his daughter, he succeeds, the the the asteroid explodes and so on and so on. You can really read you can read it as a simple Oedipal incestuous story where again the father's fury the asteroid just materializes the father's incestuous fury. The opposite case, did you read the one did you see the movie it's called Deep Impact? It's again incest. It's again about asteroid hitting the Earth. But did you note the story is there how is the the girl called who played Téa Leoni, the same incestuous story. She is furious at her father who at the beginning of the film drops her mother and marries a young girl like her. It's simply incestuous fury: if he drops my mom why didn't he pick up me and and you can really read the whole story as just acting out of her incestuous fury which is why this is the only way to account for the culmination of the film. You remember when the asteroid is approaching Earth, she joins her father alone on a beach, the big wave is approaching, she embraces him says, oh daddy, oh dad and bang they are dead. It's as happy an ending as you can get. In one of my books I even made a comparison between this you remember the famous love on the beach with waves from this was the big revolution early '50s, From Here to Eternity, where Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster, there you have an ordinary extramarital affair so you have just small waves. Here you have a more serious incestuous affair, so the wave is a little bit bigger, no like. No but so you see my point, that's what accounts for the reverberation libidinal of the movie, the combination of these two levels: catastrophe and and so on and so on. Now we can go even further here and to give you another example that I quite like although it's a shitty movie. Did you see Michael Apted's from Enigma? The one about that Bletchley Park group of cryptoanalysts, you know who were tried to who were trying to crack the the cipher, the German Enigma. Again this is Hollywood at its purest. Even if I noticed that the scenario was done by Tom Stoppard who is supposed to be the serious playwright. But what's the story? Again the official focus of the film is the team is trying to crack the enigma, there is a German spy, whatever, that's the story. But then the key is that the the central figure, mathematician called Tom Jericho, tries who is split between the two women: one called Claire, a fatal suicidal beauty and an ordinary girl played incidentally by Kate Winslet from Titanic again. And they are so stupid and tasteless in the film that somewhere half into the movie they even openly formulate provide the formula of the film, namely at some point one of them says that it's easy to crack even if they are I don't know how elaborate the enigma of the German secret code, but there is the enigma of the woman, what the woman wanted which we can never crack and so on and so on. So again the whole movie explicitly plays on this duality of enigmas: the literal enigma to crack the code and the enigma of that mysterious femme fatale and so on and so on. Sorry you. There is another strange enigma in this in that the person who really did crack the code was a Pole and Alan Turing, who who was gay. No no, I know I have it here written I didn't want to go too far. I know, this is how ideology also works: how they they heterosexuallize him and so on, no? Yeah, well he was his life was ruined when they the British ruined his life when they found out that he was gay. No no, I know I I know all that story. Which and it's even more ironic in that you know that that you know that that my Alan Turing, yes, you know that when he made a test, when he made that famous test. Turing Test. Turing test, but you know that the official version of the test is if you can talk with the blah blah blah and if you cannot guess distinguish if it's human or not then the. A computer can convince a computer that it. Yeah but do you know that this is the second version of the test? Do you know that his first version was that if you cannot distinguish if you cannot distinguish if it's a woman or a man. The first version interestingly enough was the sexual difference, only then. But again what I wanted to tell you here very briefly is that how again beware of these two levels. Now let's go a step further here. Okay, we have these two levels but these two levels here we have the elementary form where the second level is not some psychoanalytic obscene mystery whatever, it's just some apparently marginal love interest story but although it appears marginal it's crucial for how the story works. Because you can imagine the same movie Enigma without this the enigma of a woman love interest. I mean they were doing films like this in ex-socialist countries, Soviet block, which is why they were so boring, how should I put it, no? You need this two levels interaction. And let's go further. I here I really I was already did it in the couple past years here I would really like to show you, I didn't bring it to me but maybe you know it, another clip to show you how this works. You saw of course Casablanca. You remember a wonderful scene which I think embodies like in seconds you can learn basically how Hollywood works, this ambiguity of censorship. The scene two-thirds into the film where in the middle of the night Ingrid Bergman, Ilsa or whatever she's called, comes to Humphrey Bogart to Rick's Cafe asking him for that those famous papers, visa whatever and they had a conversation, then they embrace, fade out and then you see for three seconds the tower of the Casablanca airport, the light turning around, then you return to the room, the two of them conversation going on. Of course every
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normal human being asks a simple question here: did
normal human being asks a simple question here: did
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they do it or
they do it or
Slavoj Žižek
not? That is to say are these three seconds and a half or two and a half just just do they stand just for the real time so that the same conversation goes on or did they make love? Now
not? That is to say are these three seconds and a half or two and a half just just do they stand just for the real time so that the same conversation goes on or did they make love? Now
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it was a guy
it was a guy
Slavoj Žižek
incidentally called Tom Moldby who did a wonderful detailed analysis of this scene in a volume called Post-Theory. Good volume which is directed against psychoanalysis but this analysis. What he demonstrated, Tom Moldby, is the following: that it's not so much that the situation is ambiguous but that the situation is consciously inconsistent. That is to say, the movie provides a whole series of clues indicating that they did do it. First as you probably know in this Hays Code Hollywood, if a woman and a man have a conversation and then they embrace and then you have a fade out, this was a codified way to indicate there was a sex act. Another thing: after we return to them, they are smoking. I mean you know this proverb, which is the second and the third most pleasant thing in the world: the drink before and the smoke afterwards and so on. So this was also one of the codified ways in Hollywood to signal sex act. Not to mention the most more vulgar one, the tower and so on, phallic tower. On the other hand you have a whole series of clues indicating that they didn't do it. There is no bed, they are dressed in same full dresses, the same conversation seems to go on and so on. And Moldby as Moldby, this guy who wrote the analysis, indicates very nicely: this is how ideology functions in Hollywood. The movie plays simultaneously on both registers. The like the movie treats you as someone who should be allowed a forbidden pleasure, but who should at the same time be allowed to pretend that there is no dirty secret. It's as if I know you want to imagine what dirty things they were doing but so that you will not be embarrassed or so that you will not feel guilty confronted with your superego moral agency I will also provide for you a kind of a moral screen so that you know you can say to your superego watching you: nothing happened, just the same conversation went on. But at the same time the movie gives you precise clues and there is, I forgot the the guy I quoted him in my where I analyzed this, there is a wonderful pornographic short story as the time goes by which is a short story, pages, describing just this scene from Casablanca. It starts with the same scene, the two of them talking, and then it ends in the same way but the main part of the story, pages, is the detailed hardcore pornographic description of what they were doing and what is so nice so dirty about the story is that it gives a very obscene twist to the most famous phrases we all know for Casablanca. You know that famous "here's to you, kid." You know in the story he gives her her his erected penis to swallow it and says "here's to you, kid" and so on. But but I think I don't think there is anything liberating in it. I prefer this Hollywood ambiguity, you know. It functions on two levels and this is absolutely crucial. We will I will return to this to the end. This is absolutely crucial as to how ideology functions. That why am I mentioning this? Because some of my friends still interpret this how should I call it, obscene underground of Hollywood, all these hints at homosexuality, at illicit sex as some kind of subversion. You know like we have the official patriarchal puritan ideology but then you see the traces of subversion. My point is simply that this subversion is not really subversive, that it's strictly part of the system. It's you know that for let's say American ideological imaginary to function, you don't need only the official puritan whatever nothing happened, you also need all this implicit the implicit message what obscene things were going on and so on and so on. Ideology is the two of them together. It's absolutely crucial to include which is why as I did already in my early books I analyzed in detail for example, did you see a movie it's a kind of a liberal drama but I like the central point of the movie, not so much the movie itself. Did you see that legal military legal melodrama A Few Good Men with Tom Cruise and so on. You remember what they refer to in the film as the "Red Code" [sic: Code Red]. This publicly not admitted but obscene legal regulation in the military where implicitly you are allowed to I don't know you beat your colleagues if they don't and so on. So this is also and I can tell you from my own experience this is my experience in the Yugoslav army where I served for a year. How you have the official level military rules and then you have all this set of complex obscene rules. In United States when Bush was elected I noticed that he was member of some Bones and some Skull and Bones. Skull and Bones. This is what I'm talking about. All these obscene rituals and so on and so on. They are this is not any kind of subversion. Ideology needs all this to reproduce itself. Which is why, that's my usual example of this, I like so much those obscene how do you call them, marching chants. You know the songs that Marines are singing where the works are usually some kind of mixture between nonsense rhymes and obscenity. Like I remember I think it's precisely from no it's from An Officer and a Gentleman I think where the song is something like sorry for the obscenity what I'm not really sorry and so on something like "I don't know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold." You know this gross obscenity. My point is this is not any kind of subversion, you need this. That's how the military machine functions. You need all this Code Red or whatever obscene rules. And that was my fundamental experience for example in the Yugoslav army: how homosexuality. It wasn't simply prohibited. The usual story is you know it's very homophobic the army. It is true, superficially it was homophobic. For example, whenever any of our colleagues was if one was discovered to be gay, it was life was hell for him. He was dismissed, but those couple of days before he was officially dismissed from the army he was I don't know beaten beaten every night by colleagues and so on, totally homophobic. What fascinated me is another thing, how this homophobia was much more ambiguous than it may appear. It was a kind of an excessive reaction to a latent homophobia, sorry latent latent homosexual strain which permeated the entire life. For example I never was in a community where all the daily expressions had a kind of a joking homosexual undertone. For example I remember when we I when we greeted each other after awakening we didn't say good morning we said "I'll smoke yours" with reference to. This was and it was totally neutral, we even didn't laugh, it became totally or all these dirty homosexual jokes and so on. It was this is what interests me, how it's not simply homophobic, it but it's at the same time playing on these latent homophobic [sic: homosexual] jokes but totally thwarted homosexuality, absolutely prohibited to be directly enacted. And again my point is that you need both. You need both and wait a minute don't now misunderstand me here. My point is not what you find at some point even with Adorno. Adorno had this tendency sometimes, he was a little bit anti he you find clear traces of homophobia in Adorno. At some point he had this low-level state of the Nazis that the Nazi Party is really some kind of homosexuals in power that it's kind of a homo. No no no I'm not saying this. I'm saying that it's much more ambiguous. I'm saying that precisely this kind of thwarted homosexuality is most aggressive to open homosexuality. But again my point is that you you you need both levels. And this is what again from when I was young fascinated me: how ideology how what you what it may appear to you as a subversion like making fun of it telling jokes and so on how it's really part of the part of the game. For example, this is why I was always so fascinated with jokes in communist countries. Political jokes, they were excellent. I don't think this is for me the greatest sacrifice the greatest loss, cultural loss, of the fall of socialism was that these jokes disappeared. They were I think of the highest level, some jokes very complex and so on and so on, political jokes, no? But they disappeared. Of course now you will say but they were prohibited, they were you could be arrested. Not really, it was much more ambiguous. I think they were strictly part of the system. They strictly functions as a way to how do you put it the vulgar expression let the steam off or whatever. They were they were really part of it. There were even I love this story although it's not true, there were even some paranoiac theorists who claimed that there was some secret department of the secret police where they manufactured these jokes to keep the population satisfied as it were, no? And I I in a way in a way I believe in it because in the last years of Yugoslavia where it was already communist Yugoslavia where all the regime was already in kind of a decadence, something wonderful happened: to remain popular, and this was a golden era for me because communists in power knew they were lost, knew that soon they will lose power, so they did everything desperately more or less to remain popular. And some of them even tried to regain some kind of if you are from ex-Yugoslavia maybe you remember the Croatian guy Mika Špiljak for example was doing this, he proudly collected jokes about and in Slovenia that disgusting fat guy Stane Dolanc he was doing it. They proudly collected jokes about themselves and used them in their used them in their speeches and so on and so on. So you even had this level of obscenity. And what intrigues me, now I will give you another movie which partially falsifies my theory, but my God it's so it really you will say I'm I'm a bad guy, it's difficult to shock me, I was a little bit shocked depressingly. I'm really sad I didn't bring it with myself, I got a publicity copy from a friend of mine in Hollywood. No no big friend. [unintelligible] Where because my idea is these jokes, all this functions if it remains as it were of part of this non-public. You know, you shouldn't say private space because it's not really private space. It's let's call it non-public but still communal space, how should I put it, no? This obscene supplement to to the power structure. To what extent can this be rendered public? And I got one example which I thought it cannot. It's really a depressing story. I'm really sad why didn't I bring it with me, it would be worth seeing. It's maybe the most depressing documentary I've seen. It's a documentary by a Dutch group, maybe you've heard about it, I forgot the names, I'm a racist, I cannot remember those stupid strange names and so on. But I'm a democratic racist. That is to say, you know what's for me the only way to fight racism? To be a racist against everyone, you mean like in old Yugoslavia. I think one should tell bad jokes, racist jokes against all nations, that's the only way to overcome nationalism. Okay. It's really a depressing film. It's about you remember in '66 or when there was that communist coup and then the military counter-coup in Indonesia where it was followed by one of the greatest bloodbath: they think that about two million of suspected communists but mostly Chinese were slaughtered. Okay, these two is it Dutch or no it's not even Dutch it's Danish I think guys made a documentary about a group of these who as young men were organizing one of these murder gangs killing communists. The shock is the following one: they it's a documentary about them not secretly made. These people are now one is member of the Senate, the other is a big businessman, and they don't hide anything. They proudly made wanted to a documentary to be made where they publicly enact and describe, oh you see the best way to torture a woman was in this way: if you try to strangle her, her legs went apart, it was easier to rape. It's how that's what shocked me and this movie was not for the West. It was shown there in Indonesia and then there was in the State TV, one of the main programs, a public show public sorry talk where these guys presented the movie and openly boasted about it and it's the most obscene TV conversation I saw where the guy described how he raped woman, what was his preferred style and then the moderator says "what a nice confession, one big applause for the gentlemen" and so on and so on. I thought this shouldn't be possible but obviously it is. To go as it were to go to the end. Because you know even like the these death police squads torturers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, nonetheless, okay if they are caught they just give some vague indications like we did it for our country, it was tough necessity to do. But to get someone who is not only openly boasting about it, but even more, they have a whole theory of how they were imitating Hollywood heroes. For example one of their heroes was Humphrey Bogart and so on and so on and they then enact this. It's an extremely obscene thing where they, these older murderers, accepted to be dressed like Humphrey Bogart in the 40s and then a little bit like Fred Astaire they stage a musical numbers and then they describe their tortures and so on and so on. So it's it's the extreme. [Audience member: "The Act of Killing."] Act of Killing. Free men? Free men you can find it. Just put if you put "Free Men" plural like F-R-E-E-M-E-N, Free Men and put in Indonesia or what, I think you will get it immediately. But I got the movie and it's no again the problem is what kind of, to use the standard moralistic term, what kind of moral vacuum do we have here that this is openly possible. Now to avoid a misunderstanding, another of my standard points. I'm not a puritan here. My point is not all obscenities automatically serve power. I claim I'm more ambiguous here. I claim that some kind of obscenities serve can be not only appropriated but are directly in the function of power. Power doesn't function without this obscene background. On the other hand I claim they can play a very positive role. For example, referring to two of you from my our ex-country Yugoslavia. I have extremely good memories from my youth about jokes we in ex-Yugoslavia were telling to each other about our nations. And the way I remember them, they were not jokes in this aggressive mode of humiliated the other. Mostly we were when I met a Serb or a Montenegrin or a Croat friend, it was mostly who will tell a better joke about oneself. You know that each of the nations in ex-Yugoslavia was identified with a certain racist, whatever you call it, feature: like we Slovenes were supposed to be misers, Montenegrins are lazy, Bosnians are kind of an obscene cunningness and so on. And I remember one and now you I claim these jokes played an extremely positive role of establishing true obscene solidarity. Because that's I think I claim how it functions. Let's be clear. Let's say we meet belonging to different groups. What is the symbolic point at which we really become friends? If we remain at this official level: oh what a wonderful food you have, what a wonderful folkloric dances. Fuck off, that's. You know the moment you exchange an obscenity, how should I put it, no? At that point it begins. And it did and so I remember for example, I don't know, we Slovenes are supposed to be misers. So I usually tell my Balkan other friends some, they're not even so good, a standard Slovene joke is for example an old Slovene farmer is dying in his bed and all the family is around him and he says, "are you all here, my granddaughter, my son?" "Yeah, we are all here." Then he said "but if you are all here, why is then light on there in the corridor?" You know, the old miser. Then I don't know the standard vulgar Montenegrin joke playing on their laziness. You know that Montenegro is also an earthquake country. How does a Montenegrin guy masturbate? He digs a hole in the earth and puts the penis in, he's even too lazy to move, he waits for the earthquake. And you have oh there are even better the most elegant the Bosnian obscene jokes I know. For example they make very nicely fun of this international efforts to educate them, you know. Like it's a joke that now they got a teacher from abroad who wants to teach them classical education in a more creative way and wants to teach them classical music. And the teacher says to Bosnian pupils, "we will not just learn data of composers, we will do it in a creative way, so each of you should A, tell an idea and then a composition by Beethoven which you associate with this idea." So a girl said, "a nice a nice piece of grass, forests, Bambi, a stream. It's of course Pastoral Symphony." Then a boy said, "battle, heroism, revolution. Of course Eroica." Ah then the Bosnian guy comes and says a big prick like this erected one. They said "what's this?" He said "you know that the teacher said" [sic: Beethoven said] "Für Elise." For a d- Elise. Okay. But I think it works so nicely this. What I and now you will say I'm dreaming. I am not. I will give you a proof. When I remember, I'm old enough, when serious real racist tensions, ethnic tensions start to arouse in early 80s, from 80s onwards, these jokes practically disappeared I remember. They and only now they are so this is for me a kind of a if you want material proof that you need this kind of how should I put it exchange of obscenity. I cannot restrain telling you maybe you know it but it's in a book of mine which not many people read so probably you don't know it. My favorite story, it's perfect, it's from what happened to me in the army. When I was friendly with an Albanian soldier. And we we wanted to become really friends. Of course the condition was to exchange an obscenity. So how to do it? Of course Albanians, this is a cliché maybe partly true, are very sensitive on humiliating with aggressive sexual remarks, their not so much wife as sister or mother, no? So this Albanian friend of mine who was incidentally educated, university and so on, approached me one morning and said, "I fuck your mother, I screw your mother." Now I knew this was really an offer of friendship and it was up to me to answer appropriately. Believe me I don't have problems with it. I immediately answered it: "Go ahead after I finish with your sister." The point is that now come the mystery. We just smiled and that was it. We never talked about it. This was just a sign that we are really friends. We did not, as you would have expected then, spend all the time telling dirty we never engaged. It was just this token. The only thing that remained is that every morning when we met instead of saying the usual "I smoke yours" or "good morning" whatever he just told me "mother," I said "sister." Without any smile. It just meant we are still friends how should I put it, no? It worked it worked it worked perfectly. Now of course I'm here a good feminist so that you will not think that I am crazy. I am well aware of the two limitations of this story. One is that it's the standard male chauvinist story about exchange of women, no? So all I can say is I would like to live in a society where wouldn't you like to meet your friend like "I screw your father," "go ahead after I screw your brother." It would be nice to do it also if the other sex would be able to do it, how should I put it. The other thing is the problem of hierarchy of course, no? We were able to do it because we were on the same level, both private ordinary soldiers. Like I cannot imagine myself approaching a high officer and telling "I screw your sister" and so on, no? If he does it, some high officers were doing this to me because they wanted as it were to establish human contact. I hated it. Because this is the worst: you know when those who have power over you try to behave as colleagues. This for me was never liberating but even power redoubled. Because they want to retain all the power they have but on the top of it. I prefer open authority. I hate this postmodern bosses, you know, who pretend "but we are friends," ask you about your sex life, let's go drinking. This is disgusting for me. They still have the power but they pretend as if you know we are really colleagues and so on and so on. I don't buy that. Okay. So my point is that this is what always fascinated me: this how should I put it how this obscenity the ambiguity of obscenity. On the one hand in it sustains the system, on the other hand I'm not totally condemning it. It can play a positive role. What I'm just saying is that when you you should be when something is presented to you as how should I put it subversive, all these secret dirty dreams and so on, you should be very careful as to how this effectively functions. Sometimes I claim the best thing to do is not to not to to be even more how should I put it more more more puritan than the official ideology. To to stick just to the explicit rules and to ignore the implicit rules as it were. Because this is again another example that I use in my books. For example, let's imagine a nice nice in the horrible sense small city in the south of the United States, Mississippi wherever in the 20s with Ku Klux Klan and so on. You had the official ideology Christianity and so on and then you have Ku Klux Klan which was strictly what we call a carnivalesque transgression. Let's imagine someone who violates the explicit rules: doesn't go to church, gets drunk and so on. He would still have been one of us. But let's imagine someone who violates the implicit rules. For example denounces Ku Klux Klan to police. You would have been killed or at least excluded immediately. What accounts for the group identity is precisely this participation in the common transgression how should I put it. I mean I claim that some kind of rituals of common transgression violating your own explicit ideology are are are absolutely are absolutely are absolutely crucial for this. That's the true transgression the the real way to exclude yourself is to ignore or violate these implicit rules. Which brings me back to another point where one of you he was sitting yesterday there I don't know where he is today was talking about Bakhtin and so on. That's the problem I have not so much with Mikhail Bakhtin, you know the Russian guy who did not only dialogue but also this theory of carnival. Carnivalesque suspension. He wrote Bakhtin a wonderful book also on François Rabelais where he developed in detail this theory of the necessary social role of so-called carnivalesque suspension of public rules. You know that orgies, rules suspended, king is a beggar, beggar is a king and so on and so on. Where I disagree, again not so much with Bakhtin as with some of his followers. I disagree with those who claim that there is any kind of liberating dimension in this carnival. My proof is here empirical even. Maybe you heard about him. I don't agree with him theoretically but he's an intelligent guy: Boris Groys. The Russian art theorist who worked for long time in Germany, now he tries to penetrate United States, we'll see. He told me that he got contact with some guys in Russia who have access to Mikhail Bakhtin archives. Mikhail Bakhtin was writing his work when he was exiled to Kazan I think that's how he survived the Stalinist purges Kazan and okay the point is that it's clear from the manuscripts that the true model for carnival for Bakhtin were Stalinist purges. You know it's because there was an element of madness in them. You know today you are the king member of Politburo, tomorrow you are English spy and so on. So the suggestion is that one way to read the figure interpret the figure of Stalin is that kind of how should I put it king of the carnival, the guy who runs this show where your fate could be up and down and so on and so on. So again also I'm tempted to read in this way the Ku Klux Klan. I mean wasn't or to be very brutal to refer more to contemporary experience: if you a couple of boys get drunk and rape a couple of girls in a gangbang. I mean if there ever was a carnival this is a carnival. I hope you got my point: I'm not justifying the rape, on the contrary. I'm saying that I don't really believe in this how should I call it liberating power of carnival. It's very ambiguous thing. Adorno wrote some very good analysis where he interpreted even the Nazi pogroms and so on as some kind of a carnivalesque suspension of order and so on. So again let's not fall too quickly into this celebrating, "oh that wonderful moment of liberation carnival, no rules, up down down up." No, I claim that every power needs some kind of carnival some kind of carnivalesque yes please. [Audience member: mentions Bakhtin and dialogism.] Yeah but how do you apply this to there must be a connection how. Okay to put it in very simplistic terms: Bakhtin did two great things: A, all this idea of dialogism where the big author of reference was Dostoevsky, no? And then carnival where the big reference was Rabelais. How do you okay I can well see the link because it's clear that there are those intense moments of dialogue in Dostoevsky novels. For example, you know the famous scene at the end of the first part of The Idiot where Prince Myshkin who does it throws money into the fire and so on, which have this kind of carnivalesque suspension of rules dimension. But nonetheless, it's not totally clear to me how how the two are linked. What I'm saying, again, I agree with Bakhtin. I'm just saying that sometimes we read Bakhtin in a way too simplified way as simply celebrating, "oh my god, carnival." We should just be aware that that how should I put it Auschwitz was for Nazis in a way literally, my god if you read Levi it's clear that it was also in a very obscene way a carnivalesque place. A place where rules were suspended, you were allowed to enact your your your. Sorry? [Audience member: mentions *This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen* by Tadeusz Borowski.] Ah Borowski. Yeah yeah. I know and I agree totally with you. Even let's make a step further here. What always intrigued me and yeah I know you are then I know I want just to finish my narcissistic trip then you know. I this is what intrigued me also: why are to ask you a very simple question, why are why is it almost impossible to do a good serious tragedy about Holocaust? Why are all movies about Holocaust which are at least tolerable comedies? I think there is a necessity in it. And no no don't be I will not make tasteless fun okay I will legitimize myself. I sold this theory in Jerusalem in a big public talk where in first row I remember there were old ladies with numbers here sitting and they agreed with me. The point the point is that that to make a tragedy, you know what how should I put it tragedy is not when things are really horrible. Tragedy is always only possible when you remain within a certain limits of decency how should you know in order to retain your tragic dignity the humiliation must not be total. Like you cannot imagine in Auschwitz, okay you can but strictly as an exception you know, a Jew heroically tragically confronting the Nazi. As some Jewish friends told me the point is not that the Jews were not able to do it. The point is that if you portray Auschwitz in this way you give too much you concede too much to the Nazis. You diminish the level of the horror that it was going on there. The horror there was so horrible the terror to the victims that you were deprived of even the possibility of the space to play this with dignity this tragic role of a victim. And the same at a different level goes also for Stalinist trials. If you look at those horrible scenes we have some of them on movies on on accused in the Stalinist show trials confessing. The situation was so terrifying there was no space for playing the tragic role. The only way to do it is through comedy but what kind of comedy? Not comedy where you laugh, but comedy where the fact that it there is something comic about it makes it in a way even more horrible. For example, I read recently reread of course Primo Levi's If This Is a Man. You remember if you read it he describes there a scene of so-called selekcja in Polish because the kapos were Polish selection. Every month or two months doesn't matter all the from all the barracks the prisoners it was they were inspected by an SS doctor and it was decided like do you live or do you die, no? But how was this done? The doctor with the list was sitting behind a table with the list and you had to run naked in front of the doctor, you were really literally given just two-three seconds and sometimes it even happened the doctor made a confusion did and then he put you either on one on the other list: you are gas, you can survive. Of course they learned a couple of days in advance when this selection will take place. And the way Primo Levi your it was in your interest to appear as healthy and strong as possible. So all these small tricks that the prisoners tried to learn how to pinch your lips to appear not to pale, how to move and so on and this idea of now I should run will he note me or not. I'm sorry to tell you but there is something not to laugh, isn't there something almost I'm tempted to say comic about it. But of course comic in an extremely in an extremely tragic way. And again I think that here it's not good enough the movie Roberto Benigni. You know why? Because it's way too humanizing. It avoids the horror. How? The hero played by Benigni is still this kind of a standard trickster you know, the the cunning guy who can survive all the ordeals and so on. And the second thing I don't like is that all the comedy is nonetheless as it were sublimated at the end: the last scene you remember when his son remembers him you remember you are not allowed to you are not supposed to laugh, you are supposed to cry. I think the to make Life is Beautiful a truly horrible film, one should change the story a little bit. You know how? You I mean not to tell you the you know the story probably no you know the story the father so that his son swallows can survive Auschwitz or whatever, the father tells him the
incidentally called Tom Moldby who did a wonderful detailed analysis of this scene in a volume called Post-Theory. Good volume which is directed against psychoanalysis but this analysis. What he demonstrated, Tom Moldby, is the following: that it's not so much that the situation is ambiguous but that the situation is consciously inconsistent. That is to say, the movie provides a whole series of clues indicating that they did do it. First as you probably know in this Hays Code Hollywood, if a woman and a man have a conversation and then they embrace and then you have a fade out, this was a codified way to indicate there was a sex act. Another thing: after we return to them, they are smoking. I mean you know this proverb, which is the second and the third most pleasant thing in the world: the drink before and the smoke afterwards and so on. So this was also one of the codified ways in Hollywood to signal sex act. Not to mention the most more vulgar one, the tower and so on, phallic tower. On the other hand you have a whole series of clues indicating that they didn't do it. There is no bed, they are dressed in same full dresses, the same conversation seems to go on and so on. And Moldby as Moldby, this guy who wrote the analysis, indicates very nicely: this is how ideology functions in Hollywood. The movie plays simultaneously on both registers. The like the movie treats you as someone who should be allowed a forbidden pleasure, but who should at the same time be allowed to pretend that there is no dirty secret. It's as if I know you want to imagine what dirty things they were doing but so that you will not be embarrassed or so that you will not feel guilty confronted with your superego moral agency I will also provide for you a kind of a moral screen so that you know you can say to your superego watching you: nothing happened, just the same conversation went on. But at the same time the movie gives you precise clues and there is, I forgot the the guy I quoted him in my where I analyzed this, there is a wonderful pornographic short story as the time goes by which is a short story, pages, describing just this scene from Casablanca. It starts with the same scene, the two of them talking, and then it ends in the same way but the main part of the story, pages, is the detailed hardcore pornographic description of what they were doing and what is so nice so dirty about the story is that it gives a very obscene twist to the most famous phrases we all know for Casablanca. You know that famous "here's to you, kid." You know in the story he gives her her his erected penis to swallow it and says "here's to you, kid" and so on. But but I think I don't think there is anything liberating in it. I prefer this Hollywood ambiguity, you know. It functions on two levels and this is absolutely crucial. We will I will return to this to the end. This is absolutely crucial as to how ideology functions. That why am I mentioning this? Because some of my friends still interpret this how should I call it, obscene underground of Hollywood, all these hints at homosexuality, at illicit sex as some kind of subversion. You know like we have the official patriarchal puritan ideology but then you see the traces of subversion. My point is simply that this subversion is not really subversive, that it's strictly part of the system. It's you know that for let's say American ideological imaginary to function, you don't need only the official puritan whatever nothing happened, you also need all this implicit the implicit message what obscene things were going on and so on and so on. Ideology is the two of them together. It's absolutely crucial to include which is why as I did already in my early books I analyzed in detail for example, did you see a movie it's a kind of a liberal drama but I like the central point of the movie, not so much the movie itself. Did you see that legal military legal melodrama A Few Good Men with Tom Cruise and so on. You remember what they refer to in the film as the "Red Code" [sic: Code Red]. This publicly not admitted but obscene legal regulation in the military where implicitly you are allowed to I don't know you beat your colleagues if they don't and so on. So this is also and I can tell you from my own experience this is my experience in the Yugoslav army where I served for a year. How you have the official level military rules and then you have all this set of complex obscene rules. In United States when Bush was elected I noticed that he was member of some Bones and some Skull and Bones. Skull and Bones. This is what I'm talking about. All these obscene rituals and so on and so on. They are this is not any kind of subversion. Ideology needs all this to reproduce itself. Which is why, that's my usual example of this, I like so much those obscene how do you call them, marching chants. You know the songs that Marines are singing where the works are usually some kind of mixture between nonsense rhymes and obscenity. Like I remember I think it's precisely from no it's from An Officer and a Gentleman I think where the song is something like sorry for the obscenity what I'm not really sorry and so on something like "I don't know but I was told that Eskimo pussies are rather cold." You know this gross obscenity. My point is this is not any kind of subversion, you need this. That's how the military machine functions. You need all this Code Red or whatever obscene rules. And that was my fundamental experience for example in the Yugoslav army: how homosexuality. It wasn't simply prohibited. The usual story is you know it's very homophobic the army. It is true, superficially it was homophobic. For example, whenever any of our colleagues was if one was discovered to be gay, it was life was hell for him. He was dismissed, but those couple of days before he was officially dismissed from the army he was I don't know beaten beaten every night by colleagues and so on, totally homophobic. What fascinated me is another thing, how this homophobia was much more ambiguous than it may appear. It was a kind of an excessive reaction to a latent homophobia, sorry latent latent homosexual strain which permeated the entire life. For example I never was in a community where all the daily expressions had a kind of a joking homosexual undertone. For example I remember when we I when we greeted each other after awakening we didn't say good morning we said "I'll smoke yours" with reference to. This was and it was totally neutral, we even didn't laugh, it became totally or all these dirty homosexual jokes and so on. It was this is what interests me, how it's not simply homophobic, it but it's at the same time playing on these latent homophobic [sic: homosexual] jokes but totally thwarted homosexuality, absolutely prohibited to be directly enacted. And again my point is that you need both. You need both and wait a minute don't now misunderstand me here. My point is not what you find at some point even with Adorno. Adorno had this tendency sometimes, he was a little bit anti he you find clear traces of homophobia in Adorno. At some point he had this low-level state of the Nazis that the Nazi Party is really some kind of homosexuals in power that it's kind of a homo. No no no I'm not saying this. I'm saying that it's much more ambiguous. I'm saying that precisely this kind of thwarted homosexuality is most aggressive to open homosexuality. But again my point is that you you you need both levels. And this is what again from when I was young fascinated me: how ideology how what you what it may appear to you as a subversion like making fun of it telling jokes and so on how it's really part of the part of the game. For example, this is why I was always so fascinated with jokes in communist countries. Political jokes, they were excellent. I don't think this is for me the greatest sacrifice the greatest loss, cultural loss, of the fall of socialism was that these jokes disappeared. They were I think of the highest level, some jokes very complex and so on and so on, political jokes, no? But they disappeared. Of course now you will say but they were prohibited, they were you could be arrested. Not really, it was much more ambiguous. I think they were strictly part of the system. They strictly functions as a way to how do you put it the vulgar expression let the steam off or whatever. They were they were really part of it. There were even I love this story although it's not true, there were even some paranoiac theorists who claimed that there was some secret department of the secret police where they manufactured these jokes to keep the population satisfied as it were, no? And I I in a way in a way I believe in it because in the last years of Yugoslavia where it was already communist Yugoslavia where all the regime was already in kind of a decadence, something wonderful happened: to remain popular, and this was a golden era for me because communists in power knew they were lost, knew that soon they will lose power, so they did everything desperately more or less to remain popular. And some of them even tried to regain some kind of if you are from ex-Yugoslavia maybe you remember the Croatian guy Mika Špiljak for example was doing this, he proudly collected jokes about and in Slovenia that disgusting fat guy Stane Dolanc he was doing it. They proudly collected jokes about themselves and used them in their used them in their speeches and so on and so on. So you even had this level of obscenity. And what intrigues me, now I will give you another movie which partially falsifies my theory, but my God it's so it really you will say I'm I'm a bad guy, it's difficult to shock me, I was a little bit shocked depressingly. I'm really sad I didn't bring it with myself, I got a publicity copy from a friend of mine in Hollywood. No no big friend. [unintelligible] Where because my idea is these jokes, all this functions if it remains as it were of part of this non-public. You know, you shouldn't say private space because it's not really private space. It's let's call it non-public but still communal space, how should I put it, no? This obscene supplement to to the power structure. To what extent can this be rendered public? And I got one example which I thought it cannot. It's really a depressing story. I'm really sad why didn't I bring it with me, it would be worth seeing. It's maybe the most depressing documentary I've seen. It's a documentary by a Dutch group, maybe you've heard about it, I forgot the names, I'm a racist, I cannot remember those stupid strange names and so on. But I'm a democratic racist. That is to say, you know what's for me the only way to fight racism? To be a racist against everyone, you mean like in old Yugoslavia. I think one should tell bad jokes, racist jokes against all nations, that's the only way to overcome nationalism. Okay. It's really a depressing film. It's about you remember in '66 or when there was that communist coup and then the military counter-coup in Indonesia where it was followed by one of the greatest bloodbath: they think that about two million of suspected communists but mostly Chinese were slaughtered. Okay, these two is it Dutch or no it's not even Dutch it's Danish I think guys made a documentary about a group of these who as young men were organizing one of these murder gangs killing communists. The shock is the following one: they it's a documentary about them not secretly made. These people are now one is member of the Senate, the other is a big businessman, and they don't hide anything. They proudly made wanted to a documentary to be made where they publicly enact and describe, oh you see the best way to torture a woman was in this way: if you try to strangle her, her legs went apart, it was easier to rape. It's how that's what shocked me and this movie was not for the West. It was shown there in Indonesia and then there was in the State TV, one of the main programs, a public show public sorry talk where these guys presented the movie and openly boasted about it and it's the most obscene TV conversation I saw where the guy described how he raped woman, what was his preferred style and then the moderator says "what a nice confession, one big applause for the gentlemen" and so on and so on. I thought this shouldn't be possible but obviously it is. To go as it were to go to the end. Because you know even like the these death police squads torturers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, nonetheless, okay if they are caught they just give some vague indications like we did it for our country, it was tough necessity to do. But to get someone who is not only openly boasting about it, but even more, they have a whole theory of how they were imitating Hollywood heroes. For example one of their heroes was Humphrey Bogart and so on and so on and they then enact this. It's an extremely obscene thing where they, these older murderers, accepted to be dressed like Humphrey Bogart in the 40s and then a little bit like Fred Astaire they stage a musical numbers and then they describe their tortures and so on and so on. So it's it's the extreme. [Audience member: "The Act of Killing."] Act of Killing. Free men? Free men you can find it. Just put if you put "Free Men" plural like F-R-E-E-M-E-N, Free Men and put in Indonesia or what, I think you will get it immediately. But I got the movie and it's no again the problem is what kind of, to use the standard moralistic term, what kind of moral vacuum do we have here that this is openly possible. Now to avoid a misunderstanding, another of my standard points. I'm not a puritan here. My point is not all obscenities automatically serve power. I claim I'm more ambiguous here. I claim that some kind of obscenities serve can be not only appropriated but are directly in the function of power. Power doesn't function without this obscene background. On the other hand I claim they can play a very positive role. For example, referring to two of you from my our ex-country Yugoslavia. I have extremely good memories from my youth about jokes we in ex-Yugoslavia were telling to each other about our nations. And the way I remember them, they were not jokes in this aggressive mode of humiliated the other. Mostly we were when I met a Serb or a Montenegrin or a Croat friend, it was mostly who will tell a better joke about oneself. You know that each of the nations in ex-Yugoslavia was identified with a certain racist, whatever you call it, feature: like we Slovenes were supposed to be misers, Montenegrins are lazy, Bosnians are kind of an obscene cunningness and so on. And I remember one and now you I claim these jokes played an extremely positive role of establishing true obscene solidarity. Because that's I think I claim how it functions. Let's be clear. Let's say we meet belonging to different groups. What is the symbolic point at which we really become friends? If we remain at this official level: oh what a wonderful food you have, what a wonderful folkloric dances. Fuck off, that's. You know the moment you exchange an obscenity, how should I put it, no? At that point it begins. And it did and so I remember for example, I don't know, we Slovenes are supposed to be misers. So I usually tell my Balkan other friends some, they're not even so good, a standard Slovene joke is for example an old Slovene farmer is dying in his bed and all the family is around him and he says, "are you all here, my granddaughter, my son?" "Yeah, we are all here." Then he said "but if you are all here, why is then light on there in the corridor?" You know, the old miser. Then I don't know the standard vulgar Montenegrin joke playing on their laziness. You know that Montenegro is also an earthquake country. How does a Montenegrin guy masturbate? He digs a hole in the earth and puts the penis in, he's even too lazy to move, he waits for the earthquake. And you have oh there are even better the most elegant the Bosnian obscene jokes I know. For example they make very nicely fun of this international efforts to educate them, you know. Like it's a joke that now they got a teacher from abroad who wants to teach them classical education in a more creative way and wants to teach them classical music. And the teacher says to Bosnian pupils, "we will not just learn data of composers, we will do it in a creative way, so each of you should A, tell an idea and then a composition by Beethoven which you associate with this idea." So a girl said, "a nice a nice piece of grass, forests, Bambi, a stream. It's of course Pastoral Symphony." Then a boy said, "battle, heroism, revolution. Of course Eroica." Ah then the Bosnian guy comes and says a big prick like this erected one. They said "what's this?" He said "you know that the teacher said" [sic: Beethoven said] "Für Elise." For a d- Elise. Okay. But I think it works so nicely this. What I and now you will say I'm dreaming. I am not. I will give you a proof. When I remember, I'm old enough, when serious real racist tensions, ethnic tensions start to arouse in early 80s, from 80s onwards, these jokes practically disappeared I remember. They and only now they are so this is for me a kind of a if you want material proof that you need this kind of how should I put it exchange of obscenity. I cannot restrain telling you maybe you know it but it's in a book of mine which not many people read so probably you don't know it. My favorite story, it's perfect, it's from what happened to me in the army. When I was friendly with an Albanian soldier. And we we wanted to become really friends. Of course the condition was to exchange an obscenity. So how to do it? Of course Albanians, this is a cliché maybe partly true, are very sensitive on humiliating with aggressive sexual remarks, their not so much wife as sister or mother, no? So this Albanian friend of mine who was incidentally educated, university and so on, approached me one morning and said, "I fuck your mother, I screw your mother." Now I knew this was really an offer of friendship and it was up to me to answer appropriately. Believe me I don't have problems with it. I immediately answered it: "Go ahead after I finish with your sister." The point is that now come the mystery. We just smiled and that was it. We never talked about it. This was just a sign that we are really friends. We did not, as you would have expected then, spend all the time telling dirty we never engaged. It was just this token. The only thing that remained is that every morning when we met instead of saying the usual "I smoke yours" or "good morning" whatever he just told me "mother," I said "sister." Without any smile. It just meant we are still friends how should I put it, no? It worked it worked it worked perfectly. Now of course I'm here a good feminist so that you will not think that I am crazy. I am well aware of the two limitations of this story. One is that it's the standard male chauvinist story about exchange of women, no? So all I can say is I would like to live in a society where wouldn't you like to meet your friend like "I screw your father," "go ahead after I screw your brother." It would be nice to do it also if the other sex would be able to do it, how should I put it. The other thing is the problem of hierarchy of course, no? We were able to do it because we were on the same level, both private ordinary soldiers. Like I cannot imagine myself approaching a high officer and telling "I screw your sister" and so on, no? If he does it, some high officers were doing this to me because they wanted as it were to establish human contact. I hated it. Because this is the worst: you know when those who have power over you try to behave as colleagues. This for me was never liberating but even power redoubled. Because they want to retain all the power they have but on the top of it. I prefer open authority. I hate this postmodern bosses, you know, who pretend "but we are friends," ask you about your sex life, let's go drinking. This is disgusting for me. They still have the power but they pretend as if you know we are really colleagues and so on and so on. I don't buy that. Okay. So my point is that this is what always fascinated me: this how should I put it how this obscenity the ambiguity of obscenity. On the one hand in it sustains the system, on the other hand I'm not totally condemning it. It can play a positive role. What I'm just saying is that when you you should be when something is presented to you as how should I put it subversive, all these secret dirty dreams and so on, you should be very careful as to how this effectively functions. Sometimes I claim the best thing to do is not to not to to be even more how should I put it more more more puritan than the official ideology. To to stick just to the explicit rules and to ignore the implicit rules as it were. Because this is again another example that I use in my books. For example, let's imagine a nice nice in the horrible sense small city in the south of the United States, Mississippi wherever in the 20s with Ku Klux Klan and so on. You had the official ideology Christianity and so on and then you have Ku Klux Klan which was strictly what we call a carnivalesque transgression. Let's imagine someone who violates the explicit rules: doesn't go to church, gets drunk and so on. He would still have been one of us. But let's imagine someone who violates the implicit rules. For example denounces Ku Klux Klan to police. You would have been killed or at least excluded immediately. What accounts for the group identity is precisely this participation in the common transgression how should I put it. I mean I claim that some kind of rituals of common transgression violating your own explicit ideology are are are absolutely are absolutely are absolutely crucial for this. That's the true transgression the the real way to exclude yourself is to ignore or violate these implicit rules. Which brings me back to another point where one of you he was sitting yesterday there I don't know where he is today was talking about Bakhtin and so on. That's the problem I have not so much with Mikhail Bakhtin, you know the Russian guy who did not only dialogue but also this theory of carnival. Carnivalesque suspension. He wrote Bakhtin a wonderful book also on François Rabelais where he developed in detail this theory of the necessary social role of so-called carnivalesque suspension of public rules. You know that orgies, rules suspended, king is a beggar, beggar is a king and so on and so on. Where I disagree, again not so much with Bakhtin as with some of his followers. I disagree with those who claim that there is any kind of liberating dimension in this carnival. My proof is here empirical even. Maybe you heard about him. I don't agree with him theoretically but he's an intelligent guy: Boris Groys. The Russian art theorist who worked for long time in Germany, now he tries to penetrate United States, we'll see. He told me that he got contact with some guys in Russia who have access to Mikhail Bakhtin archives. Mikhail Bakhtin was writing his work when he was exiled to Kazan I think that's how he survived the Stalinist purges Kazan and okay the point is that it's clear from the manuscripts that the true model for carnival for Bakhtin were Stalinist purges. You know it's because there was an element of madness in them. You know today you are the king member of Politburo, tomorrow you are English spy and so on. So the suggestion is that one way to read the figure interpret the figure of Stalin is that kind of how should I put it king of the carnival, the guy who runs this show where your fate could be up and down and so on and so on. So again also I'm tempted to read in this way the Ku Klux Klan. I mean wasn't or to be very brutal to refer more to contemporary experience: if you a couple of boys get drunk and rape a couple of girls in a gangbang. I mean if there ever was a carnival this is a carnival. I hope you got my point: I'm not justifying the rape, on the contrary. I'm saying that I don't really believe in this how should I call it liberating power of carnival. It's very ambiguous thing. Adorno wrote some very good analysis where he interpreted even the Nazi pogroms and so on as some kind of a carnivalesque suspension of order and so on. So again let's not fall too quickly into this celebrating, "oh that wonderful moment of liberation carnival, no rules, up down down up." No, I claim that every power needs some kind of carnival some kind of carnivalesque yes please. [Audience member: mentions Bakhtin and dialogism.] Yeah but how do you apply this to there must be a connection how. Okay to put it in very simplistic terms: Bakhtin did two great things: A, all this idea of dialogism where the big author of reference was Dostoevsky, no? And then carnival where the big reference was Rabelais. How do you okay I can well see the link because it's clear that there are those intense moments of dialogue in Dostoevsky novels. For example, you know the famous scene at the end of the first part of The Idiot where Prince Myshkin who does it throws money into the fire and so on, which have this kind of carnivalesque suspension of rules dimension. But nonetheless, it's not totally clear to me how how the two are linked. What I'm saying, again, I agree with Bakhtin. I'm just saying that sometimes we read Bakhtin in a way too simplified way as simply celebrating, "oh my god, carnival." We should just be aware that that how should I put it Auschwitz was for Nazis in a way literally, my god if you read Levi it's clear that it was also in a very obscene way a carnivalesque place. A place where rules were suspended, you were allowed to enact your your your. Sorry? [Audience member: mentions *This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen* by Tadeusz Borowski.] Ah Borowski. Yeah yeah. I know and I agree totally with you. Even let's make a step further here. What always intrigued me and yeah I know you are then I know I want just to finish my narcissistic trip then you know. I this is what intrigued me also: why are to ask you a very simple question, why are why is it almost impossible to do a good serious tragedy about Holocaust? Why are all movies about Holocaust which are at least tolerable comedies? I think there is a necessity in it. And no no don't be I will not make tasteless fun okay I will legitimize myself. I sold this theory in Jerusalem in a big public talk where in first row I remember there were old ladies with numbers here sitting and they agreed with me. The point the point is that that to make a tragedy, you know what how should I put it tragedy is not when things are really horrible. Tragedy is always only possible when you remain within a certain limits of decency how should you know in order to retain your tragic dignity the humiliation must not be total. Like you cannot imagine in Auschwitz, okay you can but strictly as an exception you know, a Jew heroically tragically confronting the Nazi. As some Jewish friends told me the point is not that the Jews were not able to do it. The point is that if you portray Auschwitz in this way you give too much you concede too much to the Nazis. You diminish the level of the horror that it was going on there. The horror there was so horrible the terror to the victims that you were deprived of even the possibility of the space to play this with dignity this tragic role of a victim. And the same at a different level goes also for Stalinist trials. If you look at those horrible scenes we have some of them on movies on on accused in the Stalinist show trials confessing. The situation was so terrifying there was no space for playing the tragic role. The only way to do it is through comedy but what kind of comedy? Not comedy where you laugh, but comedy where the fact that it there is something comic about it makes it in a way even more horrible. For example, I read recently reread of course Primo Levi's If This Is a Man. You remember if you read it he describes there a scene of so-called selekcja in Polish because the kapos were Polish selection. Every month or two months doesn't matter all the from all the barracks the prisoners it was they were inspected by an SS doctor and it was decided like do you live or do you die, no? But how was this done? The doctor with the list was sitting behind a table with the list and you had to run naked in front of the doctor, you were really literally given just two-three seconds and sometimes it even happened the doctor made a confusion did and then he put you either on one on the other list: you are gas, you can survive. Of course they learned a couple of days in advance when this selection will take place. And the way Primo Levi your it was in your interest to appear as healthy and strong as possible. So all these small tricks that the prisoners tried to learn how to pinch your lips to appear not to pale, how to move and so on and this idea of now I should run will he note me or not. I'm sorry to tell you but there is something not to laugh, isn't there something almost I'm tempted to say comic about it. But of course comic in an extremely in an extremely tragic way. And again I think that here it's not good enough the movie Roberto Benigni. You know why? Because it's way too humanizing. It avoids the horror. How? The hero played by Benigni is still this kind of a standard trickster you know, the the cunning guy who can survive all the ordeals and so on. And the second thing I don't like is that all the comedy is nonetheless as it were sublimated at the end: the last scene you remember when his son remembers him you remember you are not allowed to you are not supposed to laugh, you are supposed to cry. I think the to make Life is Beautiful a truly horrible film, one should change the story a little bit. You know how? You I mean not to tell you the you know the story probably no you know the story the father so that his son swallows can survive Auschwitz or whatever, the father tells him the
unknown
story that this is not really a camp, they are there voluntarily, it's just a kind of a big test whatever, if they survive without wanting to leave they will be presented by a prize at the end blah blah blah. Okay. Imagine one complication: that at the end instead of the father the son will be dead. This would already make it more serious but for me the truly traumatic element would have been the following change: imagine that at the film's end father who was again staging a spectacle for the son pretending
story that this is not really a camp, they are there voluntarily, it's just a kind of a big test whatever, if they survive without wanting to leave they will be presented by a prize at the end blah blah blah. Okay. Imagine one complication: that at the end instead of the father the son will be dead. This would already make it more serious but for me the truly traumatic element would have been the following change: imagine that at the film's end father who was again staging a spectacle for the son pretending
Slavoj Žižek
you know this is just a game, father were to discover that his small son knew all the time the reality. He just feigned to believe the son to believe his father to make it less painful to to the father. That would make it a much more desperate the film. I think something like that should have been done. Which is why I much prefer as a Holocaust movie did you see Pasqualino Settebellezze. [Audience member: "Seven Beauties."] Yeah. This totally desperate where you have fun but at the end you don't have any redemption, you have just some kind of a total despair and so on. That's much more much more much more up to the point. So again the lesson here is that tragedy is not tragic to the end. How should I put it you know in tragedy you are still given a space for this tragic beauty like Antigone: "oh heroically opposing Creon, no I was made to die I prefer to die" and so on whatever, that's not that's not enough in a way. Okay. We did no no no we go on. I would prefer to you know what. Please please I'm sorry. Yeah please. [Audience member: asks about the carnival.] Especially the Brazilian carnival, I hate it. Yeah okay. But do you want to some analysis
you know this is just a game, father were to discover that his small son knew all the time the reality. He just feigned to believe the son to believe his father to make it less painful to to the father. That would make it a much more desperate the film. I think something like that should have been done. Which is why I much prefer as a Holocaust movie did you see Pasqualino Settebellezze. [Audience member: "Seven Beauties."] Yeah. This totally desperate where you have fun but at the end you don't have any redemption, you have just some kind of a total despair and so on. That's much more much more much more up to the point. So again the lesson here is that tragedy is not tragic to the end. How should I put it you know in tragedy you are still given a space for this tragic beauty like Antigone: "oh heroically opposing Creon, no I was made to die I prefer to die" and so on whatever, that's not that's not enough in a way. Okay. We did no no no we go on. I would prefer to you know what. Please please I'm sorry. Yeah please. [Audience member: asks about the carnival.] Especially the Brazilian carnival, I hate it. Yeah okay. But do you want to some analysis
unknown
for for example Storming the Winter Palace in Eisenstein or or the fact
for for example Storming the Winter Palace in Eisenstein or or the fact
Slavoj Žižek
that after a protest there might be more laws that suppress the protest. Here I got your point. What I would have done here I did it in some of my books is of course one has to squeeze out of this by introducing further distinctions. I don't think that really functions as carnival and I think you can find a distinction this distinction clearly in Eisenstein's work itself. You have a murderous carnival there. You know the famous scene towards the end of Ivan the Terrible Part II. The only color really. There you have the murderous carnival. Which is something absolutely breathtaking what Eisenstein does there. He portrays those oprichniki that is to say Ivan the Terrible's the Tsar's basically secret police who are dancing almost in a kind of a musical number, a little bit of Kabuki style, a little bit of Hollywood, do you know that Eisenstein was consciously imitating even Hollywood there. Eisenstein got this, this is his greatness. So I think that we should distinguish two things: on the one hand I know what you are referring to, there are this kind of excessive destructive liberating violence scenes which you find in early silent Eisenstein. For example in October you remember when the sailors break into Winter Palace and in the basement they find glasses of champagne and just break them or the most famous case, it would have been his best film, it's unfortunately destroyed we just have clips I mean just photos from it Bezhin Meadow, that movie where a group of young Komsomols breaks into a church and start to destroy the church. And it's kind of a carnivalesque scene. But I think that this type of violence is to be strictly opposed and Eisenstein knew this is not the same as the orgy of power how should I put it. One should here one should draw one should draw one should draw the difference here. Any other question before we move onwards here? Because what I want to do is because yesterday you had some problems you mentioned that you had enough of that you had enough of Fritzl, no? So okay I propose to skip Fritzl. My only point was that what fascinated me in the I mean Fritzl Austria, no? Let's skip that. No what fascinated me in the. Sorry he's not here. [Audience member: "She's not here."] He's not here. She's not here. The person didn't come. The Austrian. The Austrian, yes. The Austrian Bhutan girl. Yeah yeah. She claimed she didn't know about. She chose not to come. Sorry? She chose not to come because you were going to talk about it today. Aha, okay okay then let's go on okay. No because what I want to do is how I want to spend the rest of the time today precisely elaborating on different modalities on this of this split. Okay so let me to finish the first part go a little bit into the Fritzl domain where what I was talking about this two levels of how ideology works: the official public level, explicit rules and this obscene supplement. The first thing that cannot but strike the eye about this Fritzl affair is that he, Fritzl, the head of the family, didn't he literally realize this split even architecturally. You know how was his house rebuilt. You have the first floor the official public space and beneath the obscene trans- transgressive space. The two of them belonging together. What fascinates me here, the first thing to note is how when people you know people usually accuse Freud of being a total idiot, that when he had that idea of Urvater, primordial father, who was allowed to screw all the women daughters and so on. But the case of Fritzl gives us an idea of how we should read Freud here. He didn't mean it as we of course shouldn't read it the way probably Freud naively meant it as a real fact of first of primitive history of humanity that there was a no, it's more a kind of a fantasy supplement. In the same way as there is no official Hollywood without all those dirty obscene dreams, there is no symbolic father benevolent paternal authority without this background and this is what happened here. I claim that what Fritzl did is and it happens very rarely is that he simply enacted what is all the time here as a kind of a phantasmatic background of the paternal authority. My god I remember my father, my own father, who was supposed to be a decent ordinary father blah blah blah respectful. But I remember once he was mad at me, even now it shocks me, he exploded in a rage and started shouting at me, "do you know that you are a nobody? Do you know that I created you and I can do whatever I want to you? Do you know that if I want I can kill you? Do you know that..." It shocked me how beneath a respectable father moral ideal it was all of a sudden it was all of a sudden this kind of a dream of omnipotence. So I claim that what Fritzl did is, and it happens very rarely, is that he simply realized, that's why he was a madman, materialized literally already in the in the in the architectural structure of his house this division between paternal law, symbolic father and the obscene superego father. Then another thing is, okay I will go very fast because I don't want to dwell on this too much, on how defensive the analysis were when they tried to reduce the case of Fritzl to some kind of Austrian pathology. I think this was a too easy way out. It's easy to relativize it to just blame the Austrians how should I put it, no? And you they they they claimed that there was some kind of a dark connection with the Austrian Nazi past and so on. But but wait a minute, quite naively this is wrong because if they claimed only in a society which was still marked branded by Nazism could people ignore each other's evil. But wait a minute what we usually associate with Nazism is that people spy on each other and so on and if anything there was not enough spying going on here no, the mystery was that nobody noticed or at least pretended not to notice. So again I don't think I don't think we should in this simple way put the blame on the Austrians. We should be more radical and look for the traces of the same fantasy in other countries literatures. For example are you aware of this motive which is very interesting in American literature of this early brutal industrialist raping his daughter? You have it in
that after a protest there might be more laws that suppress the protest. Here I got your point. What I would have done here I did it in some of my books is of course one has to squeeze out of this by introducing further distinctions. I don't think that really functions as carnival and I think you can find a distinction this distinction clearly in Eisenstein's work itself. You have a murderous carnival there. You know the famous scene towards the end of Ivan the Terrible Part II. The only color really. There you have the murderous carnival. Which is something absolutely breathtaking what Eisenstein does there. He portrays those oprichniki that is to say Ivan the Terrible's the Tsar's basically secret police who are dancing almost in a kind of a musical number, a little bit of Kabuki style, a little bit of Hollywood, do you know that Eisenstein was consciously imitating even Hollywood there. Eisenstein got this, this is his greatness. So I think that we should distinguish two things: on the one hand I know what you are referring to, there are this kind of excessive destructive liberating violence scenes which you find in early silent Eisenstein. For example in October you remember when the sailors break into Winter Palace and in the basement they find glasses of champagne and just break them or the most famous case, it would have been his best film, it's unfortunately destroyed we just have clips I mean just photos from it Bezhin Meadow, that movie where a group of young Komsomols breaks into a church and start to destroy the church. And it's kind of a carnivalesque scene. But I think that this type of violence is to be strictly opposed and Eisenstein knew this is not the same as the orgy of power how should I put it. One should here one should draw one should draw one should draw the difference here. Any other question before we move onwards here? Because what I want to do is because yesterday you had some problems you mentioned that you had enough of that you had enough of Fritzl, no? So okay I propose to skip Fritzl. My only point was that what fascinated me in the I mean Fritzl Austria, no? Let's skip that. No what fascinated me in the. Sorry he's not here. [Audience member: "She's not here."] He's not here. She's not here. The person didn't come. The Austrian. The Austrian, yes. The Austrian Bhutan girl. Yeah yeah. She claimed she didn't know about. She chose not to come. Sorry? She chose not to come because you were going to talk about it today. Aha, okay okay then let's go on okay. No because what I want to do is how I want to spend the rest of the time today precisely elaborating on different modalities on this of this split. Okay so let me to finish the first part go a little bit into the Fritzl domain where what I was talking about this two levels of how ideology works: the official public level, explicit rules and this obscene supplement. The first thing that cannot but strike the eye about this Fritzl affair is that he, Fritzl, the head of the family, didn't he literally realize this split even architecturally. You know how was his house rebuilt. You have the first floor the official public space and beneath the obscene trans- transgressive space. The two of them belonging together. What fascinates me here, the first thing to note is how when people you know people usually accuse Freud of being a total idiot, that when he had that idea of Urvater, primordial father, who was allowed to screw all the women daughters and so on. But the case of Fritzl gives us an idea of how we should read Freud here. He didn't mean it as we of course shouldn't read it the way probably Freud naively meant it as a real fact of first of primitive history of humanity that there was a no, it's more a kind of a fantasy supplement. In the same way as there is no official Hollywood without all those dirty obscene dreams, there is no symbolic father benevolent paternal authority without this background and this is what happened here. I claim that what Fritzl did is and it happens very rarely is that he simply enacted what is all the time here as a kind of a phantasmatic background of the paternal authority. My god I remember my father, my own father, who was supposed to be a decent ordinary father blah blah blah respectful. But I remember once he was mad at me, even now it shocks me, he exploded in a rage and started shouting at me, "do you know that you are a nobody? Do you know that I created you and I can do whatever I want to you? Do you know that if I want I can kill you? Do you know that..." It shocked me how beneath a respectable father moral ideal it was all of a sudden it was all of a sudden this kind of a dream of omnipotence. So I claim that what Fritzl did is, and it happens very rarely, is that he simply realized, that's why he was a madman, materialized literally already in the in the in the architectural structure of his house this division between paternal law, symbolic father and the obscene superego father. Then another thing is, okay I will go very fast because I don't want to dwell on this too much, on how defensive the analysis were when they tried to reduce the case of Fritzl to some kind of Austrian pathology. I think this was a too easy way out. It's easy to relativize it to just blame the Austrians how should I put it, no? And you they they they claimed that there was some kind of a dark connection with the Austrian Nazi past and so on. But but wait a minute, quite naively this is wrong because if they claimed only in a society which was still marked branded by Nazism could people ignore each other's evil. But wait a minute what we usually associate with Nazism is that people spy on each other and so on and if anything there was not enough spying going on here no, the mystery was that nobody noticed or at least pretended not to notice. So again I don't think I don't think we should in this simple way put the blame on the Austrians. We should be more radical and look for the traces of the same fantasy in other countries literatures. For example are you aware of this motive which is very interesting in American literature of this early brutal industrialist raping his daughter? You have it in
unknown
Tender
Tender
Slavoj Žižek
is the Night, you have it in many many other novels and so on and so on. I mean the
is the Night, you have it in many many other novels and so on and so on. I mean the
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analysis
analysis
Slavoj Žižek
would be so again this brings me to to this brings me to The Sound of Music. What I find so fascinating in this film is its libidinal kitsch ambiguity, namely I think that no wonder the film was such a triumph. It you have there also at the pure level this in a pure form this duality. In what sense? First, it's a very primitive analysis that I already did in some of my books: one of the reasons I think this movie is so attractive is that its message between the lines delivered by the texture of the movie is exactly the opposite of its explicit message. Namely the explicit message is political: it's small proud Austrians resisting the Nazi invasion. Okay but look at the texture of the film. How are the Nazis that you see in the film portrayed? Basically as corrupted Jews. You remember the guy who is the Nazi manager of Salzburg Games had this kind of a typically not of real Jews but the anti-Semitic image, you know, in a tuxedo, smoking these thin cigarettes and so on and so on. And remember how are the Austrian portrayed: as kind of a small is beautiful fascist, the kind of small organic community with leather trousers and so on and so on. So I like this contrast how the message you really get is small honest fascists resisting the Jewish invasion or whatever. It plays nicely on this. Another thing: are we aware of the obscenity of the film? By this I mean that there are a couple of scenes in the film which I find so embarrassing that I I simply blush and cannot even watch them. For example you remember like one third into the film when in this von Trapp family when there there they have a big reception, guests and the family the children sing a song, this "Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye" and so on. I found this so embarrassing that I simply can- but there is one the ultimate embarrassing thing. Basically beneath all this patriarchal blah blah stuff authority, education, the movie is really a very obscene story. It's a story about a nun who needs to get laid and so on. I mean you know the first song after the introduction "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" The answer is find someone to fuck her, how should. The whole film is the story about this. Quite quite literally, if you don't believe there is a crucial scene of the film which I think tells everything and brings us to the hypocrisy of official Catholic official Catholicism. This is for me the obscenity at its purest. You remember Maria goes there, then she discovers she is in love with the baron and
would be so again this brings me to to this brings me to The Sound of Music. What I find so fascinating in this film is its libidinal kitsch ambiguity, namely I think that no wonder the film was such a triumph. It you have there also at the pure level this in a pure form this duality. In what sense? First, it's a very primitive analysis that I already did in some of my books: one of the reasons I think this movie is so attractive is that its message between the lines delivered by the texture of the movie is exactly the opposite of its explicit message. Namely the explicit message is political: it's small proud Austrians resisting the Nazi invasion. Okay but look at the texture of the film. How are the Nazis that you see in the film portrayed? Basically as corrupted Jews. You remember the guy who is the Nazi manager of Salzburg Games had this kind of a typically not of real Jews but the anti-Semitic image, you know, in a tuxedo, smoking these thin cigarettes and so on and so on. And remember how are the Austrian portrayed: as kind of a small is beautiful fascist, the kind of small organic community with leather trousers and so on and so on. So I like this contrast how the message you really get is small honest fascists resisting the Jewish invasion or whatever. It plays nicely on this. Another thing: are we aware of the obscenity of the film? By this I mean that there are a couple of scenes in the film which I find so embarrassing that I I simply blush and cannot even watch them. For example you remember like one third into the film when in this von Trapp family when there there they have a big reception, guests and the family the children sing a song, this "Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye" and so on. I found this so embarrassing that I simply can- but there is one the ultimate embarrassing thing. Basically beneath all this patriarchal blah blah stuff authority, education, the movie is really a very obscene story. It's a story about a nun who needs to get laid and so on. I mean you know the first song after the introduction "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" The answer is find someone to fuck her, how should. The whole film is the story about this. Quite quite literally, if you don't believe there is a crucial scene of the film which I think tells everything and brings us to the hypocrisy of official Catholic official Catholicism. This is for me the obscenity at its purest. You remember Maria goes there, then she discovers she is in love with the baron and
unknown
escapes back to the convent
escapes back to the convent
Slavoj Žižek
monastery whatever. Then she still wants to fuck to cut a long story short. So she goes to Mother Superior and approaches her like "I still have desires," like "punish me more." And then comes the ultimate obscenity. Remember that the Mother Superior, you would expect her to say "no, pray more, fast" whatever. No, Mother Superior sings her the most obscene song. It starts with "Climb Ev'ry Mountain." Basically basically her message is "go back and seduce the guy, fuck him, go back and seduce the guy." You know how my attention was drawn to this song? When I saw the film in Yugoslavia, we had there for some time a very intelligent censorship. They just said, it was a communist Yugoslavia in the late 60s, they censored it a little bit here and there. They left exactly the way it is, Sound of Music. They just cut out this song. And I think they were totally right, because this song describes the zero-level formula of how Catholicism really functions. It's not renounce, it's pretend to renounce and you can have all you want. It's like to be very brutal and cynical, it's "do you like to screw small children? Become a priest, you can have them as et cetera et cetera." It's always this kind of an obscene promise of no I'm not kidding here. I deeply respect Catholics. And a good friend of mine, how is he called, the one my god I forgot his name, the American well-known Catholic writer who wrote a very good book critical on John Wayne from Chicago. He wrote a book on pedophilia, the scandals, where he was shocked to discover how studying hundreds of cases, two things shocked him that we all know. First, the three things basically. First, how much more wide these cases are than we think. Like did you read recently in Ireland it was disclosed that only in Ireland we are talking about thousands, probably tens of thousands of cases. So that my friends told me from Dublin that now it's already so I was told, maybe they exaggerate, already you know this usual advice of a mother when you send the small kid to the store "don't talk to strangers," no? Now they add "especially if the stranger is a priest don't..." And I'm not making fun of the Irish here. I mean in my country it's the same. And what so the second thing. Sorry, just before you actually the point at out of pedophilia claims against priests in Ireland are wrong. Are wrong? Yeah. out of Are wrong? Yes. It's a massive perpetuated fact. Really? Yes. Why? Um... it just hasn't happened. It just didn't happen. It... it's... so many people are making these claims. Uh... none of them have at out of very few of them actually been validated and people have then gone back and said "no, actually out of were..." Okay, I must admit I don't know this. I'm not talking about Ireland, what I'm talking is that for example in my country. Oh yeah no no. There are many which are true. But nonetheless what is so shocking, and this was tested at least in my country and in Poland. The shocking thing is how the church reacted in a totally protective way. For example there was a case in Slovenia where a priest was caught raping serially small kids. Fa- the kids' parents were were invited to visit a bishop who told them if they make this public they will commit a mortal sin and the priest was simply displaced to another church where he did it again displaced to. So this absolute this absolute protective attitude. The third thing, Gary Wills is the name of the guy, this American Catholic writer. Gary Wills. Gary Wills. Yeah yeah. That he showed how the way they do it to seduce children is it's not simply that they do it in contrast with their religion, how they used all the religious you know they make it part of the religious ritual to do it. Now what you said about fantasy and so on, I tend to agree generally with you. Generally in the sense that I know that it's fashionable in a politically correct way to claim generally about pedophilia or incest and so on, you know some people even claim they go to the end that like of girls are really molested by their fathers and so on and so on. No, I I don't buy that and I don't buy that as a good Freudian. I think that fantasy is here more fundamental. And of course the moment you say this you say something horrible which is prohibited from the politically correct standpoint. You ask you raise an extremely obscure big difficult question. The question of libidinal complicity of the victim. And this is prohibited. And my position here I wonder to provoke you if you would agree is a radical one. Let's say I believe me I am not able to do it but I like to be tasteless and if I am tasteless I should be at least honest enough to be tasteless against myself. Let us say that I were to rape a woman and let us say that my excuse were to be but she really gave me signals, she really wanted it. Now you have three ways to react to this. The first would be the vulgar male chauvinist: oh maybe there is a moment of truth blah blah blah, no? Of course we all reject this, I am the first too. Then there is the second usual feminist answer which goes to say that this is not true, I projected it into the woman, and even if it is partially true it is simply that the woman the victim was to such an extent the victim of patriarchal ideology that she internalized this male desi- you know this identification with the aggressor, to be mistreated and so on and so on. I also here I draw the line disagree with this. My position is a much more radical one. My position is a very simple and radical one: why shouldn't women have the right to dream about being slightly brutally mistreated and so on? This gives you as a man absolutely no right to act on it. I claim and I'm not bluffing here, I was reading some reports on rapes in ex-Yugoslavia and other rapes where let me make I wrote about this and I try to provoke you if you agree or not and I spoke with some psychologists so I'm at least not totally bluffing here. Let's make a stupid simplified, I know things are much more complex, mental experiment. Let's take two types of women: one more autonomous aggressive one, the one more passive secret with secret dreams about being dominated by men. Let's say that they are both raped. You know what's the paradox? The paradox is the one whose fantasy is realized by the rape will be hurt much more than the other one. So it's not that it justifies, it makes it even worse. Because that's the ABC lesson of psychoanalysis: your innermost fantasies are the exactly the most touchy and dangerous point of your life is if your innermost fantasies are brutally imposed onto you from the outside. It's not that "oh my god I got what I want," this can be a nightmare, this can trigger a suicidal crisis and so on. So my point would have been that if you claim that it's not true that women have this passive masochistic fantasies and that if they have them it's just that they internalized male male ideology you blame women too much. Apparen- it may appear that you try to save, redeem women, but imagine a woman who had these fantasies. First you make her feel guilty as if you know you are some kind of subordinate dominated by male ideology. You if you claim that woman in herself cannot have this fantasy you are already for me way too close to to blaming the victim and so on and so on. I mean I my my position would have been that if a woman and why shouldn't, my god, fantasies are dirty things. You know fantasies are not nice correct things. Fantasies are always by definition embarrassing dirty and so on, that's the basic lesson of psychoanalysis. Fantasy is not oh Bambi and so on, in fantasy the Bambi screws you and you lick his testicles or whatever. Let's not go into it, no? So you know so again there is nothing more humiliating than the innermost fantasy imposed on you. So again my solution is that that in no way should the fact that you me me no me I'm always as a rapist that I saw that maybe the woman I want to rape entertains this fantasy this in no way not only does it not justify it it makes it even worse if anything. I'm for even I don't have any problems with as you already know with death penalty and so on and so on or whatever, no? So because this is why maybe you know it but I will repeat it. This is why this is how I account for the utter humiliation of the woman in that most terrifying and depressing scene from you probably saw it and if you saw the movie you definitely remember it, from David Lynch's Wild at Heart. You remember when when Daniel Defoe harasses Laura Dern say "fuck me, fuck me." He is not openly violent just invading her private space. And desperate but then out of despair but also a little bit aroused she finally says "fuck me" and you remember what he does then. He simply steps he treats it as a true authentic offer. He steps back and says "oh thanks for the offer but today" and in a way of course I'm not now downplaying real rape but in a way one could say at the level of psychological humiliation this is even more humiliating for her because in a way her fantasy is thrown aroused thrown back at her. That's so you see in this sense I think we should not be afraid we should cross this taboo. We should not be afraid to admit this ambiguous libidinal link of fantasies communicating when you if you when a woman is raped this how do you call it phantasmatic participation collaboration of the victim. But my point is that it absolutely does not
monastery whatever. Then she still wants to fuck to cut a long story short. So she goes to Mother Superior and approaches her like "I still have desires," like "punish me more." And then comes the ultimate obscenity. Remember that the Mother Superior, you would expect her to say "no, pray more, fast" whatever. No, Mother Superior sings her the most obscene song. It starts with "Climb Ev'ry Mountain." Basically basically her message is "go back and seduce the guy, fuck him, go back and seduce the guy." You know how my attention was drawn to this song? When I saw the film in Yugoslavia, we had there for some time a very intelligent censorship. They just said, it was a communist Yugoslavia in the late 60s, they censored it a little bit here and there. They left exactly the way it is, Sound of Music. They just cut out this song. And I think they were totally right, because this song describes the zero-level formula of how Catholicism really functions. It's not renounce, it's pretend to renounce and you can have all you want. It's like to be very brutal and cynical, it's "do you like to screw small children? Become a priest, you can have them as et cetera et cetera." It's always this kind of an obscene promise of no I'm not kidding here. I deeply respect Catholics. And a good friend of mine, how is he called, the one my god I forgot his name, the American well-known Catholic writer who wrote a very good book critical on John Wayne from Chicago. He wrote a book on pedophilia, the scandals, where he was shocked to discover how studying hundreds of cases, two things shocked him that we all know. First, the three things basically. First, how much more wide these cases are than we think. Like did you read recently in Ireland it was disclosed that only in Ireland we are talking about thousands, probably tens of thousands of cases. So that my friends told me from Dublin that now it's already so I was told, maybe they exaggerate, already you know this usual advice of a mother when you send the small kid to the store "don't talk to strangers," no? Now they add "especially if the stranger is a priest don't..." And I'm not making fun of the Irish here. I mean in my country it's the same. And what so the second thing. Sorry, just before you actually the point at out of pedophilia claims against priests in Ireland are wrong. Are wrong? Yeah. out of Are wrong? Yes. It's a massive perpetuated fact. Really? Yes. Why? Um... it just hasn't happened. It just didn't happen. It... it's... so many people are making these claims. Uh... none of them have at out of very few of them actually been validated and people have then gone back and said "no, actually out of were..." Okay, I must admit I don't know this. I'm not talking about Ireland, what I'm talking is that for example in my country. Oh yeah no no. There are many which are true. But nonetheless what is so shocking, and this was tested at least in my country and in Poland. The shocking thing is how the church reacted in a totally protective way. For example there was a case in Slovenia where a priest was caught raping serially small kids. Fa- the kids' parents were were invited to visit a bishop who told them if they make this public they will commit a mortal sin and the priest was simply displaced to another church where he did it again displaced to. So this absolute this absolute protective attitude. The third thing, Gary Wills is the name of the guy, this American Catholic writer. Gary Wills. Gary Wills. Yeah yeah. That he showed how the way they do it to seduce children is it's not simply that they do it in contrast with their religion, how they used all the religious you know they make it part of the religious ritual to do it. Now what you said about fantasy and so on, I tend to agree generally with you. Generally in the sense that I know that it's fashionable in a politically correct way to claim generally about pedophilia or incest and so on, you know some people even claim they go to the end that like of girls are really molested by their fathers and so on and so on. No, I I don't buy that and I don't buy that as a good Freudian. I think that fantasy is here more fundamental. And of course the moment you say this you say something horrible which is prohibited from the politically correct standpoint. You ask you raise an extremely obscure big difficult question. The question of libidinal complicity of the victim. And this is prohibited. And my position here I wonder to provoke you if you would agree is a radical one. Let's say I believe me I am not able to do it but I like to be tasteless and if I am tasteless I should be at least honest enough to be tasteless against myself. Let us say that I were to rape a woman and let us say that my excuse were to be but she really gave me signals, she really wanted it. Now you have three ways to react to this. The first would be the vulgar male chauvinist: oh maybe there is a moment of truth blah blah blah, no? Of course we all reject this, I am the first too. Then there is the second usual feminist answer which goes to say that this is not true, I projected it into the woman, and even if it is partially true it is simply that the woman the victim was to such an extent the victim of patriarchal ideology that she internalized this male desi- you know this identification with the aggressor, to be mistreated and so on and so on. I also here I draw the line disagree with this. My position is a much more radical one. My position is a very simple and radical one: why shouldn't women have the right to dream about being slightly brutally mistreated and so on? This gives you as a man absolutely no right to act on it. I claim and I'm not bluffing here, I was reading some reports on rapes in ex-Yugoslavia and other rapes where let me make I wrote about this and I try to provoke you if you agree or not and I spoke with some psychologists so I'm at least not totally bluffing here. Let's make a stupid simplified, I know things are much more complex, mental experiment. Let's take two types of women: one more autonomous aggressive one, the one more passive secret with secret dreams about being dominated by men. Let's say that they are both raped. You know what's the paradox? The paradox is the one whose fantasy is realized by the rape will be hurt much more than the other one. So it's not that it justifies, it makes it even worse. Because that's the ABC lesson of psychoanalysis: your innermost fantasies are the exactly the most touchy and dangerous point of your life is if your innermost fantasies are brutally imposed onto you from the outside. It's not that "oh my god I got what I want," this can be a nightmare, this can trigger a suicidal crisis and so on. So my point would have been that if you claim that it's not true that women have this passive masochistic fantasies and that if they have them it's just that they internalized male male ideology you blame women too much. Apparen- it may appear that you try to save, redeem women, but imagine a woman who had these fantasies. First you make her feel guilty as if you know you are some kind of subordinate dominated by male ideology. You if you claim that woman in herself cannot have this fantasy you are already for me way too close to to blaming the victim and so on and so on. I mean I my my position would have been that if a woman and why shouldn't, my god, fantasies are dirty things. You know fantasies are not nice correct things. Fantasies are always by definition embarrassing dirty and so on, that's the basic lesson of psychoanalysis. Fantasy is not oh Bambi and so on, in fantasy the Bambi screws you and you lick his testicles or whatever. Let's not go into it, no? So you know so again there is nothing more humiliating than the innermost fantasy imposed on you. So again my solution is that that in no way should the fact that you me me no me I'm always as a rapist that I saw that maybe the woman I want to rape entertains this fantasy this in no way not only does it not justify it it makes it even worse if anything. I'm for even I don't have any problems with as you already know with death penalty and so on and so on or whatever, no? So because this is why maybe you know it but I will repeat it. This is why this is how I account for the utter humiliation of the woman in that most terrifying and depressing scene from you probably saw it and if you saw the movie you definitely remember it, from David Lynch's Wild at Heart. You remember when when Daniel Defoe harasses Laura Dern say "fuck me, fuck me." He is not openly violent just invading her private space. And desperate but then out of despair but also a little bit aroused she finally says "fuck me" and you remember what he does then. He simply steps he treats it as a true authentic offer. He steps back and says "oh thanks for the offer but today" and in a way of course I'm not now downplaying real rape but in a way one could say at the level of psychological humiliation this is even more humiliating for her because in a way her fantasy is thrown aroused thrown back at her. That's so you see in this sense I think we should not be afraid we should cross this taboo. We should not be afraid to admit this ambiguous libidinal link of fantasies communicating when you if you when a woman is raped this how do you call it phantasmatic participation collaboration of the victim. But my point is that it absolutely does not
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Slavoj Žižek
it in any
it in any
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way. If anything it makes it even worse. It makes it even worse.
Slavoj Žižek
Because again to return to my previously mentioned example, if let's say a woman who is autonomous and so on self-assertive is raped, I can imagine what she will do: if hopefully there will not be a great physical harm she will take a good shower and plan her revenge, no? Totally on her. But can you imagine the trauma of, you know here things are much more complex, what and even what is suicidal crisis. For example reading reports on the survivors of rapes in Bosnia and so on, I noticed something which is a very nice Lacanian point: that the critical point of the victim of rape was usually not the rape itself. It was painful and so on but there were usually not many suicides immediately after the rape, because somehow you fix on "I have to survive to tell the story." You were looking for a symbolic space as it were where your story would have been properly received. The true critical point occurred, so some doctors were telling me, when you are necessarily more or less traumatically disappointed when you discover that there is no one to really receive your message. You know people have sneering remarks "did you really not enjoy it secretly" blah blah. That was the point where usually then suicides occur. And maybe you know it, he has a wonderful terrifying dream, Primo Levi, along a very weird dream along the same lines where he reports on a dream, don't show me that pornographic image I hate the guy there on the cover. Yeah. Like ask me okay you are not old enough but ask let me ask you a frank question: you see that image there, would you allow that guy to take your daughter to cinema? The answer is clear: never. Okay sorry let's go on. He reports on a very strange dream, how the dream is that he is set free, he survived the dream in Auschwitz, he had this dream: that he is set free, he goes back visits his family and then he is telling his family gathered around dinner about his horrible experience in Auschwitz and then they start to yawn, they get bored, they go, and at that moment he awakens. It's a horrible logic. It's as if the disappointment in the dream is so horrible that you prefer to to awaken to the to the to the reality of Auschwitz itself. And very honestly then Primo Levi reports that he thought this dream is his peculiarity, but he discovered that practically all others had this same had this same dream. Sorry you wanted to before I got into this narcissistic exercise, I thought you wanted to you you the now I will be evil evil in a stupid funny way you the protector of the Catholic Irish rapists you. No, I know my god it's a bad taste joke at. I know. No no no I saw sorry I thought you raised the hand before that you want to okay so you know what I propose: now it's to let's take let's say let's say quarter of an hour break. No sorry let's say minutes so that it will really be minutes. [Break in recording] [Inaudible student question] That's a good question. My God. Yes and no. To be very precise, Pinkard has some wonderful insights. For example, when he gets it that what Hegel calls Absolutes Wissen, absolute knowing, you should totally forget this crazy idea that Hegel was an idiot who thought "I know everything, read the mind of God." That on the contrary, what Hegel calls absolute knowing is a certain closure. It's rather the admission of a certain radical limitation. What I where I don't agree with Pinkard, are you talking about his "In the Spirit of Hegel" or what? No no no I said he actually just came out with a translation. Ah yeah of new. [unintelligible] Ah, I don't know that because my standard reference is of course that who did it that Finley [sic: Baillie]? No. Phenomenology of what does first how does what's his title, "Spirit" or "Mind"? Well Baillie did the Phenomenology of Mind and then Miller came back with Phenomenology of Spirit. I'm for Spirit, because I think that for Hegel, as everybody will tell you, spirit is a collective entity, spirit is not what in Anglo-Saxon tradition it's called mind. The whole point of Hegel is to put it simply that mind is always already spirit. That even your innermost self-identity is already and so on and so on. What I like in Pinkard is his I wouldn't say materialist but his anti-theological reading of Hegel. But I violently disagree with his point that Hegel was a kind of a pantheist you know spirit. No no no I think that Hegel was a Christian, but Hegel's point was that Christianity itself is the theological form of atheism. That Hegel's reading was that God who dies, really dies. Like you know how should I put it, but okay I did this in my so-called theological writings, that what happened on the cross. It's not simply God is up there, he sends a messenger and okay things go back, the son dies so the son returns to the father and maybe next time. That for Hegel what dies on the cross is not only the messenger, it is literally what dies on the cross is the very transcendent God, God the Father who secretly pulls the strings guarantees the happy outcome. So for Hegel Holy Spirit is simply the the collectivity of believers without any big other guaranteeing anything. And you can make here wonderful connections with radical theologians who claim that, even if they are not leftists, conservative like Claudel had something wonderful said something wonderful when he said that the deepest message of Christianity is not "trust God" is "God has to trust us." The message of crucifixion for these radical Christians is not "God will redeem us" is "God abdicates, it's up to you humanity." Like God has to we should God or as Claudel put it "God cannot do anything without us." Okay but all that stuff so again here but you know who is okay to cut a long story short my favorite American Hegelian although he is politically maybe a so-so is the one I mentioned yesterday: it's Robert Pippin nonetheless. Although I don't like his anti-ontological reading of Hegel. You know this modest reading of Hegel, like no metaphysics, just kind of a general discourse theory. But okay we will do this. Okay do I know what is this? This is B. B? Yeah. Katie B. Yep. But between B and Katie no dot. And Kohn is like a Jewish like. We are all anti-Semitic sorry okay I got it so. Hegel Hegel quotes, no? Okay okay. Definitely. Okay so we will do more Hegel definitely and we'll try to do some cognitivism and so on with pleasure. Okay now since I would let's ah okay I will skip that stuff because I think you even maybe find it somewhere on the internet so I don't want to repeat myself too much this stuff of that I mentioned yesterday Karadžić and so on. No what fascinated me is only okay if you know it I will read to you: this is a poem by Karadžić, Radovan Karadžić, head Bosnia, [unintelligible] offical translation, by official I mean I didn't do it, I don't know if it's official: "Convert to my faith, to my new faith, crowd. I offer you what no one has had before. I offer you inclemency and wine. The one who won't have bread will be fed by the light of my sun. People, nothing is forbidden in my faith. There is loving and drinking and looking at the sun as long as you want. And this Godhead forbids you nothing. Oh obey my call, brethren, people, crowd" and so on and so on. I think he formulated here quite a correct insight into how let's call it nationalist or religious fundamentalism works. It's again the story of what I was saying before about this false permissivity. Namely I will repeat an old point from my books but it's crucial to repeat it. You know usually how is usually this fundamentalism reemerging today explained? The the usual sociological doxa is that we are approaching a society of risk of uncertainty, people do not feel safe so to avoid this existential uncertainty, choices you have to make and so on, we take recourse to old traditional edifices, old ethical edifices or national identity which provide some kind of security in this confused world and so on. I claim that this is maybe a partial truth, but more fundamentally it's the exact opposite which is true. That the way I spoke with some fundamentalists in Croatia and Serbia and Bosnia and interestingly enough when I spoke with them like even in Slovenia also privately more, they told me practically the opposite story. They told me that the way they experience modern society is as an overregulated one. They told me my God everything is prohibited today. Officially it's hedonism, but you cannot beat a woman. It's politically incorrect. You cannot eat fat. It's not good. You cannot steal, you cannot swear, it's you cannot you cannot hurt, humiliate others and so on. So for them becoming a nationalist or religious fundamentalist is precisely a way to gain a new space of permissivity. It's "proclaim yourself a nationalist and you can rape, kill and so on, you are as a believer freed from all this political correctness" and so on and so on. So here but don't misunderstand me, the same goes for everyone, I am not in any way anti-Serb. But here I want to quote you what I quoted already in my books: it's a wonderful passage, a quote from a Serb journalist Aleksandar Tijanić who described how Milošević functioned when he was in power in Serbia. Quote: "Milošević generally suits the Serbs. In the time of his rule Serbs abolished the time for working. No one does anything. He allowed the flourishing of the black market and smuggling. You can appear on the state TV and insult Blair, Clinton or anyone else of the world dignitaries. Furthermore, Milošević gave us the right to carry weapons. He gave us the right to solve all our problems with weapons. He gave us also the right to drive stolen cars. Milošević changed the daily life of Serbs into one great holiday and enabled us all to feel like high school pupils on a graduation trip, which means that nothing, but really nothing of what you do can be punishable." Of course this is a rhetorical exaggeration and so on, but there is a deep element of truth in it. You when you have an authoritarian fundamentalist edifice, it is officially founded on prohibitions, no? Like Hitler's address to Germans: "enough of the Weimar decadence, sacrifice yourself for the country." This is the surface. You should always look beneath it for a hidden you may the true message is always pretend to sacrifice but then you may rape, kill, whatever whatever whatever you want. In other words to go further and to make my old point here. You remember this old saying by Dostoevsky, "if God doesn't exist then everything is permitted." I claim if there is a lesson to be learned from 20th century fundamentalisms is that the exact opposite is the true. First as Lacan puts it as every
Because again to return to my previously mentioned example, if let's say a woman who is autonomous and so on self-assertive is raped, I can imagine what she will do: if hopefully there will not be a great physical harm she will take a good shower and plan her revenge, no? Totally on her. But can you imagine the trauma of, you know here things are much more complex, what and even what is suicidal crisis. For example reading reports on the survivors of rapes in Bosnia and so on, I noticed something which is a very nice Lacanian point: that the critical point of the victim of rape was usually not the rape itself. It was painful and so on but there were usually not many suicides immediately after the rape, because somehow you fix on "I have to survive to tell the story." You were looking for a symbolic space as it were where your story would have been properly received. The true critical point occurred, so some doctors were telling me, when you are necessarily more or less traumatically disappointed when you discover that there is no one to really receive your message. You know people have sneering remarks "did you really not enjoy it secretly" blah blah. That was the point where usually then suicides occur. And maybe you know it, he has a wonderful terrifying dream, Primo Levi, along a very weird dream along the same lines where he reports on a dream, don't show me that pornographic image I hate the guy there on the cover. Yeah. Like ask me okay you are not old enough but ask let me ask you a frank question: you see that image there, would you allow that guy to take your daughter to cinema? The answer is clear: never. Okay sorry let's go on. He reports on a very strange dream, how the dream is that he is set free, he survived the dream in Auschwitz, he had this dream: that he is set free, he goes back visits his family and then he is telling his family gathered around dinner about his horrible experience in Auschwitz and then they start to yawn, they get bored, they go, and at that moment he awakens. It's a horrible logic. It's as if the disappointment in the dream is so horrible that you prefer to to awaken to the to the to the reality of Auschwitz itself. And very honestly then Primo Levi reports that he thought this dream is his peculiarity, but he discovered that practically all others had this same had this same dream. Sorry you wanted to before I got into this narcissistic exercise, I thought you wanted to you you the now I will be evil evil in a stupid funny way you the protector of the Catholic Irish rapists you. No, I know my god it's a bad taste joke at. I know. No no no I saw sorry I thought you raised the hand before that you want to okay so you know what I propose: now it's to let's take let's say let's say quarter of an hour break. No sorry let's say minutes so that it will really be minutes. [Break in recording] [Inaudible student question] That's a good question. My God. Yes and no. To be very precise, Pinkard has some wonderful insights. For example, when he gets it that what Hegel calls Absolutes Wissen, absolute knowing, you should totally forget this crazy idea that Hegel was an idiot who thought "I know everything, read the mind of God." That on the contrary, what Hegel calls absolute knowing is a certain closure. It's rather the admission of a certain radical limitation. What I where I don't agree with Pinkard, are you talking about his "In the Spirit of Hegel" or what? No no no I said he actually just came out with a translation. Ah yeah of new. [unintelligible] Ah, I don't know that because my standard reference is of course that who did it that Finley [sic: Baillie]? No. Phenomenology of what does first how does what's his title, "Spirit" or "Mind"? Well Baillie did the Phenomenology of Mind and then Miller came back with Phenomenology of Spirit. I'm for Spirit, because I think that for Hegel, as everybody will tell you, spirit is a collective entity, spirit is not what in Anglo-Saxon tradition it's called mind. The whole point of Hegel is to put it simply that mind is always already spirit. That even your innermost self-identity is already and so on and so on. What I like in Pinkard is his I wouldn't say materialist but his anti-theological reading of Hegel. But I violently disagree with his point that Hegel was a kind of a pantheist you know spirit. No no no I think that Hegel was a Christian, but Hegel's point was that Christianity itself is the theological form of atheism. That Hegel's reading was that God who dies, really dies. Like you know how should I put it, but okay I did this in my so-called theological writings, that what happened on the cross. It's not simply God is up there, he sends a messenger and okay things go back, the son dies so the son returns to the father and maybe next time. That for Hegel what dies on the cross is not only the messenger, it is literally what dies on the cross is the very transcendent God, God the Father who secretly pulls the strings guarantees the happy outcome. So for Hegel Holy Spirit is simply the the collectivity of believers without any big other guaranteeing anything. And you can make here wonderful connections with radical theologians who claim that, even if they are not leftists, conservative like Claudel had something wonderful said something wonderful when he said that the deepest message of Christianity is not "trust God" is "God has to trust us." The message of crucifixion for these radical Christians is not "God will redeem us" is "God abdicates, it's up to you humanity." Like God has to we should God or as Claudel put it "God cannot do anything without us." Okay but all that stuff so again here but you know who is okay to cut a long story short my favorite American Hegelian although he is politically maybe a so-so is the one I mentioned yesterday: it's Robert Pippin nonetheless. Although I don't like his anti-ontological reading of Hegel. You know this modest reading of Hegel, like no metaphysics, just kind of a general discourse theory. But okay we will do this. Okay do I know what is this? This is B. B? Yeah. Katie B. Yep. But between B and Katie no dot. And Kohn is like a Jewish like. We are all anti-Semitic sorry okay I got it so. Hegel Hegel quotes, no? Okay okay. Definitely. Okay so we will do more Hegel definitely and we'll try to do some cognitivism and so on with pleasure. Okay now since I would let's ah okay I will skip that stuff because I think you even maybe find it somewhere on the internet so I don't want to repeat myself too much this stuff of that I mentioned yesterday Karadžić and so on. No what fascinated me is only okay if you know it I will read to you: this is a poem by Karadžić, Radovan Karadžić, head Bosnia, [unintelligible] offical translation, by official I mean I didn't do it, I don't know if it's official: "Convert to my faith, to my new faith, crowd. I offer you what no one has had before. I offer you inclemency and wine. The one who won't have bread will be fed by the light of my sun. People, nothing is forbidden in my faith. There is loving and drinking and looking at the sun as long as you want. And this Godhead forbids you nothing. Oh obey my call, brethren, people, crowd" and so on and so on. I think he formulated here quite a correct insight into how let's call it nationalist or religious fundamentalism works. It's again the story of what I was saying before about this false permissivity. Namely I will repeat an old point from my books but it's crucial to repeat it. You know usually how is usually this fundamentalism reemerging today explained? The the usual sociological doxa is that we are approaching a society of risk of uncertainty, people do not feel safe so to avoid this existential uncertainty, choices you have to make and so on, we take recourse to old traditional edifices, old ethical edifices or national identity which provide some kind of security in this confused world and so on. I claim that this is maybe a partial truth, but more fundamentally it's the exact opposite which is true. That the way I spoke with some fundamentalists in Croatia and Serbia and Bosnia and interestingly enough when I spoke with them like even in Slovenia also privately more, they told me practically the opposite story. They told me that the way they experience modern society is as an overregulated one. They told me my God everything is prohibited today. Officially it's hedonism, but you cannot beat a woman. It's politically incorrect. You cannot eat fat. It's not good. You cannot steal, you cannot swear, it's you cannot you cannot hurt, humiliate others and so on. So for them becoming a nationalist or religious fundamentalist is precisely a way to gain a new space of permissivity. It's "proclaim yourself a nationalist and you can rape, kill and so on, you are as a believer freed from all this political correctness" and so on and so on. So here but don't misunderstand me, the same goes for everyone, I am not in any way anti-Serb. But here I want to quote you what I quoted already in my books: it's a wonderful passage, a quote from a Serb journalist Aleksandar Tijanić who described how Milošević functioned when he was in power in Serbia. Quote: "Milošević generally suits the Serbs. In the time of his rule Serbs abolished the time for working. No one does anything. He allowed the flourishing of the black market and smuggling. You can appear on the state TV and insult Blair, Clinton or anyone else of the world dignitaries. Furthermore, Milošević gave us the right to carry weapons. He gave us the right to solve all our problems with weapons. He gave us also the right to drive stolen cars. Milošević changed the daily life of Serbs into one great holiday and enabled us all to feel like high school pupils on a graduation trip, which means that nothing, but really nothing of what you do can be punishable." Of course this is a rhetorical exaggeration and so on, but there is a deep element of truth in it. You when you have an authoritarian fundamentalist edifice, it is officially founded on prohibitions, no? Like Hitler's address to Germans: "enough of the Weimar decadence, sacrifice yourself for the country." This is the surface. You should always look beneath it for a hidden you may the true message is always pretend to sacrifice but then you may rape, kill, whatever whatever whatever you want. In other words to go further and to make my old point here. You remember this old saying by Dostoevsky, "if God doesn't exist then everything is permitted." I claim if there is a lesson to be learned from 20th century fundamentalisms is that the exact opposite is the true. First as Lacan puts it as every
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Slavoj Žižek
neurotic will tell you if God doesn't exist, that is to say when you live in a permissive hedonist society, on the contrary, everything is prohibited. I mean take a walk in a in San Francisco Castro Street or
neurotic will tell you if God doesn't exist, that is to say when you live in a permissive hedonist society, on the contrary, everything is prohibited. I mean take a walk in a in San Francisco Castro Street or
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Slavoj Žižek
gay society, everything is permitted they are obsessed with their health, politically correct rules and so on and so on. On the other hand, if if God exists then usually if God does exist, everything is permitted. That's the lesson of so-called fundamentalists. If God exists, if you can claim that you act on behalf of God, then ah, who can who can stop you? Here I, although I wrote a lot about the emancipatory dimension of Christianity, here I tend to agree with that physicist, quantum physicist, Steven Weinberg who made a wonderful statement. You know usually it is said that at least even if it's not true, usually said that religion can make some bad people at least do good thing. He claims the opposite. He claims that if you without religion well good people do good things, bad people do bad things. But you need religion to make good people do bad things as a sacrifice for the higher cause and so on and so on. Okay that's not all that we can say about religion. What I'm what I'm only telling you is that it's very simple. The thing is that nonetheless spontaneously, there is a truth in it, spontaneously we find it of course most of us at least if you're not pathological we find it difficult to kill to torture I mean I don't know how you are, I may imagine to kill someone easily as I told you yesterday but the idea of torturing someone helpless. I I think that not only I wouldn't be able to do it myself, I even cannot imagine how would you react if you were forced to see some how are they called snuff movie where somebody is really tortured in front of the camera to death? I mean even to be a witness of this I so the problem is how to make people do it. And here so-called fundamentalisms or at the different level so-called totalitarianisms found a wonderful mechanism which is to to take into account your resistance to do it, but then to to stage to make you perceive this resistance like you find it disgusting to kill someone torture as your weakness and to make you experience your overcoming of this resistance as a true heroic sacrifice. For example the classical formulation of this operation you find it in one of the really bad guys, Heinrich Himmler, you know his famous speech in the early '43 when they were preparing Holocaust in Posen [sic: Poznań] in Poland to to SS officers. Where he approached directly this problem, no? And his problem was he said it openly: Nazi officers SS officers we'll have to do many horrible things like killing women, children. And then he produced the formula where he said every okay every majority of ordinary people can do a good thing for their country. It takes a truly great patriot to do a bad thing for your country. That a true greatness is that any idiot can sacrifice even his life or her for his country. It takes a true love for your country to be able to kill, to torture for your country. That is to say to crush even your elementary mor- no moral sentiment. The trick is to present your as it were spontaneous ethical attitude as part of your narcissistic identity. And claiming what right do you have when country needs it to to to stick to these rules and so on and so on. So it's a very it's a very tricky mechanism which is at work here. But okay let's leave this stuff you can read about it and so on. What I would like to do now is to make a step further to conclude for today. First, I would like to mention the last film, maybe you've heard about it, I talk about it just which is I think a perfect example of this split I'm talking about, the split, the gap between explicit and implicit ideological message. It's John Carpenter's yeah yeah the one of Halloween and so on. He's an interesting example of Hollywood left. He really is a leftist, you know how I discovered? Do you know his movie it's difficult to get, it was a failure, but I love it although it's a little bit boring, They Live, from '88. This pure leftist paranoia of you know we are controlled by foreigners. But in the middle of the film you have a wonderful totally naive scene where this the hero of the film an unemployed guy in living in LA, an unemployed worker called John Nada, very nice proletarian touch nada is Spanish for nothing, you know proletarian can nothing but your chains blah blah, takes a walk, enters an abandoned church and finds strange dark glasses. And then this is critique of ideology at its most naive: when you put the glasses on, you see the real message as it were. For example, you have the big billboard publicity: "go to Hawaii, have a life pleasure, a holiday of your lifetime." But when you put the glasses on you see just "obey, enjoy, reproduce, don't think" or whatever. And okay it goes all like the it goes all like this. This may sound naive and stupid but it's kind of primitive. Of course it is naive because the whole point is that we don't need glasses, this secret message is already in the medium itself. But I found some interesting things to comment upon here where the movie is right. First, I love the way this scene is staged because the usual naive metaphor would have been the opposite one: that in our daily lives we have on ideological glasses which falsify so that you know the usual model of enlightenment would have been learn to put the glasses down, see it with your eyes as it is. I like this idea that naturally we are in ideology. You need glasses, you need you have to be forced to see the truth. The truth hurts. Which is why if you see the movie there is a mysterious scene which is crucial to the movie. You remember half into the movie, the hero tries to convince his black friend to put on the and the friend resists and they have a friendly fight going on for over ten minutes. That's like you had to be forced I think this fight with fists has almost has almost the same function as that in Fight Club: beating himself. I mean truth hurts. You had to be forced to accept the truth. The other thing I like is how this mechanism of seeing the true message as it were. The way it is done in this film is only one of the options. The way it is done in this film is the standard consumerist society option where you are explicitly addressed by the hedonist message, enjoy blah blah, but what is invisible what is delivered between the lines what you see when you put your glasses on is the true ideological injunction: obey, consume, don't think, whatever. Of course there is the other maybe still more predominant procedure which is the opposite one. For example to return to my old example of Ku Klux Klan. You let's say we are in again American South of United States early 20s and you see some fundamentalist Ku Klux Klan propaganda: "be a good Christian, fight for Christian civilization, for our values." That's the explicit message. Then let's say you were to put this glasses on and by putting the glasses on you would have seen the true message which would have been something like "join us, we can lynch some blacks, we can have some fun" or whatever. The obscene pleasure is not what is directly offered to you. It's what is offered to you as the secret secret bribery. So that's the first thing to say how we have two opposite mechanisms. And I think that it's at this level that we should detect ideology today. Whenever you see a message, even the most innocent message, you should always ask this slightly... yes, do it now. Yeah no I just want this critique of ideology just I'm I'm I'm the shift when we talk about these two level. Is isn't it I mean ultimately I'm struck by I know it's kind of the English translation of what Kant is trying to argue that what what must be the case in order for what we know to be the case to actually be so? and this this kind of epistemic assumption. But is it ultimately an in... this condition of ideology, is this an inversion or or a paraphrase: what what must be the case in order for what we know to be the case to not actually be so? You can yeah, you can put it this way although I don't see here the parallel with Kant that I would have seen is: Kant effectively was the first to to formulate this this idea of a structurally necessary illusion. This idea, you know when Kant speaks about transcendental illusion, it's not simply a question of a mistake that can be corrected. It's a kind of a structurally necessary. There what what... No, this is ultimately the shift kind of like I mean we push kind of Marx after Kant, the shift from epistemology to ideology for making sense of the world. Yeah yeah. Although again I don't want to repeat too much myself because about this I was already writing five four-five times in my books: what I find so fascinating in Marx is his idea that for him ideology is not simply a misperception of reality. It's inscribed into reality itself. For Marx ideology is an illusion which we follow in what we do. It's not you know ideology for Marx is not at its most elementary it's not "this is what you are really doing but this is how you live in illusions, how you misperceive it." No, ideology is in what you are doing. And this is for example I've written so much about it but I think this is the crucial point where where Marx is still actual. This is the whole theory of commodity fetishism in Marx. Marx is not saying "in reality commodity is just a social product but we think fetishistically that it's some magical object." No, we Marx was well aware that we all know that a commodity or money is nothing magical. We treat it in our social exchange in our social practice as a magical object. So as I developed in some of my books things get complicated here in the sense that you don't only have reality and illusion. You have reality and illusion and you have an illusion which is constitutive of reality itself. So that the ultimate or as as Daniel Dennett I quote him here but he means this as a negative point: you have to distinguish between how things appear to you and how things *really* appear to you. You are not aware of how things *really* appear to you. So here you can establish some kind of link with link with Kant and so on but this is a very complex topic but we can go I'm afraid to enter it now because all this topic of Kant, Hegel and so on it gets very it gets very complete. Okay let me just allow me just to finish this line of putting as it were putting the glasses on. For example, let's imagine you see a public publicity for for helping some starving kids in in in in Africa. You know all these disgusting manipulations: TV clip on TV or in newspaper you see usually some disfigured black kid and then the message is "for the price of a one coffee or whatever you can make a difference" blah blah. I think that the ideology here is double. Basically the message is: people are suffering out there but you don't have really to do anything serious, just contribute a little bit of money and we absolve you, you can forget about it, you can go on and so on and so on. So the first message is to to give you an easy way out. The second even more dangerous message is depoliticization. Which is why I think charity is so fashionable today. The message of charity is always let's depoliticize it. Like you know all the big guys of charity from Bill Gates downwards, they all repeat the same mantra: "my God, people are suffering in Africa, millions are dying unnecessarily. So let's forget these old ideological problems, socialism, who who cares about that. Let's all get together, private capital, state and so on and let's go on." charity organization, let's do something. The message here is the clear one is: "let's do something so that we don't think about it." Do don't think. Which is why I think today ideology no longer functions in this simple way of mystification where then you can critically say, "oh we live in our consumerist society, are we aware that out there people are starving, dying of diseases which could have been easily cured." No, the ruling ideology all the time reminds of all the time reminds us of that. That's how it functions today, they all the time they all the time sustain this emergency state to prevent us to make you feel guilty feel guilty: "my God it's an emergency state, let's do." Sorry. Have you seen any of these charities as well that are actually just turning into businesses like the likes of I don't know Concern where they're giving out micro-loans you know to to ultimately businesses that are charities as as kind of a rejection of what ultimately charity is. And like yeah that's really a big shift because charity ultimately this giving and and getting nothing back but ingrained charity now into an economic system, we can give a loan back and it... Yeah that's crucial what you said now. Yeah I spoke with some economists and they explained it to me I claim that today charity is no longer the way it was till years ago a kind of a personal idiosyncrasy. It's really an unnecessary part of the reproduction of the system itself. It some- it changed in charity in the way but what I want to do is now to conclude with some kind of a more general as it were reflection about this famous change after '68 this so-called new stage of postmodern, digital, however we call it, capitalism, although I'm suspicious about these terms
gay society, everything is permitted they are obsessed with their health, politically correct rules and so on and so on. On the other hand, if if God exists then usually if God does exist, everything is permitted. That's the lesson of so-called fundamentalists. If God exists, if you can claim that you act on behalf of God, then ah, who can who can stop you? Here I, although I wrote a lot about the emancipatory dimension of Christianity, here I tend to agree with that physicist, quantum physicist, Steven Weinberg who made a wonderful statement. You know usually it is said that at least even if it's not true, usually said that religion can make some bad people at least do good thing. He claims the opposite. He claims that if you without religion well good people do good things, bad people do bad things. But you need religion to make good people do bad things as a sacrifice for the higher cause and so on and so on. Okay that's not all that we can say about religion. What I'm what I'm only telling you is that it's very simple. The thing is that nonetheless spontaneously, there is a truth in it, spontaneously we find it of course most of us at least if you're not pathological we find it difficult to kill to torture I mean I don't know how you are, I may imagine to kill someone easily as I told you yesterday but the idea of torturing someone helpless. I I think that not only I wouldn't be able to do it myself, I even cannot imagine how would you react if you were forced to see some how are they called snuff movie where somebody is really tortured in front of the camera to death? I mean even to be a witness of this I so the problem is how to make people do it. And here so-called fundamentalisms or at the different level so-called totalitarianisms found a wonderful mechanism which is to to take into account your resistance to do it, but then to to stage to make you perceive this resistance like you find it disgusting to kill someone torture as your weakness and to make you experience your overcoming of this resistance as a true heroic sacrifice. For example the classical formulation of this operation you find it in one of the really bad guys, Heinrich Himmler, you know his famous speech in the early '43 when they were preparing Holocaust in Posen [sic: Poznań] in Poland to to SS officers. Where he approached directly this problem, no? And his problem was he said it openly: Nazi officers SS officers we'll have to do many horrible things like killing women, children. And then he produced the formula where he said every okay every majority of ordinary people can do a good thing for their country. It takes a truly great patriot to do a bad thing for your country. That a true greatness is that any idiot can sacrifice even his life or her for his country. It takes a true love for your country to be able to kill, to torture for your country. That is to say to crush even your elementary mor- no moral sentiment. The trick is to present your as it were spontaneous ethical attitude as part of your narcissistic identity. And claiming what right do you have when country needs it to to to stick to these rules and so on and so on. So it's a very it's a very tricky mechanism which is at work here. But okay let's leave this stuff you can read about it and so on. What I would like to do now is to make a step further to conclude for today. First, I would like to mention the last film, maybe you've heard about it, I talk about it just which is I think a perfect example of this split I'm talking about, the split, the gap between explicit and implicit ideological message. It's John Carpenter's yeah yeah the one of Halloween and so on. He's an interesting example of Hollywood left. He really is a leftist, you know how I discovered? Do you know his movie it's difficult to get, it was a failure, but I love it although it's a little bit boring, They Live, from '88. This pure leftist paranoia of you know we are controlled by foreigners. But in the middle of the film you have a wonderful totally naive scene where this the hero of the film an unemployed guy in living in LA, an unemployed worker called John Nada, very nice proletarian touch nada is Spanish for nothing, you know proletarian can nothing but your chains blah blah, takes a walk, enters an abandoned church and finds strange dark glasses. And then this is critique of ideology at its most naive: when you put the glasses on, you see the real message as it were. For example, you have the big billboard publicity: "go to Hawaii, have a life pleasure, a holiday of your lifetime." But when you put the glasses on you see just "obey, enjoy, reproduce, don't think" or whatever. And okay it goes all like the it goes all like this. This may sound naive and stupid but it's kind of primitive. Of course it is naive because the whole point is that we don't need glasses, this secret message is already in the medium itself. But I found some interesting things to comment upon here where the movie is right. First, I love the way this scene is staged because the usual naive metaphor would have been the opposite one: that in our daily lives we have on ideological glasses which falsify so that you know the usual model of enlightenment would have been learn to put the glasses down, see it with your eyes as it is. I like this idea that naturally we are in ideology. You need glasses, you need you have to be forced to see the truth. The truth hurts. Which is why if you see the movie there is a mysterious scene which is crucial to the movie. You remember half into the movie, the hero tries to convince his black friend to put on the and the friend resists and they have a friendly fight going on for over ten minutes. That's like you had to be forced I think this fight with fists has almost has almost the same function as that in Fight Club: beating himself. I mean truth hurts. You had to be forced to accept the truth. The other thing I like is how this mechanism of seeing the true message as it were. The way it is done in this film is only one of the options. The way it is done in this film is the standard consumerist society option where you are explicitly addressed by the hedonist message, enjoy blah blah, but what is invisible what is delivered between the lines what you see when you put your glasses on is the true ideological injunction: obey, consume, don't think, whatever. Of course there is the other maybe still more predominant procedure which is the opposite one. For example to return to my old example of Ku Klux Klan. You let's say we are in again American South of United States early 20s and you see some fundamentalist Ku Klux Klan propaganda: "be a good Christian, fight for Christian civilization, for our values." That's the explicit message. Then let's say you were to put this glasses on and by putting the glasses on you would have seen the true message which would have been something like "join us, we can lynch some blacks, we can have some fun" or whatever. The obscene pleasure is not what is directly offered to you. It's what is offered to you as the secret secret bribery. So that's the first thing to say how we have two opposite mechanisms. And I think that it's at this level that we should detect ideology today. Whenever you see a message, even the most innocent message, you should always ask this slightly... yes, do it now. Yeah no I just want this critique of ideology just I'm I'm I'm the shift when we talk about these two level. Is isn't it I mean ultimately I'm struck by I know it's kind of the English translation of what Kant is trying to argue that what what must be the case in order for what we know to be the case to actually be so? and this this kind of epistemic assumption. But is it ultimately an in... this condition of ideology, is this an inversion or or a paraphrase: what what must be the case in order for what we know to be the case to not actually be so? You can yeah, you can put it this way although I don't see here the parallel with Kant that I would have seen is: Kant effectively was the first to to formulate this this idea of a structurally necessary illusion. This idea, you know when Kant speaks about transcendental illusion, it's not simply a question of a mistake that can be corrected. It's a kind of a structurally necessary. There what what... No, this is ultimately the shift kind of like I mean we push kind of Marx after Kant, the shift from epistemology to ideology for making sense of the world. Yeah yeah. Although again I don't want to repeat too much myself because about this I was already writing five four-five times in my books: what I find so fascinating in Marx is his idea that for him ideology is not simply a misperception of reality. It's inscribed into reality itself. For Marx ideology is an illusion which we follow in what we do. It's not you know ideology for Marx is not at its most elementary it's not "this is what you are really doing but this is how you live in illusions, how you misperceive it." No, ideology is in what you are doing. And this is for example I've written so much about it but I think this is the crucial point where where Marx is still actual. This is the whole theory of commodity fetishism in Marx. Marx is not saying "in reality commodity is just a social product but we think fetishistically that it's some magical object." No, we Marx was well aware that we all know that a commodity or money is nothing magical. We treat it in our social exchange in our social practice as a magical object. So as I developed in some of my books things get complicated here in the sense that you don't only have reality and illusion. You have reality and illusion and you have an illusion which is constitutive of reality itself. So that the ultimate or as as Daniel Dennett I quote him here but he means this as a negative point: you have to distinguish between how things appear to you and how things *really* appear to you. You are not aware of how things *really* appear to you. So here you can establish some kind of link with link with Kant and so on but this is a very complex topic but we can go I'm afraid to enter it now because all this topic of Kant, Hegel and so on it gets very it gets very complete. Okay let me just allow me just to finish this line of putting as it were putting the glasses on. For example, let's imagine you see a public publicity for for helping some starving kids in in in in Africa. You know all these disgusting manipulations: TV clip on TV or in newspaper you see usually some disfigured black kid and then the message is "for the price of a one coffee or whatever you can make a difference" blah blah. I think that the ideology here is double. Basically the message is: people are suffering out there but you don't have really to do anything serious, just contribute a little bit of money and we absolve you, you can forget about it, you can go on and so on and so on. So the first message is to to give you an easy way out. The second even more dangerous message is depoliticization. Which is why I think charity is so fashionable today. The message of charity is always let's depoliticize it. Like you know all the big guys of charity from Bill Gates downwards, they all repeat the same mantra: "my God, people are suffering in Africa, millions are dying unnecessarily. So let's forget these old ideological problems, socialism, who who cares about that. Let's all get together, private capital, state and so on and let's go on." charity organization, let's do something. The message here is the clear one is: "let's do something so that we don't think about it." Do don't think. Which is why I think today ideology no longer functions in this simple way of mystification where then you can critically say, "oh we live in our consumerist society, are we aware that out there people are starving, dying of diseases which could have been easily cured." No, the ruling ideology all the time reminds of all the time reminds us of that. That's how it functions today, they all the time they all the time sustain this emergency state to prevent us to make you feel guilty feel guilty: "my God it's an emergency state, let's do." Sorry. Have you seen any of these charities as well that are actually just turning into businesses like the likes of I don't know Concern where they're giving out micro-loans you know to to ultimately businesses that are charities as as kind of a rejection of what ultimately charity is. And like yeah that's really a big shift because charity ultimately this giving and and getting nothing back but ingrained charity now into an economic system, we can give a loan back and it... Yeah that's crucial what you said now. Yeah I spoke with some economists and they explained it to me I claim that today charity is no longer the way it was till years ago a kind of a personal idiosyncrasy. It's really an unnecessary part of the reproduction of the system itself. It some- it changed in charity in the way but what I want to do is now to conclude with some kind of a more general as it were reflection about this famous change after '68 this so-called new stage of postmodern, digital, however we call it, capitalism, although I'm suspicious about these terms
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"postmodern capitalism." But I think something did happen after '68. My reference here is maybe you've heard about the book it's a thick book which nobody read, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, *The New Spirit of Capitalism*. It's a kind of a again six-seven hundred pages book which is a kind of a classic that nobody reads but that's nothing
"postmodern capitalism." But I think something did happen after '68. My reference here is maybe you've heard about the book it's a thick book which nobody read, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, *The New Spirit of Capitalism*. It's a kind of a again six-seven hundred pages book which is a kind of a classic that nobody reads but that's nothing
Slavoj Žižek
strange about it as we all know there are big classical I claim that even a new genre is emerging today. Big classical books that everyone quotes and they are classics, reprinted all the time, but people don't read them. For example John Rawls's Theory of Justice. I know people who
strange about it as we all know there are big classical I claim that even a new genre is emerging today. Big classical books that everyone quotes and they are classics, reprinted all the time, but people don't read them. For example John Rawls's Theory of Justice. I know people who
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wrote a book on Rawls and they admitted to me they didn't
wrote a book on Rawls and they admitted to me they didn't
Slavoj Žižek
really read all of it. Or if you know philosophy that Pittsburgh Hegelian Michael Brandom making it explicit. Habermas, theory of communicative justice, pages. These are classics they are interpreted widely. Von Mises [unintelligible] "Human Action." Ah really? I didn't know. I know that Sloterdijk is also with his "Spheres," three volumes each pages and so on. Okay this is one of them. But it has a nice thesis: that after '68 a new kind of capitalism emerged, the so-called cultural compassionate capitalism, which triumphantly reintegrated the basic protest message of '68. Which was, you know, against alienation, consumerism and so on and so on. And so the best way to detect this shift I think is again by way of detecting isolating it's of course it's not but there is a shift in the predominant form of publicity I claim. Let's say that till years ago the predominant mode of publicity was one of the two elementary ones to use the Lacanian triad either real or symbolic, now we are moving towards imaginary. Real in the naive sense. First it was real in the sense of when you make publicity for a product you focus on so-called real properties of the product, no? Like you are trying to sell I don't know a Land Rover, you emphasize how much gasoline fuel it expends, that it really can climb mountains, you can cross a river with it. You refer, even if they are false, it doesn't matter. You refer to real properties. Then you have the symbolic level, so-called status theory. They play on how having this kind of a car will determine, elevate, whatever, your social status. You will be looked upon, giving you a certain image and so on and so on. But I claim none of the two really works today. Reading some of the stuff and I always like to to watch carefully publicities I noticed a new a new level which is neither the real quality of the object nor the symbolic status, all the Thorstein Veblen stuff about status usually but the experience. It addresses directly the experience this object will be given. For example for Land Rover the publicity today predominant would not be so much gasoline blah blah such power. Also not "oh you signal that to your peers that you are a strong man blah blah whatever." But something like "do you feel alienated in a big city, do you feel isolated, drive our Land Rover and you will feel as if you are having an authentic full life in the countryside" you know it will refer to the experience that consuming this product provides you. And I will try to give you here the ultimate example, which is why I hate it. Recently I entered a Starbucks place and I read an ad they had there, it was almost also there in the media an ad campaign. It begins already with "it's not just what you are buying, it's what you are buying into." So here is that paragraph, this is I think ideology today. I quote: "When you buy Starbucks, whether you realize it or not, you are buying buying into something bigger than a cup of coffee. You are buying into a coffee ethic. Through our Starbucks Shared Planet program, we purchase more fair-trade coffee than any company in the world, ensuring that the farmers who grow the beans receive a fair price for their hard work. And we
really read all of it. Or if you know philosophy that Pittsburgh Hegelian Michael Brandom making it explicit. Habermas, theory of communicative justice, pages. These are classics they are interpreted widely. Von Mises [unintelligible] "Human Action." Ah really? I didn't know. I know that Sloterdijk is also with his "Spheres," three volumes each pages and so on. Okay this is one of them. But it has a nice thesis: that after '68 a new kind of capitalism emerged, the so-called cultural compassionate capitalism, which triumphantly reintegrated the basic protest message of '68. Which was, you know, against alienation, consumerism and so on and so on. And so the best way to detect this shift I think is again by way of detecting isolating it's of course it's not but there is a shift in the predominant form of publicity I claim. Let's say that till years ago the predominant mode of publicity was one of the two elementary ones to use the Lacanian triad either real or symbolic, now we are moving towards imaginary. Real in the naive sense. First it was real in the sense of when you make publicity for a product you focus on so-called real properties of the product, no? Like you are trying to sell I don't know a Land Rover, you emphasize how much gasoline fuel it expends, that it really can climb mountains, you can cross a river with it. You refer, even if they are false, it doesn't matter. You refer to real properties. Then you have the symbolic level, so-called status theory. They play on how having this kind of a car will determine, elevate, whatever, your social status. You will be looked upon, giving you a certain image and so on and so on. But I claim none of the two really works today. Reading some of the stuff and I always like to to watch carefully publicities I noticed a new a new level which is neither the real quality of the object nor the symbolic status, all the Thorstein Veblen stuff about status usually but the experience. It addresses directly the experience this object will be given. For example for Land Rover the publicity today predominant would not be so much gasoline blah blah such power. Also not "oh you signal that to your peers that you are a strong man blah blah whatever." But something like "do you feel alienated in a big city, do you feel isolated, drive our Land Rover and you will feel as if you are having an authentic full life in the countryside" you know it will refer to the experience that consuming this product provides you. And I will try to give you here the ultimate example, which is why I hate it. Recently I entered a Starbucks place and I read an ad they had there, it was almost also there in the media an ad campaign. It begins already with "it's not just what you are buying, it's what you are buying into." So here is that paragraph, this is I think ideology today. I quote: "When you buy Starbucks, whether you realize it or not, you are buying buying into something bigger than a cup of coffee. You are buying into a coffee ethic. Through our Starbucks Shared Planet program, we purchase more fair-trade coffee than any company in the world, ensuring that the farmers who grow the beans receive a fair price for their hard work. And we
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invest in an improved coffee-growing practices and communities around the globe. It's good coffee karma. And a little bit of a price of a cup of Starbucks coffee helps furnish the place with comfortable chairs, good music, and the right atmosphere to dream, work, and check in. We all need places like that these days. When you choose Starbucks,
invest in an improved coffee-growing practices and communities around the globe. It's good coffee karma. And a little bit of a price of a cup of Starbucks coffee helps furnish the place with comfortable chairs, good music, and the right atmosphere to dream, work, and check in. We all need places like that these days. When you choose Starbucks,
Slavoj Žižek
you are buying a cup of coffee from a company that cares" and so on and so on. So again what they are saying... sorry. I would just propose that this is actually a fourth level and that the experience is actually something that's been in place for since the mid-90s, the predominant. Ah, where do you see the fourth level, yeah? And this ethnic thing is a relatively new phenomenon, so I suppose. Ah, that would be nice, so to distinguish between simple reference, yeah. Because again what interests me is did you notice what they squeeze into it. First, they promise you they and I read years ago on Larry King, no not read, I listened to an interview with the guy who owns Starbucks and he directly spelled it out. He said "I know after Reaganomics all these small community spaces, small towns are disappearing." He was fully conscious that he is really offering an ersatz community space where you can meet friends,
you are buying a cup of coffee from a company that cares" and so on and so on. So again what they are saying... sorry. I would just propose that this is actually a fourth level and that the experience is actually something that's been in place for since the mid-90s, the predominant. Ah, where do you see the fourth level, yeah? And this ethnic thing is a relatively new phenomenon, so I suppose. Ah, that would be nice, so to distinguish between simple reference, yeah. Because again what interests me is did you notice what they squeeze into it. First, they promise you they and I read years ago on Larry King, no not read, I listened to an interview with the guy who owns Starbucks and he directly spelled it out. He said "I know after Reaganomics all these small community spaces, small towns are disappearing." He was fully conscious that he is really offering an ersatz community space where you can meet friends,
unknown
chat, all this pseudo-personalization
chat, all this pseudo-personalization
Slavoj Žižek
you know that the Starbucks guys have to try to remember you if you are a permanent customer, smile, all that stuff. Then all the crisis we have today like lack of water, third-world suffering, they they make you feel that you participate in that project. Ecology, they make you feel, so again it's not just a cup of coffee. You participate in all this big you do something as they put it. On the top of this on the top of this I claim that it's not only Starbucks. It's even it's even when the cause does not seem to be so commercialized. For example, this will be an evil example, many friends hate me for mentioning it here. But for example let's be frank: when you go to a store and buy organic food, organic apples. I claim that most of us are too cynical we don't really believe, at least I'm skeptical that okay maybe they are maybe not really better. You know sometimes I have this suspicion that first they select the nice apples they send them around then the rotten ones they sell them for the double price as organic. Okay it may be true or not. What I'm saying is that I don't think you are really afraid of being poisoned, but it makes you feel good. You see, even in my everyday shopping I do something, I participate doing something for the earth, you know this making you feel nice and ethical social aware contribution and so on and so on. And this is I think ideology of and I tend to agree with you spontaneously that this may this is already an additional level, yes, because it's not just your individual feel-good experience or what, it's kind of a collective collective awareness stuff and so on and so on, no? So what I'm saying is that it's interesting how I don't have now time to go into it I want some other things to say but how all the topics, the main topics of this '68 protest against the alienated consumerist society and so on how the system integrated it. You know no longer this Fordist chain division of labor but creative interaction and so on and so on and so on. It's again what interests me is how this so-called new spirit of capitalism triumphantly recuperated the egalitarian, anti-hierarchical rhetoric of the '68, presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations of corporate capitalism or state or state socialism. I think this is again one of the greatest triumphs maybe of the of the of the of the greatest ideological triumphs. And literally everything can be recuperated. For example, okay let's take Che Guevara. It's
you know that the Starbucks guys have to try to remember you if you are a permanent customer, smile, all that stuff. Then all the crisis we have today like lack of water, third-world suffering, they they make you feel that you participate in that project. Ecology, they make you feel, so again it's not just a cup of coffee. You participate in all this big you do something as they put it. On the top of this on the top of this I claim that it's not only Starbucks. It's even it's even when the cause does not seem to be so commercialized. For example, this will be an evil example, many friends hate me for mentioning it here. But for example let's be frank: when you go to a store and buy organic food, organic apples. I claim that most of us are too cynical we don't really believe, at least I'm skeptical that okay maybe they are maybe not really better. You know sometimes I have this suspicion that first they select the nice apples they send them around then the rotten ones they sell them for the double price as organic. Okay it may be true or not. What I'm saying is that I don't think you are really afraid of being poisoned, but it makes you feel good. You see, even in my everyday shopping I do something, I participate doing something for the earth, you know this making you feel nice and ethical social aware contribution and so on and so on. And this is I think ideology of and I tend to agree with you spontaneously that this may this is already an additional level, yes, because it's not just your individual feel-good experience or what, it's kind of a collective collective awareness stuff and so on and so on, no? So what I'm saying is that it's interesting how I don't have now time to go into it I want some other things to say but how all the topics, the main topics of this '68 protest against the alienated consumerist society and so on how the system integrated it. You know no longer this Fordist chain division of labor but creative interaction and so on and so on and so on. It's again what interests me is how this so-called new spirit of capitalism triumphantly recuperated the egalitarian, anti-hierarchical rhetoric of the '68, presenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations of corporate capitalism or state or state socialism. I think this is again one of the greatest triumphs maybe of the of the of the of the greatest ideological triumphs. And literally everything can be recuperated. For example, okay let's take Che Guevara. It's
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not only the T-shirts that you get, but I learned recently that an Australian company put on the market,
not only the T-shirts that you get, but I learned recently that an Australian company put on the market,
Slavoj Žižek
you know you have this cherry whatever Cherry Garcia, they put Cherry Guevara ice cream. And this is how they promote the eating experience: "The revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed as they were trapped between the two layers of chocolate. May their memory live in your mouth" and so on and so on and anything goes. Okay we can take first I am not saying that '68 was simple I'm not this kind of an old Marxist paranoiac who claims everything was recuperated and so on. No no no it's not as simple as that. What I'm what I'm what I'm first the first thing to admit it is that nonetheless '68 did succeed in many important things. My god, our new sensitivity towards racism and towards antifeminism and so on. My god, even in the common field many things are simply impossible now which were still possible like cheap direct antifeminism, racism and so on, so there are real achievements today. This was the best critique of Sarkozy that I read in France. You know that Sarkozy made in one of his electoral speeches before he was elected president, Sarkozy said that his main task is to get rid France of the memory of '68. Of all that leftist decadence. But then as some people immediately noted that is Sarkozy aware that he is possible only after '68? A crazy non-dignified guy like him marrying Carla Bruni and so on and so on. Only after '68 can such a guy be elected president and so on and so on. So I so again I'm not saying all of it I'm just saying that I'm just saying that what happened after '68 is that this new let's call it postmodern permissive capitalism successfully recuperated at two levels the demand of '68: this fight against alienation and especially this struggle for subjective authenticity. You know how everything can and should be perceived as on the path of your subjective authentic existence and so on and so on. Again even at the most elementary level of ideology I don't think our predominant ideological interpellation today, by interpellation I mean in this simple Althusserian sense what does how does society address you, the social superego, what are you expected to be? I think today it's no longer some direct big ideological cause: fight democracy, patriot, it's some kind of a vaguely spiritualized.
you know you have this cherry whatever Cherry Garcia, they put Cherry Guevara ice cream. And this is how they promote the eating experience: "The revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed as they were trapped between the two layers of chocolate. May their memory live in your mouth" and so on and so on and anything goes. Okay we can take first I am not saying that '68 was simple I'm not this kind of an old Marxist paranoiac who claims everything was recuperated and so on. No no no it's not as simple as that. What I'm what I'm what I'm first the first thing to admit it is that nonetheless '68 did succeed in many important things. My god, our new sensitivity towards racism and towards antifeminism and so on. My god, even in the common field many things are simply impossible now which were still possible like cheap direct antifeminism, racism and so on, so there are real achievements today. This was the best critique of Sarkozy that I read in France. You know that Sarkozy made in one of his electoral speeches before he was elected president, Sarkozy said that his main task is to get rid France of the memory of '68. Of all that leftist decadence. But then as some people immediately noted that is Sarkozy aware that he is possible only after '68? A crazy non-dignified guy like him marrying Carla Bruni and so on and so on. Only after '68 can such a guy be elected president and so on and so on. So I so again I'm not saying all of it I'm just saying that I'm just saying that what happened after '68 is that this new let's call it postmodern permissive capitalism successfully recuperated at two levels the demand of '68: this fight against alienation and especially this struggle for subjective authenticity. You know how everything can and should be perceived as on the path of your subjective authentic existence and so on and so on. Again even at the most elementary level of ideology I don't think our predominant ideological interpellation today, by interpellation I mean in this simple Althusserian sense what does how does society address you, the social superego, what are you expected to be? I think today it's no longer some direct big ideological cause: fight democracy, patriot, it's some kind of a vaguely spiritualized.