The Courage Of Hopelessness
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2017-05-20 · 1:32:11 · 12,037 words
ideologygeopolitics-warpsychoanalysisliberalism-political-correctnesscommunism-socialismfascism-populismreligion-theologyhegel-dialecticsrace-antisemitismethicscinema-art-cultureeveryday-lifecapitalism
Žižek delivers a lecture in Vienna addressing the refugee crisis, ways of life, and the limits of multicultural tolerance, arguing that the humanitarian framing of the refugee problem is itself a fetish that obscures the geopolitical and economic causes. He develops an extended analysis of jouissance as the core of cultural identity, interrogates the contradictions of multiculturalism through examples from India, Tibet, and Palestine, and criticizes the 2017 French elections as a symptom of ideological closure. The talk concludes with reflections on atheist ethics, the 'courage of hopelessness,' Protestant predestination as a model of freedom, and the necessity of changing the entire political frame rather than seeking incremental solutions.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 15
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The ethical stance of fully accepting that there is no clearly discernible alternative to the current situation, refusing false consoling solutions, as the prerequisite for genuine political invention.
as “fetish (political-humanitarian)”
The humanitarian fascination with refugees' suffering functions as a fetish that displaces serious political analysis of the geopolitical causes of refugee flows onto manageable emotional concern.
Milner's concept invoked by Žižek: what remains of a citizen stripped of citizenship is a speaking body with only the most basic material rights, water, food, hygiene, toilets.
as “proletarian (classical Marxist vs. today)”
Žižek highlights the irony that traditional exploited workers now occupy an almost privileged position compared to the permanently unemployed, refugees, and precarious workers who aspire to become 'good old-fashioned exploited proletarians'.
Implicitly present in the claim that Marx's description of capitalist dynamics has become more literal than Marx could have imagined, including the dissolution of fixed sexual identities.
as “ways of life”
Not merely customs, food, and songs but the specific regulation of jouissance, sexual mores, bodily practices, and hierarchies, that constitutes the non-negotiable core of communal identity.
Žižek uses jouissance here not as direct sexual madness but as the enjoyment of organizing pleasure, how a community regulates its sexual mores, hierarchies, and bodily practices; the true kernel of any 'way of life'.
Universality is not a neutral space above particular ways of life but the critical energy that corrodes from within every particular form, the feminist or gay struggle within European culture, women's rights within Arab culture.
Implicitly invoked via the analysis of guilt-infused pleasure: enjoyment is pleasure plus the detour of guilt or prohibition, making it more than simple physiological satisfaction.
Enjoyment that produces satisfaction through suffering, sacrifice, or pure form without any accompanying pleasure, exemplified by Goebbels's Totaler Krieg speech and the ritual Walmart shopping of the impoverished middle class.
as “belief without a believer”
Beliefs that function socially without any individual holding them in the first person, as in the toilet-paper shortage where nobody believes the shortage but everyone acts as if someone else does.
as “bestimmte Negation”
Hegel's determinate negation, illustrated by the Ninotchka 'coffee without cream/milk' joke: the negation is not abstract but specific, so 'without cream' and 'without milk' are materially equivalent but logically distinct.
as “atheist Christianity”
Žižek's reading of Christianity as dying to the idea of God as transcendent guarantee, leaving humans to act ethically without any higher authority, the materialist kernel he extracts from the Crucifixion.
as “predestination as highest freedom”
Protestant predestination reread as the highest freedom: our fate is decided but unknowable, so we must always act and choose our destiny without any guarantee, making choice genuinely open.
as “Verleugnung (disavowal)”
Everyday waking reality is structured as a repression or disavowal of something traumatic, we awaken from dreams not because the external disturbance is too strong but because the dream confronts us with the real trauma.
Stories he reaches for 11
A customer asks for coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream but can offer coffee without milk. Though materially identical, the two are logically distinct, illustrating Hegelian determinate negation.
“Sorry, we don't have cream, so I cannot really give you coffee without cream. But we have milk, so I can give you coffee without milk.”
A Roma girl fled an arranged marriage; feminists supported her, but a Roma community leader pointed out that arranged marriage is central to their way of life and its abolition would destroy the community. Illustrates the intractable conflict between universal rights and ways of life.
“Arranged marriages are the key component of our way of life. You take this away from us, in two, three generations the latest, we will disappear.”
Parents deny believing in Santa while buying presents; children deny believing while pretending so as not to disappoint parents. No one believes in the first person yet the ritual functions perfectly.
“Not to offend my parents and to get presents.”
A patient taking a woman to a restaurant said 'a room for two' instead of 'a table for two.' Rather than simple sexual desire slipping out, Leader read it as an ethical reminder not to get too absorbed in the pleasure of food and forget the 'real duty', sex, upstairs.
“He was afraid that he will enjoy too much the food for pleasure, eating, and that this will make him forget why is he truly here: to sleep with the lady.”
A listener asks Radio Yerevan if Rabinovich won a new car in the state lottery; the answer is 'In principle yes, but it wasn't a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn't win it, it was stolen from him.' Used to describe the status of Marxism today.
“In principle it's true, but the true proletarians are not proletarians at all, and so on, and so on.”
Impoverished middle-class Americans who can no longer afford to buy things still go to Walmart, fill carts, and leave them, performing the ritual of shopping without purchasing. Illustrates enjoyment (the form) separated from pleasure (the content).
“They came there just to do the ritual: they walk around, put stuff in, and so on, and then they leave it there, they go. It's a wonderful example how they get enjoyment without pleasure.”
Žižek argues Benigni's film cheats because it provides a sublime sentimental ending; a truly desperate version would have revealed that the son knew the truth all along and pretended to believe his father's story to spare him, a mutual performance of belief without a believer taken to tragic extreme.
“What if just before he is taken away to be shot, the father were to learn that his son knew the truth all the time and he also pretended to believe his father just not to make it too harsh.”
Goebbels' 1943 speech offered no promise of future pleasure, only more and greater suffering, yet produced mass enthusiasm, illustrating jouissance at its purest as enjoyment without pleasure.
“He doesn't promise pleasure. It's just more suffering. This is enjoyment, jouissance, at its purest without pleasure.”
Ancient Tibetan custom required lower-status people to bow on mountain paths and adopt an idiotic facial expression when meeting superiors; when Chinese tried to prohibit this in the 1950s, the outcry was 'you are meddling in our way of life.'
“When in the late '50s Chinese wanted to prohibit this, of course, what was the outcry? 'Oh, imperialists, you are meddling in our way of life.'”
A wealthy Mexican man who digitally penetrated a girl was acquitted because he proved he 'acted without carnal intent', he didn't enjoy it. The judge's implicit premise: pleasure makes one guilty; no pleasure, no crime. Žižek notes that acting without passion is actually more disturbing.
“Mexican man cleared in sexual assault of schoolgirl because he didn't enjoy it.”
A rumor in 1970s Yugoslavia that toilet paper would run out caused a real shortage, but nobody actually believed the rumor, each person acted on the assumption that other idiots might believe it, producing the shortage through collective disavowal.
“Nobody believed that there really is not enough toilet paper. It's enough to presuppose that there is another one who believes in it and at the end the result is the same.”
Works invoked 10
Ninotchka film
The 'coffee without cream/milk' joke from this Lubitsch film is used to illustrate Hegelian determinate negation.
The Handmaid's Tale book
Described as Margaret Atwood's 'classical novel' on which the TV series is based.
Communist Manifesto book
The famous lines about everything solid melting are cited as reaching a level of descriptive accuracy today that Marx himself couldn't have imagined.
The Laws of Manu book
Described as 'one of the most horrible books I ever read' which Žižek admits to loving in a perverse way; used to show how British colonialism revived the caste system through this text.
Criticized for cheating: it fits the description of Holocaust comedy but undermines it with a sentimental redemptive ending rather than sustained total despair.
Praised as a better Holocaust comedy than La Vita È Bella because it offers no sublime redemptive moment, it ends in total despair without a resolution.
Žižek screens a clip from this Danish noir film to illustrate his concept of atheist ethics, radical goodness that has passed through the zero point of godlessness.
Peter Sloterdijk's book cited approvingly for its clear picture of unbridled capitalism and nation-state logic as catastrophic, confirming the need for radical change even from a conservative perspective.
Called 'a great speech in a terrifying sense' because it offers no pleasure, only more suffering, making it the purest example of jouissance without pleasure.
Primo Levi's memoir cited for its objectively comic yet horrifying scenes of Auschwitz selections, supporting the argument that extreme horror demands comedy.
People invoked 31
Bruno Kreisky positive
Mentioned as having been more intelligent than Kurz in exploiting Austria's unique geopolitical position, though Žižek expresses personal distaste for his type.
Primo Levi positive
Se questo è un uomo cited for its objectively comic scenes of Auschwitz selections, supporting Žižek's argument that extreme horror requires comedy rather than tragedy.
Roberto Benigni negative
La Vita È Bella criticized for cheating by providing a sublime sentimental ending rather than maintaining the logic of comedy-without-redemption.
Narendra Modi negative
Cited alongside Erdogan and Xi as exemplifying the pattern of combining open global capitalism economically with authoritarian ethnic nationalism culturally.
Marine Le Pen negative
Described as more dangerous than Trump due to openly fascist tradition; Žižek opposes her but also criticizes the ideological use of 'anti-fascism' as cover for establishment politics.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Late Lenin's tragic admissions ('we don't know at all what is happening') are cited approvingly as honest about the absence of teleological guarantee.
Cited for presenting China as defender of global open markets against Trump's protectionism while maintaining Confucian authoritarian nationalism at home.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek invokes Lacan's concept of jouissance (excessive enjoyment) as the key to understanding ways of life and why cultural integration is traumatic.
Nancy Pelosi negative
Cited as exemplifying the Democratic establishment's strategy of normalizing Trump by comparing him to Reagan or Bush.
Margaret Atwood positive
The Handmaid's Tale is described as a 'classical novel' and the TV series is used to illustrate perverted enjoyment in the depiction of female subjugation.
Robert Pfaller positive
Present at the talk; credited with developing the concept of 'belief with no bearer' (interpassivity) in detail, described as one of the most wonderful institutions Žižek can imagine.
Sebastian Kurz negative
Žižek mocks him through his Slovenian name's vulgar meaning and suggests he failed to leverage Austria's unique geopolitical position.
Called evil and dangerous but not a fascist; Žižek's controversial position was that a Trump shock might awaken the American left, though he acknowledges the Democratic Party's response has been catastrophic.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just positive
His metaphor of the revolutionary as a navigator in a storm without a compass is cited as the proper self-understanding of revolutionary action.
Emmanuel Macron negative
Described as 'establishment at its purest' who embodies the very politics that produced Le Pen; his election is the lowest point of so-called democracy.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited for the formulation that the main function of ideological censorship today is to crush hope, not actual resistance.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Cited for the formula 'thought is the courage of hopelessness,' which Žižek adopts as a central thesis of the lecture.
Jean-Claude Milner positive
Described as 'close to me' though a Zionist liberal, not a Marxist; extensively quoted on the distinction between human rights (rights of the speaking body) and citizens' rights, and on the Calais camp.
George Orwell positive
Quoted on academic radical leftists who invoke revolutionary change to prevent real change; Žižek uses the quote approvingly to open the lecture.
Bernie Sanders positive
Described as the 'Bernie Sanders danger' that the Democratic establishment is using all its energy to suppress rather than fight Trump.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan negative
Cited as another example of combining economic global capitalism with cultural authoritarian ethno-nationalism.
Maximilien Robespierre positive
Cited alongside Saint-Just as exemplifying the wisdom of true revolutionaries who knew they were acting without historical teleological guarantee.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Cited as an intelligent non-leftist conservative whose book on unbridled capitalism and nation-state logic confirms Žižek's point that radical change is recognized as necessary even by conservatives.
Darian Leader positive
Described as a British Lacanian friend and practicing analyst; provides the anecdote about the patient's slip 'a room for two' and the correct counter-intuitive psychoanalytic reading.
Lina Wertmüller positive
Pasqualino Settebellezze cited as a better Holocaust film because it offers total despair rather than a sublime redemptive ending.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
The concept of 'infinite resignation' is invoked to describe what the alternative, more devastating version of La Vita È Bella would have depicted.
Cornel West positive
Cited approvingly for identifying the Democratic Party's catastrophic response to Trump as the real problem, not Trump himself.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek holds that Marx's analysis of capitalist dynamics is more accurate than ever, but that a Hegelian gap opens precisely when the concept is fully realized, Marxism as analysis remains valid but its revolutionary teleology does not.
Sigmund Freud positive
Invoked on the logic of lying by telling the truth (Jewish joke), on dream theory and awakening, and on the Christian equation of pleasure with guilt; Žižek treats Freud's analyses as fundamentally correct.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Bestimmte Negation and the dialectic of victory as the moment of defeat are Hegelian concepts Žižek deploys extensively; he makes 'a Hegelian twist' on Pfaller's theory.
Described as someone who hates Žižek and attacked him ferociously; nevertheless credited with providing a useful formulation about the French election, voting Macron = voting Le Pen in four years.
What it argues
refugee crisis and its geopolitical causes beyond humanitarianismjouissance and ways of life as the irreducible core of cultural identitymulticulturalism's internal contradictions and class antagonismscourage of hopelessness as the proper political-ethical stanceatheist Christianity and radical ethics without transcendent guaranteecomedy as the only adequate response to extreme horrorthe French election as a model of ideological closure
Dialectical moves 12
“The true courage is not to imagine an alternative but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is today no clearly discernible alternative. The dream of an alternative is a clear sign of theoretical cowardice.”
What appears as pessimistic despair (admitting no alternative) is actually the higher form of courage, while the utopian hope for an alternative is a fetish protecting us from genuine thought.
“The light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction.”
The optimistic 'light at the end of the tunnel' motif is inverted: apparent salvation is actually the accelerating approach of catastrophe.
“Why are you telling me that you are going to Lviv when you are really going to Lviv?”
The radical self-critical stance of biennales ('we are just instruments of cultural capital') is itself the lie, because the most effective lie is to tell the truth when truth is expected, so their self-criticism changes nothing.
“The irony is that many refugees would precisely like to become proletarians in the traditional sense — they aspire to the very condition Marx's theory identifies as the position of revolutionary transformation.”
The refugees cannot be the new revolutionary proletariat because the proletarian position they lack is itself what they aspire to achieve, collapsing the analogy.
“Precisely when some concept is fully realized and directly seems to describe reality, a gap appears. The victory is the moment of defeat.”
Hegelian lesson applied to Marxism: when Marx's analysis of capitalism becomes maximally accurate, it simultaneously ceases to function as a guide to action.
“Universality is not something above particular ways of life — universality is something that corrodes from within every way of life.”
Universalism is not a neutral meta-level supervening on cultures but the immanent antagonistic energy within each particular culture that fights its own reactionary elements.
“Authentic imperialism always was in this sense multicultural — it preserved and even revived traditional hierarchies in order to dominate more effectively.”
The apparent opposition between oppressive universalist imperialism and authentic particular cultures is inverted: imperialism's power lay in championing local particularism against emancipatory universalism.
“Not only pleasure makes us guilty, but without guilt there is no pleasure — guilt transforms simple pleasure into enjoyment.”
The Christian equation 'pleasure = guilt' must be fully worked through: it is not merely that pleasure causes guilt, but that guilt is constitutive of pleasure, producing jouissance.
“You don't escape from a traumatic situation into a dream and then awaken because the external disturbance gets too strong — you awaken to be able to continue the dream which is the dream of your daily life.”
Everyday waking reality is the dream, the repression of trauma; we exit the dream-within-sleep when it threatens to expose the trauma that our waking life keeps at bay.
“Our own defenders of Europe are the true threat to European Enlightenment — not refugees.”
The threat to European values comes from within, from those who claim to defend Europe by abandoning its own principles.
“If you vote for Macron, a vote for Macron is a vote for Marine Le Pen four years from now.”
Voting against fascism by supporting centrist liberalism produces the very conditions, continued economic malaise, that make future fascist victory more likely.
“Predestination paradoxically means the highest freedom — because we are predestined but can never know our destiny, we must always choose and thereby create it.”
Protestant fatalism is reread as requiring maximum agency: unknowability of fate forces perpetual active self-determination.
Claims 15
asserts
The refugee crisis is not a humanitarian problem but a political one caused by European economic neocolonialism and geopolitical intervention; the humanitarian framing is a fetish that prevents political analysis.refugee crisis
asserts
The 'way of life' of any community is not its visible customs but its regulation of jouissance — sexual mores, bodily practices, and social hierarchies.cultural identity / jouissance
rejects
Refugees are not the new proletariat; they mostly aspire to become traditional exploited workers, making the fashionable designation of them as a revolutionary subject cynical and mystifying.refugees as revolutionary proletariat
asserts
There are no authentic, homogeneous ways of life — every way of life is traversed by internal antagonisms and class conflicts that post-colonial multiculturalism systematically obscures.multiculturalism and cultural authenticity
reframes
True universalism is not a peaceful brotherhood of ways of life but the universality immanent in each particular struggle — feminism, workers' rights, LGBT rights — that corrodes the particular from within.universalism vs. multiculturalism
asserts
Imperialism historically supported rather than dismantled traditional hierarchies — British colonialism revived the caste system; Israeli occupation ignores honor killings — because traditional patriarchal culture makes populations easier to dominate.imperialism and traditional culture
reframes
Marx's analysis of capitalism is more accurate today than ever, but precisely as it is fully realized, a gap appears — the victory is the moment of defeat.Marxism today
asserts
Dreaming of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice; the true courage is to accept that there is currently no clearly discernible alternative.political ethics / courage of hopelessness
asserts
Ideology today functions by crushing hope rather than suppressing resistance — it denounces every critical project as leading to gulag.contemporary ideology
asserts
The 2017 French election was an ideological closure: Macron embodies the very politics that produced Le Pen, so voting for Macron is a vote for Le Pen four years later.French elections / liberal centrism
asserts
Pleasure becomes genuine enjoyment (jouissance) only through the detour of guilt or prohibition — without guilt there is no enjoyment.pleasure, guilt, and jouissance
asserts
To be truly good ethically, one must survive the absence of God — atheist Christianity means acting without any transcendent guarantee or higher authority.ethics, atheism, Christianity
asserts
The best films about the Holocaust are comedies, because the horror is too extreme for tragedy — realism would produce comedy by reducing the victims to objectively comic figures.Holocaust representation / comedy and tragedy
asserts
We awaken from dreams not because the external disturbance is too strong but because the dream confronts us with the traumatic core of our lives.dream theory / Freud
reframes
European Enlightenment legacy is threatened not by refugees but by Europe's own right-wing defenders.European identity and threat
Quotes 16
“The true courage is not to imagine an alternative but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is today no clearly discernible alternative. The dream of an alternative is a clear sign of theoretical cowardice.”Slavoj Žižek · courage of hopelessness
“The light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction.”Slavoj Žižek · false hope / courage of hopelessness
“It is only when we despair and don't know anymore what to do that change can be enacted. We have to go through some kind of zero point of hopelessness.”Slavoj Žižek · dialectics of despair and change
“Thought — das Denken — is the courage of hopelessness.”Slavoj Žižek · Agamben on thought and hopelessness
“Not only pleasure makes us guilty, but without guilt there is no pleasure. Guilt transforms simple pleasure to enjoyment.”Slavoj Žižek · jouissance / guilt and enjoyment
“Universality is not something above particular ways of life. Universality is something that corrodes from within every way of life.”Slavoj Žižek · universalism as immanent corrosion
“The true proletarians are not proletarians at all.”Slavoj Žižek · Marxism today / Radio Yerevan formula
“Our program is not to be ourselves, what we are.”Slavoj Žižek · untouchables / proletarian negation of identity
“Our own defenders of Europe are the true threat to European Enlightenment. Not refugees.”Slavoj Žižek · dialectics of European identity
“The main function of ideological censorship today is not to crush actual resistance but to crush hope.”Slavoj Žižek · contemporary ideology / Badiou
“If you vote for Macron, a vote for Macron is a vote for Marine Le Pen four years from now.”Slavoj Žižek · liberal centrism produces fascism
“Precisely when some concept is fully realized and directly seems to describe reality, a gap appears. The victory is the moment of defeat.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian dialectics / Marxism
“You awaken to be able to continue the dream which is the dream of your daily life.”Slavoj Žižek · Freud / awakening and trauma
“Love is a link to an absolute singularity. It's a total imbalance in the universe.”Slavoj Žižek · love as singularity
“The highest freedom is to guess, which of course it means select, create your eternal destiny.”Slavoj Žižek · predestination as highest freedom
“We are not only citizens or humans in this abstract sense. All of us, at least initially, belong to a certain community with a specific way of life.”Slavoj Žižek · way of life / limits of abstract universalism
Transcript 21 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I will please have a little bit of patience because I will not do, I am getting tired of them, my usual jokes, I will really try to cover the topic. So, let me begin with a wonderful quote from George Orwell—I quoted it often in my work—where he describes the typical attitude of academic radical leftists. The text was written in Quote, "We all rail against class distinctions, but very few people seriously want to abolish them. Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can really be changed." End of quote. Orwell's point is that many radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitious token that should achieve the exact opposite: prevent the change from really taking place. Again, like today's academic leftists who criticize capitalist cultural imperialism but are in reality horrified at the idea that his or her field of study would really break down. And as I mentioned in Venice a week ago, I think that big biennales like Venice Biennale are a model of this. Did you notice how all these big biennales—I don't know, Kassel, Venice—their ideology is more and more the ideological presentation of biennales, that of radical leftist self-criticism. We are all penetrated by capital, we know we are just a tool for capitalist investment, we should criticize ourselves. But you know, you know the famous quote from your greatest compatriot here, Sigmund Freud. He quotes that famous Jewish joke of two Jews used to lie to each other so that the way to really lie is to tell the truth because you are expected to lie. So one Jew says to the other, "Why are you telling me that you are going to Lviv when you are really going to Lviv? I know." So again, my answer to that self-critical attitude is, why are you saying that you are just an instrument in the reproduction of cultural capital when you are really just an instrument in the reproduction of cultural capital? So how then to break this circle? It is only when we despair and don't know anymore what to do that change can be enacted. We have to go through some kind of zero point of hopelessness. The lesson of the 20th-century communism is that we have to gather the strength to fully assume this hopelessness. Giorgio Agamben said in an interview that thought—das Denken—is the courage of hopelessness. An insight again which is especially pertinent for our historical moment when even the most pessimistic diagnostics as a rule finish with an uplifting hint at some version of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The true courage is not to imagine an alternative but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is today no clearly discernible alternative. The dream of an alternative is a clear sign of theoretical cowardice. It functions as a fetish which prevents us from thinking to the end the deadlock of our predicament. In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction. This train approaching us from the opposite direction assumed lately many forms. In the last year or so, troubles in our global capitalist paradise exploded at four levels: the renewed so-called fundamentalist terrorist threat, our declaration of war against ISIS, Boko Haram, and so on; geopolitical tensions between and within non-European new powers, China, especially Russia; the flow of refugees crossing the wall that separates us from them, and so on, and so on. And I would like to begin with this problem which now appears to be temporarily resolved but which I think will explode again, the so-called—I even don't like the name—problem of refugees. My God, I was often accused of playing some kind of a racist Eurocentric game here, like some German leftist author even accused me of that I am already waiting in line to join PEGIDA or whatever. No, on the contrary, I think we should change the field radically. We should move away from this humanitarian approach. Of course, we should do what we can, all we can, to help the refugees. But the problem is not a humanitarian one. It's ridiculous to claim that if we Europeans open up our heart again then what? All the poor people will come here and what? Isn't it much more crucial to begin thinking now—it's not an improper moment now—and acting in view of this thinking about what caused the refugees? What are we, Europe also, doing wrong? Our economic neocolonialism, buying the best fertile land in Africa, the crazy geopolitics of the big powers? Are we aware that without American, Russian, Saudi Arabia, and so on intervention, there would have been no refugees from Syria, from Iraq, and so on, and so on? We have to change these coordinates. It's not—I think that precisely this fascination with refugees' suffering is the ultimate fetish because it changes a mega-serious political problem into a humanitarian concern. And sentimental liberals always like this: to change again, to avoid critical political analysis and begin to talk, I know, all this rubbish like, are our hearts open enough? No, we don't need open hearts. We need precise political action to break this cycle of global geopolitics which creates and will continue to create refugees. So what should be our theoretical starting point? I would like to begin with a reference to someone who is close to me—he is even not a leftist Marxist, more a Zionist liberal—Jean-Claude Milner. But in an interesting way, he reactivated the old infamous for some people difference between human rights and citizens' rights. Jean-Claude Milner rejects the Marxist critical notion of human rights as the rights of the egotist members of the bourgeois civil society. For Milner, citizen is the member of a community sharing its specific culture, while a human being is what remains of a citizen when he or she is deprived of his or her citizenship. Human rights are natural only in this sense of the externality to a particular culture. They have nothing to do with some eternal nature since they apply to what remains of a citizen after he or she is subtracted from a specific polis, community. In this sense, the nature of human rights—human rights as natural—means precisely rights which should apply to every human being reduced to the zero level of what are we basically: bodies, animals which speak. A nice, although a little bit too long maybe, quote from Milner: "One gains a glimpse into the real of the rights of the body in examining what goes on when they are denied to individuals. Every day brings us a new example. I do not have to think about bombs and poisonous gases. I think about Calais—you know, the camp which is now dismantled there in France. Those who are assembled there from the year are not guilty of anything. They are not accused of anything. They do not infringe upon any part of the law. They are simply there and they live. The proof that they live is that sometimes they die. Nobody knows what languages they are speaking and anyway, one doesn't listen to them. One only knows that they speak. They are therefore reduced to the status of speaking bodies. By the settlement to which they are submitted, they literally render visible in a negative way the real of the rights of men or women. These rights are distinguished from the rights of a citizen since refugees are precisely not the citizens of Calais and mostly also do not want to become that." End of quote. Milner insists on the vulgar materiality of these rights. They are more basic than the rights to reunion, free speech, opinion, and so on. Before that comes the material base of a body: water, food, hygiene, minimal space of privacy. If individuals are deprived of these, their higher human rights disappear. Human rights are first such basic material rights: toilets, kitchen, healthcare, and so on. Rights begin even with the space for secretion, toilets. Insofar as human rights were first proclaimed by the French Revolution, one should note the irony of the fact that Calais is a French city. Of course, these rights are not natural in the sense of eternity. They are always redefined by a specific historical context. We can say—but I already find this problematic—that people, refugees, who are covered by these rights, who are reduced to speaking bodies, are proletarians in the sense of being deprived of citizenship. But I find this fashionable designation problematic. Now comes the polemical aspect. Some of my friends claim refugees are the new proletariat. I find this attitude extremely cynical and mystifying. Why? One of my friends—I will not embarrass him and name him—even developed this theory: We in Europe have good revolutionary critical theory, but, and you know this is the problem of Marxism from the beginning, but we don't have a revolutionary subject who will do this. So now we have a unique chance to outsource, as it were, the revolutionary subject. Maybe the refugees will be our proletariat. It doesn't work. It's too optimistic, this. Not because, let me emphasize immediately, refugees are too stupid or whatever. But for Marx, proletariat means something very precise: workers who generate wealth but are deprived of the substance of their being, exploited, and so on, and so on. The irony is that as far as I can see, most, if not most at least many, among the refugees would precisely like to become proletarians in this sense. The irony is that—and this is what complicates everything—the irony is that the traditional working class, let's say you're a traditional worker, you are okay, alienated in the Marxist sense, blah blah, but you have a permanent job where you are permanently exploited and so on, but you survive and so on. This is almost a privileged position today. We have permanently unemployed, we have refugees, we have precarious workers, and so on, who I'm tempted to say strive all the time to become good old-fashioned exploited proletarians in this sense. You know, that's the problem with Marxism today. It is in a way, Marx's analysis of capitalism, it is more true than ever. The Marxist description of the capitalist dynamics—the famous lines in Communist Manifesto and so on—they reach today a level that Marx couldn't even have imagined. You know when Marx says everything solid melts and incredible dynamics, all natural relations dissolve. Could he even have imagined, for example, the consequences at the level of sexuality with transgenderism and so on, and so on? So it's more radical than Marx imagined. But at the same time, and that's the nice Hegelian lesson, precisely when some concept is fully realized, directly seems to describe reality, a gap appears. The victory is the moment of defeat. So to—if I try to describe in the best possible way where Marx stands today, I'm tempted to quote one of my favorite Rabinovich Radio Yerevan jokes from ex-Soviet Union. You know, Radio Yerevan was a legendary—there is a real Radio Yerevan, but I'm talking about legend—radio station to which listeners were allowed to, they were allowed to call it to ask questions and the answer of Radio Yerevan was always "In principle, yes, it's true, but..." So one of these famous questions to Radio Yerevan is, "Is it true that the Jew Rabinovich—this is the legendary figure of Soviet jokes—that the Jew Rabinovich won a new car at a state lottery?" Radio Yerevan answers, "Yes, in principle it's true, but it wasn't a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn't win it, it was stolen from him." So it was something similar that we have to say concerning "Is it true that proletarians are today a threat to existing system, blah blah blah?" Yes, in principle it's true, but the true proletarians are not proletarians at all, and so on, and so on. Now I want to do another complication here, which I also think Marx didn't take fully into account. What, and many of my friends hate even the very term, ways of life. That's the big problem with refugees. Not their problem, our problem. In no way do I blame them or even hold them for inferior. Listen, we are not only citizens or humans in this abstract sense. All of us, at least initially, belong to a certain community with a specific way of life. And of course, the problem with refugees and our problem is that this, that again refugees don't come as Cartesian subjects. Aha, I'm just a—I am just a speaking body and nothing more. No, they come with the burden of a specific way of life. How to combine these specific ways of life is a problem. Why? And again, I know I'm here treading dangerous waters, because for some of my leftist friends, the very term of way of life is "Aha, are you joining Le Pen or PEGIDA or what?" except if we speak about marginal ways of life, you know? So what I'm saying is that my first correction of the standard view, a way of life is not just what we call about civilization, customs, and so on, but a civilization, customs, which—if you permit me here a reference to theories of Jacques Lacan, psychoanalytic theories—which signal how you deal with what Lacan calls jouissance, excessive enjoyment. In, which doesn't mean kind of a half-traumatic like sexual madness enjoyment, but it means not direct pleasure but the enjoyment—maybe I can put it in this way—the enjoyment of organizing pleasure. For example, what is a way of life of a certain community? Typically, this is very evil what I will say, when I debate with my multiculturalist friends, they say each group that comes to Europe should be allowed to maintain their way of life. Okay, no problem. But then I ask them, "Okay, what do you mean by way of life?" And then they start to enumerate: their food, their dances, their songs, blah blah, whatever you want. But all of them, as far as I know, then stop at a certain level. They never add their sexual customs and their relations of hierarchy. But they are at the very core of a way of life. I remember from my own miserable country, south from here, there was—I've written often about it—there was a big conflict, big, not too big, nobody really cared but okay, polemics in Slovenia some years ago I think. A Roma—old-fashioned wrong term, Gypsy—a Roma girl escaped her home because her father, when she was in an arranged marriage wanted to force her to marry a colleague of him. And he took refuge with the police and what to do then? Of course, all the feminists exploded: we should protect the girl's rights and so on, and so on. I noticed with real vicious spirit that these same feminists otherwise were all against Eurocentrism, for the protection of different ways of life, multiculturalism. But then one key figure of Slovene Roma community said something which was deeply true. He said, "But wait a minute, arranged marriages are the key component of our way of life. You take this away from us, in two, three generations the latest, we will become, you know, the usual Gypsies. Maybe we will have our spicy food, our music, and so on, we will disappear." So where do you stop here? And I am not, to avoid a misunderstanding, in no way am I claiming, "Yes, they are barbarian, we should impose on them our way of life." I'm just—or another aspect, hierarchy, social hierarchy. For example, in India, caste system—I'm sorry to tell you this—is their way of life. And consequent post-colonial theorists there accept it. For example, when I was in India, I asked them, "What are you doing to abolish castes?" and they said, "Who are you to preach us to this, western egalitarian western democrat, racist, neocolonialist, culturalist, who wants to ruin our traditional way of life?" Again, in a way, they were right. You know, this is I think an impossible dream, that you think you can bring together what we in Europe—and I'm not saying we are right, I'm just describing—that we in Europe have certain fights for, you know, gay struggle, abortion, femininity, human rights, and so on. And the problem is no longer just theoretical when—and at the same time we want to be tolerant and so on. Where does tolerance end? And I claim there is no simple solution here. Multiculturalists like to say we should be all one big family, tolerant towards each other, and so on, and so on. I am opposed to this formula, but to avoid a misunderstanding, not because I think our universality is the right one and we can impose our universality onto others. I see a totally different way out. As I immediately discovered in India, there is no neutral way of life. What those—and this is typical, although they present themselves as leftists—what Indian post-colonial cultural studies people present as their way of life has an extremely strong class dimension. And there is a wide resistance in India which is totally obfuscated by this topic of some way of life, cultural identity. You know that there is, for example, the Naxalite rebellion, a Maoist rebellion, almost one million armed men fighting in what remains of the jungle? You don't read about this. What about—I encountered them, immediately established contact in India—the so-called untouchables, and the lowest among them, those who are cleaning dry toilets? They provide to me the best definition of what is a proletarian. I asked them, "What is your program?" They told me, "Our program is not to be ourselves, what we are." They totally rejected all this, you know, "We are poor but isn't it something wonderful in our way of life, in how we are?" No, they don't want that. And I think that, you see, that should be our first starting point. All these communities of refugees and so on, and so on, don't buy the talk of a unique homogeneous way of life, in the same sense as we, our societies, are deeply divided by antagonisms—the visible and the less visible antagonisms—for example, so-called culture wars and so on, and so on. The same goes there with very interesting paradoxes that some authentic anti-Eurocentrists don't like. For example, I discovered—and I was given texts which analyze this—that in India, I'm totally for the predominance of English language. You know why? I discovered, isn't it a paradoxical nice result, that the lower you go in social ladder in India, the more they like English. You know why? Because as untouchables explained to me, their own languages are so much penetrated by social hierarchies—like if you are member of different caste, you will use different expressions or how you address others—that for them English with its simplistic univocity, it's the language of equality and openness. And again, we have to accept this paradox. I have it at home, one of these theorists of the untouchables wrote a praise, a praisal of English language as the only means to bring social and so on, and so on. So here, this is my first point. It is not that we have ways of life and then we should tolerate each other and—this is the usual stupid formula—in an open society, each of us, each community can develop its way of life, but when one community oppresses the other, of course, the other society, the oppressed, can turn into fundamentalism, is thwarted, and so on, and so on. No, almost I'm tempted to say the opposite. There are no authentic ways of life, or ways of life are traversed, cut with radical antagonisms. What is Indian way of life? It's one great struggle and so on. It's the same with China. The regime tries to propose some kind of Confucian way of life as specifically Chinese. No, it's a cover-up for almost permanent civil war in India, and so on, and so on. So again, we should be very open here and never talk about another's way of life. When I'm come to a society, I never ask "What's your way of life?" in a foreign country. I ask them, "What are your fights?" and try to orient—so for me, universalism is not a brotherhood of ways of life, I respect you, you respect me. No, universalism is: we have a struggle here, emancipation, workers' rights, feminists, and so on; they have their struggles. Can we bring these struggles together? Now comes my paradoxical result. Here I praise—but in a very sad, almost cynical way—here I praise the wisdom of British imperialism. For example, Indian way of life is embodied, this traditional caste system, in one of the most horrible books that I ever read: The Laws of Manu. It's basically a systematic description of the caste system in all these tiny daily material practices. And an obscene old guy like me, I love it, you know? Because, for example, you have there—oh my God, how I love it—descriptions like if you don't want, during sexual act, for a man—who cares about women in that book—to make her pregnant, and after you pull in the last minute out the penis, in what way should you turn around and in a correct way wipe your penis or whatever, and so on? It's madness. It's the madness—but what I want to say is this: Then I spoke with some Indians, good friends of mine, and then I checked it up with others, it's true. They gave me a wonderful explanation. They said, "Do you know that before British colonization in 17th century, this caste system was already disintegrating? But it got a great boost from the British occupation." Because the British got it immediately: if they try to impose their way of life, they would be breeding revolutionary proletariat, social chaos what capitalism brings. So literally, these Laws of Manu were rediscovered, printed by the British, and so on, because they got it that if the silent Indian majority is in the hands of the worst hierarchic patriarchy, it will make their rule much easier. So you know, this is already a nice example of how it's not, as some post-colonial theorists try to convince us, there are some harmonious—okay, maybe with conflicts but well-doing, living in natural balance, holistic, you know all that bullshit. We imperialists just come to a mountain and mine it. No, the authentic way is to ask the spirits of a mountain "Can we rape you?" and only then you do it and so on. No, the point—the point is that it's not like this. Is that paradoxically, authentic imperialism always was in this sense multicultural. Especially today, I claim. Are you aware what is happening now, the significance of the last political events? How precisely those countries who stand economically for the most radical open global capitalism, culturally move more and more towards some kind of authoritarian ethnic stance? China: I find no contradiction in the fact that on the one hand China insists on its Confucian legacy, not just Western culture. At the same time, as a very shrewd, I think, reaction to Trump's stupidities—you saw what Xi, the Chinese president, said a week ago or so. He presented himself and China as the true agent of global open market against protectionism and so on. The same with Erdogan in Turkey, the same in India with Modi, and so on, and so on. So again, we are encountering here real problems, that's all I'm saying. Let me take—mention, I learned it from a Tibetan friend this—a wonderful, terrifying example from Tibet. I am totally horrified by what the Chinese, by what the Chinese are doing there. I'm just asking you one thing: Don't paint Tibet as some kind of holistic, harmonious society which was then brutally destabilized by the Chinese intervention in '49 and especially later in '59. Look, I read this again—I was told by a friend and then I checked this up—in a book which is totally pro-Tibetan. You know that in ancient Tibet—and this lasted till '59, when the Chinese intervened directly because till '59, for the first ten years of occupation, the Chinese basically left the way of life as it was there. You know Tibet is mountains, just narrow path. So if two persons walking in the opposite direction meet on a path, one has to step aside. And it was strictly codified. Those who is lowest—let's say an ordinary guy meets a high priest or a feudal master—he has not only to step aside, but do a certain gesture, which is so disgusting, humiliating: adopt a specific—bow his head but at the same time make a specific expression with his face, like look with eyes as an idiot up, like basically you see what a disgusting idiot I am. And it's so nice, I like this, always being devil's advocate. When in the late '50s Chinese wanted to prohibit this, of course, what was the outcry? "Oh, imperialists, you are meddling in our way of life" and so on, and so on. Now, Chinese were extremely brutal, I agree. But the situation was more complex. You know when Red Guards in the mid-'60s were thousands of them ruining monasteries in Tibet and so on? It's nice to ask one simple question: Who were these Red Guardists? The rumor was Chinese brought them by trains, by planes and so on, hordes of wild... no. Now we know the data. You know how many Red Guardists came from China to Tibet? Between and All those thousands of people were their own dissatisfied young people. So again, what I'm saying is that it's a wrong opposition: specific way of life versus bad universal imperialism. Yes, the universality of imperialist culture is often oppressive, one-sided. But don't play particular culture as the good thing to resist universality. I think that the point is to show how our European universality is a false universality and true shared struggle impose another universality. Another thing I want to make clear here, that—I'm sorry—here psychoanalysis comes useful. Why is it so traumatic for people to really integrate into a society? You know these endless debates why some refugees don't want to be integrated. I just think that it's good to include also this element of enjoyment, enjoyment in the sense of regulating sexual mores and so on, and so on. This is what really a way of life is. Not some abstract cultural values but how you make love, how you laugh, how you treat authorities, and so on, and so on. That's the core of a way of life. So when I said some ways of life are incompatible, I was accused of being a Western racist and so on, and so on. No, I just claim that this is a real problem. In the sense that it's—what's my main point? Not we should impose some standards on others. No, no, no, we should be here very open to dialogue and so on, and so on. But my thesis—to put it in very abstract, even Hegelian terms—my thesis is that universality is not something above particular ways of life. In the sense that we have each our own way of life, but we are all universal. We love, but each of us loves in a different way and so on. No, universality is something that corrodes from within every way of life. For example, fighting for universality does not mean impose our universality on others. And the same goes for ourselves. But fighting for the universality which is part of our own way of life as the critical energy which fights all that is particular reactionary in it. For example, for me gay rights, abortion, and so on, it's universality fight in our culture. Women's rights and so on, struggles insofar as they emerge in Arab countries are their own fight for universality. And here it's very interesting point of how I learned from my Palestinian friends, even Israeli government, IDF, the occupation of the West Bank plays the same game as the British. They still have among Palestinians so-called honor killings. And the Israeli occupiers practically whenever possible ignore them, don't intervene, because they got the British lesson: that it's much better to dominate the West Bank, to have these traditional Palestinians with their honor killings and so on, and so on. So what we should connect to on the West Bank is those—and they exist, I know them, wonderful rapper singers and so on—people, cultural groups, women who are at the same time opposing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and their own traditional culture, claiming that they are ultimately on the same side. Rejecting this idea that simple recourse to one's traditional identity is enough to resist universal capitalism or whatever. Because you know, the way we organize our enjoyment, it's a very ambiguous one. Let me give you an example, sorry for this brief detour, but I love it. Are you watching now, it's very popular? Okay, now I do something for which I can be arrested. If you don't have it yet on your TV, go to Pirate Bay, you get it immediately. This new TV series based on Margaret Atwood's classical novel, The Handmaid's Tale. I watched this series—it's not even the full first year, but nonetheless—I watched it with pleasure. But then I caught myself enjoying it very much. And I was horrified. Why? Because then I asked my friends and the same suspicion was confirmed. I asked them, "Why do you like this series?" Their official excuse was because it depicts the danger of this Christian fundamentalist society where women are not allowed even to read, blah blah. But then I dug a little bit deeper and discovered that it's not as simple as that. What we enjoy, we find a strange perverted pleasure to enjoy this universe how women are controlled, all the details how this works and so on. There is a strange pleasure with it. Or to give you another example, which is even crazier, of this link between pleasure and guilt. I was shocked to read recently a report on a legal case in Mexico and the title of this report as it was reported in The Guardian says it all. Quote, "Mexican man cleared in sexual assault of schoolgirl because he didn't enjoy it." And then I emailed my Mexican friends and got the story. It's a wonderful one—wonderful in a terrifying sense. A group of three rich young men raped a young girl. One of them, the wealthiest of course from a family, was pardoned. Why? He—there was no debate about facts. It was all clear. But he, the guy, his defense was not "I didn't do that." He admitted that he—sorry to be tasteless in details—that he played with, squeezed the girl's breasts, he penetrated her vagina with fingers, all that. But his defense was that he acted without carnal intent. He didn't sexually enjoy it. And the judge claimed this makes him innocent. Because if he didn't enjoy it, it was not a sexual assault. Of course, feminists explode and protest. But what was—what was this judge thinking? My first idea was—I'm sorry if it appeared problematic, but I mean it in a totally honest way—I'm totally against any rape. But if I were to have to choose: a guy who rapes a girl in some kind of a blind passion and a guy who does it not even enjoying it, just in a cold way? Sorry, but for me the second thing is nonetheless minimally worse. Because fuck it, why did he do it if he didn't enjoy it? Obviously out of pure brutality, to humiliate her, to... he didn't even have the excuse of "I couldn't resist my passion" or whatever. Obviously, the silent premise of the judge was: experiencing pleasure as such makes us guilty. With quite a logical conclusion: if you didn't experience pleasure, you are not guilty. And I think this is maybe part of our Christian legacy, and it goes even further. The first step is: pleasure is guilty. But as every good psychoanalyst knows, you must bring this to the end. Not only pleasure makes us guilty, but without guilt there is no pleasure. And isn't this the maybe, I simplify, the basic premise of Protestantism? You know like as we say, that was a common saying when I was young, in Catholicism and in Protestantism you can do whatever you want. Just in Catholicism, if you confess it at the end of the week, it's okay; in Protestantism, if you feel guilty while you are doing it, it's okay. And you know, this is what I wanted to make clear with enjoyment. Yes, pleasure is pleasure, but guilt transforms simple—sorry, simple pleasure to enjoyment. You take away guilt, pleasure is just a stupid physiological pleasure. And I'm so sad I don't have time here to go deeply into this crucial opposition between pleasure and enjoyment. Enjoyment would be pleasure generated by all the detours and so on in our approach to pleasure. Like sex is not just, I see you, uh, I jump on you or whatever. Sex are all the detours of seduction and so on, and so on. There is no direct sex. Let me quote you an anecdote from my friend, the British Lacanian Darian Leader—I use it in just one of my books so it's safe to repeat it here—which I love it. He is a practicing analyst and he told me he had a patient who reported to him one, how do you call it, slip of the tongue—Fehlleistung—or what. He take a lady with whom he was flirting to a restaurant which was in the basement of a hotel. Of course, his dirty plan was a good dinner and then, "Oh, I'm tired, why don't we go up for a room" and so on, they do. But you know what happened? When he entered the restaurant, instead of saying "a table for two, please," he said "a room for two, a bed for two, please." Now, here you see that Darian Leader is a good psychoanalyst. His reading was not the obvious one, which is of course he was already thinking at sex, at sex. No, it was the opposite one. He was afraid that he will enjoy too much the food for pleasure, eating, and that this will make him forget why is he truly here: to sleep with the lady. So it was kind of an ethical reminder: don't get too much caught into eating, remember your true duty up there later, and so on. You know, this is why he was afraid in this sense of his enjoyment. Or another example, wonderful, of enjoyment another friend informed me about it who is now in United States—now that they have still a crisis—my friend of mine, in the evening wanted—so he went into one of these big Walmart mega stores. And noticed something very mysterious: close to the exit of the store there were many, how do you call it, those carts where you put what you want to buy, but still full there, full of stuff abandoned. And he asked a guy working for Walmart, "What does this mean?" and he told him something very tragic, almost beautiful: impoverished middle class who had this ordinary ritual of going to shop, now cannot afford it. So they came there just to do the ritual: they walk around, put stuff in, and so on, and then they leave it there, they go. It's a wonderful example how they get enjoyment without pleasure. I don't have time to show you another example which is the purest for me and it's terrifying. I hope you saw it, not to—to be terrorized, not to enjoy it. Joseph Goebbels' Totaler Krieg speech. Took it, you find it in versions at YouTube and so on. And you know what's so surprising? He doesn't promise pleasure. It's just more suffering. Like Goebbels said in almost Kantian terms: "Do you want a war which will be so total that you cannot even imagine how total it will be? Do you want to suffer so much more that you cannot even imagine how much you will suffer?" And it's an—this is really, in a terrifying sense, a great speech. Because there is no promise at the end, but at the end you will... no, he just promises more suffering. This is enjoyment, jouissance, at its purest without pleasure. So okay, now let me check it up because... Okay, okay, what I will do is this, if you allow me to go a little bit over: I wanted before coming to the conclusion to do another detour through apocalypse since we already—that how we and here I wanted also to refer to my good friend Robert Pfaller who is here, how this dimension of enjoyment beyond pleasure is as a rule embodied, enacted, in all those blind superfluous rituals and so on that accompany our acts of, as Robert Pfaller developed this in detail in one of the most wonderful institutions that I imagine, this is the title of one of his books: belief with no believer, with no bearer. You know, this is—was always for me the basic miracle of social life. How there are beliefs which can function socially without anyone believing in the first person. Like, allow me to repeat—I hope you don't know it—another wonderful story that really happened in my country in the '70s, ex-Yugoslavia. There was enough toilet paper in the stores. But a rumor started to circulate that there will be a shortage of toilet paper. So, now comes the beauty: what happened? People, in contrast to what we usually assume, did not distrust powers. They accepted it that there is enough toilet paper. But they reasoned in this way: "But what if there are some idiots who really think that there is not enough toilet paper, so to make it sure that they have they will start to buy it like crazy and there really will not be enough toilet paper? To prevent that, it's good for me now to go and buy a lot of toilet paper." So you see the point? Nobody believed that there really is not enough toilet paper. It's enough to presuppose that there is another one who believes in it and at the end the result is the same. I will not bore you here with the standard stories of that I like to repeat of—of these beliefs of other, of look Santa Claus, you know like ask parents "Do you believe in Santa Claus?" they say "Of course not, I'm not an idiot, I buy the presents." You ask children "Do you believe in Santa Claus?" "Of course not," so "Why do you act as if?" "Well, not to offend my parents and to get presents." You know like there are numerous examples of this belief which functions socially—beliefs without anyone in the first person believing in them. And we can go even a step further. Now, because I know that Robert doesn't quite like Hegel, I will make a Hegelian twist on his theory and introduce here *bestimmte Negation*. I will quote a joke, probably you know it, but I like to repeat it. One of the best jokes in Ninotchka, Ernst Lubitsch film, you know: a guy comes to a cafeteria and says "Can I get coffee without cream, please?" You know what's the answer? You must know he gets: "Sorry, we don't have cream, so I cannot really give you coffee without cream. But we have milk, so I can give you coffee without milk." You know, this is what Hegel meant with *bestimmte Negation*, you know that although it's materially the same coffee without, it's not the same coffee, it's without milk or without cream. And from my youth, oh those were paradise times—not really—communism, I remember we had exactly the same joke. You, when something was missing, for example—that was the joke, socialist joke—you enter a store and ask, "Do you already have or do you still not have let's say toilet paper?" And you know what was the classic answer: "Sorry, you are in the wrong store. We are not the store which doesn't have oil. The store which doesn't have toilet paper is the one across the street," and so on. So, but now you will think it's just a cheap joke. No, I don't have time to go into it and I hope Robert that for this what will add now I will be a little bit pardoned, not totally liquidated for Hegelian deviation, that I think that ideology mostly lies in this way today. It's not like it—it brings you coffee without milk and it claims that it brings you coffee without cream, how should I put it? You know what I mean, it's the—the implied negation which is a false one. How does this work? Well, I tried to develop it when I wrote a text—not the one in Independent but the one that I didn't yet get published, nobody wants to publish it, it is too crazy—about the French elections. I still think they are the lowest point of our so-called democracy. Why? Okay, we had Le Pen, we know what she is, proto-fascist, whatever you want. Although I don't like this term "proto-fascist" or "fascist." Not that she is any better. The problem is that don't you think that leftists are often quite lazy? They see something they don't like and instead of thinking what is specifically new here, you simply apply the old term, fascism. You miss the point, I think. But okay, we have Le Pen, we know what she is: danger. Then who is Macron? He is, it's clear, establishment at its purest. And when I just expressed some doubts in Macron, I was immediately accused of being a slave of fascism, of supporting fascism, and so on, and so on. So do you see the absurd situation? How—okay, I will repeat, you remember the Radio Yerevan joke? Let's ask Radio Yerevan: "Is it true that in France, Emmanuel Macron, independent outsider, united all the people in a great anti-fascist struggle and so on?" Again, in principle it's true, but (a) he is not an outsider but the very inside, and (b) he stands, he embodies the very politics which produced Marine Le Pen. He stands for what gives space to phenomena like—like Le Pen. So as a guy who hates me very much, he attacked me ferociously, a biographer of Michel Foucault, Didier Eribon. But he provided here a wonderful... he said, "The choice is this one: If you vote for Marine Le Pen now, you vote for Marine Le Pen. If you vote for Macron, a vote for Macron is a vote for Marine Le Pen four years from now in the future." That's all I meant, not that I am for Marine Le Pen. But this tragic closure, how—and so here what does this tell of ideology today? Alain Badiou at some point put it in a wonderful way when he wrote that the main function of ideological censorship today is not to crush actual resistance—repressive apparatuses do that—but to crush hope. To immediately denounce every critical project as opening a path at the end of which there is something like—like gulag. So I think that's the crucial thing that happened in France. You know, we had Marine Le Pen for what she is and we had establishment at its purest. No actual alternative. And the paradox being, if you wanted to move more to the left, you were proclaimed an instrument of the right. That's what centrist liberals like to do today. They claim there is no longer a difference between left and right, just between liberal openness, which means global capitalism the way we have it today, and right-wing—and right-wing populism. So I think that one of the great prospects—this makes me really sad for Europe—is that this standard politics will go on the way it is which brought us into trouble, just every four years we will be mobilized to vote for this politics in order to prevent the fascist danger, you know? And then if you will move to the left, they will say "No, no, objectively you serve—you serve—you serve fascism" and so on, and so on. So we are in a very sad situation. I had another long part but one has to, you know, at least from what I said now you know what—why people call me Fidel, not because of politics but you know, comrades, five minutes and then five hours, no? So I'm a little bit too long, I admit. But now if you asked me a more fundamental question: What can we do? What ethical attitude is the proper one today? When I say courage of hopelessness, I of course don't mean it we should just despair. I'm just saying that courage of hopelessness means not renounce hope, but get rid of the false solutions. Recognize a false solution which appears as a solution but it's really a train moving towards you. That's the only way to really invent something new. Now I will do something quite surprising—for some of you—I will show you a clip, have patience, some five-seven minutes, of a film which I really like. It's from this new Danish noir series about a detective called Carl Mørck. He designates himself as a terminally depressed detective. And this is towards the end, what you will see, of the film—original title is *Flaschenpost*, Message in a Bottle, but the title was very nicely changed in English to *A Conspiracy of Faith*. Just so that you see the situation—not yet, wait for half a minute after... the situation is that in a—in a small hut close to the coast in the sea, there are four people: there is this detective, terminally depressed detective, broken, chain there, uh, and then there is the serial murderer called Johannes. He holds in chain Mørck, inspector, as prisoner, and two kidnapped children, a boy and a girl. And Johannes is a pathological killer who presents himself as one of Devil's sons whose task is to destroy faith. And he says to Mørck, "And now I will take away your faith." And I just, if it will work, should I maybe put this away? I don't... what I try to render with my idea of courage of hopelessness, this is it. The beauty of this scene is for me not just that you see also a man who doesn't believe can be good. No, I'm more crazy. It's a radical atheist ethics in the sense of what I call atheist Christianity. In order to be really radically good or believer, but in this materialist sense, you have to survive the fact that there is no God, no guarantee, and so on. You have to go through this zero point. Of course, it would be easy to read this scene in a cheap religious point and said "But it's not true that God is not here. But God was here two times: when He wanted the detective, depressed, to sacrifice himself, and when the girl who is the sister of the drowned boy didn't want to take revenge." But my point again is what only very intelligent theologians even, some Protestants and so on, know: that ethics again not only is independent of belief in the sense of we can all be good—no, to be truly good you have not to believe in this sense. Of believing in any higher authority that controls you, directs you, provides general—provid... provides higher guarantee, and so on. That's so difficult to accept for us. The 20th-century Marxism was I think still part of this transcendent, almost religious ethics, you know like history is on our side, we act with accordance of history, we get direction from history. Today we have to act alone in this sense. There is no higher sense, there is no higher authority that will guarantee, provide meaning to our acts. There is no meaningful totality. It no longer works that classical teleology which was still operative in traditional Marxism, you know that the most disgusting metaphor I can imagine for religion: the so-called big painting metaphor, that we limited humans are like idiots staring at a picture—which means reality—too close and you see just stains. If you step back, you see that what appeared to you stains creates, contributes to the harmony of the entire picture. In my reading, atheist of Christianity, this is what dies on the cross. This idea of God as someone who when you are in deep shit you can say "But don't worry, there is a higher authority which provides guarantee." Well, tell this to gulag prisoners or to Jews in Auschwitz. "Don't worry, your suffering here is just a stain, step back and you will see how it contributes to the harmony of the universe." The proper Christian ethics is much more paradoxical. Is, no, your unique suffering here, insignificant as it may appear from the abstract standpoint of some cosmic perspective, this is what absolutely matters, this absolute engagement. This paradox, to put it in theological terms, although we are obviously a small piece of dust in a small planet as they say on the outskirts of our universe, but nonetheless in some existential sense—of course not literally but existentially—when you are in a difficult ethical predicament, your only experience is the whole world was created so that for me, you know, everything will be decided, the fate of the universe in this fight here and now. And that's how I even read the radical notion of love. It's not love in the sense—this Buddhist love, you know, "Oh, all the universe, all the living beings." No, love is unique. That person, and I don't care if all the world falls, disintegrates. That's why true love for me is not simply love for this on those reasons. It's there is an important... you know when you truly love someone, if you are asked "Why do you love him/her?" the only answer is "Because I cannot do it without. It's impossible simply to step out to leave behind." Love is not this cosmic, Buddhist, all-embracing perspective. Love is a link to an absolute singularity. It's a total imbalance in the universe. So that would be, if you ask me, my existential perspective, the only hope given to us today. You have to be radically atheist. We are approaching deep shit, it's clear, at multiple levels: ecological crisis, biogenetics, just name it. And I'm re... provoked to provoke you, Peter. I can do it because haha only leader will be able to ask questions, you will not be able to ask... I even think that Protestant predestination means this. It is predestination in the sense of our fate is decided. But the secret premise of Protestantism is not "Okay, if our fate is decided, so—sorry to be vulgar—let's sit down, get drunk, drugs, and watch pornography, who cares." No, you have to fight all the time. You know why? Because we are predestined, but we never can know what is our destiny. And that's for me paradoxically the highest freedom. The highest freedom is to guess, which of course it means select, create your eternal destiny. No matter how limited we are in our practical choices, we can always choose our destiny as it were. In—to put it in philosophical terms—and that's how we should react to today's crisis. We have a destiny, predes... we are predestined. If things go the way they go, in years either it will be a total ecological, social catastrophe, or in the best case, as Hollywood teaches us wisely, it will be in films like Hunger Games and so on, it will be a new class society: those who are in, those who are out of the cupola. It will be worse than the old class society. This is our destiny. And the thing to do is to radically change the entire frame, to change destiny itself, to change the entire perspective. That's why I think we should reject that simple strategy, you know: What are the realistic options? Let's diminish pollution a little bit, you know all this idea if—if temperature raised for two, two degrees it's still good, if for two and a half it's bad. These are totally imaginary numbers, I claim. That's superstition. No, we have as they say to change more radically our own way of life. Now you will say I'm dreaming. Listen, maybe I'm dreaming, but I'm not alone. Even intelligent conservatives know this. Read, please, the one who certainly is not a leftist Marxist, Peter Sloterdijk. In his book, *Was geschah im Jahrhundert?*, he paints very clearly this picture of unbridled capitalism and the nation-state logic of the highest ethics as sacrificing for your state brings catastrophe. A radical change is needed, and so on, and so on. Everybody knows it, my God. Capitalism is changing into something new we don't know what. And the horror why we are like that detective Mørck is that again, we cannot any longer rely on any safe Marxist teleology, you know like "Yeah, but progress, oh digitalization we will become whatever the stupidities are, singularity or a new brain" and so on, and so on. It's an open situation, we don't know where we are going. This is the wisdom of true revolutionaries. Robespierre and Saint-Just knew this exactly. Their metaphor was not "We revolutionaries are developing some higher necessity." The most beautiful metaphor of Saint-Just was, a revolutionary is like a navigator on a ship in the middle of a storm without a compass, and so on. And even Lenin at the end of his life in some tragic moments he wrote "We don't know at all what is happening," and so on. That's the only hope. I'm sorry if I was too long. That's nature. And I'm very extremely grateful for your patience. And I know like—I hope for a new Renaissance of Vienna to flatter you at the end, but I mean it seriously. You know that a little bit over years ago, your city was as they say in Star Wars, the center of the known universe? Name it: science, music, Schoenberg, all of them—I mean Freud—you were it, you were it. And you know why, Adorno... precisely because you were not at the center of technological inventions and so on, and so on. There was space for this and I just hope that you will become that again. I'm sure that the official big cities—Paris, London, New York—they are lost. It's chance with cities like yours here. Thank you very much and I'm sorry for... So let me repeat my old joke. Don't waste your energy now. When we take over in different official conferences, you will be forced to applaud, you know? Keep your energy for our dictators later, okay? Now, *jetzt Genosse Stalin wird einen kleinen Resümee mit kritischen Bemerkungen geben*. Slavoj, thank you very much for always interesting lecture and to be with us. I have here two pages of questions and I try... I hope you wrote the questions before knowing what I will talk about in a Stalinist way. To be honest, I choose the questions after, although during the lecture. And there was one interesting question fitting in the context of the film—question that we also got from listeners—yes, but before the lecture sent by email. And this question—it's really true—it was, how did you sleep yesterday? I mean, I know you love the detective stories and we saw the film, so maybe it fits to the film. What is the point of this question? To put it in a nice way, but if you put it the way you put it, it would be like as if yesterday I raped five children and so on. "How did you manage to sleep them?" No, I must tell you this, the same as you as a heavy diabetic, whatever problems I have, there are no problems with sleep. I sleep more than well. The only problem and I can confirm this the truth of Freud's interpretation—sorry, I rather go to this, yes, okay, the of Freud's reading of that famous "Father, seest thou not I am burning?"—*Vater, siehst du nicht, dass ich verbrenne?*. You know we don't just escape from traumatic situation into sleep and then dreams. What regularly happens, and it happens to me all the time, is that okay, there is something unpleasant going on, you escape you dream, but then the big question that Freud asks, a very naive question, is: Why do you awaken in the dream? His answer is implicit: You sleep, but then like he uses this example—you know we have so-called dreams which quickly incorporate an external disturbance so that you can continue to sleep, like the classic stupid things, it happened to me often, happens: something is disturbing your sleep, let's say phone ringing. What you do is quickly construct a dream in which a phone is ringing so that you gain time. Now the big question is, but why do you then awaken? The standard primitive answer is that simply the external intrusion gets too strong. Like you can, to be vulgar, go on sleeping if I just say something you can con... but if I start to beat you, there will be a limit, no? But Freud's answer is the opposite one. You escape from external disturbance into a dream. But what you then encounter in a dream can be the trauma of your life. So you in a dialectical sense, you awaken to be able to continue the dream which is the dream of your daily life. Let's say you are—you did something horrible, you want to forget it. And you dream, but you awaken when in the dream you confront that trauma. So it's a beautiful idea which is I think a correct one, not in this metaphysical or romantic sense "Our life is just a dream," but that our everyday reality is structured not as a dream but as an repression, *Verleugnung*, whatever of something traumatic. So that will be my answer: I have no problem falling asleep, but unfortunately I quite often awaken in... the problem is awakening. I awaken in nightmares, confronting different traumas and so on, and so on. So that would be the answer. Very good answer. So the second question—interesting question, but not so far away from your theories—is, do you think politics and comedy has something in common? Yes, but on one condition. My God, I didn't pay you for these questions because they are so till now so easy and nice that... you know what's crucial if you permit me a brief improvisation here? The crucial thing is to learn and I often develop this point that comedy is not only the easy thing. When things get really horrible, then they are too horrible to do a tragedy out of them. The only thing you can can do is a comedy. The idea came to me—I'm sorry if you know some of you this line of thought of mine—I approach the question: why is it that all good films about Holocaust are comedies? Because again it's too horrible to... for example, let's imagine that you were to do a heroic tragedy. A Nazi torturer approaching a Jew and a Jew says heroically, "You can kill me but not break my spirit," opens his shirt or whatever. It underestimates the horror of concentration camp or at the... you know, you are so broken down that from—for an external view at least—it's a comedy. You know where also came this idea to me? Did you—did you read, I hope you did, Primo Levi, *Se questo un uomo*, If This Is a Man? And I discovered that some of the most horrifying scenes that he depicts are objectively comic scenes. Like you know when you had once a month or every two months in Auschwitz so-called *seleksja* in Polish, selection. All inmates had to run quickly in front of an SS doctor, just half a second, and you just put you into one of the two lists: to be burnt or to... and how it was a whole comedy to do it. The prisoners exchanged advices how—the point was to appear healthy, no? So how to pinch your skin to appear more lively red, how to—even if you are that tired and exhausted—that you appear strong. It's a comedy. But it's even the worst of Auschwitz, the so-called *Muselmänner*, the Muslims, the living dead. The way they acted was like comic dolls and that's the... it's not a comedy where you laugh, it's comedy at its most terrifying. That's—I wonder if you would agree—I'm sorry if I already developed at some of my other talks here this point. You saw the movie to which I'm opposed although it fits my description of concentration camp comedy, Benigni, *La Vita Bella*. I think the movie cheats because first, it's not comical enough at the very end when father sacrifices himself for the son and mocks as if "They take me away" but he knows he will die and when the son at the very end describes this to his, I don't know who... at that point you are supposed even to cry probably, I don't know. It's not—I think, that's why I'm telling you this, where does the film cheat? How to make
I will please have a little bit of patience because I will not do, I am getting tired of them, my usual jokes, I will really try to cover the topic. So, let me begin with a wonderful quote from George Orwell—I quoted it often in my work—where he describes the typical attitude of academic radical leftists. The text was written in Quote, "We all rail against class distinctions, but very few people seriously want to abolish them. Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can really be changed." End of quote. Orwell's point is that many radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitious token that should achieve the exact opposite: prevent the change from really taking place. Again, like today's academic leftists who criticize capitalist cultural imperialism but are in reality horrified at the idea that his or her field of study would really break down. And as I mentioned in Venice a week ago, I think that big biennales like Venice Biennale are a model of this. Did you notice how all these big biennales—I don't know, Kassel, Venice—their ideology is more and more the ideological presentation of biennales, that of radical leftist self-criticism. We are all penetrated by capital, we know we are just a tool for capitalist investment, we should criticize ourselves. But you know, you know the famous quote from your greatest compatriot here, Sigmund Freud. He quotes that famous Jewish joke of two Jews used to lie to each other so that the way to really lie is to tell the truth because you are expected to lie. So one Jew says to the other, "Why are you telling me that you are going to Lviv when you are really going to Lviv? I know." So again, my answer to that self-critical attitude is, why are you saying that you are just an instrument in the reproduction of cultural capital when you are really just an instrument in the reproduction of cultural capital? So how then to break this circle? It is only when we despair and don't know anymore what to do that change can be enacted. We have to go through some kind of zero point of hopelessness. The lesson of the 20th-century communism is that we have to gather the strength to fully assume this hopelessness. Giorgio Agamben said in an interview that thought—das Denken—is the courage of hopelessness. An insight again which is especially pertinent for our historical moment when even the most pessimistic diagnostics as a rule finish with an uplifting hint at some version of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The true courage is not to imagine an alternative but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is today no clearly discernible alternative. The dream of an alternative is a clear sign of theoretical cowardice. It functions as a fetish which prevents us from thinking to the end the deadlock of our predicament. In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction. This train approaching us from the opposite direction assumed lately many forms. In the last year or so, troubles in our global capitalist paradise exploded at four levels: the renewed so-called fundamentalist terrorist threat, our declaration of war against ISIS, Boko Haram, and so on; geopolitical tensions between and within non-European new powers, China, especially Russia; the flow of refugees crossing the wall that separates us from them, and so on, and so on. And I would like to begin with this problem which now appears to be temporarily resolved but which I think will explode again, the so-called—I even don't like the name—problem of refugees. My God, I was often accused of playing some kind of a racist Eurocentric game here, like some German leftist author even accused me of that I am already waiting in line to join PEGIDA or whatever. No, on the contrary, I think we should change the field radically. We should move away from this humanitarian approach. Of course, we should do what we can, all we can, to help the refugees. But the problem is not a humanitarian one. It's ridiculous to claim that if we Europeans open up our heart again then what? All the poor people will come here and what? Isn't it much more crucial to begin thinking now—it's not an improper moment now—and acting in view of this thinking about what caused the refugees? What are we, Europe also, doing wrong? Our economic neocolonialism, buying the best fertile land in Africa, the crazy geopolitics of the big powers? Are we aware that without American, Russian, Saudi Arabia, and so on intervention, there would have been no refugees from Syria, from Iraq, and so on, and so on? We have to change these coordinates. It's not—I think that precisely this fascination with refugees' suffering is the ultimate fetish because it changes a mega-serious political problem into a humanitarian concern. And sentimental liberals always like this: to change again, to avoid critical political analysis and begin to talk, I know, all this rubbish like, are our hearts open enough? No, we don't need open hearts. We need precise political action to break this cycle of global geopolitics which creates and will continue to create refugees. So what should be our theoretical starting point? I would like to begin with a reference to someone who is close to me—he is even not a leftist Marxist, more a Zionist liberal—Jean-Claude Milner. But in an interesting way, he reactivated the old infamous for some people difference between human rights and citizens' rights. Jean-Claude Milner rejects the Marxist critical notion of human rights as the rights of the egotist members of the bourgeois civil society. For Milner, citizen is the member of a community sharing its specific culture, while a human being is what remains of a citizen when he or she is deprived of his or her citizenship. Human rights are natural only in this sense of the externality to a particular culture. They have nothing to do with some eternal nature since they apply to what remains of a citizen after he or she is subtracted from a specific polis, community. In this sense, the nature of human rights—human rights as natural—means precisely rights which should apply to every human being reduced to the zero level of what are we basically: bodies, animals which speak. A nice, although a little bit too long maybe, quote from Milner: "One gains a glimpse into the real of the rights of the body in examining what goes on when they are denied to individuals. Every day brings us a new example. I do not have to think about bombs and poisonous gases. I think about Calais—you know, the camp which is now dismantled there in France. Those who are assembled there from the year are not guilty of anything. They are not accused of anything. They do not infringe upon any part of the law. They are simply there and they live. The proof that they live is that sometimes they die. Nobody knows what languages they are speaking and anyway, one doesn't listen to them. One only knows that they speak. They are therefore reduced to the status of speaking bodies. By the settlement to which they are submitted, they literally render visible in a negative way the real of the rights of men or women. These rights are distinguished from the rights of a citizen since refugees are precisely not the citizens of Calais and mostly also do not want to become that." End of quote. Milner insists on the vulgar materiality of these rights. They are more basic than the rights to reunion, free speech, opinion, and so on. Before that comes the material base of a body: water, food, hygiene, minimal space of privacy. If individuals are deprived of these, their higher human rights disappear. Human rights are first such basic material rights: toilets, kitchen, healthcare, and so on. Rights begin even with the space for secretion, toilets. Insofar as human rights were first proclaimed by the French Revolution, one should note the irony of the fact that Calais is a French city. Of course, these rights are not natural in the sense of eternity. They are always redefined by a specific historical context. We can say—but I already find this problematic—that people, refugees, who are covered by these rights, who are reduced to speaking bodies, are proletarians in the sense of being deprived of citizenship. But I find this fashionable designation problematic. Now comes the polemical aspect. Some of my friends claim refugees are the new proletariat. I find this attitude extremely cynical and mystifying. Why? One of my friends—I will not embarrass him and name him—even developed this theory: We in Europe have good revolutionary critical theory, but, and you know this is the problem of Marxism from the beginning, but we don't have a revolutionary subject who will do this. So now we have a unique chance to outsource, as it were, the revolutionary subject. Maybe the refugees will be our proletariat. It doesn't work. It's too optimistic, this. Not because, let me emphasize immediately, refugees are too stupid or whatever. But for Marx, proletariat means something very precise: workers who generate wealth but are deprived of the substance of their being, exploited, and so on, and so on. The irony is that as far as I can see, most, if not most at least many, among the refugees would precisely like to become proletarians in this sense. The irony is that—and this is what complicates everything—the irony is that the traditional working class, let's say you're a traditional worker, you are okay, alienated in the Marxist sense, blah blah, but you have a permanent job where you are permanently exploited and so on, but you survive and so on. This is almost a privileged position today. We have permanently unemployed, we have refugees, we have precarious workers, and so on, who I'm tempted to say strive all the time to become good old-fashioned exploited proletarians in this sense. You know, that's the problem with Marxism today. It is in a way, Marx's analysis of capitalism, it is more true than ever. The Marxist description of the capitalist dynamics—the famous lines in Communist Manifesto and so on—they reach today a level that Marx couldn't even have imagined. You know when Marx says everything solid melts and incredible dynamics, all natural relations dissolve. Could he even have imagined, for example, the consequences at the level of sexuality with transgenderism and so on, and so on? So it's more radical than Marx imagined. But at the same time, and that's the nice Hegelian lesson, precisely when some concept is fully realized, directly seems to describe reality, a gap appears. The victory is the moment of defeat. So to—if I try to describe in the best possible way where Marx stands today, I'm tempted to quote one of my favorite Rabinovich Radio Yerevan jokes from ex-Soviet Union. You know, Radio Yerevan was a legendary—there is a real Radio Yerevan, but I'm talking about legend—radio station to which listeners were allowed to, they were allowed to call it to ask questions and the answer of Radio Yerevan was always "In principle, yes, it's true, but..." So one of these famous questions to Radio Yerevan is, "Is it true that the Jew Rabinovich—this is the legendary figure of Soviet jokes—that the Jew Rabinovich won a new car at a state lottery?" Radio Yerevan answers, "Yes, in principle it's true, but it wasn't a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn't win it, it was stolen from him." So it was something similar that we have to say concerning "Is it true that proletarians are today a threat to existing system, blah blah blah?" Yes, in principle it's true, but the true proletarians are not proletarians at all, and so on, and so on. Now I want to do another complication here, which I also think Marx didn't take fully into account. What, and many of my friends hate even the very term, ways of life. That's the big problem with refugees. Not their problem, our problem. In no way do I blame them or even hold them for inferior. Listen, we are not only citizens or humans in this abstract sense. All of us, at least initially, belong to a certain community with a specific way of life. And of course, the problem with refugees and our problem is that this, that again refugees don't come as Cartesian subjects. Aha, I'm just a—I am just a speaking body and nothing more. No, they come with the burden of a specific way of life. How to combine these specific ways of life is a problem. Why? And again, I know I'm here treading dangerous waters, because for some of my leftist friends, the very term of way of life is "Aha, are you joining Le Pen or PEGIDA or what?" except if we speak about marginal ways of life, you know? So what I'm saying is that my first correction of the standard view, a way of life is not just what we call about civilization, customs, and so on, but a civilization, customs, which—if you permit me here a reference to theories of Jacques Lacan, psychoanalytic theories—which signal how you deal with what Lacan calls jouissance, excessive enjoyment. In, which doesn't mean kind of a half-traumatic like sexual madness enjoyment, but it means not direct pleasure but the enjoyment—maybe I can put it in this way—the enjoyment of organizing pleasure. For example, what is a way of life of a certain community? Typically, this is very evil what I will say, when I debate with my multiculturalist friends, they say each group that comes to Europe should be allowed to maintain their way of life. Okay, no problem. But then I ask them, "Okay, what do you mean by way of life?" And then they start to enumerate: their food, their dances, their songs, blah blah, whatever you want. But all of them, as far as I know, then stop at a certain level. They never add their sexual customs and their relations of hierarchy. But they are at the very core of a way of life. I remember from my own miserable country, south from here, there was—I've written often about it—there was a big conflict, big, not too big, nobody really cared but okay, polemics in Slovenia some years ago I think. A Roma—old-fashioned wrong term, Gypsy—a Roma girl escaped her home because her father, when she was in an arranged marriage wanted to force her to marry a colleague of him. And he took refuge with the police and what to do then? Of course, all the feminists exploded: we should protect the girl's rights and so on, and so on. I noticed with real vicious spirit that these same feminists otherwise were all against Eurocentrism, for the protection of different ways of life, multiculturalism. But then one key figure of Slovene Roma community said something which was deeply true. He said, "But wait a minute, arranged marriages are the key component of our way of life. You take this away from us, in two, three generations the latest, we will become, you know, the usual Gypsies. Maybe we will have our spicy food, our music, and so on, we will disappear." So where do you stop here? And I am not, to avoid a misunderstanding, in no way am I claiming, "Yes, they are barbarian, we should impose on them our way of life." I'm just—or another aspect, hierarchy, social hierarchy. For example, in India, caste system—I'm sorry to tell you this—is their way of life. And consequent post-colonial theorists there accept it. For example, when I was in India, I asked them, "What are you doing to abolish castes?" and they said, "Who are you to preach us to this, western egalitarian western democrat, racist, neocolonialist, culturalist, who wants to ruin our traditional way of life?" Again, in a way, they were right. You know, this is I think an impossible dream, that you think you can bring together what we in Europe—and I'm not saying we are right, I'm just describing—that we in Europe have certain fights for, you know, gay struggle, abortion, femininity, human rights, and so on. And the problem is no longer just theoretical when—and at the same time we want to be tolerant and so on. Where does tolerance end? And I claim there is no simple solution here. Multiculturalists like to say we should be all one big family, tolerant towards each other, and so on, and so on. I am opposed to this formula, but to avoid a misunderstanding, not because I think our universality is the right one and we can impose our universality onto others. I see a totally different way out. As I immediately discovered in India, there is no neutral way of life. What those—and this is typical, although they present themselves as leftists—what Indian post-colonial cultural studies people present as their way of life has an extremely strong class dimension. And there is a wide resistance in India which is totally obfuscated by this topic of some way of life, cultural identity. You know that there is, for example, the Naxalite rebellion, a Maoist rebellion, almost one million armed men fighting in what remains of the jungle? You don't read about this. What about—I encountered them, immediately established contact in India—the so-called untouchables, and the lowest among them, those who are cleaning dry toilets? They provide to me the best definition of what is a proletarian. I asked them, "What is your program?" They told me, "Our program is not to be ourselves, what we are." They totally rejected all this, you know, "We are poor but isn't it something wonderful in our way of life, in how we are?" No, they don't want that. And I think that, you see, that should be our first starting point. All these communities of refugees and so on, and so on, don't buy the talk of a unique homogeneous way of life, in the same sense as we, our societies, are deeply divided by antagonisms—the visible and the less visible antagonisms—for example, so-called culture wars and so on, and so on. The same goes there with very interesting paradoxes that some authentic anti-Eurocentrists don't like. For example, I discovered—and I was given texts which analyze this—that in India, I'm totally for the predominance of English language. You know why? I discovered, isn't it a paradoxical nice result, that the lower you go in social ladder in India, the more they like English. You know why? Because as untouchables explained to me, their own languages are so much penetrated by social hierarchies—like if you are member of different caste, you will use different expressions or how you address others—that for them English with its simplistic univocity, it's the language of equality and openness. And again, we have to accept this paradox. I have it at home, one of these theorists of the untouchables wrote a praise, a praisal of English language as the only means to bring social and so on, and so on. So here, this is my first point. It is not that we have ways of life and then we should tolerate each other and—this is the usual stupid formula—in an open society, each of us, each community can develop its way of life, but when one community oppresses the other, of course, the other society, the oppressed, can turn into fundamentalism, is thwarted, and so on, and so on. No, almost I'm tempted to say the opposite. There are no authentic ways of life, or ways of life are traversed, cut with radical antagonisms. What is Indian way of life? It's one great struggle and so on. It's the same with China. The regime tries to propose some kind of Confucian way of life as specifically Chinese. No, it's a cover-up for almost permanent civil war in India, and so on, and so on. So again, we should be very open here and never talk about another's way of life. When I'm come to a society, I never ask "What's your way of life?" in a foreign country. I ask them, "What are your fights?" and try to orient—so for me, universalism is not a brotherhood of ways of life, I respect you, you respect me. No, universalism is: we have a struggle here, emancipation, workers' rights, feminists, and so on; they have their struggles. Can we bring these struggles together? Now comes my paradoxical result. Here I praise—but in a very sad, almost cynical way—here I praise the wisdom of British imperialism. For example, Indian way of life is embodied, this traditional caste system, in one of the most horrible books that I ever read: The Laws of Manu. It's basically a systematic description of the caste system in all these tiny daily material practices. And an obscene old guy like me, I love it, you know? Because, for example, you have there—oh my God, how I love it—descriptions like if you don't want, during sexual act, for a man—who cares about women in that book—to make her pregnant, and after you pull in the last minute out the penis, in what way should you turn around and in a correct way wipe your penis or whatever, and so on? It's madness. It's the madness—but what I want to say is this: Then I spoke with some Indians, good friends of mine, and then I checked it up with others, it's true. They gave me a wonderful explanation. They said, "Do you know that before British colonization in 17th century, this caste system was already disintegrating? But it got a great boost from the British occupation." Because the British got it immediately: if they try to impose their way of life, they would be breeding revolutionary proletariat, social chaos what capitalism brings. So literally, these Laws of Manu were rediscovered, printed by the British, and so on, because they got it that if the silent Indian majority is in the hands of the worst hierarchic patriarchy, it will make their rule much easier. So you know, this is already a nice example of how it's not, as some post-colonial theorists try to convince us, there are some harmonious—okay, maybe with conflicts but well-doing, living in natural balance, holistic, you know all that bullshit. We imperialists just come to a mountain and mine it. No, the authentic way is to ask the spirits of a mountain "Can we rape you?" and only then you do it and so on. No, the point—the point is that it's not like this. Is that paradoxically, authentic imperialism always was in this sense multicultural. Especially today, I claim. Are you aware what is happening now, the significance of the last political events? How precisely those countries who stand economically for the most radical open global capitalism, culturally move more and more towards some kind of authoritarian ethnic stance? China: I find no contradiction in the fact that on the one hand China insists on its Confucian legacy, not just Western culture. At the same time, as a very shrewd, I think, reaction to Trump's stupidities—you saw what Xi, the Chinese president, said a week ago or so. He presented himself and China as the true agent of global open market against protectionism and so on. The same with Erdogan in Turkey, the same in India with Modi, and so on, and so on. So again, we are encountering here real problems, that's all I'm saying. Let me take—mention, I learned it from a Tibetan friend this—a wonderful, terrifying example from Tibet. I am totally horrified by what the Chinese, by what the Chinese are doing there. I'm just asking you one thing: Don't paint Tibet as some kind of holistic, harmonious society which was then brutally destabilized by the Chinese intervention in '49 and especially later in '59. Look, I read this again—I was told by a friend and then I checked this up—in a book which is totally pro-Tibetan. You know that in ancient Tibet—and this lasted till '59, when the Chinese intervened directly because till '59, for the first ten years of occupation, the Chinese basically left the way of life as it was there. You know Tibet is mountains, just narrow path. So if two persons walking in the opposite direction meet on a path, one has to step aside. And it was strictly codified. Those who is lowest—let's say an ordinary guy meets a high priest or a feudal master—he has not only to step aside, but do a certain gesture, which is so disgusting, humiliating: adopt a specific—bow his head but at the same time make a specific expression with his face, like look with eyes as an idiot up, like basically you see what a disgusting idiot I am. And it's so nice, I like this, always being devil's advocate. When in the late '50s Chinese wanted to prohibit this, of course, what was the outcry? "Oh, imperialists, you are meddling in our way of life" and so on, and so on. Now, Chinese were extremely brutal, I agree. But the situation was more complex. You know when Red Guards in the mid-'60s were thousands of them ruining monasteries in Tibet and so on? It's nice to ask one simple question: Who were these Red Guardists? The rumor was Chinese brought them by trains, by planes and so on, hordes of wild... no. Now we know the data. You know how many Red Guardists came from China to Tibet? Between and All those thousands of people were their own dissatisfied young people. So again, what I'm saying is that it's a wrong opposition: specific way of life versus bad universal imperialism. Yes, the universality of imperialist culture is often oppressive, one-sided. But don't play particular culture as the good thing to resist universality. I think that the point is to show how our European universality is a false universality and true shared struggle impose another universality. Another thing I want to make clear here, that—I'm sorry—here psychoanalysis comes useful. Why is it so traumatic for people to really integrate into a society? You know these endless debates why some refugees don't want to be integrated. I just think that it's good to include also this element of enjoyment, enjoyment in the sense of regulating sexual mores and so on, and so on. This is what really a way of life is. Not some abstract cultural values but how you make love, how you laugh, how you treat authorities, and so on, and so on. That's the core of a way of life. So when I said some ways of life are incompatible, I was accused of being a Western racist and so on, and so on. No, I just claim that this is a real problem. In the sense that it's—what's my main point? Not we should impose some standards on others. No, no, no, we should be here very open to dialogue and so on, and so on. But my thesis—to put it in very abstract, even Hegelian terms—my thesis is that universality is not something above particular ways of life. In the sense that we have each our own way of life, but we are all universal. We love, but each of us loves in a different way and so on. No, universality is something that corrodes from within every way of life. For example, fighting for universality does not mean impose our universality on others. And the same goes for ourselves. But fighting for the universality which is part of our own way of life as the critical energy which fights all that is particular reactionary in it. For example, for me gay rights, abortion, and so on, it's universality fight in our culture. Women's rights and so on, struggles insofar as they emerge in Arab countries are their own fight for universality. And here it's very interesting point of how I learned from my Palestinian friends, even Israeli government, IDF, the occupation of the West Bank plays the same game as the British. They still have among Palestinians so-called honor killings. And the Israeli occupiers practically whenever possible ignore them, don't intervene, because they got the British lesson: that it's much better to dominate the West Bank, to have these traditional Palestinians with their honor killings and so on, and so on. So what we should connect to on the West Bank is those—and they exist, I know them, wonderful rapper singers and so on—people, cultural groups, women who are at the same time opposing Israeli occupation of the West Bank and their own traditional culture, claiming that they are ultimately on the same side. Rejecting this idea that simple recourse to one's traditional identity is enough to resist universal capitalism or whatever. Because you know, the way we organize our enjoyment, it's a very ambiguous one. Let me give you an example, sorry for this brief detour, but I love it. Are you watching now, it's very popular? Okay, now I do something for which I can be arrested. If you don't have it yet on your TV, go to Pirate Bay, you get it immediately. This new TV series based on Margaret Atwood's classical novel, The Handmaid's Tale. I watched this series—it's not even the full first year, but nonetheless—I watched it with pleasure. But then I caught myself enjoying it very much. And I was horrified. Why? Because then I asked my friends and the same suspicion was confirmed. I asked them, "Why do you like this series?" Their official excuse was because it depicts the danger of this Christian fundamentalist society where women are not allowed even to read, blah blah. But then I dug a little bit deeper and discovered that it's not as simple as that. What we enjoy, we find a strange perverted pleasure to enjoy this universe how women are controlled, all the details how this works and so on. There is a strange pleasure with it. Or to give you another example, which is even crazier, of this link between pleasure and guilt. I was shocked to read recently a report on a legal case in Mexico and the title of this report as it was reported in The Guardian says it all. Quote, "Mexican man cleared in sexual assault of schoolgirl because he didn't enjoy it." And then I emailed my Mexican friends and got the story. It's a wonderful one—wonderful in a terrifying sense. A group of three rich young men raped a young girl. One of them, the wealthiest of course from a family, was pardoned. Why? He—there was no debate about facts. It was all clear. But he, the guy, his defense was not "I didn't do that." He admitted that he—sorry to be tasteless in details—that he played with, squeezed the girl's breasts, he penetrated her vagina with fingers, all that. But his defense was that he acted without carnal intent. He didn't sexually enjoy it. And the judge claimed this makes him innocent. Because if he didn't enjoy it, it was not a sexual assault. Of course, feminists explode and protest. But what was—what was this judge thinking? My first idea was—I'm sorry if it appeared problematic, but I mean it in a totally honest way—I'm totally against any rape. But if I were to have to choose: a guy who rapes a girl in some kind of a blind passion and a guy who does it not even enjoying it, just in a cold way? Sorry, but for me the second thing is nonetheless minimally worse. Because fuck it, why did he do it if he didn't enjoy it? Obviously out of pure brutality, to humiliate her, to... he didn't even have the excuse of "I couldn't resist my passion" or whatever. Obviously, the silent premise of the judge was: experiencing pleasure as such makes us guilty. With quite a logical conclusion: if you didn't experience pleasure, you are not guilty. And I think this is maybe part of our Christian legacy, and it goes even further. The first step is: pleasure is guilty. But as every good psychoanalyst knows, you must bring this to the end. Not only pleasure makes us guilty, but without guilt there is no pleasure. And isn't this the maybe, I simplify, the basic premise of Protestantism? You know like as we say, that was a common saying when I was young, in Catholicism and in Protestantism you can do whatever you want. Just in Catholicism, if you confess it at the end of the week, it's okay; in Protestantism, if you feel guilty while you are doing it, it's okay. And you know, this is what I wanted to make clear with enjoyment. Yes, pleasure is pleasure, but guilt transforms simple—sorry, simple pleasure to enjoyment. You take away guilt, pleasure is just a stupid physiological pleasure. And I'm so sad I don't have time here to go deeply into this crucial opposition between pleasure and enjoyment. Enjoyment would be pleasure generated by all the detours and so on in our approach to pleasure. Like sex is not just, I see you, uh, I jump on you or whatever. Sex are all the detours of seduction and so on, and so on. There is no direct sex. Let me quote you an anecdote from my friend, the British Lacanian Darian Leader—I use it in just one of my books so it's safe to repeat it here—which I love it. He is a practicing analyst and he told me he had a patient who reported to him one, how do you call it, slip of the tongue—Fehlleistung—or what. He take a lady with whom he was flirting to a restaurant which was in the basement of a hotel. Of course, his dirty plan was a good dinner and then, "Oh, I'm tired, why don't we go up for a room" and so on, they do. But you know what happened? When he entered the restaurant, instead of saying "a table for two, please," he said "a room for two, a bed for two, please." Now, here you see that Darian Leader is a good psychoanalyst. His reading was not the obvious one, which is of course he was already thinking at sex, at sex. No, it was the opposite one. He was afraid that he will enjoy too much the food for pleasure, eating, and that this will make him forget why is he truly here: to sleep with the lady. So it was kind of an ethical reminder: don't get too much caught into eating, remember your true duty up there later, and so on. You know, this is why he was afraid in this sense of his enjoyment. Or another example, wonderful, of enjoyment another friend informed me about it who is now in United States—now that they have still a crisis—my friend of mine, in the evening wanted—so he went into one of these big Walmart mega stores. And noticed something very mysterious: close to the exit of the store there were many, how do you call it, those carts where you put what you want to buy, but still full there, full of stuff abandoned. And he asked a guy working for Walmart, "What does this mean?" and he told him something very tragic, almost beautiful: impoverished middle class who had this ordinary ritual of going to shop, now cannot afford it. So they came there just to do the ritual: they walk around, put stuff in, and so on, and then they leave it there, they go. It's a wonderful example how they get enjoyment without pleasure. I don't have time to show you another example which is the purest for me and it's terrifying. I hope you saw it, not to—to be terrorized, not to enjoy it. Joseph Goebbels' Totaler Krieg speech. Took it, you find it in versions at YouTube and so on. And you know what's so surprising? He doesn't promise pleasure. It's just more suffering. Like Goebbels said in almost Kantian terms: "Do you want a war which will be so total that you cannot even imagine how total it will be? Do you want to suffer so much more that you cannot even imagine how much you will suffer?" And it's an—this is really, in a terrifying sense, a great speech. Because there is no promise at the end, but at the end you will... no, he just promises more suffering. This is enjoyment, jouissance, at its purest without pleasure. So okay, now let me check it up because... Okay, okay, what I will do is this, if you allow me to go a little bit over: I wanted before coming to the conclusion to do another detour through apocalypse since we already—that how we and here I wanted also to refer to my good friend Robert Pfaller who is here, how this dimension of enjoyment beyond pleasure is as a rule embodied, enacted, in all those blind superfluous rituals and so on that accompany our acts of, as Robert Pfaller developed this in detail in one of the most wonderful institutions that I imagine, this is the title of one of his books: belief with no believer, with no bearer. You know, this is—was always for me the basic miracle of social life. How there are beliefs which can function socially without anyone believing in the first person. Like, allow me to repeat—I hope you don't know it—another wonderful story that really happened in my country in the '70s, ex-Yugoslavia. There was enough toilet paper in the stores. But a rumor started to circulate that there will be a shortage of toilet paper. So, now comes the beauty: what happened? People, in contrast to what we usually assume, did not distrust powers. They accepted it that there is enough toilet paper. But they reasoned in this way: "But what if there are some idiots who really think that there is not enough toilet paper, so to make it sure that they have they will start to buy it like crazy and there really will not be enough toilet paper? To prevent that, it's good for me now to go and buy a lot of toilet paper." So you see the point? Nobody believed that there really is not enough toilet paper. It's enough to presuppose that there is another one who believes in it and at the end the result is the same. I will not bore you here with the standard stories of that I like to repeat of—of these beliefs of other, of look Santa Claus, you know like ask parents "Do you believe in Santa Claus?" they say "Of course not, I'm not an idiot, I buy the presents." You ask children "Do you believe in Santa Claus?" "Of course not," so "Why do you act as if?" "Well, not to offend my parents and to get presents." You know like there are numerous examples of this belief which functions socially—beliefs without anyone in the first person believing in them. And we can go even a step further. Now, because I know that Robert doesn't quite like Hegel, I will make a Hegelian twist on his theory and introduce here *bestimmte Negation*. I will quote a joke, probably you know it, but I like to repeat it. One of the best jokes in Ninotchka, Ernst Lubitsch film, you know: a guy comes to a cafeteria and says "Can I get coffee without cream, please?" You know what's the answer? You must know he gets: "Sorry, we don't have cream, so I cannot really give you coffee without cream. But we have milk, so I can give you coffee without milk." You know, this is what Hegel meant with *bestimmte Negation*, you know that although it's materially the same coffee without, it's not the same coffee, it's without milk or without cream. And from my youth, oh those were paradise times—not really—communism, I remember we had exactly the same joke. You, when something was missing, for example—that was the joke, socialist joke—you enter a store and ask, "Do you already have or do you still not have let's say toilet paper?" And you know what was the classic answer: "Sorry, you are in the wrong store. We are not the store which doesn't have oil. The store which doesn't have toilet paper is the one across the street," and so on. So, but now you will think it's just a cheap joke. No, I don't have time to go into it and I hope Robert that for this what will add now I will be a little bit pardoned, not totally liquidated for Hegelian deviation, that I think that ideology mostly lies in this way today. It's not like it—it brings you coffee without milk and it claims that it brings you coffee without cream, how should I put it? You know what I mean, it's the—the implied negation which is a false one. How does this work? Well, I tried to develop it when I wrote a text—not the one in Independent but the one that I didn't yet get published, nobody wants to publish it, it is too crazy—about the French elections. I still think they are the lowest point of our so-called democracy. Why? Okay, we had Le Pen, we know what she is, proto-fascist, whatever you want. Although I don't like this term "proto-fascist" or "fascist." Not that she is any better. The problem is that don't you think that leftists are often quite lazy? They see something they don't like and instead of thinking what is specifically new here, you simply apply the old term, fascism. You miss the point, I think. But okay, we have Le Pen, we know what she is: danger. Then who is Macron? He is, it's clear, establishment at its purest. And when I just expressed some doubts in Macron, I was immediately accused of being a slave of fascism, of supporting fascism, and so on, and so on. So do you see the absurd situation? How—okay, I will repeat, you remember the Radio Yerevan joke? Let's ask Radio Yerevan: "Is it true that in France, Emmanuel Macron, independent outsider, united all the people in a great anti-fascist struggle and so on?" Again, in principle it's true, but (a) he is not an outsider but the very inside, and (b) he stands, he embodies the very politics which produced Marine Le Pen. He stands for what gives space to phenomena like—like Le Pen. So as a guy who hates me very much, he attacked me ferociously, a biographer of Michel Foucault, Didier Eribon. But he provided here a wonderful... he said, "The choice is this one: If you vote for Marine Le Pen now, you vote for Marine Le Pen. If you vote for Macron, a vote for Macron is a vote for Marine Le Pen four years from now in the future." That's all I meant, not that I am for Marine Le Pen. But this tragic closure, how—and so here what does this tell of ideology today? Alain Badiou at some point put it in a wonderful way when he wrote that the main function of ideological censorship today is not to crush actual resistance—repressive apparatuses do that—but to crush hope. To immediately denounce every critical project as opening a path at the end of which there is something like—like gulag. So I think that's the crucial thing that happened in France. You know, we had Marine Le Pen for what she is and we had establishment at its purest. No actual alternative. And the paradox being, if you wanted to move more to the left, you were proclaimed an instrument of the right. That's what centrist liberals like to do today. They claim there is no longer a difference between left and right, just between liberal openness, which means global capitalism the way we have it today, and right-wing—and right-wing populism. So I think that one of the great prospects—this makes me really sad for Europe—is that this standard politics will go on the way it is which brought us into trouble, just every four years we will be mobilized to vote for this politics in order to prevent the fascist danger, you know? And then if you will move to the left, they will say "No, no, objectively you serve—you serve—you serve fascism" and so on, and so on. So we are in a very sad situation. I had another long part but one has to, you know, at least from what I said now you know what—why people call me Fidel, not because of politics but you know, comrades, five minutes and then five hours, no? So I'm a little bit too long, I admit. But now if you asked me a more fundamental question: What can we do? What ethical attitude is the proper one today? When I say courage of hopelessness, I of course don't mean it we should just despair. I'm just saying that courage of hopelessness means not renounce hope, but get rid of the false solutions. Recognize a false solution which appears as a solution but it's really a train moving towards you. That's the only way to really invent something new. Now I will do something quite surprising—for some of you—I will show you a clip, have patience, some five-seven minutes, of a film which I really like. It's from this new Danish noir series about a detective called Carl Mørck. He designates himself as a terminally depressed detective. And this is towards the end, what you will see, of the film—original title is *Flaschenpost*, Message in a Bottle, but the title was very nicely changed in English to *A Conspiracy of Faith*. Just so that you see the situation—not yet, wait for half a minute after... the situation is that in a—in a small hut close to the coast in the sea, there are four people: there is this detective, terminally depressed detective, broken, chain there, uh, and then there is the serial murderer called Johannes. He holds in chain Mørck, inspector, as prisoner, and two kidnapped children, a boy and a girl. And Johannes is a pathological killer who presents himself as one of Devil's sons whose task is to destroy faith. And he says to Mørck, "And now I will take away your faith." And I just, if it will work, should I maybe put this away? I don't... what I try to render with my idea of courage of hopelessness, this is it. The beauty of this scene is for me not just that you see also a man who doesn't believe can be good. No, I'm more crazy. It's a radical atheist ethics in the sense of what I call atheist Christianity. In order to be really radically good or believer, but in this materialist sense, you have to survive the fact that there is no God, no guarantee, and so on. You have to go through this zero point. Of course, it would be easy to read this scene in a cheap religious point and said "But it's not true that God is not here. But God was here two times: when He wanted the detective, depressed, to sacrifice himself, and when the girl who is the sister of the drowned boy didn't want to take revenge." But my point again is what only very intelligent theologians even, some Protestants and so on, know: that ethics again not only is independent of belief in the sense of we can all be good—no, to be truly good you have not to believe in this sense. Of believing in any higher authority that controls you, directs you, provides general—provid... provides higher guarantee, and so on. That's so difficult to accept for us. The 20th-century Marxism was I think still part of this transcendent, almost religious ethics, you know like history is on our side, we act with accordance of history, we get direction from history. Today we have to act alone in this sense. There is no higher sense, there is no higher authority that will guarantee, provide meaning to our acts. There is no meaningful totality. It no longer works that classical teleology which was still operative in traditional Marxism, you know that the most disgusting metaphor I can imagine for religion: the so-called big painting metaphor, that we limited humans are like idiots staring at a picture—which means reality—too close and you see just stains. If you step back, you see that what appeared to you stains creates, contributes to the harmony of the entire picture. In my reading, atheist of Christianity, this is what dies on the cross. This idea of God as someone who when you are in deep shit you can say "But don't worry, there is a higher authority which provides guarantee." Well, tell this to gulag prisoners or to Jews in Auschwitz. "Don't worry, your suffering here is just a stain, step back and you will see how it contributes to the harmony of the universe." The proper Christian ethics is much more paradoxical. Is, no, your unique suffering here, insignificant as it may appear from the abstract standpoint of some cosmic perspective, this is what absolutely matters, this absolute engagement. This paradox, to put it in theological terms, although we are obviously a small piece of dust in a small planet as they say on the outskirts of our universe, but nonetheless in some existential sense—of course not literally but existentially—when you are in a difficult ethical predicament, your only experience is the whole world was created so that for me, you know, everything will be decided, the fate of the universe in this fight here and now. And that's how I even read the radical notion of love. It's not love in the sense—this Buddhist love, you know, "Oh, all the universe, all the living beings." No, love is unique. That person, and I don't care if all the world falls, disintegrates. That's why true love for me is not simply love for this on those reasons. It's there is an important... you know when you truly love someone, if you are asked "Why do you love him/her?" the only answer is "Because I cannot do it without. It's impossible simply to step out to leave behind." Love is not this cosmic, Buddhist, all-embracing perspective. Love is a link to an absolute singularity. It's a total imbalance in the universe. So that would be, if you ask me, my existential perspective, the only hope given to us today. You have to be radically atheist. We are approaching deep shit, it's clear, at multiple levels: ecological crisis, biogenetics, just name it. And I'm re... provoked to provoke you, Peter. I can do it because haha only leader will be able to ask questions, you will not be able to ask... I even think that Protestant predestination means this. It is predestination in the sense of our fate is decided. But the secret premise of Protestantism is not "Okay, if our fate is decided, so—sorry to be vulgar—let's sit down, get drunk, drugs, and watch pornography, who cares." No, you have to fight all the time. You know why? Because we are predestined, but we never can know what is our destiny. And that's for me paradoxically the highest freedom. The highest freedom is to guess, which of course it means select, create your eternal destiny. No matter how limited we are in our practical choices, we can always choose our destiny as it were. In—to put it in philosophical terms—and that's how we should react to today's crisis. We have a destiny, predes... we are predestined. If things go the way they go, in years either it will be a total ecological, social catastrophe, or in the best case, as Hollywood teaches us wisely, it will be in films like Hunger Games and so on, it will be a new class society: those who are in, those who are out of the cupola. It will be worse than the old class society. This is our destiny. And the thing to do is to radically change the entire frame, to change destiny itself, to change the entire perspective. That's why I think we should reject that simple strategy, you know: What are the realistic options? Let's diminish pollution a little bit, you know all this idea if—if temperature raised for two, two degrees it's still good, if for two and a half it's bad. These are totally imaginary numbers, I claim. That's superstition. No, we have as they say to change more radically our own way of life. Now you will say I'm dreaming. Listen, maybe I'm dreaming, but I'm not alone. Even intelligent conservatives know this. Read, please, the one who certainly is not a leftist Marxist, Peter Sloterdijk. In his book, *Was geschah im Jahrhundert?*, he paints very clearly this picture of unbridled capitalism and the nation-state logic of the highest ethics as sacrificing for your state brings catastrophe. A radical change is needed, and so on, and so on. Everybody knows it, my God. Capitalism is changing into something new we don't know what. And the horror why we are like that detective Mørck is that again, we cannot any longer rely on any safe Marxist teleology, you know like "Yeah, but progress, oh digitalization we will become whatever the stupidities are, singularity or a new brain" and so on, and so on. It's an open situation, we don't know where we are going. This is the wisdom of true revolutionaries. Robespierre and Saint-Just knew this exactly. Their metaphor was not "We revolutionaries are developing some higher necessity." The most beautiful metaphor of Saint-Just was, a revolutionary is like a navigator on a ship in the middle of a storm without a compass, and so on. And even Lenin at the end of his life in some tragic moments he wrote "We don't know at all what is happening," and so on. That's the only hope. I'm sorry if I was too long. That's nature. And I'm very extremely grateful for your patience. And I know like—I hope for a new Renaissance of Vienna to flatter you at the end, but I mean it seriously. You know that a little bit over years ago, your city was as they say in Star Wars, the center of the known universe? Name it: science, music, Schoenberg, all of them—I mean Freud—you were it, you were it. And you know why, Adorno... precisely because you were not at the center of technological inventions and so on, and so on. There was space for this and I just hope that you will become that again. I'm sure that the official big cities—Paris, London, New York—they are lost. It's chance with cities like yours here. Thank you very much and I'm sorry for... So let me repeat my old joke. Don't waste your energy now. When we take over in different official conferences, you will be forced to applaud, you know? Keep your energy for our dictators later, okay? Now, *jetzt Genosse Stalin wird einen kleinen Resümee mit kritischen Bemerkungen geben*. Slavoj, thank you very much for always interesting lecture and to be with us. I have here two pages of questions and I try... I hope you wrote the questions before knowing what I will talk about in a Stalinist way. To be honest, I choose the questions after, although during the lecture. And there was one interesting question fitting in the context of the film—question that we also got from listeners—yes, but before the lecture sent by email. And this question—it's really true—it was, how did you sleep yesterday? I mean, I know you love the detective stories and we saw the film, so maybe it fits to the film. What is the point of this question? To put it in a nice way, but if you put it the way you put it, it would be like as if yesterday I raped five children and so on. "How did you manage to sleep them?" No, I must tell you this, the same as you as a heavy diabetic, whatever problems I have, there are no problems with sleep. I sleep more than well. The only problem and I can confirm this the truth of Freud's interpretation—sorry, I rather go to this, yes, okay, the of Freud's reading of that famous "Father, seest thou not I am burning?"—*Vater, siehst du nicht, dass ich verbrenne?*. You know we don't just escape from traumatic situation into sleep and then dreams. What regularly happens, and it happens to me all the time, is that okay, there is something unpleasant going on, you escape you dream, but then the big question that Freud asks, a very naive question, is: Why do you awaken in the dream? His answer is implicit: You sleep, but then like he uses this example—you know we have so-called dreams which quickly incorporate an external disturbance so that you can continue to sleep, like the classic stupid things, it happened to me often, happens: something is disturbing your sleep, let's say phone ringing. What you do is quickly construct a dream in which a phone is ringing so that you gain time. Now the big question is, but why do you then awaken? The standard primitive answer is that simply the external intrusion gets too strong. Like you can, to be vulgar, go on sleeping if I just say something you can con... but if I start to beat you, there will be a limit, no? But Freud's answer is the opposite one. You escape from external disturbance into a dream. But what you then encounter in a dream can be the trauma of your life. So you in a dialectical sense, you awaken to be able to continue the dream which is the dream of your daily life. Let's say you are—you did something horrible, you want to forget it. And you dream, but you awaken when in the dream you confront that trauma. So it's a beautiful idea which is I think a correct one, not in this metaphysical or romantic sense "Our life is just a dream," but that our everyday reality is structured not as a dream but as an repression, *Verleugnung*, whatever of something traumatic. So that will be my answer: I have no problem falling asleep, but unfortunately I quite often awaken in... the problem is awakening. I awaken in nightmares, confronting different traumas and so on, and so on. So that would be the answer. Very good answer. So the second question—interesting question, but not so far away from your theories—is, do you think politics and comedy has something in common? Yes, but on one condition. My God, I didn't pay you for these questions because they are so till now so easy and nice that... you know what's crucial if you permit me a brief improvisation here? The crucial thing is to learn and I often develop this point that comedy is not only the easy thing. When things get really horrible, then they are too horrible to do a tragedy out of them. The only thing you can can do is a comedy. The idea came to me—I'm sorry if you know some of you this line of thought of mine—I approach the question: why is it that all good films about Holocaust are comedies? Because again it's too horrible to... for example, let's imagine that you were to do a heroic tragedy. A Nazi torturer approaching a Jew and a Jew says heroically, "You can kill me but not break my spirit," opens his shirt or whatever. It underestimates the horror of concentration camp or at the... you know, you are so broken down that from—for an external view at least—it's a comedy. You know where also came this idea to me? Did you—did you read, I hope you did, Primo Levi, *Se questo un uomo*, If This Is a Man? And I discovered that some of the most horrifying scenes that he depicts are objectively comic scenes. Like you know when you had once a month or every two months in Auschwitz so-called *seleksja* in Polish, selection. All inmates had to run quickly in front of an SS doctor, just half a second, and you just put you into one of the two lists: to be burnt or to... and how it was a whole comedy to do it. The prisoners exchanged advices how—the point was to appear healthy, no? So how to pinch your skin to appear more lively red, how to—even if you are that tired and exhausted—that you appear strong. It's a comedy. But it's even the worst of Auschwitz, the so-called *Muselmänner*, the Muslims, the living dead. The way they acted was like comic dolls and that's the... it's not a comedy where you laugh, it's comedy at its most terrifying. That's—I wonder if you would agree—I'm sorry if I already developed at some of my other talks here this point. You saw the movie to which I'm opposed although it fits my description of concentration camp comedy, Benigni, *La Vita Bella*. I think the movie cheats because first, it's not comical enough at the very end when father sacrifices himself for the son and mocks as if "They take me away" but he knows he will die and when the son at the very end describes this to his, I don't know who... at that point you are supposed even to cry probably, I don't know. It's not—I think, that's why I'm telling you this, where does the film cheat? How to make
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a truly desperate film? You know the story, I will be very brief: father and son are captured in Italy as Jews sent to Auschwitz. There father in order to spare the son of the horror tells to the son a story with a different spin. He said "We can leave whenever we want, this is just one big competition for a prize. If you stay here, if you don't escape, then at the end we will get some big prize," whatever blah blah. And the tragedy is that allegedly the son doesn't suspect the truth and father in this way saves the son
a truly desperate film? You know the story, I will be very brief: father and son are captured in Italy as Jews sent to Auschwitz. There father in order to spare the son of the horror tells to the son a story with a different spin. He said "We can leave whenever we want, this is just one big competition for a prize. If you stay here, if you don't escape, then at the end we will get some big prize," whatever blah blah. And the tragedy is that allegedly the son doesn't suspect the truth and father in this way saves the son
Slavoj Žižek
from too big a trauma. But imagine there would have been a way to make a movie much more horrible along
from too big a trauma. But imagine there would have been a way to make a movie much more horrible along
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the lines of the story
the lines of the story
Slavoj Žižek
that I said about Santa Claus. What if just before he is taken away to be shot, the father—Benigni himself—were to learn that
that I said about Santa Claus. What if just before he is taken away to be shot, the father—Benigni himself—were to learn that
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his son, he pretended to his son this is just a comedy,
his son, he pretended to his son this is just a comedy,
Slavoj Žižek
his son knew the truth all the time and he also pretended to believe his father just not to make it too harsh for his father and so on? That would have been what I would have called in Kierkegaard's term infinite resignation and so on. I think that the other horrible film with—how is it called—*Pasqualino Settebellezze*, maybe you know it, it's another desperate—I think it's Liliana Cavani or Lina Wertmüller, Holocaust comedy, is much better because at the end when laughter stops you don't get some sublime moment of crying, you just get total despair and so on, and so on. You know? Sorry, as they say, you know when I was young we were still reading, now it's forgotten, Karl May, Winnetou, and then the chief said at the end "Howgh, ich habe gesprochen." So, *ich habe gesprochen*, sorry, you know... Okay, the last question: what do you think about Austrian politics at the moment? Ah, it's very difficult for me to talk
his son knew the truth all the time and he also pretended to believe his father just not to make it too harsh for his father and so on? That would have been what I would have called in Kierkegaard's term infinite resignation and so on. I think that the other horrible film with—how is it called—*Pasqualino Settebellezze*, maybe you know it, it's another desperate—I think it's Liliana Cavani or Lina Wertmüller, Holocaust comedy, is much better because at the end when laughter stops you don't get some sublime moment of crying, you just get total despair and so on, and so on. You know? Sorry, as they say, you know when I was young we were still reading, now it's forgotten, Karl May, Winnetou, and then the chief said at the end "Howgh, ich habe gesprochen." So, *ich habe gesprochen*, sorry, you know... Okay, the last question: what do you think about Austrian politics at the moment? Ah, it's very difficult for me to talk
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about Austrian
about Austrian
Slavoj Žižek
politics without laughing, but not for the reasons that you think. No, no, no, you are wrong. You know that the name of your Foreign Minister who will now even maybe be your Prime Minister, Kurz—in my Slovene language this is an extremely vulgar term for penis. Much worse than *Schwanz* and so on. So when they say Kurz is coming to Ljubljana, everybody dies laughing, you know? And I think that in a way—ah, even now that Kurz will visit Slovenia, the titles in Slovene was "Kurz is looking at you" and this sounds because you say "kurc te gleda," like when I'm tired with you I say "kurc te gleda" like "let the prick look at you," which means "fuck off," you know? No, but I'm saying that although he is supposed to be intelligent, nice, well, maybe ultimately he is *ein einfaches Kurz* in Slovenian, you know? That he could have done much more precisely taking
politics without laughing, but not for the reasons that you think. No, no, no, you are wrong. You know that the name of your Foreign Minister who will now even maybe be your Prime Minister, Kurz—in my Slovene language this is an extremely vulgar term for penis. Much worse than *Schwanz* and so on. So when they say Kurz is coming to Ljubljana, everybody dies laughing, you know? And I think that in a way—ah, even now that Kurz will visit Slovenia, the titles in Slovene was "Kurz is looking at you" and this sounds because you say "kurc te gleda," like when I'm tired with you I say "kurc te gleda" like "let the prick look at you," which means "fuck off," you know? No, but I'm saying that although he is supposed to be intelligent, nice, well, maybe ultimately he is *ein einfaches Kurz* in Slovenian, you know? That he could have done much more precisely taking
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into account the unique Austrian position. Even Kreisky, I think, as much as I don't like these *jouisseur* decadent
into account the unique Austrian position. Even Kreisky, I think, as much as I don't like these *jouisseur* decadent
Slavoj Žižek
types as... but wasn't Bruno Kreisky—okay, he was chancellor, but nonetheless—actually he was much more I think intelligent in playing, in knowing how to nonetheless play an international role with this unique neither here nor there Austrian position. Like your position enables you to do more, I claim, your unique geopolitical position. But listen, if this is all you have, why don't we break all the rules of it's prohibited—I know it's horrible for old-fashioned like us—and allow at least symbolically one question from
types as... but wasn't Bruno Kreisky—okay, he was chancellor, but nonetheless—actually he was much more I think intelligent in playing, in knowing how to nonetheless play an international role with this unique neither here nor there Austrian position. Like your position enables you to do more, I claim, your unique geopolitical position. But listen, if this is all you have, why don't we break all the rules of it's prohibited—I know it's horrible for old-fashioned like us—and allow at least symbolically one question from
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there? One, so that
there? One, so that
Slavoj Žižek
then we can say "But the public also debated" and so on, you know? Because I feel bad, even the better thing would be to—this is deepest anti-feminist manipulation—to have a lady ask the question so that we can say "But
then we can say "But the public also debated" and so on, you know? Because I feel bad, even the better thing would be to—this is deepest anti-feminist manipulation—to have a lady ask the question so that we can say "But
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no, ladies were also,"
no, ladies were also,"
Slavoj Žižek
you know? Sorry, do you agree? Did I say something too much? Like at least one question if you want to because I really, all the jokes that I made but like maybe, maybe we shouldn't totally dominate the people. Do any of you... ah, yes, sorry, you are. *Sie können Frage auf Deutsch stellen, wenn Sie wollen.* I'll start in English. Okay. You say the problem in France is that after four years of Macron, you will have maybe Le Pen. Because the causes which will... yes. In German we say: *Besser ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende.* In this sense, would it have been better—would it have been better to have like in the United States, choose Le Pen right away, or Trump, the incident, and we have the horror now but the end? I know what you are saying and when I said—although I was misunderstood—that I prefer Trump, I was attacked for the same reason. My thing would have... yes, you know what I hoped? No, in France I didn't support Le Pen because I think she is more dangerous with all the openly fascist tradition than Trump. But listen, I think still basically I was right. My logic was this one: First, and we can see it clearly now, no, Trump is a confused guy, he is not a fascist and so on. My... he is evil, dangerous. My point was this one about Trump: only a kind of a shock which hopefully will not be too dangerous can awaken the American Left. I hoped for a more dynamic, faced with the trauma of Trump's victory, in the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, it's horror what is now happening, and as some of my leftist friends like Cornel West said, it's not the problem of United States now, it's not even primarily Trump, it's the catastrophic reaction to him of Democratic Party. They were first horrified, Trump the end of the world, now Democratic Party is radically renormalizing Trump. Nancy Pelosi said recently, "Don't be afraid, Trump is like Reagan or Bush, after four or eight years we'll be back," and the Democratic Party establishment is now using all its energy not to really fight Trump but to throw out the Bernie Sanders danger. So I still—you know, it's not an a priori statement. I'm not this old-fashioned crazy Marxist like Communists in Germany '33, *besser Hitler*, the lines would be clear. It's a very strategic statement. I'm just afraid as I said that we are entering a new cycle—isn't this a very sad prospect? But what you said, I deeply appreciate that logic, because do you remember, I think I found a wonderful example, even with my limited knowledge of German, I remember some years ago was it, when against Kohl the candidate was Hans-Jochen Vogel. And I know
you know? Sorry, do you agree? Did I say something too much? Like at least one question if you want to because I really, all the jokes that I made but like maybe, maybe we shouldn't totally dominate the people. Do any of you... ah, yes, sorry, you are. *Sie können Frage auf Deutsch stellen, wenn Sie wollen.* I'll start in English. Okay. You say the problem in France is that after four years of Macron, you will have maybe Le Pen. Because the causes which will... yes. In German we say: *Besser ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende.* In this sense, would it have been better—would it have been better to have like in the United States, choose Le Pen right away, or Trump, the incident, and we have the horror now but the end? I know what you are saying and when I said—although I was misunderstood—that I prefer Trump, I was attacked for the same reason. My thing would have... yes, you know what I hoped? No, in France I didn't support Le Pen because I think she is more dangerous with all the openly fascist tradition than Trump. But listen, I think still basically I was right. My logic was this one: First, and we can see it clearly now, no, Trump is a confused guy, he is not a fascist and so on. My... he is evil, dangerous. My point was this one about Trump: only a kind of a shock which hopefully will not be too dangerous can awaken the American Left. I hoped for a more dynamic, faced with the trauma of Trump's victory, in the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, it's horror what is now happening, and as some of my leftist friends like Cornel West said, it's not the problem of United States now, it's not even primarily Trump, it's the catastrophic reaction to him of Democratic Party. They were first horrified, Trump the end of the world, now Democratic Party is radically renormalizing Trump. Nancy Pelosi said recently, "Don't be afraid, Trump is like Reagan or Bush, after four or eight years we'll be back," and the Democratic Party establishment is now using all its energy not to really fight Trump but to throw out the Bernie Sanders danger. So I still—you know, it's not an a priori statement. I'm not this old-fashioned crazy Marxist like Communists in Germany '33, *besser Hitler*, the lines would be clear. It's a very strategic statement. I'm just afraid as I said that we are entering a new cycle—isn't this a very sad prospect? But what you said, I deeply appreciate that logic, because do you remember, I think I found a wonderful example, even with my limited knowledge of German, I remember some years ago was it, when against Kohl the candidate was Hans-Jochen Vogel. And I know
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enough of vulgar German
enough of vulgar German
Slavoj Žižek
that I know *verkohlt* means *verbrannt* with Kohl, no, and *vervögelt* means we know what. And one of the leftist motto was a nice lady saying "*Besser vervögelt als verkohlt*," you know? I like it, I'm sorry. But what I'm so—saying to: no, I'm not so crazy, I'm well aware of dangers. I just—I'm desperate, I know all the risks. And again in France, Le Pen is not innocent. We are witnessing—entering now a terrible new era. Not so much France, not even you Austria, but some of post-communist East European countries, my own Croatia, Hungary, up to a point Poland, Baltic countries. A new narrative is emerging, which is terrifying, which is: not only rehabilitation or rehabilitation, denial whatever of Holocaust, but the idea is this one: to cut a long story short, Holocaust was organized by Jews. How and why? Jews wanted to dominate Europe, to ruin Christianity, and in a cold calculation they knew that Germany is the only hard moment defending Europe—French are degenerate and British are in their island—so
that I know *verkohlt* means *verbrannt* with Kohl, no, and *vervögelt* means we know what. And one of the leftist motto was a nice lady saying "*Besser vervögelt als verkohlt*," you know? I like it, I'm sorry. But what I'm so—saying to: no, I'm not so crazy, I'm well aware of dangers. I just—I'm desperate, I know all the risks. And again in France, Le Pen is not innocent. We are witnessing—entering now a terrible new era. Not so much France, not even you Austria, but some of post-communist East European countries, my own Croatia, Hungary, up to a point Poland, Baltic countries. A new narrative is emerging, which is terrifying, which is: not only rehabilitation or rehabilitation, denial whatever of Holocaust, but the idea is this one: to cut a long story short, Holocaust was organized by Jews. How and why? Jews wanted to dominate Europe, to ruin Christianity, and in a cold calculation they knew that Germany is the only hard moment defending Europe—French are degenerate and British are in their island—so
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Germany has to be
Germany has to be
Slavoj Žižek
broken. They consciously
broken. They consciously
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provoked Hitler to do the Holocaust so that now Germany is just in this regressive mood, non-aggressive, accepting refugees. Now come with the second
provoked Hitler to do the Holocaust so that now Germany is just in this regressive mood, non-aggressive, accepting refugees. Now come with the second
Slavoj Žižek
point: the claim is there is no Arab-Israeli conflict, it's just a mask to blind us, the Arab invasion, refugees of Europe is a Jewish plot to ruin Europe. Why I'm telling you this, not to shock you, but for one reason: isn't this sad, and Trump is part of the same movement, this regression, decadence of public speech? Such rumors were circulating all the time, but till five years ago, maybe ten, they were a private obscenity. You talk like this if you're crazy with your friends at an *Gaststätte* or where. Now they more and more penetrate the public speech. I think this is a catastrophe. So that's how the title of the book is meant. Not the final countdown, will we be swallowed by refugees. No, I think we should be more proud but in the right way as Europeans. European legacy of enlightenment and so on, it's a great legacy. The true threat to it are not refugees, our own defenders of Europe are the true threat to it. Imagine Europe when Le Pen is a president in France and so on. That would no longer have been Europe. Whatever maybe if there is still worth fighting for in Europe. But again, to calm you down, I'm not totally crazy in just engaging in provocations. I'm just deeply afraid if just this type of conflicts will get repeated: Macron-Le Pen, Macron-Le Pen, then at certain point Le Pen will win. We have to change the field. That's my only point. Thank you, Slavoj, very much. *Ich danke Ihnen. Danke. Und als ich zu sagen pflege in meinem provokanten Stil, unter Verwendung von sehr problematischen Begriffen: Wir sollen immer Einsatzbereit sein in unser Kampf für Freiheit und... I like to use the term Einsatzbereit in different way.* Thank you very much, I was proud to be this.
point: the claim is there is no Arab-Israeli conflict, it's just a mask to blind us, the Arab invasion, refugees of Europe is a Jewish plot to ruin Europe. Why I'm telling you this, not to shock you, but for one reason: isn't this sad, and Trump is part of the same movement, this regression, decadence of public speech? Such rumors were circulating all the time, but till five years ago, maybe ten, they were a private obscenity. You talk like this if you're crazy with your friends at an *Gaststätte* or where. Now they more and more penetrate the public speech. I think this is a catastrophe. So that's how the title of the book is meant. Not the final countdown, will we be swallowed by refugees. No, I think we should be more proud but in the right way as Europeans. European legacy of enlightenment and so on, it's a great legacy. The true threat to it are not refugees, our own defenders of Europe are the true threat to it. Imagine Europe when Le Pen is a president in France and so on. That would no longer have been Europe. Whatever maybe if there is still worth fighting for in Europe. But again, to calm you down, I'm not totally crazy in just engaging in provocations. I'm just deeply afraid if just this type of conflicts will get repeated: Macron-Le Pen, Macron-Le Pen, then at certain point Le Pen will win. We have to change the field. That's my only point. Thank you, Slavoj, very much. *Ich danke Ihnen. Danke. Und als ich zu sagen pflege in meinem provokanten Stil, unter Verwendung von sehr problematischen Begriffen: Wir sollen immer Einsatzbereit sein in unser Kampf für Freiheit und... I like to use the term Einsatzbereit in different way.* Thank you very much, I was proud to be this.