The Empowerment of the Right and the Dissolution of the Left
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2011-11-05 · 1:24:25 · 11,180 words
ideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticscapitalismphilosophy-generalcinema-art-culturetechnology-ai-cyberspaceliberalism-political-correctnessrevolution-violencedemocracyeconomicsreligion-theologyeveryday-lifesubjectivitylanguage
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture at the Jan van Eyck Academy covering the material weight of ideology, the role of theory versus expertise, and the dialectical logic of negativity. He moves from a reading of the SixthSense wearable interface as an ideological apparatus, through Malebranche's Occasionalism, Lacanian jokes about negation, and John Carpenter's They Live, to a political economy of unemployment following Fredric Jameson, ultimately arguing for a rehabilitation of exploitation over domination, a progressive Leitkultur, and a reversal of the intellectual/people relation in which protesters are 'answers' to questions theorists must still formulate.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
By analogy with the military-industrial complex, Žižek designates the US healthcare system as a comparable ideological-economic apparatus spending twice as much and equally structuring political debate.
as “post-political cultural capitalism”
Žižek's term for the current regime in which all conflicts are reduced to cultural differences to be 'tolerated', displacing genuine economic and political antagonisms.
as “way of life ecology”
His term for the ideological reduction of the ecological crisis to small personal rituals (recycling a can, separating newspapers) that generate individual satisfaction while the systemic problem disappears.
Shakespeare's phrase (A Midsummer Night's Dream) recruited to define poetic/political imagination as the capacity to materialise the genuinely new, nothing, rather than merely misperceive or transfigure what already exists.
Chesterton's ironic figure (adopted and critiqued by Žižek) of a detective who reads philosophical texts for proto-criminal tendencies, used to characterise the liberal anti-totalitarian move of tracing totalitarianism to metaphysical 'totality'.
Not a harmonious whole but a whole plus all its distortions and contradictions, so that apparent violations of an idea (e.g. prostitution vis-à-vis marriage) are immanent to the idea itself.
as “ideological camera / SixthSense as ideology”
Žižek coins the SixthSense wearable projector as a literal materialisation of ideology's mechanism: it naturalises the Big Other by making ideological projections appear as inherent properties of objects.
as “Big Other”
The inconsistent network or texture of ideological prejudices that coordinates our contact with reality, analogised here to God in Malebranche's Occasionalism.
as “over-orthodox theologian”
Žižek's label for thinkers like Malebranche who draw all consequences of a position so absurdly literally that the absurdity reveals the nonsense of the original premise.
Malebranche's doctrine that mind and body cannot directly interact and God coordinates every apparent causal connection; Žižek uses it as an allegory for how ideology (the Big Other) mediates our contact with reality.
as “coffee without cream / coffee without milk”
Žižek's signature illustration of Hegelian negativity: that what a thing lacks (its absent supplement) constitutes its identity, so two positively identical objects can be different by virtue of differing absences.
The Hegelian insight that what is absent from a thing determines it as much as what is present: coffee without milk is not the same as coffee without cream even if positively identical.
Implicitly at work in the commodity logic: coffee is never fully itself, requiring a supplement (milk, cream, or tautologically itself) to close the gap of desire.
The elusive surplus-object within a commodity illustrated by the plastic toy inside a Kinder Egg, which is what the consumer really desires beyond the commodity's material content.
as “ideologico-critical sunglasses”
The sunglasses in They Live that reveal hidden ideological injunctions beneath consumerist imagery, used by Žižek to argue that ideology requires active conceptual work ('glasses') to see through, not naive direct perception.
Implied in the analysis of structural unemployment: workers who drop out of the production process are still fully included in, and produced by, global capitalism as totality.
The classic Marxist category expanded by Jameson/Žižek to include entire populations and failed states permanently excluded from the capitalist modernisation project.
as “domination vs. exploitation”
Žižek's polemical distinction: he argues for rehabilitating exploitation (Marxist) over domination (Foucaultian/Agambenian) because capitalism can reproduce exploitation even without formal domination.
as “Leitkultur (progressive)”
Žižek reclaims Leitkultur not as ethnic domination but as a necessary set of basic emancipatory norms (feminism, tolerance, equality) without which multicultural coexistence is impossible; he turns the right-wing concept against the right.
as “protesters as answers not questions”
Žižek's reversal of the vanguard-intellectual model: ordinary protesters already embody answers to historical problems, and intellectuals' task is to formulate the right questions to which those answers correspond.
Stories he reaches for 8
A customer orders coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream but can offer coffee without milk. Even though the result is identical, the absent supplement matters, Hegelian negativity in a joke.
“"Sorry, but we have run out of cream. Can I bring you coffee without milk?"”
At Starbucks, buying an overpriced coffee already includes a donation to Guatemalan farmers, so anti-consumerist humanitarian guilt-relief is literally part of the price. The consumer pays for the right to consume without guilt in a single transaction.
“To be a good citizen, caring and so on, is literally part of the price... you feel bad as a consumer, you pay a little bit more and the anti-consumerist humanitarian charity is included into the price.”
In Carpenter's They Live, an unemployed worker finds sunglasses that reveal the true ideological injunctions beneath consumer imagery. Žižek uses this to argue that ideology requires active work (wearing glasses) to see through, and that contemporary ideology places the order implicitly, the bribe explicitly, the reverse of classical ideology.
“It goes against our spontaneous ideological perception... You need glasses. You need violence, work on yourself, to see the way things are.”
In Brassed Off, a man accompanies a woman home; she offers coffee; he says he doesn't drink coffee; she says no problem, she has none. The double negation produces an obscene erotic invitation without any explicit content.
“"I don't drink coffee." Her answer: "No problem, I don't have any coffee."”
China prohibited fiction involving time travel or alternate realities, Žižek reads this as a paradoxically good sign: Chinese people can still imagine alternative societies, whereas in the West we need no such prohibition because political imagination is already constrained.
“It's too dangerous even to allow people to dream about possible different societies. But I think this is a good sign for China.”
From The Man Who Was Thursday: a philosophical policeman detects crimes not from diaries but from books of sonnets, he reads future crimes in present philosophy. Žižek uses this to critique the Popperian/Adornian move of tracing totalitarianism to philosophical totality.
“The ordinary detective discovers from a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed.”
Žižek cites Hobsbawm: all that Scottish Highland culture (kilts etc.) is a late 19th-century invention, illustrating Malebranche's fossil-planting God as the model for ideological false pasts.
“All that Scottish bullshit with skirts, kilts, this is all late 19th century, of course.”
From A Midsummer Night's Dream: madman misperceives a bush as a bear; lover sees the divine in the beloved's imperfect face; poet gives to airy nothing a local habitation. Žižek uses this to define poetry/theory as the materialization of genuine novelty, not misperception, not transfiguration, but creation from nothing.
“The poet gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”
Works invoked 19
Capital book
Marx's Capital is said to need rereading with focus on the category of unemployment, following Jameson.
Ninotchka film
Lubitsch film providing the coffee-without-cream joke; Žižek calls it 'the best introduction into Hegelian notion of negativity'.
They Live film
John Carpenter film described as 'primitive Hollywood Marxism, but in a good sense'; used extensively to analyse the structure of ideology, the reversal of visible/hidden, and the need for critical glasses.
Communist Manifesto book
Cited for Marx's classic line that marriage is ultimately a form of prostitution, an example of Hegelian totality in which the distortion (prostitution) is immanent to the institution (marriage).
Brassed Off film
English working-class drama with the 'I don't drink coffee / I don't have any coffee' scene, used to illustrate double negation and implicit erotic invitation as model for ideology's implicit logic.
Chesterton's novel providing the figure of the philosophical policeman; Žižek uses it critically to expose the liberal anti-totalitarian move while admiring Chesterton as his favourite theologian.
Hobsbawm-edited collection cited to show that apparently ancient traditions (Scottish kilts) are recent fabrications, used to illustrate how ideology creates false pasts, like God planting fossils.
The Soul book
Platonov short story collection with John Berger's afterword; the afterword provides the key formula: multitudes have answers to questions not yet posed, providing the model for Žižek's intellectual/people reversal.
High Noon film
Classic Western cited alongside Shane as Bazin's example of tautological meta-Western; Žižek says he doesn't like it too much personally.
Quoted extensively for the madman/lover/poet triad; Žižek finds the formulation 'beautiful' and uses it as the foundation for his theory of political imagination as materialisation of nothing.
Pursued film
Raoul Walsh Western noir with Robert Mitchum; cited as a 'very good one' in the meta-Western taxonomy.
Cited as example of Western-musical hybrid in the meta-Western taxonomy, Western supplemented by another genre.
Shane film
Classic Western cited (via Bazin) as a meta-Western whose supplement is Western itself, a tautological self-supplementation producing mythic purity. Žižek says he doesn't like it too much personally.
Arnolfini Portrait artwork
Jan van Eyck's painting used as a metaphor for theory: the mirror in the painting reflects what is outside the frame, just as theory must reflect the productive process back into the ideological scene.
Go West film
Marx Brothers film (described as one of their 'bad late movies') providing the Groucho 'don't count the money' joke used to illustrate ideology's implicit implications.
The DSM's categorisations are described as having enormous material weight because they determine what treatments insurance will cover, illustrating that 'minor theoretical points' have hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.
Descartes' method of radical doubt, asking whether his own culture seems as ridiculous to others as other cultures do to him, is cited as the beginning of true multiculturalism.
Representing Capital book
Fredric Jameson's book quoted for the structural inseparability of unemployment from capitalist accumulation and the world market as a space where labour prices itself out of the system.
Heidegger's text about declining the Berlin professorship by consulting an old farmer is mocked as a staged fantasy of popular wisdom that merely confirms what the philosopher already wanted to hear.
People invoked 48
André Bazin positive
French film theorist cited for his analysis of Shane and High Noon as 'pure' meta-Westerns whose supplement is Western itself, used to illustrate tautological self-supplementation.
David Cameron negative
Cited alongside Merkel as proposing the wrong kind of Leitkultur.
Friend of Žižek whose girlfriend Sarah Kamens campaigned against the DSM categorisation; mentioned as part of the opening political anecdote.
Geert Wilders negative
Cited as a right-wing populist who is the true threat to European civilisation, not its defender; Žižek imagines Europe under Wilders as no longer Europe in any meaningful sense.
John Carpenter positive
Director of They Live, which Žižek praises as 'primitive Hollywood Marxism, but in a good sense' and uses extensively to analyse ideology's structure.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Member of Žižek's 'Slovene-Lacanian party troika'; credited with drawing attention to the Ninotchka coffee joke and the Brassed Off scene as illustrations of Hegelian negativity.
Claude Lévi-Strauss positive
Cited for the insight that the prohibition of incest is not a question but an answer to an unknown question, used as the model for Žižek's reversal of the intellectual/people relation.
Philippe Van Parijs negative
His basic income proposal is presented as a proposed solution to unemployment that Žižek does not agree with, because it aims to save capitalism rather than transform it.
Theodor W. Adorno negative
Grouped with Popper and Levinas as philosophical police detecting totalitarianism in metaphysics of presence/totality.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
Grouped with Popper and Adorno in the philosophical police critique; anti-totality position used as a foil.
Jacques Lacan positive
Invoked for the concept of the Big Other (as network of ideological prejudices coordinating reality) and objet petit a; central theoretical resource throughout.
John Rawls negative
His principle that inequality is acceptable if it benefits the worst-off and is merit-based is called 'madness' by Žižek, who argues meritocracy produces more resentment and violence than contingent inequality.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Called 'my favorite theologian'; his philosophical policeman from The Man Who Was Thursday is used critically to expose the liberal anti-totalitarian move.
Donald Rumsfeld negative
Used as the example of a political actor who relies on implicit implications (torture, private business enrichment) rather than explicit statements, the Marx Brothers joke applied to US imperial policy.
Francis Fukuyama negative
His end-of-history thesis, that liberal democracy and welfare capitalism are the goal all countries are approaching, is implicitly rejected as a failure to grasp capitalism as totality including its monstrous supplements.
Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens negative
Called 'a postmodern idiot' for telling displaced workers to 'reinvent yourself', symptom of the liberal ideology that naturalises structural unemployment.
Identified as the Indian MIT Media Lab developer of the SixthSense wearable interface, used as the key example of ideological naturalisation.
Nicolas Malebranche positive
Called 'a total madman whom I like' and 'a genius'; his Occasionalism is used as the key allegory for how the Big Other mediates our contact with reality; his theory of the Fall as fall from Occasionalism is presented as the funniest definition of original sin.
Mentioned in passing ('in Negri-hard terms') in relation to John Berger's use of 'multitudes'.
Giorgio Agamben negative
Cited alongside Foucault as representative of the domination/Homo Sacer paradigm that Žižek argues mystifies capitalist exploitation.
Andrei Platonov positive
Russian writer whose short story collection The Soul (with Berger's afterword) provides the reversal of the intellectual/people formula; Žižek says he increasingly likes Platonov's later texts.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited on the unimaginability of alternatives to capitalism and on structural unemployment from Representing Capital; Žižek says he 'deeply agrees' with Jameson's analysis.
Eric Hobsbawm positive
Cited for The Invention of Tradition and its demonstration that supposed ancient traditions (Scottish kilts) are recent fabrications, used to illustrate the ideological construction of false pasts.
Žižek says he doesn't idealize him but defends him against the Swedish extradition, which he regards as based on an absurd, unfounded application of an archaic law.
John Berger positive
His afterword to Platonov's The Soul is cited approvingly for the formulation that multitudes have answers to questions not yet posed.
Mladen Dolar positive
Another member of the Slovenian Lacanian trio; wrote on the fossil-planting God theory and introduced Žižek to the Jan van Eyck Academy; mentioned warmly as a friend.
James Cameron negative
Mentioned negatively as representing 'disgusting' Hollywood Marxism, in contrast to Carpenter's good version.
Michel Foucault negative
Cited (with Agamben) as representing the 'postmodern trick' of focusing on domination and microphysics of power at the expense of exploitation.
Jörg Haider negative
Austrian far-right politician cited alongside Wilders and Le Pen as example of the internal threat to European emancipatory heritage.
Martin Heidegger negative
His 'Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?' text is mocked for staging a farmer's approval as folk wisdom that validates Heidegger's own pre-formed conclusion, an example of false celebration of ordinary people's wisdom.
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Director of Ninotchka, whose coffee-without-cream joke is called 'the best introduction into Hegelian notion of negativity'.
Mentioned as representing a Sweden of higher political standards, in contrast with the current Sweden willing to extradite Assange.
Angela Merkel negative
Cited as proposing the wrong kind of Leitkultur (ethnically or conservatively conceived) rather than a progressive one.
Mao Zedong positive
Cited for the 'swim with the people but don't drown with them' remark, treated as wiser than the pseudo-Maoist celebration of popular wisdom.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited for the idea that capitalism is a form of religion/metaphysics in which capital must circulate regardless of personal gain.
His Social Contract is cited as an example of a philosophical text from which Popperian philosophical police would claim to detect future totalitarian crime.
William Shakespeare positive
A Midsummer Night's Dream quoted at length for the madman/lover/poet triad; Žižek presents the formulation as 'beautiful' and builds his theory of political imagination on it.
Jean-Marie Le Pen negative
French far-right politician cited as example of the internal threat to European emancipatory heritage.
Director of Pursued (Western noir with Robert Mitchum), cited in the meta-Western taxonomy.
Žižek says he is 'very critical' of Obama but credits him with triggering the important ideological debate about universal healthcare and freedom of choice.
Martin Luther King Jr. positive
Cited approvingly as an example of someone who correctly understood racism as a problem of economic injustice and law, not tolerance.
Karl Popper negative
Cited as exemplifying the philosophical police move: tracing totalitarianism to philosophical totality (Plato to NATO), which Žižek rejects as ideologically motivated.
Heart of Darkness evoked as the colonial metaphor for Congo that Žižek deconstructs: Congo is a Heart of Darkness produced by, not outside, global capitalism.
Joseph Stalin negative
Stalinism is discussed as an example where you cannot excuse the horror by claiming Marx's original idea was good, the horror is immanent to the movement.
His dialogues are cited as the canonical example in the liberal narrative 'from Plato to NATO', philosophical totality supposedly leading to political totalitarianism.
Karl Marx positive
Cited on marriage as prostitution (Communist Manifesto) and on the labour theory of value; Žižek argues Capital should be reread via unemployment but retains Marx's concept of exploitation.
René Descartes positive
His method of radical doubt, asking whether his own culture appears ridiculous to others, is cited as the beginning of true multiculturalism; however his pineal gland solution to mind-body interaction is called 'totally stupid'.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Repeatedly cited as the key resource for the concepts of totality, negativity, and Absolute Spirit (Art/Religion/Philosophy); Žižek identifies as a Hegelian throughout.
What it argues
the material weight of ideology and its implicit injunctionsnegativity and the dialectics of coffee without milk vs. creamSixthSense technology as naturalisation of ideologyOccasionalism and the Big Other as coordinator of realitystructural unemployment and the expansion of the category of the exploitedthe reversal of the intellectual/people relation: protesters as answers not questionersprogressive Leitkultur and the defence of European emancipatory heritage against right-wing populism
Dialectical moves 10
“Totality is not a harmonious whole; totality is a whole plus all its distortions—the distortions of an idea are an immanent part of the idea.”
Rejects the harmonising reading of Hegel in favour of a critical one: contradictions and violations are internal to any social formation, not external aberrations.
“Coffee without milk is not the same as coffee without cream even if positively identical—negativity matters.”
The absent supplement constitutes identity; two phenomenally identical things differ by virtue of what each lacks, which is the key to ideology's operation.
“Far from being outside global capitalism, Congo is kept in the state of Heart of Darkness precisely by its total inclusion in global capitalism.”
The apparent exception to capitalism is in fact produced by capitalism's full incorporation, the outside is an inside effect.
“In today's ideology, the bribery is explicit and the injunction implicit—the exact reverse of classical ideology where the obscene supplement was hidden.”
Contemporary ideology has inverted the classical structure: pleasure is openly offered while the command to obey remains unspoken.
“You need glasses to see ideology—it is not that you must take the glasses off to see the truth; ideology is our nature in class society and you need violence, work on yourself, to see through it.”
Against the naive view that removing ideological distortion reveals direct truth; critical work (the glasses) is the condition for seeing reality, not an obstacle to it.
“People demonstrating are the answer—but they don't know to what question they are the answer; intellectuals' task is to formulate the right question.”
Reverses the vanguard schema: protesters don't pose questions for intellectuals to answer, they already ARE answers and intellectuals must work backwards to the question.
“It's not that Stalinist horror was a distortion of Marx's good original message; the horror emerged immanently from within the Marxist movement itself.”
The deviation-from-ideal excuse is rejected: failures are internal to the idea, not external accidents, and this applies equally to capitalism's own monstrous outgrowths.
“Poetry is not misperceiving reality (madman) nor seeing the divine in the ordinary (lover)—it gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; nothing appears.”
The poet's imagination is radically materialist: it creates appearance without a prior substantial referent, which is Žižek's model for genuine political imagination.
“Not the Muslims or immigrants are the true threat to European civilisation; you, the right-wing populists, are the true threat to Europe.”
The internal enemy is re-identified: the very people claiming to defend Europe are destroying what is most worth defending in its tradition.
“What appears as Evil from too close is part of the global horror when seen from a distance—the reverse of the theological painting metaphor where stains become beautiful from afar.”
A materialist inversion of the theodicy metaphor: stepping back does not reveal harmony but global horror, denaturalising the theological consolation.
Claims 21
asserts
The debate about universal healthcare in the US was an important ideological struggle because it disturbed the core American notion of freedom of choice.Obama healthcare reform and the material weight of ideology
asserts
Theory's first task is not to answer problems formulated by others but to formulate the problem correctly—experts who answer pre-given problems are the end of theory.the role of theory vs. expertise
rejects
Translating racism and sexism into a problem of tolerance is an ideological mystification; for Martin Luther King racism was a problem of economic injustice, not tolerance.liberal multiculturalism and the politics of tolerance
asserts
Ecological awareness is being ideologically neutralised by 'way of life ecology'—small personal rituals that make people feel they are doing enough while the real systemic problem disappears.ideology of ecology
asserts
Hegelian totality is not a harmonious whole but a whole that includes all its distortions and antagonisms as immanent parts—apparent violations of an idea are internal to the idea.Hegel's concept of totality and its critical use
rejects
Congo is not a Heart of Darkness outside global capitalism but is kept in that state precisely by its total inclusion in the global capitalist market.liberal/Conradian image of Africa as outside capitalism
asserts
The SixthSense wearable interface materialises ideology at its purest by making the Big Other's data projections appear as inherent properties of objects, naturalising pre-modern unity of meaning and things.SixthSense technology and ideology
asserts
Ideology today does not cheat at the level of what it says but at the level of what it implies and does not say—the lie is in the absent supplement, not the explicit content.how contemporary ideology functions
asserts
In contemporary liberal hedonist societies, the order/injunction is implicit while the bribery/pleasure is explicit—the reverse of classical ideology where the obscene bribe was hidden.the structure of contemporary vs. classical ideology
asserts
Charity and Starbucks-style ethical consumerism are ideological operations that include anti-consumerist guilt-relief in the price, making consumers feel they have done their duty without changing the system.charity, ethical consumerism, and ideology
asserts
Unemployment should be rethought beyond the reserve army of labour to encompass entire populations and states excluded from the capitalist process—not just temporarily unemployed but permanently unemployable.Marxist category of unemployment and structural exclusion
asserts
Exploitation must be rehabilitated as a category over domination because capitalism can produce exploitation even without formal domination, and reducing everything to domination mystifies the revolts happening today.exploitation vs. domination in Marxist and Foucauldian theory
rejects
The Egyptian Tahrir Square demonstrations were reduced by Western media to a demand for liberal democracy, which missed their actual character as something beyond what Europe already has.Western liberal reading of Arab Spring
rejects
A Rawlsian meritocratic society where inequality is justified by ability produces more violence and resentment than contingent inequality, because it forces the poor to admit their inferiors are truly better.Rawlsian justice and meritocracy
asserts
Capitalism is not driven by egotism but is a form of religion/metaphysics in which capital must circulate regardless of the capitalist's personal gain.the nature of capitalism as religion (Walter Benjamin)
reframes
A progressive Leitkultur is necessary for multiculturalism to function; the problem with Merkel and Cameron's Leitkultur is not the concept but the wrong content.multiculturalism and Leitkultur
asserts
Right-wing populists like Wilders, Haider, and Le Pen are the true threat to European civilisation, not Muslim immigrants; the left should claim the European emancipatory heritage aggressively.European identity and right-wing populism
reframes
Intellectuals should not act as vanguard providers of answers to the people's questions, nor should they celebrate popular wisdom; people are answers and intellectuals must formulate the right questions.the intellectual/people relation in political movements
reframes
China's prohibition of fiction involving time travel or alternate realities is a good sign because it shows people there can still imagine difference; in the West we do not need the prohibition because our political imagination is already so constrained.political imagination and ideological constraint
asserts
It is easier to imagine the end of the world than a slight change in capitalism; as if all life on Earth could be annihilated but capitalism would go on.the limits of political imagination under capitalism
rejects
The task of theory is to show how the system immanently undermines itself, not to detect philosophical seeds of totalitarianism in metaphysics as Popper, Adorno, and Levinas do.the liberal philosophical police (Popper/Adorno/Levinas critique of totality)
Quotes 17
“Theory is precisely the first step of theory is not to answer problems formulated by others, but to formulate the problem correctly. This is where theory begins.”Slavoj Žižek · the task of theory vs. expertise
“It's easy to imagine the end of the world all the time... But it's impossible to imagine a slight change in capitalism. It is as if all life on Earth can be annihilated but somehow capitalism will go on.”Slavoj Žižek · limits of political imagination under capitalism
“The poet gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”Slavoj Žižek · poetry / theory as materialization of genuine novelty
“Fall into sin is fall from philosophy of Occasionalism into British empiricism, when you think that objects affect you.”Slavoj Žižek · Malebranche's Fall as philosophical regression
“This camera of this SixthSense machinery is literally a camera of ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · SixthSense as materialisation of ideology
“You need glasses. You need violence, work on yourself, to see the way things are.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology requires active critical work to see through
“The main function of charity today: just to enable you to feel good, I did my duty, fuck off, now I can live my life.”Slavoj Žižek · charity as ideological guilt-relief
“To be a good citizen, caring and so on, is literally part of the price... the anti-consumerist humanitarian charity is included into the price.”Slavoj Žižek · Starbucks ethics: guilt-relief commodified
“People demonstrating are the answer but they don't know to what question they are the answer. We intellectuals should just help them and ourselves to ask the right question.”Slavoj Žižek · reversal of the intellectual/people relation
“Unemployment is structurally inseparable from the dynamic of accumulation and expansion.”Slavoj Žižek · structural unemployment as immanent to capitalism (Jameson)
“Even when formally you have no domination, exploitation is still here. If we just focus on domination then we mystify even the revolts, demonstrations going on today.”Slavoj Žižek · exploitation vs. domination as analytical categories
“Imagine a Rawlsian just society. Then I would have to admit that you are really more intelligent and better if you are rich. It is here that violence explodes.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of Rawlsian meritocracy as generator of resentment
“A true capitalist doesn't work for his or her egotistic good. A proper capitalist idea is even if the whole world falls apart, capital has to circulate.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism as religion not egotism
“You, anti-immigrant populist, you are the true threat to Europe. We are the ones defending it.”Slavoj Žižek · reversal: right-wing populists are the true threat to European civilisation
“I would like to live in a society where you don't have to argue why women shouldn't be raped—where advocating rape simply appears a bad joke or a complete idiot.”Slavoj Žižek · the necessity of unwritten norms / Leitkultur
“The prohibition of incest is not a question, an enigma. It is an answer to a question but we do not know which question. (Lévi-Strauss)”Slavoj Žižek · model for the intellectual/people reversal—answers precede their questions
“An ideology never works just explicitly by what it says. It's absolutely crucial to include all the sometimes obscene sometimes whatsoever implications.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology operates through implicit content not explicit speech
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Grateful I am meant to be allowed to speak here because as I will I will return to this point at the end, it's extremely important what you are fighting for here. Today we effectively live in an era where incredibly important, let's call them ideological struggles, are taking place. For example, although it's fashionable today to criticize President Obama, and I am very critical towards him, but don't underestimate the impact of that debate about universal health care. This was his great achievement, to trigger a debate. You know why? Because that debate disturbed the very core of American ideology, this notion of freedom of choice and so on, you know, because this is how Republicans succeeded to totally dilute Obama's health care reform by claiming, ah, Obama wants to take from us the freedom of choice. It was the right debate. And this for example, which are other debates like this? It's a wonderful example of material weight of ideology. A girlfriend of a friend of mine, of Udi Aloni, Sarah Kamens, started to circulate a letter against this—how do you call this—DSM. You know this—is it DSM, this psychiatric—oh, DSM. Sorry, DSM. DSM, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I told her, okay, who cares about some categorization there? And she told me, are you crazy? The categorization there determines which illnesses will be covered by insurance organizations, which which which medicines, pills, or which treatments will be covered by—in other words, we may it may appear that we are just there fighting for some minor theoretical points: is hysteria illness or not? We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Because do you know that, speaking about military-industrial complex, but do you know that in United States the, let's call it medical-industrial complex, spends twice the money more than the entire military-industrial complex. So and I will return to it at the end. This is why I think it's absolutely crucial, the fight that is going on here. In what sense, I will return to it to the end. Let me just to so that I don't forget another anecdotic fact. It’s really madness what happened—did you read it, I think this is part of the same reactionary offensive—that Julian Assange will be extradited. I mean, I don't idealize him. I mean, but he explained to me and I checked it up, there is madness in this case. Where is madness? Do you know that, this is the madness. You know why they will extradite him? For accusations of rape. Okay, but you know what form this rape had? It was a totally consensual sex, just two weeks afterwards the woman complained something that he didn't use the right type of condom or something like that. And for this he is extradited. Now comes the total point of madness. Do you know that there is no charge in Sweden against Assange? So he'll be extradited without there being any charge against him. And you will like this, do you know what law did they use? Most European countries accepted in around when everyone—they were afraid of the spread of Bolshevism, they accepted some kind of a law where if you are suspected of communist terror, without even clear accusation, you can be extradited to another country and so on. This is one of these weird laws that exist only because they forgot to cancel them, to cancel them. You know, it's like I now read—you can check it on the web, this is a monument to legal order I claim—like the most crazy laws in United States. Like in Texas, if you have—be careful if you go to Texas—if you have more than six of sex toys, more than six, you can be arrested. Then in another country, Tennessee or where, anal intercourse, you can be arrested. You know these laws that nobody nobody even thinks about them. No, this is what they are using there. No, so it—again, it's pretty dark because don't have any big illusions about Sweden. Assange told me, you know, Sweden is no longer the Sweden of our youth, of Olof Palme and so on, which at least stood for certain standards. Okay, getting lost here. Let me begin with again how proud I am to be here. As my friend Mladen Dolar explained to me what like him, what I really like here is already the subtitle of this institution. It's intro-blah-blah for Art, Design, Theory. Of course, as a Hegelian, I immediately recognized in it the three forms of Absolute Spirit, you know. Art is Art, Theory is Philosophy, Design is Religion. Religion is theory from the problem of design. You have an idea of God, how what design to make to make it palpable, no? And so before elaborating this a little bit, I hope you will not be disappointed, I will what you will get here is, you know that proverb English phrase that what the bride should bring when there is a wedding, no? It's something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. You will get something like this from me here, but with a little bit of change. Something old, yes, as always I will recycle myself. Something new, there will be some original idea. Something borrowed, yes, especially from my Slovene friends, Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupančič. And here there is a problem. Not something blue, you will get something red at the end, of course. But then there must be a rhyme, so instead of new I propose bad. Bad for the those in power. So I will give you something old, something bad, something borrowed, something red. Why? You know that here we are in Jan van Eyck Academy. You know of course, even I knew it without checking on Wikipedia, which is the most famous painting, no? That guy, Arnolfini and his bride. And this is a nice metaphor for theory. We, the theory, are of course that mirror. That mirror where you see why? Because you know what what you see in that mirror in the middle of the painting is like the production process in a way, no? It's precisely we have to reflect into the scene of ideology what is outside, the productive process. So again, I will come back to this later. Just a short remark then business starts. Just a short remark on these three forms of Absolute Spirit, that is to say, Art, Design, Religion and Theory. You know, let's nonetheless because serious high culture is obviously threatened today. I will return to this to the end. You know, the time has come to accept a tragic fact that we, who are now under criticism, kind of a useless academic study, we are the last survivors of high culture. And the good point is that at the end it will be we, the leftists, who will be the last chance for high culture. Because what those in power want from us more and more is like is education whose aim is to produce experts. Like I was debating Bologna reform, this terrible European community thing in France and a guy who later even wanted to become a minister gave me a wonderful example. He told me, this was a couple of years ago when there were burning cars in Paris suburbs. He told me, look, now cars are burning there, we don't need some stupid abstract philosophy. What we need from you intellectuals is, we need specialist psychologists to to describe to us the psychology of the wild crowd, how to control it. We need urban urban developers to know, you know, how to construct suburbia so that to prevent mass gatherings and so on and so on. That's what they want from from us. They want us as experts to solve the problems that they formulate. But that's not theory. This is the end of theory. Theory is precisely the first step of theory is not to answer problems formulated by others, but to formulate the problem correctly. This is where theory begins. Like today for example, yes, we are all against racism, sexism and so on, but the problem is what? My old example, I'm sorry if I repeat myself with racism and sexism, did you notice typically how we automatically translate racism, sexism into problem of tolerance? But this is not self-evident. Think about Martin Luther King, he practically never mentions tolerance. Why do we automatically translate racism, sexism into a problem of tolerance? Again, this is a sign of this post-political cultural capitalism where all conflicts are conflicts between different cultures and then all you can do is tolerate differences and so on and so on. For Martin Luther King, my God, racism wasn't a problem of tolerance, it’s a problem of economic injustice, laws, and so on and so on. Even for feminism it goes the same. I found it even ridiculous and every woman does who is a feminist, to claim that the goal of feminist is what, that women should be more tolerated by men or what? It's ridiculous. This is not a problem. It's ideological mystification of a problem. Not to mention my other well-known, I repeat them too much I know, examples. For example, ecology. Yes, it is a problem, we may all die because of it maybe. But did you notice how what is more and more in front presented to all of us is precisely the ideological version of what I like to call, or what some people already call, the way of life ecology. You know, like they offer you as a bribe small daily rituals to keep you ecologically satisfied. Like did you recycle that Coke can? Did you put did you separate newspapers to be recycled? And okay, it's good to do this, but the problem is that when you do this you already feel, look, I'm doing something for Mother Earth, a great project and so on. And of course in this way it makes you feel good. The real the real problem somehow disappears. So again, this is our task as theorists. So again, let me just before I begin properly, this is just the what in sex they call foreplay, yeah. Let me just quote you a wonderful couple of lines from Shakespeare, *Midsummer Night's Dream*. It's Act Scene where Theseus says, listen it's beautiful: "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy"—what a beautiful formulation—"and the poet gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name." So Shakespeare articulates here a triad. A madman sees devils everywhere. For example, he misperceives a bush as a wild animal, a bear. A lover sees sublime beauty in an ordinary face. A poet gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. So in all three cases we have a gap between ordinary reality and some transcendent ethereal dimension. But this gap is gradually reduced. The madman simply misperceives a real object as something else. I see a bush, I think it's a wild animal. It's simple confusion. A lover maintains the reality of the beloved object, which is not cancelled but transubstantiated into the appearance of a sublime dimension. Everybody knows this. In true love, when you are truly in love, you do not need to idealize the object of love. You can be well aware of all all imperfections and so on. But at the same time, this is the paradox of love, this very imperfect frail being is the absolute for you. Then with the poet it's something much more mysterious. We also get an appearance. But this appearance, again, is neither as with madman the appearance of some false reality misperceived as real, real reality—it's not that you see a bush you misperceive it as a bear—it's not the appearance of transcendence in immanence—it's not this ordinary woman I see absolute the absolute in her—it's much something much more beautiful, a materialization of nothing. You are able to give shape and form to nothing. You have an appearance in which it's an appearance where it's not some substantial X that appears. It's nothing. Nothing appears. And maybe this is a nice formula even for political revolution. This is what we need today, the political imagination to give shape to nothing, opening of the new. And at the end I will return to it, another political point here. Do you know that—it's not a joke, I checked it up with my Chinese friends—do you know that a couple of months ago in China they they imposed a new law which prohibits in all narrative media, comics, books, cinema, TV, in all fiction narrative, all stories which deal either with time travel or with alternate reality. Of course, it's clear why. The idea is it's too dangerous even to allow people to dream about possible different societies. But I think this is a good sign for China. Because it means at least that people there are still able to imagine a difference. The problem with us in the so-called developed West is that we don't need this prohibition. Because our—and this is the material weight weight of ideology—our, let's call it, political imagination is so constrained that it doesn't work in this sense. Like as my friend Fredric Jameson put it decades ago, it's easy to imagine the end of the world all the time, all these boring movies, you know, asteroid hitting Earth, whatever. But it's impossible to imagine a slight change in capitalism. You know, it is as if all life on Earth can be annihilated but somehow capitalism will go on or whatever, no? So so again, my point was that if if this is religion, if this is love—you are able to see in an ordinary face the divine dimension—poetry is nothing, you see nothing as something. And maybe we theorists, we are madmen, no? Sorry? Definitely. Definitely. Okay. Now comes a little bit more serious work to substantiate this all. Let me begin with an idea which I already used in my some of my work, which I really like. It will strike you as eccentric, but then you will see how we practice it. But we shouldn't. I'm referring of course to my favorite theologian, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who in his classical novel, *The Man Who Was Thursday*, ironically proposed to install a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers. Here is the wonderful quote: "The work of the philosophical policeman is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to T-houses to arrest thieves. We, philosopher-policemen, we go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed." And so on and so on. Now you think this is madness. Ah, would thinkers as different as Karl Popper, Theodor Adorno, and Emmanuel Levinas, would they also not subscribe to just a slightly different version of this idea? Where, for example, the actual political crime is called totalitarianism and the philosophical crime is condensed in the notion of totality. The thesis of, for example, Karl Popper is that philosophical totality, pretension to absolute knowledge, is at the beginning of the road which ends up in political totalitarianism. So, to paraphrase Chesterton, the task of Popperian or Adornian or Levinasian philosophical police is to discover from a book of Plato's dialogues or a treatise on Social Contract by Rousseau that a political crime, Gulag, whatever, will be committed. Or as we used to say when I was young, from Plato to NATO, you know, like straight line. The ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest revolutionaries. The philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia to detect proponents of totality. Is this accusation correct or not? The interesting thing to note is how some apparent left-wingers, but also right-wingers, of course, liberals, but also others, even if they would find this idea of Chesterton the way it's formulated ridiculous, do practice this line. The great sport of today's liberal anti-radical thought is to detect in metaphysics of presence, in the what is for them bad philosophy, the roots of future totalitarianism. What should be our answer to this? Our answer should be, I claim, very simple. Our answer should be that no, this is not what we theorists should be doing. We are not doing this. What we are doing is that through concrete analysis, we are demonstrating, we are trying to show how how the system already immanently undermines itself. We are, to put it in Hegelian terms—and this is the content of the notion of totality, the true content—totality, Hegelian totality, is not this ridiculous idea things may appear contradictory to you, but if you put them in a perspective of totality even apparently dissonant details serve the global harmony and so on. No, Hegel is here a radical thinker and I think the most important critical tool is his notion of totality. Totality means precisely that if you are dealing with an idea and you discover some features, elements, which seem to violate this idea, it means that these violations, distortions of the idea are an immanent part of the idea. For example, you have marriage and you have prostitution, cheating, blah-blah. The point is not to say prostitution, cheating violate the idea of marriage. The point is to show how in concrete social reality marriage is necessarily supplemented by prostitution, or as Marx put it in his classic lines in *Communist Manifesto*, marriage ultimately is a form of prostitution. You know this, you got the Hegelian point, which is the distortion of an idea should be conceived as immanent part of the idea. Now I will be critical towards the 20th century Left. I agree with those, even liberal critics, why not, who claimed apropos of Stalinism, how it's too easy to say oh, Stalin distorted Marx's original message, which was democratic, or something even more horrible like I think that today when I tried to sleep because of jet lag, there was a nice intervention here where it was argued nicely against this socialism with human face, whatever. No, the idea is that nonetheless, you cannot save Marx in this simple way: oh his idea was good, bad realization. How was it nonetheless possible that out of a movement inspired by Marx, the horror of Stalinism emerged? Okay, I say, but let's be honest in the same way about today's global capitalism. We should not conceive its ideal form, relatively till now till now successful, acceptable, social democratic, welfare state, tolerant capitalism, and then in a Fukuyama way to claim, yeah, all other countries may still be dictatorial, brutal, but this is the goal, slowly, slowly we are all approaching this. No, the point is that all these symptoms, antagonisms, inconsistencies of global capitalism should be included into the notion of capitalism as totality. Totality is not a harmonious whole. Totality is a whole, totality plus all its distortions and so on. Okay, to be very concrete today. Totality of capitalism is also Congo. Literally, you know, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo is usually painted as a kind of a Conradian Heart of Darkness. Yeah, in some sense it is, it's horror, the state doesn't function, you have local warlords, you have about at least I was told children who were drugged when they were five, six, so that at you get perfect killers and so on. But let's not forget how this same Congo is kept in this state by being fully included into the global capitalist market. You know that they have, I'm too stupid to know the names, some of the crucial metals for pieces and so on, I don't know—and diamonds—and diamonds, yeah, yeah. All that stuff is—so you know this is how precisely a place which appears as a Heart of Darkness outside is kept in that state, in that state, by way of its total inclusion into into global capitalism. This is this is what we should focus on. This is what again totality means. It's not this the most disgusting maybe justification metaphorical of religion, you know, when they say what appears to us as evil it's only because we don't have the right perspective. You know, usually people use this disgusting metaphor of a painting: like what appears to you as evil is the same as if you look at the picture. If you look from too close you see just stains, but if you look at it from a proper distance, you see how what appeared to you as stains are part of the global harmony. Well, I find it a little bit problematic to say that Congo or Auschwitz were just these stains and we cannot see how they contribute to the divine beauty or whatever, no? If I claim that a materialist should maybe turn around the metaphor. That is to say that when you look closely at something it may appear beautiful, no? But when you withdraw a little bit you see how precisely this beauty is part of the global horror and shit or whatever, no? Okay, so how is it that we are not able to do this type of analysis of totality? I would like to draw your attention to a certain technological invention which I love. It's not yet practiced, but I don't think that it doesn't function because okay, as if this means something, I saw a report on it on I don't know what TV. It's I think a perfect example of how an apparently innocent technological invention is not only penetrated by ideology, but even materializes at its purest an ideological mechanism. I'm talking about SixthSense. It's a so-called wearable gestural interface developed by an Indian, Pranav Mistry, who works at MIT—Cambridge, Massachusetts, at MIT Media Lab. It is a simple machine. The hardware is simple: a small web camera dangling here from your neck, a pocket projector—small projector—a mirror, all connected wirelessly to a smartphone in your pocket. And that's it. So what's the magic effect? It's incredible. The if you have all this on, you begin by handling objects and making gestures. The camera recognizes objects, gestures, and identifies them using computer vision-based techniques. The software then processes the video stream data, reading it as a series of instructions, and retrieves, you know, a smartphone, retrieves all the data which are then sent back and through the small projector, you can see them on any flat surface in front of you. I was really shocked when I saw this report on TV, how it works. It's almost a miracle in a way. It is like, for example, you are in a bookstore. You see you hold a book like this and of course the the camera recognizes the book, sends the data to smartphone, the smartphone contacts the cloud, data, and immediately on the very pages of the book, you will see projected the latest criticism of the book, all the data and so on and so on. Or for for example, you want to check time. You just do like this in front, clock, and immediately time is projected. And so on and so on. Or for example, I just do like this, the camera recognizes this as a photo symbol and instantly a photo of what you see is stored in front of you. Now of course I am an evil guy, you know, I'm coming from Balkan, ex-Yugoslavia, rape, mess, ethnic cleansing. So my idea was, of course, I warn you, this is dirty, politically incorrect. Like, I hope this works, like let's say you're a beautiful woman, no? I look at you and immediately projected onto you, she likes cunnilingus, Dostoevsky, that's the way to seduce her. Okay, I had to say this—the nastiest dream, you know. But what I'm saying is that this invention was celebrated as the great breakthrough because it allegedly, and it does in a way, overcomes the division between virtual world of information and like real reality. The idea is that the standard use of cyberspace still implies a radical division. Either you deal with real people or you are in front of a screen. The idea is that here we get the two dimensions together. You move in a real world, dealing with real people, but at the same time you are in the virtual world where data are projected. But here I claim ideology enters. Because if we generally call ideology the ground of ideology what Jacques Lacan calls the Big Other, which here means simply the inconsistent network, texture of ideological prejudices and so on. You should always ask yourself when your smartphone connects with the cloud. But what is in the cloud? Who controls the cloud? So again, my the danger of this technology, I think, is that it in a way naturalizes ideology. Because although you rationally know that there are two different things, like I'm referring to the beautiful woman on my head, that one is your body, the other is the data, but in my immediate experience, you know, it's this magic effect as if the thing itself is answering back to me. It's as if out of you the answers emerge. In other words, we are back into the pre-modern universe where meaning is experienced as directly immanent to things. It's no longer this modern distinction between meaningless grey infinite universe and our human horizon of meaning. We are back at pre-modern unity. Ah, this will be your beauty drink or what remains. Sorry. Okay. So the second thing, even more tragic, is that precisely—let me imagine my tasteless example, let me return to it. Woman, it tells it there. And let's apply this to racism. Isn't exactly—I hope you will get the structural homology—isn't this exactly how ideology works? Let's say, believe me I'm not, I have many sins, but maybe just maybe I'm not a racist, or to be more precise, I am a racist but a universal racist. I hate all racists. Okay, let's say that I am anti-Arab and I see an Arab. But if I'm a racist, what I see there, isn't it exactly the same? I see, you know, when a racist sees an Arab or a Jew, you say look his evil smile, look he will steal you. It's literally you see all the prejudices projected onto it. It's the basic ideological logic of perception. And again, the danger of this machinery is that in a way with all this new age mythology, you know, oh we are back into the unity of sensual domain of objects and the virtual world of universe, it stages a total mystification. Because it conflates two dimensions. Here, I think, we should return to one of the greatest philosophers, a total madman whom I like, Nicolas Malebranche. You know, the follower of Descartes, I think was a genius, if there ever was one. Ah no, he was a genius. He was what I called over-orthodox theologian, you know. He drew all the consequences in such an absurd way that you see the nonsense of it. For example, we think that we would all be lost without Jesus Christ, but Jesus Christ came and redeemed some of us. No, Malebranche says without Christ, we would all be redeemed. God in his vanity wanted to be admired by men to redeem some of us. So God pushed all of us into sin so that then he could redeem some of us. Just so that we will—okay, so what you know what is the specificity of Malebranche? You will see the connection with this ideological mechanism. It's so-called Occasionalism. You know what is this, no? He solves Descartes's problem. Descartes's problem is we have two substances, *res cogitans*, *res extensa*. How are they connected? Descartes's idea is totally stupid, no? Is that pineal gland or what? It was the only one single gland that Descartes found here when he was doing this—how do you call it, not vivisection, but—no, no, not surgery. You cut dead bodies. I hope so, he didn't—okay, and his idea was there maybe our mind is sending signals to our body. Now Malebranche knew saw this is nonsense, but wanted to remain a Cartesian dualist. So he provided a crazy solution: that our thinking substance and our material substance are totally without contact, incompatible. So how is it nonetheless then that let's say now I think about raising my hand, my brain gives—or my mind gives an order to my hand, I can do it? He claims God is observing us all the time and God takes care of the coordination. When God reads in my mind the idea 'raise the hand', he triggers the material process. It's all coordinated through God. I claim that—and yes—then now comes Malebranche's total madness. His idea is that then he constructs a wonderful narrative of the origins of Fall. That is to say, if this is the state of things, how is it nonetheless that in our immediate experience, we don't see things like this? We think I immediately contact my hand or I immediately affected by objects. His idea was that it was of course, we are in Christianity, the guilty one is Eve. Adam was a good Occasionalist. He knew what he sees there, material objects, are totally separated by ontological gap from his mind. His idea was that when Adam saw naked Eve, he was so fascinated that he thought, oh my God, here the object is directly addressing me. He forgot about divine intervention. And then comes the point of true madness. Then Malebranche goes on that God, when he saw this regression into—that's what I like, the this I think is the funniest definition of the Fall into sin. Fall into sin is fall from philosophy of Occasionalism into British empiricism, when you think that objects affect you. So his idea is that this is how then Malebranche explains erection. Malebranche says to remind men—women don't count, men—to remind a man that there is no direct contact between his mind and his body, he will make one organ, penis, independent on his will. Like you want it should get up, it will not get up, or when you will least want it, it will get up. This is the reminder that they are separated, no? Monics. But you know what? What I'm trying to tell you, where is the moment of truth here? When you hear this type of nonsensical stories, you should always ask yourself: is there a moment of truth in them? You know, it's the same as with that—Mladen Dolar, my friend, wrote about it nicely—that totally crazy theory of of how to unite Darwinism and Christianity. You know that theory, no? I mean, when Darwin elaborated his evolutionary theory, Christians have a problem because if you read the Bible literally and you count all the generations, then God should have created the world a little bit over years ago, no? Even some British guy had this wonderful idea that at in the morning at minus and something B.C., at in the morning God created the world and so on, no? So how to unite the two? This theol—this theological friend of Darwin proposed a wonderful idea: that, my God, the Bible is true, it cannot be wrong, so the universe really was created and so on years ago. So what's the trick? Ah, the trick is that to lure us, to seduce us, God directly created fossils, you know? He created a kind of a false opening of the universe with mirrors. Now you will—oh this is, maybe it is, okay—evolutionary, scientifically nonsense. But isn't it the best theory of ideology that you can imagine? Doesn't ideology work precisely like that, that each epoch creates its own false past? Like there was a wonderful book, I hope you know it, it's a collection of essays edited by Eric Hobsbawm, *The Invention of Tradition*. Yeah, yeah. You know where he shows, for example, that you know all that Scottish bullshit with skirts, kilts, this is all late 19th century, of course, no? In the but how—okay, so you see, and it's the same for Malebranche. Of course, it's nonsense as a scientific theory or whatever. But isn't something, if you replace God with ideological space, isn't this precisely the way things function? That is to say that precisely we are never just we in direct contact with reality. The Big Other always coordinates our contact with reality. What we see in reality is never just reality. It's so that this camera of this SixthSense machinery is literally an a camera of ideology. How do we detect this? Now I will borrow—maybe she was even here explaining it, but I will give a more political twist to it—I will borrow an idea, or rather two jokes, from the other member of my Slovene-Lacanian party troika, the cells, Alenka Zupančič, who drew my attention and wrote a nice text on it, maybe you even know already the joke. She drew attention to a wonderful joke from Ernst Lubitsch's *Ninotchka*. I think it's the best introduction into Hegelian notion of negativity. If you have a stupid uncle, half-senile, says "phew, Hegel, I don't understand it," well tell him this, maybe they will. It's a joke where the hero enters a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. The waiter replies, "Sorry, but we have run out of cream. Can I bring you but we have milk. Can I bring you coffee without milk?" Now this is a nice Hegelian point that like negativity matters. Thing is not just what it is positively. You know, coffee without milk is not the same as coffee without cream, even if in its immediate positive existence it may appear the same. Okay, I don't have time here to go into the entire dialectics of desire here. Because you know the basic question to explain is: why do we add to coffee milk or cream? There's only one speculative answer. Because coffee is never fully coffee. It has an opening, a gap. And we have to fill in this gap. And this brings us to the most elementary structure of a commodity, you know, which is for me best exemplified by, sorry to repeat an old joke, but you know Kinder Egg Surprise, that bullshit. This is a commodity at its purest. You have a chocolate shell, but you know how the publicity for commodity goes. Like, oh you don't just buy chocolate, there is some mystic ingredient, that's it. Where the genius of Kinder Surprise is that you really get that mystic ingredient, you know, that plastic stupid toy in the middle, no? No wonder in United States, in California at least, you know that till a couple of years ago—I'm not kidding—it was prohibited to sell Kinder Egg Surprise. They claimed that it was cheating, like you pretend to sell something but you are really selling something else. Here you can see how Americans wanted to prohibit what in Lacanian theory we call objet petit a, object small a. Because this okay, now let's complicate things, but you will say but I am a fanatic, I just like plain coffee. Doesn't this undermine your—I don't need any milk or whatever. Ah, I can claim the reflexive structure is still here, it's just tautological. Coffee can be its own supplement. How? Let me give you a an example of the same logic from history of cinema, which I like very much. If you know today's half-forgotten genre, Western, you may know that in early 50s, late 40s there was a crisis of Western as a genre. So the first reaction was to shoot so-called meta-Westerns. Westerns which combine Western genre with another genre. You have like *Seven Brides for Seven Brothers*—who are the other guys? Grooms. Yes, it was Western with musical. You have a very good one, even *Pursued* by Raoul Walsh with Robert Mitchum, clear case of Western noir. You have even Western detective. You know, like like Western is not strong enough to sustain itself so you like this would be, you know, Western with coffee is musical, Western with milk is noir. But then André Bazin, the great French theorist, asked a wonderful question: what are then the two pure Westerns from early or mid 50s? Kind of legendary, although I don't like them too much, it's *Shane* and *High Noon*. He claims these are meta-Westerns, but the supplement is Western itself. They mythically, tautologically, which is why they are such pure mythical Westerns. Okay, nonetheless, so let's go back. So why is this structure important? This structure of is it coffee without milk or coffee without cream? Okay, to make this clear let me connect this to another joke that I really like. It's from a did you see it's only years, most of you are maybe too young, an English working-class half-comedy half-drama with with Ewan McGregor before he became a Jedi when he was still working-class hero, *Brassed Off*. This kind of unemployed miners melodrama where it's a wonderful scene in the middle of the film where Ewan McGregor, the hero of the film, accompanies a young pretty woman to her flat. And then at the entrance to the flat, she tells him, "Would you like to come in up to my place for a coffee?" He answers, "Yeah, but there is a problem. I don't drink coffee." Her answer: "No problem, I don't have any coffee." You see, the beauty is that without any obscenity, just through this double negation—I don't drink coffee, no problem I don't have any—what you get is the most obscene brutal erotic invitation that you can imagine. Just through double negation. Okay, not to lose time. How does this work in ideology? Okay, to give you a very first it's clear the political example. For example, a Polish friend told me that in socialist Poland where things were usually often lacking, they didn't have them in the stores, there is a similar joke where a customer enters a store and asks, "Did you already get butter, do you have butter now?" And the salesperson answers, "Sorry, you entered the wrong store. We are the store which doesn't have toilet paper. The store across the street is the one which doesn't have butter." You know, like negativity matters. Now you will say what has this to do—ah now comes, sorry I'm not just bullshitting I hope so, now a more important lesson comes here. I claim that today more and more ideology cheats in this way. At the level of implications, it acts as if it's offering you coffee without cream, but it's really offering you coffee without milk, no? That is to say, it cheats not at the level of what it says, but of what is absent in it, what it implies to say but doesn't say. There is another stupid Marx Brothers joke from one of their bad late movies, *Go West*, at the beginning, which exemplifies what I want to say. This scene at the very beginning of *Go West*, Groucho Marx approaches a how-do-you-call-it where they are selling tickets at a train station, his friend window, and buys a ticket and gives to the salesperson a bunch of dollars and says, "Oh it's okay, you don't have to count the money," no? But the salesperson nonetheless counts the money in detail and says, "But wait a minute, it's not enough money." And Groucho answers, "But I told you not to not to count the money." You see the trick. He his implication was: don't count the money, everything is okay, no? But I think we can imagine absolutely something of the same. Do you remember Donald Rumsfeld when he was justifying the torture Iraq invasion? He said, something have to be done discreetly, he meant pressure torture for the interest of United States and we simply shouldn't talk about it, no? But then later, unfortunately, we discovered that he didn't mean only torture, which is also unacceptable for me, he also meant organizing things for his private business, Halliburton, all the companies. And then, you know, imagine the exact replica of Marx Brothers jokes that we would tell him, but wait a minute, you provided billions of dollars to your companies. And he would say, but I told you it's better not to talk about these things and so on, no? Or if you want the same joke, imagine Americans and Europeans debating in late the invasion of Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction. Okay, Rumsfeld says to some European minister, "Would you care to join us in the attack on Iraq to find the weapons of mass destruction?" We Europeans try to squeeze out, but we don't want to offend United States so we give a kind of a answer, "Yeah, but we have no facilities to search for weapons of mass destruction." And then Rumsfeld answers, "No problem, there are no weapons. We just want to raid the country." No, but now more seriously. I claim that, and this is a very dangerous moment, that's why we are having and it's the good thing that we are having all the demonstration and so on. Of course, in our conformist everyday life, we are opportunists. We don't want to know everything. An average voter let's be frank, it's not that they don't want their state to torture. They just don't want to know about it, you know? Like there are things we want done but let others do it and so on. And again more and more important is that—this is why people are so disappointed today—that they feel cheated at the level of these implications. Not at the level of what ideology says but at the level of what it doesn't say and but implies. And you will say now who cares about this. I think this is absolutely crucial. An ideology never works just explicitly by what it says. It's absolutely crucial to include all the sometimes obscene sometimes whatsoever implications. And there we have more and more the lie today. For example, did you see—my last movie example then a little bit of Marx—did you see it's an old classic, now it's emerging as a cult. It may appear naive but I like it, I've written about it a lot. Did you see John Carpenter's film *They Live*? You should. It's crazy film, like kind of a primitive Hollywood Marxism, but in a good sense, not in the disgusting James Cameron sense. It's the story of John Nada, an unemployed worker in in L.A., who Nada, very nice Nada means nothing in Spanish, you know, like proletarian, who enters an abandoned church and then finds there a box of strange sunglasses. And then later, walking around the downtown of Los Angeles, he discovers what these strange sunglasses do. They're kind of ideologico-critical sunglasses. Like you see a poster "Go to Hawaii, have the holiday of your lifetime" and so on. You put the glasses on, you see words like "Enjoy," "Don't think," "Consume," "Remain stupid" or something, you know, in a very naive way you get the true ideological message. Now you will say but this is stupid naive. No it's not, I like this example. And I will tell you why. First, what I like is that it goes against our spontaneous ideological perception which would have been: we see things distorted through glasses, you must put the glasses off, look with your own eyes and you will see the truth. No, ideology is our nature as it were in class society. You need glasses. That is to say, you need in a way violence, work on yourself, to see the way things are. Second thing I like is how the scene staged by this film is already a consumerist scene. That is to say it's not classical ideology but today's ideology. Why? Because I claim that in classical ideology the situation is exactly the opposite one. In classical ideology you directly see the order, and it's all the dirty obscene stuff that is unseen but there. For example, in classical ideology you would have a direct appeal—let me be very evil now taking into account all the pedophilic cases of Catholic Church—you would have a poster "Become a monk, do your duty, humanity, live for Christ" and so on. And then you put the glasses on and you would see "And you can have all the small boys you want" or whatever, you know, like it could have worked like this then. The obscene bribery of ideology is implicit. Here it's the opposite. The direct bribery is there, but the injunction, the order, is here. This is very important because this is how today ideology functions. It's more and more in our liberal hedonist societies that the order is still here but implicit. And again, just imagine to see what is without milk or without cream. This is a very good naive critical approach. When you see some phenomenon, just imagine you putting the glasses on and what you would have seen. For example, I'm sorry if I repeat myself my standard example, imagine you see what we do unfortunately see often: a kind of a disfigured black boy's face and then for some charity organization from a goal like "Oh for the price of a couple of cups of cappuccino you can make a difference, you can save this child's life." Now imagine you put the glasses on. I claim you would have seen something like: we know we exploit the Third World, people are suffering there, but for the price of couple of cappuccinos we can not only redeem you of guilt, we can make even make you feel good that you are doing something for it and so on. Because this I claim the main function of charity today. Just to enable you like, you know, you pay per month to some child in Africa and you feel good, I did my duty, fuck off, now I can live my life. Or sorry if I repeat myself, Starbucks is even better here. Because there Starbucks is really a work of a genius. You know why? If you go to Starbucks coffee, you know what's the trick, no? They tell you immediately there: our cappuccino is more expensive, but we give to some Guatemalan children, for water in Sahara, whatever. This is an ingenious operation. Because in the old times of pure consumerism we were consuming and then we felt bad, so we had to do something to be also good citizens, no? But here, to be a good citizen, caring and so on, is literally part of the price, you know, like you pay the idea is you feel bad as a consumer, you pay a little bit more and the anti-consumerist humanitarian charity is included into the price. It's this is what I call a genius. Okay, now a little bit of how did we end up in this situation. If you allow me, I'm slowly approaching the end, don't be too afraid. I would like nonetheless to give, and I wonder now in serious if you would agree politically with this reading, where do we stand economically today? I am tempted to follow Fredric Jameson who doesn't know anything about economy but is following some other economists who do know about economy, no? That today we should reread *Capital* by way of focusing on the category of unemployment. I quote Fredric Jameson from his *Representing Capital*: "Unemployment is structurally inseparable from the dynamic of accumulation and expansion." So again, the more capitalism develops, the more it produces unemployment, in the sense of workers who when we have new technologies and so on, all of a sudden become unemployable. Again, a quote from Jameson: "The world market is thus a space in which everyone has once been a productive laborer and in which labor has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system." End of quote. So in the ongoing process of capitalist globalization, the category of the unemployed acquired a new quality beyond the classic Marxist notion of the reserve army of labor. One should consider in terms of the category of unemployed those massive populations around the world who have as it were dropped out of history, who have been deliberately excluded from the modernizing projects of the First World capitalism, who were written off as hopeless or terminal cases, so-called failed states: Congo, Somalia, victims of famine or ecological disasters, countries caught in pseudo-archaic ethnic hatred, objects of philanthropy and non-governmental organizations, or often the same people, victims of the war on terror. So the category of the unemployed should be encompassed to should be expanded to encompass a wide span of population from the temporarily unemployed through no longer employable and permanently unemployed up to people living in slums and other types of ghettos where they can also be employed but again, outside the system and finally the whole area populations even states excluded from the capitalist process. This is the first point of Jameson. I deeply agree with it so that again, exploitation—unemployment is not only so that because I think if we don't take this into account, the way people are unemployed in this more radical sense, we should also rethink exploitation in this way I think. Exploitation is not only today like people in Congo are in this deeper sense also exploited because they are structurally put in a position where they are not even allowed to participate in the world of exploitation. I don't have time to develop here the more speculative logic of how to be exploited today is not only to be exploited in the sense of "I work and capitalist take the profit." If you don't work you are in a way even more radically exploited. And again it's not the same thing as before, as we all know more and more we have categories of ex-employed people, for example, for years working in a factory, new technology, and then of course some postmodern idiot like Anthony Giddens would tell you, "Oh this is a new opportunity to reinvent yourself," [unintelligible] whatever well, when you are and tired it's easy to say. But another thing, we even have and this is I think the problem in Greece and other countries, we even have more and more people who are already as it were in advance unemployable, like students finishing studies without even a chance of employment and so on. I really think that the category of unemployment is a crucial category and of course we have a solution here with which I don't agree, a proposed solution, which was precisely invented by a guy, I think he is—I will not name the country, bad obscene joke, it’s a country immediately south from here whose character is: people there have two features: that they have many pedophiles and good chocolate, which are maybe's one feature because you would use chocolate to to seduce small children, no? Sorry, bad taste. I told I warned you I am a universal racist. No, seriously. What I want to say is that Philippe Van Parijs proposed the idea of basic income. It's interesting that in Brazil where they passed it into a law it's called *Renda Básica*, the basic rent. It's a paradoxical crazy solution because don't forget that for Van Parijs's idea is to save capitalism. His problem is: can capitalism retain all its productivity and nonetheless bring some kind of a social justice? He said capitalism today is so productive that it can sustain also a minimal wage for all citizens. There are many problems for me here. The first big problem is that what then comes with a Marxist theory of exploitation? Now you know even the un—like my point here being that the notion of exploitation should be rethought but nonetheless it should be kept. Why? Now comes before the conclusion my final point, because I wonder if you would agree with it. But I claim that maybe it's time to to shift the accent from exploitation to domination. The big, let's call it postmodern trick, Agamben, Foucault and so on was domination: microphysics of power, different strategies of domination and so on and so on. I don't think that we should focus on the notion of domination. Domination still allows for some kind of a liberal or whatever option, you know, everyone should be included blah blah blah. Because I still think that Marx's point of capitalism holds: that the paradox of capitalism is that even when formally you have no domination, exploitation is still here. And I think that if we just focus on domination then we mystify even the revolts, demonstrations going on today. For example, how did the Western media perceive the Tahrir Square, the Egyptian demonstration? By changing them into pure pro-democracy demonstrations as if they just want what we in Europe already have. Precisely this, if you listen to them, was not the case. So again, this would be again the last point for me that we have to rehabilitate, with all this topic they are doing great things: all this analysis of microphysics of power, forms of domination, *Homo Sacer*, blah-blah, but a reference to production process and exploitation is needed. Now to conclude. I mean... I claim that if we really want to rethink our situation today, we should also kill many sacred cows. The Left should really be radical even against its own prejudices. The first one, you know this problem, hierarchy. Let me now give you just three provocative ideas. One, I claim that the most dangerous idea, and here I radically disagree with John Rawls, is this idea that, you know, inequality is—try to imagine a society which would have worked the way John Rawls wanted it to work. That is to say that inequality is allowed on two conditions, if I simplify it: first that if I gain much more than you, you should gain at least a little bit more, that is to say that it profits also those on the bottom, and second point, it shouldn't be simply inherited or what, but as much as possible based on my like labor, labor achievements, whatever. I claim this is madness. I claim that that if we have differences, they should be experienced as contingent. Why? Because this is the only way that differences are made tolerable because of the logic all-pervasive capitalist logic of envy and resentment. Let's say I am poor you are rich. Let's flip it around. I'll be poor you're rich. No, but I'm a good liberal condescending liberal. Why don't you—okay. Let's pretend that you are rich for five minutes. Sorry. You know I totally agree with you you know why because what I really hate about politically correct liberals is did you notice how when they describe in a book like a bad guy and a good guy, like Rorty, Ironist and Fundamentalist, Ironist is she, fundamentalist is a he, you know like the good are the women. No I think this is secret patronizing. My God, I think it's great if you can be truly evil, no? Okay. No what I want to say is this. Let's let's say that we live in a society where the fact that you are rich and I am poor depends on chance, tradition or whatever. Then I can still save my dignity because I can say to myself, "Oh you see that total idiot, he is much more stupid than me, but he was lucky he is rich." So you know real my my narcissism survives. Now imagine that I live in a Rawlsian just society. Then I would have to admit that you are really more intelligent and better if you are rich. It is here that violence explodes. So we should be here much more brutally open. Second thing, we should stop with this Catholic total bullshit against against utilitarianism in the sense of today's capitalism is egotist, greed and so on, you know? No, capitalism as Walter Benjamin knew is a form of religion. And I mean it in a literal sense, a form of metaphysics. In the sense that a true capitalist doesn't work for his or her egotistic good. A proper capitalist idea is even if the whole world falls apart, capital has to circulate and so on and so on. It has nothing to do with his private gains and so on. So no, I claim that to be a good ecologist it precisely we need more egotism in a way. Third point. Now this will be a little bit maybe more problematic for you. Leitkultur. I’m for Leitkultur absolutely. Don't misunderstand me. No no no. I was I didn't get any special honorarium for a certain popular Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, but you know what I'm saying, that what I don't like in the idea of multiculturalism is this liberal, if you have this radical multiculturalism, it's the idea that different cultures coexist, intermingle, all we need is some neutral legal frame to allow the coexistence. No, the fact is that if you look at all examples of more or less successful multiculturalism, you will always find a Leitkultur. But not in the sense of one is the top. In the sense of for us to coexist, we all have to accept a certain set of basic cultural norms of tolerance, blah-blah, and so on. This is absolutely crucial. What I and I'm even for dogmatism here. In what sense? Let's take rape. I would like to live in a society where you don't have to argue why women shouldn't be raped, you know what I mean? I would like to live in a society where when someone advocates rape it simply appears in the best case a bad joke, in the worst case a complete idiot or whatever. In other words, what I'm saying is let's not underestimate the necessity for, let's call it, a set of—and this cannot be politically correct commandments—it must be a set of let's call them unwritten rules which regulate the very coexistence of different cultures blah-blah. This is where the battle is won. So again, my problem with all those from Angela Merkel to David Cameron, Leitkultur, is no, they that it's the wrong Leitkultur they are proposing. I'm not against Leitkultur as such. Leitkultur can be a very progressive one. This is the tragedy of Hitler. The tragedy for not for Hitler—namely, look at Weimar Germany, whatever we say about it critically, it obviously had a different Leitkultur, basically it was secular Jewish Leitkultur with tolerance, acceptance. And Hitler radically changed the German Leitkultur. What do I mean by this? Ah, let me even add another provocation here. Eurocentrism. Well, we have this far this right-wing anti-immigrant freaks who claim we defend the European legacy. I totally disagree with this ridiculous ridiculous masochist liberal attitude: no, we are guilty, Europe colonization, we killed millions, blah blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true. But nonetheless, I think it's much more effective and shocking once they almost beat me when I advocated this to the right-wingers. It clearly hurts them to tell them, "No, you got it wrong. There are good things in European tradition—feminism, equality, democracy and so on—and our point should be you anti-immigrant populist, you are the true threat the true threat to Europe. We are." And so I mean this, now I'm slowly returning to Jan van Eyck Academy here, there is—maybe it's not, I'm not sure—but okay, but nonetheless I claim there are some things in European tradition which are the very core of European tradition and which are worth fighting. The idea which you find in Descartes, wonderful idea. This is the beginning of true multiculturalism for me. You remember when Descartes at the beginning of his *Meditations* says, "This is how I began really to think, that first I saw other cultures appear to me ridiculous, but then I asked myself, but what if in the eyes of other cultures my own culture is ridiculous and so on?" This, this is why incidentally Cartesian Cogito was so popular with women. Don't you know it's not only Queen Christina of Sweden, it's many others. They said Cogito has no sex, at least in principle. We we—so what I'm saying is that our we should be much more aggressive here. Don't even concede to the enemy what he claims. What we should say is that no, yes, we should say yes, European European heritage, Judeo-Christian civilization is under threat today by you, exactly by you. All that is great, you are threatening. No, not by poor Muslims or whoever here. They are not a threat. They are in the worst of cases some narrow group who tries to impose—but they are not a threat. A true threat comes from within, they are. Imagine Europe where how do you call this guy, Geert Wilders, would be the Prime Minister here, where I don't know he died okay, but Haider in Germany, Le Pen in France, my God, pathetically I claim this would no longer have been Europe in any sense. So again, we should be here much more aggressive. So again, now really to conclude with the texts—namely, sorry not—with what does this mean in all these battles? What is our duty and yours here? You know, situation has changed. That is to say, A, we no longer can play the game of traditional vanguard intellectuals who, you know, ordinary people are now protesting and we will provide the answer. I doubt it. I doubt it. Also on the other hand, we should not in a pseudo-Maoist way celebrate the ordinary people: "Oh there is a wisdom in them, we intellectuals should just learn." No, you will say Mao. Ah, but Mao as you must know was much more wise. You know when he did that swimming? You know what Mao said? He said a leader should swim with the people, but he shouldn't drown with the people, no? Ah, he wasn't so—no seriously. What I'm saying is that let's be frank. We should not—every false elevation of ordinary people is a fake. Recently I reread that horrible text by Heidegger, you know, *Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?*, Why should we stay in province? You know when Heidegger was called to Berlin in '34 and here is the scene. Sorry, I quote Heidegger: "Recently I got an invitation to teach at the University of Berlin. On that occasion I left Freiburg and withdrew to the cabin Todtnauberg," famous hut there, "I listened to what the mountains and the forest and the farmlands were saying. And I went to see an old friend of mine, a 75-year-old farmer. He had read about the call to Berlin in the newspapers. What would he say? Slowly he fixed the sure gaze of his clear eyes on mine and keeping his mouth tightly shut, he thoughtfully put his faithful hand on my shoulder. Ever so slightly he shook his head. That meant absolutely no." No, the ordinary wisdom told—now first I claim one can only imagine what the old farmer was really thinking. I claim something like he knew he tried desperately to guess what Heidegger wanted to hear from him and he probably he guessed it correctly that Heidegger wanted to have confirmed his the no. So again today, we will not learn from ordinary people, if I may put it in German but referring to ongoing demonstrations: *Warum sollen wir in Wall Street bleiben?*—something like this, no? We we cannot trust the people. We don't know, intellectuals, so where are we? Is it a blind man leading a blind man? No, I propose a formula, I wonder if you will find acceptable this formula. I propose a simple formula which turns it around. Recently reading a book, a very good one in English, if you don't read Russian you should get it, you know who is Andrei Platonov. You had here some meetings on him, the great Russian writer. There is a collection of his short stories which are excellent, I more and more like Platonov from the 30s his later texts, there is a collection called *The Soul* where John Berger wrote a wonderful afterword. Where, okay, unfortunately in Negri-hard terms, he refers to multitudes of those who found themselves on the wrong side of the wall. And here is what he writes: "The multitudes have answers to questions which have not yet been posed, and they have the capacity to outlive the walls. The questions are not yet asked because to do so requires words and concepts which ring true, and those currently being used to name events have been rendered meaningless: democracy, freedom, productivity, and so on. With new concepts the questions will soon be posed, for history involves precisely such a problem of questioning soon? within a generation." So I think he proposes a wonderful reversal that let's call them naively people, ordinary people, it's not that they ask us questions and we will provide the answers. No, they are the answer but they don't know to what question they are the answer. And we intellectuals should just help them and ourselves to ask the right question. What do I mean by this? Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote something wonderful, I think already in '49 or '53 in his great analysis of the kinship: that the prohibition of incest is not a question, an enigma. It is an answer to a question but we do not know which question. And I claim it's something similar with the demands of all protesters today, Wall Street and so on. Intellectuals should not take the protesters as people who ask questions and that we intellectuals should provide answers. People demonstrating are have answers but we should be ready to propose to formulate questions to which their demonstration are a proper answer. Only in this way I think we can make a difference. Thank you very much.
Grateful I am meant to be allowed to speak here because as I will I will return to this point at the end, it's extremely important what you are fighting for here. Today we effectively live in an era where incredibly important, let's call them ideological struggles, are taking place. For example, although it's fashionable today to criticize President Obama, and I am very critical towards him, but don't underestimate the impact of that debate about universal health care. This was his great achievement, to trigger a debate. You know why? Because that debate disturbed the very core of American ideology, this notion of freedom of choice and so on, you know, because this is how Republicans succeeded to totally dilute Obama's health care reform by claiming, ah, Obama wants to take from us the freedom of choice. It was the right debate. And this for example, which are other debates like this? It's a wonderful example of material weight of ideology. A girlfriend of a friend of mine, of Udi Aloni, Sarah Kamens, started to circulate a letter against this—how do you call this—DSM. You know this—is it DSM, this psychiatric—oh, DSM. Sorry, DSM. DSM, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I told her, okay, who cares about some categorization there? And she told me, are you crazy? The categorization there determines which illnesses will be covered by insurance organizations, which which which medicines, pills, or which treatments will be covered by—in other words, we may it may appear that we are just there fighting for some minor theoretical points: is hysteria illness or not? We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. Because do you know that, speaking about military-industrial complex, but do you know that in United States the, let's call it medical-industrial complex, spends twice the money more than the entire military-industrial complex. So and I will return to it at the end. This is why I think it's absolutely crucial, the fight that is going on here. In what sense, I will return to it to the end. Let me just to so that I don't forget another anecdotic fact. It’s really madness what happened—did you read it, I think this is part of the same reactionary offensive—that Julian Assange will be extradited. I mean, I don't idealize him. I mean, but he explained to me and I checked it up, there is madness in this case. Where is madness? Do you know that, this is the madness. You know why they will extradite him? For accusations of rape. Okay, but you know what form this rape had? It was a totally consensual sex, just two weeks afterwards the woman complained something that he didn't use the right type of condom or something like that. And for this he is extradited. Now comes the total point of madness. Do you know that there is no charge in Sweden against Assange? So he'll be extradited without there being any charge against him. And you will like this, do you know what law did they use? Most European countries accepted in around when everyone—they were afraid of the spread of Bolshevism, they accepted some kind of a law where if you are suspected of communist terror, without even clear accusation, you can be extradited to another country and so on. This is one of these weird laws that exist only because they forgot to cancel them, to cancel them. You know, it's like I now read—you can check it on the web, this is a monument to legal order I claim—like the most crazy laws in United States. Like in Texas, if you have—be careful if you go to Texas—if you have more than six of sex toys, more than six, you can be arrested. Then in another country, Tennessee or where, anal intercourse, you can be arrested. You know these laws that nobody nobody even thinks about them. No, this is what they are using there. No, so it—again, it's pretty dark because don't have any big illusions about Sweden. Assange told me, you know, Sweden is no longer the Sweden of our youth, of Olof Palme and so on, which at least stood for certain standards. Okay, getting lost here. Let me begin with again how proud I am to be here. As my friend Mladen Dolar explained to me what like him, what I really like here is already the subtitle of this institution. It's intro-blah-blah for Art, Design, Theory. Of course, as a Hegelian, I immediately recognized in it the three forms of Absolute Spirit, you know. Art is Art, Theory is Philosophy, Design is Religion. Religion is theory from the problem of design. You have an idea of God, how what design to make to make it palpable, no? And so before elaborating this a little bit, I hope you will not be disappointed, I will what you will get here is, you know that proverb English phrase that what the bride should bring when there is a wedding, no? It's something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. You will get something like this from me here, but with a little bit of change. Something old, yes, as always I will recycle myself. Something new, there will be some original idea. Something borrowed, yes, especially from my Slovene friends, Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupančič. And here there is a problem. Not something blue, you will get something red at the end, of course. But then there must be a rhyme, so instead of new I propose bad. Bad for the those in power. So I will give you something old, something bad, something borrowed, something red. Why? You know that here we are in Jan van Eyck Academy. You know of course, even I knew it without checking on Wikipedia, which is the most famous painting, no? That guy, Arnolfini and his bride. And this is a nice metaphor for theory. We, the theory, are of course that mirror. That mirror where you see why? Because you know what what you see in that mirror in the middle of the painting is like the production process in a way, no? It's precisely we have to reflect into the scene of ideology what is outside, the productive process. So again, I will come back to this later. Just a short remark then business starts. Just a short remark on these three forms of Absolute Spirit, that is to say, Art, Design, Religion and Theory. You know, let's nonetheless because serious high culture is obviously threatened today. I will return to this to the end. You know, the time has come to accept a tragic fact that we, who are now under criticism, kind of a useless academic study, we are the last survivors of high culture. And the good point is that at the end it will be we, the leftists, who will be the last chance for high culture. Because what those in power want from us more and more is like is education whose aim is to produce experts. Like I was debating Bologna reform, this terrible European community thing in France and a guy who later even wanted to become a minister gave me a wonderful example. He told me, this was a couple of years ago when there were burning cars in Paris suburbs. He told me, look, now cars are burning there, we don't need some stupid abstract philosophy. What we need from you intellectuals is, we need specialist psychologists to to describe to us the psychology of the wild crowd, how to control it. We need urban urban developers to know, you know, how to construct suburbia so that to prevent mass gatherings and so on and so on. That's what they want from from us. They want us as experts to solve the problems that they formulate. But that's not theory. This is the end of theory. Theory is precisely the first step of theory is not to answer problems formulated by others, but to formulate the problem correctly. This is where theory begins. Like today for example, yes, we are all against racism, sexism and so on, but the problem is what? My old example, I'm sorry if I repeat myself with racism and sexism, did you notice typically how we automatically translate racism, sexism into problem of tolerance? But this is not self-evident. Think about Martin Luther King, he practically never mentions tolerance. Why do we automatically translate racism, sexism into a problem of tolerance? Again, this is a sign of this post-political cultural capitalism where all conflicts are conflicts between different cultures and then all you can do is tolerate differences and so on and so on. For Martin Luther King, my God, racism wasn't a problem of tolerance, it’s a problem of economic injustice, laws, and so on and so on. Even for feminism it goes the same. I found it even ridiculous and every woman does who is a feminist, to claim that the goal of feminist is what, that women should be more tolerated by men or what? It's ridiculous. This is not a problem. It's ideological mystification of a problem. Not to mention my other well-known, I repeat them too much I know, examples. For example, ecology. Yes, it is a problem, we may all die because of it maybe. But did you notice how what is more and more in front presented to all of us is precisely the ideological version of what I like to call, or what some people already call, the way of life ecology. You know, like they offer you as a bribe small daily rituals to keep you ecologically satisfied. Like did you recycle that Coke can? Did you put did you separate newspapers to be recycled? And okay, it's good to do this, but the problem is that when you do this you already feel, look, I'm doing something for Mother Earth, a great project and so on. And of course in this way it makes you feel good. The real the real problem somehow disappears. So again, this is our task as theorists. So again, let me just before I begin properly, this is just the what in sex they call foreplay, yeah. Let me just quote you a wonderful couple of lines from Shakespeare, *Midsummer Night's Dream*. It's Act Scene where Theseus says, listen it's beautiful: "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold, That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy"—what a beautiful formulation—"and the poet gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name." So Shakespeare articulates here a triad. A madman sees devils everywhere. For example, he misperceives a bush as a wild animal, a bear. A lover sees sublime beauty in an ordinary face. A poet gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. So in all three cases we have a gap between ordinary reality and some transcendent ethereal dimension. But this gap is gradually reduced. The madman simply misperceives a real object as something else. I see a bush, I think it's a wild animal. It's simple confusion. A lover maintains the reality of the beloved object, which is not cancelled but transubstantiated into the appearance of a sublime dimension. Everybody knows this. In true love, when you are truly in love, you do not need to idealize the object of love. You can be well aware of all all imperfections and so on. But at the same time, this is the paradox of love, this very imperfect frail being is the absolute for you. Then with the poet it's something much more mysterious. We also get an appearance. But this appearance, again, is neither as with madman the appearance of some false reality misperceived as real, real reality—it's not that you see a bush you misperceive it as a bear—it's not the appearance of transcendence in immanence—it's not this ordinary woman I see absolute the absolute in her—it's much something much more beautiful, a materialization of nothing. You are able to give shape and form to nothing. You have an appearance in which it's an appearance where it's not some substantial X that appears. It's nothing. Nothing appears. And maybe this is a nice formula even for political revolution. This is what we need today, the political imagination to give shape to nothing, opening of the new. And at the end I will return to it, another political point here. Do you know that—it's not a joke, I checked it up with my Chinese friends—do you know that a couple of months ago in China they they imposed a new law which prohibits in all narrative media, comics, books, cinema, TV, in all fiction narrative, all stories which deal either with time travel or with alternate reality. Of course, it's clear why. The idea is it's too dangerous even to allow people to dream about possible different societies. But I think this is a good sign for China. Because it means at least that people there are still able to imagine a difference. The problem with us in the so-called developed West is that we don't need this prohibition. Because our—and this is the material weight weight of ideology—our, let's call it, political imagination is so constrained that it doesn't work in this sense. Like as my friend Fredric Jameson put it decades ago, it's easy to imagine the end of the world all the time, all these boring movies, you know, asteroid hitting Earth, whatever. But it's impossible to imagine a slight change in capitalism. You know, it is as if all life on Earth can be annihilated but somehow capitalism will go on or whatever, no? So so again, my point was that if if this is religion, if this is love—you are able to see in an ordinary face the divine dimension—poetry is nothing, you see nothing as something. And maybe we theorists, we are madmen, no? Sorry? Definitely. Definitely. Okay. Now comes a little bit more serious work to substantiate this all. Let me begin with an idea which I already used in my some of my work, which I really like. It will strike you as eccentric, but then you will see how we practice it. But we shouldn't. I'm referring of course to my favorite theologian, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who in his classical novel, *The Man Who Was Thursday*, ironically proposed to install a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers. Here is the wonderful quote: "The work of the philosophical policeman is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to T-houses to arrest thieves. We, philosopher-policemen, we go to artistic tea parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed." And so on and so on. Now you think this is madness. Ah, would thinkers as different as Karl Popper, Theodor Adorno, and Emmanuel Levinas, would they also not subscribe to just a slightly different version of this idea? Where, for example, the actual political crime is called totalitarianism and the philosophical crime is condensed in the notion of totality. The thesis of, for example, Karl Popper is that philosophical totality, pretension to absolute knowledge, is at the beginning of the road which ends up in political totalitarianism. So, to paraphrase Chesterton, the task of Popperian or Adornian or Levinasian philosophical police is to discover from a book of Plato's dialogues or a treatise on Social Contract by Rousseau that a political crime, Gulag, whatever, will be committed. Or as we used to say when I was young, from Plato to NATO, you know, like straight line. The ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest revolutionaries. The philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia to detect proponents of totality. Is this accusation correct or not? The interesting thing to note is how some apparent left-wingers, but also right-wingers, of course, liberals, but also others, even if they would find this idea of Chesterton the way it's formulated ridiculous, do practice this line. The great sport of today's liberal anti-radical thought is to detect in metaphysics of presence, in the what is for them bad philosophy, the roots of future totalitarianism. What should be our answer to this? Our answer should be, I claim, very simple. Our answer should be that no, this is not what we theorists should be doing. We are not doing this. What we are doing is that through concrete analysis, we are demonstrating, we are trying to show how how the system already immanently undermines itself. We are, to put it in Hegelian terms—and this is the content of the notion of totality, the true content—totality, Hegelian totality, is not this ridiculous idea things may appear contradictory to you, but if you put them in a perspective of totality even apparently dissonant details serve the global harmony and so on. No, Hegel is here a radical thinker and I think the most important critical tool is his notion of totality. Totality means precisely that if you are dealing with an idea and you discover some features, elements, which seem to violate this idea, it means that these violations, distortions of the idea are an immanent part of the idea. For example, you have marriage and you have prostitution, cheating, blah-blah. The point is not to say prostitution, cheating violate the idea of marriage. The point is to show how in concrete social reality marriage is necessarily supplemented by prostitution, or as Marx put it in his classic lines in *Communist Manifesto*, marriage ultimately is a form of prostitution. You know this, you got the Hegelian point, which is the distortion of an idea should be conceived as immanent part of the idea. Now I will be critical towards the 20th century Left. I agree with those, even liberal critics, why not, who claimed apropos of Stalinism, how it's too easy to say oh, Stalin distorted Marx's original message, which was democratic, or something even more horrible like I think that today when I tried to sleep because of jet lag, there was a nice intervention here where it was argued nicely against this socialism with human face, whatever. No, the idea is that nonetheless, you cannot save Marx in this simple way: oh his idea was good, bad realization. How was it nonetheless possible that out of a movement inspired by Marx, the horror of Stalinism emerged? Okay, I say, but let's be honest in the same way about today's global capitalism. We should not conceive its ideal form, relatively till now till now successful, acceptable, social democratic, welfare state, tolerant capitalism, and then in a Fukuyama way to claim, yeah, all other countries may still be dictatorial, brutal, but this is the goal, slowly, slowly we are all approaching this. No, the point is that all these symptoms, antagonisms, inconsistencies of global capitalism should be included into the notion of capitalism as totality. Totality is not a harmonious whole. Totality is a whole, totality plus all its distortions and so on. Okay, to be very concrete today. Totality of capitalism is also Congo. Literally, you know, Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo is usually painted as a kind of a Conradian Heart of Darkness. Yeah, in some sense it is, it's horror, the state doesn't function, you have local warlords, you have about at least I was told children who were drugged when they were five, six, so that at you get perfect killers and so on. But let's not forget how this same Congo is kept in this state by being fully included into the global capitalist market. You know that they have, I'm too stupid to know the names, some of the crucial metals for pieces and so on, I don't know—and diamonds—and diamonds, yeah, yeah. All that stuff is—so you know this is how precisely a place which appears as a Heart of Darkness outside is kept in that state, in that state, by way of its total inclusion into into global capitalism. This is this is what we should focus on. This is what again totality means. It's not this the most disgusting maybe justification metaphorical of religion, you know, when they say what appears to us as evil it's only because we don't have the right perspective. You know, usually people use this disgusting metaphor of a painting: like what appears to you as evil is the same as if you look at the picture. If you look from too close you see just stains, but if you look at it from a proper distance, you see how what appeared to you as stains are part of the global harmony. Well, I find it a little bit problematic to say that Congo or Auschwitz were just these stains and we cannot see how they contribute to the divine beauty or whatever, no? If I claim that a materialist should maybe turn around the metaphor. That is to say that when you look closely at something it may appear beautiful, no? But when you withdraw a little bit you see how precisely this beauty is part of the global horror and shit or whatever, no? Okay, so how is it that we are not able to do this type of analysis of totality? I would like to draw your attention to a certain technological invention which I love. It's not yet practiced, but I don't think that it doesn't function because okay, as if this means something, I saw a report on it on I don't know what TV. It's I think a perfect example of how an apparently innocent technological invention is not only penetrated by ideology, but even materializes at its purest an ideological mechanism. I'm talking about SixthSense. It's a so-called wearable gestural interface developed by an Indian, Pranav Mistry, who works at MIT—Cambridge, Massachusetts, at MIT Media Lab. It is a simple machine. The hardware is simple: a small web camera dangling here from your neck, a pocket projector—small projector—a mirror, all connected wirelessly to a smartphone in your pocket. And that's it. So what's the magic effect? It's incredible. The if you have all this on, you begin by handling objects and making gestures. The camera recognizes objects, gestures, and identifies them using computer vision-based techniques. The software then processes the video stream data, reading it as a series of instructions, and retrieves, you know, a smartphone, retrieves all the data which are then sent back and through the small projector, you can see them on any flat surface in front of you. I was really shocked when I saw this report on TV, how it works. It's almost a miracle in a way. It is like, for example, you are in a bookstore. You see you hold a book like this and of course the the camera recognizes the book, sends the data to smartphone, the smartphone contacts the cloud, data, and immediately on the very pages of the book, you will see projected the latest criticism of the book, all the data and so on and so on. Or for for example, you want to check time. You just do like this in front, clock, and immediately time is projected. And so on and so on. Or for example, I just do like this, the camera recognizes this as a photo symbol and instantly a photo of what you see is stored in front of you. Now of course I am an evil guy, you know, I'm coming from Balkan, ex-Yugoslavia, rape, mess, ethnic cleansing. So my idea was, of course, I warn you, this is dirty, politically incorrect. Like, I hope this works, like let's say you're a beautiful woman, no? I look at you and immediately projected onto you, she likes cunnilingus, Dostoevsky, that's the way to seduce her. Okay, I had to say this—the nastiest dream, you know. But what I'm saying is that this invention was celebrated as the great breakthrough because it allegedly, and it does in a way, overcomes the division between virtual world of information and like real reality. The idea is that the standard use of cyberspace still implies a radical division. Either you deal with real people or you are in front of a screen. The idea is that here we get the two dimensions together. You move in a real world, dealing with real people, but at the same time you are in the virtual world where data are projected. But here I claim ideology enters. Because if we generally call ideology the ground of ideology what Jacques Lacan calls the Big Other, which here means simply the inconsistent network, texture of ideological prejudices and so on. You should always ask yourself when your smartphone connects with the cloud. But what is in the cloud? Who controls the cloud? So again, my the danger of this technology, I think, is that it in a way naturalizes ideology. Because although you rationally know that there are two different things, like I'm referring to the beautiful woman on my head, that one is your body, the other is the data, but in my immediate experience, you know, it's this magic effect as if the thing itself is answering back to me. It's as if out of you the answers emerge. In other words, we are back into the pre-modern universe where meaning is experienced as directly immanent to things. It's no longer this modern distinction between meaningless grey infinite universe and our human horizon of meaning. We are back at pre-modern unity. Ah, this will be your beauty drink or what remains. Sorry. Okay. So the second thing, even more tragic, is that precisely—let me imagine my tasteless example, let me return to it. Woman, it tells it there. And let's apply this to racism. Isn't exactly—I hope you will get the structural homology—isn't this exactly how ideology works? Let's say, believe me I'm not, I have many sins, but maybe just maybe I'm not a racist, or to be more precise, I am a racist but a universal racist. I hate all racists. Okay, let's say that I am anti-Arab and I see an Arab. But if I'm a racist, what I see there, isn't it exactly the same? I see, you know, when a racist sees an Arab or a Jew, you say look his evil smile, look he will steal you. It's literally you see all the prejudices projected onto it. It's the basic ideological logic of perception. And again, the danger of this machinery is that in a way with all this new age mythology, you know, oh we are back into the unity of sensual domain of objects and the virtual world of universe, it stages a total mystification. Because it conflates two dimensions. Here, I think, we should return to one of the greatest philosophers, a total madman whom I like, Nicolas Malebranche. You know, the follower of Descartes, I think was a genius, if there ever was one. Ah no, he was a genius. He was what I called over-orthodox theologian, you know. He drew all the consequences in such an absurd way that you see the nonsense of it. For example, we think that we would all be lost without Jesus Christ, but Jesus Christ came and redeemed some of us. No, Malebranche says without Christ, we would all be redeemed. God in his vanity wanted to be admired by men to redeem some of us. So God pushed all of us into sin so that then he could redeem some of us. Just so that we will—okay, so what you know what is the specificity of Malebranche? You will see the connection with this ideological mechanism. It's so-called Occasionalism. You know what is this, no? He solves Descartes's problem. Descartes's problem is we have two substances, *res cogitans*, *res extensa*. How are they connected? Descartes's idea is totally stupid, no? Is that pineal gland or what? It was the only one single gland that Descartes found here when he was doing this—how do you call it, not vivisection, but—no, no, not surgery. You cut dead bodies. I hope so, he didn't—okay, and his idea was there maybe our mind is sending signals to our body. Now Malebranche knew saw this is nonsense, but wanted to remain a Cartesian dualist. So he provided a crazy solution: that our thinking substance and our material substance are totally without contact, incompatible. So how is it nonetheless then that let's say now I think about raising my hand, my brain gives—or my mind gives an order to my hand, I can do it? He claims God is observing us all the time and God takes care of the coordination. When God reads in my mind the idea 'raise the hand', he triggers the material process. It's all coordinated through God. I claim that—and yes—then now comes Malebranche's total madness. His idea is that then he constructs a wonderful narrative of the origins of Fall. That is to say, if this is the state of things, how is it nonetheless that in our immediate experience, we don't see things like this? We think I immediately contact my hand or I immediately affected by objects. His idea was that it was of course, we are in Christianity, the guilty one is Eve. Adam was a good Occasionalist. He knew what he sees there, material objects, are totally separated by ontological gap from his mind. His idea was that when Adam saw naked Eve, he was so fascinated that he thought, oh my God, here the object is directly addressing me. He forgot about divine intervention. And then comes the point of true madness. Then Malebranche goes on that God, when he saw this regression into—that's what I like, the this I think is the funniest definition of the Fall into sin. Fall into sin is fall from philosophy of Occasionalism into British empiricism, when you think that objects affect you. So his idea is that this is how then Malebranche explains erection. Malebranche says to remind men—women don't count, men—to remind a man that there is no direct contact between his mind and his body, he will make one organ, penis, independent on his will. Like you want it should get up, it will not get up, or when you will least want it, it will get up. This is the reminder that they are separated, no? Monics. But you know what? What I'm trying to tell you, where is the moment of truth here? When you hear this type of nonsensical stories, you should always ask yourself: is there a moment of truth in them? You know, it's the same as with that—Mladen Dolar, my friend, wrote about it nicely—that totally crazy theory of of how to unite Darwinism and Christianity. You know that theory, no? I mean, when Darwin elaborated his evolutionary theory, Christians have a problem because if you read the Bible literally and you count all the generations, then God should have created the world a little bit over years ago, no? Even some British guy had this wonderful idea that at in the morning at minus and something B.C., at in the morning God created the world and so on, no? So how to unite the two? This theol—this theological friend of Darwin proposed a wonderful idea: that, my God, the Bible is true, it cannot be wrong, so the universe really was created and so on years ago. So what's the trick? Ah, the trick is that to lure us, to seduce us, God directly created fossils, you know? He created a kind of a false opening of the universe with mirrors. Now you will—oh this is, maybe it is, okay—evolutionary, scientifically nonsense. But isn't it the best theory of ideology that you can imagine? Doesn't ideology work precisely like that, that each epoch creates its own false past? Like there was a wonderful book, I hope you know it, it's a collection of essays edited by Eric Hobsbawm, *The Invention of Tradition*. Yeah, yeah. You know where he shows, for example, that you know all that Scottish bullshit with skirts, kilts, this is all late 19th century, of course, no? In the but how—okay, so you see, and it's the same for Malebranche. Of course, it's nonsense as a scientific theory or whatever. But isn't something, if you replace God with ideological space, isn't this precisely the way things function? That is to say that precisely we are never just we in direct contact with reality. The Big Other always coordinates our contact with reality. What we see in reality is never just reality. It's so that this camera of this SixthSense machinery is literally an a camera of ideology. How do we detect this? Now I will borrow—maybe she was even here explaining it, but I will give a more political twist to it—I will borrow an idea, or rather two jokes, from the other member of my Slovene-Lacanian party troika, the cells, Alenka Zupančič, who drew my attention and wrote a nice text on it, maybe you even know already the joke. She drew attention to a wonderful joke from Ernst Lubitsch's *Ninotchka*. I think it's the best introduction into Hegelian notion of negativity. If you have a stupid uncle, half-senile, says "phew, Hegel, I don't understand it," well tell him this, maybe they will. It's a joke where the hero enters a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. The waiter replies, "Sorry, but we have run out of cream. Can I bring you but we have milk. Can I bring you coffee without milk?" Now this is a nice Hegelian point that like negativity matters. Thing is not just what it is positively. You know, coffee without milk is not the same as coffee without cream, even if in its immediate positive existence it may appear the same. Okay, I don't have time here to go into the entire dialectics of desire here. Because you know the basic question to explain is: why do we add to coffee milk or cream? There's only one speculative answer. Because coffee is never fully coffee. It has an opening, a gap. And we have to fill in this gap. And this brings us to the most elementary structure of a commodity, you know, which is for me best exemplified by, sorry to repeat an old joke, but you know Kinder Egg Surprise, that bullshit. This is a commodity at its purest. You have a chocolate shell, but you know how the publicity for commodity goes. Like, oh you don't just buy chocolate, there is some mystic ingredient, that's it. Where the genius of Kinder Surprise is that you really get that mystic ingredient, you know, that plastic stupid toy in the middle, no? No wonder in United States, in California at least, you know that till a couple of years ago—I'm not kidding—it was prohibited to sell Kinder Egg Surprise. They claimed that it was cheating, like you pretend to sell something but you are really selling something else. Here you can see how Americans wanted to prohibit what in Lacanian theory we call objet petit a, object small a. Because this okay, now let's complicate things, but you will say but I am a fanatic, I just like plain coffee. Doesn't this undermine your—I don't need any milk or whatever. Ah, I can claim the reflexive structure is still here, it's just tautological. Coffee can be its own supplement. How? Let me give you a an example of the same logic from history of cinema, which I like very much. If you know today's half-forgotten genre, Western, you may know that in early 50s, late 40s there was a crisis of Western as a genre. So the first reaction was to shoot so-called meta-Westerns. Westerns which combine Western genre with another genre. You have like *Seven Brides for Seven Brothers*—who are the other guys? Grooms. Yes, it was Western with musical. You have a very good one, even *Pursued* by Raoul Walsh with Robert Mitchum, clear case of Western noir. You have even Western detective. You know, like like Western is not strong enough to sustain itself so you like this would be, you know, Western with coffee is musical, Western with milk is noir. But then André Bazin, the great French theorist, asked a wonderful question: what are then the two pure Westerns from early or mid 50s? Kind of legendary, although I don't like them too much, it's *Shane* and *High Noon*. He claims these are meta-Westerns, but the supplement is Western itself. They mythically, tautologically, which is why they are such pure mythical Westerns. Okay, nonetheless, so let's go back. So why is this structure important? This structure of is it coffee without milk or coffee without cream? Okay, to make this clear let me connect this to another joke that I really like. It's from a did you see it's only years, most of you are maybe too young, an English working-class half-comedy half-drama with with Ewan McGregor before he became a Jedi when he was still working-class hero, *Brassed Off*. This kind of unemployed miners melodrama where it's a wonderful scene in the middle of the film where Ewan McGregor, the hero of the film, accompanies a young pretty woman to her flat. And then at the entrance to the flat, she tells him, "Would you like to come in up to my place for a coffee?" He answers, "Yeah, but there is a problem. I don't drink coffee." Her answer: "No problem, I don't have any coffee." You see, the beauty is that without any obscenity, just through this double negation—I don't drink coffee, no problem I don't have any—what you get is the most obscene brutal erotic invitation that you can imagine. Just through double negation. Okay, not to lose time. How does this work in ideology? Okay, to give you a very first it's clear the political example. For example, a Polish friend told me that in socialist Poland where things were usually often lacking, they didn't have them in the stores, there is a similar joke where a customer enters a store and asks, "Did you already get butter, do you have butter now?" And the salesperson answers, "Sorry, you entered the wrong store. We are the store which doesn't have toilet paper. The store across the street is the one which doesn't have butter." You know, like negativity matters. Now you will say what has this to do—ah now comes, sorry I'm not just bullshitting I hope so, now a more important lesson comes here. I claim that today more and more ideology cheats in this way. At the level of implications, it acts as if it's offering you coffee without cream, but it's really offering you coffee without milk, no? That is to say, it cheats not at the level of what it says, but of what is absent in it, what it implies to say but doesn't say. There is another stupid Marx Brothers joke from one of their bad late movies, *Go West*, at the beginning, which exemplifies what I want to say. This scene at the very beginning of *Go West*, Groucho Marx approaches a how-do-you-call-it where they are selling tickets at a train station, his friend window, and buys a ticket and gives to the salesperson a bunch of dollars and says, "Oh it's okay, you don't have to count the money," no? But the salesperson nonetheless counts the money in detail and says, "But wait a minute, it's not enough money." And Groucho answers, "But I told you not to not to count the money." You see the trick. He his implication was: don't count the money, everything is okay, no? But I think we can imagine absolutely something of the same. Do you remember Donald Rumsfeld when he was justifying the torture Iraq invasion? He said, something have to be done discreetly, he meant pressure torture for the interest of United States and we simply shouldn't talk about it, no? But then later, unfortunately, we discovered that he didn't mean only torture, which is also unacceptable for me, he also meant organizing things for his private business, Halliburton, all the companies. And then, you know, imagine the exact replica of Marx Brothers jokes that we would tell him, but wait a minute, you provided billions of dollars to your companies. And he would say, but I told you it's better not to talk about these things and so on, no? Or if you want the same joke, imagine Americans and Europeans debating in late the invasion of Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction. Okay, Rumsfeld says to some European minister, "Would you care to join us in the attack on Iraq to find the weapons of mass destruction?" We Europeans try to squeeze out, but we don't want to offend United States so we give a kind of a answer, "Yeah, but we have no facilities to search for weapons of mass destruction." And then Rumsfeld answers, "No problem, there are no weapons. We just want to raid the country." No, but now more seriously. I claim that, and this is a very dangerous moment, that's why we are having and it's the good thing that we are having all the demonstration and so on. Of course, in our conformist everyday life, we are opportunists. We don't want to know everything. An average voter let's be frank, it's not that they don't want their state to torture. They just don't want to know about it, you know? Like there are things we want done but let others do it and so on. And again more and more important is that—this is why people are so disappointed today—that they feel cheated at the level of these implications. Not at the level of what ideology says but at the level of what it doesn't say and but implies. And you will say now who cares about this. I think this is absolutely crucial. An ideology never works just explicitly by what it says. It's absolutely crucial to include all the sometimes obscene sometimes whatsoever implications. And there we have more and more the lie today. For example, did you see—my last movie example then a little bit of Marx—did you see it's an old classic, now it's emerging as a cult. It may appear naive but I like it, I've written about it a lot. Did you see John Carpenter's film *They Live*? You should. It's crazy film, like kind of a primitive Hollywood Marxism, but in a good sense, not in the disgusting James Cameron sense. It's the story of John Nada, an unemployed worker in in L.A., who Nada, very nice Nada means nothing in Spanish, you know, like proletarian, who enters an abandoned church and then finds there a box of strange sunglasses. And then later, walking around the downtown of Los Angeles, he discovers what these strange sunglasses do. They're kind of ideologico-critical sunglasses. Like you see a poster "Go to Hawaii, have the holiday of your lifetime" and so on. You put the glasses on, you see words like "Enjoy," "Don't think," "Consume," "Remain stupid" or something, you know, in a very naive way you get the true ideological message. Now you will say but this is stupid naive. No it's not, I like this example. And I will tell you why. First, what I like is that it goes against our spontaneous ideological perception which would have been: we see things distorted through glasses, you must put the glasses off, look with your own eyes and you will see the truth. No, ideology is our nature as it were in class society. You need glasses. That is to say, you need in a way violence, work on yourself, to see the way things are. Second thing I like is how the scene staged by this film is already a consumerist scene. That is to say it's not classical ideology but today's ideology. Why? Because I claim that in classical ideology the situation is exactly the opposite one. In classical ideology you directly see the order, and it's all the dirty obscene stuff that is unseen but there. For example, in classical ideology you would have a direct appeal—let me be very evil now taking into account all the pedophilic cases of Catholic Church—you would have a poster "Become a monk, do your duty, humanity, live for Christ" and so on. And then you put the glasses on and you would see "And you can have all the small boys you want" or whatever, you know, like it could have worked like this then. The obscene bribery of ideology is implicit. Here it's the opposite. The direct bribery is there, but the injunction, the order, is here. This is very important because this is how today ideology functions. It's more and more in our liberal hedonist societies that the order is still here but implicit. And again, just imagine to see what is without milk or without cream. This is a very good naive critical approach. When you see some phenomenon, just imagine you putting the glasses on and what you would have seen. For example, I'm sorry if I repeat myself my standard example, imagine you see what we do unfortunately see often: a kind of a disfigured black boy's face and then for some charity organization from a goal like "Oh for the price of a couple of cups of cappuccino you can make a difference, you can save this child's life." Now imagine you put the glasses on. I claim you would have seen something like: we know we exploit the Third World, people are suffering there, but for the price of couple of cappuccinos we can not only redeem you of guilt, we can make even make you feel good that you are doing something for it and so on. Because this I claim the main function of charity today. Just to enable you like, you know, you pay per month to some child in Africa and you feel good, I did my duty, fuck off, now I can live my life. Or sorry if I repeat myself, Starbucks is even better here. Because there Starbucks is really a work of a genius. You know why? If you go to Starbucks coffee, you know what's the trick, no? They tell you immediately there: our cappuccino is more expensive, but we give to some Guatemalan children, for water in Sahara, whatever. This is an ingenious operation. Because in the old times of pure consumerism we were consuming and then we felt bad, so we had to do something to be also good citizens, no? But here, to be a good citizen, caring and so on, is literally part of the price, you know, like you pay the idea is you feel bad as a consumer, you pay a little bit more and the anti-consumerist humanitarian charity is included into the price. It's this is what I call a genius. Okay, now a little bit of how did we end up in this situation. If you allow me, I'm slowly approaching the end, don't be too afraid. I would like nonetheless to give, and I wonder now in serious if you would agree politically with this reading, where do we stand economically today? I am tempted to follow Fredric Jameson who doesn't know anything about economy but is following some other economists who do know about economy, no? That today we should reread *Capital* by way of focusing on the category of unemployment. I quote Fredric Jameson from his *Representing Capital*: "Unemployment is structurally inseparable from the dynamic of accumulation and expansion." So again, the more capitalism develops, the more it produces unemployment, in the sense of workers who when we have new technologies and so on, all of a sudden become unemployable. Again, a quote from Jameson: "The world market is thus a space in which everyone has once been a productive laborer and in which labor has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system." End of quote. So in the ongoing process of capitalist globalization, the category of the unemployed acquired a new quality beyond the classic Marxist notion of the reserve army of labor. One should consider in terms of the category of unemployed those massive populations around the world who have as it were dropped out of history, who have been deliberately excluded from the modernizing projects of the First World capitalism, who were written off as hopeless or terminal cases, so-called failed states: Congo, Somalia, victims of famine or ecological disasters, countries caught in pseudo-archaic ethnic hatred, objects of philanthropy and non-governmental organizations, or often the same people, victims of the war on terror. So the category of the unemployed should be encompassed to should be expanded to encompass a wide span of population from the temporarily unemployed through no longer employable and permanently unemployed up to people living in slums and other types of ghettos where they can also be employed but again, outside the system and finally the whole area populations even states excluded from the capitalist process. This is the first point of Jameson. I deeply agree with it so that again, exploitation—unemployment is not only so that because I think if we don't take this into account, the way people are unemployed in this more radical sense, we should also rethink exploitation in this way I think. Exploitation is not only today like people in Congo are in this deeper sense also exploited because they are structurally put in a position where they are not even allowed to participate in the world of exploitation. I don't have time to develop here the more speculative logic of how to be exploited today is not only to be exploited in the sense of "I work and capitalist take the profit." If you don't work you are in a way even more radically exploited. And again it's not the same thing as before, as we all know more and more we have categories of ex-employed people, for example, for years working in a factory, new technology, and then of course some postmodern idiot like Anthony Giddens would tell you, "Oh this is a new opportunity to reinvent yourself," [unintelligible] whatever well, when you are and tired it's easy to say. But another thing, we even have and this is I think the problem in Greece and other countries, we even have more and more people who are already as it were in advance unemployable, like students finishing studies without even a chance of employment and so on. I really think that the category of unemployment is a crucial category and of course we have a solution here with which I don't agree, a proposed solution, which was precisely invented by a guy, I think he is—I will not name the country, bad obscene joke, it’s a country immediately south from here whose character is: people there have two features: that they have many pedophiles and good chocolate, which are maybe's one feature because you would use chocolate to to seduce small children, no? Sorry, bad taste. I told I warned you I am a universal racist. No, seriously. What I want to say is that Philippe Van Parijs proposed the idea of basic income. It's interesting that in Brazil where they passed it into a law it's called *Renda Básica*, the basic rent. It's a paradoxical crazy solution because don't forget that for Van Parijs's idea is to save capitalism. His problem is: can capitalism retain all its productivity and nonetheless bring some kind of a social justice? He said capitalism today is so productive that it can sustain also a minimal wage for all citizens. There are many problems for me here. The first big problem is that what then comes with a Marxist theory of exploitation? Now you know even the un—like my point here being that the notion of exploitation should be rethought but nonetheless it should be kept. Why? Now comes before the conclusion my final point, because I wonder if you would agree with it. But I claim that maybe it's time to to shift the accent from exploitation to domination. The big, let's call it postmodern trick, Agamben, Foucault and so on was domination: microphysics of power, different strategies of domination and so on and so on. I don't think that we should focus on the notion of domination. Domination still allows for some kind of a liberal or whatever option, you know, everyone should be included blah blah blah. Because I still think that Marx's point of capitalism holds: that the paradox of capitalism is that even when formally you have no domination, exploitation is still here. And I think that if we just focus on domination then we mystify even the revolts, demonstrations going on today. For example, how did the Western media perceive the Tahrir Square, the Egyptian demonstration? By changing them into pure pro-democracy demonstrations as if they just want what we in Europe already have. Precisely this, if you listen to them, was not the case. So again, this would be again the last point for me that we have to rehabilitate, with all this topic they are doing great things: all this analysis of microphysics of power, forms of domination, *Homo Sacer*, blah-blah, but a reference to production process and exploitation is needed. Now to conclude. I mean... I claim that if we really want to rethink our situation today, we should also kill many sacred cows. The Left should really be radical even against its own prejudices. The first one, you know this problem, hierarchy. Let me now give you just three provocative ideas. One, I claim that the most dangerous idea, and here I radically disagree with John Rawls, is this idea that, you know, inequality is—try to imagine a society which would have worked the way John Rawls wanted it to work. That is to say that inequality is allowed on two conditions, if I simplify it: first that if I gain much more than you, you should gain at least a little bit more, that is to say that it profits also those on the bottom, and second point, it shouldn't be simply inherited or what, but as much as possible based on my like labor, labor achievements, whatever. I claim this is madness. I claim that that if we have differences, they should be experienced as contingent. Why? Because this is the only way that differences are made tolerable because of the logic all-pervasive capitalist logic of envy and resentment. Let's say I am poor you are rich. Let's flip it around. I'll be poor you're rich. No, but I'm a good liberal condescending liberal. Why don't you—okay. Let's pretend that you are rich for five minutes. Sorry. You know I totally agree with you you know why because what I really hate about politically correct liberals is did you notice how when they describe in a book like a bad guy and a good guy, like Rorty, Ironist and Fundamentalist, Ironist is she, fundamentalist is a he, you know like the good are the women. No I think this is secret patronizing. My God, I think it's great if you can be truly evil, no? Okay. No what I want to say is this. Let's let's say that we live in a society where the fact that you are rich and I am poor depends on chance, tradition or whatever. Then I can still save my dignity because I can say to myself, "Oh you see that total idiot, he is much more stupid than me, but he was lucky he is rich." So you know real my my narcissism survives. Now imagine that I live in a Rawlsian just society. Then I would have to admit that you are really more intelligent and better if you are rich. It is here that violence explodes. So we should be here much more brutally open. Second thing, we should stop with this Catholic total bullshit against against utilitarianism in the sense of today's capitalism is egotist, greed and so on, you know? No, capitalism as Walter Benjamin knew is a form of religion. And I mean it in a literal sense, a form of metaphysics. In the sense that a true capitalist doesn't work for his or her egotistic good. A proper capitalist idea is even if the whole world falls apart, capital has to circulate and so on and so on. It has nothing to do with his private gains and so on. So no, I claim that to be a good ecologist it precisely we need more egotism in a way. Third point. Now this will be a little bit maybe more problematic for you. Leitkultur. I’m for Leitkultur absolutely. Don't misunderstand me. No no no. I was I didn't get any special honorarium for a certain popular Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, but you know what I'm saying, that what I don't like in the idea of multiculturalism is this liberal, if you have this radical multiculturalism, it's the idea that different cultures coexist, intermingle, all we need is some neutral legal frame to allow the coexistence. No, the fact is that if you look at all examples of more or less successful multiculturalism, you will always find a Leitkultur. But not in the sense of one is the top. In the sense of for us to coexist, we all have to accept a certain set of basic cultural norms of tolerance, blah-blah, and so on. This is absolutely crucial. What I and I'm even for dogmatism here. In what sense? Let's take rape. I would like to live in a society where you don't have to argue why women shouldn't be raped, you know what I mean? I would like to live in a society where when someone advocates rape it simply appears in the best case a bad joke, in the worst case a complete idiot or whatever. In other words, what I'm saying is let's not underestimate the necessity for, let's call it, a set of—and this cannot be politically correct commandments—it must be a set of let's call them unwritten rules which regulate the very coexistence of different cultures blah-blah. This is where the battle is won. So again, my problem with all those from Angela Merkel to David Cameron, Leitkultur, is no, they that it's the wrong Leitkultur they are proposing. I'm not against Leitkultur as such. Leitkultur can be a very progressive one. This is the tragedy of Hitler. The tragedy for not for Hitler—namely, look at Weimar Germany, whatever we say about it critically, it obviously had a different Leitkultur, basically it was secular Jewish Leitkultur with tolerance, acceptance. And Hitler radically changed the German Leitkultur. What do I mean by this? Ah, let me even add another provocation here. Eurocentrism. Well, we have this far this right-wing anti-immigrant freaks who claim we defend the European legacy. I totally disagree with this ridiculous ridiculous masochist liberal attitude: no, we are guilty, Europe colonization, we killed millions, blah blah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true. But nonetheless, I think it's much more effective and shocking once they almost beat me when I advocated this to the right-wingers. It clearly hurts them to tell them, "No, you got it wrong. There are good things in European tradition—feminism, equality, democracy and so on—and our point should be you anti-immigrant populist, you are the true threat the true threat to Europe. We are." And so I mean this, now I'm slowly returning to Jan van Eyck Academy here, there is—maybe it's not, I'm not sure—but okay, but nonetheless I claim there are some things in European tradition which are the very core of European tradition and which are worth fighting. The idea which you find in Descartes, wonderful idea. This is the beginning of true multiculturalism for me. You remember when Descartes at the beginning of his *Meditations* says, "This is how I began really to think, that first I saw other cultures appear to me ridiculous, but then I asked myself, but what if in the eyes of other cultures my own culture is ridiculous and so on?" This, this is why incidentally Cartesian Cogito was so popular with women. Don't you know it's not only Queen Christina of Sweden, it's many others. They said Cogito has no sex, at least in principle. We we—so what I'm saying is that our we should be much more aggressive here. Don't even concede to the enemy what he claims. What we should say is that no, yes, we should say yes, European European heritage, Judeo-Christian civilization is under threat today by you, exactly by you. All that is great, you are threatening. No, not by poor Muslims or whoever here. They are not a threat. They are in the worst of cases some narrow group who tries to impose—but they are not a threat. A true threat comes from within, they are. Imagine Europe where how do you call this guy, Geert Wilders, would be the Prime Minister here, where I don't know he died okay, but Haider in Germany, Le Pen in France, my God, pathetically I claim this would no longer have been Europe in any sense. So again, we should be here much more aggressive. So again, now really to conclude with the texts—namely, sorry not—with what does this mean in all these battles? What is our duty and yours here? You know, situation has changed. That is to say, A, we no longer can play the game of traditional vanguard intellectuals who, you know, ordinary people are now protesting and we will provide the answer. I doubt it. I doubt it. Also on the other hand, we should not in a pseudo-Maoist way celebrate the ordinary people: "Oh there is a wisdom in them, we intellectuals should just learn." No, you will say Mao. Ah, but Mao as you must know was much more wise. You know when he did that swimming? You know what Mao said? He said a leader should swim with the people, but he shouldn't drown with the people, no? Ah, he wasn't so—no seriously. What I'm saying is that let's be frank. We should not—every false elevation of ordinary people is a fake. Recently I reread that horrible text by Heidegger, you know, *Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?*, Why should we stay in province? You know when Heidegger was called to Berlin in '34 and here is the scene. Sorry, I quote Heidegger: "Recently I got an invitation to teach at the University of Berlin. On that occasion I left Freiburg and withdrew to the cabin Todtnauberg," famous hut there, "I listened to what the mountains and the forest and the farmlands were saying. And I went to see an old friend of mine, a 75-year-old farmer. He had read about the call to Berlin in the newspapers. What would he say? Slowly he fixed the sure gaze of his clear eyes on mine and keeping his mouth tightly shut, he thoughtfully put his faithful hand on my shoulder. Ever so slightly he shook his head. That meant absolutely no." No, the ordinary wisdom told—now first I claim one can only imagine what the old farmer was really thinking. I claim something like he knew he tried desperately to guess what Heidegger wanted to hear from him and he probably he guessed it correctly that Heidegger wanted to have confirmed his the no. So again today, we will not learn from ordinary people, if I may put it in German but referring to ongoing demonstrations: *Warum sollen wir in Wall Street bleiben?*—something like this, no? We we cannot trust the people. We don't know, intellectuals, so where are we? Is it a blind man leading a blind man? No, I propose a formula, I wonder if you will find acceptable this formula. I propose a simple formula which turns it around. Recently reading a book, a very good one in English, if you don't read Russian you should get it, you know who is Andrei Platonov. You had here some meetings on him, the great Russian writer. There is a collection of his short stories which are excellent, I more and more like Platonov from the 30s his later texts, there is a collection called *The Soul* where John Berger wrote a wonderful afterword. Where, okay, unfortunately in Negri-hard terms, he refers to multitudes of those who found themselves on the wrong side of the wall. And here is what he writes: "The multitudes have answers to questions which have not yet been posed, and they have the capacity to outlive the walls. The questions are not yet asked because to do so requires words and concepts which ring true, and those currently being used to name events have been rendered meaningless: democracy, freedom, productivity, and so on. With new concepts the questions will soon be posed, for history involves precisely such a problem of questioning soon? within a generation." So I think he proposes a wonderful reversal that let's call them naively people, ordinary people, it's not that they ask us questions and we will provide the answers. No, they are the answer but they don't know to what question they are the answer. And we intellectuals should just help them and ourselves to ask the right question. What do I mean by this? Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote something wonderful, I think already in '49 or '53 in his great analysis of the kinship: that the prohibition of incest is not a question, an enigma. It is an answer to a question but we do not know which question. And I claim it's something similar with the demands of all protesters today, Wall Street and so on. Intellectuals should not take the protesters as people who ask questions and that we intellectuals should provide answers. People demonstrating are have answers but we should be ready to propose to formulate questions to which their demonstration are a proper answer. Only in this way I think we can make a difference. Thank you very much.