The Flight of Minerva in the City of God
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2022-08-29 · 1:39:07 · 9,752 words
ideologygeopolitics-warliberalism-political-correctnessdemocracycommunism-socialismfascism-populismhistoryphilosophy-generaleveryday-life
Žižek delivers a talk in Slovenia (likely 2022) defending the universality of the European project in the context of Russia's war on Ukraine, arguing that united Europe, understood as objective social democracy, remains the only viable model for international cooperation against global crises. He develops a theory of unwritten rules and how ideology operates through implicit prohibitions and permitted freedoms, illustrating this with examples from Soviet and Stalinist practice, Trump's violation of unwritten norms, and the new right's embrace of obscenity. The talk concludes with a call for Europe to awaken from passive liberal hedonism, drawing on the Haitian Revolution and Mandela as models of universalism against the culturalist manipulations of both colonialism and today's populist right. A discussion follows with participants on European civilization, leadership, democracy, and the limits of Eurocentrism.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 14
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Sloterdijk's distinction, endorsed by Žižek, between social democratic parties and social democratic measures (healthcare, free education) embedded in state apparatuses regardless of who is in power.
The implicit meta-level rules that govern how explicit rules are to be obeyed, violated, or selectively applied, constituting the true ethical substance of social interaction.
as “ethical substance”
Žižek uses the Hegelian-inflected term to refer to the implicit norms and unwritten rules that constitute the actual texture of a society's moral life, beyond explicit legal codes.
as “Nachholende Revolution (catch-up revolution)”
Habermas's term for the East European 1989 revolutions as merely catching up to what the West already had, which Žižek invokes to argue that this reading is no longer adequate given the West's own crisis.
Robert Pfaller's concept, adopted by Žižek: not the other acting for me but the other being passive for me, outsourcing one's emotional or ritual responses to an external proxy (weepers, canned laughter).
as “fetish (knowledge as fetish)”
Žižek applies the psychoanalytic concept of fetishism to our relationship with knowledge: knowing what must be done substitutes for doing it, functioning as an ersatz action.
as “cynical ideology”
The mode of ideology in which knowing what is wrong functions as a fetish substitute for acting on that knowledge, 'I know what I'm doing but I'm doing it anyway.'
Žižek maps the Book of Revelation's four horsemen onto contemporary crises: pandemic (plague), Ukraine war (war), global warming and food crisis (hunger), and technologically mediated loss of humanity (death).
Žižek invokes the concept of digital control over lives through surveillance capitalism as one of the new forms of death threatening what it means to be human.
Žižek tracks how the term 'denazification' migrates from Putin's justification for invading Ukraine to Serbian politicians threatening the Balkans, treating it as a spreading ideological virus.
as “theologico-political vision”
Žižek's term for the ideological combination of religious fundamentalism and geopolitical expansionism that drives Putin and Dugin, framing their project as more than ordinary imperialism.
Žižek's satirical extension of Republican Senator Todd Akin's 'legitimate rape' category to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, arguing both deploy the logic that the victim secretly consented.
as “good alienation”
Žižek's provocation that a well-functioning alienated state structure that people can basically trust, without requiring constant direct participation, is not only inevitable but desirable.
Žižek's closing thesis that what is unique about European civilization is that it includes radical doubt about itself, making self-critique a feature rather than a weakness.
Stories he reaches for 15
In Nazism the crowd applauds the leader who accepts it; in Stalinism the leader stands up and applauds with the crowd, Žižek jokes he has chosen his side (Stalinism).
“In Stalinism, the leader stands up and joins the applause. So I have chosen my side.”
When a richer host invites you to dinner, you are expected to offer to pay, knowing they will refuse; the offer is a mandatory fake that everyone understands.
“You offer something and of course it's a fake offer.”
Apartheid South Africa published brochures arguing that immediate racial equality would destroy authentic black tribal culture, using cultural preservation as justification for segregation, the very logic now deployed by sovereigntists.
“We should keep the difference... apartheid people wanted blacks to retain their own culture.”
In Stalin's USSR it was forbidden to criticize Stalin, but it was even more forbidden to publicly announce that this prohibition existed, demonstrating the meta-level of unwritten rules.
“It was forbidden to criticize Stalin, but it was forbidden to announce publicly these prohibitions themselves.”
At the Glasgow COP meeting, leaders (including Prince Charles) delivered true statements about urgency and the need to act, yet exactly nothing happened, illustrating knowledge-as-fetish.
“Everything they said was true. It's five minutes to twelve, we need to act, and exactly nothing happened.”
A friend in the Yugoslav army asked whether signing the oath was obligatory; told it was free, he refused; when told he'd be arrested, the officer resolved the contradiction by writing 'I order you to freely sign this document.'
“The officer wrote him an official letter claiming, 'I order you to freely sign this document.'”
When Napoleon's army approached Haitian black rebels, they heard wild singing, expecting tribal songs, they discovered it was La Marseillaise. Polish soldiers, realizing they were on the wrong side, defected to the Haitian rebels.
“When they came nearer, you know what they heard? La Marseillaise. Of course.”
After the Taliban takeover, China and the Taliban reached an implicit deal: China would not interfere with what the Taliban does to women; the Taliban would not interfere with what China does to Uyghurs, illustrating where the sovereignty/culturalism logic leads.
“'We, Chinese, allow you to do whatever you want with women there. You allow us to do with Uyghurs, Muslims, whatever we want here.'”
Two weeks before Blair's election victory, a poll named him the most unpopular person in the UK, he then won. Žižek uses this to illustrate the gap between popular discontent and what can be translated into political form.
“There was a big referendum tens of thousand people voting who is the most unpopular person in United Kingdom. Tony Blair won. Two weeks afterwards, he won the elections.”
Asked by a French journalist in Geneva in 1953 what he thought of the French Revolution, Zhou Enlai replied 'It's too early to say', Žižek cites this as a model for the long temporality of historical judgment.
“'What do you think about French Revolution?' 'It's too early to say. It's not yet far enough.'”
Writing a prayer on paper and spinning a wheel counts as praying even while thinking about sins, the most radical case of interpassivity before Žižek introduces canned laughter.
“You write a prayer on a piece of paper, you turn it around and you are praying in this way.”
Žižek's favorite definition of life: 'Life is a disease which is transmitted by sex and always ends with death', attributed to Polish graffiti, used to distinguish ordinary biological death from the deeper technological threats to humanity.
“'Life is a disease which is transmitted by sex and always ends with death.' It's the best definition of life.”
At a public meeting, Trump listened to a tape of an FBI agent making love and imitated her orgasm, Žižek uses this as evidence that the new right has abandoned the dignity formerly maintained by those in power.
“Trump imitated... an FBI agent who was making love with her partner, and imitated her orgasm.”
Leftist friends told Žižek the Capitol storming was wonderful, people breaking into the seat of power, but then noted the wrong people were doing it, capturing the paradox of the new right acting like the old radical left.
“'This is wonderful, people breaking into the seat of power... just we should have been doing this, the wrong people are doing this.'”
Trump strategist Steve Bannon explicitly calls himself a Leninist, saying his goals are what leftists were doing twenty years ago, illustrating the right's conscious appropriation of radical left tactics.
“Steve Bannon, the big Trump supporter, calls himself a Leninist.”
Works invoked 6
Žižek credits Sloterdijk's formula of cynical reason, 'I know what I am doing but I am nonetheless doing it', as the key description of ideological cynicism today.
Nineteen Eighty-Four book
Žižek mentions a Russian journalist's argument that Orwell's target was Western liberalism rather than Stalinism, a rewriting Žižek invokes as an example of Russian ideological manipulation of Western texts.
Book of Revelation book
Žižek maps the four horsemen of the apocalypse onto contemporary crises (pandemic, Ukraine war, food crisis, technological death of humanity) as a structuring analogy.
Žižek notes British colonizers reprinted and propagated this traditional Indian legal text to keep Indians attached to their own culture as a colonial control mechanism.
Norbert Elias's work cited in the discussion; Žižek endorses the connection Elias makes between the civilizing process and developing cooperative rules between nation-states.
A book given to Žižek the day before by a participant; he says he is 'very close' to it and agrees with its argument defending European pride from a leftist position.
People invoked 20
Todd Akin negative
Republican Senate nominee whose 'legitimate rape' category Žižek uses as emblematic of the new right's fusion of Christian fundamentalism with explicit misogynist vulgarity.
Zhou Enlai positive
Žižek cites Zhou Enlai's answer that it is 'too early to say' about the French Revolution as a model for historical patience and long-term thinking about emancipatory events.
Žižek recalls the leaked Maidan phone call where Nuland said 'Fuck the EU,' as evidence that the US was pursuing its own goals in Ukraine independent of European interests.
Marine Le Pen negative
Žižek notes that Le Pen presents herself as protector of working people against multinational corporations promoting multiculturalism, showing the structural identity of right-wing populism with Russia's anti-colonial narrative.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Žižek notes that Putin's Feb 21 speech singled out Lenin as the enemy, pointing out that Lenin defended full Ukrainian sovereignty and the right to leave the USSR, making support for Ukraine consistent with the Leninist legacy.
Steve Bannon negative
Žižek notes that Bannon calls himself a Leninist and claims his ideals are what leftists were doing twenty years ago, using this to illustrate the right's conscious adoption of left tactics.
Robert Pfaller positive
Žižek calls him 'my good friend Austrian philosopher' and credits him with the concept of interpassivity, which Žižek treats as crucial for understanding contemporary passivity.
Donald Trump negative
Žižek argues Trump's danger was not violating explicit laws but systematically ignoring the unwritten silent pacts of democratic practice; gives examples of his public obscenity.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy positive
Žižek quotes Zelenskyy's March 2022 European Parliament speech ('Ukraine is ready to die for Europe') approvingly and notes there was an element of a true emancipatory leader in him.
Alexander Dugin negative
Žižek quotes Dugin's claim to be fighting 'the absolute evil embodied in Western civilization' and its 'liberal totalitarian hegemony'; used as exemplar of the theologico-political right.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Žižek calls him 'my friend' and a 'conservative German philosopher'; uses his distinction between subjective and objective social democracy, and his concept of cynical reason.
Napoleon negative
Žižek frames Napoleon as the 'bad guy' who crushed the Haitian revolution, contrasting him with the Jacobins who recognized Haiti.
Olof Palme positive
Žižek references the first time Swedish social democrats lost power after Palme and nothing changed, as evidence for the concept of objective social democracy embedded in state structures.
Viktor Orbán negative
Žižek quotes Orbán's claim that Western liberal hegemony is 'essentially Marxist with liberal remnants' as evidence of the ideological battle over Europe's identity.
Walter Benjamin positive
Žižek approvingly cites Benjamin's formula that every emancipatory movement is also a struggle to redeem the past, calling it 'a beautiful formula.'
Norbert Elias positive
Cited via another participant for 'The Civilizing Process'; Žižek endorses the connection between civilizing process and rule-based cooperation, noting Elias himself links civilization and power of rules.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Žižek critiques Habermas's 'Nachholende Revolution' thesis as inadequate because it presupposes Western liberal democracy as the endpoint, ignoring the West's own crisis.
Vladimir Putin negative
Žižek analyzes Putin's theologico-political vision, his use of obscene rhetoric (quoting punk rape lyric before invasion), and his manipulation of anti-colonial discourse; strongly opposes him.
Nelson Mandela positive
Žižek invokes Mandela's refusal to subscribe to apartheid's culturalist logic of keeping black authentic identities separate, calling it Mandela's 'greatness' as a universalist.
Žižek recalls Blair being voted most unpopular person in the UK two weeks before winning the election, as an example of the gap between popular discontent and electoral outcomes.
What it argues
unwritten rules and how ideology functions through implicit prohibitionsdefense of united Europe as model for global cooperationRussia-Ukraine war and the threat of illiberal nationalisminterpassivity and the externalization of emotion in late modernitythe new populist right's fusion of religious fundamentalism with obscenityuniversalism versus culturalism: Haiti and Mandela as modelsgood alienation and the paradoxes of democratic participation
Dialectical moves 10
“The true leader is not a master who controls you; on the contrary, a true leader liberates you—makes you aware that you can do what you thought was impossible.”
Inverts the common sense that leadership means command, arguing instead that genuine leadership is emancipatory, expanding the field of the possible.
“Peace alone is not a term which allows us to draw key political differences. Occupiers always sincerely want peace in the territory they hold.”
Inverts the assumption that peace is an unambiguous political good by showing it is the preferred state of occupiers, making pacifism structurally indistinguishable from complicity.
“It was forbidden to criticize Stalin, but it was also forbidden to announce publicly that this prohibition itself existed.”
Demonstrates the second-order character of unwritten rules: the prohibition on stating the rule is stricter than the rule itself, exposing the recursive structure of ideological censorship.
“Knowing what has to be done itself functions as an ersatz, as a fetish—I know, I know, I know, and this knowing substitutes for doing it.”
Inverts Enlightenment assumptions about knowledge leading to action: in cynical ideology, knowledge actively prevents action by providing the satisfaction of pseudo-engagement.
“It's not that they need us, our help. We need them. Ukrainians are a unique chance for us, Europe, to awaken from this dogmatic slumber.”
Reverses the patronizing helper-helped relation: Ukraine is not the beneficiary of European solidarity but the agent of European self-renewal.
“In Nazism, when Hitler speaks, the public applauds and the leader accepts the applause. In Stalinism, the leader stands up and joins the applause.”
Uses the contrast in the applause ritual to make a structural point about the difference between fascist and Stalinist forms of political authority.
“Far from being the anti-colonial left, Russia's decolonization narrative is structurally identical to the old right's culturalist defense of distinct identities—and is actively used by Marine Le Pen.”
Inverts the apparent progressive valence of Russian anti-colonial rhetoric by showing its structural identity with the right-wing culturalism it claims to oppose.
“What is unique in Europe is that it's a civilization which includes a radical doubt about itself.”
Identifies self-critique as Europe's defining positive feature rather than a weakness, inverting the usual culturalist logic where civilizational confidence is the virtue.
“You are given a free choice if you make the right choice.”
Encapsulates the paradox of ideological freedom: the freedom offered is conditional on its not being exercised against the expected outcome, exposing the coercive core of ideological liberalism.
“In some sense, Haitian people not only found their voice, but in finding their voice they were in some sense more European than we were in Europe.”
Inverts the Eurocentric direction of cultural transmission: the enslaved Haitians who sang La Marseillaise embodied European universalist ideals more fully than the Europeans themselves.
Claims 14
asserts
United Europe, understood as objective social democracy with enforceable cooperation, is the only viable model for addressing global crises such as pandemics, climate change, and mass migration.European integration and social democracy
asserts
The anti-European axis uniting Putin with populist movements in the US and Europe is one of the most dangerous elements in contemporary politics.Geopolitics and the Russia-populism nexus
rejects
Abstract pacifism is insufficient: peace alone does not allow us to draw key political distinctions, since occupiers always sincerely want peace in the territory they hold.Pacifism as political position
asserts
Ideology functions not through explicit rules but through unwritten meta-rules that tell us how to obey, which rules to secretly violate, and which permitted freedoms we are effectively prohibited from using.How ideology functions
asserts
Trump's real danger was not violating explicit legal rules but violating the unwritten silent pacts that determine how rules should be practiced.Trump and the breakdown of unwritten norms
rejects
Habermas's reading of 1989 revolutions as mere catch-up with the West is now inadequate because Western liberal democracy itself is in deep crisis.Habermas's 'catch-up revolution' thesis
asserts
Our knowing what is wrong and what must be done increasingly functions as a fetish substitute for action—the cynical mode of ideology.Cynical ideology and political passivity
asserts
Most people do not really want direct democracy; they want the appearance of being consulted while being clearly told what to do—and a true leader is one who liberates people to do what they thought was impossible.Democracy and leadership
rejects
Russia's decolonization narrative is not leftist but is structurally identical to the old right's culturalist defense of distinct identities against universalism, and has been historically used to entrench colonialism.Russian anti-colonial rhetoric and culturalism
asserts
Ukraine's resistance is a chance for Europe to awaken from dogmatic slumber and reinvent itself; Europe needs Ukraine as much as Ukraine needs Europe.Ukraine war and Europe's self-renewal
asserts
Authentic cultural voice can itself be manipulated by colonial and authoritarian powers (apartheid, British colonialism in India) to entrench hierarchy—making universalism the more emancipatory position.Cultural authenticity versus universalism
asserts
The new populist right's combination of religious fundamentalism with explicit obscenity is not a contradiction but the truth of their political project.New right ideology and obscenity
asserts
Putin's speech on 21 February 2022 targeting Lenin—not liberalism—reveals that the war against Ukraine is also a war against the Leninist legacy of Ukrainian sovereignty.Putin's ideology and Lenin
asserts
Europe is the only existing model of supranational cooperation that could serve as a template for global governance without becoming a corrupt world government.Global governance models
Quotes 13
“You are given a free choice if you make the right choice.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological freedom as coerced choice
“It was forbidden to criticize Stalin, but it was forbidden to announce publicly these prohibitions themselves.”Slavoj Žižek · meta-prohibition and unwritten rules in Stalinist ideology
“The officer wrote him an official letter claiming, 'I order you to freely sign this document.' But this is not just a joke. This is how ideology functions.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as forced freedom
“Peace means they do it. Israel definitely wants peace on the occupied West Bank, and Russia is in a mission for peace in Ukraine.”Slavoj Žižek · pacifism as cover for occupation
“I know what I am doing, but I am nonetheless doing it.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical reason / cynical ideology
“'Life is a disease which is transmitted by sex and always ends with death.' It's the best definition of life.”Slavoj Žižek · ironic definition of life
“It's not only that they need us, our help. We need them. They are a unique chance for us, Europe, to awaken from this dogmatic slumber.”Slavoj Žižek · Ukraine as Europe's chance for self-renewal
“When a diplomat says yes, he means maybe. When he says maybe, he means no. And when he says no, he's not a good diplomat.”Slavoj Žižek · diplomatic language and unwritten rules
“The TV machine is laughing for me. And I feel relaxed in exactly the same way as if I was laughing. I think this is great civilization, that you can externalize your feelings.”Slavoj Žižek · interpassivity / canned laughter as externalized emotion
“What Putin and that Serb delegate are talking about is precisely what we can call the legitimate rape of a country.”Slavoj Žižek · legitimate rape as geopolitical category
“What is nonetheless unique in Europe is that it's a civilization which includes a radical doubt about itself.”Slavoj Žižek · Europe as self-critiquing civilization
“Ukraine is Lenin's invention. And we can say many things critical about Lenin, but here he was radical enough. He was for total autonomy of Ukraine.”Slavoj Žižek · Lenin's legacy and Ukrainian sovereignty
“Even when we criticize Europe and Eurocentrism, are you aware that most of the logic of the arguments is European, is taken from European enlightenment?”Slavoj Žižek · universalism embedded in critique of Eurocentrism
Transcript 52 turns
Slavoj Žižek
As they say in German when the Nazis attack, ich bin immer einsatzbereit.
As they say in German when the Nazis attack, ich bin immer einsatzbereit.
unknown
You know, if you know. Okay,
You know, if you know. Okay,
Slavoj Žižek
so let's go. It's time to go. Slavoj. I hope you got my introductory joke. When you applauded, I applauded. No, you know what's the joke? Did you notice this beautiful difference between Nazism and Stalinism? In Nazism, when Hitler speaks, the public applauds and the leader just accepts the applause. In Stalinism, the leader stands up and joins the applause. So I have chosen my side. Sorry. Okay, now I really don't want to be too long. I'm sorry if some of you know the stuff I will be talking around. It will be very elementary, using the old stuff, but I want, I think it's in... I'm very close to your—you gave it to me yesterday—wonderful small book, Fierté Européenne, European Pride. And yes, I agree with this. As a leftist, I'm getting tired of the old mantra of opposing Eurocentrism. What bothers many across the entire political spectrum, from... Where is
so let's go. It's time to go. Slavoj. I hope you got my introductory joke. When you applauded, I applauded. No, you know what's the joke? Did you notice this beautiful difference between Nazism and Stalinism? In Nazism, when Hitler speaks, the public applauds and the leader just accepts the applause. In Stalinism, the leader stands up and joins the applause. So I have chosen my side. Sorry. Okay, now I really don't want to be too long. I'm sorry if some of you know the stuff I will be talking around. It will be very elementary, using the old stuff, but I want, I think it's in... I'm very close to your—you gave it to me yesterday—wonderful small book, Fierté Européenne, European Pride. And yes, I agree with this. As a leftist, I'm getting tired of the old mantra of opposing Eurocentrism. What bothers many across the entire political spectrum, from... Where is
unknown
secret police to liquidate
secret police to liquidate
Slavoj Žižek
the traitors who are disturbing?
the traitors who are disturbing?
unknown
Russian interference. Sorry? Russian interferences.
Russian interference. Sorry? Russian interferences.
Slavoj Žižek
There are no interferences or what, there is only enemy action, but okay.
There are no interferences or what, there is only enemy action, but okay.
unknown
Yeah, yeah. Okay, sorry,
Yeah, yeah. Okay, sorry,
Slavoj Žižek
let's go on quickly. What bothers many across the entire political spectrum from the anti-colonialist left to the populist right is the idea of a united Europe. With all justified critique of some key parts of European legacy, I think that what makes Europe such an object of hatred and envy is the idea that in the eyes of many, Europe still stands for peaceful cooperation of nations, personal freedom, welfare state, and so on and so forth. Europe is, as far as I know, the only example of what, at least in an elementary form, of what—it's better this—of what we need today more than ever. Not more sovereignty, not also one big central government, world government—that would have meant probably unimaginable corruption and so on—but a much closer cooperation, obligatory even cooperation. Just think about what is awaiting us: another, let's say, another pandemic, or hunger, or war, or whatever, global warming. Are you aware that millions will probably become immigrants, they will have to move, and the choice will be only war or cooperation? And to destroy this, not just part of Ukraine, I think is Putin's real goal. On the afternoon of March the 1st, video-speaking to the European Parliament, Zelenskyy said, "Ukraine is ready to die for Europe. Now let's see if Europe is ready to die for Ukraine." I agree, but which Europe? We should ask ourselves what the Ukrainians see in Europe. And are we ready to live up to their expectations? Whichever way you turn it, united Europe stands for some kind of social democracy. Not social democracy in the narrow sense of a social democratic party in power. Peter Sloterdijk, my friend, a conservative German philosopher, distinguishes between what he calls subjective social democracy—parties, movements—and what he calls objective social democracy: social democratic measures, like again free education, healthcare, and so on, which are embedded in state apparatuses and public life independently of who is in power. I remember, I'm old enough, many of you are not, when for the first time after decades in Sweden, Palme and social democrats lost power. And we were all afraid what will happen. Nothing happened. That's a lie, because the legacy of Swedish social democracy was so deeply ingrained in social texture that it didn't matter who is in power. No wonder Viktor Orbán in a recent interview proclaimed that the Western liberal hegemony is gradually becoming Marxist. They are essentially Marxist with liberal remnants, Orbán said. In short, Europe is in the middle of a big ideological conflict about its identity. And Ukraine will confront the true choice if or hopefully when it will win. Will it join the camp of illiberal conservatives or will it become part of the united social democratic Europe? This legacy of Europe is universal. If we just defend Europe, we already speak the language of Alexander Dugin, who as you know opposes Russian truth to European truth. No, the limit between civilization and barbarism is internal to each civilization, which is why I think the legacy of Europe is more than ever universal. The threat comes from many sides. I'm not against Russia, not just from Russia. For example, I like these details which make me worry. On June 19th this year, there was a meeting of a convention of Texas Republicans. And they approved measures declaring that President Joe Biden is not legitimately elected, and so on and so forth. They also voted on a platform that declares homosexuality an abnormal life choice, and so on and so forth. Now I find this horrible. When an official party, which will maybe win next elections in the United States, declares that Biden was not legitimately elected, it's a clear step in the direction of, for the time being still cold, civil war in the United States. And if we combine this fact, the fact that there is no longer a neutral political space in the United States—it's kind of ideological civil war, they cannot even agree on rules. If you ask me what worries me most in the United States, it's as you maybe know, Republicans are pushing measures so that in single states of the United States, if anybody complains that the results of elections there are not clear, the Congress of that state can simply directly nominate delegates. This means maybe even real civil war. But what worries me even more is that with the Ukraine war fatigue, a dark prospect opens up. What if Trump wins next elections and enforces a pact with Russia, abandoning Ukrainians in the same way he did it with Kurds, Kurdistan? During the Maidan uprising, a telephone call was leaked of US diplomat Victoria Nuland, who casually stated, "Fuck the EU," European Union. A clear signal that United States were pursuing its own goals in Ukraine. Putin is also for years consistently pursuing the politics of, sorry for the expression, "Fuck Europe," of dismantling the united Europe. He supported Brexit, Catalonian separatism, Le Pen in France, Salvini in Italy, and so on. This anti-European axis that unites Putin with certain trends in European and American politics is again one of the most dangerous elements in today's politics. And here, although I'm not for war but beware, here confronted with these tensions, abstract pacifism is not enough. We all want peace. But peace alone is not a term which allows us to draw key political differences. Occupiers always sincerely want peace in the territory they hold. Germany, for example, when it occupied France in they definitely wanted peace there. Peace means they do it. Israel definitely wants peace on the occupied West Bank, and Russia is in a mission for peace in Ukraine. In a way they are sincere, yes, peace means for them we occupy it all. So what should we fight for? Here I want to—now comes a little bit of very simple philosophy—here I want to recall the title of today's meeting, "Power of Rules, Rules of Power." Which rules? The space of ideology or of customs that regulate our daily interactions is ambiguous and inconsistent. There are prohibitions we are expected to violate, but discreetly not in public. And the obverse, there are freedoms that are given to us on condition that we don't use them. We are given a free choice if we make the right choice. Are you aware to what extent our daily life is penetrated, regulated by such unwritten rules? For example, I don't know how it is in other parts of Europe, but here in Slovenia, let's say I invite you to dinner. And let's say, which is unfortunately not true, that I have much more money than you. If I invite you... Of course. Yeah, it is clear that I will pay for dinner. But do you remember how things are here? Nonetheless, you are expected when the bill arrives, you are expected to say, "No, let me contribute a little bit, let's share it," and so on. We all know that I will pay. In my evil, I often do this to friends just to shock them. I say, "Okay, you pay if you want." And then it's a... But you know what I want to say here. This is a beautiful example of everyday politeness. How you offer something and of course it's a fake offer. But—and I want to tell you a story—okay, you will stop me if I improvise a little bit, if I go too long. One of true heroes of mine is a friend of mine who served the Yugoslav Army in, like me, And after two weeks of initial training, there was a big ceremony where you had to sign the oath. And when he approached the officer with the big book, his name, he asked the officer, "Is this obligatory or not?" The officer told him, "No, of course not. You—it's free for you to sign it or not." Then my friend said, "Then I will not sign it." Then the officer said, "Then you will be arrested." So the friend said, "So what is it?" And then my friend got a wonderful document because the officer was stupid. This was the compromise. The officer wrote him an official letter claiming, "I order you to freely sign this document." But this is not just a joke. This is how ideology functions. Another trick here. Every diplomat knows this. You know which is my favorite saying about diplomats? When a diplomat says yes, he means maybe. When he says maybe, he means no. And now comes the beautiful paradox: when he says no, he's not a good diplomat. You know? But these are our daily lives. We have prohibitions. Bravo Žižek! Bravo. Be careful. You know, when I take power, I'm already making a list for Gulag, but that's another question, yeah. Sorry, seriously. Look, let me give you another popular example of how unwritten rules work. In... Imagine, my favorite imagine, we are the Central Committee of Soviet Party '35, I'm Stalin. I give a speech, you applaud. Then somebody stands up and criticizes me. It's madness, he will disappear the next day. But then another guy stands up and says to the first guy who criticized me, "But are you crazy? Don't you know that in our country we don't do this? It's forbidden to criticize Stalin." He will disappear even faster. You see the paradox. It was forbidden to criticize Stalin, but it was forbidden to announce publicly these prohibitions themselves. So what's my message to you? I'm not losing my track here. It's that the, let's call it ethical substance, the substance of our interactions, of our daily exchanges, are not just written explicit rules. But you always have a higher level of rules which tell you how to obey rules. Which rules you are even expected to secretly violate, which rules you are... and or the opposite, which rules even if they allow you something you are basically prohibited to use these freedoms promised by these rules. And I think this was the big problem in the last decades in Russia. Friends from Russia told me that in Yeltsin years, there was a big mess. Because under Soviet Union, you have rules and then there were very clear unwritten rules. For example, whom you have to bribe, where you can cheat or not. In Yeltsin years, people didn't know what are the unwritten rules. That's why, as my friend convinced me, even Mafia and gangster organizations played a positive role. Because they were kind of ersatz law structure. You turn to a local Mafia and they explain it to you: you want this, okay, we will contact that gang and so on. With Putin, we have new rules. They are clear now, even almost as oppressive if not more than under the Soviet Union. But I think that now we have new rules, but I think that in international politics we have not yet reached that stage. Back in the '90s in Yeltsin years, a silent pact was regulating the relationship between Western great powers and Russia. Western states treated Russia as a great power on condition that Russia didn't effectively act as one. That was the silent rule. And under Putin, this silent rule was violated and now we don't know where we are. That's one problem. The second problem connected with this one also concerns the fate of unwritten rules in our so-called developed Western countries. Remember Donald Trump. He more or less stuck to explicit legal regulations, but he tended to ignore the unwritten silent pacts which determine how we should practice these rules. That was one thing, you know, that was for me so interesting and horrible about Trump. It's not so much that he violated explicit rules, but with every rule come certain manners, silent rules, how you do this, how you do that. He violated all that. Another thing, everybody knows this, not only with Trump but with so-called alternative right, new conservatives, is that... and I find this very sad... it's that when I was young, leftists liked to speak with obscene terms, making obscene signs, using F-word and so on, like we are the subversive one. While those in power played the game of dignity, politeness. Did you notice that today it's almost the opposite? The old right is getting more and more explicitly obscene. I don't want to lose your time here, just two very briefly examples. One is at one public meeting Trump imitated, because he was listening to her tape, an FBI agent who was, he taped this, making love with her partner, and imitated her orgasm. Or there are other similar examples of open direct obscenity. This was unimaginable thirty, forty years ago. So what's the problem here? I think that in his interpretation of the fall of East European communism, Jürgen Habermas, who was at least close to an official philosopher of European Union, accepted the fact that the existing liberal democratic order is the best one possible and that while we should strive to make it more just, we should not challenge its basic premises. I think that—so he, Habermas, sorry—understood Central and East European revolutions, in the sense of getting rid of communism, as something that was just rectifying or catching up with the West. He called them Nachholende Revolution, catch-up revolution. The aim being of them was for Habermas to establish in Eastern Europe what the West already had. I'm sorry, I'm—and this is I think the challenge for Europe today—I'm a little bit more pessimistic. I think that also in Western Europe, from Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) in France, the protest in Spain, and other similar protests, we have some kind of dissatisfaction precisely with the standard multi-party liberal democratic system. We have some kind of discontent which it is not possible to translate into institutions or public space of political establishment. You know when there were the last elections won by Tony Blair, I remember I was there in England two weeks before the elections and there was a big almost referendum tens of thousand people voting who is the most unpopular person in United Kingdom. Tony Blair won. Two weeks afterwards, he won the elections. This is horrible for me. This means there is a gap, like Yellow Vests in France, it was not possible to translate their discontent into political form. So now today we... now if you allow me again a little bit more philosophy but it's crucial... I think that the paradox today is best expressed by the shock of some of my friends, a year and a half ago you remember the 6th of January the crowd penetrates the Capitol. My friends, leftists, naive leftists were telling me, "This is wonderful, people breaking into the seat of power and so on. Just we should have been doing this, the wrong people are doing this." That's our reality today. Let's face it, the old right, alternative right, is consciously even some of them is speaking the language and even acting like the old radical left. And they are conscious of this link. Steve Bannon, the big Trump supporter, calls himself a Leninist. He said, "My ideals are what the leftists were doing twenty years ago," and so on. So why can't we, let's call it the civilized social democratic mainstream, why can't we counteract? It's not that we are too passive. There is something deeper here. For me, the saddest lesson of the experience of pandemic is how our societies—and that was the difference between West and East, that's why in from China to India, in all those countries, it was much easier for them to deal with the pandemic—because they still could rely on public rituals of mourning, Trauer. They were... still... today, our reaction was private disclosures on Facebooks and so on, impossibility of collective mourning. Here I want to introduce another category that I hope you will like. It's for me a crucial category to understand where we are today, developed by my good friend Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller: interpassivity. This doesn't mean the other acts for me, but that the other is passive for me. And this is not for me a form of alienation, it's very precious. A simple example: I know, I visited, there are some parts of Europe like in South of Peloponnesus where they still have what they call weepers, women that you pay to cry for you. I don't think this is alienation, I think this is something wonderful in a human sense. It doesn't mean hypocrisy, it means when your beloved dies, you are in such a deep shock that you cannot perform the ritual so you pay another to cry for you. Now you will say of course the extreme case here are Tibetan prayer wheels, you know. You write a prayer on a piece of paper, you turn it around and you are praying in this way, even if you think about nasty sexual sins or whatever. Now you will say, yeah, this goes for primitive countries. Ho-ho! What is the greatest contribution of American culture in twentieth century to world civilization? I think seriously it is something that is called canned laughter. You know what is this? Laughter included into the soundtrack. And I find this something wonderful. At least I fall for it. In the evening I return home, I'm too tired even to laugh. I put on some stupid series and I watch tired. The TV machine is laughing for me. And I feel relaxed in exactly the same way as if I was laughing. I think this is great civilization, that you can externalize your feelings. Today we are not able, we are not able to do it no longer. This is why we... I'm trying to go. Yeah, please. But no, like I'm against this metaphysical notion of linear time, so that time can be expanded and so on. Yes. But no, but Gulag, okay, let's go on. No, no, something very serious. Did you notice... I will... I am approaching the end. No, no, but I asked Peter to bring some glasses of wine, please. Could you? This is typical for contemporary
let's go on quickly. What bothers many across the entire political spectrum from the anti-colonialist left to the populist right is the idea of a united Europe. With all justified critique of some key parts of European legacy, I think that what makes Europe such an object of hatred and envy is the idea that in the eyes of many, Europe still stands for peaceful cooperation of nations, personal freedom, welfare state, and so on and so forth. Europe is, as far as I know, the only example of what, at least in an elementary form, of what—it's better this—of what we need today more than ever. Not more sovereignty, not also one big central government, world government—that would have meant probably unimaginable corruption and so on—but a much closer cooperation, obligatory even cooperation. Just think about what is awaiting us: another, let's say, another pandemic, or hunger, or war, or whatever, global warming. Are you aware that millions will probably become immigrants, they will have to move, and the choice will be only war or cooperation? And to destroy this, not just part of Ukraine, I think is Putin's real goal. On the afternoon of March the 1st, video-speaking to the European Parliament, Zelenskyy said, "Ukraine is ready to die for Europe. Now let's see if Europe is ready to die for Ukraine." I agree, but which Europe? We should ask ourselves what the Ukrainians see in Europe. And are we ready to live up to their expectations? Whichever way you turn it, united Europe stands for some kind of social democracy. Not social democracy in the narrow sense of a social democratic party in power. Peter Sloterdijk, my friend, a conservative German philosopher, distinguishes between what he calls subjective social democracy—parties, movements—and what he calls objective social democracy: social democratic measures, like again free education, healthcare, and so on, which are embedded in state apparatuses and public life independently of who is in power. I remember, I'm old enough, many of you are not, when for the first time after decades in Sweden, Palme and social democrats lost power. And we were all afraid what will happen. Nothing happened. That's a lie, because the legacy of Swedish social democracy was so deeply ingrained in social texture that it didn't matter who is in power. No wonder Viktor Orbán in a recent interview proclaimed that the Western liberal hegemony is gradually becoming Marxist. They are essentially Marxist with liberal remnants, Orbán said. In short, Europe is in the middle of a big ideological conflict about its identity. And Ukraine will confront the true choice if or hopefully when it will win. Will it join the camp of illiberal conservatives or will it become part of the united social democratic Europe? This legacy of Europe is universal. If we just defend Europe, we already speak the language of Alexander Dugin, who as you know opposes Russian truth to European truth. No, the limit between civilization and barbarism is internal to each civilization, which is why I think the legacy of Europe is more than ever universal. The threat comes from many sides. I'm not against Russia, not just from Russia. For example, I like these details which make me worry. On June 19th this year, there was a meeting of a convention of Texas Republicans. And they approved measures declaring that President Joe Biden is not legitimately elected, and so on and so forth. They also voted on a platform that declares homosexuality an abnormal life choice, and so on and so forth. Now I find this horrible. When an official party, which will maybe win next elections in the United States, declares that Biden was not legitimately elected, it's a clear step in the direction of, for the time being still cold, civil war in the United States. And if we combine this fact, the fact that there is no longer a neutral political space in the United States—it's kind of ideological civil war, they cannot even agree on rules. If you ask me what worries me most in the United States, it's as you maybe know, Republicans are pushing measures so that in single states of the United States, if anybody complains that the results of elections there are not clear, the Congress of that state can simply directly nominate delegates. This means maybe even real civil war. But what worries me even more is that with the Ukraine war fatigue, a dark prospect opens up. What if Trump wins next elections and enforces a pact with Russia, abandoning Ukrainians in the same way he did it with Kurds, Kurdistan? During the Maidan uprising, a telephone call was leaked of US diplomat Victoria Nuland, who casually stated, "Fuck the EU," European Union. A clear signal that United States were pursuing its own goals in Ukraine. Putin is also for years consistently pursuing the politics of, sorry for the expression, "Fuck Europe," of dismantling the united Europe. He supported Brexit, Catalonian separatism, Le Pen in France, Salvini in Italy, and so on. This anti-European axis that unites Putin with certain trends in European and American politics is again one of the most dangerous elements in today's politics. And here, although I'm not for war but beware, here confronted with these tensions, abstract pacifism is not enough. We all want peace. But peace alone is not a term which allows us to draw key political differences. Occupiers always sincerely want peace in the territory they hold. Germany, for example, when it occupied France in they definitely wanted peace there. Peace means they do it. Israel definitely wants peace on the occupied West Bank, and Russia is in a mission for peace in Ukraine. In a way they are sincere, yes, peace means for them we occupy it all. So what should we fight for? Here I want to—now comes a little bit of very simple philosophy—here I want to recall the title of today's meeting, "Power of Rules, Rules of Power." Which rules? The space of ideology or of customs that regulate our daily interactions is ambiguous and inconsistent. There are prohibitions we are expected to violate, but discreetly not in public. And the obverse, there are freedoms that are given to us on condition that we don't use them. We are given a free choice if we make the right choice. Are you aware to what extent our daily life is penetrated, regulated by such unwritten rules? For example, I don't know how it is in other parts of Europe, but here in Slovenia, let's say I invite you to dinner. And let's say, which is unfortunately not true, that I have much more money than you. If I invite you... Of course. Yeah, it is clear that I will pay for dinner. But do you remember how things are here? Nonetheless, you are expected when the bill arrives, you are expected to say, "No, let me contribute a little bit, let's share it," and so on. We all know that I will pay. In my evil, I often do this to friends just to shock them. I say, "Okay, you pay if you want." And then it's a... But you know what I want to say here. This is a beautiful example of everyday politeness. How you offer something and of course it's a fake offer. But—and I want to tell you a story—okay, you will stop me if I improvise a little bit, if I go too long. One of true heroes of mine is a friend of mine who served the Yugoslav Army in, like me, And after two weeks of initial training, there was a big ceremony where you had to sign the oath. And when he approached the officer with the big book, his name, he asked the officer, "Is this obligatory or not?" The officer told him, "No, of course not. You—it's free for you to sign it or not." Then my friend said, "Then I will not sign it." Then the officer said, "Then you will be arrested." So the friend said, "So what is it?" And then my friend got a wonderful document because the officer was stupid. This was the compromise. The officer wrote him an official letter claiming, "I order you to freely sign this document." But this is not just a joke. This is how ideology functions. Another trick here. Every diplomat knows this. You know which is my favorite saying about diplomats? When a diplomat says yes, he means maybe. When he says maybe, he means no. And now comes the beautiful paradox: when he says no, he's not a good diplomat. You know? But these are our daily lives. We have prohibitions. Bravo Žižek! Bravo. Be careful. You know, when I take power, I'm already making a list for Gulag, but that's another question, yeah. Sorry, seriously. Look, let me give you another popular example of how unwritten rules work. In... Imagine, my favorite imagine, we are the Central Committee of Soviet Party '35, I'm Stalin. I give a speech, you applaud. Then somebody stands up and criticizes me. It's madness, he will disappear the next day. But then another guy stands up and says to the first guy who criticized me, "But are you crazy? Don't you know that in our country we don't do this? It's forbidden to criticize Stalin." He will disappear even faster. You see the paradox. It was forbidden to criticize Stalin, but it was forbidden to announce publicly these prohibitions themselves. So what's my message to you? I'm not losing my track here. It's that the, let's call it ethical substance, the substance of our interactions, of our daily exchanges, are not just written explicit rules. But you always have a higher level of rules which tell you how to obey rules. Which rules you are even expected to secretly violate, which rules you are... and or the opposite, which rules even if they allow you something you are basically prohibited to use these freedoms promised by these rules. And I think this was the big problem in the last decades in Russia. Friends from Russia told me that in Yeltsin years, there was a big mess. Because under Soviet Union, you have rules and then there were very clear unwritten rules. For example, whom you have to bribe, where you can cheat or not. In Yeltsin years, people didn't know what are the unwritten rules. That's why, as my friend convinced me, even Mafia and gangster organizations played a positive role. Because they were kind of ersatz law structure. You turn to a local Mafia and they explain it to you: you want this, okay, we will contact that gang and so on. With Putin, we have new rules. They are clear now, even almost as oppressive if not more than under the Soviet Union. But I think that now we have new rules, but I think that in international politics we have not yet reached that stage. Back in the '90s in Yeltsin years, a silent pact was regulating the relationship between Western great powers and Russia. Western states treated Russia as a great power on condition that Russia didn't effectively act as one. That was the silent rule. And under Putin, this silent rule was violated and now we don't know where we are. That's one problem. The second problem connected with this one also concerns the fate of unwritten rules in our so-called developed Western countries. Remember Donald Trump. He more or less stuck to explicit legal regulations, but he tended to ignore the unwritten silent pacts which determine how we should practice these rules. That was one thing, you know, that was for me so interesting and horrible about Trump. It's not so much that he violated explicit rules, but with every rule come certain manners, silent rules, how you do this, how you do that. He violated all that. Another thing, everybody knows this, not only with Trump but with so-called alternative right, new conservatives, is that... and I find this very sad... it's that when I was young, leftists liked to speak with obscene terms, making obscene signs, using F-word and so on, like we are the subversive one. While those in power played the game of dignity, politeness. Did you notice that today it's almost the opposite? The old right is getting more and more explicitly obscene. I don't want to lose your time here, just two very briefly examples. One is at one public meeting Trump imitated, because he was listening to her tape, an FBI agent who was, he taped this, making love with her partner, and imitated her orgasm. Or there are other similar examples of open direct obscenity. This was unimaginable thirty, forty years ago. So what's the problem here? I think that in his interpretation of the fall of East European communism, Jürgen Habermas, who was at least close to an official philosopher of European Union, accepted the fact that the existing liberal democratic order is the best one possible and that while we should strive to make it more just, we should not challenge its basic premises. I think that—so he, Habermas, sorry—understood Central and East European revolutions, in the sense of getting rid of communism, as something that was just rectifying or catching up with the West. He called them Nachholende Revolution, catch-up revolution. The aim being of them was for Habermas to establish in Eastern Europe what the West already had. I'm sorry, I'm—and this is I think the challenge for Europe today—I'm a little bit more pessimistic. I think that also in Western Europe, from Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) in France, the protest in Spain, and other similar protests, we have some kind of dissatisfaction precisely with the standard multi-party liberal democratic system. We have some kind of discontent which it is not possible to translate into institutions or public space of political establishment. You know when there were the last elections won by Tony Blair, I remember I was there in England two weeks before the elections and there was a big almost referendum tens of thousand people voting who is the most unpopular person in United Kingdom. Tony Blair won. Two weeks afterwards, he won the elections. This is horrible for me. This means there is a gap, like Yellow Vests in France, it was not possible to translate their discontent into political form. So now today we... now if you allow me again a little bit more philosophy but it's crucial... I think that the paradox today is best expressed by the shock of some of my friends, a year and a half ago you remember the 6th of January the crowd penetrates the Capitol. My friends, leftists, naive leftists were telling me, "This is wonderful, people breaking into the seat of power and so on. Just we should have been doing this, the wrong people are doing this." That's our reality today. Let's face it, the old right, alternative right, is consciously even some of them is speaking the language and even acting like the old radical left. And they are conscious of this link. Steve Bannon, the big Trump supporter, calls himself a Leninist. He said, "My ideals are what the leftists were doing twenty years ago," and so on. So why can't we, let's call it the civilized social democratic mainstream, why can't we counteract? It's not that we are too passive. There is something deeper here. For me, the saddest lesson of the experience of pandemic is how our societies—and that was the difference between West and East, that's why in from China to India, in all those countries, it was much easier for them to deal with the pandemic—because they still could rely on public rituals of mourning, Trauer. They were... still... today, our reaction was private disclosures on Facebooks and so on, impossibility of collective mourning. Here I want to introduce another category that I hope you will like. It's for me a crucial category to understand where we are today, developed by my good friend Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller: interpassivity. This doesn't mean the other acts for me, but that the other is passive for me. And this is not for me a form of alienation, it's very precious. A simple example: I know, I visited, there are some parts of Europe like in South of Peloponnesus where they still have what they call weepers, women that you pay to cry for you. I don't think this is alienation, I think this is something wonderful in a human sense. It doesn't mean hypocrisy, it means when your beloved dies, you are in such a deep shock that you cannot perform the ritual so you pay another to cry for you. Now you will say of course the extreme case here are Tibetan prayer wheels, you know. You write a prayer on a piece of paper, you turn it around and you are praying in this way, even if you think about nasty sexual sins or whatever. Now you will say, yeah, this goes for primitive countries. Ho-ho! What is the greatest contribution of American culture in twentieth century to world civilization? I think seriously it is something that is called canned laughter. You know what is this? Laughter included into the soundtrack. And I find this something wonderful. At least I fall for it. In the evening I return home, I'm too tired even to laugh. I put on some stupid series and I watch tired. The TV machine is laughing for me. And I feel relaxed in exactly the same way as if I was laughing. I think this is great civilization, that you can externalize your feelings. Today we are not able, we are not able to do it no longer. This is why we... I'm trying to go. Yeah, please. But no, like I'm against this metaphysical notion of linear time, so that time can be expanded and so on. Yes. But no, but Gulag, okay, let's go on. No, no, something very serious. Did you notice... I will... I am approaching the end. No, no, but I asked Peter to bring some glasses of wine, please. Could you? This is typical for contemporary
unknown
French people.
French people.
Slavoj Žižek
I give them deep thoughts, they think about alcohol. No,
I give them deep thoughts, they think about alcohol. No,
unknown
but we speak... we speak about party spirit which is Europe, and Europe is
but we speak... we speak about party spirit which is Europe, and Europe is
Slavoj Žižek
wine. Don't mention France. France is for me, that's why I love it, a country whose entire cuisine is based on turning a failure into success. No, you know what I mean. You know what is champagne. Champagne is you wanted to have wine, wine fermented, got rotten, and you said, "Okay, it's champagne, it's even better." You make cheese, the cheese got rotten and you say, "Okay, we have this rotten cheese, it's our specialty." So don't try to sell me your stuff. Okay, let's go. Sorry. Now much more seriously. This problem with passivity is a great one for our liberal societies because it's no longer that we don't know what is happening. We know very well what is happening. Look at those disgusting big meetings, why disgusting, because they talk in a way that you can be sure nothing will be done. You remember the Glasgow, the Glasgow meeting of Prince Charles, everybody... Everything they said was true. It's five minutes to twelve, we need to act, and exactly nothing happened. So now—I don't want to go—so we not only know what is wrong, all the crisis we are in, we know what has to be done. But you know what—I'm sorry I don't have the time to develop it, I'm really cutting it short—but do you know what's the problem here? The problem is that our knowing it itself functions like an ersatz as a fetish in psychoanalytic terms. I know something, you tell me, "Why don't you do it?" And I say, "Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I know." You know, knowledge itself about what has to be done is evoked instead of doing it. This is what I call—read my books if you want to know more—the cynical mode of ideology, as again Peter Sloterdijk wrote in his formula of cynical reason: "I know what I am doing, but I am nonetheless doing it." And that's our problem today. We have big crisis which for me remind me of the four riders of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation: plague, war, hunger, death. Plague (Pandemic), war (Russian attack on Ukraine and so on), hunger (with global warming we know what is coming), and death. What kind of death? I don't mean the empirical death, although people are dying. I mean something much more ominous and that should worry you. As for ordinary death, it's part of life. My favorite definition of life is a Polish graffiti, I think, I love it. It says, "Life is a disease which is transmitted by sex and always ends with death." It's the best definition of life. But I'm talking about other another thing here. First, we have digital control over our lives with so-called surveillance capitalism. Then we have already the possibility to intervene into our DNA, to change, and the next step will be, we are close to it—you don't read a lot—so-called wired brain: direct interaction between computer machine and our line of thoughts. What will this mean? Will we still be human after all of this? So if you permit me just the final conclusion. Okay, now I will do something really evil against you. Please. Now you will say it's the end. I will say yes and I start with the discussion by asking myself, so what is the conclusion of all of this? And I will answer very briefly. No, my first conclusion is that we don't need the old communism, I'm not crazy, it was even more inefficient. But all these problems—immigrants, war, global warming—isn't it clear that a much stronger wider collaboration will be needed? And the only model for this in the world today that I see is Europe, again. But just to conclude, to return nonetheless to topic, to the topic which is in front of our eyes all the days, the ongoing war. What worried me is that a couple of days or weeks ago when a new tension erupted in northern Kosovo, Vladimir Đukanović from the ruling Serbian Progressive Party wrote on Twitter that, I quote, "Serbia might be forced to engage in the denazification of the Balkans." You see how this name "denazification" is gradually spreading. First to Ukraine, now not just to Kosovo, to Balkans, which means Bosnia included and so on and so forth. So this is... and behind this, that's why I take Russia seriously. It's not just what Russia is now doing, it's not just a simple big justification to get a small piece of land in Ukraine. I don't under—never underestimate ideology. There is a big theologico-political vision. Or to quote Alexander Dugin, "We are fighting the absolute evil embodied in Western civilization. Its liberal totalitarian hegemony, embodied in Ukrainian Nazism." Now if you allow me just... what I want to say is that this is what really worries me and this will be my concluding point. It's how we have this absolute religious fundamentalism but combined with more or less open obscenity. This is for me the truth of the new populist right. What do I mean by this? Let me conclude with a very shocking example. It's really tasteless but I'm sorry, this is what happened, you know where? Not in a private pub but on the floor of American Senate, where Todd Akin, I don't know how you pronounce it, a Republican Senate nominee, introduced the category of "legitimate rape." I'm sorry for these details, but I want to shock you with them. His reasoning again, developed not in some bar after the meeting but there on the big podium, is that cases of real rape are almost impossible because to penetrate the woman, the woman has to get—sorry for the vulgarity—wet or whatever, relax her muscles. And this signals, if she is aware it or not, that she accepted sex. I find this category terrifying. Why do I mention it here? First, because always be attentive to how with this new old alternative fundamentalist theology, Christianity, fake Christianity but nonetheless Christian fundamentalism, is connected with extreme racist, anti-feminist vulgarity. And I just want to warn you that Putin used apropos of Ukraine the same metaphor of rape. When he announced the invasion, he quoted a Soviet-era punk rock group Red Mold and from their song "Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin." Here are the lines: "Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and fucked her. Like it or dislike it, sleep my beauty." Like, you will get if you want it or not. So such male chauvinist obscenities are the not even so hidden truth of the proponents today unfortunately of populist Christian values. So my point is that what Putin and that Serb delegate, member of parliament, are talking is precisely what we can call the legitimate rape of a country. But this is not all. Just really the conclusion. This is not all about, we should say about Putin. You know, I know friends who know friends who know friends who at the end know the right people. And from them I learned that what is Putin now doing is very interesting. He doesn't have only Dugin and these theologico-conservative advisors. He mobilized a Marxist group which provides to him elements for how to justify Russian politics in the eyes of Africans, Latino Americans and so on. The idea is that to play the card against Western colonization, the idea is: Western liberalism is the true totalitarianism. And they go to the end. I read a wonderful text by a Russian journalist who said we were reading Orwell in a wrong way. The target of Orwell is Western liberalism, not Stalinism and so on. So the idea is that Russia is decolonizing all the world by breaking Western hegemony and by allowing each country to enjoy full sovereignty based on their own distinct identity, traditions, and values. Now what this means, we know. Respect for distinct identity: it means and this is the world we are approaching, it made me really sad. You remember after Taliban took over Afghanistan, there was immediate pact between Taliban and China. The deal was very simple: "We, Chinese, allow you to do whatever you want with women there. You allow us to do with Uyghurs, Muslims, whatever we want—whatever we want here." But what I want to say is that this image of decolonization is not really a leftist one. It is a key component of old right movements around the way. Marine Le Pen also... last page, I must not lie... Marine Le Pen also presents herself as the protector of ordinary working people against the big international corporations which promote multiculturalism and sexual depravity to undermine national identities, and so on and so forth. So we have, it's interesting to read today's old right. They like to begin almost like Marxists: class struggle, we protect ordinary people, and so on. And then of course you end up with racism and so on. Remember here, this is for me not an argument against socialism. Remember that Hitler's party was called National Socialist German Workers' Party. So things are here much more problematic. But Putin at least makes it clear. Did you read—concluding thoughts, really—did you read Putin's speech two days before invasion, on 21st of February, where he mocked Ukrainians destroying Lenin's statues? And he says literally, "You Ukrainians, you say you want to de-communize your country." And he said, "Perfect, we totally agree with you. But you are not radical enough. Wait for us and we will really de-communize you." And as a leftist, that's why I support Ukraine totally. Because remember something. How can leftists fall for this bullshit? If you support Ukraine, you support NATO militarism. Don't you remember in his speech on the 21st of February, Putin mentioned only one name critically? You remember whom? Lenin. He said Ukraine is Lenin's invention. And we can say many things critical about Lenin, but here he was radical enough. He was for total autonomy of Ukraine, inclusive of the right to full sovereignty, to leave the Union of Soviet Republics or whatever it was, it was called. So even if Ukraine will hopefully protect its independence, I think their eventual victory will be their moment of truth. They will have to learn the lesson that it is not enough to catch up with the West and join the EU. West itself is in a deep crisis. There is a deep discontent in Western liberal democracies. Not only illiberal authoritarianism but also this inability of liberal democracy to function properly. And last sentence, seriously, that's why I think don't be patronizing towards Ukrainians. It's not, "Yes, they are a little bit crazy but we should support them so that they will join us." No. It's not only that they need us, our help. We need them. In the sense that they are a unique chance for us, Europe, to awaken from this dogmatic slumber, sleep of inactivity. We really got too passive. We need a mobilization, not primarily in the military sense, but this times of comfortable liberal hedonism are over. We will have crisis—immigrants, food crisis, we don't know what. And the easy time is over. That's the lesson we have to learn from Ukraine. Not, it's not enough to help Ukraine. Europe itself will have to reinvent itself. And here again Ukraine plays an extremely positive role. Because again, they are in some sense more European than we, many of us in daily life ourselves. We say, "Yeah, yeah, Europe is great," but we are lost in total non-engagement, talking about things, doing nothing, and so on. And it's like our conscience speaking. I'm not idealizing Ukrainians, if you want in the debate I can tell you twenty things, I have a list, what they were doing wrong. But nonetheless, they see in us, when they claim they fight for Europe, something that we ourselves lost in our pragmatism, which is horrible pragmatism, like the logic even of some leftists is: "Okay, we should be for peace, let's not give arms to Ukraine, because if we do this, we may pay more for electricity or whatever." It's an extremely egotist approach on which Putin counts. So I think that Ukraine should serve us to become aware of, my god, we know we are corrupted, sleepy and so on, but what do they see in us? Let's try to live up to what poor Ukraine with all its problems, oligarchs, corruption, sees in us: Europe. That's why again Ukraine is a chance for all of us for a stronger, more cooperative Europe. Thank you very much. Slavoj, may I take a pre-introduction?
wine. Don't mention France. France is for me, that's why I love it, a country whose entire cuisine is based on turning a failure into success. No, you know what I mean. You know what is champagne. Champagne is you wanted to have wine, wine fermented, got rotten, and you said, "Okay, it's champagne, it's even better." You make cheese, the cheese got rotten and you say, "Okay, we have this rotten cheese, it's our specialty." So don't try to sell me your stuff. Okay, let's go. Sorry. Now much more seriously. This problem with passivity is a great one for our liberal societies because it's no longer that we don't know what is happening. We know very well what is happening. Look at those disgusting big meetings, why disgusting, because they talk in a way that you can be sure nothing will be done. You remember the Glasgow, the Glasgow meeting of Prince Charles, everybody... Everything they said was true. It's five minutes to twelve, we need to act, and exactly nothing happened. So now—I don't want to go—so we not only know what is wrong, all the crisis we are in, we know what has to be done. But you know what—I'm sorry I don't have the time to develop it, I'm really cutting it short—but do you know what's the problem here? The problem is that our knowing it itself functions like an ersatz as a fetish in psychoanalytic terms. I know something, you tell me, "Why don't you do it?" And I say, "Yeah, yeah, I know, I know, I know." You know, knowledge itself about what has to be done is evoked instead of doing it. This is what I call—read my books if you want to know more—the cynical mode of ideology, as again Peter Sloterdijk wrote in his formula of cynical reason: "I know what I am doing, but I am nonetheless doing it." And that's our problem today. We have big crisis which for me remind me of the four riders of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation: plague, war, hunger, death. Plague (Pandemic), war (Russian attack on Ukraine and so on), hunger (with global warming we know what is coming), and death. What kind of death? I don't mean the empirical death, although people are dying. I mean something much more ominous and that should worry you. As for ordinary death, it's part of life. My favorite definition of life is a Polish graffiti, I think, I love it. It says, "Life is a disease which is transmitted by sex and always ends with death." It's the best definition of life. But I'm talking about other another thing here. First, we have digital control over our lives with so-called surveillance capitalism. Then we have already the possibility to intervene into our DNA, to change, and the next step will be, we are close to it—you don't read a lot—so-called wired brain: direct interaction between computer machine and our line of thoughts. What will this mean? Will we still be human after all of this? So if you permit me just the final conclusion. Okay, now I will do something really evil against you. Please. Now you will say it's the end. I will say yes and I start with the discussion by asking myself, so what is the conclusion of all of this? And I will answer very briefly. No, my first conclusion is that we don't need the old communism, I'm not crazy, it was even more inefficient. But all these problems—immigrants, war, global warming—isn't it clear that a much stronger wider collaboration will be needed? And the only model for this in the world today that I see is Europe, again. But just to conclude, to return nonetheless to topic, to the topic which is in front of our eyes all the days, the ongoing war. What worried me is that a couple of days or weeks ago when a new tension erupted in northern Kosovo, Vladimir Đukanović from the ruling Serbian Progressive Party wrote on Twitter that, I quote, "Serbia might be forced to engage in the denazification of the Balkans." You see how this name "denazification" is gradually spreading. First to Ukraine, now not just to Kosovo, to Balkans, which means Bosnia included and so on and so forth. So this is... and behind this, that's why I take Russia seriously. It's not just what Russia is now doing, it's not just a simple big justification to get a small piece of land in Ukraine. I don't under—never underestimate ideology. There is a big theologico-political vision. Or to quote Alexander Dugin, "We are fighting the absolute evil embodied in Western civilization. Its liberal totalitarian hegemony, embodied in Ukrainian Nazism." Now if you allow me just... what I want to say is that this is what really worries me and this will be my concluding point. It's how we have this absolute religious fundamentalism but combined with more or less open obscenity. This is for me the truth of the new populist right. What do I mean by this? Let me conclude with a very shocking example. It's really tasteless but I'm sorry, this is what happened, you know where? Not in a private pub but on the floor of American Senate, where Todd Akin, I don't know how you pronounce it, a Republican Senate nominee, introduced the category of "legitimate rape." I'm sorry for these details, but I want to shock you with them. His reasoning again, developed not in some bar after the meeting but there on the big podium, is that cases of real rape are almost impossible because to penetrate the woman, the woman has to get—sorry for the vulgarity—wet or whatever, relax her muscles. And this signals, if she is aware it or not, that she accepted sex. I find this category terrifying. Why do I mention it here? First, because always be attentive to how with this new old alternative fundamentalist theology, Christianity, fake Christianity but nonetheless Christian fundamentalism, is connected with extreme racist, anti-feminist vulgarity. And I just want to warn you that Putin used apropos of Ukraine the same metaphor of rape. When he announced the invasion, he quoted a Soviet-era punk rock group Red Mold and from their song "Sleeping Beauty in a Coffin." Here are the lines: "Sleeping beauty in a coffin, I crept up and fucked her. Like it or dislike it, sleep my beauty." Like, you will get if you want it or not. So such male chauvinist obscenities are the not even so hidden truth of the proponents today unfortunately of populist Christian values. So my point is that what Putin and that Serb delegate, member of parliament, are talking is precisely what we can call the legitimate rape of a country. But this is not all. Just really the conclusion. This is not all about, we should say about Putin. You know, I know friends who know friends who know friends who at the end know the right people. And from them I learned that what is Putin now doing is very interesting. He doesn't have only Dugin and these theologico-conservative advisors. He mobilized a Marxist group which provides to him elements for how to justify Russian politics in the eyes of Africans, Latino Americans and so on. The idea is that to play the card against Western colonization, the idea is: Western liberalism is the true totalitarianism. And they go to the end. I read a wonderful text by a Russian journalist who said we were reading Orwell in a wrong way. The target of Orwell is Western liberalism, not Stalinism and so on. So the idea is that Russia is decolonizing all the world by breaking Western hegemony and by allowing each country to enjoy full sovereignty based on their own distinct identity, traditions, and values. Now what this means, we know. Respect for distinct identity: it means and this is the world we are approaching, it made me really sad. You remember after Taliban took over Afghanistan, there was immediate pact between Taliban and China. The deal was very simple: "We, Chinese, allow you to do whatever you want with women there. You allow us to do with Uyghurs, Muslims, whatever we want—whatever we want here." But what I want to say is that this image of decolonization is not really a leftist one. It is a key component of old right movements around the way. Marine Le Pen also... last page, I must not lie... Marine Le Pen also presents herself as the protector of ordinary working people against the big international corporations which promote multiculturalism and sexual depravity to undermine national identities, and so on and so forth. So we have, it's interesting to read today's old right. They like to begin almost like Marxists: class struggle, we protect ordinary people, and so on. And then of course you end up with racism and so on. Remember here, this is for me not an argument against socialism. Remember that Hitler's party was called National Socialist German Workers' Party. So things are here much more problematic. But Putin at least makes it clear. Did you read—concluding thoughts, really—did you read Putin's speech two days before invasion, on 21st of February, where he mocked Ukrainians destroying Lenin's statues? And he says literally, "You Ukrainians, you say you want to de-communize your country." And he said, "Perfect, we totally agree with you. But you are not radical enough. Wait for us and we will really de-communize you." And as a leftist, that's why I support Ukraine totally. Because remember something. How can leftists fall for this bullshit? If you support Ukraine, you support NATO militarism. Don't you remember in his speech on the 21st of February, Putin mentioned only one name critically? You remember whom? Lenin. He said Ukraine is Lenin's invention. And we can say many things critical about Lenin, but here he was radical enough. He was for total autonomy of Ukraine, inclusive of the right to full sovereignty, to leave the Union of Soviet Republics or whatever it was, it was called. So even if Ukraine will hopefully protect its independence, I think their eventual victory will be their moment of truth. They will have to learn the lesson that it is not enough to catch up with the West and join the EU. West itself is in a deep crisis. There is a deep discontent in Western liberal democracies. Not only illiberal authoritarianism but also this inability of liberal democracy to function properly. And last sentence, seriously, that's why I think don't be patronizing towards Ukrainians. It's not, "Yes, they are a little bit crazy but we should support them so that they will join us." No. It's not only that they need us, our help. We need them. In the sense that they are a unique chance for us, Europe, to awaken from this dogmatic slumber, sleep of inactivity. We really got too passive. We need a mobilization, not primarily in the military sense, but this times of comfortable liberal hedonism are over. We will have crisis—immigrants, food crisis, we don't know what. And the easy time is over. That's the lesson we have to learn from Ukraine. Not, it's not enough to help Ukraine. Europe itself will have to reinvent itself. And here again Ukraine plays an extremely positive role. Because again, they are in some sense more European than we, many of us in daily life ourselves. We say, "Yeah, yeah, Europe is great," but we are lost in total non-engagement, talking about things, doing nothing, and so on. And it's like our conscience speaking. I'm not idealizing Ukrainians, if you want in the debate I can tell you twenty things, I have a list, what they were doing wrong. But nonetheless, they see in us, when they claim they fight for Europe, something that we ourselves lost in our pragmatism, which is horrible pragmatism, like the logic even of some leftists is: "Okay, we should be for peace, let's not give arms to Ukraine, because if we do this, we may pay more for electricity or whatever." It's an extremely egotist approach on which Putin counts. So I think that Ukraine should serve us to become aware of, my god, we know we are corrupted, sleepy and so on, but what do they see in us? Let's try to live up to what poor Ukraine with all its problems, oligarchs, corruption, sees in us: Europe. That's why again Ukraine is a chance for all of us for a stronger, more cooperative Europe. Thank you very much. Slavoj, may I take a pre-introduction?
unknown
Ah,
Ah,
Slavoj Žižek
you, after my talk you want to do the introduction.
you, after my talk you want to do the introduction.
unknown
No, a pre-introduction. Just to say a word. Earlier today... earlier today I met a civil servant. And I knew the guy, we signed a paper one or two years ago. In fact, I did not know the guy when we signed the paper and it was not you. It was a diplomat. And in this paper we said we need to organize as Europeans in order to fight autocracy. We mean Russia and China. But also forces in the West. Yes. This guy is a Slovenian diplomat. He was in charge of many topics in the Ministry and he told me the day I signed this paper—I see Tanja, maybe she knows who he is about—the day I signed this paper I lost my mission, I lost my job. And I was in a corridor in the Ministry and I met only five persons a week. Nobody wanted to speak to me. Now he has a very important job and he has five persons every hour in his office. And just to remember that he told me, "It's not Janša who said the people not to come to my office or to ask or who asked to take my mission. It's the people who thought that this would please Janša." And this is the way step by step Putin in Russia developed this autocratic process which change Russian society. When I see this room and when I think one years before, I see people who are living with a party spirit and party—and some of you drinking wine. I'm not sure this would have been possible one year ago because I did not see anybody doing that. But I do mean the European spirit is fighting against these facilities. Sorry, if
No, a pre-introduction. Just to say a word. Earlier today... earlier today I met a civil servant. And I knew the guy, we signed a paper one or two years ago. In fact, I did not know the guy when we signed the paper and it was not you. It was a diplomat. And in this paper we said we need to organize as Europeans in order to fight autocracy. We mean Russia and China. But also forces in the West. Yes. This guy is a Slovenian diplomat. He was in charge of many topics in the Ministry and he told me the day I signed this paper—I see Tanja, maybe she knows who he is about—the day I signed this paper I lost my mission, I lost my job. And I was in a corridor in the Ministry and I met only five persons a week. Nobody wanted to speak to me. Now he has a very important job and he has five persons every hour in his office. And just to remember that he told me, "It's not Janša who said the people not to come to my office or to ask or who asked to take my mission. It's the people who thought that this would please Janša." And this is the way step by step Putin in Russia developed this autocratic process which change Russian society. When I see this room and when I think one years before, I see people who are living with a party spirit and party—and some of you drinking wine. I'm not sure this would have been possible one year ago because I did not see anybody doing that. But I do mean the European spirit is fighting against these facilities. Sorry, if
Slavoj Žižek
by European state you mean
by European state you mean
unknown
EU. European... European spirit, not European state. Uh-huh. And we... we can speak about the European state a bit later. Okay. But this European spirit is fighting against these facilities to accept, to neglect people, to put people aside. It's laughing as you are, as you were laughing and smiling. It's having wine. This is the party spirit and this is deeply Europe. And we are Europe because we have a party spirit since the Renaissance. And this is ourselves and this what I wanted to share as a pre-introduction. But now let me... come back to what you have said. And finally if I have to sum up in two words what you have said at the end of your speech, it is thank you Zelenskyy. Thank you Zelenskyy because last March in the European Parliament, you have said what no European leader—and we should ask why—is
EU. European... European spirit, not European state. Uh-huh. And we... we can speak about the European state a bit later. Okay. But this European spirit is fighting against these facilities to accept, to neglect people, to put people aside. It's laughing as you are, as you were laughing and smiling. It's having wine. This is the party spirit and this is deeply Europe. And we are Europe because we have a party spirit since the Renaissance. And this is ourselves and this what I wanted to share as a pre-introduction. But now let me... come back to what you have said. And finally if I have to sum up in two words what you have said at the end of your speech, it is thank you Zelenskyy. Thank you Zelenskyy because last March in the European Parliament, you have said what no European leader—and we should ask why—is
unknown
capable of saying. Europe, or more exactly the EU, is a new civilization. Is a new civilization which privilege equality, which privilege dignity, which privilege respect, which privilege spirit against power. And we, Ukrainians, are the protection of this civilization. And civilization for decade, and for reason that we can understand, was a forbidden, a forbidden word in Europe because civilization was attached to colonization, to Shoah, to many thing. But you like Sloterdijk, and Sloterdijk is explaining to us that we are in a war of narrative and a war of narrative is a war of civilization. So we need to rehabilitate the word civilization and to give him the meaning we want to give, which is a civilization which replace war, intermittent war by perpetual peace—this is the Kant project—which replace force by law, which replace unlimited power by dignity of the human being. And this is exactly the European project. And what is the EU? The EU is the concrete, the political embodiment of this civilization. And once you say that, you think that the EU is a very, very dangerous model for Russia, for China, and for everybody who want to contest any kind of universalism.
capable of saying. Europe, or more exactly the EU, is a new civilization. Is a new civilization which privilege equality, which privilege dignity, which privilege respect, which privilege spirit against power. And we, Ukrainians, are the protection of this civilization. And civilization for decade, and for reason that we can understand, was a forbidden, a forbidden word in Europe because civilization was attached to colonization, to Shoah, to many thing. But you like Sloterdijk, and Sloterdijk is explaining to us that we are in a war of narrative and a war of narrative is a war of civilization. So we need to rehabilitate the word civilization and to give him the meaning we want to give, which is a civilization which replace war, intermittent war by perpetual peace—this is the Kant project—which replace force by law, which replace unlimited power by dignity of the human being. And this is exactly the European project. And what is the EU? The EU is the concrete, the political embodiment of this civilization. And once you say that, you think that the EU is a very, very dangerous model for Russia, for China, and for everybody who want to contest any kind of universalism.
Slavoj Žižek
But also for old, old alternative right in United States and so on. And you are right.
But also for old, old alternative right in United States and so on. And you are right.
unknown
One topic is in the United States, there are many people who are against Europe because Europe stand for somehow a new kind of success. And America, when you look at America today, America is a failure. There is a huge fragmentation. The American Dream is for a very limited number of people and the American society in fact is a combination of community. And when we speak about this new European civilization, for me it's two thing. On the one side, it is what we could call a great society, like there was a Roman or a Greek society. It's very funny because Nobel Prize Krugman, who was quite Euroskeptical last time he came in Europe some month ago, he said, "But from Ljubljana to Vilnius to Lisbon, I see a European society." And we have built, without being aware as you said earlier, a great European society of people sharing a European style of being, common rules, common conduct, same concern with regard to the future. And this is
One topic is in the United States, there are many people who are against Europe because Europe stand for somehow a new kind of success. And America, when you look at America today, America is a failure. There is a huge fragmentation. The American Dream is for a very limited number of people and the American society in fact is a combination of community. And when we speak about this new European civilization, for me it's two thing. On the one side, it is what we could call a great society, like there was a Roman or a Greek society. It's very funny because Nobel Prize Krugman, who was quite Euroskeptical last time he came in Europe some month ago, he said, "But from Ljubljana to Vilnius to Lisbon, I see a European society." And we have built, without being aware as you said earlier, a great European society of people sharing a European style of being, common rules, common conduct, same concern with regard to the future. And this is
unknown
huge. Just for the fun. The day before, I was in a plane and I was close to the American coach of the climbing, the US climbing team. And there is a competition in Slovenia at the end of the week. And he told me, "Hey, Europe for me is very clear. European, you have style. We have lost the style in the US. You... you are fit. You are mobile. You have good food. Culture is everywhere. You have solidarity. This is Europe. This is very clear. It's not anymore the US." So we have built a strong society but we are not able to see it. And this is one thing, this is one part of this new civilization. And the second part is what Norbert Elias, because you mention this European state, calls the European state. In fact, it is a capacity to develop between nation state cooperation. Cooperation, cooperation. And Norbert Elias after last war said, the... the next step of civilization is to invent better cooperation between nation state in order to protect citizen and to create the condition for the fulfillment of... of people. And this... and the place to develop that, the lab for that, will be Europe, and I name that the European state, l'État européen as Norbert Elias said. And I think we have been successful in that. So in fact nowadays, and I want your opinion on that, we have developed a new civilization based upon a great society and a new solidarity, this European state. And now the question is: how do we go ahead? How can we build something where we develop a real pride of it? Slavoj.
huge. Just for the fun. The day before, I was in a plane and I was close to the American coach of the climbing, the US climbing team. And there is a competition in Slovenia at the end of the week. And he told me, "Hey, Europe for me is very clear. European, you have style. We have lost the style in the US. You... you are fit. You are mobile. You have good food. Culture is everywhere. You have solidarity. This is Europe. This is very clear. It's not anymore the US." So we have built a strong society but we are not able to see it. And this is one thing, this is one part of this new civilization. And the second part is what Norbert Elias, because you mention this European state, calls the European state. In fact, it is a capacity to develop between nation state cooperation. Cooperation, cooperation. And Norbert Elias after last war said, the... the next step of civilization is to invent better cooperation between nation state in order to protect citizen and to create the condition for the fulfillment of... of people. And this... and the place to develop that, the lab for that, will be Europe, and I name that the European state, l'État européen as Norbert Elias said. And I think we have been successful in that. So in fact nowadays, and I want your opinion on that, we have developed a new civilization based upon a great society and a new solidarity, this European state. And now the question is: how do we go ahead? How can we build something where we develop a real pride of it? Slavoj.
Slavoj Žižek
It sounds nice, again. But you are going to disagree. No, not totally, but you know... where is the but? Where is the but? My god, I'm supposed to be the crazy... am I so crazy? I'm supposed to be the crazy philosopher, but I'm much more brutal realist—is not the right term here. Let me, let me give you this example. It will sound... first I deeply agree with what you said about rewriting of history. You know who is my model here? Do you know this story? It's a wonderful moment. In '53, when there were in Geneva negotiations about peace in Korea, Zhou Enlai was there to finish the negotiations about Korean peace. And he was asked by a French journalist, "What do you think about French Revolution?"
It sounds nice, again. But you are going to disagree. No, not totally, but you know... where is the but? Where is the but? My god, I'm supposed to be the crazy... am I so crazy? I'm supposed to be the crazy philosopher, but I'm much more brutal realist—is not the right term here. Let me, let me give you this example. It will sound... first I deeply agree with what you said about rewriting of history. You know who is my model here? Do you know this story? It's a wonderful moment. In '53, when there were in Geneva negotiations about peace in Korea, Zhou Enlai was there to finish the negotiations about Korean peace. And he was asked by a French journalist, "What do you think about French Revolution?"
unknown
You know what Zhou Enlai's
You know what Zhou Enlai's
Slavoj Žižek
answer was? "It's too early to say. It's not yet far enough." And he was deeply right because what happened in exactly years after, was something that triggered, at least in the mainstream liberals and right-wingers, a rewriting of history. They claimed French Revolution, especially in its Jacobin form, is the origin of this revolutionary logic whose final failure was to come years later. I don't agree with that, but I agree with you. This is a beautiful formula proposed by Walter Benjamin, the German fellow traveler of Marxism, who said that every emancipatory movement is also a struggle to redeem the past. We are always in this sense rewriting the past, giving new meaning to it. Now comes my pessimism. You know, what if I, in contrast to this "we are all citizens, leaders, blah blah blah," no, I think that... let me ask you a frank, I simplify it and I want to provoke you to attack me more, question. I definitely wouldn't like to live in a country where a true self-management would have been operative. Like, you know, I work in the morning, every afternoon I have to participate in some local stupid meetings where we decide how our children are educated, how we organize... I want to have a society of some basic well-functioning alienation. I want peace. I want an invisible network of state to smoothly function, of course not totally out of control. But now I will go even a step further. I think—trigger warning as they say in politically correct societies, provocation—that most of the people... this is an attack on you but I hope I will get a counterattack... people don't really want democracy if by democracy you mean they really decide. People want the appearance of democracy. They want the appearance to be asked "What do you want?" but at the same time they want clearly to be told "What do they want?" And I think this is the role of a good leader. Not a—you know, a good leader is not the one who simply orders you what you want. It's... when we are—now comes my provocation but I love it, I agree with it—a true leader is not a master who controls you. On the contrary, in your everyday life, if you're a stupid hedonist pragmatic individualist, you are not really free. You are caught in your daily routine. A true leader liberates you. A true leader makes you aware of: "My god, I thought this is not possible, but I can do this." So we need a leader to make us aware that it's possible to do things we thought it's not possible. Now I don't want to make judgments who knows what is Zelenskyy really, but there was an element of this leader in him because let's be frankly critical how stupid we were a couple of months ago. First, we thought—all my political friends were telling me this—"Listen, Putin is bluffing, don't worry, he will never attack." Then when he attacked, the same friends were telling me, "Listen, be serious, Kyiv will fall in two, three days and it will be all over," and so on and so forth. And there was some shocking surprise. This is what I like about Ukrainians. Yet it was madness, impossible, but they did it. But nonetheless, ask yourself again. Isn't it that when there are elections, when things are really decided, we are usually afraid of those moments? It's almost like civil war. Like in Europe we came close to radical election with Syriza, I think. And people were afraid: "Will there be civil war?" and so on and so forth. So again, I as an ordinary conformist, here comes my provocation, I don't want to lose my time thinking too much about a society. I want some basic assurance that of course that those in power are somehow controlled, but I don't want to know too much. I want to have my peaceful life to read books, write books, watch good movies, listen good music and so on. And I just want society, for example, I don't want to know too much about healthcare. I want it to function a little bit better than it's functioning in my country now and so on and so forth. So I'm provoking you now with a category of good alienation. Not in the sense of alienated power, but in the sense of there is a basically alienated state structure and the best thing that can happen is that you somehow basically trust it. Do you have a problem with this? Yes, tell me why. Several thing. First about leadership. Yeah, my definition of leadership converges with yours. For me, a leader is somebody who opens the universe of possible. Yeah, yeah. And this is also the European dream: to be able for anybody to open the universe of possible. So that's leadership. But you have forgotten something regarding democracy. The fact is people, they are working a lot, but they are working less and less and less in the medium long term. And they have a lot of time. So they have time to read books, they have time to go to cinema, to have sex, to look after their family, etc. But they are also interested in what's happening in daily life. And politics and democracy is part. And they want—I do agree—they want to participate. And they want to be included and they don't want to be excluded. So the role of politics and of politician is to find the way to
answer was? "It's too early to say. It's not yet far enough." And he was deeply right because what happened in exactly years after, was something that triggered, at least in the mainstream liberals and right-wingers, a rewriting of history. They claimed French Revolution, especially in its Jacobin form, is the origin of this revolutionary logic whose final failure was to come years later. I don't agree with that, but I agree with you. This is a beautiful formula proposed by Walter Benjamin, the German fellow traveler of Marxism, who said that every emancipatory movement is also a struggle to redeem the past. We are always in this sense rewriting the past, giving new meaning to it. Now comes my pessimism. You know, what if I, in contrast to this "we are all citizens, leaders, blah blah blah," no, I think that... let me ask you a frank, I simplify it and I want to provoke you to attack me more, question. I definitely wouldn't like to live in a country where a true self-management would have been operative. Like, you know, I work in the morning, every afternoon I have to participate in some local stupid meetings where we decide how our children are educated, how we organize... I want to have a society of some basic well-functioning alienation. I want peace. I want an invisible network of state to smoothly function, of course not totally out of control. But now I will go even a step further. I think—trigger warning as they say in politically correct societies, provocation—that most of the people... this is an attack on you but I hope I will get a counterattack... people don't really want democracy if by democracy you mean they really decide. People want the appearance of democracy. They want the appearance to be asked "What do you want?" but at the same time they want clearly to be told "What do they want?" And I think this is the role of a good leader. Not a—you know, a good leader is not the one who simply orders you what you want. It's... when we are—now comes my provocation but I love it, I agree with it—a true leader is not a master who controls you. On the contrary, in your everyday life, if you're a stupid hedonist pragmatic individualist, you are not really free. You are caught in your daily routine. A true leader liberates you. A true leader makes you aware of: "My god, I thought this is not possible, but I can do this." So we need a leader to make us aware that it's possible to do things we thought it's not possible. Now I don't want to make judgments who knows what is Zelenskyy really, but there was an element of this leader in him because let's be frankly critical how stupid we were a couple of months ago. First, we thought—all my political friends were telling me this—"Listen, Putin is bluffing, don't worry, he will never attack." Then when he attacked, the same friends were telling me, "Listen, be serious, Kyiv will fall in two, three days and it will be all over," and so on and so forth. And there was some shocking surprise. This is what I like about Ukrainians. Yet it was madness, impossible, but they did it. But nonetheless, ask yourself again. Isn't it that when there are elections, when things are really decided, we are usually afraid of those moments? It's almost like civil war. Like in Europe we came close to radical election with Syriza, I think. And people were afraid: "Will there be civil war?" and so on and so forth. So again, I as an ordinary conformist, here comes my provocation, I don't want to lose my time thinking too much about a society. I want some basic assurance that of course that those in power are somehow controlled, but I don't want to know too much. I want to have my peaceful life to read books, write books, watch good movies, listen good music and so on. And I just want society, for example, I don't want to know too much about healthcare. I want it to function a little bit better than it's functioning in my country now and so on and so forth. So I'm provoking you now with a category of good alienation. Not in the sense of alienated power, but in the sense of there is a basically alienated state structure and the best thing that can happen is that you somehow basically trust it. Do you have a problem with this? Yes, tell me why. Several thing. First about leadership. Yeah, my definition of leadership converges with yours. For me, a leader is somebody who opens the universe of possible. Yeah, yeah. And this is also the European dream: to be able for anybody to open the universe of possible. So that's leadership. But you have forgotten something regarding democracy. The fact is people, they are working a lot, but they are working less and less and less in the medium long term. And they have a lot of time. So they have time to read books, they have time to go to cinema, to have sex, to look after their family, etc. But they are also interested in what's happening in daily life. And politics and democracy is part. And they want—I do agree—they want to participate. And they want to be included and they don't want to be excluded. So the role of politics and of politician is to find the way to
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involve them. What I have
involve them. What I have
Slavoj Žižek
said exactly is we need
said exactly is we need
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traditional democracy, parliamentary democracy, but we need to complement it because we are in a time where in which citizen have time to contribute to participate. So we need to find the balance. This is my position and I think this is very European. And it's really funny because when you give an opportunity for a citizen to be a real citizen and to think about to contribute to the thinking of the future, it takes the time. It takes the time, so it's
traditional democracy, parliamentary democracy, but we need to complement it because we are in a time where in which citizen have time to contribute to participate. So we need to find the balance. This is my position and I think this is very European. And it's really funny because when you give an opportunity for a citizen to be a real citizen and to think about to contribute to the thinking of the future, it takes the time. It takes the time, so it's
Slavoj Žižek
interesting, it's interesting. I would not say everybody would do that. I would not say
interesting, it's interesting. I would not say everybody would do that. I would not say
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if you do it once in your life, you are going to do it again. But it's an experience of universalism. Okay, sorry, it's the same line of justification. Okay, where would you locate here Gilets Jaunes, yellow vests? There you got the real voice of the people and it was... it was a mixture of leftist proposals, racist proposals and so on. There the people spoke and it was a big mess. Okay, but because there was... it was in France, no? So what? You think France is a big mess? No, no, but I mean in my country, because we are... we are a very presidential regime, we have not the culture, the real culture of listening the people. It's really top-down country for decades and decades and decades. And we have difficulty to manage the crisis. So sometimes every seventy years or we have war or revolution and it helps to manage the transformation. But it is...
if you do it once in your life, you are going to do it again. But it's an experience of universalism. Okay, sorry, it's the same line of justification. Okay, where would you locate here Gilets Jaunes, yellow vests? There you got the real voice of the people and it was... it was a mixture of leftist proposals, racist proposals and so on. There the people spoke and it was a big mess. Okay, but because there was... it was in France, no? So what? You think France is a big mess? No, no, but I mean in my country, because we are... we are a very presidential regime, we have not the culture, the real culture of listening the people. It's really top-down country for decades and decades and decades. And we have difficulty to manage the crisis. So sometimes every seventy years or we have war or revolution and it helps to manage the transformation. But it is...
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it is France, I would say. Um, can I change topics? You are the boss. Okay. I just want, and after we will go to the question, I just want to say a very quick word about Taiwan. Because we spoke about universality. Yeah. And for me, Taiwan is the proof that European values are not only European but they are universal. And this... this is very important. I wanted to share that with you. And then we take one question or two and we go to bed. Uh, we can't listen to you at all. My god. Micro, blah blah. Does this work? Or no, because I would be ready to give it to you, like... Oh, can you give me a... give him a microphone. Thank you. Professor's coming. Thank you, thank you. I just repeat my name is Ibrahim and I... I repeat what I say before, that I say thanks to the organizers to invite me and also I congratulate you for this brilliant and lively interventions and we have a cocktail of good ideas and also bad ideas. So I just want to tell my contribution, what I can do. I just want to tell you that the situation are very serious in this moment. There's no joke now. We have to decide what we want in this world. As you want collapse or you want to survive? And on my side, this life is so beautiful for me that I want to live for maybe hundred years, for today. And it's also very serious that, you know, that people are dying in Ukraine, people are dying in Mali, in Somalia, in... so we have to decide and you say that Europe have a future of Europe. The future of Europe for me is that Europe have to listen others. For the past years, just Europe is talking. Other people, other nations, they don't exist. If they want to exist, Europe say no. Because Europe don't give them opportunity, as you give me, that I can talk. If you see how a dialogue, the dialogue is that we are in a crisis and the solution of this world are not only in Europe. I think we... I think
it is France, I would say. Um, can I change topics? You are the boss. Okay. I just want, and after we will go to the question, I just want to say a very quick word about Taiwan. Because we spoke about universality. Yeah. And for me, Taiwan is the proof that European values are not only European but they are universal. And this... this is very important. I wanted to share that with you. And then we take one question or two and we go to bed. Uh, we can't listen to you at all. My god. Micro, blah blah. Does this work? Or no, because I would be ready to give it to you, like... Oh, can you give me a... give him a microphone. Thank you. Professor's coming. Thank you, thank you. I just repeat my name is Ibrahim and I... I repeat what I say before, that I say thanks to the organizers to invite me and also I congratulate you for this brilliant and lively interventions and we have a cocktail of good ideas and also bad ideas. So I just want to tell my contribution, what I can do. I just want to tell you that the situation are very serious in this moment. There's no joke now. We have to decide what we want in this world. As you want collapse or you want to survive? And on my side, this life is so beautiful for me that I want to live for maybe hundred years, for today. And it's also very serious that, you know, that people are dying in Ukraine, people are dying in Mali, in Somalia, in... so we have to decide and you say that Europe have a future of Europe. The future of Europe for me is that Europe have to listen others. For the past years, just Europe is talking. Other people, other nations, they don't exist. If they want to exist, Europe say no. Because Europe don't give them opportunity, as you give me, that I can talk. If you see how a dialogue, the dialogue is that we are in a crisis and the solution of this world are not only in Europe. I think we... I think
Slavoj Žižek
we understood your intervention and your question. Do you want to react and conclude because it's time I was said? No, I just stopped. No, no, but you have stopped but... Okay. Oh no, sorry, I would like to go. I'm so sorry. I know people are dying here, I mean of tiredness, but we don't have time. But you know, I... my point would have been here—I'm so sorry we don't have time to develop it—that I don't think there is a necessary contradiction between what the good part of Europe stands for and this, let's call it emancipation of those excluded by Europe. The first thing I noted is that... I'll try to be very brief although I could go on for hours... take the French Revolution. For me, you know which was the crucial moment of the French Revolution? Haiti. Without Haiti, French Revolution would have been a limited European moment. You know what happened in Haiti? People, black people, slaves rebelled on behalf of European ideals, but they didn't simply imitate European ideas. They gave them a specific twist and it's incredible. In some sense, Haitian people not only found their voice, but in finding their voice they were in some sense more European that we were in Europe. The bad guy there, as you probably know, was Napoleon. All my glory to Jacobins who immediately recognized Haiti. [unintelligible] he was I think already... I don't know why he didn't come to Paris... others. Then Napoleon as we know sent the army, and a miracle happened there. Do you know what happened? When the French army was approaching Haiti black rebels, they heard some wild singing. And they thought, "Eh, this must be some stupid black tribal songs." When they came nearer, you know what they heard? La Marseillaise. Of course. And all the glory to Polish soldiers mobilized by Napoleon. Even with the worst anti-white blacks, they are honored even today because they said, "Wait a minute, we are here on the wrong side." And they changed side, they went to the blacks. So what I am saying is that another danger that I see... I agree with you deeply, find blacks everybody find your own voice. But do you know that this also can be profoundly manipulated? What they shocked me when I was young, I'm old enough, I followed in detail apartheid and the struggle against apartheid and British colonization in India. Do you know that in apartheid, the politics of apartheid—it was of course a lie—but it was also apartheid in the sense, for example, a friend brought me a brochure from apartheid white South Africa where they said, "We cannot simply introduce equality. All the black tribes will lose their authentic voice and so on. We should keep the difference." And to the end, apartheid people wanted blacks to retain their own culture. Mandela never... that was his greatness... subscribed to this. He was always a universalist. The same in India. Do you know that the British, when they colonized India, they not only they did not try to Europeanize the Indians, they even reprinted, massively propagated, for example, the laws, the Book of Manu, a traditional Indian book about how authority functions, blah blah blah, because they got it that it's much better for colonialism if the natives keep their own culture. Now you will say of course this is not authentic culture. But here is the... the problem, you know. It's not so much you get your voice. Professor, Professor, excuse me. Please. Excuse me, we as Africans, we have our philosophy
we understood your intervention and your question. Do you want to react and conclude because it's time I was said? No, I just stopped. No, no, but you have stopped but... Okay. Oh no, sorry, I would like to go. I'm so sorry. I know people are dying here, I mean of tiredness, but we don't have time. But you know, I... my point would have been here—I'm so sorry we don't have time to develop it—that I don't think there is a necessary contradiction between what the good part of Europe stands for and this, let's call it emancipation of those excluded by Europe. The first thing I noted is that... I'll try to be very brief although I could go on for hours... take the French Revolution. For me, you know which was the crucial moment of the French Revolution? Haiti. Without Haiti, French Revolution would have been a limited European moment. You know what happened in Haiti? People, black people, slaves rebelled on behalf of European ideals, but they didn't simply imitate European ideas. They gave them a specific twist and it's incredible. In some sense, Haitian people not only found their voice, but in finding their voice they were in some sense more European that we were in Europe. The bad guy there, as you probably know, was Napoleon. All my glory to Jacobins who immediately recognized Haiti. [unintelligible] he was I think already... I don't know why he didn't come to Paris... others. Then Napoleon as we know sent the army, and a miracle happened there. Do you know what happened? When the French army was approaching Haiti black rebels, they heard some wild singing. And they thought, "Eh, this must be some stupid black tribal songs." When they came nearer, you know what they heard? La Marseillaise. Of course. And all the glory to Polish soldiers mobilized by Napoleon. Even with the worst anti-white blacks, they are honored even today because they said, "Wait a minute, we are here on the wrong side." And they changed side, they went to the blacks. So what I am saying is that another danger that I see... I agree with you deeply, find blacks everybody find your own voice. But do you know that this also can be profoundly manipulated? What they shocked me when I was young, I'm old enough, I followed in detail apartheid and the struggle against apartheid and British colonization in India. Do you know that in apartheid, the politics of apartheid—it was of course a lie—but it was also apartheid in the sense, for example, a friend brought me a brochure from apartheid white South Africa where they said, "We cannot simply introduce equality. All the black tribes will lose their authentic voice and so on. We should keep the difference." And to the end, apartheid people wanted blacks to retain their own culture. Mandela never... that was his greatness... subscribed to this. He was always a universalist. The same in India. Do you know that the British, when they colonized India, they not only they did not try to Europeanize the Indians, they even reprinted, massively propagated, for example, the laws, the Book of Manu, a traditional Indian book about how authority functions, blah blah blah, because they got it that it's much better for colonialism if the natives keep their own culture. Now you will say of course this is not authentic culture. But here is the... the problem, you know. It's not so much you get your voice. Professor, Professor, excuse me. Please. Excuse me, we as Africans, we have our philosophy
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named Ubuntu. I know, I know it. You know the Ubuntu philosophy. The Ubuntu philosophy, you don't talk about democracy, we talk about how we can be wise and to solve problems. This is... when Europeans come to us, they try to deny our civilization but they don't succeed. They never succeed. They never succeed and they will never succeed because our civilization is stronger, strongest than European... you have to know that in Europe all the
named Ubuntu. I know, I know it. You know the Ubuntu philosophy. The Ubuntu philosophy, you don't talk about democracy, we talk about how we can be wise and to solve problems. This is... when Europeans come to us, they try to deny our civilization but they don't succeed. They never succeed. They never succeed and they will never succeed because our civilization is stronger, strongest than European... you have to know that in Europe all the
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problems you made in this world are coming from
problems you made in this world are coming from
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Europe: first
Europe: first
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war, second war. All the wars in the world are from Europe. So come on. la France, vous êtes français, vous savez comme français que vous n'êtes pas... que vous avez fait des problèmes partout dans le monde. You made problems all in the world. Just professor I just want to tell you that we have Europe have to learn and listen others. Because I'm European. And that's why I want to use that you hear to others to solve problems. The problem with Ukraine, you know the Ukraine problem with Ukraine... Okay I can give back the... the microphone and I
war, second war. All the wars in the world are from Europe. So come on. la France, vous êtes français, vous savez comme français que vous n'êtes pas... que vous avez fait des problèmes partout dans le monde. You made problems all in the world. Just professor I just want to tell you that we have Europe have to learn and listen others. Because I'm European. And that's why I want to use that you hear to others to solve problems. The problem with Ukraine, you know the Ukraine problem with Ukraine... Okay I can give back the... the microphone and I
Slavoj Žižek
think that I succeed to tell you that I want to say something and I succeed to tell
think that I succeed to tell you that I want to say something and I succeed to tell
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you that Europe have to learn and talk with others, dialogue with others countries. It's very important because if you want to solve the problems in the world, in Ukraine, in Mali, in Somalia, we have to sit down and say that something went wrong. Okay, but I think, sorry, thank you. You told it several times, so I think we understood your point. We do agree the discussion we have, sorry, the discussion we have earlier is Europe made mistake and we draw lessons, we... we have to listen and we have to go on develop teaching, but I think Europe is doing this work and I'm not sure everywhere in the world it is the same thing. So I think now it's time to... to conclude. Do you want to
you that Europe have to learn and talk with others, dialogue with others countries. It's very important because if you want to solve the problems in the world, in Ukraine, in Mali, in Somalia, we have to sit down and say that something went wrong. Okay, but I think, sorry, thank you. You told it several times, so I think we understood your point. We do agree the discussion we have, sorry, the discussion we have earlier is Europe made mistake and we draw lessons, we... we have to listen and we have to go on develop teaching, but I think Europe is doing this work and I'm not sure everywhere in the world it is the same thing. So I think now it's time to... to conclude. Do you want to
Slavoj Žižek
say a last word? Slavoj. Okay, just one
say a last word? Slavoj. Okay, just one
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comment because it was long discussion what Europe is bringing or could bring to the world. And there was hypothesis we can bring civilization and we are special and we are developed. I think we
comment because it was long discussion what Europe is bringing or could bring to the world. And there was hypothesis we can bring civilization and we are special and we are developed. I think we
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should play for power of rules, not civilizing. Because you was mentioning Professor Žižek many times habits and so on. There is a fantastic book of Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process and His Story of Manners. And if you look into this book carefully you will see how thin is what we are talking about. He describes France,
should play for power of rules, not civilizing. Because you was mentioning Professor Žižek many times habits and so on. There is a fantastic book of Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process and His Story of Manners. And if you look into this book carefully you will see how thin is what we are talking about. He describes France,
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Germany, England manners until 19th-20th century and how people behaved. So
Germany, England manners until 19th-20th century and how people behaved. So
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it's much
it's much
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better to play
better to play
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on
on
Slavoj Žižek
rules than on civilizing process. Yeah, but what Norbert Elias is saying is we need to civilize relationship within nation and this go with the power of rules. So you see, Elias himself is connecting civilization and giving a new meaning of civilization. So the question is what we put behind civilization. So I think we do agree. No, I am so sorry because you are weak people. I am a, you know how Stalin defined a Bolshevik: "We are made of special stuff and so on." I am. I could go on for four hours. Now you are weak ordinary people. But just to say what I wanted to say with this rules. You know, I think rules are my god again I tried to emphasize this: rules are never simply rules. They... for example, one example from my own past here: I knew two people in Slovene Central Committee who were young, maybe stupid, because they sincerely believed in our self-management socialism. They lost their job. You know why? Because they sincerely believed in self-management. So this was... So what I'm saying is that my god, show me the only example that I know where they try to impose rules is political correctness. And it's... but then you get Texas Republican Party which says, "I don't accept elections because I don't accept rules." No, they are... no, first they are not saying this. What they are saying is Biden broke the rules, and it's much more tragic because they simply have no shared background of they don't speak the same language. But again, I'm so sad we don't have time to prolong that debate about Europe civilization and so on and so forth. I think, I cannot prove it now, I think that in the same way I agree with you that we shouldn't idealize Europe. Europe nonetheless, remember that people tend to—haha that would be maybe my skepticism against you—you know that in 15th century or later, slavery almost disappeared. And then capitalism, modernity gave
rules than on civilizing process. Yeah, but what Norbert Elias is saying is we need to civilize relationship within nation and this go with the power of rules. So you see, Elias himself is connecting civilization and giving a new meaning of civilization. So the question is what we put behind civilization. So I think we do agree. No, I am so sorry because you are weak people. I am a, you know how Stalin defined a Bolshevik: "We are made of special stuff and so on." I am. I could go on for four hours. Now you are weak ordinary people. But just to say what I wanted to say with this rules. You know, I think rules are my god again I tried to emphasize this: rules are never simply rules. They... for example, one example from my own past here: I knew two people in Slovene Central Committee who were young, maybe stupid, because they sincerely believed in our self-management socialism. They lost their job. You know why? Because they sincerely believed in self-management. So this was... So what I'm saying is that my god, show me the only example that I know where they try to impose rules is political correctness. And it's... but then you get Texas Republican Party which says, "I don't accept elections because I don't accept rules." No, they are... no, first they are not saying this. What they are saying is Biden broke the rules, and it's much more tragic because they simply have no shared background of they don't speak the same language. But again, I'm so sad we don't have time to prolong that debate about Europe civilization and so on and so forth. I think, I cannot prove it now, I think that in the same way I agree with you that we shouldn't idealize Europe. Europe nonetheless, remember that people tend to—haha that would be maybe my skepticism against you—you know that in 15th century or later, slavery almost disappeared. And then capitalism, modernity gave
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a new impetus to slavery. On the other hand, I'm skeptical just towards all civilizations. I why for example Taliban undoubtedly there the original at least part of the original Afghani national voice was expressed and you get Taliban in Afghanistan and so on and so forth. So I just think that this will be a provocation you will not agree, that even when we criticize Europe and Eurocentrism, are you aware that most of
a new impetus to slavery. On the other hand, I'm skeptical just towards all civilizations. I why for example Taliban undoubtedly there the original at least part of the original Afghani national voice was expressed and you get Taliban in Afghanistan and so on and so forth. So I just think that this will be a provocation you will not agree, that even when we criticize Europe and Eurocentrism, are you aware that most of
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the logic of the arguments
the logic of the arguments
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is European, is taken from
is European, is taken from
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European enlightenment? You will not agree but because I
European enlightenment? You will not agree but because I
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think that what
think that what
Slavoj Žižek
is nonetheless unique in Europe is that it's a civilization which includes a radical doubt about itself.
is nonetheless unique in Europe is that it's a civilization which includes a radical doubt about itself.