The Freedom of a Forced Choice
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2014-11-22 · 1:24:08 · 11,059 words
capitalismideologypsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsdemocracyliberalism-political-correctnessrevolution-violencecinema-art-culturesubjectivitygeopolitics-warcommunism-socialismphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging public lecture in Porto, Portugal, addressing the political horizon of left movements like Podemos and Syriza, the paradoxes of freedom under global capitalism, and the nature of ideological control in contemporary societies. He argues that the current crisis demands not a choice between existing options but a genuinely free choice of one's historical fate, a notion he develops through Dupuy's counterfactuals and the Hitchcock film Vertigo. Along the way he examines perversion vs. hysteria as political stances, the desexualization of sexuality, the immanent transgressions of social orders, and the limits of conventional democratic imagination.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 18
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “Aufhebung / spiritual result”
Hegel's notion invoked through the claim that the 'spiritual result' of the Peloponnesian War was Thucydides' book, the real war was fought to enable the work of spirit.
Implied in the analysis of high-frequency trading as a process that operates at a level literally unrepresentable to human actors yet determines their outcomes.
Global capitalism is not tied to Western liberal values but is inherently multicultural in a non-emancipatory sense, functioning equally well with authoritarian nationalist regimes.
The paradoxical situation of being compelled to 'freely' choose, referenced ironically as the audience's situation listening to him, and more seriously as the condition of contemporary political subjects.
as “perversion (political)”
Not sexual deviance but a political-subjective position that merely enacts the obscene supplement of the ruling order rather than genuinely subverting it, the 'inherent transgressor' who does the master's dirty work.
The obscene underside or supplement that is not external to a social order but internally generated and required by it, e.g. Catholic Church pedophilia as the Church's own immanent transgression.
as “ideological interpellation”
The mechanism by which ideology assigns subjects a public identity (e.g. free consumer, revolutionary, mother), invoked here via Althusser to set up the contrast with hysteria and perversion.
as “hysteria (political)”
The genuinely subversive stance that problematizes ideological interpellation by asking 'why am I what you tell me I am?', for Žižek, following Lacan, the truly radical subjective position.
The symbolic order or social authority whose interpellating call assigns identities; the hysterical question ('why am I what you tell me I am?') is addressed to it.
Implicitly present in the discussion of perverse enjoyment and the obscene ritual underside of ideological orders.
as “super-ego culpabilization”
The ideological mechanism of bombarding individuals with guilt about personal consumption choices (ecology, diet, smoking) to displace attention from structural questions while offering commodified absolution.
as “desexualization of sex”
The contemporary ideological process by which sexuality is drained of its dangerous, event-like quality and reduced to a safe, contractualized, politically-correct activity.
as “the event (Badiou's)”
Invoked via Badiou's analysis of falling in love as an 'event', the moment of unexpected openness where something 'hits you' that contemporary ideology tries to eliminate via dating algorithms.
as “retroactive causality / retroactive necessity”
Once a free choice is made it retroactively becomes one's fate, even changing how the past appears, illustrated via Caesar crossing the Rubicon and Vertigo's revelation about Madeleine.
as “counterfactuals (Dupuy's notion)”
The logical distinction between 'someone else did it' (fact-based) and 'someone else would have done it' (determinist thesis) used to articulate the genuine contingency vs. deeper necessity debate about historical events.
as “predestination (theological-Marxist)”
Reread after Jameson as the most dialectical notion of freedom: fate is predetermined but unknown, so you must be constantly active, the paradox that makes it the ultimate capitalist and authentic radical theology simultaneously.
as “freedom of choice vs. freedom to choose one's fate”
The distinction between trivial consumer choice among given options and the radical freedom to choose the very coordinates of one's existence, the latter is what genuine political action requires.
Implicitly present in Žižek's ironic self-presentation and in the audience's expectation that the philosopher will provide answers, inverted when he confesses his school is in open, uncertain territory.
Stories he reaches for 11
Starbucks charges more for coffee but tells customers a percentage goes to Guatemala children or African water projects, letting consumers fully enjoy their consumerism because their ethical duty is pre-included in the price, the ideal form of ideological absolution.
“Pay a little bit more and you are clean.”
Scientists have wired rats' brains to computers so they can be remotely controlled like toy cars; the key question is whether the controlled rat experiences itself as free. The answer: unfortunately yes, it thinks it is acting freely.
“Like you know you are controlled you even don't know.”
In Quantum of Solace, James Bond has no sex scene at the end, the first Bond film without it. Žižek reads this alongside Dan Brown's sexless Da Vinci Code as symptoms of the ideological desexualization of sex: sex is allowed but only if reduced of its dangerous substance.
“There is no sex at the end. Did you notice this? It's the first James Bond film...”
You meet someone contingently, but once you fall in love you perceive your entire past as pointing toward this moment, contingency retroactively transforms into destiny.
“once you fall in love you automatically perceive all your past as my god it was all pointing towards this moment”
No one can imagine Caesar not crossing the Rubicon, yet it was a free choice. Once he made it, it retroactively became his fate, and even the past appeared different.
“once he did it even the past appeared different”
Gangs systematically abduct, gang-rape, and murder women workers in Ciudad Juárez in ritualized ways; the official response treats them as individual pathological crimes, obscuring their nature as the ritualized dark underside of the ideology of the maquiladora free-trade zone.
“They are the dark underside of the ruling ideology. In the sense of they are obscene rituals.”
The ideal politically correct date ends with each partner using their own plastic sexual apparatus (dildo / 'stamina training unit') connected to electricity, the machines enjoying for them while they have a nice cup of tea, the reductio ad absurdum of the contractualization and desexualization of sex.
“the machines are buzzing, okay they are enjoying for us and I can then sit with her and have a nice cup of tea”
At the end of Vertigo Scottie discovers not only that he lost Madeleine but that Madeleine never existed, the vulgar Judy and Madeleine were the same person. This illustrates retroactive causality: the past itself changes when the truth is revealed.
“retroactively Madeleine never existed”
A male ritual of killing Native American Indian girls on Vancouver-area reserves is systematically treated by police as isolated family matters or attributed to the girls' own families, suppressing its ritualized, symbolic nature.
“It's clearly a male some kind of a ritual of maturation.”
Scientists developing drugs to distort subjective time (minutes feel like years) immediately propose using them to make prison terms more 'efficient.' Žižek notes that nobody imagined using them to make love-making last longer, revealing the impoverishment of contemporary imagination.
“My immediate association was why not think about it in the opposite sense? Like you make love for five minutes you experience it like years.”
The TISA agreements regulating financial and information flows were negotiated secretly, and stipulate that after acceptance they remain secret for five years, all major decisions made without democratic input and hidden from citizens.
“for five years after it will be accepted and enforced for five years it should remain secret”
Works invoked 17
Vertigo film
Central illustration of retroactive causality: Scottie's discovery that Madeleine never existed shows how the past itself changes when truth is revealed. Also: San Francisco deserves to exist because it enabled Hitchcock to shoot Vertigo there.
Less Than Nothing book
Žižek's own 'mega book' (over 1000 pages, jokingly it 'certainly doesn't weigh less than nothing'), mentioned as the first of three major philosophical books he is writing (followed by Absolute Recoil and Figures of Negativity).
The Da Vinci Code book
Žižek would burn it, but uses it as a symptom: there is no sex in Da Vinci Code, illustrating the contemporary desexualization of mainstream cultural products.
Elysium film
Cited alongside Hunger Games as a Hollywood film detecting the coming class apartheid society.
The Hunger Games film
Cited as one of the Hollywood blockbusters that depicts a post-apocalyptic extreme class society, evidence that even Hollywood senses the trajectory of global capitalism toward a new apartheid.
Quantum of Solace film
Praised as 'politically a very good one' for having Bond save Morales regime in Bolivia against a bad international corporation; also analyzed as symptom of desexualization, first Bond film without a sex scene.
Angels and Demons film
Dan Brown's novel has sex but the Hollywood adaptation removes it, the opposite of the usual pattern, showing that Hollywood is now sanitizing sex rather than adding it.
Absolute Recoil book
Žižek's second major philosophical book, described as fighting with the same problems as Less Than Nothing.
Zardoz film
John Boorman's 1974 film cited as the first to prophesy the coming apartheid society of global capitalism, the rich in a protected 'Vortex,' the rest excluded.
Žižek loves Piketty's book but considers it 'the most utopian book I haven't recently read', the proposal to keep capitalism and just raise taxes is a utopia because it requires a world authority that does not exist.
Maurizio Lazzarato's analysis of how contemporary ideology treats all subjects as self-entrepreneurs and debtors, cited approvingly as illuminating how ideology works today.
Beyond Interpellation essay
Mladen Dolar's essay described as 'really an ingenious move': hysteria is the gesture of problematizing interpellation, the fundamental hysterical question is 'why am I what you tell me I am?'
Jean-Pierre Dupuy's synthesis, recently published by Michigan State University Press, provides the theoretical framework of counterfactuals and retroactive causality that Žižek deploys to argue for the radical notion of political freedom as choosing one's fate.
Peter Sloterdijk's book developing the globe metaphor, the privileged are inside and think they see everything but cannot perceive the enclosure that separates them from those outside.
The third major philosophical book Žižek is currently writing, described as developing new lines of thought in an open, uncertain situation.
Flash Boys book
Best-selling book elaborating the high-frequency trading phenomenon, cited to illustrate how power operates at a level literally below human representation.
Jeremy Rifkin's book is cited for the convincing argument that the internet is generating a new sphere of free circulation that no longer functions at market level, intellectual property is by nature communist.
People invoked 36
Fernando Pessoa positive
Žižek says he cannot imagine his life without Pessoa, one of the reasons he loves Portugal.
Žižek says he is 'not in great favor of Fidel Castro' politically; he respects ordinary Cubans' desire for a good life and criticizes leftists ready to sacrifice ordinary people for grand historical missions. The comparison to himself is merely that they both talk too much.
José Saramago positive
Alongside Pessoa, one of the writers who gives Portugal its right to exist in Žižek's Hegelian framework, he cannot imagine his life without Saramago.
Used as an example of how radical neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism coexist without contradiction, the combination of opening India to foreign capital and authoritarian nationalist politics is offered as proof of the thesis about authoritarian capitalism.
Jean-Pierre Dupuy positive
Described as 'my good friend the French philosopher thinker of catastrophes'; his book Economy and the Future and his development of counterfactuals are the theoretical basis for Žižek's argument about retroactive causality and choosing one's fate.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as his 'Slovene Lacanian colleague'; her analysis of the paradoxical distribution of the possible and impossible under contemporary capitalism is cited approvingly. She is writing a new book on ontology and sexual difference.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical reference throughout: hysteria as the fundamental subversive attitude, the big Other, the hysterical question. Žižek's school is working to make a move 'beyond' Hegel and Lacan.
Georgi Plekhanov negative
Cited as the representative of the 'great man in history' determinist thesis, the view that historical tendencies would have been realized by someone else if not by the individual (Napoleon / Stalin). Žižek disputes this determinism via Dupuy.
Louis Althusser positive
His concept of ideological interpellation is invoked as the framework for Žižek's analysis of hysteria vs. perversion as political stances.
Gilles Deleuze negative
The 'pseudo-Deleuzian' post-'68 celebration of perversion against hysteria is what Žižek explicitly rejects, attributing to that tradition an anti-feminist message and a false picture of where genuine subversion lies.
Cited as example of how anything is 'possible' if you have money (space flights via Virgin), illustrating the paradox that technology allows unlimited possibilities while modest political reforms are declared impossible.
Franco Berardi positive
Paired with Lazzarato as 'very important' Italian leftist thinker analyzing the ideology of debt and the indebted man.
Alain Badiou positive
Called 'my friend'; cited for his analysis of falling in love as an 'event' and for noticing dating agency ads promising 'love without the fall', used to illustrate the desexualization of sex.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Mentioned as one of the thinkers who has tried to conceptualize the division between those who are 'in' and those who are 'out' under global capitalism.
Alexis Tsipras positive
Žižek considers Tsipras a kind of friend, wishes Syriza well, but warns him of the enormous difficulties, corrupted state apparatus, Golden Dawn police, hostile bankers, that await if they win.
Fredric Jameson positive
Referred to as 'my friend'; cited for the observation that today it's easier to imagine the end of the world than a radical change in capitalism, and for the surprising claim that predestination is the most dialectical notion for Marxist revolutionaries.
Julian Assange positive
Cited as the source of information that Sweden is debating mandatory written consent contracts for sexual activity, used to illustrate the contractualization and desexualization of sex.
Mladen Dolar positive
Fellow member of the Slovenian Lacanian school; Žižek cites his text 'Beyond Interpellation' as 'really an ingenious move' showing that hysteria problematizes ideological interpellation. Dolar is currently working on new material.
Thucydides positive
Cited via Hegel: the spiritual result of the Peloponnesian War was Thucydides' book about it, the real war was fought to enable the writer.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Described as 'my right-wing friend but he is not an idiot'; his book In the World Interior of Capital with the globe metaphor is invoked approvingly to describe how the privileged are enclosed within global capitalism without perceiving the enclosure.
Žižek takes Iglesias's Porto speech as the occasion for his lecture, supports Podemos but critiques the 'no left no right / dignity' signifier as too vague without a struggle for what dignity means.
Ernesto Laclau positive
Žižek acknowledges Laclau as 'a kind of official philosopher of Podemos' and 'my friend, although we were enemies personally for reasons unknown to me.' Despite personal enmity, he has 'great appreciation for him as a political thinker' and invokes his notion of 'struggle for ideological hegemony.'
Warren Buffett positive
Quoted for his remark 'There is class warfare all right but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war and we are winning', used to affirm that class struggle is real.
Jeremy Rifkin positive
Described as 'someone with whom I don't wholly agree politically but he is sometimes interesting'; his book The Zero Marginal Cost Society is cited for the convincing argument that a new sphere of free circulation (internet, data) is emerging that no longer functions at the market level.
Napoleon positive
Quoted for 'On s'engage et puis on verra' (you engage and then you see) as the model for beginning political action without a complete plan; also used as the Plekhanov determinist example.
John Boorman positive
Director of Zardoz, cited approvingly as the first filmmaker to detect the coming trend of enclave capitalism and new apartheid.
William Shakespeare positive
Used as the paradigmatic example: Elizabethan England is remembered today because it gave birth to Shakespeare, the spiritual result justifies the historical period.
Rosa Luxemburg positive
Quoted approvingly: 'If you wait for the right moment it will never arrive. Through your action you should create conditions for the right moment.'
Dan Brown negative
Žižek says he would burn Brown's books like the Nazis burned books; but his sexless Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons are nonetheless used as ideological symptoms of the desexualization of sex.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
San Francisco exists to enable Hitchcock to shoot Vertigo there; Vertigo is analyzed at length as the key illustration of retroactive causality, when truth is revealed the past itself changes.
Barack Obama positive
Žižek has 'a certain respect' for Obama; his push for universal healthcare was an 'incredible ideological shock' for the US that destabilized the American myth of freedom of choice.
Žižek opposes Putin but resists the left-wing label 'neo-fascist' for him, arguing it fills an analytical gap with old vocabulary instead of grasping what the new authoritarianism actually is.
Used in two ways: the Stalinist determinist thesis about October Revolution is rejected via Dupuy; the anecdote about Stalin stopping obligatory applause illustrates totalitarian super-ego enjoyment.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Multiple invocations: his lesson on the Peloponnesian War's spiritual result being Thucydides, the Hegelian retroactive structure of meaning, the school's attempt to move 'beyond' him.
Maurizio Lazzarato positive
Cited alongside Franco 'Bifo' Berardi for analyzing how ideology treats workers as self-entrepreneurs and indebted subjects; described as 'very important' Italian leftist thinker.
Thomas Piketty negative
Žižek says he loves Piketty's book but considers it the most utopian book he has recently read, the proposal to keep capitalism and just raise taxes requires a world authority that doesn't exist and is already presupposing that 'we have won.'
What it argues
the 'morning after' problem: what happens when revolutionary enthusiasm subsidesfreedom of choice vs. freedom to choose the coordinates of choiceperversion as the obscene supplement of ideology, not true subversionretroactive causality and choosing one's fatethe desexualization of sex and contractualization of desireimmanent transgressions and the dark underside of social ordersauthoritarian capitalism and the obsolescence of bourgeois democracy
Dialectical moves 11
“In order to understand real Portugal nothing — but if you look at real Portugal after reading Saramago, Pessoa, then you understand the country. The spiritual result of the Peloponnesian War was the book Thucydides wrote about it.”
The real historical event exists in order to enable the spiritual work that retroactively gives it meaning, a Hegelian reversal of base and superstructure.
“The true utopians today are not the radical leftists but the moderate pragmatists.”
The apparently realistic reformist position (e.g. Piketty: keep capitalism, raise taxes) is in fact the greater utopia because it presupposes conditions that do not exist.
“A pervert is not truly subversive — the pervert is always just the obscene other side of the ruling ideology.”
What presents itself as transgression and subversion is in fact the functional supplement that reproduces the social order.
“The fall of the Berlin Wall produced new walls all around — the paradox of global capitalism is that commodities circulate freely but people circulate less freely than ever.”
The apparent victory of universal freedom (end of communism) generated its opposite in the form of new enclosures and exclusions.
“The Chinese Communist Party is the ideal political power to guarantee conditions for unbridled capitalism.”
What appears as the antithesis of capitalism (communist party rule) turns out to be its most effective enabling condition.
“In the domains of technology and personal freedom almost everything is possible; but raise taxes one percent and they say: sorry, that's not possible.”
The boundary of the possible and impossible is ideologically inverted, radical personal possibilities coexist with the prohibition of modest collective reforms.
“Once Scottie discovers there was no Madeleine, he learns not only that he lost her but that retroactively Madeleine never existed.”
The revelation does not merely change the future, it retroactively changes the past, illustrating how a free choice or a loss can alter what had already happened.
“If my partner says yes to seduction, it is not that I overcame the obstacle — it is that I retroactively discover there never was an obstacle.”
The successful outcome does not remove a pre-existing barrier; it retroactively cancels the existence of the barrier.
“Your fate is predetermined — that is why you have to be active all the time. Predestination is not quietism but an instigation to constant activity.”
The theological doctrine most associated with passivity and fatalism is reread as the strongest motor for constant action.
“European legacy is devalued at precisely the point when capitalism no longer needs European values to function smoothly.”
Anti-Eurocentrism gains cultural dominance at the moment it serves capitalism's move toward authoritarian alternatives, the critique of European values coincides with capitalism's abandonment of them.
“We are fascinated by Ukraine because we saw something unimaginable in our societies: people collectively acting and enforcing a decision.”
The 'backward' country enacting collective political agency embodies what the 'advanced' Western democracies have lost.
Claims 18
asserts
The true measure of a revolution is not the enthusiastic moment in the street but what actually changes when things return to normal.revolution, political change
rejects
Piketty's proposal to keep capitalism and merely raise taxes is more utopian than radical leftism, because it presupposes a world authority that does not exist.reformist capitalism, Piketty
asserts
Both radical leftist purism and moderate pragmatic reformism are forms of utopianism; authentic politics starts with a concrete measure that triggers further measures.political strategy, left politics
rejects
A pervert is not truly subversive but is the obscene supplement and support of the ruling ideology, performing the dirty work the official order cannot acknowledge.perversion as subversion, post-'68 Deleuzian celebration of perversion
asserts
Hysteria — the question 'why am I what you tell me I am?' — is the genuinely subversive political stance because it problematizes rather than completes the ideological order.hysteria, ideology, subjective resistance
asserts
Global capitalism can no longer afford even bourgeois democracy and is moving toward a new form of authoritarian society that preserves personal freedoms while eliminating collective political agency.capitalism, democracy, authoritarianism
asserts
Authoritarian countries do not thrive in spite of their authoritarianism but precisely because of it — Chinese capitalism was enabled by, not in contradiction with, Communist Party rule.China, authoritarian capitalism
rejects
Global capitalism is immanently multicultural in a non-emancipatory sense, working equally well with authoritarian nationalist regimes, so anti-Eurocentrism plays into capitalism's hands.anti-Eurocentrism, postcolonial critique of Europe
asserts
Intellectual property is by its nature communist — it must circulate freely and cannot ultimately be inscribed into private property without contradiction.intellectual property, capitalism, internet
asserts
The dominant ideology restricts freedom of choice in the political-economic domain while expanding it in the personal-technological domain, creating an illusion of freedom.freedom, ideology, capitalism
asserts
The super-ego culpabilization of individuals (ecology, smoking, political correctness) prevents genuine social critique while offering commodified absolution (e.g. Starbucks).ideology, ecology, political correctness, consumerism
rejects
Contemporary violence like femicide in Ciudad Juárez and killings of Indigenous women in Vancouver is not individual pathology but ritualized, symbolic enactment of the dark underside of ruling ideology.official treatment of gendered violence, ideology
asserts
Radical political freedom today must be understood not as freedom of choice between options but as the freedom to choose one's fate — to retroactively determine the very coordinates of choice.freedom, politics, subjectivity
asserts
Once a free choice is made it retroactively becomes one's fate, altering not just the future but the appearance of the past.retroactive causality, freedom, contingency
reframes
Podemos and 'dignity' as a master signifier are not enough: the real struggle is for what dignity will come to mean — the struggle for ideological hegemony.Podemos, dignity, political signifiers
asserts
Obama's push for universal healthcare was a significant ideological shock because it destabilized the foundational American myth of freedom of choice.Obama, healthcare, American ideology
asserts
High-frequency trading is a paradigm of how power now operates at a level literally unrepresentable to ordinary human actors, making democratic control impossible.financial markets, democracy, ideology
asserts
Contemporary sexuality is being desexualized — drained of the dangerous event-quality of falling in love — and reduced to contractualized, politically-correct consumption.sexuality, ideology, political correctness
Quotes 17
“There is class warfare all right but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war and we are winning.”Slavoj Žižek · class warfare — Warren Buffett quoted by Žižek
“The measure of the revolution is not those enthusiastic moments but what really changes when things return to normal.”Slavoj Žižek · revolutionary criterion: normalization test
“If you wait for the right moment it will never arrive. Through your action you should create conditions for the right moment.”Slavoj Žižek · Rosa Luxemburg / political strategy
“Today it's easy to imagine the end of the life on earth, asteroid hitting us, but it's almost impossible to imagine just a radical change in capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · failure of political imagination / Jameson
“Intellectual property is something which cannot be inscribed into the ultimately into the level of private property. It is almost in its nature communist.”Slavoj Žižek · intellectual property as immanently communist
“Yes commodities circulate freely but people circulate less free than ever.”Slavoj Žižek · paradox of globalization: free commodities, unfree people
“The Chinese Communist Party is the ideal political power to guarantee conditions for unbridled capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · authoritarian capitalism — communism enables capitalism
“A pervert is not truly subversive. A pervert is always just the what I call inherent transgression, the obscene other side of the ruling ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · perversion as supplement of ideology, not subversion
“There is no master without a pervert doing the dirty work for him, supporting it.”Slavoj Žižek · perversion and the master
“By sucking electronic cigarette you give a dangerous example to others of how you're not able to control yourself.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology of self-control / prohibition of enjoyment display
“Pay a little bit more and you are clean.”Slavoj Žižek · Starbucks / commodified ethical absolution
“We should accept that catastrophe is our fate. But accepting this doesn't mean simply yes it will happen. We should accept it as a fate but doing everything that this fate will not be realized.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive fate / radical politics of catastrophe
“Once you will make this choice, retroactively you will create your own fate.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive causality / freedom as fate-creation
“Yes your fate is predetermined but you don't know how. Your freedom is the freedom to choose your fate.”Slavoj Žižek · predestination reread as radical freedom
“We are fighting about Hegel and Lacan. We are no longer just playing this game Hegel and Lacan together can save us. We are trying to make a move beyond.”Slavoj Žižek · Slovenian school's open philosophical moment
“Freedom is yes but for whom to do what?”Slavoj Žižek · Leninist question about freedom / ideological specification
“Authoritarian countries are not thriving in spite of their authoritarianism but precisely on behalf of it.”Slavoj Žižek · authoritarian capitalism thesis
Transcript 2 turns
unknown
Thank you. You
Thank you. You
Slavoj Žižek
organizers, you know that you give a secret sign when they should applaud and so on. I see here a lack of party discipline. Sorry, so let's go. First let me say, and I really mean it, these are not polite phrases. If anything I am not, this is superficially polite, but how glad I am to be here. First, generally, I love Portugal because of your literature, cinema and so on. I cannot imagine my life without Pessoa, without Saramago and so on. And I'm here anti-historicist. I don't believe that you know as vulgar Marxists, pseudo-Marxists say, in order to understand a writer you have to study the context, the country. Maybe, but I think a much deeper truth is if you say the opposite. In order... if I come here and just look around real Portugal, nothing. But if I look at real Portugal after reading Saramago, Pessoa, then I will understand the country. And I think the same goes for example for England. This is my Hegelian part. Hegel says something wonderful in his lessons on I think philosophy of history, world history. He says that the spiritual result of the Peloponnesian War was the book that was written about it by Thucydides. It's a terrible thought, so the real war was fought to enable the writer to do it. But I think in some way, without justifying the horrors, the deaths, this is spiritually true. Like isn't the reason we remember today Elizabethan England that it gave birth to Shakespeare and so on? So in this sense for me, and I'm ready to go to the end here, when I was recently in San Francisco I told them the reason your city deserves to exist is that to enable Hitchcock to shoot Vertigo there, no? In the same sense, yes, you have the right to exist after Saramago and so on. I especially like this city with its convoluted streets, streetcars. This morning was, I stepped around and my god, you know, three small bookstores immediately around. And back to your... to my translator, I think it's I should be grateful and honored to be with you because it's for people like that, people who are also attentive that beneath all my stupidities that I often said there is some kind of an effort to think. And if I got it correctly from what you said, you are well aware of the tensions and so on I'm struggling with. It's all very open for me, the moment is very tense. So, so much for the introduction. Now, how do you say, let's do some work, carago! Or how? Okay, okay. First let me say that it's as if history conspired with me because when I awakened this morning and looked at the news, I thought where am I, in some ideal country like ancient Greece? You know I open the news it says Sócrates arrested, you know. Then I looked then I thought that if I look deeper I will find then some financial news like because of austerity measures Plato's Academy will no longer get the state support or what. I knew I'm at home. But then the second news, the speech yesterday in Lisboa by Pablo Iglesias. And maybe in some sense you can take what I will say today here as my comment about that speech. I am fully of course supportive of Podemos, but I think it's the duty of us thinkers, philosophers, now to be attentive, to show to hint at possible future problems, contradictions and so on because this is my big obsession. What in English or rather American they call the morning after, after the night of drinking, orgies or whatever. It's relatively easy to have a big enthusiastic public event, hundreds of thousands of people in Cairo, Tahrir Square, what is the other one, Gezi, Gezi Square in Istanbul and so on. That's relatively easy. But my fear is and anxiety goes to what happens after when as we say things return to normal. I'm... my great fear is that you know the situation will get simply normalized and then those revolutionaries of today five years ago will meet in a cafeteria and talk: Wasn't it nice when we were all on the street? And then they will talk until the phone of one will ring and sorry I have to go to my bank with my business or whatever. So for me the measure of the revolution is... are not those enthusiastic moments but what really changes when things return to normal. And here I'm just warning all the people I know for example whenever I meet, we are kind of friends, Alexis Tsipras of Syriza in Greece, I tell him I wish you all the best but are you aware how horrible the situation will be if you win? If you will be the first to win, you will have a state apparatus totally corrupted of two million people which will see you as a threat. You will have a police which is fifty percent they are members of Golden Dawn, of direct almost not even proto-fascist, fascist right-wing. They will have bankers, everyone against them and so on and so on. And I told him: What will you do with secret police? But I didn't mean it in this Stalinist way, you know, like to arrest, but you will need it. So precisely how not to do it in the Stalinist way. So while I am totally aware of tremendous things going on now with Syriza, Podemos and so on, and I also know that it's an illusion to ask now for a precise plan like this measure, those measures and so on. No, we have to begin with taking risks. You do this, you do that. But you should be aware that by doing this or that even if it's a small very reasonable measure then you will see that in order to really do that you have to do something more and so on and so on. And here the enemies are waiting for us. For example, my more obscure friends in Germany are telling me that there is a very strong conservative strength in European politics which wants nothing more than the Syriza to win. And they already have plans how to guarantee chaos, hunger, so as someone told me: It's good for so-called people's power to emerge there so that we will teach them a lesson. You know, so again I just like to complicate things. But again we have to begin. For me the true utopians today are not just these radical leftists like let's wait for pure situation when we will have a true proletarian revolution. The problem is that also moderate pragmatists are leftists, sorry are utopians. For example, my god a Freudian could analyze me now, for example Piketty. I love his book, but I think that I haven't recently read a more utopian book than his. What's his idea? Openly he admits it: Capitalism is the only thing that really functions, very productive. So let's keep the system as it is, let's just change the taxation system, higher taxes and so on. This I think is a utopia if there ever was one. Because he is well aware that for this measure to be effective you would need some world-wide authority, otherwise the capital will simply move elsewhere and so on. My problem is but in order to be in a position to do this we would already have to win. Like in present political situation you cannot do it. Point two, even after you do it you would immediately face further problems which would, you know, which would demand further measures. Like the utopia is that we can have the system as it is, just three times higher taxes and so on. That's utopia. So, but so what's my solution? It's simply as Napoleon put it: On s'engage et puis on verra, you know. We have to begin with something and I support everything. I think the task of a true radical politician is not to begin with radical revolution. If you as Rosa Luxemburg put it wonderfully: If you wait for the right moment it will never arrive. Through your action you should create conditions for the right moment. How? Precisely with and that's the great art of politics today more than ever, that's political wisdom, to pick out to focus on a measure, and it can be a different measure in different countries, which appears and is in a way moderate, fully fitting what Pablo Iglesias calls dignity, common sense dignity, but a measure which will then trigger further measures. For example this is why, and this may be a horrible idea for some of you, I still have a certain respect for President Obama. His attempt to enforce universal healthcare was an incredible ideological shock for the United States. He was even dragged to I think to constitutional Supreme Court or whatever. Why? Because although it was a modest measure and he was right to say: Wait a minute this is not any revolution, they have it up from us in Canada, they have it in Europe and so on. But it was something which fundamentally destabilized the very basis of American ideology focused on this false ideological notion, more about this later, of freedom of choice and so on. And in some of my books it was meant as a joke but I love this joke, I even claim that how you can detect this limitation of United States in some very superficial features like this limitation in the sense of limitation imposed of them by commonly accepted ideology. If you visited United States you must have noticed two things in hotels for example, big hotels. First that they count floors in a different way. It's first floor for them is what we call ground floor. They begin with one. This I claim is their limitation. They don't know that in order to count you have to have a zero, which is what in Europe we call spiritual substance, historical weight. They think you just have choices in the air. Second connected problem, that's why in an ironic terms I put it at a conference to them: They are not religious enough. In what sense? You know when you, are you also doing it here? But I don't think we are doing this in Europe. That if you have a hotel with more than floors they skip over the 13th floor. It's and But I told them: But whom are you cheating? God knows that is really you know. And it points in the same direction. And again this is a good beginning for the United States. So we have to begin with such a modest attempt and also in a modest way. I'm not, although people accuse me of being Stalinist whatever, I'm not this kind of a radical leftist who doesn't have a respect for ordinary people and their troubles. This is why for example openly I tell you I'm not in a great favor of Fidel Castro. Although many of my friends call me Fidel, but not because of politics but because like Fidel I talk too much you know like you can never stop me, no. But you know like when people say oh those filthy ordinary Cubans, traitors who want to go to Miami and so on, well I respect ordinary people's desire for some happiness, good life and so on. I don't like leftists who due to some large historical mission are ready to sacrifice ordinary people. So this is clear. Now let me return to Pablo Iglesias who said if I understood it correctly you explained this to me and I looked on the internet, this idea of no left, no right, especially no left with high churches organized, just people against elites with a new master signifier: dignity. Okay, I think dignity is not a bad word because the term is appropriate insofar as it makes clear that protesters are not protesting just because of some particular material demands. Dignity has this universal dimension of freedom and emancipation. However, my problem is that then what dignity means. And I totally support Podemos. But as I've written already two years ago when it all started with Indignados, how I read in detail their programs and just to provoke them I've written that if you take their program literally even every honest fascist would have subscribed it. You know, everyone, dignity, just society, money should serve people not people money and so on and so on. These are generalities. The problem is what do you do with it. I'm not saying now in a stupid way that we should abandon dignity and say in a stupid direct way class struggle or whatever. Dignity is a good motto to mobilize people. We should just fight for what dignity will mean. The point is as my friend, although we were enemies personally for reasons unknown to me, who recently died and who was even a kind of official philosopher of Podemos, Ernesto Laclau, I still have great appreciation for him as a political thinker, what he called struggle for ideological hegemony. You know we have big words: dignity, democracy, honesty, freedom. The problem is what will they mean. And here the struggle begins. Now let me really begin. When President Obama was accused of irresponsibly introducing class warfare into American political life, the billionaire Warren Buffett snapped back in defense of Obama: 'There is class warfare all right but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war and we are winning.' End of quote. So if class warfare is still anathema in the American public discourse, this repressed topic is returning with a vengeance in Hollywood. This is why I trust up to a point Hollywood. You know when friends tell me: Oh you are still a stupid old Marxist, class war. I tell them: But what are you talking about? Look at recent Hollywood blockbusters. They are all about a post-apocalyptic extreme class society. Hunger Games, Elysium and so on and so on. So even Hollywood senses that if we allow the present development where our society is, our societies even worldwide are spontaneously moving, if we allowed this development to just go on, I think we are approaching some kind of new apartheid authoritarian society. It will not be the old fascist authoritarian society which is why whenever left-wingers when confronted with something they hate and maybe probably they are right to hate it, when they use verbs like neo-fascism and so on I immediately become suspicious because you know they use big old words as filling the gap of the lack of their analysis of what really goes on today. I don't think for example Putin, I oppose to him, Putin in Russia, that he is simply a neo-fascist and so on and so on. We are now approaching a new type of authoritarian state which still allows you all your personal freedoms, abortion, sexuality, whatever you want, at the individual level you are fully allowed to follow all your idiosyncrasies and so on and so on. But I think so what's the problem? I hope you saw an old film which was the first to detect the trend where we are moving: John Boorman's Zardoz from back with, he was still young then, Sean Connery and so on. It depicts again a future society where the rich elite lives in so-called Vortex, a secluded community of civilized beings protected all around by an invisible force shield. And is this not the result of the fall of communism? That there is a universal new world order, but this... but the paradox of the fall of the Berlin Wall is that new walls are emerging all around. United States versus Mexico, West Bank, even Europe there in the south, Spain protecting it from Africa whatever. And I claim that this is the paradox of global capitalism. Yes commodities circulate freely but people circulate less free than ever. I'm even ready to go a step further and claim that it's clear that today the global capitalist order can less and less afford even the good old, let's call it naively, bourgeois democracy. It cannot be for everyone. More and more we have the division of those who are in, those who are out. Here I rely on my right-wing friend but he is not an idiot, you should nonetheless read him, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who wrote an interesting short book translated into English, I don't know if it's in Portuguese also, In the World Interior of Capital. Where he just develops this metaphor of a globe, claiming that global capitalism doesn't mean only globally in the sense of all encompassing but also global in the sense of a globe. We privileged are in and being in means that you think you see everything but you don't even perceive the globe, the limit which separates you from those outside. And it's not only the radical outside, like way back there in I don't know, Chinese gulag or in Indonesia this cheap factories where ordinary workers are exploited. I remember I was in Italy in December when something maybe you remember it strange happened. At least seven people died when a Chinese-owned clothing factory in suburb of Firenze, a small town called Prato, burns down. And then analyzing it, surprised Italians noticed that in the very suburb of Florence, Firenze, they had slavery. Thousands of people of illegally immigrated there, they immigrated there Chinese were working in half slave conditions and so on and so on. So again and if you go for example to Los Angeles you have the same experience. Just remember when you land in Los Angeles, the airport, the international big one, LAX is the code, is above in the area called Inglewood. You know why? Because it's a slum area and who cares if the landing plane makes sounds and so on. But the point is that you see, for you Los Angeles is if you go as a tourist, you know maybe Santa Monica, Venice, Hollywood, you simply don't see, don't you don't you don't notice that. That's our problem today. Maybe it's no longer the classical class division but it's in a way an even stronger division which also thinkers like Agamben tried to conceptualize. A division between those who are in and those who are out, to put it very simply. And so how to be active in these conditions? What to do? Here I agree with the term Podemos. Yes we can. But we should be aware of how of all the ambiguity of how this slogan can function today. Because and now I will repeat an analysis done by my Slovene Lacanian colleague you mentioned her, Alenka Zupančič, who noticed how you know how what is possible and what is impossible is divided in a very strange way today. On the one hand in the domains of technology, personal freedoms, sexuality almost everything is possible or so they tell us, you know. Through new inventions biogenetic or others we will be able to live almost eternally. We have this tech-gnostic dream that we will become a software program just downloading oneself from other from one to another material embodiment. Sexually you do whatever you want and I know here some extreme cases to amuse you which shocked even me, an old pervert guy. When I was in New York I couldn't believe it. I learned that there in some radically experimental sexual circles something became fashionable. And okay it's not that every man is doing it but it's a small fashion, many are doing it. Surgeon can cut your penis into two so that you have two penises and then there are techniques that you can penetrate two women at the same time or all that. So okay you can do... there are some small problems with urination then but that's another thing. But the point is that here the idea is you can do it. You know that Richard Branson, the the Virgin boss, already tries to do, yeah yeah yeah, to flights flights into space. Okay if you have money of course everything can be done. At this radical level. But on the other hand, so everything becomes possible. But if you want to raise taxes one percent they tell you: Oh sorry that's not possible, no. So it's a nice paradox. What is possible, what is not possible. And I think that this is how I see Podemos. It's not: No we can do even more than ruling ideology is promising us. No, it's we should do those much more modest lesser things which are effectively prohibited today, prohibited in the sense that they are presented as impossible. And I'm not joking. Like the point is not just to do them. If you do them you are immediately punished by international capital. And another note that a little bit maybe I don't totally agree disturbed me in the speech by Iglesias. You know this fashionable hatred of Germany. I'm always afraid when you, I'm not saying the Germans are good guys but nonetheless don't blame an external enemy. The problem is the global system, you know. Okay, but what I want to say is that so this is how I see this Podemos in the in a paradoxically much more modest sense. And again yes that's what I wanted to say. It's this is the truly difficult thing to do. Because okay you raise taxes then you are isolated by international capital, how do you do it? And it's not that there are simply bad guys out there. No I mean the problem is in the system. It's a big problem how to really break out. At the same time the problem is how although we live apparently in an era where we imagine unlimited things, how our political imagination has decayed. This makes me very sad. My friend whom you mentioned I think Fredric Jameson made, says this years ago and I always use it: How today it's easy to imagine the end of the life of earth, asteroid hitting us, but it's almost impossible to imagine just a radical change in capitalism. You know, like the world can disappear but capitalism cannot disappear. And recently I got a funny, disgusting at the same time, example of this limitation. I found on the internet a report on how scientists are developing, it's still in the utopian stage but nonetheless, special drugs which will distort your sense of time so that in reality only let's say minutes will pass but you will experience it as or years. Okay, I will not engage into is this really possible or not, I don't care I don't know. But what really depressed me is that the researchers who did it what did they offer as an example of practical use of it? The immediate example was prison terms. Like let's say I am young specialist in something and I do some nice killing and I get years of prison. Wouldn't it be much more productive for society, you know, to give me those drugs so that subjectively I will experience it as if I am in prison for years but in reality it will be just minutes so that I can be useful then, I don't get old for society. And okay again maybe I'm an old pervert man, but my first association was isn't this sad that this is where the imagination was directed? My immediate association was why not think about it in the opposite sense? Like you make love for five minutes you experience it like years, you know. Why why automatically the again the imagination did go in this direction? The problem here is again it's not that there are no changes imaginable. No, the problem is that there are changes but uncontrollable. I think the world is radically changing. The problem is in what direction. For example as to positive potentials. Someone with whom I don't wholly agree politically but he is sometimes interesting, the British social thinker Jeremy Rifkin. He in a recent book called The Zero Marginal Cost Society he developed in a quite convincing way how due to recent progress of internet and so on, how a new sphere is emerging which simply no longer functions at the level of market. Like free circulation of data, even of some commodities and so on. And I really think that no wonder that the so-called the so-called problem of so-called intellectual property is such a problem today. Frankly I don't think capitalist society will be able to resolve this problem. Because to put it in I'm consciously here provocatively very naive, that intellectual property is something which cannot be inscribed into the ultimately into the level of private property. Like it's an explosive dimension. It is almost I would say in its nature communist. It has to function normally if I may use this term, it has to circulate freely. So okay we have all these potentials of internet but at the same time as we learn from what from Snowden and others of course WikiLeaks, at the same time this same phenomenon, internet, engenders new unthinkable forms of control which are I think much more dangerous than old types of controlling people. But you know why? Because in these new forms of control you still retain your sense of freedom. So when I got read WikiLeaks agreement WikiLeaks revelations I totally agree with those who claim but why focus on the United States, isn't China or Russia much worse? My answer: Yes. But in China and Russia, especially in China you at least know directly that you are controlled. No one has even the illusion of freedom. While the problem in the United States is that they are controlled but while still retaining the self-experience that they are free. And a vulgar metaphor came to me. Vulgar, rough. You know I read somewhere, this always fascinates me this new biogenetic or technological brain sciences inventions, that they already succeeded in connecting brains to computers in such a way that at least it works with rats. My friend a neurobiologist send me videos which show this, it's pretty horrifying. Like you have a rat freely jumping around. Then you click, connect it to a machine and you can play with a living rat like with a like with a like with a remote controlled car. You do no? And of course privately they are afraid to come with this out into public. Privately they told me of course the whole point is to apply this to humans. And I immediately asked them the question which they admitted it's the right question. The enigma is this one. Let's say I do this to you, I would love to. You wander around I control you. The problem is how will you experience it? Will you experience it oh my god I'm no longer myself, someone? Or will you simply think that you are still free? They told me unfortunately it's the second option. Isn't this horrible? Like you know you are controlled you even don't know. Another dimension of this new means of control. Did you hear about a so-called so-called high frequency traders? There was recently a some Flash Boys, a best-selling book which elaborated it. It's so interesting. The idea is that you know how millions are earned, billions are earned? They established an extremely fast optic cable connection between Chicago and New York stock markets. It's just a tiny like instead of milliseconds it's milliseconds. And what do they do? Let's say I'm a stock broker. I'm in front of a screen I see an offer I press the button: buy! And it appears to me that immediately it's realized. Ah! What happens in that four milliseconds is that the computer program of those bad guys, high frequency traders, registers my yes offer and itself the computer with its program buys that commodity and sells sells is back to me for a slightly higher price. And I don't even get because again the difference is milliseconds. I think that it's instant. I press the button I have it. Why is this so interesting? Because it literally first it undermines the internet myth that it's an instant synchronous world community as they like to say it doesn't matter where you are. Well here it matters where you are. And the interesting thing is again that you are cheated at the level which is simply beyond your powers of representation. It happens in some reality which is simply unrepresentable for you. And yes now they're already building an optic cable connecting London and Frankfurt stock market with New York. So it will even go on and so on. So what I'm saying is that things are happening today, new new methodologies of how to control us which are simply literally beyond our comprehension. They work at a level that we cannot even we cannot even imagine. This is why I think it is important today whenever people talk about freedom, everyone is for freedom of course, to specify what is freedom. What do we mean by freedom? You know we should repeat the infamous Leninist question: freedom, yes but for whom to do what? On the one hand this is I think how ideology works. On the one hand how do we experience our freedom at everyday day level? It's usually the freedom of choice. You know like yes I'm free I can do whatever I want. I'm gay I'm heterosexual I do it with cats dogs I leave you all that. Or I go where I want I choose my profession blah blah. At the same time more and more large political financial economic decisions are made not only without democratic consultation but even so that we even don't know, secretly. For example I hope you did hear about so-called TISA, T-I-S-A, TISA agreements which I mean it's true and it's crazy. Agreements were prepared among the leading trade nations which will regulate in detail the conditions of financial flow and information flow. And some things are quite horrible there. For example one of the provisions is that let's say a foreign company invests into your country. Let's say that then your legislature you get some left-wing government taxes them much higher and then because of this they will lose some money. According to this agreement they can prosecute your government for depriving them of legal profits and so on and so on. But okay whatever I'm not even necessarily against it, of course I am but this is not the question. The question is that something so absolutely important is being debated and not only were the negotiations done in freedom but it even says in the agreement that for five years after it will be accepted and enforced for five years it should remain secret. So all the big decisions or how to fight a war, Iraq whatever you want, all this is done in secret. And what does this mean? This means that obviously the notion of freedom which is our spontaneous notion of freedom, freedom of free choice is not enough. It's not enough to choose between options given to you. What's more at least as I have nothing against this type of freedom I'm not a Stalinist who think you know that we should move beyond and to some total regulation. No what I'm saying that but we should also include into the notion of freedom the freedom to influence choose the very framework of these choices. That's the important thing. Like in what the very coordinates of our freedom of choice. Here ideology works as some Italian economists and leftist thinkers, I wonder if their work is translated here, I think they're very important, like Maurizio Lazzarato, The Rise of the Indebted Man, or Franco 'Bifo' Berardi developed. Here ideology works in a wonderful way. The latest trick is that we are all treated as capitalists. The idea goes like this. Even if you are a moderate worker and for example you want your children to be educated then you take a credit. The idea is that you have to be treated as a self-entrepreneur. You act as a small capitalist. I get a credit and again it's this stupid freedom: I'm free to decide, will I spend it for my children's education, for a holiday, for I don't know better health insurance. So the idea is a wonderful one that we are basically all capitalists and it's just a matter of percentage of commas if like you, I hope you do, then I can exploit you, that you invest millions I invest or whatever. You know so you see this basic experience of freedom is in this sense false and mystifying. Freedom is no longer associated with large collective decisions. And my crazy idea, I wonder if you would agree, is that this is why we were so fascinated by events in Ukraine. It wasn't just European racism like oh finally the primitive Ukrainians will drop Russia and become join the enlightened West. It was something deeply much more tragic. We saw there something that is unimaginable in our societies: people collectively acting and enforcing a decision. In our societies this no longer works. So again how to break out of this? Let me just control myself a little bit. Yes do you allow me a little bit... you know usually I make this joke here that yes if you apply the normal metaphysical linear notion of time I'm close to the end. But here we should fight this metaphysical notion of time you know and apply a circular notion of time and so on. No sorry, the temptation here is anti-Eurocentrism. And I wonder if you will accept this, I'm trying to provoke you, this is my constant motive. That you know all this fashion even among some so-called postcolonial thinkers of you know uh Europe is over, resistance from local cultures to global Western civilization and so on. I think absolute... I'm absolutely opposed to it for a whole series of reasons. First, I think it's very significant, symptomatic that the European legacy is devalued at the very point when capitalism got global and no longer let's put it like this needs European values. The first thing that I always emphasize the big historical thing is that today okay Europe lost is losing ideologically. But I don't like how it is losing. Because it is simply that Europe has triumphed in the sense of global capitalism. But the problem is that this global capitalism no longer needs to function smoothly the European notion of equality, democracy and so on. It functions much better with so-called Asian values which, I'm not a racist here, they have nothing necessarily to do with Asia, it simply means authoritarian capitalism. And that's the sad experience. Those countries which are the most innovative, dynamic from capitalist standpoint like like I don't know China, Singapore, South Korea... here you have a new capitalism which fits perfectly a more even demands to function smoothly uh a more authoritarian political order. And exactly at this point that's why I think we should resist this temptation of easy anti-Eurocentrism. No, at this point we can precisely use the authentic European legacy of equality, personal freedoms, uh uh welfare state and so on and so on as a weapon against capitalist globalization. What do I mean is the following: It's wrong to think that global capitalism promotes also American or European culture. No, I always repeat this: Global capitalism is immanently multicultural. Of course not in the authentic emancipatory sense but in the sense that it works quite well with even potentially racist authoritarian nationalistic regimes. That's why I think that what happened recently in India, you must know it that this Modi, the new prime minister who won the elections is at the same time radical neoliberal, he openly told that he wants to make India into next China in the sense of opening India to foreign capital for cheap working force, and a radical Hindu nationalist. It's not it's there is no tension here. This is why and here we should really be anti-Eurocentric. We should drop this liberal illusion that okay maybe some countries need authoritarian order because they are too backward for our freedoms. No, the authoritarian countries are not thriving in spite of their authoritarianism but precisely on behalf of it. For example, my leftist friends and I have many in India told me that they were shocked to discover that the most efficient, even new digital capitalists in their private lives they are usually very conservative like family values and so on. It is in this way that they are motivated for their harsh work like I'm really doing it to honor my gods to take care of my family and so on and so on. So again and it's the same in China. I totally oppose the stupid idea that that Chinese capitalism will enter into contradiction with Communist Party rule. No, I this is a very sad thing to say but I think that it was precisely the continuing communist rule which enabled in China such an explosive development. And they know it in a way. Isn't this a wonderful paradox that the Chinese Communist Party is the ideal political power to guarantee conditions for unbridled capitalism? That's our reality today. So oh my god now come really interesting things. I want to focus before I return to the forced choice and so on and the forced choice is basically your forced choice like you are forced to freely choose to listen to me you know okay that's another... what type of subjectivity fits this global capitalism? I think a perverse type. Perversion. Where by perversion I don't mean perversion in the sense of doing horrible thing but something else. What? I remember when I was young, '68 and so on, revolution. It was fashionable to celebrate in this pseudo-Deleuzian, Gilles Deleuze mood, it was fashionable to celebrate perversion against hysteria. You know like hysterics are and it was even a clear anti-feminist message here: Feminists, women are hysterics, they provoke the master but at the same time demand a new master and so on, while perverse males they go to the end. They don't just dream about it, provoking the master, they do... I think this entire view is totally to be rejected. If there is a lesson to be learned from after '68 social development but also from psychoanalysis it's that a pervert is not truly subversive. A pervert is always just the what I call inherent transgression, the obscene other side of the ruling ideology. Why? Let me apply this here this maybe probably you know it this term by Louis Althusser: ideological interpellation. It means ideology interpellates you in the sense of it it provides an ideological public identity for you: You are a free consumerist, a fascist, whatever, mother, teacher, revolutionary. You have a certain identity. And now I'm referring to the other of my Slovene colleagues, Mladen Dolar, who did a wonderful text already years ago 'Beyond Interpellation'. It was really an ingenious move where he claimed that hysteria is precisely a gesture of problematizing interpellation. As Lacan pointed out the fundamental hysterical question is: Who am I in the sense of why am I what you, the big other society, why am I what you are telling me that I am? I mean you have even ridiculed by men but not in the right way, you know, that's the that's beneath this eternal feminine question: If you tell a woman you love me, tell me why do you love me. And the instinct is right I think here. That's the enigma. I mean this is why for Lacan hysteria is the basic subversive attitude. And what the hysteric knows perfectly is that perversion is not truly subversive. It closes the gap, it just provides the let's call it the obscene supplement. Like you have the public regime of dignity, Christianity and then you have the perverse other side, torturers, police, or in United States in the 20s, Ku Klux Klan and so on. This is what always fascinated me and I'm sorry we don't have time to develop it more. This notion how every social order is not just what it is but you have a whole series of what I call implicit transgressions. Let me take with all the respect for Christianity, I'm clear here my god I as an atheist I wrote five four or five books celebrating the emancipatory potential of Christianity. But nonetheless I must say isn't clear case of Catholic Church pedophilia. This is their own immanent transgression. Because it's absolutely clear if you analyze and I did it, I have friends who investigated, the enigma is this is not just like okay there are pedophiliacs everywhere, no wonder that they are there. No, the very reaction of the church to it, this absolutely protective attitude and so on, shows that pedophilia is like an inherent transgression, something in a perverse way generated by it. And so this is what again the hysterical subject knows perfectly. That that the official order and its obscene other form a totality. That every order has its dark side if you want it like this. The perverse... there is no master without a pervert doing the dirty work for him, supporting it. That's what the hysterical subject against again perfectly knows. And again I will try to squeeze... I have more minutes? minutes in a linear metaphysical sense to be deconstructed. Okay. No no because you know how this works. For example it I will tell you some first funny things then unfortunately some horrible things. Imagine how was it when you were introduced into these pleasures of the adults. Smoking, heavy drinks. Isn't it always like this, some older friend tell you do you know what adults are doing, he or she gave you a cigarette, a strong whiskey whatever drink, and admit it your first reaction was disgust: [sound of disgust]. How can they enjoy it? It's a learned pleasure. It's not spontaneous. If you were to stick to your spontaneous pleasures, well you would have been probably I don't know drinking fruit juices or milk or whatever you know. And the same goes even now let's make a step further for talking dirty, swearing. My experience is that it's not that I talk in a polite way with you and then you say something stupid or something that annoys me and then I exploit... sorry I explode. No my I have with my friends a weird ritual which I think proves the opposite. When I meet with my friends we first for minutes talk dirty and exchange insults like you know and I'm from Balkan we really know how to do it, like I will dig your dead mother out of her grave and screwed up whatever better. But then comes a magic moment after minutes when we say okay now we did our duty to be ugly now we can kindly talk to each other. And it works in a perfect way. Now let me get more serious. Two phenomena, one north the other south of United States. You know what is happening in Ciudad Juárez? There is a good Deleuzian analysis, so-called femicide. Gangs of white men are systematically kidnapping white women and torturing, collective rape, murder in a terrifying way. They usually first gang rape them then slowly slice them. First they cut off their breast with brutal with scissors, it's unimaginable. But what's so interesting is that this is not a spontaneous outburst. It's clear what is happening. You have there in Ciudad Juárez which is the capital of this fast just you know putting together parts assembled from elsewhere where they need many young cheap labor force. Thousands of women are there and they're nonetheless free, living alone, single, this is a provocation to male powers no. But the interesting thing is how how ritualized these horrible acts are. So you can see they are not individual outbursts. They are the dark underside of the ruling ideology. In the sense of they are obscene rituals. And this is what the official reaction to them tries to obliterate. They are treated as always as individual pathological cases which is why it's a horrible thing not one perpetrator was arrested. The only one who was punished was a mother of one of these girls who protested too much. Now let me move to the north of American Vancouver Indian reservations there, it's a similar thing. There is a male ritual to kill the girls there, to kill Native American Indian girls and it's the same. It's clearly a male some kind of a ritual of maturation. But police strictly treats it as isolated family matters. They try to attribute it to the fa to the family of the girl, oh it must be again a drunken mother or whatever. So again what is oppressed is not the horror of the crime but again it's uh it's systematic ritualized symbolic nature. This and I claim that this is one part of our ideological ideologically situation. Look always for the immanent dirty secret, for that something which may appear even subversive but is really part of the of how ruling ideology reproduces itself. The obverse of this is another strange phenomenon which I think is strictly part of the ruling ideology, the super-ego oppressive culpabilization of us as individuals. You know we are all time bombarded by for example ecology. It's a big field of ideology. Why? The way it is done. If you ask general questions: okay what are big companies doing and so on and so on. The answer is usually wait a minute who are you, are you innocent? And then it begins, you know like did you put aside all Coca-Cola cans? Did you put... like to make you guilty and forever guilty in the sense of did you do enough and so on. It's the same with politically correct fighting of sexual harassment. I'm totally against sexual harassment. But you don't like... I don't like this especially in United States this endless self-imagination: How did you look at that woman? Are you sure there wasn't already an element of they call it visual rape you know like how you and so on and so on. I think that there is something absolutely false in this radical self-culpabilization. Like you know you are because you know the ruling ideology at the same time then offers you an easy way out. Like I'm sorry if I repeat this case forever: Starbucks. It's the biggest maybe one of the biggest ideological machineries today. Why? They did something ingenious. They uh they counted count on this guilt feeling: My god while children are starving in Africa I'm here enjoying my cappuccino. And they make you pay for it to make to offer you an easy way out. Like the message of Starbucks even literally is yes our cappuccino is more expensive but one percent goes to Guatemala children, another goes to fighting uh to give water to Sahara whatever. And it's a wonderful operation when you can fully enjoy to be a consumerist because your ethical duty to provide nonetheless is already included into the price you know. Pay a little bit more and you are clean. So and of course this type of super-ego individual culpabilization uh also prevents you from asking radical uh social questions. Then another strategy that I admire today, it's strictly part of all this constellation then I'm trying to describe. It's my favorite one is how uh sexuality itself gets desexualized. Did you notice a strange thing in last in the latest uh James Bond movies? It's a politically a very good one, Quantum of Solace. Politically there James Bond my god he saves Morales regime in Bolivia against a bad international corporation. But something very strange happens there: There is no sex at the end. Did you notice this? It's the first James Bond film... now you will say fine, less male chauvinism. It's much more ambiguous. Let's now move from James Bond point really low. To books which I I become Goebbels there I would have burned them in public like the Nazis did: Dan Brown. Did you notice how in his last novels sex is disappearing? There is no sex in Da Vinci Code and in his later novels. In the previous one, it's even more interesting, Angels and Demons, there is sex in the novel but not in the film. Isn't this strange? Usually we thought Hollywood adds sex to make it more commercial. No Hollywood... and you know what happens here? My friend Alain Badiou wrote a lot about it. We are allowed sex today but it has to be healthy sex, sex reduced of its dangerous substance. This is why Badiou made this wonderful observation. I don't know how it is in your language but in uh English and French the verb we use for falling in love is precisely fall. You fall into it. And this is wonderful. This is what in Badiou's terms makes sex an event. This moment of openness you know unexplainably something hits you, you are in it. But the whole ideology today is directed against it. Even Badiou found some ads and found them in English of these marriage or dating agencies where even literally alluding to this formula they said: We will enable you to be in love without the fall. Like you know we will you will not have to look around what will hit me, they organize the ideal partner for you and so on and so on. And what is at the end of this road is something really sad. If you talk about uh politically correct sex it's something very sad, even some feminists got this. Namely you know as everybody knows in a process of seduction someone at a certain point had to make a move. You know, okay you may be flirting gently but then somebody had to come open. And this is always a risky move. Like following strict politically correct rules if the woman or the man says no, you can be accused of sexual harassment minimally. Is there a way not to do it? Yes. And it's very tragic, it's pure contractualization of sex. And again some intelligent feminists claim that the only sex flirting without harassment is to make a kind of explicit deal. And Julian Assange told me that in Sweden they are already considering it. It's not yet accepted by the law but they debate in public the following proposition, which for me is horrible one: Let's say I'm flirting with a woman, man whatever and we both want to do it. But we want to be sure that it will be politically correct. So they are debating a form where we fill it in: your name, my name, date of birth, religion, do I have any illnesses and so on and then we both sign it and up we are free to do it. I find... I find this pretty terrifying, this obsession and even as I I've written a lot about it, even uh even our obsession with the danger of smoking is for me suspicious. No I'm totally against smoking I don't smoke. But I don't think our obsession with prohibiting smoking can be explained really in the terms of just medical care and so on. Did you notice how at least in United States and uh and some other parts of Northern Europe the same people who are obsessively against smoking are usually for uh free drugs that you know. So it's clearly something else. And I think what annoys people... the hint was given to me by recent decision of American big companies to prohibit on their flights even electronic cigarettes. And they made it explicit that it's not because we don't know they also can be dangerous. No, they accept that e-smoking electronic is not dangerous. They write... their justification is something terrifying for me. They say: By sucking electronic cigarette you give a dangerous example to others of how you're not able to control yourself. I mean and again at the end it's what type of sex? Maybe you know the joke, I'm sorry if I repeat it but I love it. Uh a year ago along Guardian magazine asked me to imagine how romance romance is still imaginable today. And I my answer was an instant one. You know that you have for women these plastic penises dildos properly accompanied with a battery where you can regulate how okay. But you know that you have now the same for men. Plastic vaginas, they are called I love the term it's so technical: stamina training unit. It's like a big battery you can carry it around so that it doesn't embarrass you and then you take off the top and you put on whatever plastic opening you want. Vaginal, mouth, anal. And then you regulate it, you know, how uh how how strong it should vibrate, how tense it should be. And then what would be for me the ideal politically correct date if you ask me? Okay I have a woman, let's take it from my uh uh male chauvinist perspective: We want to do it. Okay we make a date at her or my place and each comes with his or her plastic apparatus. We connect both of them to electricity, I push my penis into her plastic vagina, my plastic... oh no the opposite, she pushes she has it into mine and we turn on the machines and: Ah the machines are buzzing, okay they are enjoying for us and I can then sit with her and have a nice cup of tea and so on. That's where, believe me, that's where we are aiming. So nonetheless if you give me now just three-four minutes to make the theoretical final point, to save my honor I have to do some theory. My good friend the French philosopher uh thinker of catastrophes, philosopher catastrophe, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, they you should translate it. He recently published a book which kind of uh a synthesis of his work, recently it was published by Michigan State University Press, now a couple now a month ago. It's simply called Economy and the Future. And what he does in this work he develops in a wonderful way the notion of counterfactuals. You know it's now let's make it to conclude a little bit more difficult. For example take these two types of a conditional statement. If Shakespeare did not write Hamlet someone else did it. This is true, it's a factual statement, why? Because Hamlet exists. So it's clear that if Shakespeare did not write it someone else had to do it. But change this subtly into a statement: If Shakespeare had not written Hamlet someone else would have done it. Ah this is a much more risky thesis. This is a determinist thesis that there was in the spirit of time some deeper necessity, pressure to do it, so if not Shakespeare someone else would have done it. You know that this is something like very similar to this vulgar Marxist notion of the role of big historical persons like Georgi Plekhanov, the Russian Marxist from late 19th beginning of 20th century, he developed this idea. It was there was a general tendency at the end of the French Revolution towards the passage from republic towards empire. And if not Napoleon simply someone else would have taken this over. Now my idea following and following and you know the same debate you have about Stalinism. There are hardline determinists who claim there was a necessary tendency for the Russian Revolution, October Revolution, to turn into a Stalinist kind of regime. So if not Stalin someone else, let's imagine Stalin having an accident killed in early 20s, well someone else would have to do it, maybe in a little bit different way but basically in the same way. I claim, and here I follow Dupuy, that the solution to this is a much more simple but at the same time radical. That the unity of necessity and contingency is not of this type: there is a deeper necessity and it's contingent how it will be realized. There is a genuine contingency. But what it is? What happens? You do have a free, now I come to my title, you do have a free choice. But once you make the choice your choice becomes retroactively your destiny. Retro... what do I mean by this? So that at this counterfactual level, we are not talking about magic, you can change the past. Let me give you a simple if you love movies example from Hitchcock's Vertigo. Scottie the hero, you know the story I hope, first loses Madeleine. Okay, it's a tragic loss and so on. But something even more tragic happens at the end when he learns that there was no Madeleine. The woman whom he encountered as Madeleine was the same as the vulgar Judy. So Madeleine so in a way what he discovers at the end is not only that there was no Madeleine, but that retro... sorry that he lost Madeleine but that retroactively Madeleine never existed. You know in this counterfactual sense the the past has changed. Now let me give you another example and go back to what I mentioned uh uh that process of seduction. Let's say okay I have a difficult I'm in a difficult spot. Should I as they call it make a pass, the explicit gesture or not? If I do, if I am rejected then I can be accused of harassment, politically correct, but... but if my partner the one whom I want to seduce says yes, then it's not that I overcome successfully the obstacle, it's that I retroactively discover that there never was an obstacle. And there are wonderful uh uh cases of this, of this contingency retroactively turning into fate. For example in authentic falling in love. Isn't it that you encounter someone contingently, but once you fall in love you automatically perceive all your past as my god it was all pointing towards this moment and so on and so on? Like and even we can take here the best-known example: Caesar crossing Rubicon. No one can well imagine him not crossing Rubicon. But once he did it it was his fate to do it. You see what I'm saying. I'm not only saying that once he did it the future was different. What I'm claiming is that once he did it even the past appeared different. And I think that this is why we are confronting a crisis. Now back to global capitalism. We are confronting a crisis in the sense of it's clear that at the level of at the level of ecology it can't go on indefinitely the way it does. In the best case we will end up in this type of referring to the movie Zardoz society where the elite will live in protected areas, intellectual property, banking, new forms of apartheid, biogenetics... who knows who will control it and so on. So I don't think we should put our situation in this simple terms of this or that. No, we have a choice but not simply a choice between possibilities. We literally have to choose our fate. That's what I'm saying. You know we should accept that catastrophe is our fate. But accepting this doesn't mean simply yes it will happen. We should accept it as a fate but doing everything that this fate will not be realized. You know what I mean. The situation in which we are is such that again in the existing world it's our fate that we are approaching a catastrophe. And then we should do things to in a way change our fate retroactively. I don't have time to go into it now when things are getting for philosophers interesting but uh this should also be connected just to give you a hint to what my friend Fredric Jameson to a surprising statement he made. He said that if there is a notion in theology which should be of interest to Marxist revolutionaries is the notion of predestination. He claimed this is the most dialectical notion. Why? Because as every good Protestant knows predestination does not mean oh everything is predetermined so I can do whatever I no! Predestination means precisely an instigation to constant activity. That's why predestination theology was precisely the ultimate capitalist theology. You see the paradox is my fate is predetermined, that's why I have to be active all the time. This is I think the only authentic radical notion of freedom. Why? Because as every good Protestant theologian knows: Yes your fate is predetermined but you don't know how. You don't know where you are. And I think that when you are in a position of everything is predetermined but I don't know how, the choice you make is a radically free choice. It's a much more free choice than this simple freedom of choice choice where you know where you enter into a patisserie and you choose strawberry cake or chocolate cake or whatever. No, things are predetermined but how? Which means your freedom is much higher than simple freedom of choice. Your freedom is the freedom to choose your fate. Because once you will make this choice, yeah retroactively you will create your own fate. And I think only in this radical way we can fight our fights today. If we limit ourselves to the first vulgar choice: freedom of choice, this or that, we are already within the existing capitalist coordinates. The choice again is a much more radical and this would be my reading of Podemos. No? It's not just we can have a chocolate cake instead of strawberry cake, no? But we can choose our fate. Thanks very much if I was too long, well but it's in my nature, thank you. Sorry now I will to answer your applause I will use another of my old standard jokes which is like you know: Don't applaud too much, spare your energy for when we communists will take power you will have to applaud in the obligatory rituals you know. So spare your energy for when we... and there is a wonderful anecdote about Stalin along these lines. Once Stalin was old, I read somewhere in a biography of Stalin like he received a small group of generals for some order and at the end they applauded him. The problem was it was a small room only fifty of them, so no one dared to stop applauding you know to be the first. And it was so tragic like two or three of them they were old generals collapsed and so on but still no one dared so at the end Stalin had to say: 'Comrades enough,' no like he had to do it. Like I would die to be in that situation. Thank you very much. Thank you. This is a great thank you and uh and I promise you I don't associate it with that plastic penis I talked about. I promise you it's not that. I'm really glad to be here, thank you. And listen I would really like if there is genuine interest in you to come here back again, I don't demand any money and so on, just to do some maybe a little bit more narrow real seminar. Because what I'm doing now is as you gently indicated all my group, you know are in what situation? Do you know that there is a mystery about Pythagorean school that someone make made a mathematic discovery about how some numbers cannot be divided or whatever which would have ruined their thought so they tried to keep that secret no? And we Slovene my Slovene school me Mladen Dolar Alenka Zupančič have similar problems with Hegel and Lacan. We are no longer just playing this game Hegel and Lacan together can save us. We are trying to make a move beyond. And it's the situation is very open, we don't know where it will go and so on. And this is what we are all fighting about. Alenka Zupančič is now doing a new book about uh ontology and sexual difference approaching this problem. Mladen Dolar is doing some stuff. I'm now doing a new book Figures of Negativity where I try to deliver and I have many new lines of thought. You know this is madness. People thought after the mega book, mega quantitatively Less Than Nothing, no? And it's a nice joke Less Than Nothing, well it's over pages, it certainly doesn't weight less than nothing no. I did another one Absolute Recoil where I fight with the same problem and now I'm writing Figures of Negativity, the third philosophical one. Like things are really happening, it's horrible we don't have a position, we are open and I would love to come here and to do it maybe since you are the British city here I was told you don't have problems with English to do this in a more serious way like that I send some chapters to you in advance. Yeah yeah in this sense that you have the text before and then you can debate it. I would love to come again here, thank you. Thank you.
organizers, you know that you give a secret sign when they should applaud and so on. I see here a lack of party discipline. Sorry, so let's go. First let me say, and I really mean it, these are not polite phrases. If anything I am not, this is superficially polite, but how glad I am to be here. First, generally, I love Portugal because of your literature, cinema and so on. I cannot imagine my life without Pessoa, without Saramago and so on. And I'm here anti-historicist. I don't believe that you know as vulgar Marxists, pseudo-Marxists say, in order to understand a writer you have to study the context, the country. Maybe, but I think a much deeper truth is if you say the opposite. In order... if I come here and just look around real Portugal, nothing. But if I look at real Portugal after reading Saramago, Pessoa, then I will understand the country. And I think the same goes for example for England. This is my Hegelian part. Hegel says something wonderful in his lessons on I think philosophy of history, world history. He says that the spiritual result of the Peloponnesian War was the book that was written about it by Thucydides. It's a terrible thought, so the real war was fought to enable the writer to do it. But I think in some way, without justifying the horrors, the deaths, this is spiritually true. Like isn't the reason we remember today Elizabethan England that it gave birth to Shakespeare and so on? So in this sense for me, and I'm ready to go to the end here, when I was recently in San Francisco I told them the reason your city deserves to exist is that to enable Hitchcock to shoot Vertigo there, no? In the same sense, yes, you have the right to exist after Saramago and so on. I especially like this city with its convoluted streets, streetcars. This morning was, I stepped around and my god, you know, three small bookstores immediately around. And back to your... to my translator, I think it's I should be grateful and honored to be with you because it's for people like that, people who are also attentive that beneath all my stupidities that I often said there is some kind of an effort to think. And if I got it correctly from what you said, you are well aware of the tensions and so on I'm struggling with. It's all very open for me, the moment is very tense. So, so much for the introduction. Now, how do you say, let's do some work, carago! Or how? Okay, okay. First let me say that it's as if history conspired with me because when I awakened this morning and looked at the news, I thought where am I, in some ideal country like ancient Greece? You know I open the news it says Sócrates arrested, you know. Then I looked then I thought that if I look deeper I will find then some financial news like because of austerity measures Plato's Academy will no longer get the state support or what. I knew I'm at home. But then the second news, the speech yesterday in Lisboa by Pablo Iglesias. And maybe in some sense you can take what I will say today here as my comment about that speech. I am fully of course supportive of Podemos, but I think it's the duty of us thinkers, philosophers, now to be attentive, to show to hint at possible future problems, contradictions and so on because this is my big obsession. What in English or rather American they call the morning after, after the night of drinking, orgies or whatever. It's relatively easy to have a big enthusiastic public event, hundreds of thousands of people in Cairo, Tahrir Square, what is the other one, Gezi, Gezi Square in Istanbul and so on. That's relatively easy. But my fear is and anxiety goes to what happens after when as we say things return to normal. I'm... my great fear is that you know the situation will get simply normalized and then those revolutionaries of today five years ago will meet in a cafeteria and talk: Wasn't it nice when we were all on the street? And then they will talk until the phone of one will ring and sorry I have to go to my bank with my business or whatever. So for me the measure of the revolution is... are not those enthusiastic moments but what really changes when things return to normal. And here I'm just warning all the people I know for example whenever I meet, we are kind of friends, Alexis Tsipras of Syriza in Greece, I tell him I wish you all the best but are you aware how horrible the situation will be if you win? If you will be the first to win, you will have a state apparatus totally corrupted of two million people which will see you as a threat. You will have a police which is fifty percent they are members of Golden Dawn, of direct almost not even proto-fascist, fascist right-wing. They will have bankers, everyone against them and so on and so on. And I told him: What will you do with secret police? But I didn't mean it in this Stalinist way, you know, like to arrest, but you will need it. So precisely how not to do it in the Stalinist way. So while I am totally aware of tremendous things going on now with Syriza, Podemos and so on, and I also know that it's an illusion to ask now for a precise plan like this measure, those measures and so on. No, we have to begin with taking risks. You do this, you do that. But you should be aware that by doing this or that even if it's a small very reasonable measure then you will see that in order to really do that you have to do something more and so on and so on. And here the enemies are waiting for us. For example, my more obscure friends in Germany are telling me that there is a very strong conservative strength in European politics which wants nothing more than the Syriza to win. And they already have plans how to guarantee chaos, hunger, so as someone told me: It's good for so-called people's power to emerge there so that we will teach them a lesson. You know, so again I just like to complicate things. But again we have to begin. For me the true utopians today are not just these radical leftists like let's wait for pure situation when we will have a true proletarian revolution. The problem is that also moderate pragmatists are leftists, sorry are utopians. For example, my god a Freudian could analyze me now, for example Piketty. I love his book, but I think that I haven't recently read a more utopian book than his. What's his idea? Openly he admits it: Capitalism is the only thing that really functions, very productive. So let's keep the system as it is, let's just change the taxation system, higher taxes and so on. This I think is a utopia if there ever was one. Because he is well aware that for this measure to be effective you would need some world-wide authority, otherwise the capital will simply move elsewhere and so on. My problem is but in order to be in a position to do this we would already have to win. Like in present political situation you cannot do it. Point two, even after you do it you would immediately face further problems which would, you know, which would demand further measures. Like the utopia is that we can have the system as it is, just three times higher taxes and so on. That's utopia. So, but so what's my solution? It's simply as Napoleon put it: On s'engage et puis on verra, you know. We have to begin with something and I support everything. I think the task of a true radical politician is not to begin with radical revolution. If you as Rosa Luxemburg put it wonderfully: If you wait for the right moment it will never arrive. Through your action you should create conditions for the right moment. How? Precisely with and that's the great art of politics today more than ever, that's political wisdom, to pick out to focus on a measure, and it can be a different measure in different countries, which appears and is in a way moderate, fully fitting what Pablo Iglesias calls dignity, common sense dignity, but a measure which will then trigger further measures. For example this is why, and this may be a horrible idea for some of you, I still have a certain respect for President Obama. His attempt to enforce universal healthcare was an incredible ideological shock for the United States. He was even dragged to I think to constitutional Supreme Court or whatever. Why? Because although it was a modest measure and he was right to say: Wait a minute this is not any revolution, they have it up from us in Canada, they have it in Europe and so on. But it was something which fundamentally destabilized the very basis of American ideology focused on this false ideological notion, more about this later, of freedom of choice and so on. And in some of my books it was meant as a joke but I love this joke, I even claim that how you can detect this limitation of United States in some very superficial features like this limitation in the sense of limitation imposed of them by commonly accepted ideology. If you visited United States you must have noticed two things in hotels for example, big hotels. First that they count floors in a different way. It's first floor for them is what we call ground floor. They begin with one. This I claim is their limitation. They don't know that in order to count you have to have a zero, which is what in Europe we call spiritual substance, historical weight. They think you just have choices in the air. Second connected problem, that's why in an ironic terms I put it at a conference to them: They are not religious enough. In what sense? You know when you, are you also doing it here? But I don't think we are doing this in Europe. That if you have a hotel with more than floors they skip over the 13th floor. It's and But I told them: But whom are you cheating? God knows that is really you know. And it points in the same direction. And again this is a good beginning for the United States. So we have to begin with such a modest attempt and also in a modest way. I'm not, although people accuse me of being Stalinist whatever, I'm not this kind of a radical leftist who doesn't have a respect for ordinary people and their troubles. This is why for example openly I tell you I'm not in a great favor of Fidel Castro. Although many of my friends call me Fidel, but not because of politics but because like Fidel I talk too much you know like you can never stop me, no. But you know like when people say oh those filthy ordinary Cubans, traitors who want to go to Miami and so on, well I respect ordinary people's desire for some happiness, good life and so on. I don't like leftists who due to some large historical mission are ready to sacrifice ordinary people. So this is clear. Now let me return to Pablo Iglesias who said if I understood it correctly you explained this to me and I looked on the internet, this idea of no left, no right, especially no left with high churches organized, just people against elites with a new master signifier: dignity. Okay, I think dignity is not a bad word because the term is appropriate insofar as it makes clear that protesters are not protesting just because of some particular material demands. Dignity has this universal dimension of freedom and emancipation. However, my problem is that then what dignity means. And I totally support Podemos. But as I've written already two years ago when it all started with Indignados, how I read in detail their programs and just to provoke them I've written that if you take their program literally even every honest fascist would have subscribed it. You know, everyone, dignity, just society, money should serve people not people money and so on and so on. These are generalities. The problem is what do you do with it. I'm not saying now in a stupid way that we should abandon dignity and say in a stupid direct way class struggle or whatever. Dignity is a good motto to mobilize people. We should just fight for what dignity will mean. The point is as my friend, although we were enemies personally for reasons unknown to me, who recently died and who was even a kind of official philosopher of Podemos, Ernesto Laclau, I still have great appreciation for him as a political thinker, what he called struggle for ideological hegemony. You know we have big words: dignity, democracy, honesty, freedom. The problem is what will they mean. And here the struggle begins. Now let me really begin. When President Obama was accused of irresponsibly introducing class warfare into American political life, the billionaire Warren Buffett snapped back in defense of Obama: 'There is class warfare all right but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war and we are winning.' End of quote. So if class warfare is still anathema in the American public discourse, this repressed topic is returning with a vengeance in Hollywood. This is why I trust up to a point Hollywood. You know when friends tell me: Oh you are still a stupid old Marxist, class war. I tell them: But what are you talking about? Look at recent Hollywood blockbusters. They are all about a post-apocalyptic extreme class society. Hunger Games, Elysium and so on and so on. So even Hollywood senses that if we allow the present development where our society is, our societies even worldwide are spontaneously moving, if we allowed this development to just go on, I think we are approaching some kind of new apartheid authoritarian society. It will not be the old fascist authoritarian society which is why whenever left-wingers when confronted with something they hate and maybe probably they are right to hate it, when they use verbs like neo-fascism and so on I immediately become suspicious because you know they use big old words as filling the gap of the lack of their analysis of what really goes on today. I don't think for example Putin, I oppose to him, Putin in Russia, that he is simply a neo-fascist and so on and so on. We are now approaching a new type of authoritarian state which still allows you all your personal freedoms, abortion, sexuality, whatever you want, at the individual level you are fully allowed to follow all your idiosyncrasies and so on and so on. But I think so what's the problem? I hope you saw an old film which was the first to detect the trend where we are moving: John Boorman's Zardoz from back with, he was still young then, Sean Connery and so on. It depicts again a future society where the rich elite lives in so-called Vortex, a secluded community of civilized beings protected all around by an invisible force shield. And is this not the result of the fall of communism? That there is a universal new world order, but this... but the paradox of the fall of the Berlin Wall is that new walls are emerging all around. United States versus Mexico, West Bank, even Europe there in the south, Spain protecting it from Africa whatever. And I claim that this is the paradox of global capitalism. Yes commodities circulate freely but people circulate less free than ever. I'm even ready to go a step further and claim that it's clear that today the global capitalist order can less and less afford even the good old, let's call it naively, bourgeois democracy. It cannot be for everyone. More and more we have the division of those who are in, those who are out. Here I rely on my right-wing friend but he is not an idiot, you should nonetheless read him, the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, who wrote an interesting short book translated into English, I don't know if it's in Portuguese also, In the World Interior of Capital. Where he just develops this metaphor of a globe, claiming that global capitalism doesn't mean only globally in the sense of all encompassing but also global in the sense of a globe. We privileged are in and being in means that you think you see everything but you don't even perceive the globe, the limit which separates you from those outside. And it's not only the radical outside, like way back there in I don't know, Chinese gulag or in Indonesia this cheap factories where ordinary workers are exploited. I remember I was in Italy in December when something maybe you remember it strange happened. At least seven people died when a Chinese-owned clothing factory in suburb of Firenze, a small town called Prato, burns down. And then analyzing it, surprised Italians noticed that in the very suburb of Florence, Firenze, they had slavery. Thousands of people of illegally immigrated there, they immigrated there Chinese were working in half slave conditions and so on and so on. So again and if you go for example to Los Angeles you have the same experience. Just remember when you land in Los Angeles, the airport, the international big one, LAX is the code, is above in the area called Inglewood. You know why? Because it's a slum area and who cares if the landing plane makes sounds and so on. But the point is that you see, for you Los Angeles is if you go as a tourist, you know maybe Santa Monica, Venice, Hollywood, you simply don't see, don't you don't you don't notice that. That's our problem today. Maybe it's no longer the classical class division but it's in a way an even stronger division which also thinkers like Agamben tried to conceptualize. A division between those who are in and those who are out, to put it very simply. And so how to be active in these conditions? What to do? Here I agree with the term Podemos. Yes we can. But we should be aware of how of all the ambiguity of how this slogan can function today. Because and now I will repeat an analysis done by my Slovene Lacanian colleague you mentioned her, Alenka Zupančič, who noticed how you know how what is possible and what is impossible is divided in a very strange way today. On the one hand in the domains of technology, personal freedoms, sexuality almost everything is possible or so they tell us, you know. Through new inventions biogenetic or others we will be able to live almost eternally. We have this tech-gnostic dream that we will become a software program just downloading oneself from other from one to another material embodiment. Sexually you do whatever you want and I know here some extreme cases to amuse you which shocked even me, an old pervert guy. When I was in New York I couldn't believe it. I learned that there in some radically experimental sexual circles something became fashionable. And okay it's not that every man is doing it but it's a small fashion, many are doing it. Surgeon can cut your penis into two so that you have two penises and then there are techniques that you can penetrate two women at the same time or all that. So okay you can do... there are some small problems with urination then but that's another thing. But the point is that here the idea is you can do it. You know that Richard Branson, the the Virgin boss, already tries to do, yeah yeah yeah, to flights flights into space. Okay if you have money of course everything can be done. At this radical level. But on the other hand, so everything becomes possible. But if you want to raise taxes one percent they tell you: Oh sorry that's not possible, no. So it's a nice paradox. What is possible, what is not possible. And I think that this is how I see Podemos. It's not: No we can do even more than ruling ideology is promising us. No, it's we should do those much more modest lesser things which are effectively prohibited today, prohibited in the sense that they are presented as impossible. And I'm not joking. Like the point is not just to do them. If you do them you are immediately punished by international capital. And another note that a little bit maybe I don't totally agree disturbed me in the speech by Iglesias. You know this fashionable hatred of Germany. I'm always afraid when you, I'm not saying the Germans are good guys but nonetheless don't blame an external enemy. The problem is the global system, you know. Okay, but what I want to say is that so this is how I see this Podemos in the in a paradoxically much more modest sense. And again yes that's what I wanted to say. It's this is the truly difficult thing to do. Because okay you raise taxes then you are isolated by international capital, how do you do it? And it's not that there are simply bad guys out there. No I mean the problem is in the system. It's a big problem how to really break out. At the same time the problem is how although we live apparently in an era where we imagine unlimited things, how our political imagination has decayed. This makes me very sad. My friend whom you mentioned I think Fredric Jameson made, says this years ago and I always use it: How today it's easy to imagine the end of the life of earth, asteroid hitting us, but it's almost impossible to imagine just a radical change in capitalism. You know, like the world can disappear but capitalism cannot disappear. And recently I got a funny, disgusting at the same time, example of this limitation. I found on the internet a report on how scientists are developing, it's still in the utopian stage but nonetheless, special drugs which will distort your sense of time so that in reality only let's say minutes will pass but you will experience it as or years. Okay, I will not engage into is this really possible or not, I don't care I don't know. But what really depressed me is that the researchers who did it what did they offer as an example of practical use of it? The immediate example was prison terms. Like let's say I am young specialist in something and I do some nice killing and I get years of prison. Wouldn't it be much more productive for society, you know, to give me those drugs so that subjectively I will experience it as if I am in prison for years but in reality it will be just minutes so that I can be useful then, I don't get old for society. And okay again maybe I'm an old pervert man, but my first association was isn't this sad that this is where the imagination was directed? My immediate association was why not think about it in the opposite sense? Like you make love for five minutes you experience it like years, you know. Why why automatically the again the imagination did go in this direction? The problem here is again it's not that there are no changes imaginable. No, the problem is that there are changes but uncontrollable. I think the world is radically changing. The problem is in what direction. For example as to positive potentials. Someone with whom I don't wholly agree politically but he is sometimes interesting, the British social thinker Jeremy Rifkin. He in a recent book called The Zero Marginal Cost Society he developed in a quite convincing way how due to recent progress of internet and so on, how a new sphere is emerging which simply no longer functions at the level of market. Like free circulation of data, even of some commodities and so on. And I really think that no wonder that the so-called the so-called problem of so-called intellectual property is such a problem today. Frankly I don't think capitalist society will be able to resolve this problem. Because to put it in I'm consciously here provocatively very naive, that intellectual property is something which cannot be inscribed into the ultimately into the level of private property. Like it's an explosive dimension. It is almost I would say in its nature communist. It has to function normally if I may use this term, it has to circulate freely. So okay we have all these potentials of internet but at the same time as we learn from what from Snowden and others of course WikiLeaks, at the same time this same phenomenon, internet, engenders new unthinkable forms of control which are I think much more dangerous than old types of controlling people. But you know why? Because in these new forms of control you still retain your sense of freedom. So when I got read WikiLeaks agreement WikiLeaks revelations I totally agree with those who claim but why focus on the United States, isn't China or Russia much worse? My answer: Yes. But in China and Russia, especially in China you at least know directly that you are controlled. No one has even the illusion of freedom. While the problem in the United States is that they are controlled but while still retaining the self-experience that they are free. And a vulgar metaphor came to me. Vulgar, rough. You know I read somewhere, this always fascinates me this new biogenetic or technological brain sciences inventions, that they already succeeded in connecting brains to computers in such a way that at least it works with rats. My friend a neurobiologist send me videos which show this, it's pretty horrifying. Like you have a rat freely jumping around. Then you click, connect it to a machine and you can play with a living rat like with a like with a like with a remote controlled car. You do no? And of course privately they are afraid to come with this out into public. Privately they told me of course the whole point is to apply this to humans. And I immediately asked them the question which they admitted it's the right question. The enigma is this one. Let's say I do this to you, I would love to. You wander around I control you. The problem is how will you experience it? Will you experience it oh my god I'm no longer myself, someone? Or will you simply think that you are still free? They told me unfortunately it's the second option. Isn't this horrible? Like you know you are controlled you even don't know. Another dimension of this new means of control. Did you hear about a so-called so-called high frequency traders? There was recently a some Flash Boys, a best-selling book which elaborated it. It's so interesting. The idea is that you know how millions are earned, billions are earned? They established an extremely fast optic cable connection between Chicago and New York stock markets. It's just a tiny like instead of milliseconds it's milliseconds. And what do they do? Let's say I'm a stock broker. I'm in front of a screen I see an offer I press the button: buy! And it appears to me that immediately it's realized. Ah! What happens in that four milliseconds is that the computer program of those bad guys, high frequency traders, registers my yes offer and itself the computer with its program buys that commodity and sells sells is back to me for a slightly higher price. And I don't even get because again the difference is milliseconds. I think that it's instant. I press the button I have it. Why is this so interesting? Because it literally first it undermines the internet myth that it's an instant synchronous world community as they like to say it doesn't matter where you are. Well here it matters where you are. And the interesting thing is again that you are cheated at the level which is simply beyond your powers of representation. It happens in some reality which is simply unrepresentable for you. And yes now they're already building an optic cable connecting London and Frankfurt stock market with New York. So it will even go on and so on. So what I'm saying is that things are happening today, new new methodologies of how to control us which are simply literally beyond our comprehension. They work at a level that we cannot even we cannot even imagine. This is why I think it is important today whenever people talk about freedom, everyone is for freedom of course, to specify what is freedom. What do we mean by freedom? You know we should repeat the infamous Leninist question: freedom, yes but for whom to do what? On the one hand this is I think how ideology works. On the one hand how do we experience our freedom at everyday day level? It's usually the freedom of choice. You know like yes I'm free I can do whatever I want. I'm gay I'm heterosexual I do it with cats dogs I leave you all that. Or I go where I want I choose my profession blah blah. At the same time more and more large political financial economic decisions are made not only without democratic consultation but even so that we even don't know, secretly. For example I hope you did hear about so-called TISA, T-I-S-A, TISA agreements which I mean it's true and it's crazy. Agreements were prepared among the leading trade nations which will regulate in detail the conditions of financial flow and information flow. And some things are quite horrible there. For example one of the provisions is that let's say a foreign company invests into your country. Let's say that then your legislature you get some left-wing government taxes them much higher and then because of this they will lose some money. According to this agreement they can prosecute your government for depriving them of legal profits and so on and so on. But okay whatever I'm not even necessarily against it, of course I am but this is not the question. The question is that something so absolutely important is being debated and not only were the negotiations done in freedom but it even says in the agreement that for five years after it will be accepted and enforced for five years it should remain secret. So all the big decisions or how to fight a war, Iraq whatever you want, all this is done in secret. And what does this mean? This means that obviously the notion of freedom which is our spontaneous notion of freedom, freedom of free choice is not enough. It's not enough to choose between options given to you. What's more at least as I have nothing against this type of freedom I'm not a Stalinist who think you know that we should move beyond and to some total regulation. No what I'm saying that but we should also include into the notion of freedom the freedom to influence choose the very framework of these choices. That's the important thing. Like in what the very coordinates of our freedom of choice. Here ideology works as some Italian economists and leftist thinkers, I wonder if their work is translated here, I think they're very important, like Maurizio Lazzarato, The Rise of the Indebted Man, or Franco 'Bifo' Berardi developed. Here ideology works in a wonderful way. The latest trick is that we are all treated as capitalists. The idea goes like this. Even if you are a moderate worker and for example you want your children to be educated then you take a credit. The idea is that you have to be treated as a self-entrepreneur. You act as a small capitalist. I get a credit and again it's this stupid freedom: I'm free to decide, will I spend it for my children's education, for a holiday, for I don't know better health insurance. So the idea is a wonderful one that we are basically all capitalists and it's just a matter of percentage of commas if like you, I hope you do, then I can exploit you, that you invest millions I invest or whatever. You know so you see this basic experience of freedom is in this sense false and mystifying. Freedom is no longer associated with large collective decisions. And my crazy idea, I wonder if you would agree, is that this is why we were so fascinated by events in Ukraine. It wasn't just European racism like oh finally the primitive Ukrainians will drop Russia and become join the enlightened West. It was something deeply much more tragic. We saw there something that is unimaginable in our societies: people collectively acting and enforcing a decision. In our societies this no longer works. So again how to break out of this? Let me just control myself a little bit. Yes do you allow me a little bit... you know usually I make this joke here that yes if you apply the normal metaphysical linear notion of time I'm close to the end. But here we should fight this metaphysical notion of time you know and apply a circular notion of time and so on. No sorry, the temptation here is anti-Eurocentrism. And I wonder if you will accept this, I'm trying to provoke you, this is my constant motive. That you know all this fashion even among some so-called postcolonial thinkers of you know uh Europe is over, resistance from local cultures to global Western civilization and so on. I think absolute... I'm absolutely opposed to it for a whole series of reasons. First, I think it's very significant, symptomatic that the European legacy is devalued at the very point when capitalism got global and no longer let's put it like this needs European values. The first thing that I always emphasize the big historical thing is that today okay Europe lost is losing ideologically. But I don't like how it is losing. Because it is simply that Europe has triumphed in the sense of global capitalism. But the problem is that this global capitalism no longer needs to function smoothly the European notion of equality, democracy and so on. It functions much better with so-called Asian values which, I'm not a racist here, they have nothing necessarily to do with Asia, it simply means authoritarian capitalism. And that's the sad experience. Those countries which are the most innovative, dynamic from capitalist standpoint like like I don't know China, Singapore, South Korea... here you have a new capitalism which fits perfectly a more even demands to function smoothly uh a more authoritarian political order. And exactly at this point that's why I think we should resist this temptation of easy anti-Eurocentrism. No, at this point we can precisely use the authentic European legacy of equality, personal freedoms, uh uh welfare state and so on and so on as a weapon against capitalist globalization. What do I mean is the following: It's wrong to think that global capitalism promotes also American or European culture. No, I always repeat this: Global capitalism is immanently multicultural. Of course not in the authentic emancipatory sense but in the sense that it works quite well with even potentially racist authoritarian nationalistic regimes. That's why I think that what happened recently in India, you must know it that this Modi, the new prime minister who won the elections is at the same time radical neoliberal, he openly told that he wants to make India into next China in the sense of opening India to foreign capital for cheap working force, and a radical Hindu nationalist. It's not it's there is no tension here. This is why and here we should really be anti-Eurocentric. We should drop this liberal illusion that okay maybe some countries need authoritarian order because they are too backward for our freedoms. No, the authoritarian countries are not thriving in spite of their authoritarianism but precisely on behalf of it. For example, my leftist friends and I have many in India told me that they were shocked to discover that the most efficient, even new digital capitalists in their private lives they are usually very conservative like family values and so on. It is in this way that they are motivated for their harsh work like I'm really doing it to honor my gods to take care of my family and so on and so on. So again and it's the same in China. I totally oppose the stupid idea that that Chinese capitalism will enter into contradiction with Communist Party rule. No, I this is a very sad thing to say but I think that it was precisely the continuing communist rule which enabled in China such an explosive development. And they know it in a way. Isn't this a wonderful paradox that the Chinese Communist Party is the ideal political power to guarantee conditions for unbridled capitalism? That's our reality today. So oh my god now come really interesting things. I want to focus before I return to the forced choice and so on and the forced choice is basically your forced choice like you are forced to freely choose to listen to me you know okay that's another... what type of subjectivity fits this global capitalism? I think a perverse type. Perversion. Where by perversion I don't mean perversion in the sense of doing horrible thing but something else. What? I remember when I was young, '68 and so on, revolution. It was fashionable to celebrate in this pseudo-Deleuzian, Gilles Deleuze mood, it was fashionable to celebrate perversion against hysteria. You know like hysterics are and it was even a clear anti-feminist message here: Feminists, women are hysterics, they provoke the master but at the same time demand a new master and so on, while perverse males they go to the end. They don't just dream about it, provoking the master, they do... I think this entire view is totally to be rejected. If there is a lesson to be learned from after '68 social development but also from psychoanalysis it's that a pervert is not truly subversive. A pervert is always just the what I call inherent transgression, the obscene other side of the ruling ideology. Why? Let me apply this here this maybe probably you know it this term by Louis Althusser: ideological interpellation. It means ideology interpellates you in the sense of it it provides an ideological public identity for you: You are a free consumerist, a fascist, whatever, mother, teacher, revolutionary. You have a certain identity. And now I'm referring to the other of my Slovene colleagues, Mladen Dolar, who did a wonderful text already years ago 'Beyond Interpellation'. It was really an ingenious move where he claimed that hysteria is precisely a gesture of problematizing interpellation. As Lacan pointed out the fundamental hysterical question is: Who am I in the sense of why am I what you, the big other society, why am I what you are telling me that I am? I mean you have even ridiculed by men but not in the right way, you know, that's the that's beneath this eternal feminine question: If you tell a woman you love me, tell me why do you love me. And the instinct is right I think here. That's the enigma. I mean this is why for Lacan hysteria is the basic subversive attitude. And what the hysteric knows perfectly is that perversion is not truly subversive. It closes the gap, it just provides the let's call it the obscene supplement. Like you have the public regime of dignity, Christianity and then you have the perverse other side, torturers, police, or in United States in the 20s, Ku Klux Klan and so on. This is what always fascinated me and I'm sorry we don't have time to develop it more. This notion how every social order is not just what it is but you have a whole series of what I call implicit transgressions. Let me take with all the respect for Christianity, I'm clear here my god I as an atheist I wrote five four or five books celebrating the emancipatory potential of Christianity. But nonetheless I must say isn't clear case of Catholic Church pedophilia. This is their own immanent transgression. Because it's absolutely clear if you analyze and I did it, I have friends who investigated, the enigma is this is not just like okay there are pedophiliacs everywhere, no wonder that they are there. No, the very reaction of the church to it, this absolutely protective attitude and so on, shows that pedophilia is like an inherent transgression, something in a perverse way generated by it. And so this is what again the hysterical subject knows perfectly. That that the official order and its obscene other form a totality. That every order has its dark side if you want it like this. The perverse... there is no master without a pervert doing the dirty work for him, supporting it. That's what the hysterical subject against again perfectly knows. And again I will try to squeeze... I have more minutes? minutes in a linear metaphysical sense to be deconstructed. Okay. No no because you know how this works. For example it I will tell you some first funny things then unfortunately some horrible things. Imagine how was it when you were introduced into these pleasures of the adults. Smoking, heavy drinks. Isn't it always like this, some older friend tell you do you know what adults are doing, he or she gave you a cigarette, a strong whiskey whatever drink, and admit it your first reaction was disgust: [sound of disgust]. How can they enjoy it? It's a learned pleasure. It's not spontaneous. If you were to stick to your spontaneous pleasures, well you would have been probably I don't know drinking fruit juices or milk or whatever you know. And the same goes even now let's make a step further for talking dirty, swearing. My experience is that it's not that I talk in a polite way with you and then you say something stupid or something that annoys me and then I exploit... sorry I explode. No my I have with my friends a weird ritual which I think proves the opposite. When I meet with my friends we first for minutes talk dirty and exchange insults like you know and I'm from Balkan we really know how to do it, like I will dig your dead mother out of her grave and screwed up whatever better. But then comes a magic moment after minutes when we say okay now we did our duty to be ugly now we can kindly talk to each other. And it works in a perfect way. Now let me get more serious. Two phenomena, one north the other south of United States. You know what is happening in Ciudad Juárez? There is a good Deleuzian analysis, so-called femicide. Gangs of white men are systematically kidnapping white women and torturing, collective rape, murder in a terrifying way. They usually first gang rape them then slowly slice them. First they cut off their breast with brutal with scissors, it's unimaginable. But what's so interesting is that this is not a spontaneous outburst. It's clear what is happening. You have there in Ciudad Juárez which is the capital of this fast just you know putting together parts assembled from elsewhere where they need many young cheap labor force. Thousands of women are there and they're nonetheless free, living alone, single, this is a provocation to male powers no. But the interesting thing is how how ritualized these horrible acts are. So you can see they are not individual outbursts. They are the dark underside of the ruling ideology. In the sense of they are obscene rituals. And this is what the official reaction to them tries to obliterate. They are treated as always as individual pathological cases which is why it's a horrible thing not one perpetrator was arrested. The only one who was punished was a mother of one of these girls who protested too much. Now let me move to the north of American Vancouver Indian reservations there, it's a similar thing. There is a male ritual to kill the girls there, to kill Native American Indian girls and it's the same. It's clearly a male some kind of a ritual of maturation. But police strictly treats it as isolated family matters. They try to attribute it to the fa to the family of the girl, oh it must be again a drunken mother or whatever. So again what is oppressed is not the horror of the crime but again it's uh it's systematic ritualized symbolic nature. This and I claim that this is one part of our ideological ideologically situation. Look always for the immanent dirty secret, for that something which may appear even subversive but is really part of the of how ruling ideology reproduces itself. The obverse of this is another strange phenomenon which I think is strictly part of the ruling ideology, the super-ego oppressive culpabilization of us as individuals. You know we are all time bombarded by for example ecology. It's a big field of ideology. Why? The way it is done. If you ask general questions: okay what are big companies doing and so on and so on. The answer is usually wait a minute who are you, are you innocent? And then it begins, you know like did you put aside all Coca-Cola cans? Did you put... like to make you guilty and forever guilty in the sense of did you do enough and so on. It's the same with politically correct fighting of sexual harassment. I'm totally against sexual harassment. But you don't like... I don't like this especially in United States this endless self-imagination: How did you look at that woman? Are you sure there wasn't already an element of they call it visual rape you know like how you and so on and so on. I think that there is something absolutely false in this radical self-culpabilization. Like you know you are because you know the ruling ideology at the same time then offers you an easy way out. Like I'm sorry if I repeat this case forever: Starbucks. It's the biggest maybe one of the biggest ideological machineries today. Why? They did something ingenious. They uh they counted count on this guilt feeling: My god while children are starving in Africa I'm here enjoying my cappuccino. And they make you pay for it to make to offer you an easy way out. Like the message of Starbucks even literally is yes our cappuccino is more expensive but one percent goes to Guatemala children, another goes to fighting uh to give water to Sahara whatever. And it's a wonderful operation when you can fully enjoy to be a consumerist because your ethical duty to provide nonetheless is already included into the price you know. Pay a little bit more and you are clean. So and of course this type of super-ego individual culpabilization uh also prevents you from asking radical uh social questions. Then another strategy that I admire today, it's strictly part of all this constellation then I'm trying to describe. It's my favorite one is how uh sexuality itself gets desexualized. Did you notice a strange thing in last in the latest uh James Bond movies? It's a politically a very good one, Quantum of Solace. Politically there James Bond my god he saves Morales regime in Bolivia against a bad international corporation. But something very strange happens there: There is no sex at the end. Did you notice this? It's the first James Bond film... now you will say fine, less male chauvinism. It's much more ambiguous. Let's now move from James Bond point really low. To books which I I become Goebbels there I would have burned them in public like the Nazis did: Dan Brown. Did you notice how in his last novels sex is disappearing? There is no sex in Da Vinci Code and in his later novels. In the previous one, it's even more interesting, Angels and Demons, there is sex in the novel but not in the film. Isn't this strange? Usually we thought Hollywood adds sex to make it more commercial. No Hollywood... and you know what happens here? My friend Alain Badiou wrote a lot about it. We are allowed sex today but it has to be healthy sex, sex reduced of its dangerous substance. This is why Badiou made this wonderful observation. I don't know how it is in your language but in uh English and French the verb we use for falling in love is precisely fall. You fall into it. And this is wonderful. This is what in Badiou's terms makes sex an event. This moment of openness you know unexplainably something hits you, you are in it. But the whole ideology today is directed against it. Even Badiou found some ads and found them in English of these marriage or dating agencies where even literally alluding to this formula they said: We will enable you to be in love without the fall. Like you know we will you will not have to look around what will hit me, they organize the ideal partner for you and so on and so on. And what is at the end of this road is something really sad. If you talk about uh politically correct sex it's something very sad, even some feminists got this. Namely you know as everybody knows in a process of seduction someone at a certain point had to make a move. You know, okay you may be flirting gently but then somebody had to come open. And this is always a risky move. Like following strict politically correct rules if the woman or the man says no, you can be accused of sexual harassment minimally. Is there a way not to do it? Yes. And it's very tragic, it's pure contractualization of sex. And again some intelligent feminists claim that the only sex flirting without harassment is to make a kind of explicit deal. And Julian Assange told me that in Sweden they are already considering it. It's not yet accepted by the law but they debate in public the following proposition, which for me is horrible one: Let's say I'm flirting with a woman, man whatever and we both want to do it. But we want to be sure that it will be politically correct. So they are debating a form where we fill it in: your name, my name, date of birth, religion, do I have any illnesses and so on and then we both sign it and up we are free to do it. I find... I find this pretty terrifying, this obsession and even as I I've written a lot about it, even uh even our obsession with the danger of smoking is for me suspicious. No I'm totally against smoking I don't smoke. But I don't think our obsession with prohibiting smoking can be explained really in the terms of just medical care and so on. Did you notice how at least in United States and uh and some other parts of Northern Europe the same people who are obsessively against smoking are usually for uh free drugs that you know. So it's clearly something else. And I think what annoys people... the hint was given to me by recent decision of American big companies to prohibit on their flights even electronic cigarettes. And they made it explicit that it's not because we don't know they also can be dangerous. No, they accept that e-smoking electronic is not dangerous. They write... their justification is something terrifying for me. They say: By sucking electronic cigarette you give a dangerous example to others of how you're not able to control yourself. I mean and again at the end it's what type of sex? Maybe you know the joke, I'm sorry if I repeat it but I love it. Uh a year ago along Guardian magazine asked me to imagine how romance romance is still imaginable today. And I my answer was an instant one. You know that you have for women these plastic penises dildos properly accompanied with a battery where you can regulate how okay. But you know that you have now the same for men. Plastic vaginas, they are called I love the term it's so technical: stamina training unit. It's like a big battery you can carry it around so that it doesn't embarrass you and then you take off the top and you put on whatever plastic opening you want. Vaginal, mouth, anal. And then you regulate it, you know, how uh how how strong it should vibrate, how tense it should be. And then what would be for me the ideal politically correct date if you ask me? Okay I have a woman, let's take it from my uh uh male chauvinist perspective: We want to do it. Okay we make a date at her or my place and each comes with his or her plastic apparatus. We connect both of them to electricity, I push my penis into her plastic vagina, my plastic... oh no the opposite, she pushes she has it into mine and we turn on the machines and: Ah the machines are buzzing, okay they are enjoying for us and I can then sit with her and have a nice cup of tea and so on. That's where, believe me, that's where we are aiming. So nonetheless if you give me now just three-four minutes to make the theoretical final point, to save my honor I have to do some theory. My good friend the French philosopher uh thinker of catastrophes, philosopher catastrophe, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, they you should translate it. He recently published a book which kind of uh a synthesis of his work, recently it was published by Michigan State University Press, now a couple now a month ago. It's simply called Economy and the Future. And what he does in this work he develops in a wonderful way the notion of counterfactuals. You know it's now let's make it to conclude a little bit more difficult. For example take these two types of a conditional statement. If Shakespeare did not write Hamlet someone else did it. This is true, it's a factual statement, why? Because Hamlet exists. So it's clear that if Shakespeare did not write it someone else had to do it. But change this subtly into a statement: If Shakespeare had not written Hamlet someone else would have done it. Ah this is a much more risky thesis. This is a determinist thesis that there was in the spirit of time some deeper necessity, pressure to do it, so if not Shakespeare someone else would have done it. You know that this is something like very similar to this vulgar Marxist notion of the role of big historical persons like Georgi Plekhanov, the Russian Marxist from late 19th beginning of 20th century, he developed this idea. It was there was a general tendency at the end of the French Revolution towards the passage from republic towards empire. And if not Napoleon simply someone else would have taken this over. Now my idea following and following and you know the same debate you have about Stalinism. There are hardline determinists who claim there was a necessary tendency for the Russian Revolution, October Revolution, to turn into a Stalinist kind of regime. So if not Stalin someone else, let's imagine Stalin having an accident killed in early 20s, well someone else would have to do it, maybe in a little bit different way but basically in the same way. I claim, and here I follow Dupuy, that the solution to this is a much more simple but at the same time radical. That the unity of necessity and contingency is not of this type: there is a deeper necessity and it's contingent how it will be realized. There is a genuine contingency. But what it is? What happens? You do have a free, now I come to my title, you do have a free choice. But once you make the choice your choice becomes retroactively your destiny. Retro... what do I mean by this? So that at this counterfactual level, we are not talking about magic, you can change the past. Let me give you a simple if you love movies example from Hitchcock's Vertigo. Scottie the hero, you know the story I hope, first loses Madeleine. Okay, it's a tragic loss and so on. But something even more tragic happens at the end when he learns that there was no Madeleine. The woman whom he encountered as Madeleine was the same as the vulgar Judy. So Madeleine so in a way what he discovers at the end is not only that there was no Madeleine, but that retro... sorry that he lost Madeleine but that retroactively Madeleine never existed. You know in this counterfactual sense the the past has changed. Now let me give you another example and go back to what I mentioned uh uh that process of seduction. Let's say okay I have a difficult I'm in a difficult spot. Should I as they call it make a pass, the explicit gesture or not? If I do, if I am rejected then I can be accused of harassment, politically correct, but... but if my partner the one whom I want to seduce says yes, then it's not that I overcome successfully the obstacle, it's that I retroactively discover that there never was an obstacle. And there are wonderful uh uh cases of this, of this contingency retroactively turning into fate. For example in authentic falling in love. Isn't it that you encounter someone contingently, but once you fall in love you automatically perceive all your past as my god it was all pointing towards this moment and so on and so on? Like and even we can take here the best-known example: Caesar crossing Rubicon. No one can well imagine him not crossing Rubicon. But once he did it it was his fate to do it. You see what I'm saying. I'm not only saying that once he did it the future was different. What I'm claiming is that once he did it even the past appeared different. And I think that this is why we are confronting a crisis. Now back to global capitalism. We are confronting a crisis in the sense of it's clear that at the level of at the level of ecology it can't go on indefinitely the way it does. In the best case we will end up in this type of referring to the movie Zardoz society where the elite will live in protected areas, intellectual property, banking, new forms of apartheid, biogenetics... who knows who will control it and so on. So I don't think we should put our situation in this simple terms of this or that. No, we have a choice but not simply a choice between possibilities. We literally have to choose our fate. That's what I'm saying. You know we should accept that catastrophe is our fate. But accepting this doesn't mean simply yes it will happen. We should accept it as a fate but doing everything that this fate will not be realized. You know what I mean. The situation in which we are is such that again in the existing world it's our fate that we are approaching a catastrophe. And then we should do things to in a way change our fate retroactively. I don't have time to go into it now when things are getting for philosophers interesting but uh this should also be connected just to give you a hint to what my friend Fredric Jameson to a surprising statement he made. He said that if there is a notion in theology which should be of interest to Marxist revolutionaries is the notion of predestination. He claimed this is the most dialectical notion. Why? Because as every good Protestant knows predestination does not mean oh everything is predetermined so I can do whatever I no! Predestination means precisely an instigation to constant activity. That's why predestination theology was precisely the ultimate capitalist theology. You see the paradox is my fate is predetermined, that's why I have to be active all the time. This is I think the only authentic radical notion of freedom. Why? Because as every good Protestant theologian knows: Yes your fate is predetermined but you don't know how. You don't know where you are. And I think that when you are in a position of everything is predetermined but I don't know how, the choice you make is a radically free choice. It's a much more free choice than this simple freedom of choice choice where you know where you enter into a patisserie and you choose strawberry cake or chocolate cake or whatever. No, things are predetermined but how? Which means your freedom is much higher than simple freedom of choice. Your freedom is the freedom to choose your fate. Because once you will make this choice, yeah retroactively you will create your own fate. And I think only in this radical way we can fight our fights today. If we limit ourselves to the first vulgar choice: freedom of choice, this or that, we are already within the existing capitalist coordinates. The choice again is a much more radical and this would be my reading of Podemos. No? It's not just we can have a chocolate cake instead of strawberry cake, no? But we can choose our fate. Thanks very much if I was too long, well but it's in my nature, thank you. Sorry now I will to answer your applause I will use another of my old standard jokes which is like you know: Don't applaud too much, spare your energy for when we communists will take power you will have to applaud in the obligatory rituals you know. So spare your energy for when we... and there is a wonderful anecdote about Stalin along these lines. Once Stalin was old, I read somewhere in a biography of Stalin like he received a small group of generals for some order and at the end they applauded him. The problem was it was a small room only fifty of them, so no one dared to stop applauding you know to be the first. And it was so tragic like two or three of them they were old generals collapsed and so on but still no one dared so at the end Stalin had to say: 'Comrades enough,' no like he had to do it. Like I would die to be in that situation. Thank you very much. Thank you. This is a great thank you and uh and I promise you I don't associate it with that plastic penis I talked about. I promise you it's not that. I'm really glad to be here, thank you. And listen I would really like if there is genuine interest in you to come here back again, I don't demand any money and so on, just to do some maybe a little bit more narrow real seminar. Because what I'm doing now is as you gently indicated all my group, you know are in what situation? Do you know that there is a mystery about Pythagorean school that someone make made a mathematic discovery about how some numbers cannot be divided or whatever which would have ruined their thought so they tried to keep that secret no? And we Slovene my Slovene school me Mladen Dolar Alenka Zupančič have similar problems with Hegel and Lacan. We are no longer just playing this game Hegel and Lacan together can save us. We are trying to make a move beyond. And it's the situation is very open, we don't know where it will go and so on. And this is what we are all fighting about. Alenka Zupančič is now doing a new book about uh ontology and sexual difference approaching this problem. Mladen Dolar is doing some stuff. I'm now doing a new book Figures of Negativity where I try to deliver and I have many new lines of thought. You know this is madness. People thought after the mega book, mega quantitatively Less Than Nothing, no? And it's a nice joke Less Than Nothing, well it's over pages, it certainly doesn't weight less than nothing no. I did another one Absolute Recoil where I fight with the same problem and now I'm writing Figures of Negativity, the third philosophical one. Like things are really happening, it's horrible we don't have a position, we are open and I would love to come here and to do it maybe since you are the British city here I was told you don't have problems with English to do this in a more serious way like that I send some chapters to you in advance. Yeah yeah in this sense that you have the text before and then you can debate it. I would love to come again here, thank you. Thank you.