The Future of Global Capitalism
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-03-09 · 1:34:37 · 12,885 words
ideologycapitalismliberalism-political-correctnesscommunism-socialismfascism-populismrace-antisemitismecology-climatehegel-dialecticsgeopolitics-warhistoryrevolution-violencedemocracy
Žižek delivers a lecture on the 2008 financial crisis, arguing that ideology, not mere technical failure, underlies the meltdown and that competing narratives will determine what lessons are drawn. He critiques liberal multiculturalism's 'culturalization of politics,' the rise of 'socially responsible eco-capitalism,' and the shock-doctrine exploitation of the crisis. The second half warns against ideological regression toward 'reasonable racism,' the false opposition between liberal openness and fundamentalism, and the absence of a genuinely emancipatory left position. Q&A covers Stalinism, the Frankfurt School's silence on it, fascism as a 'third way,' Israel-Palestine, and the Yugoslav dissolution.
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
A notion which, while designating a real problem, blurs a crucial line of separation, here, it mystifies the financial crisis by naturalizing systemic flaws as technical accidents or human-nature imperfections.
The liberal multiculturalist operation whereby political and economic differences (inequality, exploitation) are recast as cultural differences, mere different 'ways of life' to be tolerated rather than antagonisms to be struggled over.
Lacan's concept applied here to Alan Greenspan, the 'non-partisan' technocratic authority presumed to possess mastery over the economy, whose collapse of belief triggers ideological crisis.
Naomi Klein's concept, invoked by Žižek to describe how crises are deliberately or opportunistically used to impose radical free-market restructuring while populations are disoriented.
Hegel's concept applied ironically to China: the Cultural Revolution's violent destruction of tradition unintentionally prepared the conditions for capitalist explosion.
The hegemonic ideological response to the financial crisis: a narrative that admits past capitalist excess but claims a new holistic, post-materialist, ecologically aware capitalism can reconcile profit and social good.
Capital as the Real of our lives, an abstract financial circuit whose demands are more absolute than any concrete social or natural reality, making it effectively uncontrollable.
as “fetishist denial”
The structure 'I know very well the risks (or inevitability of collapse), but nonetheless I continue', illustrated by Madoff's pyramid scheme as the pure form of capitalist speculation.
as “toxic subjects”
A postmodern ideological category that pathologizes the Other (immigrant, terrorist, abusive parent) as inherently contaminating, ultimately universalizing so that the neighbor as such becomes toxic.
A state of exception (here referencing Agamben) that is declared against immigrant or terrorist 'threats' and then normalized as a routine condition of democratic life.
as “permissive society”
Post-1968 society in which the demand for new rights was granted as mere 'permissions', easier lives without any redistribution of actual power, following Milner's analysis.
The current phase of capitalism in which consumers purchase not utility or status but 'experience,' meaning, and the feeling of social responsibility, epitomized by Starbucks Ethos Water.
Adorno's concept, which Žižek reframes as not the opposite of liberal-democratic personality but its symptomatic repressed truth, what the liberal 'Third Wave' enthusiasm reveals.
as “universality of a fight”
Against abstract multicultural universalism, Žižek's alternative: genuine universality is achieved only through concrete political struggle and solidarity across civilizational lines in shared antagonism against a common enemy.
Adorno and Horkheimer's thesis that 20th-century barbarism is immanent to Enlightenment rationality, Žižek argues Stalinism (not fascism) is its purest example because it was a movement of radical equality that generated horror.
Žižek's term for the emerging model, pioneered by Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore and adopted by China, of fully functioning capitalism permanently decoupled from liberal democracy.
as “reasonable antisemitism / reasonable racism”
The logic by which liberal governments, having rejected crude bigotry, adopt 'moderate' discriminatory protective measures, structurally identical to Robert Brasillach's 1930s formula for 'reasonable antisemitism.'
Habermas's legitimation crisis, invoked to explain the Yugoslav dissolution: communist nomenklaturas that had lost economic justification reinvented themselves as ethnic nationalist protectors.
Stories he reaches for 6
People buy expensive half-rotten organic apples not because they are healthier but because it makes them feel they are participating in something meaningful, a paradigm of cultural capitalism's integration of ethical consumerism.
“Don't fool me. Do you really believe that the half-rotten expensive organic apples are healthier? I don't.”
Bernard Madoff's fraud is not an exception to capitalism but its logical intensification: capitalist investment is always a risk-wager borrowing from the future, and the line between legitimate investment and pyramid scheme is blurred by the system's own dynamic. The structure is one of fetishist denial.
“The temptation to morph legitimate business into a pyramid scheme is part of the very nature of the capitalist circulation.”
Peter Sloterdijk predicts a future monument to Lee Kuan Yew for having invented and sustained capitalism permanently without democracy in Singapore, subsequently adopted by China. Žižek uses this to argue the last legitimating link between capitalism and democracy is dissolving.
“The historical meaning of what Lee Kuan Yew invented is a model which no longer follows this logic.”
Starbucks charges more for 'Ethos Water,' donating five cents per bottle while pocketing an extra forty-five cents profit. Žižek uses this as the exemplary case of cultural capitalism: the consumer feels socially engaged while the humanitarian gesture is built into the commodity's price mark-up.
“After reading this passage I was tempted to—to—to be a terrorist and start to throw Molotov cocktails at Starbucks.”
History teacher Ron Jones at a Palo Alto high school started a mock fascist movement ('Third Wave') to show students how Hitler worked; students became so committed they denounced peers, until Jones terminated it after four days. Žižek sides with the students against the liberal 'Lord of the Flies' reading, arguing the experiment reveals the repressed of liberalism, not an external barbarism.
“I'm more on the side of the students here... what if the authoritarian personality which exploded here is the repressed obverse of the liberal open personality itself?”
Žižek twice paraphrases Brecht's line, 'what is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?', first to compare Maoist violence to capitalist creative destruction, then to compare petty financial crime to the speculations that robbed tens of millions of homes.
“What is the stealing of a couple of thousands of dollars for which you go to prison compared to financial speculations which deprive tens of millions of their homes and savings?”
Works invoked 18
Casablanca film
Invoked as the anti-feminist structural template that Das Leben der Anderen repeats, the woman is sacrificed for male friendship and ideological redemption.
Žižek's own book; referenced in Q&A as the work that tried to rehabilitate leftist political ideology and address Stalinism.
Adorno and Horkheimer's core text; described as the 'big achievement of Frankfurt School'; Žižek argues Stalinism, not fascism, is its purest exemplification.
Žižek's own book; mentioned as where he elaborated his position on Fukuyama vs. Huntington.
Lenin's book; briefly referenced when Žižek misunderstood a Chinese scholar's 'transcendent realism in Lacan' as a Leninist philosophical position, a comic anecdote about translation.
The Shock Doctrine book
Naomi Klein's book; Žižek quotes its core thesis and deploys it directly to analyze the 2008 crisis and the GM bankruptcy.
Žižek finds the film 'really dull', its plot of a corrupt minister weaponizing Stasi surveillance against a rival is 'way too soft' because it reduces institutional terror to individual corruption; also called anti-feminist for its Casablanca structure.
Soviet Marxism book
Marcuse's book on the Soviet Union; Žižek calls it 'the weirdest book I've ever read', basically just an analysis of Khrushchev's 20th Congress speech, inadequate as a theoretical engagement with Stalinism.
Boltanski and Chiapello's analysis of how post-1968 capitalism adopted network-based organization and the far-left's self-management rhetoric; cited as the best description of what post-68 capitalism became.
Adorno et al.'s study; praised for identifying features of the authoritarian personality but criticized for avoiding the crucial question of whether that personality is the symptomatic truth of democratic personality.
Emotional Vampires book
Albert Bernstein's book; cited alongside Toxic People as exemplifying the horror-mythology mobilized by postmodern pathologization of the Other.
Toxic People book
Lillian Glass's self-help book; cited as a paradigmatic example of the ideological 'toxic subjects' discourse that pathologizes interpersonal relations.
Harvest of Sorrow book
Robert Conquest's book on Ukraine; praised as informative but theoretically naive, it fails to grasp the structural specificity of Stalinism, treating Stalinists as liberals who turned evil.
Lord of the Flies book
Referenced negatively as the liberal reading that the Third Wave experiment is said to confirm, the idea that beneath the civilized surface we are all potential fascists. Žižek rejects this interpretation.
Toxic Parents book
Susan Forward's study; cited as part of the 'toxic subjects' discourse extended from interpersonal to institutional relations.
Behemoth book
Franz Neumann's study; cited as a Frankfurt School attempt to analyze Stalinism that merely collapsed it into a generic 'totalitarianism' alongside fascism and New Deal America, not a genuine structural analysis.
Recommended as a valuable source for understanding key data about the Yugoslav dissolution, Žižek specifically mentions the detail about when the Yugoslav army first publicly intervened (against Belgrade anti-Milošević demonstrators).
Jean-Claude Milner's analysis of May 1968's legacy in France; Žižek says he 'totally disagrees' with it overall but endorses its key distinction between rights and permissions.
People invoked 32
Samuel Huntington negative
The clash of civilizations thesis is reframed as the political form liberalism takes at the end of history, not its alternative; Žižek says he treated this in Welcome to the Desert of the Real.
Žižek analyzes Milošević's 'genius' as a structural move: facing legitimation crisis, he reinvented the nomenklatura as ethnic nationalist protectors, not from genuine care for Serbs but as a political survival strategy.
Thomas Frank positive
Cited for the Kansas example: a state that was a bedrock of radical leftist populism until the 1970s and is now a bedrock of Christian fundamentalism, evidence of Benjamin's thesis.
Adam Kirsch negative
Attacked Žižek in The New Republic as a 'neo-fascist antisemite' who supports the physical elimination of all Jews except those critical of Israel, Žižek treats this characterization as absurd.
Singapore's longtime leader cited (via Sloterdijk) as the inventor of the capitalism-without-democracy model that Žižek treats as the ominous horizon of our political situation.
Robert Brasillach negative
French fascist antisemitic intellectual whose 1930s formula for 'reasonable antisemitism' is quoted at length as the exact structural template for today's liberal anti-immigration policies.
Theodor W. Adorno positive
Co-author of Dialectic of Enlightenment; his 'Authoritarian Personality' study is discussed with the critique that Adorno avoided the crucial question of whether authoritarian personality is the repressed truth of democratic personality, probably for political opportunism.
Cited for having visited Singapore and declaring it the model for the new China, illustrating the export of the capitalism-without-democracy formula.
Francis Fukuyama negative
His 'end of history' thesis is treated not as simply naive but as identical (with Huntington) to the clash of civilizations thesis, two faces of the same post-political liberal universe.
Alan Greenspan negative
Described as 'the non-partisan subject supposed to know', the master technocrat whose admission of a 'flaw in the model' is the symptomatic ideological confession of free-market ideology's failure.
Naomi Klein positive
Cited approvingly for the 'shock doctrine' concept, the use of crises to impose radical free-market reforms; Žižek explicitly applies her framework to the 2008 meltdown.
Ève Chiapello positive
Co-author with Boltanski of The New Spirit of Capitalism; cited for the analysis of how post-Fordist capitalism co-opted left rhetoric of workers' self-management.
Luc Boltanski positive
Co-author of The New Spirit of Capitalism with Chiapello, cited for the thesis that post-1968 capitalism absorbed the left's critique of alienation and used network-based organization and worker autonomy to legitimize itself.
Thomas Friedman negative
Cited as a proponent of the 'socially responsible eco-capitalism' ideology, 'nobody has to be vile in order to do business', which Žižek treats as the hegemonic mystification of the financial crisis.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited twice: once for his formula on enemy propaganda annihilating unnoticed possibility, once for a pithy quote on the contrast between bailing out banks and refusing to nationalize factories.
Giorgio Agamben positive
His theory of the state of exception/emergency is invoked to analyze Italy's normalization of emergency measures against immigrants; also cited as a more critical Marxist who sees authoritarian personality as the repressed truth of liberal personality.
Guy Sorman negative
Described as a 'French journalist ideologist' (explicitly not a theoretician); cited as a 'clinically pure distilled version' of capitalist ideology, useful precisely because his version is too naked and over-identifies with the ideology's premises.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Condemned for the 'catastrophic conclusion' that anti-capitalism is secretly antisemitic, a position Žižek treats as completely unacceptable from a left standpoint.
Jean-Claude Milner positive
Žižek explicitly disagrees with the book overall (L'Arrogance du présent) but endorses Milner's key distinction between rights (which redistribute power) and permissions (which merely widen the scope of what is allowed without changing power).
Robert Conquest negative
His The Harvest of Sorrow on Ukraine is praised as informative but criticized for theoretically reducing Stalinism to 'the same liberal type but really evil', missing the structural specificity.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Brecht's quip about robbing a bank vs. founding a bank is paraphrased twice to satirize capitalist financial speculation.
Evo Morales negative
Žižek says he 'totally supports' Morales's politics but is made nervous by the 'Mother Earth is complaining' rhetoric, a slide toward abstract anti-capitalism via ecological mysticism rather than class politics.
Called 'my political enemy but not an idiot', cited for his observation that future monuments may go to Lee Kuan Yew for inventing capitalism without democracy.
Bill Gates negative
Cited as an exemplar of 'socially responsible capitalism', the billionaire philanthropist whose giving-back rhetoric serves as ideological cover for the system that enabled his wealth.
Herbert Marcuse negative
His Soviet Marxism is described as 'the weirdest book I've ever read', basically an analysis of Khrushchev's 20th Congress speech, cited as an example of Frankfurt School's inadequate engagement with Stalinism.
Walter Benjamin positive
His thesis 'every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution' is repeatedly endorsed and applied to Islamism and Christian fundamentalism in Kansas.
Moishe Postone negative
Žižek says he 'otherwise appreciates very much' Postone but rejects his thesis that, since crises enable both left and antisemitism, it is better to support successful capitalism and hope there is no crisis.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Criticized for writing fifty years of German philosophy that never engages with the existence of two German states or analyzes Stalinism, despite being vocally anti-communist in public political statements; his 'Legitimationskrise' concept is nonetheless used approvingly for the Yugoslav analysis.
Max Horkheimer positive
His formula 'those who do not want to talk about fascism should keep quiet about liberal democracy' is endorsed and extended. However, Žižek also criticizes Horkheimer for supporting US military interventions and being closer to Christian Democrats than to the left.
Martin Luther King Jr. positive
Cited to show that the word 'tolerance' is practically absent from his speeches; he fought racism through emancipatory political struggle, not liberal tolerance.
Immanuel Kant positive
Referenced for the notion that the sums mobilized in the bank bailout were 'sublime' in the Kantian sense, beyond imagination, and for the formula that humans are animals who need a master.
History teacher who conducted the 'Third Wave' experiment at Cubberley High School; Žižek uses the experiment against the liberal reading Jones intended.
What it argues
ideology and the 2008 financial crisisculturalization of politics and liberal multiculturalismshock doctrine and the exploitation of crisisreasonable racism and the new emergency statethe false opposition between liberalism and fundamentalismthe missing left and the need for a third emancipatory positioncapitalism without democracy: the Singapore/China model
Dialectical moves 8
“What if it is exactly the opposite that is the case? What if the Chinese Cultural Revolution was a shock which created the conditions for the ensuing capitalist explosion?”
The Cultural Revolution, read as anti-capitalist, was in fact capitalism's unwitting enabler, an ironic cunning of reason.
“Republican populists who resisted financial bailout measures are doing the wrong thing for the right reason; the proponents of the bailout are doing the right thing for the wrong reason.”
Inverts the intuitive alignment of politics and justification to reveal the structural contradiction between populist rhetoric and systemic necessity.
“The authoritarian personality is not the opposite of the liberal-democratic personality but its repressed symptomatic truth.”
Liberalism and authoritarianism are not external antagonists but internally related, the authoritarian is what liberal openness disavows about itself.
“Those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also be quiet about religious fundamentalism—they mutually imply each other.”
Adapts Horkheimer's formula on fascism and capitalism to show liberalism and fundamentalism as structurally complicit rather than simply opposed.
“Fascism and Huntington's clash of civilizations are not remainders of the pre-liberal past but are the very form that global capitalism and post-political liberalism generate.”
What appears as the external enemy of liberal modernity is in fact its internal product.
“The more open Yugoslav socialism made life better before the fall—but precisely this openness made the dissolution into ethnic war far worse afterward.”
The very feature that was a virtue (relative openness) became the condition of catastrophe, a tragic dialectical reversal.
“Fukuyama and Huntington are not opposites but two sides of the same coin: clashes of civilizations are the form politics takes at the end of history.”
The apparent contradiction between end-of-history universalism and civilization clash is resolved, they are the same diagnosis seen from different angles.
“The goal of all enemy propaganda is not to annihilate an existing force but to annihilate an unnoticed possibility of the situation—one unnoticed even by those conducting the propaganda.”
Ideology operates not by suppressing actual opposition but by foreclosing the very possibility of imagining an alternative (citing Badiou).
Claims 22
asserts
The financial crisis will be resolved ideologically through whatever narrative succeeds in imposing itself, and the danger is that the shock doctrine narrative—using the crisis to push further neoliberal deregulation—will prevail.the 2008 financial crisis and ideology
reframes
Racism today should be fought not with tolerance but with emancipatory political struggle against inequality and exploitation—tolerance is itself an ideological mystification.tolerance and anti-racism
asserts
The flaw that produces financial crises is immanent to the capitalist system itself, not attributable to secondary deviations like regulatory failures or individual corruption.capitalism and systemic crisis
rejects
Ecological problems are not technical problems with technical solutions but eminently political questions about what to produce and consume—the reduction to technical solutions is itself ideological.ecologism and technical solutions (Guy Sorman)
rejects
The claim that free market capitalism merely reflects human nature is a paradigmatic ideological legitimation that forecloses historical alternatives.free market ideology (Guy Sorman)
asserts
Banks were bailed out unconditionally and instantly while AIDS, climate change, and hunger were left to wait—this reveals that capital is the true Real of our social existence.capitalism and the priority of finance over human life
asserts
The relationship between Main Street and Wall Street is non-transitive: what is good for Wall Street is not necessarily good for Main Street, but Main Street cannot thrive without Wall Street—giving Wall Street an a priori structural advantage.Wall Street, Main Street, and the structural logic of capitalism
asserts
So-called 'reasonable racism'—liberal governments adopting 'moderate' anti-immigrant measures—will receive a major boost from the financial crisis.immigration, racism, and crisis
asserts
Post-1968 permissive society granted new freedoms (divorce, abortion, gay marriage) as permissions rather than rights, leaving power distributions entirely unchanged.May 1968 legacy and liberal permissiveness
asserts
Every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution—this holds for 'Islamo-fascism' as much as historical European fascism, and for Christian fundamentalism in Kansas.fascism, fundamentalism, and the failure of the left
reframes
The opposition between liberal democratic openness and religious or fascist fundamentalism is a false one—they are caught in a vicious cycle reproducing each other; the left is the missing third term.liberalism versus fundamentalism
asserts
Totalitarianism is not the opposite of liberalism but its repressed truth—the authoritarian personality is the symptom of the liberal-democratic personality, not its external enemy.liberalism and totalitarianism
asserts
The Chinese Cultural Revolution was not a counterforce to capitalism but—through the cunning of reason—a shock that cleared the way for China's capitalist explosion.Chinese Cultural Revolution and capitalism
reframes
Fukuyama and Huntington are not opposites but two sides of the same coin: the clash of civilizations is precisely the form politics takes at the end of history.Fukuyama vs. Huntington
asserts
Liberalism is not strong enough to fight fundamentalism; only a genuinely emancipatory left position can break out of the liberal-fundamentalism vicious cycle.liberalism, fundamentalism, and the left
asserts
Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore invented and proved the viability of capitalism permanently without democracy—a model now followed by China that breaks the previously assumed inextricable link.capitalism and democracy
asserts
Stalinism remains a genuine theoretical enigma that cannot be reduced to just another variant of totalitarianism alongside Nazism—it is the purest example of the Dialectic of Enlightenment.Stalinism and totalitarianism theory
asserts
The Frankfurt School's near-silence on Stalinism is intellectually indefensible and not explained by Cold War political caution, since the same thinkers were vocally anti-communist in public political statements.Frankfurt School and Stalinism
reframes
The Yugoslav dissolution was not caused by ancient ethnic hatreds but by the communist nomenklatura's legitimation crisis, with Milosevic reinventing himself as ethnic nationalist protector to keep the elite in power.Yugoslav dissolution and ethnic conflict
asserts
Solidary across civilizations is possible only through solidarity in struggles against shared enemies within each civilization—not through multicultural 'we are all one' rhetoric.universality and cross-civilizational solidarity
rejects
Bernard-Henri Lévy's thesis that anti-capitalism is secretly antisemitic is the catastrophic conclusion to be rejected—supporting successful capitalism to avoid antisemitism is not a left position.anti-capitalism and antisemitism (Lévy / Postone)
asserts
The Israel-Palestine conflict is, from a leftist standpoint, a fundamentally wrong conflict—it displaces the real political battles—and the true problem is Israel's slow bureaucratic strangulation of Palestinian viability on the West Bank.Israel-Palestine
Quotes 15
“There are not only wrong answers, there are also wrong questions. These wrong questions are what we call ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as wrong questions
“Go and check Martin Luther King's speeches. The word tolerance is practically absent from them. For him, one doesn't fight racism with tolerance but with emancipatory political struggle, even armed struggle.”Slavoj Žižek · tolerance vs. emancipatory struggle
“The self-propelling circulation of the capital remains more than ever the ultimate real of our lives, the abyss which by definition cannot be controlled, since it itself controls our activity.”Slavoj Žižek · capital as the Real
“It is one big fetishist denial. I know very well the risks I'm courting, even the inevitability of the final collapse, but nonetheless I can protract the collapse a little bit more.”Slavoj Žižek · fetishist denial in capitalist speculation
“Save the banks is an unconditional imperative which demands and gets immediate action. Did you feel this, how even democracy was practically suspended?”Slavoj Žižek · capital as unconditional imperative over democracy
“A right in a strict sense of the term gives access to the exercise of a power at the expense of another power. A permission doesn't diminish the power of the one who gives it; it doesn't augment the power of the one who gets it.”Slavoj Žižek · rights vs. permissions (Milner)
“The goal of all enemy propaganda is not to annihilate an existing force but rather to annihilate an unnoticed possibility of the situation.”Slavoj Žižek · enemy propaganda forecloses utopian possibility (Badiou)
“Every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution.”Slavoj Žižek · fascism as index of failed revolution (Benjamin)
“Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride. Sorry, I don't see any problem. What's bad about this if the community is a radical emancipatory community?”Slavoj Žižek · emancipatory subject appropriating fascist slogans
“Those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also be quiet about religious fundamentalism.”Slavoj Žižek · liberalism and fundamentalism as mutually implicated
“We need more struggle, more hatred. The only way to overcome clash of civilizations is to focus on the clash within each civilization and then to establish a solidarity.”Slavoj Žižek · universality through intra-civilizational struggle
“The future will be either socialist or communist, I claim. Capitalism in order to survive will incorporate what I'm tempted to call capitalism with Asian values.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism with Asian values as the alternative to communism
“Stalinism simply is still an enigma, and all these attempts to reduce it to just another sub-form of the so-called Nazi totalitarianism doesn't work.”Slavoj Žižek · Stalinism as unreduced theoretical enigma
“I claim if we were to have a more hardline Stalinist, openly Stalinist regime, maybe you just cut off the head and it would have been easier. This is for me the saddest irony of the situation.”Slavoj Žižek · tragic dialectic: Yugoslav openness enabled worse dissolution
“Is economy really a science? Does the present crisis not demonstrate that no one really knows what to do? The reason is that expectations are part of the game.”Slavoj Žižek · economics not a science because expectations are reflexive
Transcript 39 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thanks very much. I'm honored to be here. This meeting confronts me in a very painful way with the limitation of being a philosopher. I cannot answer your probably implicit demand to provide solutions or at least directions what to do apropos the ongoing financial crisis. The task of philosophy is not to provide answers but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be part of the problem, mystifying it instead of enabling us to solve it. There are not only wrong answers, there are also wrong questions. These wrong questions are what we call ideology. When we are dealing with a problem which is undoubtedly a real one, ideology performs its invisible mystification. Say, tolerance designates a real problem. And I'm as a rule asked when I oppose tolerance, but how can you be for intolerance towards foreigners, for anti-feminism, for homophobia and so on? But therein resides the catch. Of course I'm not against all this, but what I am against is today's automatic perception of racism as a problem of tolerance. Go and check Martin Luther King's speeches. The word tolerance is practically absent from them. For him, one doesn't fight racism with tolerance but with emancipatory political struggle, even armed struggle. So why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance rather than problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? The immediate answer lies in the liberal multiculturalist's basic ideological operation, the culturalization of politics. Political differences—differences conditioned by political inequality or economic exploitation—are naturalized and neutralized into cultural differences, that is, into different ways of life which are something given, something that cannot be overcome. They can only be tolerated. And incidentally, I think that the same goes for harassment. In today's ideological space, the very real harassment—rape, bigotry—is often reduced, intertwined with two or intertwined with the narcissistic notion of an individual who experiences all proximity of others as an intrusion into his or her private space. Ideology is in this precise sense a notion which while designating a real problem blurs a crucial line of separation. And I think we should do the same apropos the financial meltdown. What can help us is the fact that the very term ideology intervened at the crucial moment of the debates surrounding the ongoing crisis. As probably a lot of you know, on October 23rd, Alan Greenspan, the non-partisan subject supposed to know, secret master of the long period of economic growth in the last decades, was submitted to a congressional hearing. In the climactic moment of this hearing, the US representative Henry Waxman intervened, quote: "I'm going to interrupt you," he says to Greenspan. "The question I have for you is, you had an ideology. This is your statement: 'I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We have tried regulation—regulations, none meaningfully worked.' That was your quote. You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?" Greenspan's answer: "I found a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works." End of quote. In other words, Greenspan conceded that when a, as he called it, "once-in-a-century credit tsunami" has engulfed financial markets, his free-market ideology shunning regulation was proven flawed. Later, Greenspan reiterated his shocked disbelief that financial companies failed to execute sufficient surveillance on their trading counterparties to prevent surging losses. Another quote from Greenspan: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief." End of quote. Shocked disbelief. Does this then mean that the financial meltdown will be a sobering moment, the awakening from a long economico-ideological dream? Well, it all depends on which ideological interpretation or story will impose itself and determine the perception of the crisis. When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field is open for ideological competition. For example, as we all know, in Germany in the late 20s and early 30s, Hitler won in the competition for the narrative which will explain to Germans the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it. His narrative, of course, his plot, was the Jewish plot. In France in it was Marshal Pétain's narrative which won in explaining the reasons for the French defeat: it's not the failure of France, it's the failure of the Jewish Freemasons and so on, corruption; so defeat by Germany is a unique chance for the restoration of French greatness and so on. The danger is thus, I think, that the ongoing meltdown will be used following the lines of what Naomi Klein called the shock doctrine. Quote: "The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of the past thirty-five years, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market reforms." End of quote. So, I think the danger is that the ongoing meltdown will also be used as a kind of intended or non-intended shock therapy creating ideological conditions for further liberal measures. This already happened a couple of times when nobody expected it to happen. For example, some naive leftists claim that it is the legacy of the Cultural Revolution in China which acts as a counterforce to the unbridled capitalism, preventing its worst excesses, maintaining a minimum of social solidarity. What if, however, it is exactly the opposite that is the case? What if in a kind of unintended and for this reason all the more cruelly ironic cunning of reason, the Chinese Cultural Revolution with its brutal erasure of past traditions was a shock which created the conditions for the ensuing capitalist explosion? What if today's China has to be added to Naomi Klein's list of states in which a natural, military, or social catastrophe cleared the slate for a new capitalist explosion? There is even a further paradox at work here. There is beyond all cheap gibes and superficial analogies a profound structural homology between the Maoist permanent self-revolutionizing, the permanent struggle against the ossification of state structures, and the inherent dynamics of capitalism. I'm tempted to paraphrase here Bertolt Brecht's pun: what is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank? What are the violent and destructive outbursts of a Red Guardist caught in the Cultural Revolution compared to the true cultural revolution, the permanent dissolution of all life forms necessitated by the capitalist reproduction? Today the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward in China in the late 50s is repeated as the comedy of the rapid capitalist great leap forward into modernization, with the old slogan "iron foundry into every village" re-emerging as a skyscraper into every street of Shanghai and so on. Consequently, to put in—to put it in old-fashioned Marxist terminology, the main task of the ruling ideology today is to impose a narrative which will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system as such but on its secondary accidental deviations—too lax legal regulations, the corruption of big financial institutions and so on. Against this tendency, one should insist on the key question: which flaw of the system as such opens up the possibility for crisis and collapses? The first thing to bear in mind is that the origin of the crisis was a benevolent one. After the digital bubble in the first years of the new millennium, the decision across the party lines in the United States was to facilitate real estate investments in order to keep economy going. Today's meltdown is the price paid for the fact that the United States avoided a recession five, six years ago. The danger is thus that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one which instead of awakening us from a dream will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry. Not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, the so-called, to use the nice euphemism, further structural adjustments. But we should worry about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the war on terror or repeat interventionism, military interventionism in order to keep the economy running, or in home politics, the sudden rise of populist racism all around Europe. I more and more think that in this post-political era where we are today that we are slowly approaching a new model in the developed states where the two parties are no longer moderate left, moderate right, but how should I call it, a neutral technocratic party usually more culturalist open, post—post-political, claiming we are just for [unintelligible] reasonable administration, so pure technocratic party and more rightist populist party. That's the only alternative unfortunately which is emerging. An exemplary case of how the meltdown already is used in ideologico-political struggle is the debate in the United States on what to do with General Motors. Should the state allow its bankruptcy or not? Since General Motors is one of the institutions which define the so-called American dream, its bankruptcy was long considered unthinkable. But more and more voices now refer to the meltdown as the additional push which should make us accept the unthinkable. For example, a recent column in New York Times with the title "Imagining a General Motors Bankruptcy" dotted the i when it focused on the standoff between General Motors and its unionized workers. Here is a quote: "Bankruptcy would allow General Motors to unilaterally reject its collective bargaining agreements, as long as a judge approved." End of quote. In other words, bankruptcy should be used to break the backbone of one of the last remaining strong trade unions in the United States, leaving thousands with lower wages and other thousands much more tragically with lower retirement sums. Note the contrast with the urgency to save the big banks. Here, where the survival of thousands of active or retired workers is at stake, there is of course no emergency but on the contrary an opportunity to allow free market to show its brutal force. As if the trade unions, not the wrong strategy of the managers, are to blame for the General Motors troubled waters. This is how the impossible becomes possible. What was hitherto considered unthinkable within the horizon of the established standards of work decency and solidarity should become acceptable. Marx wrote that bourgeois ideology loves to historicize. Every social, religious, cultural form is historical, contingent, relative, every form with the exception of its own. There was history, as Marx put it, but now there is no history. With capitalist liberalism, history is at an end, the natural form is found. This old paradox of liberal ideology exploded with new power in today's apologies of the end of history. To get a clinically pure, as it were, distilled version of today's capitalist ideology, one should turn not so much to Fukuyama as to—my choice—Guy Sorman, a French journalist ideologist, I will not call him theoretician. The very title of the interview, one of the interviews he recently gave, "This crisis will be short enough," signals that Sorman fulfills the basic demand that ideology has to meet with regard to the financial meltdown: to re-normalize the situation. A quote: "This ceaseless replacement of the old with the new driven by technological—by technical innovation and entrepreneurialism, itself encouraged by good economic policies, brings prosperity, though those displaced by the process who find their jobs made redundant can understandably object to it." End of quote. This, incidentally, this re-normalization of course co-exists with its opposite: the panic raised by the authorities in order to create a shock among the wide public. The very fundamentals of our way of life are threatened and thereby to make the public ready to accept the proposed solutions. Back to Sorman. His starting premise is that in the last decades, more precisely after the fall of socialism in economy finally became a fully tested science. In an almost laboratory situation, the same country was split into two: West and East Germany, South and North Korea, South and North Vietnam. Each part submitted to the opposite economic system, and the result was unambiguous. But I ask myself, is economy really a science? Does the present crisis not demonstrate that as one of the participants put it, no one really knows what to do? The reason is that expectations are part of the game. How the market will react depends not only on how much people trust the interventions, but even more on how much they think others will trust them. One cannot take into account—into account the effects of one's own interventions. So while Sorman admits that market is full of irrational behavior, his medi—medicament is not even psychology but neuroeconomics. Listen, a quote: "Economic actors tend to behave both rationally and irrationally. Laboratory work has demonstrated that one part of our brain bears blame for many of our economically mistaken short-term decisions, while another is responsible for decisions that make economic sense, usually taking a longer view. Just as the state protects us from asymmetric, asymmetric by forbidding insider trading, should it also protect us from our own irrational impulses?" End of quote. Of course, Sorman is quick to add that, another quote: "it would be preposterous to use behavioral economics to justify restoring excessive state regulations. After all, the state is no more rational than the individual, and its actions can have enormously destructive consequences. Neuroeconomics should encourage us to make markets more transparent, not more regulated." End of quote. I mean, I find this proposal wonderful. To treat this necessary psychological effect of capitalist market, so-called irrational behavior, as a neuronally-based pathology to be treated in this way. With this happy twin rule of economic science supplemented by neuroeconomics, gone are the old times of ideological dreams masked as science. So, so Sorman claims. As it was the case of Marx, whose work, quote, "can be described as a materialist rewriting of the Bible." End of quote. But even if Marxism is dead, the naked emperor continues to haunt us with new clothes. The chief among them, according to Sorman, ecologism. Sorman claims that the ecological movement is the communism of the 21st century. Quote: "It is certain that ecologism is a recreation of communism, the actual anti-capitalism. However, its other half is composed of a quarter of pagan utopia of the cult of nature, which is much earlier than Marxism, which is why ecologism is so strong in Germany with its naturalist and pagan tradition. Look-look. Ecologism is thus an anti-Christian movement. Nature has precedence over man. The last quarter of ecological problematic is rational. There are true problems for which—listen, that's crucial—for which there are technical solutions." End of quote. Note the term technical solutions. Rational problems have technical solutions. I claim a blatantly wrong claim. The confrontation with ecological problems demands choices and decisions: what to produce, what to consume and so on, which ultimately concern the very way of life of the people. As such they are not technical but eminently political in the most radical sense of fundamental social choices. So back to Sorman. No wonder that capitalism is presented in technical terms, not even as a science but simply as something that works. It needs no ideological justification because its success itself is its sufficient justification. Socialism—capitalism works. That's it. Now Sorman is aware of the problem that lurks here. How to keep people's faith in capitalism alive when the inexorable reality of a crisis brutally crushes these dreams? Here enters the need for a mature realistic pragmatism. One should heroically resist dreams of perfection and happiness and accept the bitter capitalist reality as the best possible or the least bad of all worlds. Rarely, I think, was the function of ideology described in clearer terms: to defend the existing system against any serious critique, legitimizing it as a direct expression of human nature. A quote: "An essential task of democratic governments and opinion makers when confronting economic cycles and political pressure is to secure and protect the system that has served humanity so well, and not to change it for the worse on the pretext of its imperfection. Still, this lesson is doubtless one of the hardest to translate into language that public opinion will accept. The best of all possible economic systems is indeed imperfect. Whatever the truth uncovered by economic science, the free market is finally only the reflection of human nature, itself hardly perfectible." End of quote. So, it doesn't work fully, free market, but the reason is directly human nature. End of quote. Such ideological legitimations, I think, perfectly exemplify Alain Badiou's precise formula of the basic paradox of enemy propaganda. Enemy propaganda fights something of which it is itself not aware, something for which it is structurally blind. Not the actual counterforces, political opponents, but the possibility, the utopian revolutionary emancipatory potential which is immanent to the situation. Quote from Badiou: "The goal of all enemy propaganda is not to annihilate an existing force—this function is generally left to police—but rather to annihilate an unnoticed possibility of the situation. This possibility is also unnoticed by those who conduct this propaganda, since its features are to be simultaneously immanent to the situation and not to appear in it." End of quote. This is why I think enemy propaganda against radical politics is by definition cynical. Not in the simple sense of not believing its own words, but at a much more basic level. It is cynical precisely and even more insofar as it does believe its own words, since its message is a resigned conviction that the world we live in, even if not the best of all possible worlds, is the least bad one, so that any radical change can only make it worse. Sorman's version is of course too brutal to be directly endorsed as hegemonic. That's why I picked this relatively unknown guy here, at least in the Anglo-Saxon domain, Guy Sorman. Because you know, you have to look to the margins to see the underlying ideological structure emerge at its purest. There is something of an over-identification in Sorman's version. He states too openly the underlying premises, and this is why he is an embarrassment. Out of present crisis, the version which is emerging as hegemonic, I think, is not this brutal reassertion of capitalism but that of, as they call it, socially responsible eco-capitalism. While admitting that in the past and present capitalism was often over-exploitative or catastrophic, the claim is that one can already discern signs of a new orientation which is aware that the capitalist mobilization of society's productive capacity can also be made to serve ecological goals, the struggle against poverty and so on. As a rule, this version is presented as part of the shift towards a new holistic post-materialist spiritual paradigm. In our era, so we are told, in our era of the growing awareness of the unity of all life on earth and of the common dangers we are all facing, a new approach is emerging which no longer opposes market and social responsibility. They can be reunited for mutual benefit. As Thomas Friedman put it, nobody has to be vile in order to do business. Collaboration with and participation of the employees, dialogue with customers, respect for the environment, transparency of deals are nowadays the keys to success. Capitalists—capitalists should not be just machines for generating profits; their lives should and can have a deeper meaning. Their preferred motto is social responsibility and gratitude. They are the first to admit that society was incredibly good to them by allowing them to deploy their talents and amass fortunes. So it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. After all, as they like to say, all of them from Bill Gates down: what is the point of my success if not to help people? It is only this caring that makes my business success worthwhile. This new ethics of global responsibility can thus put capitalism to work as the most efficient instrument of the common good. But I claim, was the financial meltdown of not a kind of ironic comment on the ideological nature of this dream of the spiritualized and socially responsible eco-capitalism? As we all know, on December 11th, Bernard Madoff, a great investment manager and a mega-philanthropist, was arrested, charged with allegedly running a billion pyramid scheme. One has to ask here a naive question: but didn't Madoff—didn't he know that in the long term his scheme is bound to collapse? What force counteracted this obvious insight? I think it's not Madoff's personal evil or irrationality, but a pressure, a drive to go on, to expand the circulation in order to keep the machinery running, the pressure which is inscribed into the very system of capitalist relations. The temptation to morph legitimate business into a pyramid scheme is part of the very nature of the capitalist circulation. There is no exact point at which the Rubicon was crossed and the legitimate investment business morphed into an illegal pyramid scheme. The very dynamic of capitalism blurs this frontier, because capitalist investment is in its very core a risk wager that the scheme will turn out to be profitable. It's an act of borrowing from the future. A sudden shift in uncontrollable circumstances can ruin a very safe investment. This is what the capitalist risk is about. This is the reality of the postmodern capitalism. The ruinous speculation raised to a much higher degree than it was even imaginable before. The self-propelling circulation of the capital thus remains more than ever the ultimate real of our lives, the abyss which by definition cannot be controlled, since it itself controls our activity, making us blind for even the most obvious insights into the dangers we are courting. It is one big fetishist denial. I know very well the risks I'm courting, even the inevitability of the final collapse, but nonetheless I can protract the collapse a little bit more, take a little bit greater risk and so on indefinitely. The dilemma we are facing now is thus: will the crisis be used following the rules defined by Naomi Klein in her shock doctrine, or maybe, just maybe, will this very awareness of the immanent logic of today's capitalism, of where this logic is leading us, will it give rise to a slow awakening from the capitalist dogmatic dream? Perhaps the time has come to reapply to our situation Brecht's already quoted quip: what is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank? What is the stealing of a couple of thousands of dollars for which you go to prison compared to financial speculations which deprive tens of millions of their homes and savings and are then rewarded by state help of sublime grandeur? As Alain Badiou put it succinctly, a quote: "One demands absolutely from ordinary citizens to understand that it is not possible to fill in the financial gap of the social security, but that without counting the billions, one should fill in the gap of the banks. We should seriously approve that nobody wants to nationalize a factory in trouble, but that it is evident to nationalize a bank which burned because of its speculations." End of quote. One should, I think, generalize this statement. When we are fighting AIDS, hunger, lack of water, global warming and so on, although we recognize the urgency of these problems, there is always time to reflect, to postpone decisions. Recall how the main conclusion of the last meeting of the superpower leaders in Bali, hailed as a success, the main conclusion of this meeting was that they will meet again in two years to continue the talk. But with the financial meltdown, the urgency to act was unconditional. A sum beyond imagination, really in the Kantian sense sublime, was immediately found. Saving endangered species, save the planet from global warming, save the AIDS patients, save the patients dying because of the lack of funds for—for expensive treatment, save the starving children—all these can wait a little bit. But the call "save the banks" is an unconditional imperative which demands and gets immediate action. Did you feel this, how even democracy was practically suspended? I was fascinated in the United States how basically all got instantly together: McCain, McCain, Obama, Bush when the Congress—you remember in the first vote when—as I would put it as a wrong—as an old Stalinist voted wrongly, you know, took the wrong decision and they implied like "okay, okay, democracy, but no time for jokes here. This has to be done, unconditionally." And let us also not forget that this sublimely enormous sum was spent not for some clear real task but basically in order to restore confidence to the markets, to restore belief. Do we need another proof that capital is the real of our lives? The real whose demands are much more absolute than even the most pressing demands of our social and natural reality. We can all be dead because of some ecological catastrophe, there can be unrest, civil war, spread of disease and so on—"okay, okay, that can wait." Banks? No jokes there. That's the real. You don't negotiate there. But things are not as easy as they appear here. And this, I think, can maybe be the positive lesson of this crisis. Namely, the problem here is that in the capitalist system welfare of the mainstream effectively depends on the thriving Wall Street. So all these populist formulas "don't help the banks, help the ordinary small businessman" are deeply misleading. So while in the United States republican populists who resisted these financial measures are doing the wrong thing for the right reason, the proponents of the bailout are doing, I think, the right thing for the wrong reason. To put it in more sophisticated terms of propositional logic, the relationship between Main Street and Wall Street is a non-transitive one. Why? What is good for Wall Street is not necessarily good for Main Street. Main Street cannot thrive if Wall Street is not doing well. And this asymmetry gives an a priori advantage to Wall Street. That is to say, it's really as if we have here a kind of secret theological logic which says "of course we ultimately want to help ordinary people, but you cannot do it directly. If you help them directly, it will be counterproductive. The only way to help ordinary people is to help the big banks which are the blood, the very life of the system as they put it." And then we cannot do anything, but we can just pray, hope that through a kind of a grace miracle of the system somehow this help that we distribute to big banks, companies and so on will somehow trickle down to ordinary people. So—so again, the problem is that insofar as we remain in capitalism, there is a truth in this defense of Wall Street. The kick at Wall Street will really hit ordinary workers. Therein resides the hard lesson of today's crisis. The flaw is immanent to the system itself. We are, I think, approaching the moment where short-term solutions will work less and less. That's as—as one who is not qualified to pass high economic judgments, that's my, to put it very naively and modestly, even basic impression. That what really makes this crisis so unsettling is that these short-term solutions no longer work or are even counterproductive. So that the more you try to do, the more you are confronting the basic problem, which is the system as such. So what to do, how to act? Well, I will not answer in this point here. Come to the conference on the "Idea of Communism" this weekend in Birkbeck College, maybe you will get some answers. But I would like to use the remaining time to change the terrain and point out another danger which is extremely serious, I claim, which lurks in the moments of crisis: a certain ideological regression. Recently—let me begin with a general observation—recently the notion of toxic subjects is gaining popularity in, especially, United States academia. For example, in her book *Toxic People*, Lillian Glass identifies thirty types of toxic people, some with humorous labels such as the "Smiling Two-Faced Sneaky Backstabber" and so on. She provides a "Toxic People Quiz" to help readers identify which category a suspect toxic terror, which category he falls into, and suggests ten techniques to handle them: direct confrontation, vicarious fantasy, calm questioning and so on. Conceding that to some degree we are all toxic, Glass offers a "Toxic Image Inventory" enabling us to identify our own destructive behavior. In the same mode, Albert Bernstein in his *Emotional Vampires*, dealing with people who drain you dry, goes a step further and directly mobilizes horror mythology, speaking directly of emotional vampires preying on us, masquerading as ordinary people. They may lurk in your office, your family, your circle of friends, perhaps—he says—they even share your bed. Bright, talented, and charismatic, they win your trust and then they drain you out of your energy. This topic of toxic subjects is expanding much further than immediate interpersonal relations in a paradigmatic postmodern way. The predicate "toxic" covers a series of properties which belong to totally different domains—natural, cultural, psychological, political. A toxic subject can be an immigrant with a deadly disease who should be quarantined. A terrorist whose deadly plans should be prevented and who belongs to Guantanamo, the empty zone—the empty zone exempted from the rule of law. A fundamentalist ideologist who should be silenced because he is spreading hatred. A parent, teacher or priest who abuses and corrupts children. See Susan Forward's *Toxic Parents*, a detailed study of the way parents can ruin their children's lives. So what I propose here is that in a Hegelian way of universalization, one should accomplish here the passage from predicate to subject. From the standpoint of postmodern individualist subject, is there not something toxic in the very idea of a parent, this parasitic mediator who subjects the subject to an authority in the very process of—of raising him or her as free and autonomous? If there is a clinical lesson about parenthood, it is that there is no clean non-toxic parent. And one should bring this generalization I think to the end. What is toxic is ultimately the neighbor as such, the abyss of the neighbor's desire or obscene enjoyment. So that the ultimate aim of all rules of personal relations is to quarantine or at least neutralize and contain this toxic dimension, to reduce the neighbor to a fellow man. It is thus not enough to search for contingent toxic components in another subject, maybe subject as such is toxic. And this model is I think socialized in the emerging new postmodern racism directed at—let's call them—toxic immigrants. As if in an ironic nod to Giorgio Agamben's theory, in July the Italian government proclaimed the state of emergency, which still lasts in entire Italy, in order to cope with the problem of the neighbor in its paradigmatic form today, the illegal entry of the immigrants from North Africa and Eastern Europe. Making a step further in this direction, at the beginning of August the Italian government demonstratively deployed armed soldiers to control sensitive points in big cities—train station, commercial centers—and thus raise public security. There are now plans to use the military to protect women from rapes and so on. What is important to note here is that the emergency state was introduced without great fuss. Life goes on as normal. Is this not the state we are approaching in developed country all around the globe? Where this or that form of emergency state against the terrorist threat, against immigrants, is simply accepted as a necessary measure which guarantees the normal run of things. Which is the logic at work here? We should return to a pretty terrifying formula of so-called "reasonable antisemitism" which was proposed in France in by the great French antisemitic intellectual Robert Brasillach, who saw himself as a "modern" antisemite. Quote from him: "We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half-Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half-Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew. And the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz. We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual antisemitism is to organize a reasonable antisemitism." End of quote. Is this same attitude not at work in the way our governments are dealing with the immigrant threat? After righteously rejecting direct populist racism as unreasonable, unacceptable for our democratic standards, they endorse a reasonably racist protective measures. Or as today's Brasillachs—some of them even social democrats—are telling us: "We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and East European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable violent anti-immigrant measures is to organize a reasonable anti-immigrant protection." What I fear is that such "reasonable racism" will—will get a big boost by the present crisis. Radical multiculturalist liberals are of course terrified by this prospect. But I think their legacy is part of the problem. Why? I want to refer to a book now with which I totally don't agree, Jean-Claude Milner's new analysis of the May in France, *L'Arrogance du présent* (The Arrogance of the Present), but there are some important developments in the book. Milner develops how the French establishment succeeded in undoing all threatening consequences of the May by way of incorporating the so-called "spirit of and thereby turning it against the real core of The demand for new rights which would have meant a true redistribution of power were granted but in the guise of permissions. And permissive society designates precisely the way to broaden the scope of what subjects are allowed to do without giving them any real additional power. A nice quote from Milner: "Those who hold power know very well the difference between a right and a permission. A right in a strict sense of the term gives access to the exercise of a power at the expense of another power. A permission doesn't diminish the power of the one who gives it; it doesn't augment the power of the one who gets it. It makes his life easier, which is not nothing. This is how it goes with the right to divorce, abortion, gay marriage and so on. They—these are all permissions masked as rights. They do not change in any way the distribution of powers. Such was the effect of the spirit of It effectively contributed to make life easier. This is a lot, but this is not all, because it didn't encroach upon powers." End of quote. So in what did more closely this shift in capitalism after events consist? The best description, at least for what went on in France, is probably Boltanski and Chiapello's *The New Spirit of Capitalism*. The thesis is that from the 1970s onwards, a new figure of the spirit of capitalism is emerging. Capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist structure of the production process and developed a network-based form of organization founded on employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace. Instead of hierarchical centralized chain of command, we get networks with a multitude of participants organizing work in the form of teams or projects intent of customer—on customer satisfaction, and a general mobilization of workers thanks to their leader's vision. In this way, capitalism is transformed and legitimized as an egalitarian project. By way of accentuating autopoietic interaction and spontaneous self-organization, it even usurped the far-left's rhetoric of workers' self-management and turned it from an anti-capitalist to a capitalist slogan. At the level of consumption, this new spirit is the one of the so-called cultural capitalism. We primarily buy commodities neither on account of their utility, their real properties, nor as status symbols. We buy them to get the experience provided by them. We consume them in order to make our life pleasurable and meaningful. Consumption should sustain the quality of life. Its time should be, as they put it in California, quality time. Not the time of alienation of imitating models imposed by society, but the time of the authentic fulfillment of my true self, of the sensuous play of experience of caring for others, from ecology to charity. Here is an exemplary case of cultural capitalism: Starbucks' self-description of their ethos—like E-T-H-O-S, like ethics—Ethos Water program. Quote. I mean, after reading this passage I was tempted to—to—to be a terrorist and start to throw Molotov cocktails at Starbucks. "Ethos Water is a brand with a social mission helping children around the world get clean water and raising awareness of the world water crisis. Every time you purchase a bottle of—bottle of Ethos Water, Ethos Water will contribute five US cents towards our goal of raising at least ten million dollars. Through the Starbucks Foundation, Ethos Water supports humanitarian water programs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Today, Ethos Water grant commitments exceed million dollars," and so on and so on and so on. Of course they forget to say that this—I mean, the—the manipulation here is breathtaking. That here, but in the United States, this water costs instead of before, so that they give five cents but they immediately profit forty-five. But I think they make you feel well, that's the point. This is how capitalism at the level of consumption integrated the legacy of the critique of alienated consumption. Authentic experience matters. Is this not why—let me go to the end here—why we buy organic food? Don't fool me. Do you really believe that the half-rotten expensive organic apples are healthier? I don't. So why are we buying them? Well, it makes you feel good. Instead you say to yourself, "You see, I'm not just a stupid consumer. By buying organic apples I participate in a meaningful social activity, I'm helping all of us becoming aware of the crisis we are all in" and so on and so on and so on. That's the problem for me with this attitude. Why? The first thing to do is to problematize this tolerant and so on post-68 ideological universe. How? Allow me to conclude with a couple of more radical proposals. Walter Benjamin's old thesis: "every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution." I think not only holds today but is today more pertinent than ever. Liberals like to point out similarities between left and right extremisms. Hitler's terror and camps imitated Bolshevik terror. The Leninist party is today alive in Al-Qaeda and so on and so on. I say yes, but what does all this mean? I claim it can also be read as an indication of how fascism literally replaced—took the place of the leftist revolution. Its rise was the left's failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, a dissatisfaction which the left was not able to mobilize. And I think today it's especially important to emphasize how the same holds for the so-called, by some people, not me, "Islamo-fascism." Is the rise of radical Islamism not exactly correlative to the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries? Today, when Afghanistan is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers that thirty years ago it was a country with strong secular tradition, up to a powerful communist party which took power there independently of the Soviet Union? Soviet Union later intervened and saved them. Where did this secular tradition disappear? In Europe, exactly the same goes for Bosnia. Back in the 1970s and 80s, Bosnia and Herzegovina was multiculturally the most thriving, alive of all Yugoslav republics, with an internationally recognized cinema school, a unique style of rock music and so on. In today's Bosnia, there are effectively strong fundamentalist forces, like the crowd which brutally attacked the gay parade in Sarajevo in September But the main reason of this regression is the desperate situation of Bosnians in the war where they were basically abandoned by the Western powers. And as Thomas Frank has shown, the same goes for Kansas—the US homegrown version of Afghanistan—Kansas, the state which was till 1970s the bedrock of radical leftist populism is today the bedrock of Christian fundamentalism. Does this not confirm again Benjamin's thesis that fascism is an index of a failed revolution? Now, the most catastrophic conclusion that can be drawn from this constellation is the one drawn by a theoretician whom I otherwise appreciate very much, Moishe Postone, and some of his colleagues. His thesis to simplify is the following one: since every crisis which opens up a space for radical left also gives rise to antisemitism or populist racism, it is better for us to support successful capitalism and hope there will be no crisis. Brought to its conclusion by for example Bernard-Henri Lévy, this reasoning implies that—and this is now Bernard-Henri Lévy's thesis—anti-capitalism is as such secretly antisemitic. The difference between liberalism and the radical left is that although they refer to the same three elements—liberal center, populist right, radical left—they locate them in a different topology. For the liberal center, radical left and right are the two forms of appearance of the same totalitarian excess. While for the left, the only true alternative is between itself, the left, and the liberal mainstream, with the populist radical right as nothing but the symptom of liberalism's inability to deal with the leftist threat. One should accomplish here a Hegelian step back and put in question the very measure from which fundamentalism appears in all its horror. Liberals I think have long ago lost their right to judge. What do I mean by this? Let me now conclude with a brutal example. The "Third Wave"—not third wave, wave like the sea. This is, maybe some of you know, a social experiment undertaken by history teacher Ron Jones at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, of course, in April Unable to explain to his students how Germans could obey Hitler and accept the Holocaust, he decided to show this to them instead. So he started a movement called the "Third Wave" and convinced his students that the movement is to—the goal of the movement is to eliminate democracy. Jones emphasized this main point of the movement in the motto: "Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride." On the fourth day, however, Jones decided to terminate the experiment because it was slipping out of his control. Students became increasingly—increasingly involved in the project, fully identified with it. Their discipline and loyalty were astounding. Some of them even denounced to Jones some of their peers whom they suspected that they do not really fully believe in the project and so on. So on the fourth day Jones ordered his students to attend a rally at noon next day where then, next day, instead of a televised address by their leader, the students were presented with an—just an empty TV screen, empty channel. After a few minutes of waiting, Jones announced that they have been part of an experiment in fascism and that they all willingly created a sense of superiority and trashing the enemy—"so now you understand how Hitler did it." Now comes my result. If this is not now what I'm always expected to do, shocking and tasteless enough, then I don't know what to do. I'm more on the side of the students here. I sympathize with the students. In what sense? As expected, liberals were fascinated by the "Third Wave," discerning in it the deep *Lord of the Flies* insight into how beneath the civilized surface we are all potentially fascists. The barbarian sadistic beast is lurking in all of us, awaiting its opportunity. You know, liberals like this topic. Be careful, politically correct, watch over yourself, the beast is always waiting. But I claim, what if we shift the perspective a little bit and conceive the authoritarian personality which exploded here as the repressed obverse of the liberal open personality itself? One encounters the same ambiguity in the legendary study on "Authoritarian Personality" in which as you all know Adorno participated. The features of authoritarian personality are clearly opposed to the standard figure of open democratic personality. So the underlying dilemma is—and typically Adorno in the study avoids this crucial question—how is then the relationship between open democratic and authoritarian personality to be understood? Are these two types of personality simply the opposites in a struggle so that we should fight one against the other? Or in other words, which is the status of the scale of features which are the opposite of those which define the authoritarian personality? Are they simply to be endorsed as democratic personality, or is the authoritarian personality to be conceived as the symptomatic truth, the repressed if you want of the democratic personality—the view of more critical Marxists like Agamben and the view towards which I think Adorno tends but probably for politically opportunist reasons he's afraid to endorse it? Now, this is how we should read the liberal enthusiasm for the "Third Wave" phenomenon. The function of this experiment I think was to assert the struggle of liberal openness against the totalitarian closure as our fundamental struggle and thus to obliterate their mutual complicity, the fact that totalitarianism is the return of the repressed of liberalism itself. This obliteration also enables us to condense fascism and communism into one and the same anti-liberal totalitarian figure, and thus to block the search for a third option. This is the—this is what I claim. In the same way you got it as the struggle between today's religious fundamentalism and liberal openness is not the true struggle, in the same way that I think this is a false opposition. Of course they are radically opposed, this is a big fight, but I claim it's kind of a vicious cycle, they are reproducing each other. The task is to see what is missing in this opposition. The opposition between liberal democratic openness and a fundamentalist violence, whatever, what it excludes is simply the left. Left is missing here. And it's the same here. I think that it's absolutely crucial to see how this self-satisfaction that it gives you, this—"Oh you see how we were caught into that totalitarian trap, we started to imitate whatever, but we are not really that, we should be very careful" and so on—is to avoid the crucial question: the third option, the personality structure of a subject engaged in a radical emancipatory struggle, a subject who subscribes without any qualms to the motto "Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride" and yet remains engaged in a radical egalitarian emancipatory struggle. That's why, maybe I'm half-crazy, but that's my thesis: listen to this—"Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride." Sorry, I don't see any problem. What's bad about this if the community is—is an—an radical emancipatory community? If the discipline is a discipline of anti-fascist or whatever struggle? If the action is progressive action? If the pride is the pride in our progressive achievements? What's wrong in all this? The liberal simply cannot see this. That's the danger here. What a liberal can do apropos such a—a subject is either to dismiss it as just another version of the authoritarian personality, or to claim that this subject is placed a contradiction, like it's inconsistent, like you have nice goals, equality and so on, but your means are authoritarian and so on and so on. In both cases, the specificity of this third type of subject is—remains unseen. There is no place for this type of subject in today's liberal cognitive mapping. So that's my thesis. Now I'm really concluding. What Max Horkheimer said about fascism and liberal capitalism—you know that those who do not want to talk about fascism should also keep quiet about liberal democracy in the sense of they mutually imply each other—should also be applied to today's fundamentalism. Those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also be quiet about religious fundamentalism. The task today is to break out of this vicious cycle. A third position by definition a left one is needed. Otherwise—otherwise we are I think, to put it very simply, we are approaching something, all of us, gradually something new which is already emerging. What is this new? Recently, as you can see I read many reactionaries, I read a small book, rather debate, by Peter Sloterdijk—my political enemy but he is not an idiot—who says something very interesting. He says that if there will be a monument to some person hundreds years from now, it will be probably to Lee Kuan Yew. You know who he was, the longtime leader of Singapore. His, to put it ironically, historic achievement was first to invent and successfully practice, to cut a long story short, capitalism without democracy. Till now, liberals had one point to make, I fully admit it: sooner or later capitalism implied, demanded some kind of democracy. You can have a decade, maximum two of dictatorship like I don't know, like Chile, like South Korea, but then when things developed, democracy becomes necessary. I think that the historical meaning of what Lee Kuan Yew invented is a model which no longer follows this logic. And the same goes on in China today. Maybe you know that Deng Xiaoping, when he was preparing his reforms, visited Singapore, and I saw him saying on the TV—I saw some interview—like "this is the path for the new China" and so on. So because of this, because of this, because the last thing that you can say did give some legitimacy to capitalism—this inextricable link with democracy—is its fall—is falling apart. What does it mean? This means that liberalism itself is not strong enough, I claim, to fight fundamentalism. For this, the third position is needed; we need to break out of it. How? I don't know, I only know what sad fate awaits us if we don't do it. Thank you very much. [Applause] But I like the dialogues that I like are late Plato's dialogues. You know how they look: one guy talks all the time, the other says like every ten minutes "By Zeus, so it is Socrates, yes." I'm inviting in this deep sense to a dialogue. [Laughter] **Question:** Just in regards to dialogue, I just had a question about your feelings on Huntington and his—some opinions on culture, um, his essays he's written just before he passed on—on how affecting culture will invariably affect the society as a whole. And following on from that, um, in regards to—to—um—in regards to your—um—your statements about immigration, I'm wondering, um, your personal opinion on um the expansion of the EU to include Turkey. **Slavoj Žižek:** Uh, as to the inclusion of Turkey, okay, but this is empirical question, maybe I don't know enough about it. My general position is—generally I am sympathetic although I see some problems and so on. That's not—that's an empirical question where I'm probably not fully qualified. But what really interests me—how you mentioned Huntington. Well, my main position apropos Huntington was made clear when I think I elaborated in my *Welcome to the Desert of the Real*, where my claim is that one should not oppose Huntington and Fukuyama. They are for me two—sorry—they are for me two sides of the same coin. Usually one says, "Oh, Fukuyama naively thinks or at least did think about the possibility of this, I don't know, new global liberal democratic universe, we are all participating in the same big society, while Huntington sees clashes, conflicts and so on." But I think that clashes of civilizations are precisely the form of politics at, as Fukuyama would have put it, at the end of history. Where precisely because of the move that I described very briefly—not theoretically, really analytically at the very beginning—this post-political universe where the questions we are debating, which are truly questions of political choice, are more and more cultural questions: gay marriage questions, gay marriage—uh—abortion and so on. So I think that the two are the same and this again has to be perceived as some kind of dialectical identity which gives the key to our situation. I don't think that these cultural clashes or clashes of civilizations are—are a kind of remainder not yet overcome by further liberal development. I think that the more we will have global capitalism, the more we will have them. That's where I'm—that's where I'm—that's where I'm a pessimist. Although another question—so again, my formula here is not to get over the clash of civilizations with some kind of the most boring United UNESCO proclamations—"nonetheless we are all one—one big human family" and then this—No, I think we need, as I always claim, more struggle, more hatred. That is to say, the only way to overcome clash of civilizations, the only true link between civilizations is to focus on the clash within each civilization and then to establish a solidarity. Our solidarity with Arabs shouldn't be like "Oh, we may have different Gods but you know like this postmodern Gnostic shit sounds, you know like—aren't all our Gods different names for the same unknown entity or whatever?" No! The point is that the divisions are even radical. The point is we have a clash within ourselves, our civilization is agonistic, their civilization is agonistic. Let's see if—if we can have a solidarity in our struggles. The solidarity in struggles is for me the only way out of—out of clash of civilizations. And can I tell you briefly, really... no, I find—I am human in the sense in which Immanuel Kant says that a human is an animal who needs a master, you know, like I need somebody to control me. Okay. When I visited recently China, you know, first we were engaged in this—very personal simple experience—in this, you know, totally boring multicultural politenesses—"Oh how interesting, you know," trying to—what you were saying—trying to establish some links. Then two groups of Chinese started to fight each other ferociously about how to read some Hegelian points and so on. And okay, to make a slight—uh—almost racist remark, I had a wonderful experience where one of the participants attacked me that I underestimate the—uh—the—that I underestimate the role of transcendent—transcendent realism in Lacan. Now I didn't quite get it what this should mean, no? I thought transcendent realism like reality exists and is transcendent to our senses, like some kind of primitive Lenin from *Materialism and Empirio-criticism*, materialism or what, no? And then I got it. That was the beauty. This was the clumsy re-translation back into English of surrealism. They translated "sur-transcendent," he simply meant in young Lacan references to Dali, all those guys were crucial, no? But okay, that's another question that I found this—what I'm saying is that then there was a clash between two groups of Chinese and at that point I became identified, you know, I immediately joined one camp and then this very mysterious how even all these problems—"Oh sorry to mis-understand you correctly" and so on—literally disappeared. I believe in universality, but not in this universality above conflicts, you know, like "What are our small struggles if you look from the property trust" or whatever. No, universality is universality of a fight. That's for me the only universality to be reasserted. This is the way above these extremely boring politically correct debates—"How do we know that when I debate with the others that I'm not imposing when I talk about freedom my notion of freedom of them, that I'm not a secret Western imperialist?" Where if we fight the enemy, all this common enemy, all these problems disappear. I think political struggle is a form of actual universality. Thank you. We still have time to squeeze a couple more in, I'm sure. Go on then. **Question:** One of the points of your last book was that um, to rehabilitate... **Slavoj Žižek:** There are too many, which one? *Lost Causes*? **Question:** Yeah, *Lost Causes*. Sorry. Yeah. Um, to rehabilitate the kind of leftist political ideology you're talking about, one of the crucial things that needed to happen was uh, to analyze Stalinism and the authoritarian tendencies in that form of leftist politics, um, that hadn't been dealt with by the left but had been extremely well-critiqued by the right. Um, I just wondered when are you going to get around to writing a book on that? **Slavoj Žižek:** You know what, I do love to... I'm sorry, yeah, let me make a point clear. I'm even embarrassed to answer to you precisely because I love your question, but you know what happens to me all the time when I write about Stalinism? People always tell me, "Can't you get rid over this boring East European drama and so on as if nobody—nobody cares about it?" But again, let me quickly repeat, quickly, quickly, not to provoke you... quickly repeat my general position. First, all those who think that I'm kind of playing some kind of obscene secret game of secretly rehabilitating Stalin or whatever, I'm sorry to disappoint them, they are wrong, no? What intrigues me—the only point on which I do insist—is that there was an authentic moment in October Revolution, which makes the whole situation if anything even more tragic. Because what I want to emphasize is how—what I want to—a point I repeat in many of my last books: for example, isn't this a mystery for me, a kind of philosophical detective mystery, why almost total silence in Frankfurt School about Stalinism? And don't know, I did my homework, don't counter-attack, I know there is *Soviet Marxism* by Marcuse; then there is—there is this Neumann's *Behemoth*, no? Already in the late thirties I think. And then there are some of dissident uses of Habermas in some Eastern countries, like Habermas's civil society blah blah blah to apply it as against the totalitarian—the totalitarians. But what Behe—what Neumann does in *Behemoth* is simply a version of that fashionable theory that all big systems of the day—fascism,
Thanks very much. I'm honored to be here. This meeting confronts me in a very painful way with the limitation of being a philosopher. I cannot answer your probably implicit demand to provide solutions or at least directions what to do apropos the ongoing financial crisis. The task of philosophy is not to provide answers but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be part of the problem, mystifying it instead of enabling us to solve it. There are not only wrong answers, there are also wrong questions. These wrong questions are what we call ideology. When we are dealing with a problem which is undoubtedly a real one, ideology performs its invisible mystification. Say, tolerance designates a real problem. And I'm as a rule asked when I oppose tolerance, but how can you be for intolerance towards foreigners, for anti-feminism, for homophobia and so on? But therein resides the catch. Of course I'm not against all this, but what I am against is today's automatic perception of racism as a problem of tolerance. Go and check Martin Luther King's speeches. The word tolerance is practically absent from them. For him, one doesn't fight racism with tolerance but with emancipatory political struggle, even armed struggle. So why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance rather than problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? The immediate answer lies in the liberal multiculturalist's basic ideological operation, the culturalization of politics. Political differences—differences conditioned by political inequality or economic exploitation—are naturalized and neutralized into cultural differences, that is, into different ways of life which are something given, something that cannot be overcome. They can only be tolerated. And incidentally, I think that the same goes for harassment. In today's ideological space, the very real harassment—rape, bigotry—is often reduced, intertwined with two or intertwined with the narcissistic notion of an individual who experiences all proximity of others as an intrusion into his or her private space. Ideology is in this precise sense a notion which while designating a real problem blurs a crucial line of separation. And I think we should do the same apropos the financial meltdown. What can help us is the fact that the very term ideology intervened at the crucial moment of the debates surrounding the ongoing crisis. As probably a lot of you know, on October 23rd, Alan Greenspan, the non-partisan subject supposed to know, secret master of the long period of economic growth in the last decades, was submitted to a congressional hearing. In the climactic moment of this hearing, the US representative Henry Waxman intervened, quote: "I'm going to interrupt you," he says to Greenspan. "The question I have for you is, you had an ideology. This is your statement: 'I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We have tried regulation—regulations, none meaningfully worked.' That was your quote. You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?" Greenspan's answer: "I found a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works." End of quote. In other words, Greenspan conceded that when a, as he called it, "once-in-a-century credit tsunami" has engulfed financial markets, his free-market ideology shunning regulation was proven flawed. Later, Greenspan reiterated his shocked disbelief that financial companies failed to execute sufficient surveillance on their trading counterparties to prevent surging losses. Another quote from Greenspan: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief." End of quote. Shocked disbelief. Does this then mean that the financial meltdown will be a sobering moment, the awakening from a long economico-ideological dream? Well, it all depends on which ideological interpretation or story will impose itself and determine the perception of the crisis. When the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field is open for ideological competition. For example, as we all know, in Germany in the late 20s and early 30s, Hitler won in the competition for the narrative which will explain to Germans the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic and the way out of it. His narrative, of course, his plot, was the Jewish plot. In France in it was Marshal Pétain's narrative which won in explaining the reasons for the French defeat: it's not the failure of France, it's the failure of the Jewish Freemasons and so on, corruption; so defeat by Germany is a unique chance for the restoration of French greatness and so on. The danger is thus, I think, that the ongoing meltdown will be used following the lines of what Naomi Klein called the shock doctrine. Quote: "The history of the contemporary free market was written in shocks. Some of the most infamous human rights violations of the past thirty-five years, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by anti-democratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market reforms." End of quote. So, I think the danger is that the ongoing meltdown will also be used as a kind of intended or non-intended shock therapy creating ideological conditions for further liberal measures. This already happened a couple of times when nobody expected it to happen. For example, some naive leftists claim that it is the legacy of the Cultural Revolution in China which acts as a counterforce to the unbridled capitalism, preventing its worst excesses, maintaining a minimum of social solidarity. What if, however, it is exactly the opposite that is the case? What if in a kind of unintended and for this reason all the more cruelly ironic cunning of reason, the Chinese Cultural Revolution with its brutal erasure of past traditions was a shock which created the conditions for the ensuing capitalist explosion? What if today's China has to be added to Naomi Klein's list of states in which a natural, military, or social catastrophe cleared the slate for a new capitalist explosion? There is even a further paradox at work here. There is beyond all cheap gibes and superficial analogies a profound structural homology between the Maoist permanent self-revolutionizing, the permanent struggle against the ossification of state structures, and the inherent dynamics of capitalism. I'm tempted to paraphrase here Bertolt Brecht's pun: what is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank? What are the violent and destructive outbursts of a Red Guardist caught in the Cultural Revolution compared to the true cultural revolution, the permanent dissolution of all life forms necessitated by the capitalist reproduction? Today the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward in China in the late 50s is repeated as the comedy of the rapid capitalist great leap forward into modernization, with the old slogan "iron foundry into every village" re-emerging as a skyscraper into every street of Shanghai and so on. Consequently, to put in—to put it in old-fashioned Marxist terminology, the main task of the ruling ideology today is to impose a narrative which will not put the blame for the meltdown onto the global capitalist system as such but on its secondary accidental deviations—too lax legal regulations, the corruption of big financial institutions and so on. Against this tendency, one should insist on the key question: which flaw of the system as such opens up the possibility for crisis and collapses? The first thing to bear in mind is that the origin of the crisis was a benevolent one. After the digital bubble in the first years of the new millennium, the decision across the party lines in the United States was to facilitate real estate investments in order to keep economy going. Today's meltdown is the price paid for the fact that the United States avoided a recession five, six years ago. The danger is thus that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one which instead of awakening us from a dream will enable us to continue to dream. And it is here that we should start to worry. Not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, the so-called, to use the nice euphemism, further structural adjustments. But we should worry about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the war on terror or repeat interventionism, military interventionism in order to keep the economy running, or in home politics, the sudden rise of populist racism all around Europe. I more and more think that in this post-political era where we are today that we are slowly approaching a new model in the developed states where the two parties are no longer moderate left, moderate right, but how should I call it, a neutral technocratic party usually more culturalist open, post—post-political, claiming we are just for [unintelligible] reasonable administration, so pure technocratic party and more rightist populist party. That's the only alternative unfortunately which is emerging. An exemplary case of how the meltdown already is used in ideologico-political struggle is the debate in the United States on what to do with General Motors. Should the state allow its bankruptcy or not? Since General Motors is one of the institutions which define the so-called American dream, its bankruptcy was long considered unthinkable. But more and more voices now refer to the meltdown as the additional push which should make us accept the unthinkable. For example, a recent column in New York Times with the title "Imagining a General Motors Bankruptcy" dotted the i when it focused on the standoff between General Motors and its unionized workers. Here is a quote: "Bankruptcy would allow General Motors to unilaterally reject its collective bargaining agreements, as long as a judge approved." End of quote. In other words, bankruptcy should be used to break the backbone of one of the last remaining strong trade unions in the United States, leaving thousands with lower wages and other thousands much more tragically with lower retirement sums. Note the contrast with the urgency to save the big banks. Here, where the survival of thousands of active or retired workers is at stake, there is of course no emergency but on the contrary an opportunity to allow free market to show its brutal force. As if the trade unions, not the wrong strategy of the managers, are to blame for the General Motors troubled waters. This is how the impossible becomes possible. What was hitherto considered unthinkable within the horizon of the established standards of work decency and solidarity should become acceptable. Marx wrote that bourgeois ideology loves to historicize. Every social, religious, cultural form is historical, contingent, relative, every form with the exception of its own. There was history, as Marx put it, but now there is no history. With capitalist liberalism, history is at an end, the natural form is found. This old paradox of liberal ideology exploded with new power in today's apologies of the end of history. To get a clinically pure, as it were, distilled version of today's capitalist ideology, one should turn not so much to Fukuyama as to—my choice—Guy Sorman, a French journalist ideologist, I will not call him theoretician. The very title of the interview, one of the interviews he recently gave, "This crisis will be short enough," signals that Sorman fulfills the basic demand that ideology has to meet with regard to the financial meltdown: to re-normalize the situation. A quote: "This ceaseless replacement of the old with the new driven by technological—by technical innovation and entrepreneurialism, itself encouraged by good economic policies, brings prosperity, though those displaced by the process who find their jobs made redundant can understandably object to it." End of quote. This, incidentally, this re-normalization of course co-exists with its opposite: the panic raised by the authorities in order to create a shock among the wide public. The very fundamentals of our way of life are threatened and thereby to make the public ready to accept the proposed solutions. Back to Sorman. His starting premise is that in the last decades, more precisely after the fall of socialism in economy finally became a fully tested science. In an almost laboratory situation, the same country was split into two: West and East Germany, South and North Korea, South and North Vietnam. Each part submitted to the opposite economic system, and the result was unambiguous. But I ask myself, is economy really a science? Does the present crisis not demonstrate that as one of the participants put it, no one really knows what to do? The reason is that expectations are part of the game. How the market will react depends not only on how much people trust the interventions, but even more on how much they think others will trust them. One cannot take into account—into account the effects of one's own interventions. So while Sorman admits that market is full of irrational behavior, his medi—medicament is not even psychology but neuroeconomics. Listen, a quote: "Economic actors tend to behave both rationally and irrationally. Laboratory work has demonstrated that one part of our brain bears blame for many of our economically mistaken short-term decisions, while another is responsible for decisions that make economic sense, usually taking a longer view. Just as the state protects us from asymmetric, asymmetric by forbidding insider trading, should it also protect us from our own irrational impulses?" End of quote. Of course, Sorman is quick to add that, another quote: "it would be preposterous to use behavioral economics to justify restoring excessive state regulations. After all, the state is no more rational than the individual, and its actions can have enormously destructive consequences. Neuroeconomics should encourage us to make markets more transparent, not more regulated." End of quote. I mean, I find this proposal wonderful. To treat this necessary psychological effect of capitalist market, so-called irrational behavior, as a neuronally-based pathology to be treated in this way. With this happy twin rule of economic science supplemented by neuroeconomics, gone are the old times of ideological dreams masked as science. So, so Sorman claims. As it was the case of Marx, whose work, quote, "can be described as a materialist rewriting of the Bible." End of quote. But even if Marxism is dead, the naked emperor continues to haunt us with new clothes. The chief among them, according to Sorman, ecologism. Sorman claims that the ecological movement is the communism of the 21st century. Quote: "It is certain that ecologism is a recreation of communism, the actual anti-capitalism. However, its other half is composed of a quarter of pagan utopia of the cult of nature, which is much earlier than Marxism, which is why ecologism is so strong in Germany with its naturalist and pagan tradition. Look-look. Ecologism is thus an anti-Christian movement. Nature has precedence over man. The last quarter of ecological problematic is rational. There are true problems for which—listen, that's crucial—for which there are technical solutions." End of quote. Note the term technical solutions. Rational problems have technical solutions. I claim a blatantly wrong claim. The confrontation with ecological problems demands choices and decisions: what to produce, what to consume and so on, which ultimately concern the very way of life of the people. As such they are not technical but eminently political in the most radical sense of fundamental social choices. So back to Sorman. No wonder that capitalism is presented in technical terms, not even as a science but simply as something that works. It needs no ideological justification because its success itself is its sufficient justification. Socialism—capitalism works. That's it. Now Sorman is aware of the problem that lurks here. How to keep people's faith in capitalism alive when the inexorable reality of a crisis brutally crushes these dreams? Here enters the need for a mature realistic pragmatism. One should heroically resist dreams of perfection and happiness and accept the bitter capitalist reality as the best possible or the least bad of all worlds. Rarely, I think, was the function of ideology described in clearer terms: to defend the existing system against any serious critique, legitimizing it as a direct expression of human nature. A quote: "An essential task of democratic governments and opinion makers when confronting economic cycles and political pressure is to secure and protect the system that has served humanity so well, and not to change it for the worse on the pretext of its imperfection. Still, this lesson is doubtless one of the hardest to translate into language that public opinion will accept. The best of all possible economic systems is indeed imperfect. Whatever the truth uncovered by economic science, the free market is finally only the reflection of human nature, itself hardly perfectible." End of quote. So, it doesn't work fully, free market, but the reason is directly human nature. End of quote. Such ideological legitimations, I think, perfectly exemplify Alain Badiou's precise formula of the basic paradox of enemy propaganda. Enemy propaganda fights something of which it is itself not aware, something for which it is structurally blind. Not the actual counterforces, political opponents, but the possibility, the utopian revolutionary emancipatory potential which is immanent to the situation. Quote from Badiou: "The goal of all enemy propaganda is not to annihilate an existing force—this function is generally left to police—but rather to annihilate an unnoticed possibility of the situation. This possibility is also unnoticed by those who conduct this propaganda, since its features are to be simultaneously immanent to the situation and not to appear in it." End of quote. This is why I think enemy propaganda against radical politics is by definition cynical. Not in the simple sense of not believing its own words, but at a much more basic level. It is cynical precisely and even more insofar as it does believe its own words, since its message is a resigned conviction that the world we live in, even if not the best of all possible worlds, is the least bad one, so that any radical change can only make it worse. Sorman's version is of course too brutal to be directly endorsed as hegemonic. That's why I picked this relatively unknown guy here, at least in the Anglo-Saxon domain, Guy Sorman. Because you know, you have to look to the margins to see the underlying ideological structure emerge at its purest. There is something of an over-identification in Sorman's version. He states too openly the underlying premises, and this is why he is an embarrassment. Out of present crisis, the version which is emerging as hegemonic, I think, is not this brutal reassertion of capitalism but that of, as they call it, socially responsible eco-capitalism. While admitting that in the past and present capitalism was often over-exploitative or catastrophic, the claim is that one can already discern signs of a new orientation which is aware that the capitalist mobilization of society's productive capacity can also be made to serve ecological goals, the struggle against poverty and so on. As a rule, this version is presented as part of the shift towards a new holistic post-materialist spiritual paradigm. In our era, so we are told, in our era of the growing awareness of the unity of all life on earth and of the common dangers we are all facing, a new approach is emerging which no longer opposes market and social responsibility. They can be reunited for mutual benefit. As Thomas Friedman put it, nobody has to be vile in order to do business. Collaboration with and participation of the employees, dialogue with customers, respect for the environment, transparency of deals are nowadays the keys to success. Capitalists—capitalists should not be just machines for generating profits; their lives should and can have a deeper meaning. Their preferred motto is social responsibility and gratitude. They are the first to admit that society was incredibly good to them by allowing them to deploy their talents and amass fortunes. So it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. After all, as they like to say, all of them from Bill Gates down: what is the point of my success if not to help people? It is only this caring that makes my business success worthwhile. This new ethics of global responsibility can thus put capitalism to work as the most efficient instrument of the common good. But I claim, was the financial meltdown of not a kind of ironic comment on the ideological nature of this dream of the spiritualized and socially responsible eco-capitalism? As we all know, on December 11th, Bernard Madoff, a great investment manager and a mega-philanthropist, was arrested, charged with allegedly running a billion pyramid scheme. One has to ask here a naive question: but didn't Madoff—didn't he know that in the long term his scheme is bound to collapse? What force counteracted this obvious insight? I think it's not Madoff's personal evil or irrationality, but a pressure, a drive to go on, to expand the circulation in order to keep the machinery running, the pressure which is inscribed into the very system of capitalist relations. The temptation to morph legitimate business into a pyramid scheme is part of the very nature of the capitalist circulation. There is no exact point at which the Rubicon was crossed and the legitimate investment business morphed into an illegal pyramid scheme. The very dynamic of capitalism blurs this frontier, because capitalist investment is in its very core a risk wager that the scheme will turn out to be profitable. It's an act of borrowing from the future. A sudden shift in uncontrollable circumstances can ruin a very safe investment. This is what the capitalist risk is about. This is the reality of the postmodern capitalism. The ruinous speculation raised to a much higher degree than it was even imaginable before. The self-propelling circulation of the capital thus remains more than ever the ultimate real of our lives, the abyss which by definition cannot be controlled, since it itself controls our activity, making us blind for even the most obvious insights into the dangers we are courting. It is one big fetishist denial. I know very well the risks I'm courting, even the inevitability of the final collapse, but nonetheless I can protract the collapse a little bit more, take a little bit greater risk and so on indefinitely. The dilemma we are facing now is thus: will the crisis be used following the rules defined by Naomi Klein in her shock doctrine, or maybe, just maybe, will this very awareness of the immanent logic of today's capitalism, of where this logic is leading us, will it give rise to a slow awakening from the capitalist dogmatic dream? Perhaps the time has come to reapply to our situation Brecht's already quoted quip: what is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank? What is the stealing of a couple of thousands of dollars for which you go to prison compared to financial speculations which deprive tens of millions of their homes and savings and are then rewarded by state help of sublime grandeur? As Alain Badiou put it succinctly, a quote: "One demands absolutely from ordinary citizens to understand that it is not possible to fill in the financial gap of the social security, but that without counting the billions, one should fill in the gap of the banks. We should seriously approve that nobody wants to nationalize a factory in trouble, but that it is evident to nationalize a bank which burned because of its speculations." End of quote. One should, I think, generalize this statement. When we are fighting AIDS, hunger, lack of water, global warming and so on, although we recognize the urgency of these problems, there is always time to reflect, to postpone decisions. Recall how the main conclusion of the last meeting of the superpower leaders in Bali, hailed as a success, the main conclusion of this meeting was that they will meet again in two years to continue the talk. But with the financial meltdown, the urgency to act was unconditional. A sum beyond imagination, really in the Kantian sense sublime, was immediately found. Saving endangered species, save the planet from global warming, save the AIDS patients, save the patients dying because of the lack of funds for—for expensive treatment, save the starving children—all these can wait a little bit. But the call "save the banks" is an unconditional imperative which demands and gets immediate action. Did you feel this, how even democracy was practically suspended? I was fascinated in the United States how basically all got instantly together: McCain, McCain, Obama, Bush when the Congress—you remember in the first vote when—as I would put it as a wrong—as an old Stalinist voted wrongly, you know, took the wrong decision and they implied like "okay, okay, democracy, but no time for jokes here. This has to be done, unconditionally." And let us also not forget that this sublimely enormous sum was spent not for some clear real task but basically in order to restore confidence to the markets, to restore belief. Do we need another proof that capital is the real of our lives? The real whose demands are much more absolute than even the most pressing demands of our social and natural reality. We can all be dead because of some ecological catastrophe, there can be unrest, civil war, spread of disease and so on—"okay, okay, that can wait." Banks? No jokes there. That's the real. You don't negotiate there. But things are not as easy as they appear here. And this, I think, can maybe be the positive lesson of this crisis. Namely, the problem here is that in the capitalist system welfare of the mainstream effectively depends on the thriving Wall Street. So all these populist formulas "don't help the banks, help the ordinary small businessman" are deeply misleading. So while in the United States republican populists who resisted these financial measures are doing the wrong thing for the right reason, the proponents of the bailout are doing, I think, the right thing for the wrong reason. To put it in more sophisticated terms of propositional logic, the relationship between Main Street and Wall Street is a non-transitive one. Why? What is good for Wall Street is not necessarily good for Main Street. Main Street cannot thrive if Wall Street is not doing well. And this asymmetry gives an a priori advantage to Wall Street. That is to say, it's really as if we have here a kind of secret theological logic which says "of course we ultimately want to help ordinary people, but you cannot do it directly. If you help them directly, it will be counterproductive. The only way to help ordinary people is to help the big banks which are the blood, the very life of the system as they put it." And then we cannot do anything, but we can just pray, hope that through a kind of a grace miracle of the system somehow this help that we distribute to big banks, companies and so on will somehow trickle down to ordinary people. So—so again, the problem is that insofar as we remain in capitalism, there is a truth in this defense of Wall Street. The kick at Wall Street will really hit ordinary workers. Therein resides the hard lesson of today's crisis. The flaw is immanent to the system itself. We are, I think, approaching the moment where short-term solutions will work less and less. That's as—as one who is not qualified to pass high economic judgments, that's my, to put it very naively and modestly, even basic impression. That what really makes this crisis so unsettling is that these short-term solutions no longer work or are even counterproductive. So that the more you try to do, the more you are confronting the basic problem, which is the system as such. So what to do, how to act? Well, I will not answer in this point here. Come to the conference on the "Idea of Communism" this weekend in Birkbeck College, maybe you will get some answers. But I would like to use the remaining time to change the terrain and point out another danger which is extremely serious, I claim, which lurks in the moments of crisis: a certain ideological regression. Recently—let me begin with a general observation—recently the notion of toxic subjects is gaining popularity in, especially, United States academia. For example, in her book *Toxic People*, Lillian Glass identifies thirty types of toxic people, some with humorous labels such as the "Smiling Two-Faced Sneaky Backstabber" and so on. She provides a "Toxic People Quiz" to help readers identify which category a suspect toxic terror, which category he falls into, and suggests ten techniques to handle them: direct confrontation, vicarious fantasy, calm questioning and so on. Conceding that to some degree we are all toxic, Glass offers a "Toxic Image Inventory" enabling us to identify our own destructive behavior. In the same mode, Albert Bernstein in his *Emotional Vampires*, dealing with people who drain you dry, goes a step further and directly mobilizes horror mythology, speaking directly of emotional vampires preying on us, masquerading as ordinary people. They may lurk in your office, your family, your circle of friends, perhaps—he says—they even share your bed. Bright, talented, and charismatic, they win your trust and then they drain you out of your energy. This topic of toxic subjects is expanding much further than immediate interpersonal relations in a paradigmatic postmodern way. The predicate "toxic" covers a series of properties which belong to totally different domains—natural, cultural, psychological, political. A toxic subject can be an immigrant with a deadly disease who should be quarantined. A terrorist whose deadly plans should be prevented and who belongs to Guantanamo, the empty zone—the empty zone exempted from the rule of law. A fundamentalist ideologist who should be silenced because he is spreading hatred. A parent, teacher or priest who abuses and corrupts children. See Susan Forward's *Toxic Parents*, a detailed study of the way parents can ruin their children's lives. So what I propose here is that in a Hegelian way of universalization, one should accomplish here the passage from predicate to subject. From the standpoint of postmodern individualist subject, is there not something toxic in the very idea of a parent, this parasitic mediator who subjects the subject to an authority in the very process of—of raising him or her as free and autonomous? If there is a clinical lesson about parenthood, it is that there is no clean non-toxic parent. And one should bring this generalization I think to the end. What is toxic is ultimately the neighbor as such, the abyss of the neighbor's desire or obscene enjoyment. So that the ultimate aim of all rules of personal relations is to quarantine or at least neutralize and contain this toxic dimension, to reduce the neighbor to a fellow man. It is thus not enough to search for contingent toxic components in another subject, maybe subject as such is toxic. And this model is I think socialized in the emerging new postmodern racism directed at—let's call them—toxic immigrants. As if in an ironic nod to Giorgio Agamben's theory, in July the Italian government proclaimed the state of emergency, which still lasts in entire Italy, in order to cope with the problem of the neighbor in its paradigmatic form today, the illegal entry of the immigrants from North Africa and Eastern Europe. Making a step further in this direction, at the beginning of August the Italian government demonstratively deployed armed soldiers to control sensitive points in big cities—train station, commercial centers—and thus raise public security. There are now plans to use the military to protect women from rapes and so on. What is important to note here is that the emergency state was introduced without great fuss. Life goes on as normal. Is this not the state we are approaching in developed country all around the globe? Where this or that form of emergency state against the terrorist threat, against immigrants, is simply accepted as a necessary measure which guarantees the normal run of things. Which is the logic at work here? We should return to a pretty terrifying formula of so-called "reasonable antisemitism" which was proposed in France in by the great French antisemitic intellectual Robert Brasillach, who saw himself as a "modern" antisemite. Quote from him: "We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half-Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half-Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew. And the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz. We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual antisemitism is to organize a reasonable antisemitism." End of quote. Is this same attitude not at work in the way our governments are dealing with the immigrant threat? After righteously rejecting direct populist racism as unreasonable, unacceptable for our democratic standards, they endorse a reasonably racist protective measures. Or as today's Brasillachs—some of them even social democrats—are telling us: "We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and East European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don't want to kill anyone, we don't want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable violent anti-immigrant measures is to organize a reasonable anti-immigrant protection." What I fear is that such "reasonable racism" will—will get a big boost by the present crisis. Radical multiculturalist liberals are of course terrified by this prospect. But I think their legacy is part of the problem. Why? I want to refer to a book now with which I totally don't agree, Jean-Claude Milner's new analysis of the May in France, *L'Arrogance du présent* (The Arrogance of the Present), but there are some important developments in the book. Milner develops how the French establishment succeeded in undoing all threatening consequences of the May by way of incorporating the so-called "spirit of and thereby turning it against the real core of The demand for new rights which would have meant a true redistribution of power were granted but in the guise of permissions. And permissive society designates precisely the way to broaden the scope of what subjects are allowed to do without giving them any real additional power. A nice quote from Milner: "Those who hold power know very well the difference between a right and a permission. A right in a strict sense of the term gives access to the exercise of a power at the expense of another power. A permission doesn't diminish the power of the one who gives it; it doesn't augment the power of the one who gets it. It makes his life easier, which is not nothing. This is how it goes with the right to divorce, abortion, gay marriage and so on. They—these are all permissions masked as rights. They do not change in any way the distribution of powers. Such was the effect of the spirit of It effectively contributed to make life easier. This is a lot, but this is not all, because it didn't encroach upon powers." End of quote. So in what did more closely this shift in capitalism after events consist? The best description, at least for what went on in France, is probably Boltanski and Chiapello's *The New Spirit of Capitalism*. The thesis is that from the 1970s onwards, a new figure of the spirit of capitalism is emerging. Capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist structure of the production process and developed a network-based form of organization founded on employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace. Instead of hierarchical centralized chain of command, we get networks with a multitude of participants organizing work in the form of teams or projects intent of customer—on customer satisfaction, and a general mobilization of workers thanks to their leader's vision. In this way, capitalism is transformed and legitimized as an egalitarian project. By way of accentuating autopoietic interaction and spontaneous self-organization, it even usurped the far-left's rhetoric of workers' self-management and turned it from an anti-capitalist to a capitalist slogan. At the level of consumption, this new spirit is the one of the so-called cultural capitalism. We primarily buy commodities neither on account of their utility, their real properties, nor as status symbols. We buy them to get the experience provided by them. We consume them in order to make our life pleasurable and meaningful. Consumption should sustain the quality of life. Its time should be, as they put it in California, quality time. Not the time of alienation of imitating models imposed by society, but the time of the authentic fulfillment of my true self, of the sensuous play of experience of caring for others, from ecology to charity. Here is an exemplary case of cultural capitalism: Starbucks' self-description of their ethos—like E-T-H-O-S, like ethics—Ethos Water program. Quote. I mean, after reading this passage I was tempted to—to—to be a terrorist and start to throw Molotov cocktails at Starbucks. "Ethos Water is a brand with a social mission helping children around the world get clean water and raising awareness of the world water crisis. Every time you purchase a bottle of—bottle of Ethos Water, Ethos Water will contribute five US cents towards our goal of raising at least ten million dollars. Through the Starbucks Foundation, Ethos Water supports humanitarian water programs in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Today, Ethos Water grant commitments exceed million dollars," and so on and so on and so on. Of course they forget to say that this—I mean, the—the manipulation here is breathtaking. That here, but in the United States, this water costs instead of before, so that they give five cents but they immediately profit forty-five. But I think they make you feel well, that's the point. This is how capitalism at the level of consumption integrated the legacy of the critique of alienated consumption. Authentic experience matters. Is this not why—let me go to the end here—why we buy organic food? Don't fool me. Do you really believe that the half-rotten expensive organic apples are healthier? I don't. So why are we buying them? Well, it makes you feel good. Instead you say to yourself, "You see, I'm not just a stupid consumer. By buying organic apples I participate in a meaningful social activity, I'm helping all of us becoming aware of the crisis we are all in" and so on and so on and so on. That's the problem for me with this attitude. Why? The first thing to do is to problematize this tolerant and so on post-68 ideological universe. How? Allow me to conclude with a couple of more radical proposals. Walter Benjamin's old thesis: "every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution." I think not only holds today but is today more pertinent than ever. Liberals like to point out similarities between left and right extremisms. Hitler's terror and camps imitated Bolshevik terror. The Leninist party is today alive in Al-Qaeda and so on and so on. I say yes, but what does all this mean? I claim it can also be read as an indication of how fascism literally replaced—took the place of the leftist revolution. Its rise was the left's failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, a dissatisfaction which the left was not able to mobilize. And I think today it's especially important to emphasize how the same holds for the so-called, by some people, not me, "Islamo-fascism." Is the rise of radical Islamism not exactly correlative to the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries? Today, when Afghanistan is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers that thirty years ago it was a country with strong secular tradition, up to a powerful communist party which took power there independently of the Soviet Union? Soviet Union later intervened and saved them. Where did this secular tradition disappear? In Europe, exactly the same goes for Bosnia. Back in the 1970s and 80s, Bosnia and Herzegovina was multiculturally the most thriving, alive of all Yugoslav republics, with an internationally recognized cinema school, a unique style of rock music and so on. In today's Bosnia, there are effectively strong fundamentalist forces, like the crowd which brutally attacked the gay parade in Sarajevo in September But the main reason of this regression is the desperate situation of Bosnians in the war where they were basically abandoned by the Western powers. And as Thomas Frank has shown, the same goes for Kansas—the US homegrown version of Afghanistan—Kansas, the state which was till 1970s the bedrock of radical leftist populism is today the bedrock of Christian fundamentalism. Does this not confirm again Benjamin's thesis that fascism is an index of a failed revolution? Now, the most catastrophic conclusion that can be drawn from this constellation is the one drawn by a theoretician whom I otherwise appreciate very much, Moishe Postone, and some of his colleagues. His thesis to simplify is the following one: since every crisis which opens up a space for radical left also gives rise to antisemitism or populist racism, it is better for us to support successful capitalism and hope there will be no crisis. Brought to its conclusion by for example Bernard-Henri Lévy, this reasoning implies that—and this is now Bernard-Henri Lévy's thesis—anti-capitalism is as such secretly antisemitic. The difference between liberalism and the radical left is that although they refer to the same three elements—liberal center, populist right, radical left—they locate them in a different topology. For the liberal center, radical left and right are the two forms of appearance of the same totalitarian excess. While for the left, the only true alternative is between itself, the left, and the liberal mainstream, with the populist radical right as nothing but the symptom of liberalism's inability to deal with the leftist threat. One should accomplish here a Hegelian step back and put in question the very measure from which fundamentalism appears in all its horror. Liberals I think have long ago lost their right to judge. What do I mean by this? Let me now conclude with a brutal example. The "Third Wave"—not third wave, wave like the sea. This is, maybe some of you know, a social experiment undertaken by history teacher Ron Jones at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, of course, in April Unable to explain to his students how Germans could obey Hitler and accept the Holocaust, he decided to show this to them instead. So he started a movement called the "Third Wave" and convinced his students that the movement is to—the goal of the movement is to eliminate democracy. Jones emphasized this main point of the movement in the motto: "Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride." On the fourth day, however, Jones decided to terminate the experiment because it was slipping out of his control. Students became increasingly—increasingly involved in the project, fully identified with it. Their discipline and loyalty were astounding. Some of them even denounced to Jones some of their peers whom they suspected that they do not really fully believe in the project and so on. So on the fourth day Jones ordered his students to attend a rally at noon next day where then, next day, instead of a televised address by their leader, the students were presented with an—just an empty TV screen, empty channel. After a few minutes of waiting, Jones announced that they have been part of an experiment in fascism and that they all willingly created a sense of superiority and trashing the enemy—"so now you understand how Hitler did it." Now comes my result. If this is not now what I'm always expected to do, shocking and tasteless enough, then I don't know what to do. I'm more on the side of the students here. I sympathize with the students. In what sense? As expected, liberals were fascinated by the "Third Wave," discerning in it the deep *Lord of the Flies* insight into how beneath the civilized surface we are all potentially fascists. The barbarian sadistic beast is lurking in all of us, awaiting its opportunity. You know, liberals like this topic. Be careful, politically correct, watch over yourself, the beast is always waiting. But I claim, what if we shift the perspective a little bit and conceive the authoritarian personality which exploded here as the repressed obverse of the liberal open personality itself? One encounters the same ambiguity in the legendary study on "Authoritarian Personality" in which as you all know Adorno participated. The features of authoritarian personality are clearly opposed to the standard figure of open democratic personality. So the underlying dilemma is—and typically Adorno in the study avoids this crucial question—how is then the relationship between open democratic and authoritarian personality to be understood? Are these two types of personality simply the opposites in a struggle so that we should fight one against the other? Or in other words, which is the status of the scale of features which are the opposite of those which define the authoritarian personality? Are they simply to be endorsed as democratic personality, or is the authoritarian personality to be conceived as the symptomatic truth, the repressed if you want of the democratic personality—the view of more critical Marxists like Agamben and the view towards which I think Adorno tends but probably for politically opportunist reasons he's afraid to endorse it? Now, this is how we should read the liberal enthusiasm for the "Third Wave" phenomenon. The function of this experiment I think was to assert the struggle of liberal openness against the totalitarian closure as our fundamental struggle and thus to obliterate their mutual complicity, the fact that totalitarianism is the return of the repressed of liberalism itself. This obliteration also enables us to condense fascism and communism into one and the same anti-liberal totalitarian figure, and thus to block the search for a third option. This is the—this is what I claim. In the same way you got it as the struggle between today's religious fundamentalism and liberal openness is not the true struggle, in the same way that I think this is a false opposition. Of course they are radically opposed, this is a big fight, but I claim it's kind of a vicious cycle, they are reproducing each other. The task is to see what is missing in this opposition. The opposition between liberal democratic openness and a fundamentalist violence, whatever, what it excludes is simply the left. Left is missing here. And it's the same here. I think that it's absolutely crucial to see how this self-satisfaction that it gives you, this—"Oh you see how we were caught into that totalitarian trap, we started to imitate whatever, but we are not really that, we should be very careful" and so on—is to avoid the crucial question: the third option, the personality structure of a subject engaged in a radical emancipatory struggle, a subject who subscribes without any qualms to the motto "Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride" and yet remains engaged in a radical egalitarian emancipatory struggle. That's why, maybe I'm half-crazy, but that's my thesis: listen to this—"Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride." Sorry, I don't see any problem. What's bad about this if the community is—is an—an radical emancipatory community? If the discipline is a discipline of anti-fascist or whatever struggle? If the action is progressive action? If the pride is the pride in our progressive achievements? What's wrong in all this? The liberal simply cannot see this. That's the danger here. What a liberal can do apropos such a—a subject is either to dismiss it as just another version of the authoritarian personality, or to claim that this subject is placed a contradiction, like it's inconsistent, like you have nice goals, equality and so on, but your means are authoritarian and so on and so on. In both cases, the specificity of this third type of subject is—remains unseen. There is no place for this type of subject in today's liberal cognitive mapping. So that's my thesis. Now I'm really concluding. What Max Horkheimer said about fascism and liberal capitalism—you know that those who do not want to talk about fascism should also keep quiet about liberal democracy in the sense of they mutually imply each other—should also be applied to today's fundamentalism. Those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also be quiet about religious fundamentalism. The task today is to break out of this vicious cycle. A third position by definition a left one is needed. Otherwise—otherwise we are I think, to put it very simply, we are approaching something, all of us, gradually something new which is already emerging. What is this new? Recently, as you can see I read many reactionaries, I read a small book, rather debate, by Peter Sloterdijk—my political enemy but he is not an idiot—who says something very interesting. He says that if there will be a monument to some person hundreds years from now, it will be probably to Lee Kuan Yew. You know who he was, the longtime leader of Singapore. His, to put it ironically, historic achievement was first to invent and successfully practice, to cut a long story short, capitalism without democracy. Till now, liberals had one point to make, I fully admit it: sooner or later capitalism implied, demanded some kind of democracy. You can have a decade, maximum two of dictatorship like I don't know, like Chile, like South Korea, but then when things developed, democracy becomes necessary. I think that the historical meaning of what Lee Kuan Yew invented is a model which no longer follows this logic. And the same goes on in China today. Maybe you know that Deng Xiaoping, when he was preparing his reforms, visited Singapore, and I saw him saying on the TV—I saw some interview—like "this is the path for the new China" and so on. So because of this, because of this, because the last thing that you can say did give some legitimacy to capitalism—this inextricable link with democracy—is its fall—is falling apart. What does it mean? This means that liberalism itself is not strong enough, I claim, to fight fundamentalism. For this, the third position is needed; we need to break out of it. How? I don't know, I only know what sad fate awaits us if we don't do it. Thank you very much. [Applause] But I like the dialogues that I like are late Plato's dialogues. You know how they look: one guy talks all the time, the other says like every ten minutes "By Zeus, so it is Socrates, yes." I'm inviting in this deep sense to a dialogue. [Laughter] **Question:** Just in regards to dialogue, I just had a question about your feelings on Huntington and his—some opinions on culture, um, his essays he's written just before he passed on—on how affecting culture will invariably affect the society as a whole. And following on from that, um, in regards to—to—um—in regards to your—um—your statements about immigration, I'm wondering, um, your personal opinion on um the expansion of the EU to include Turkey. **Slavoj Žižek:** Uh, as to the inclusion of Turkey, okay, but this is empirical question, maybe I don't know enough about it. My general position is—generally I am sympathetic although I see some problems and so on. That's not—that's an empirical question where I'm probably not fully qualified. But what really interests me—how you mentioned Huntington. Well, my main position apropos Huntington was made clear when I think I elaborated in my *Welcome to the Desert of the Real*, where my claim is that one should not oppose Huntington and Fukuyama. They are for me two—sorry—they are for me two sides of the same coin. Usually one says, "Oh, Fukuyama naively thinks or at least did think about the possibility of this, I don't know, new global liberal democratic universe, we are all participating in the same big society, while Huntington sees clashes, conflicts and so on." But I think that clashes of civilizations are precisely the form of politics at, as Fukuyama would have put it, at the end of history. Where precisely because of the move that I described very briefly—not theoretically, really analytically at the very beginning—this post-political universe where the questions we are debating, which are truly questions of political choice, are more and more cultural questions: gay marriage questions, gay marriage—uh—abortion and so on. So I think that the two are the same and this again has to be perceived as some kind of dialectical identity which gives the key to our situation. I don't think that these cultural clashes or clashes of civilizations are—are a kind of remainder not yet overcome by further liberal development. I think that the more we will have global capitalism, the more we will have them. That's where I'm—that's where I'm—that's where I'm a pessimist. Although another question—so again, my formula here is not to get over the clash of civilizations with some kind of the most boring United UNESCO proclamations—"nonetheless we are all one—one big human family" and then this—No, I think we need, as I always claim, more struggle, more hatred. That is to say, the only way to overcome clash of civilizations, the only true link between civilizations is to focus on the clash within each civilization and then to establish a solidarity. Our solidarity with Arabs shouldn't be like "Oh, we may have different Gods but you know like this postmodern Gnostic shit sounds, you know like—aren't all our Gods different names for the same unknown entity or whatever?" No! The point is that the divisions are even radical. The point is we have a clash within ourselves, our civilization is agonistic, their civilization is agonistic. Let's see if—if we can have a solidarity in our struggles. The solidarity in struggles is for me the only way out of—out of clash of civilizations. And can I tell you briefly, really... no, I find—I am human in the sense in which Immanuel Kant says that a human is an animal who needs a master, you know, like I need somebody to control me. Okay. When I visited recently China, you know, first we were engaged in this—very personal simple experience—in this, you know, totally boring multicultural politenesses—"Oh how interesting, you know," trying to—what you were saying—trying to establish some links. Then two groups of Chinese started to fight each other ferociously about how to read some Hegelian points and so on. And okay, to make a slight—uh—almost racist remark, I had a wonderful experience where one of the participants attacked me that I underestimate the—uh—the—that I underestimate the role of transcendent—transcendent realism in Lacan. Now I didn't quite get it what this should mean, no? I thought transcendent realism like reality exists and is transcendent to our senses, like some kind of primitive Lenin from *Materialism and Empirio-criticism*, materialism or what, no? And then I got it. That was the beauty. This was the clumsy re-translation back into English of surrealism. They translated "sur-transcendent," he simply meant in young Lacan references to Dali, all those guys were crucial, no? But okay, that's another question that I found this—what I'm saying is that then there was a clash between two groups of Chinese and at that point I became identified, you know, I immediately joined one camp and then this very mysterious how even all these problems—"Oh sorry to mis-understand you correctly" and so on—literally disappeared. I believe in universality, but not in this universality above conflicts, you know, like "What are our small struggles if you look from the property trust" or whatever. No, universality is universality of a fight. That's for me the only universality to be reasserted. This is the way above these extremely boring politically correct debates—"How do we know that when I debate with the others that I'm not imposing when I talk about freedom my notion of freedom of them, that I'm not a secret Western imperialist?" Where if we fight the enemy, all this common enemy, all these problems disappear. I think political struggle is a form of actual universality. Thank you. We still have time to squeeze a couple more in, I'm sure. Go on then. **Question:** One of the points of your last book was that um, to rehabilitate... **Slavoj Žižek:** There are too many, which one? *Lost Causes*? **Question:** Yeah, *Lost Causes*. Sorry. Yeah. Um, to rehabilitate the kind of leftist political ideology you're talking about, one of the crucial things that needed to happen was uh, to analyze Stalinism and the authoritarian tendencies in that form of leftist politics, um, that hadn't been dealt with by the left but had been extremely well-critiqued by the right. Um, I just wondered when are you going to get around to writing a book on that? **Slavoj Žižek:** You know what, I do love to... I'm sorry, yeah, let me make a point clear. I'm even embarrassed to answer to you precisely because I love your question, but you know what happens to me all the time when I write about Stalinism? People always tell me, "Can't you get rid over this boring East European drama and so on as if nobody—nobody cares about it?" But again, let me quickly repeat, quickly, quickly, not to provoke you... quickly repeat my general position. First, all those who think that I'm kind of playing some kind of obscene secret game of secretly rehabilitating Stalin or whatever, I'm sorry to disappoint them, they are wrong, no? What intrigues me—the only point on which I do insist—is that there was an authentic moment in October Revolution, which makes the whole situation if anything even more tragic. Because what I want to emphasize is how—what I want to—a point I repeat in many of my last books: for example, isn't this a mystery for me, a kind of philosophical detective mystery, why almost total silence in Frankfurt School about Stalinism? And don't know, I did my homework, don't counter-attack, I know there is *Soviet Marxism* by Marcuse; then there is—there is this Neumann's *Behemoth*, no? Already in the late thirties I think. And then there are some of dissident uses of Habermas in some Eastern countries, like Habermas's civil society blah blah blah to apply it as against the totalitarian—the totalitarians. But what Behe—what Neumann does in *Behemoth* is simply a version of that fashionable theory that all big systems of the day—fascism,
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communism, New Deal United States—are approaching the same totalitarian system and so on and so on. So this is not truly an analysis. Marcuse's book is the weird—it's a short book, it's the weirdest book I've ever read. It's so strange, it's basically the analysis of Khrushchev's 20th Congress speech... can I take a couple more? Yeah, yeah. No, all I want to say is that this is an enigma. And I—my sincere wager here as you maybe know with your kind question—is that only the left can
communism, New Deal United States—are approaching the same totalitarian system and so on and so on. So this is not truly an analysis. Marcuse's book is the weird—it's a short book, it's the weirdest book I've ever read. It's so strange, it's basically the analysis of Khrushchev's 20th Congress speech... can I take a couple more? Yeah, yeah. No, all I want to say is that this is an enigma. And I—my sincere wager here as you maybe know with your kind question—is that only the left can
Slavoj Žižek
effectively do it. For example, when I read—I have no problems as you noticed of reading enemies—when I read for example Robert Conquest, I think his best book is nonetheless that *The Harvest of Sorrow* about Ukraine, it's—you learn a lot, but there is something too naive in the theoretical explanation, in the sense of he simply makes Stalinist, how to put it, basically people who are the same liberal type but really evil, who turned... something is missing there. And the same goes, maybe you know why I develop this for the film—didn't see, I'm very sorry but this I think a nice point. The film—did you see, you all did so I can make it without boring you with telling the story, my example—did you see *Life of the Other*, *Das Leben der Anderen* (The Lives of Others)? Yes. You know what shocked me in that movie? It tries to be ferociously anti-communist, I even know why, the guy is from East Prussia, his estate from a noble family was taken, so that was his revenge. I claim—and I claim this as a leftist—the film is way too soft! It didn't get it! You know what's the story? Some corrupted minister wants to screw the writer's beautiful wife, so he asks the agents to organize uh, to listen, to totally watch over him to find something even to plant so that he will be arrested, he will get the—the woman and so on and so on. But you know what's my point? Wait a minute. A thing like this can happen also in any capitalist country; a corrupted operative can do it. What was specific of East Germany was that the writer like the one presented in the film, you know, international great figure and so on—sorry, he would have been totally under constant observation by at least ten agents all the time, even—even if there were to be no minister who wants to screw your wife. I mean you get the point: a terror which was institutional. Even if the old guys were the same, how to put it, relatively decent Stasi agents as the hero of the film who turns around, the exact—without, this is what you then get it from the film, that it was in the system, without that horny minister, exactly the same effect. And this made the film for me really dull. It's another version of *Casablanca*. I haven't seen such a—such an anti-feminist film. The story is, you know the story: what? It is—uh—we have to sacrifice the woman and then it's the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I thought, are we aware what we swallow there actually, no? So you get—just briefly back to Frankfurt School. Uh, look, what's the big achievement of Frankfurt School? *Dialectic of Enlightenment*. Which means horrible phenomena of the 20th century are not simply result of some remainders of the dark mythic past, they are results of the, how to put it, inherent antagonisms, contradictions in the very project of enlightenment. Isn't your, at least it's mine, first association if you want the pure example of *Dialectic of Enlightenment*: it's Stalinism much more than fascism. With fascism it's relatively clear, it's conservative—conservative—conservative revolution, this regression blah blah blah. But Stalinism is the true enigma! Where you have a movement, not like Nazism saying we need old hierarchy and so on—a movement of radical equality, freedom, which generated a horror in some sense, maybe we can say at the level of physical suffering, even worse than Nazism. How was this possible? How is it that, for example, this would have been and I'm saying this as a leftist my God, this would have been one of my major reproaches to Habermas. Read him. You have there a German philosopher writing the last fifty years. If you read his books, would you ever have guessed that there are two German states? That there is another... why this avoidance? The only answer that I got from their friends is they knew that to attack communism would mean to play the role in the Cold War they didn't want to. Don't bullshit! Because they made extremely clear how ferociously anti-communist they were in their public political statement. For example, in when an American general
effectively do it. For example, when I read—I have no problems as you noticed of reading enemies—when I read for example Robert Conquest, I think his best book is nonetheless that *The Harvest of Sorrow* about Ukraine, it's—you learn a lot, but there is something too naive in the theoretical explanation, in the sense of he simply makes Stalinist, how to put it, basically people who are the same liberal type but really evil, who turned... something is missing there. And the same goes, maybe you know why I develop this for the film—didn't see, I'm very sorry but this I think a nice point. The film—did you see, you all did so I can make it without boring you with telling the story, my example—did you see *Life of the Other*, *Das Leben der Anderen* (The Lives of Others)? Yes. You know what shocked me in that movie? It tries to be ferociously anti-communist, I even know why, the guy is from East Prussia, his estate from a noble family was taken, so that was his revenge. I claim—and I claim this as a leftist—the film is way too soft! It didn't get it! You know what's the story? Some corrupted minister wants to screw the writer's beautiful wife, so he asks the agents to organize uh, to listen, to totally watch over him to find something even to plant so that he will be arrested, he will get the—the woman and so on and so on. But you know what's my point? Wait a minute. A thing like this can happen also in any capitalist country; a corrupted operative can do it. What was specific of East Germany was that the writer like the one presented in the film, you know, international great figure and so on—sorry, he would have been totally under constant observation by at least ten agents all the time, even—even if there were to be no minister who wants to screw your wife. I mean you get the point: a terror which was institutional. Even if the old guys were the same, how to put it, relatively decent Stasi agents as the hero of the film who turns around, the exact—without, this is what you then get it from the film, that it was in the system, without that horny minister, exactly the same effect. And this made the film for me really dull. It's another version of *Casablanca*. I haven't seen such a—such an anti-feminist film. The story is, you know the story: what? It is—uh—we have to sacrifice the woman and then it's the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I thought, are we aware what we swallow there actually, no? So you get—just briefly back to Frankfurt School. Uh, look, what's the big achievement of Frankfurt School? *Dialectic of Enlightenment*. Which means horrible phenomena of the 20th century are not simply result of some remainders of the dark mythic past, they are results of the, how to put it, inherent antagonisms, contradictions in the very project of enlightenment. Isn't your, at least it's mine, first association if you want the pure example of *Dialectic of Enlightenment*: it's Stalinism much more than fascism. With fascism it's relatively clear, it's conservative—conservative—conservative revolution, this regression blah blah blah. But Stalinism is the true enigma! Where you have a movement, not like Nazism saying we need old hierarchy and so on—a movement of radical equality, freedom, which generated a horror in some sense, maybe we can say at the level of physical suffering, even worse than Nazism. How was this possible? How is it that, for example, this would have been and I'm saying this as a leftist my God, this would have been one of my major reproaches to Habermas. Read him. You have there a German philosopher writing the last fifty years. If you read his books, would you ever have guessed that there are two German states? That there is another... why this avoidance? The only answer that I got from their friends is they knew that to attack communism would mean to play the role in the Cold War they didn't want to. Don't bullshit! Because they made extremely clear how ferociously anti-communist they were in their public political statement. For example, in when an American general
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visited Frankfurt and there were big student demonstrators. Horkheimer not only refused to participate, he made to
visited Frankfurt and there were big student demonstrators. Horkheimer not only refused to participate, he made to
Slavoj Žižek
support the demonstrators, he made a public statement claiming whenever US Army intervenes it is on behalf of freedom and peace. The same goes today for Vietnam. If you read Horkheimer's letters you can see he was closer to Christian Democrats or liberals like Theodor Heuss, the first president who was his friend, than to social democrats. So this is for me the enigma. This
support the demonstrators, he made a public statement claiming whenever US Army intervenes it is on behalf of freedom and peace. The same goes today for Vietnam. If you read Horkheimer's letters you can see he was closer to Christian Democrats or liberals like Theodor Heuss, the first president who was his friend, than to social democrats. So this is for me the enigma. This
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intrigued me: I think
intrigued me: I think
Slavoj Žižek
Stalinism simply is still an enigma, and all these attempts to reduce it to just another sub-form of the so-called Nazi totalitarianism doesn't work. So yes. So I move on Slavoj, a couple more. **Slavoj Žižek:** I—I gracefully accept your... one or two decades ago... are you from Russia? No. Azerbaijan?
Stalinism simply is still an enigma, and all these attempts to reduce it to just another sub-form of the so-called Nazi totalitarianism doesn't work. So yes. So I move on Slavoj, a couple more. **Slavoj Žižek:** I—I gracefully accept your... one or two decades ago... are you from Russia? No. Azerbaijan?
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I'm from Israel. I'm very sorry. Okay, okay. I'm sorry. I forgot your colleague's name. Sorry. He's from—My mother is Zionist. Ah, I knew you'd say that. I'm very sorry, please go on. I'm very sorry, please. **Question:** Okay, thanks. Um, I wanted to ask you if you're familiar with the—marginal political alternative from one or two decades ago that offered an—a third position, uh, but uh, their third position was in opposition
I'm from Israel. I'm very sorry. Okay, okay. I'm sorry. I forgot your colleague's name. Sorry. He's from—My mother is Zionist. Ah, I knew you'd say that. I'm very sorry, please go on. I'm very sorry, please. **Question:** Okay, thanks. Um, I wanted to ask you if you're familiar with the—marginal political alternative from one or two decades ago that offered an—a third position, uh, but uh, their third position was in opposition
Slavoj Žižek
of both capitalism and communism. Um, they saw capitalism and communism as uh, redundant and evil to some extent, and they tried to make a third position which was a synthesis of supposedly left and right ideas. I wanted to ask you if you're familiar with that. **Slavoj Žižek:** Was
of both capitalism and communism. Um, they saw capitalism and communism as uh, redundant and evil to some extent, and they tried to make a third position which was a synthesis of supposedly left and right ideas. I wanted to ask you if you're familiar with that. **Slavoj Žižek:** Was
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this—was
this—was
Slavoj Žižek
this third option called fascism? **Question:** Pardon? **Slavoj Žižek:** Because I'm quite serious now that what—the way you describe this third position fits pretty exactly some kind of fascism, at least a soft fascism. This is how they always presented themselves, fascists. "We want a third way, taking the best from both, from communists their sense of order and so on, but"—this is the genuine fascist legitimation—is that "Communists it's good they want order and so on, organization, but they stick too much at the individual level, economic initiative and so on and so on, so we have to find a third way." Sorry, not as—again,
this third option called fascism? **Question:** Pardon? **Slavoj Žižek:** Because I'm quite serious now that what—the way you describe this third position fits pretty exactly some kind of fascism, at least a soft fascism. This is how they always presented themselves, fascists. "We want a third way, taking the best from both, from communists their sense of order and so on, but"—this is the genuine fascist legitimation—is that "Communists it's good they want order and so on, organization, but they stick too much at the individual level, economic initiative and so on and so on, so we have to find a third way." Sorry, not as—again,
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so when
so when
Slavoj Žižek
you mention this, no, sorry, I'm not aware of this. What I fear more generally is that—I'm not again, I don't know into what direction they went—but what I generally fear is that—you may disagree with me—is that there is one way to be anti-capitalist which is to change or elevate the critique of capitalism into a kind of a—you find elements of this in Heidegger, in some of the Frankfurt School people and so on—into a kind of more general critique of what can be called modern technology, instrumental reason or whatever. And then this explodes into a critique of technological civilization as such. And this—this can then be connected with so-called deep ecology, the idea is something went terribly wrong with Industrial Revolution or before, or with the Cartesian subjectivity. For example, even the one who I still have great confidence and totally support his politics, Evo Morales, made recently a big proclamation, somebody sent me his letter to international public, where he already starts with the way that makes me nervous—like "Mother Earth is complaining, Mother Earth is wounded, you know, then capitalism, you know this abstract corporatist critique of capitalism." So to give you a, how you call it, a teaser for this weekend's communism colloquium, what I will try to develop there is that of course liberal capitalism will not be able to survive the way it is. But I think that the term to be dropped is socialism. Socialism for me is, you know usually you say socialism—no, socialism is for me basically uh, how should I put it, it's—socialism the meaning of socialism today I think is mostly conservative. Socialism means "Let's keep freedoms but in a kind of hierarchic, hierarchical organic element" and so on. So I think that future will be either socialist or communist, I claim. That the—the capitalism in order to survive we have to more and more incorporate what today's predominant form of socialism which I'm tempted to call capitalism with Asian values. And the paradox is that against this temptation, we radical left should be the one to—to take over. My message to liberals is not "I hate you too much freedom." It's: "Don't you see that you will have to come to us? That the only way to—that the tendency goes into let's call it capitalism with—with Asian values. The only way for you to save what you are striving for is—is—is to come to us." That's I think what will be the struggle. Should we take one more question? **Slavoj Žižek:** Yeah, sorry, just one point. And here, although, no let me because I'm often attacked for me, one point I think to make. Some people accuse me like I'm like neither here nor there on the question of Israel, Palestine and so on. No, I first I like our position because I was attacked recently Adam
you mention this, no, sorry, I'm not aware of this. What I fear more generally is that—I'm not again, I don't know into what direction they went—but what I generally fear is that—you may disagree with me—is that there is one way to be anti-capitalist which is to change or elevate the critique of capitalism into a kind of a—you find elements of this in Heidegger, in some of the Frankfurt School people and so on—into a kind of more general critique of what can be called modern technology, instrumental reason or whatever. And then this explodes into a critique of technological civilization as such. And this—this can then be connected with so-called deep ecology, the idea is something went terribly wrong with Industrial Revolution or before, or with the Cartesian subjectivity. For example, even the one who I still have great confidence and totally support his politics, Evo Morales, made recently a big proclamation, somebody sent me his letter to international public, where he already starts with the way that makes me nervous—like "Mother Earth is complaining, Mother Earth is wounded, you know, then capitalism, you know this abstract corporatist critique of capitalism." So to give you a, how you call it, a teaser for this weekend's communism colloquium, what I will try to develop there is that of course liberal capitalism will not be able to survive the way it is. But I think that the term to be dropped is socialism. Socialism for me is, you know usually you say socialism—no, socialism is for me basically uh, how should I put it, it's—socialism the meaning of socialism today I think is mostly conservative. Socialism means "Let's keep freedoms but in a kind of hierarchic, hierarchical organic element" and so on. So I think that future will be either socialist or communist, I claim. That the—the capitalism in order to survive we have to more and more incorporate what today's predominant form of socialism which I'm tempted to call capitalism with Asian values. And the paradox is that against this temptation, we radical left should be the one to—to take over. My message to liberals is not "I hate you too much freedom." It's: "Don't you see that you will have to come to us? That the only way to—that the tendency goes into let's call it capitalism with—with Asian values. The only way for you to save what you are striving for is—is—is to come to us." That's I think what will be the struggle. Should we take one more question? **Slavoj Žižek:** Yeah, sorry, just one point. And here, although, no let me because I'm often attacked for me, one point I think to make. Some people accuse me like I'm like neither here nor there on the question of Israel, Palestine and so on. No, I first I like our position because I was attacked recently Adam
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Kirsch, The New Republic, as openly
Kirsch, The New Republic, as openly
Slavoj Žižek
neo-fascist antisemite. It's I mean what people can write, it's breathtaking. You know like
neo-fascist antisemite. It's I mean what people can write, it's breathtaking. You know like
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the thesis you
the thesis you
Slavoj Žižek
find there is that I actively support—read it, it's on the internet now—the physical elimination, Holocaust of all Jews with the exception of those who are critical about the State of Israel. That my thesis is simply new Holocaust. Okay, why not? Interesting creative idea. But what I
find there is that I actively support—read it, it's on the internet now—the physical elimination, Holocaust of all Jews with the exception of those who are critical about the State of Israel. That my thesis is simply new Holocaust. Okay, why not? Interesting creative idea. But what I
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want to say, for example,
want to say, for example,
Slavoj Žižek
is that it goes without saying that for the same text some friend told me I was attacked in Al-Ahram as a Zionist agent and so on. There is a moment of truth, in what sense? I think it's crucial here to maintain. If you are a leftist, that should be your position: even if we all die because of the Middle
is that it goes without saying that for the same text some friend told me I was attacked in Al-Ahram as a Zionist agent and so on. There is a moment of truth, in what sense? I think it's crucial here to maintain. If you are a leftist, that should be your position: even if we all die because of the Middle
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East conflict, it's in a
East conflict, it's in a
Slavoj Žižek
fundamental sense a fake, wrong conflict. This conflict is here because we are not fighting the right battles. I mean for me it's the end of the world then Huntington is right or whatever if we accept that this is the real conflict. Which means the consequence of this is that on the one hand there should be absolutely no tolerance for antisemitism. I don't buy this "Oh you should understand them the Arabs because, you know, they were so screwed up." No. On the other hand, one should emphasize enough more—and it's deep interesting how difficult this is
fundamental sense a fake, wrong conflict. This conflict is here because we are not fighting the right battles. I mean for me it's the end of the world then Huntington is right or whatever if we accept that this is the real conflict. Which means the consequence of this is that on the one hand there should be absolutely no tolerance for antisemitism. I don't buy this "Oh you should understand them the Arabs because, you know, they were so screwed up." No. On the other hand, one should emphasize enough more—and it's deep interesting how difficult this is
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to publish. I sent this to
to publish. I sent this to
Slavoj Žižek
New York Times, they didn't want it and so on. My basic point about Middle East process now: okay of course this is open to debate. Should a Hamas bomb rocket blah blah blah?
New York Times, they didn't want it and so on. My basic point about Middle East process now: okay of course this is open to debate. Should a Hamas bomb rocket blah blah blah?
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And it's easy to play this moralistic role, "Oh my God, of course if there are rockets falling on you, you will answer." Okay, in a way it is true, but I think that's not the question. The question is what happens when nothing is going on in the Middle East. You should really visit Middle East and go to Ramallah or East—sorry, West Bank. Don't go to these
And it's easy to play this moralistic role, "Oh my God, of course if there are rockets falling on you, you will answer." Okay, in a way it is true, but I think that's not the question. The question is what happens when nothing is going on in the Middle East. You should really visit Middle East and go to Ramallah or East—sorry, West Bank. Don't go to these
Slavoj Žižek
big political centers, go—I did it—with
big political centers, go—I did it—with
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ordinary farmers and so on, and you will see
ordinary farmers and so on, and you will see
Slavoj Žižek
what it means how should I call it,
what it means how should I call it,
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occupation through
occupation through
Slavoj Žižek
bureaucracy. This detailed slow strangling of—of Palestinian
bureaucracy. This detailed slow strangling of—of Palestinian
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viability with measures of
viability with measures of
Slavoj Žižek
ridiculous rules. Do you know for example in just small words you it's not big news but do you know for example that a week ago it was posted in Western media marginally that the government of Israel established a plan to build new homes? This means for people. On the West Bank! Even worse. If you look how they are disposed, they are not close at least to the border with pre-67 Israel, they are not even most of them close to the existing Israeli settlements, but they are strategically dispersed to gradually cover—cover all the terrain. That's for me nonetheless without excusing any of horrible things that Palestinians can be doing and so on, this is for me the fundamental reality of the situation. This is what we should talk about. This is what is really going on: this slow, slow strangling of a nation. Okay. Time for one more question. **Question:** We come from a... we used to share the same country before Yugoslavia. I'm from Kosovo. So I just want to ask you a question. You know, the id—no, this is my point. Um, how did the authoritarian communist regime that you maneuvered being obviously at your early stages in life and forming Yugoslavia—how did that influence on your formation as an intellectual and your position today, um, and how did you escape from it as well, you know? **Slavoj Žižek:** Well you know it wasn't uh even such a big problem of escaping. Uh because as you—okay—you're too young to be but okay your parents blah blah blah in Kosovo, there probably the situation was for specific reasons of tensions with Serbs more tense. But the way I experienced the situation in Slovenia is that it was almost an ideal position to develop critical theory. Why? Because on the one hand we were still, let's face it in spite of all features which maybe made life much more tolerable than in ordinary East European regimes, you lived in a communist regime. So cut the crap, it was the same party dictatorship and so on. Life was much better, I mean like I don't know, freedom of art relative, freedom of theory relative, freedom to travel the West blah blah blah. But it was, no? So we didn't have any illusions that even some Western idiots had, you know, "Oh but isn't Yugoslav socialism something unique, a third way and so on?" It wasn't, no? On the other hand, precisely because borders to the West were totally open, we also didn't have many illusions about the West. And this is I think very simply our—our—our—our priorities. Just to answer you another question I ask you if colleague from another ex where incidentally next week I'm going to Pristina to Kosovo too... have to go there. Uh what—is that I think I
ridiculous rules. Do you know for example in just small words you it's not big news but do you know for example that a week ago it was posted in Western media marginally that the government of Israel established a plan to build new homes? This means for people. On the West Bank! Even worse. If you look how they are disposed, they are not close at least to the border with pre-67 Israel, they are not even most of them close to the existing Israeli settlements, but they are strategically dispersed to gradually cover—cover all the terrain. That's for me nonetheless without excusing any of horrible things that Palestinians can be doing and so on, this is for me the fundamental reality of the situation. This is what we should talk about. This is what is really going on: this slow, slow strangling of a nation. Okay. Time for one more question. **Question:** We come from a... we used to share the same country before Yugoslavia. I'm from Kosovo. So I just want to ask you a question. You know, the id—no, this is my point. Um, how did the authoritarian communist regime that you maneuvered being obviously at your early stages in life and forming Yugoslavia—how did that influence on your formation as an intellectual and your position today, um, and how did you escape from it as well, you know? **Slavoj Žižek:** Well you know it wasn't uh even such a big problem of escaping. Uh because as you—okay—you're too young to be but okay your parents blah blah blah in Kosovo, there probably the situation was for specific reasons of tensions with Serbs more tense. But the way I experienced the situation in Slovenia is that it was almost an ideal position to develop critical theory. Why? Because on the one hand we were still, let's face it in spite of all features which maybe made life much more tolerable than in ordinary East European regimes, you lived in a communist regime. So cut the crap, it was the same party dictatorship and so on. Life was much better, I mean like I don't know, freedom of art relative, freedom of theory relative, freedom to travel the West blah blah blah. But it was, no? So we didn't have any illusions that even some Western idiots had, you know, "Oh but isn't Yugoslav socialism something unique, a third way and so on?" It wasn't, no? On the other hand, precisely because borders to the West were totally open, we also didn't have many illusions about the West. And this is I think very simply our—our—our—our priorities. Just to answer you another question I ask you if colleague from another ex where incidentally next week I'm going to Pristina to Kosovo too... have to go there. Uh what—is that I think I
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totally
totally
Slavoj Žižek
reject any of this old ethnic hatreds bullshit about the war. I think the war exploded as a, to use Habermas's terms, the *Legitimationskrise*, legitimation crisis of communist nomenklatura. In the last decade, they lost any economic justification whatever, so the only way for local nomenklaturas to justify their rule, legitimize them, was to reinvent themselves as protectors of local communist interest and so on and so on. This was I think Milosevic's genius. Milosevic's problem—I don't think he even really cared about the Serbs. His problem was how to legitimize nomenklatura staying in power. And that was his formula. And it's wonderful to read it. Did any of you see that BBC series *Fall of Yugoslavia*? At the look at the first one, it's wonderful how many crucial data that I almost forgot, you forget. Like, do you know where Yugoslav army the first time in old Yugoslavia publicly intervened? **Audience Member:** In
reject any of this old ethnic hatreds bullshit about the war. I think the war exploded as a, to use Habermas's terms, the *Legitimationskrise*, legitimation crisis of communist nomenklatura. In the last decade, they lost any economic justification whatever, so the only way for local nomenklaturas to justify their rule, legitimize them, was to reinvent themselves as protectors of local communist interest and so on and so on. This was I think Milosevic's genius. Milosevic's problem—I don't think he even really cared about the Serbs. His problem was how to legitimize nomenklatura staying in power. And that was his formula. And it's wonderful to read it. Did any of you see that BBC series *Fall of Yugoslavia*? At the look at the first one, it's wonderful how many crucial data that I almost forgot, you forget. Like, do you know where Yugoslav army the first time in old Yugoslavia publicly intervened? **Audience Member:** In
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Kosovo. **Slavoj Žižek:** No, no, no, no, no. Okay, maybe in
Kosovo. **Slavoj Žižek:** No, no, no, no, no. Okay, maybe in
Slavoj Žižek
smaller operations, but really brutal? Do you remember when there were big demonstrations against Milosevic himself? And there the army intervened, then—really intervened, tanks were all around Belgrade. And then one week later, Milosevic's people announced, made the decision, it's now clear all his
smaller operations, but really brutal? Do you remember when there were big demonstrations against Milosevic himself? And there the army intervened, then—really intervened, tanks were all around Belgrade. And then one week later, Milosevic's people announced, made the decision, it's now clear all his
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guys
guys
Slavoj Žižek
admitted that to escalate war in Croatia. It was the direct answer of... you know, this is for me again, forget about all those years old struggles or whatever up and
admitted that to escalate war in Croatia. It was the direct answer of... you know, this is for me again, forget about all those years old struggles or whatever up and
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down, no. The problem was here, and you see here, this is what really makes me sad. I think that tragically the civil war—or the war that we have—I don't like the term civil war because then this implies as if there were ethnic groups or nations fighting each other.
down, no. The problem was here, and you see here, this is what really makes me sad. I think that tragically the civil war—or the war that we have—I don't like the term civil war because then this implies as if there were ethnic groups or nations fighting each other.
Slavoj Žižek
I still—people ask me why are you pro-Bosnian? Are—are they the same as others? No, I tell them what happened to me recently, half a year ago, I was in Sarajevo. When I approached by a car from the airport, no, I looked those mountains and asked the taxi driver, a masterly Bosnian, "Look, are—are these the mountains where Serb guns were hitting us?" And this was an ordinary guy, and I was—my God, I don't say almost started to cry but one step towards, no—I was shocked when he said "What Serbs? These were Chetniks! Serbs were also," you know, he absolutely spontaneously rejected to take it as ethnic conflict. I mean this—this is what I find—what I find admirable there, no? So—but the tragedy I think is that somehow precisely what was relatively more open about Yugoslav regime made it more vulnerable to this kind of dissolution in war. I claim if we were to have a more hardline Stalinist, openly Stalinist regime, maybe you just cut off the head and it would have been easier. This is for me the saddest irony of the situation, that what made the situation better before made it much worse later, no? [Laughter] [Applause]
I still—people ask me why are you pro-Bosnian? Are—are they the same as others? No, I tell them what happened to me recently, half a year ago, I was in Sarajevo. When I approached by a car from the airport, no, I looked those mountains and asked the taxi driver, a masterly Bosnian, "Look, are—are these the mountains where Serb guns were hitting us?" And this was an ordinary guy, and I was—my God, I don't say almost started to cry but one step towards, no—I was shocked when he said "What Serbs? These were Chetniks! Serbs were also," you know, he absolutely spontaneously rejected to take it as ethnic conflict. I mean this—this is what I find—what I find admirable there, no? So—but the tragedy I think is that somehow precisely what was relatively more open about Yugoslav regime made it more vulnerable to this kind of dissolution in war. I claim if we were to have a more hardline Stalinist, openly Stalinist regime, maybe you just cut off the head and it would have been easier. This is for me the saddest irony of the situation, that what made the situation better before made it much worse later, no? [Laughter] [Applause]