The Need to Censor our Dreams
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2014-11-11 · 1:33:20 · 13,519 words
with Cathy Newman, Darko Radosavljev, John Bird (audience member, founder of The Big Issue)
ideologycapitalismcommunism-socialismdemocracyhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisgeopolitics-warrace-antisemitismliberalism-political-correctnessrevolution-violencetechnology-ai-cyberspaceecology-climatesexuality-gendereveryday-life
Žižek delivers a lecture at the LSE's Institute of Public Affairs on his book, arguing that the left must 'censor its dreams' and abandon three exhausted utopias: Stalinist communism, social-democratic welfare state, and anti-representative direct local democracy. He critiques post-colonial anti-Western discourse as blind to capitalism's genuine universalism, dissects how ideology today operates through false individualization and superego guilt rather than explicit prohibition, and argues that global capitalism functions even more efficiently without liberal democracy, pointing to China and authoritarian modernities as proof. The Q&A extends into geopolitics (Putin, the risk of a new world war), social media as a site of class struggle, and Malcolm X's universalism as a model for solidarity.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 17
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The ethical-political task of relinquishing exhausted utopian fantasies (Stalinist communism, welfare-state social democracy, direct local democracy) so that genuinely new thinking can emerge.
The actual operative universalism of capital that renders cultural differences irrelevant in the moment of a business deal, regardless of what 'truth' or 'peace' means to each party.
as “capitalist universalism”
The real, operative universalism of global capital, transcending cultural difference in practice, as opposed to the discursively contested universalism of Western human-rights rhetoric.
as “authoritarian modernity”
Forms of capitalism (China, Singapore) that achieve rapid development and even outperform liberal capitalism precisely by dispensing with democratic freedoms.
The pattern of contemporary culture that strips experiences of their disturbing substance: beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine, sex without sex (safe sex), decaffeinated pleasures.
The codified violation of official norms that is not a true subversion but is built into and expected by the ideological order itself.
as “institutional unconscious”
The obscene, unacknowledged ritual underside of an institution (e.g. pedophilia as a structural feature of the Catholic Church, not merely individual pathology) that the institution protects by denying.
as “belief without believers”
A belief that functions socially without any individual actually owning it in the first person, illustrated by Santa Claus: neither parent nor child believes, yet the belief operates.
Althusser's concept, here reversed by Balibar: the superego interpellates subjects not into ideological masses but into isolated guilty individuals.
Reversing Althusser's formula: the superego does not absorb individuals into the collective but instead isolates them as guilty individuals, the primary form of ideology today.
The ideological mechanism that redirects systemic critique onto personal conduct ('Did you recycle?'), making individuals feel responsible for structural failures.
The Freudian agency that paradoxically intensifies guilt the more one tries to be innocent, used to explain how ecological/PC ideology perpetually makes subjects feel guilty.
as “commodity fetishism / Starbucks ideology”
Starbucks as the purest form of capitalist ideology: the inclusion of a charitable donation in the price of a commodity that allows guilt-free consumerism by integrating social duty into the act of buying.
as “abstract thinking (Hegelian sense)”
Used against Piketty and Stiglitz: taking one isolated measure (raise taxes, change laws) without seeing the whole web of conditions it presupposes, the failure to think concretely.
Žižek's measure of a genuine revolution: not the spectacular event (Tahrir Square, Istanbul) but what changes when things return to normal a month or two later.
as “progressive dogmatism”
The idea that genuine progress consists not in endless debate but in certain ethical gains (e.g. that rape is wrong) becoming non-negotiable axioms beyond argument.
as “big Other”
Invoked in the discussion of NSA surveillance: the fantasy that a comprehensive, intelligent agency records and understands everything, Žižek argues it is in fact 'stupid', drowning in data it cannot process.
Stories he reaches for 11
Starbucks integrates the consumer's social duty (5% to Guatemala children) into the price of the coffee, so the act of buying itself counts as political engagement, perfect capitalist ideology.
“you can be peacefully a consumerist because your social duty towards nature and others is included into the price of the commodity.”
Malcolm X understood that having no roots (the X replacing a slave name) is not only a wound but also a chance to achieve a universalism more authentic than the West's own, the negative becomes a positive resource.
“being deprived of your particular roots at the same time gives you a unique chance to be more universalist, authentically universalist than the western people themselves.”
Dan Brown's films delete the sex that appears in the novels (e.g. Langdon and Vittoria Vetra in Angels and Demons), showing Hollywood is now erasing sex rather than adding it for commercial appeal.
“once we thought hollywood adds sex to make it more commercial. now hollywood is erasing sex.”
In the Stalin era, criticizing Stalin was prohibited, but even more strictly prohibited was publicly saying that criticism of Stalin is prohibited, the meta-rule had to remain unspeakable.
“it wasn't only prohibited to criticize stalin, it was absolutely even more prohibited to publicly say that it's prohibited to criticize stalin.”
Neither the parent buying the Santa Claus present (admittedly doesn't believe) nor the child (plays along not to disappoint the parent) actually believes, yet the belief functions socially.
“nobody has to believe, but it functions as a belief.”
The Bond film is the first without sex at the end (just a desperate embrace), yet is the most politically leftist Bond, saving Bolivia from water privatization; Žižek reads the sexlessness as symptom of controlled neo-Buddhist subjectivity.
“this one is the first one... with no sex at the end. they just embrace, they are too desperate.”
Survivors from Srebrenica, site of the massacre, are already telling self-directed dark jokes (e.g. about buying land 'with bones or without'); Žižek reads this as authentic survival through obscenity rather than fake dignity.
“when things are really terrifying, horrible, isn't it a fake to play this dignified role? in a way, you can survive it only through obscenity.”
A Montenegrin man digs a hole in the earth, inserts his penis, and waits for an earthquake to do the work, because Montenegrins are stereotyped as too lazy even to masturbate.
“how do a montenegrin guy in their lazy masturbate? he digs a hole in the earth, put his penis in and wait for the earthquake.”
In late-1970s Yugoslavia, Žižek's student journal took the communist party's claim of 'free elections' literally and published an election-night issue treating the outcome as genuinely uncertain; they were summoned by the central committee, whose bureaucrat could not explicitly say what they'd done wrong.
“since the party claims that these are free elections, what if we treat them as if they are free? the reaction was incredible. we were immediately called to the central committee.”
Pedophilia in the Catholic Church is not a coincidental accumulation of individual cases but a structural feature, an institutional unconscious or obscene ritual that the institution protects.
“pedophilia [is] a kind of what I called institutional unconscious, an obscene institutional ritual part of the identity of catholic church.”
The serial killings of women in Ciudad Juárez, kidnapping, rape, slow torture of young factory workers, are not private pathologies but a ritualized social act with clear symbolic structure targeting independent female workers.
“if you look at it closely... this is not some kind of an elementary outburst of male fury. it's a clear symbolic structure. it's a social ritual.”
Works invoked 11
The Da Vinci Code film
Cited as an example of the erasure of sex from Hollywood, you cannot have sex with the granddaughter of Jesus Christ.
Elysium film
Cited alongside The Hunger Games as a Hollywood blockbuster that depicts extreme class divisions, evidence of Hollywood's symptomatic knowledge of capitalist inequality.
The Hunger Games film
Cited as evidence that Hollywood blockbusters unconsciously know about and depict radical class divisions in post-apocalyptic societies.
Quantum of Solace film
Called the most politically leftist Bond film (saves Bolivia from water privatization by a multinational); the first Bond film with no sex at the end, which Žižek reads as a symptom of controlled neo-Buddhist subjectivity.
Angels and Demons film
The film erases the sex that exists in the Dan Brown novel (between Langdon and Vittoria Vetra), used as evidence of Hollywood's growing sexlessness.
The Name of the Rose book
Eco's novel/film is critiqued for its claim that laughter is always a threat to power, Žižek argues this is wrong and that totalitarian regimes have their own brutal laughter.
Žižek says he reads Piketty but finds his proposals too utopian precisely because they require a global enforcement authority that would already constitute victory.
Referenced approvingly for the theory that Google is a privatized version of the NSA, used in the discussion of social media as a site of class struggle.
Carmen opera
Mentioned as the opera banned by a Perth company because its tobacco-factory setting could constitute propaganda, used to illustrate the absurdity of politically correct excess.
Called one of Žižek's 'most favorite British movies'; the classroom scene is used to illustrate how apparent spontaneous transgression is actually performed for authority.
Government report from British Columbia cited as evidence of ritualized violence against indigenous women near Vancouver, paralleling the Ciudad Juárez cases.
People invoked 31
Mentioned alongside Richard Gere as the wrong kind of celebrity solidarity that Pussy Riot fell into after their release.
Frantz Fanon positive
Cited approvingly: Fanon wrote that the goal of the anti-colonial struggle is not to make white people feel guilty but to achieve something more fundamental, used to critique guilt-based solidarity.
Mangosuthu Buthelezi negative
Cited as the nativist alternative to the ANC in South Africa, paid by the apartheid regime, contrasted unfavorably with Mandela's universalism.
Mahatma Gandhi negative
Žižek says Gandhi did great things but his attitude toward caste, 'every caste is divine', was 'proto-fascist'; contrasted unfavorably with Ambedkar's egalitarianism.
Cited as an example of a violent Hindu nationalist who is also a partisan of ruthless global capitalism, illustrating that global capitalism has no problem accommodating local nationalism.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as a member of Žižek's 'theoretical gang' from Ljubljana; credited with developing the point about the asymmetry between technological and social possibility.
Umberto Eco negative
Žižek says Eco is 'totally wrong' in The Name of the Rose's claim that laughter is always a threat to power, totalitarian systems have their own brutal laughter.
Edward Snowden positive
Defended as part of the same struggle as Pussy Riot; Žižek insists that dropping Snowden's cause means losing everything, Pussy Riot erred by not supporting Snowden.
Mentioned as the example of direct brain-computer interface, one no longer needs even a finger to translate thought into action.
Louis Althusser positive
His classic interpellation formula is cited as the starting point; Balibar's reversal of it (invoked by Žižek) is the actual argument.
Joseph E. Stiglitz negative
Stiglitz's argument that we need to change laws and strengthen democracy is critiqued as abstract thinking, raising taxes without addressing the web of conditions it requires.
Mentioned as an unexpected ally: even Fukuyama now admits capitalism cannot handle ecology and biogenetics, thus ceasing to be a Fukuyamaist.
Arundhati Roy positive
Cited as a friend who pointed out that the gang rape that provoked moral outrage was committed by poor men, whereas worse abuses (child prostitution rings in Bombay) go unreported.
Judith Butler negative
Žižek expresses great admiration but argues Butler's model of performative subversive identity is not subversive at all, it precisely describes the dominant mode of subjectivity under capitalism.
B. R. Ambedkar positive
Favorably contrasted with Gandhi as the representative of a more egalitarian tradition and the political tradition with which Žižek is involved.
Mentioned as a friend from Democracy Now who was shocked when Žižek told her the solution to reactionary racism is 'progressive racism' (mutual self-directed jokes).
Pankaj Mishra negative
Žižek quotes Mishra's diagnosis of Western civilizational decline at length, then says he 'cannot more disagree', he regards the post-colonial common sense Mishra articulates as blind to capitalist universalism.
Étienne Balibar positive
Credited with the reversal of Althusser's interpellation formula: the superego interpellates subjects into individuals rather than dissolving them into the collective.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as a good friend; cited for the diagnosis that the current geopolitical situation resembles Europe around 1900 with declining and rising powers generating the risk of world war.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited approvingly for the observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than minor economic reform.
Julian Assange positive
Žižek spoke with Assange who told him Snowden is not bought by Putin but is in a desperate predicament, the West is keeping Snowden in Russia by refusing asylum.
Malcolm X positive
Described as one of Žižek's heroes; praised for seeing that the X (deprivation of particular roots) simultaneously offers a unique chance for authentic universalism beyond Western limitations.
Richard Gere negative
Invoked twice: as a symbol of fake Hollywood Buddhism (don't attach yourself too much) and as the wrong kind of celebrity politics that Pussy Riot embraced after their release.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited approvingly on the train-of-history metaphor: Benjamin rejected the idea that history is on our side and instead said our task is to pull the emergency brake on the train.
Pussy Riot positive
Žižek supported them but critiqued their post-release appearance in New York with Richard Gere and Bob Geldof as a lapse of good manners and political principle.
Barack Obama negative
Cited critically: Obama's defense of American global policeman role fails to see that America ends up doing dirty work for rising powers that exploit American force.
Vladimir Putin negative
Dismissed as just another form of the new global capitalism married to local nationalist ideology; criticized not primarily for lack of democracy but for economic inefficiency, Russia's dependence on resource exports.
Nelson Mandela positive
Praised for never succumbing to nativist 'return to our roots' politics, used as an example of genuine universalist politics in contrast to Buthelezi.
Jokingly invoked in the opening banter (women's minds are 'impressible', can't think rationally), clearly ironic self-mockery.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the superego paradox (more innocent = more guilty) and the dream-interpretation that many penises signify castration, applied to the proliferation of walls after the Berlin Wall fell.
Thomas Piketty negative
Žižek says he reads and even sympathizes with Piketty, but dismisses the proposal for a global wealth tax as 'too utopian' because it presupposes a global authority that would only exist after a won revolution.
What it argues
the necessity of censoring the left's outdated utopian dreamscapitalist universalism versus post-colonial critique of Western universalismideology as false individualization and superego guiltauthoritarian capitalism — global capitalism thriving without liberal democracythe impasse of imagination: easier to imagine the end of the world than minor tax raisesinherent transgression — codified rule-breaking as part of the ideological orderthe danger of a new world war in a multipolar world
Dialectical moves 11
“In today's China, capitalist growth is exploding not in spite of communist rule, but because of it.”
The apparent contradiction between communist governance and capitalist growth is resolved by showing communist authoritarianism is the enabling condition of unrestrained capital.
“The cruel irony of anti-Eurocentrism is that one criticizes the West at the very historical moment when global capitalism no longer needs Western cultural values to function smoothly.”
Post-colonial critique, intended to subvert Western hegemony, arrives precisely when that hegemony has already dissolved into a capitalism indifferent to culture.
“The mask of cultural diversity is sustained by the actual universalism of global capital.”
Cultural pluralism and local traditions are not obstacles to capitalism but its ideological supplement, diversity is the form in which capitalist universalism presents itself.
“Piketty and Stiglitz are too utopian precisely insofar as they want to be realistic.”
Their 'realist' reforms presuppose conditions (global tax authority, democratic enforcement) that could only exist after a thoroughgoing political transformation, making their realism the more utopian position.
“The more you try to be clean [politically correct], the more you feel guilty.”
The superego dynamic means that moral self-policing intensifies rather than satisfies the guilt it is meant to address.
“It wasn't only prohibited to criticize Stalin — it was even more prohibited to publicly say that it is prohibited to criticize Stalin.”
The deepest layer of ideological prohibition is the prohibition on naming the prohibition, the meta-rule that must remain unspeakable.
“The superego interpellates subjects into individuals — reversing Althusser's formula.”
Rather than dissolving individuality into the collective, ideology today isolates and individualizes subjects as uniquely guilty agents responsible for systemic failures.
“The light at the end of the tunnel is another train coming.”
Optimistic metaphors of imminent political resolution conceal the approach of a new catastrophe rather than genuine progress.
“The Malcolm X insight: being deprived of your particular roots at the same time gives you a unique chance to be more authentically universalist than Western people themselves.”
The X of dispossession, rather than being purely a wound, opens the possibility of a universalism that does not rest on a particular cultural identity.
“Far from being an obstacle to capitalist development, communist rule guarantees the best conditions for unbridled capitalism.”
The standard assumption that political freedom is necessary for capitalism is inverted: authoritarian order provides superior conditions for capital accumulation.
“The only result of the fall of the Berlin Wall — because whenever in a dream you have many penises, Freud says it means castration — is that we get walls everywhere.”
The apparent triumph of freedom (one wall falls) produces a proliferation of new walls, the elimination of one border symptom generates its repetition everywhere.
Claims 25
rejects
Post-colonial critique of Western universalism is blind to the fact that global capitalism has already achieved genuine universalism — cultural difference is irrelevant when the deal is done.post-colonial anti-Western critique / Pankaj Mishra's diagnosis
asserts
Global capitalism has no need of Western liberal-democratic values and functions even more smoothly under authoritarian rule, as demonstrated by China and Singapore.capitalism and democracy
asserts
In China, capitalist growth explodes not in spite of communist rule but because of it — communist party authority provides the optimal conditions for unbridled capitalism.China / capitalism without democracy
asserts
Traditional pre-modern values (family, community, rejection of hedonism) do not impede capitalist modernization but paradoxically enable individuals in China, India, and Singapore to pursue capitalism more ruthlessly.so-called Asian values and capitalist development
asserts
The primary everyday form of ideology today is false individualization — the superego mechanism that redirects systemic critique into personal guilt (recycling, political correctness).ideology / ecology / political correctness
asserts
The more one tries to be innocent by following politically correct self-examination, the more guilty one feels — the superego paradox amplifies rather than reduces guilt.superego / political correctness
asserts
Starbucks is the perfect ideological company because it incorporates the social duty of the consumer into the price of the commodity, allowing guilt-free consumerism.commodity fetishism / capitalist ideology
asserts
The left must abandon all three of its inherited utopian dreams — Stalinist communism, social-democratic welfare state, and anti-representative direct local democracy — before genuinely new thinking can emerge.the future of the left
rejects
Piketty and Stiglitz are too utopian precisely because they want to be realistic: their proposals (global wealth tax, legal reform) already presuppose the global authority that only a won revolution could provide.Piketty / Stiglitz / reformist left
rejects
Anti-representative direct local democracy cannot address the large-scale problems of ecology, biogenetics, and intellectual property, which require extensive regulatory frameworks.direct democracy / horizontalism
asserts
The true measure of a revolution is not the spectacular event but 'the morning after' — what endures when things return to normal.revolution / political change
asserts
We are approaching a new apartheid post-democratic society where democracy persists formally but decisions about economics and war are made entirely behind citizens' backs.democracy / post-democracy
asserts
Today it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a 3% tax increase for healthcare and education.failure of political imagination / ideology
asserts
Every ideological field is immanently and necessarily inconsistent — it contains both official rules and codified modes of violating them, and to understand an ideology you must account for both.ideology / structure of social norms
asserts
Enjoyment is not spontaneous but an acquired taste, learned through imitation — even sex and hard liquor must be learned before they become pleasurable.enjoyment / jouissance / desire
rejects
The disappearance of sex in Hollywood films (Quantum of Solace, Angels and Demons) is not feminist progress but a symptom of a deeply controlled, neo-Buddhist subjectivity afraid of passionate attachment.political correctness / sexuality / Hollywood
asserts
Harassment discourse, beneath the surface, often functions as a form of class and racial intolerance — an upper-middle-class mechanism to keep loud, smelly ordinary people at a distance.political correctness / harassment / class
asserts
Solidarity must be grounded in universalism, not guilt-manipulation of the privileged; manipulating middle-class guilt is already inscribed in the ruling ideology and will not produce genuine change.solidarity / anti-racism / the left
asserts
Malcolm X's insight — that being deprived of particular roots gives one a unique chance to be more authentically universalist than Western people themselves — is a key model for emancipatory politics.universalism / Malcolm X / race and emancipation
reframes
Social media and the internet are an antagonistic phenomenon — sites of genuine class struggle — rather than simply tools of emancipation or tools of control.social media / internet / ideology
reframes
NSA mass surveillance is less threatening than it appears because the Big Other it instantiates is 'stupid' — it collects so much data it cannot process or act on it.surveillance / the Big Other / NSA
asserts
Gang rapes and ritualized violence against women are not individual pathological outbursts but social rituals with a clear symbolic structure — which authorities systematically suppress by psychologizing them.violence against women / ideology / symbolic order
asserts
Gandhi's attitude toward the caste system was proto-fascist — he wanted every caste to have its divine role rather than abolishing the system, while the Dalits themselves demanded to disappear as a caste.Gandhi / caste / colonialism
asserts
The contemporary geopolitical situation resembles Europe around 1900 — a declining hegemon (USA) facing rising powers (Russia, China) — and may be heading toward a new world war.geopolitics / world war / multipolar order
asserts
America's role as global policeman is a strategic mistake: it ends up doing the dirty work for new powers (fighting ISIS, confronting Iran) that exploit American force while undercutting American influence.US foreign policy / geopolitics
Quotes 18
“today it's much easier to imagine the end of the world, of our lives, some comet asteroid hitting the earth, than to imagine a 3% raise of taxes for healthcare, education and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · failure of political imagination
“the mask of cultural diversity is sustained by the actual universalism of the global capital.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalist universalism vs cultural diversity
“we live in very strange times: practically everything seems possible today at the level of technology, but at the level of social life and economy, practically everything is impossible.”Slavoj Žižek · asymmetry of possibility — technology vs politics
“in today's china, capitalist growth is exploding not in spite of communist rule, but because of it.”Slavoj Žižek · communism as capitalism's best manager
“capitalism today functions even better without democracy.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism and democracy are separable
“we can have today beer without alcohol, coffee without caffeine, sausages without fat — when we also have sex, well, basically without sex. it's called safe sex.”Slavoj Žižek · decaffeinated pleasures / X without X
“love is fall. you are surprised, shocked, you open yourself to it. we are no longer ready to fall in love.”Slavoj Žižek · passionate love vs neo-Buddhist detachment
“it wasn't only prohibited to criticize stalin, it was absolutely even more prohibited to publicly say that it's prohibited to criticize stalin.”Slavoj Žižek · the prohibition on naming the prohibition
“the more you try to be clean [politically correct], the more you feel guilty.”Slavoj Žižek · superego paradox — guilt amplifies with innocence
“you can be peacefully a consumerist because your social duty towards nature and others is included into the price of the commodity you buy. it's perfect.”Slavoj Žižek · Starbucks ideology / commodity fetishism
“the true problem of a revolution is the morning after.”Slavoj Žižek · the measure of genuine political change
“when communists will take power, you will have to applaud. spare the energy for people's democracy.”Slavoj Žižek · self-deprecating communist joke
“there is a light at the end of the tunnel — which is another train coming.”Slavoj Žižek · Balkan pessimism / false optimism
“the struggle for this new global social media [is] maybe even one of the principal forms of class struggle today.”Slavoj Žižek · internet as site of class struggle
“everything is recorded. yes, it's recorded, but it's a stupid big [Other]. they don't know what to do with it.”Slavoj Žižek · the Big Other is stupid — surveillance overload
“solidarity must be deeper. if we want just to make the well-standing white people feel guilty or whatever, it will not work.”Slavoj Žižek · limits of guilt-based solidarity
“the measure of progress is not we can debate about anything — the measure of progress for me is good progressive dogmatism.”Slavoj Žižek · progressive dogmatism as the measure of progress
“what i really hate are these enthusiastic leftists who like every 10 years a big event and then they can meet once a year in the evening to drink tea and remember how wonderful it was.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of event-fetishism on the left
Transcript 81 turns
Cathy Newman
well, first of all, welcome to you all. what a fantastically full room we have. and i think we also have an overflow room tonight. i'm penny stone. i'll be chairing tonight. and i will introduce professor žižek in just a moment. i'd like to just say a little bit about the ipa which is hosting this event tonight. and i can't see connor who i'd like to introduce. where connor? you're supposed to be at the front. the institute of public affairs is sort of a relaunched part of the lse with professor connor gearty at the back as the director and myself. everybody's turning around right on queue, conor. and myself as a deputy director where we we have a very successful masters's in public administration running and we have also some innovative work. which you may have heard about, for example, we're now crowdsourcing a new constitution for the uk. literally crowdsourcing. so anybody here wants to have an input or a say in that, please get in touch with me or with jack, who i'm going to point out like can you wave. who will be available to tell you more about it at the end.
well, first of all, welcome to you all. what a fantastically full room we have. and i think we also have an overflow room tonight. i'm penny stone. i'll be chairing tonight. and i will introduce professor žižek in just a moment. i'd like to just say a little bit about the ipa which is hosting this event tonight. and i can't see connor who i'd like to introduce. where connor? you're supposed to be at the front. the institute of public affairs is sort of a relaunched part of the lse with professor connor gearty at the back as the director and myself. everybody's turning around right on queue, conor. and myself as a deputy director where we we have a very successful masters's in public administration running and we have also some innovative work. which you may have heard about, for example, we're now crowdsourcing a new constitution for the uk. literally crowdsourcing. so anybody here wants to have an input or a say in that, please get in touch with me or with jack, who i'm going to point out like can you wave. who will be available to tell you more about it at the end.
Slavoj Žižek
i.
i.
Cathy Newman
i miss.
i miss.
Slavoj Žižek
no no, you just missed. you didn't miss grace. don't be afraid.
no no, you just missed. you didn't miss grace. don't be afraid.
Cathy Newman
what was i saying? okay, so we have the constitution project.
what was i saying? okay, so we have the constitution project.
Slavoj Žižek
you see, descartes was right. women's mind is impressible, you can't think rational. you are overwhelmed.
you see, descartes was right. women's mind is impressible, you can't think rational. you are overwhelmed.
Cathy Newman
are we having a fight tonight?
are we having a fight tonight?
Slavoj Žižek
absolutely. till death. okay. tes, i mean, okay.
absolutely. till death. okay. tes, i mean, okay.
Cathy Newman
i'm going to have to come back to you in a minute.
i'm going to have to come back to you in a minute.
Slavoj Žižek
well.
well.
Cathy Newman
um so then we also have, we've had a series of talks around one nation britain, which we will be publishing something on shortly. there's really been an interesting debate between... political parties, academics and commentators around what does the idea of one nation mean. and what is it about? who owns it? who has the history? who wants to take forward ideas for the country as we move forward? and the other project i want to mention to you is one on women in public life called women above the parapet. where we're looking at how. women have succeeded at getting into senior positions in politics, diplomacy, academia and civil society. some of you may have been at the lecture by joyce banda a couple of weeks ago. and we have a new one on more women can run by professor sue carroll. on the 24th of november. that's our next event. but really, we're really delighted to be hosting professor slavoojic tonight. and the ipa exists really to look at the linkages between scholarship and public life, public policy, how we think, what we do. we're very, very delighted to host you here tonight. i agreed with sl that i wouldn't read the 60-odd pages of biography that exists online because then he would have no time to speak. so all i want to say very briefly is really what you've got on the on the website so i won't dwell on it too long. um... slavoy is a hegelian philosopher, a psychoanalyst and political activist. he's the international director of the birkbeck institute for humanities and the author of numerous books on dialectical materialism, critique of ideology and art. and tonight he's talking to us. about his new book. which i can wave. and which he will be signing copies of later tonight after his his lecture. savo would like to speak to us for about 40-45 minutes.
um so then we also have, we've had a series of talks around one nation britain, which we will be publishing something on shortly. there's really been an interesting debate between... political parties, academics and commentators around what does the idea of one nation mean. and what is it about? who owns it? who has the history? who wants to take forward ideas for the country as we move forward? and the other project i want to mention to you is one on women in public life called women above the parapet. where we're looking at how. women have succeeded at getting into senior positions in politics, diplomacy, academia and civil society. some of you may have been at the lecture by joyce banda a couple of weeks ago. and we have a new one on more women can run by professor sue carroll. on the 24th of november. that's our next event. but really, we're really delighted to be hosting professor slavoojic tonight. and the ipa exists really to look at the linkages between scholarship and public life, public policy, how we think, what we do. we're very, very delighted to host you here tonight. i agreed with sl that i wouldn't read the 60-odd pages of biography that exists online because then he would have no time to speak. so all i want to say very briefly is really what you've got on the on the website so i won't dwell on it too long. um... slavoy is a hegelian philosopher, a psychoanalyst and political activist. he's the international director of the birkbeck institute for humanities and the author of numerous books on dialectical materialism, critique of ideology and art. and tonight he's talking to us. about his new book. which i can wave. and which he will be signing copies of later tonight after his his lecture. savo would like to speak to us for about 40-45 minutes.
Slavoj Žižek
more 45.
more 45.
Cathy Newman
more 45 and 40. but he has asked me to be fairly strict with time as he's speaking, so i will keep an eye on that. and we will then have about half an hour or so, if we stick to time, to have questions and discussion at the end. so i would like to stay seated here, so i'm sure i think you just need to pull the mic quite close.
more 45 and 40. but he has asked me to be fairly strict with time as he's speaking, so i will keep an eye on that. and we will then have about half an hour or so, if we stick to time, to have questions and discussion at the end. so i would like to stay seated here, so i'm sure i think you just need to pull the mic quite close.
Slavoj Žižek
it
it
Cathy Newman
all right. and i won't delay you any longer. you're all here to hear him. so, sloy, over to you. thank you very much.
all right. and i won't delay you any longer. you're all here to hear him. so, sloy, over to you. thank you very much.
Slavoj Žižek
thank you very much. i'm really glad to be here and i'm also grateful to ipa, which incidentally for me means, of course, also international psychoanalytic association,. but i'm really grateful to be here and my brief intervention may surprise you because i don't know what you expect from me from the attacks, what you can gather from the attacks on me lately, that i will do some kind of pro-communist, leftist, fascist, violent. and so you are in for some big surprises maybe.
thank you very much. i'm really glad to be here and i'm also grateful to ipa, which incidentally for me means, of course, also international psychoanalytic association,. but i'm really grateful to be here and my brief intervention may surprise you because i don't know what you expect from me from the attacks, what you can gather from the attacks on me lately, that i will do some kind of pro-communist, leftist, fascist, violent. and so you are in for some big surprises maybe.
Cathy Newman
yeah.
yeah.
Slavoj Žižek
okay. the need to censor our dreams by this i simply refer to defect especially those who, those social thinkers, politicians who like to or would like to propose an alternate vision of reality, how difficult really it is to imagine an alternative. and it's a nice paradox because precisely in our era when think within so-called real life are really changing. just think about biogenetics and other technological developments. for example, what always intrigued me, i follow it closely, is how with new options of our mind being wired directly to a computer, what was once considered a magic is gradually becoming an everyday practice that you, like stephen hawking, no longer need even his famous finger, you know. you think, the computer can decode what you think and the object moves. your thoughts have a direct effect on reality, of course. the problem here is what goes out goes also in. you can be controlled in the same way and so on. what i'm saying that precisely in an epoch where almost everything appears to be possible at the level of technology or private pleasures and so on. it's more and more difficult to imagine a social alternative. it's an old thought that i often repeat. from fred jameson, how today it's much easier to imagine the end of the world, of our lives, some comet asteroid hitting the earth, than to imagine a 3% raise of taxes for healthcare care, education and so on. and my another colleague of mine, alenka zupančič from slovenia ljubljana, member of my theoretical gang, also made this point how on the one hand, practically everything seems possible today. you can travel into space. we have this tech, technological gnostic dream of the ultimate horizon we turn ourselves, our identity as selves into a virtual entity that can be simply downloaded from one hard drive to another and thus we become immortal, whatever. this is all possible. but in the level of social life and economy, practically everything is impossible. you know, you want to raise taxes a little bit, oh financial catastrophe and so on and so on. so we live in very strange times and i want to address this. i want to begin with... someone whom i appreciate but i want to quote him. his name is pankaj mishra, the well-known indian, i think. p, sorry. i appreciate him, but nonetheless, i have a critical point to make. in his recent text with the title on the twilight of the west? he presents his diagnosis of today's predicament. here comes this slightly, maybe too long quote. i quote. in the 21st century, the old spell of universal progress, whether through western-style socialism or capitalism and democracy, has been decisively broken. the global crisis, which is as much moral and intellectual as it is political and environmental, puts into question above all our long submission to western ideas of politics and economy. whether it is catastrophic wars in iraq and afghanistan, oristan disastrous interventions in libya. the financial crisis of 2008, soaring unemployment in europe, which seems like a problem with no solution, and it's likely to empower far-right parties across the continent. the unresolved crisis of the euro, hideous income disparities in both europe and the united states, the widespread suspicion that big money has corrupted democratic processes. the absurdly dysfunctional american political system, edward snowden's revelations about the nsa, or the dramatic loss of a sense of possibility for young people everywhere. all of this, separately and together, has not only severely depleted the west's moral authority, but also weakened its intellectual hegemony. the western path to modernity can no longer be regarded as normal it cannot be the standard against which historical change in other parts of the world is measured. europeans. had created their own kind of modernity in the very particular historical circumstances of the 19th and 20th century. and other people have been trying since then with varying degrees of success to imitate it. but there are and always were other ways of conceiving of the state, society, economy. and good life. they all have their own specific difficulties and challenges. nevertheless, it will be possible to understand them only through an open and sustained engagement with non-western societies and their political and intellectual traditions. such an effort, formidable in itself, would also go against every instinct of the self-regarding universalism that west has upheld for two centuries. but it will be needed if we wish to seriously confront the great problem confronting the vast majority of 7 billion human beings, how to secure a dignified and sustainable life amid deepening inequality and animosity in an interdependent world. now, this seems almost a commonplace, a doxa today, revers acceptable. well, i cannot more disagree. with it. bye. this long passage is again. render in a concise way the post-colonial common sense, the failure of the western civilization as a global model and the failure of those decolonized nations which tried to emulate it. there is nonetheless, i claim, a problem with this diagnosis. yes, the lesson of post september 11th. catastrophe is the end of the fukuyama dream of global liberal democracy. but at the level of economy. capitalism has triumphed. worldwide the third world nations which endorsed it are those which are now growing with spectacular rate. the mask of cultural diversity is sustained by the actual universalism of the global capital. so my point is, i'm tired of this post-colonial critique, know your western universalism of human rights is imposed. it's not a true universalism. i'm not talking about that universalism. i'm talking about capitalist universalism, where simply all these cultural differences are in some sense irrelevant. when a british manager and a chinese manager meet in business negotiations. yes, we can play endlessly these games when they use words like truth, peace, whatever, do they mean the same thing? it doesn't matter. the deal is done. that's the actual universalism. and i find it paradoxical when people talk about decline of the west and the end of western universalism when precisely western capitalism effectively is universal. and this new global capitalist functions, that's for me the ultimate paradox. even better, if its political supplement relies on so-called, i'm not a racist here, it has nothing to do with asia. what we falsely call asian values, a more authoritarian version. global capitalism, i claim, has no problem in accommodating itself to a plurality of local religions, cultures, traditions and so on. i think, for example, that there is no paradox in what, if i know the media, what i know from the media, if it's right, maybe you know much better than me, like now in india, modi, how is it called? how do you pronounce? modi, yes. at the same time, at least he was, i don't know. how hypocritical is he now. a pretty violent hind nationalist and a total partisan of the most ruthless global capitalism. this is global capitalism. global capitalism is not we must all eat hamburgers and so on. global the form of global capitalism is more and more narrow nationalisms. up. global capitalism, again, has no problem in accommodating this plurality of local cultures and so on. so the cruel irony of anti-eurocentrism is that on behalf of anti-colonialism, one criticizes the west at the very historical moment when global capitalism no longer needs so-called western cultural values in order to function smoothly and it's doing quite well with authoritarian alternate modernities. in short, one tends to proclaim western cultural values. that at the very moment when critically reinterpreted, of course, many of them, egalitarianism, welfare state and so on, can effectively serve as a weapon against capitalist globalization. and i'm not bluffing here. you know, for example, when i was in india, i noticed how all those sco whose mouths are full against western imperialism and so on, are usually the brahmin cultural studies people who went even up to defending hindu caste system as, you know, it's our cultural specificity. what right do you from your western imperialist perspective you have to cancel it. while on the other hand, where i immediately felt at home is with untouchables and with, how do you call them, dalits. uh. the untouchables, the lowest class with. i have some sympathies for them with how to you call them, nit, the maoist guerr nal yes. here you can see how biased around media. there are almost one million of them. and you barely don't read of them. there is a great rebellion going on in india. it's ignored. or the political struggle with which i am involved, in which i am involved, there gandhi against ambedkar, a more egalitarian tradition. you know, gandhi, i have problems with gandhi. he was a great guy. he did many great things. but you know, his attitude towards caste was, sorry, what i'm tempted to call proto-fascist. she was not for the abolition of castes. his motto was every caste is divine, they have their own role to play, their own and the dalits whom i met, the lowest of the lowest, those who clean the dry toilets, they told me, no, we don't want to keep our specific identity. prec precisely we want to disappear. we want no longer to be who we are. we don't care if you say we also have a divine role and so on. so let's go on we should bear in mind that global capitalism does not automatically push all its subjects towards hedonist permissive individualism. that we have in our countries. and the fact that in many countries which recently entered the road of rapid capitalist modernization. china, india and so on. many individuals stick to the so-called traditional pre-modern beliefs and ethics, family values, rejection of unbridled hedonism, strong ethnic identification, giving preference to community ties over individual achievement, respect for elders and so on. this in no way proves that they are not fully modern. as if people in the liberal west can afford direct and full capitalist modernization while those from less developed asian, latin american, african countries can only survive the onslaught of capitalist dynamics through the help of the crutches of traditional ties. that is to say, as if traditional values are needed when local populations are not able to survive capitalism by way of adopting the proper capitalist, liberal hedonist, individualist ethics. i think that post-colonial subaltern theorists who see in the persistence of pre-modern traditions in global capitalism and its violent modernization disruptive of traditional ties. who perceiveceiving this way global capitalism, i think, are here wrong. on the contrary, fidelity to pre-modern, so-called falsely asian values is paradoxically the very feature which allows countries like china, singapore, india, to follow the path of capitalist dynamics even more radically than western liberal countries. reference to traditional values enable individuals to justify their ruthless engagement in market competition, to justify it in ethical terms like i'm really doing it to help my parents to earn money so that my children will be able to study and so on and so on. we can say something similar about today's china, i think. it is wrong to claim that china faces the choice of becoming a truly capitalist country or of maintaining the communist rule which thwarts the full capitalist development. i claim this choice is a false one. in today's china, capitalist growth is exploding not in spite of the communist rule, but because of it. far from being an obstacle to capitalist development, the communist rule guarantees the best conditions for unbridled capitalism. here we should be effectively anti-eurocentrist. it's our prejudice that there is something like a natural marriage between capitalism and so-called western hedonist individual values. no, this marriage is dissolving today. it's approaching divorce. today, and that's for me the danger, the tragedy. we we have new forms of capitalism, china, singapore and so on, which function even more smoothly in the sense of course crazy capitalist self-destructive dynamics and have need of democratic freedoms and so on and so on. capitalism today functions even better without. democracy. so again, how in these conditions can we imagine an alternative? the problem that i see is not only that it's difficult to imagine a radical alternative. everybody knows this. although incidentally, we all know that something is wrong. and my ultimate proof here, i hope you are corrupted like me. i like hollywood blockbusters and so on. when friends are telling me that you are a stupid marxist, probably you are still influenced by your communist yugoslav past, where do you see class division? today. i tell them, i see them in hollywood. did you notice how almost all big blockbusters tell an extremely violent story of a new post-apocalyptic society with radical class divisions, hunger games, elysium and so on. my god, hollywood knows it. you know it would be very nice in this sense to read even james bond films in a symptomatic way as uh. document of our era. i'm thinking about two moments. the first one is, did you notice that james bond films traditionally are one of the few films in which you can still see the active material productive process. but you know where? in the middle of the film usually bond penetrates the bad guy's private domain. the small factory where they either process drugs, deal with diamonds, gold, there you see production, material production. and then what's the function of gr bond? he's almost a kind of an agent of those theorists of disappearing labor and so on. his function is to exploit this so that, you know, we no longer have material product and so on. the other thing that makes me sad, but i don't have time to improvise in this in grandbond films, is that do you notice a sad thing in one before, not the last one, one before quantum of solace? it was a standard feature of james bond films that at the very end you have big sex between bond and bond girl. this one where the woman, the bon girlish olga kurylenko, the ukrainian star, is the first one, remember, with no sex at the end. they just embrace they are too desperate. they go apart. why is this so fascinating? because et. because you cannot accuse it of being a conservative film. on the other hand, politically, quantum of solence is the most leftist bond that i can imagine. basically, explicitly, james bond saves morales regime from some bad multinational company which wants to monopolize water supply in bolivia. but you know why i think this is dangerous. it's not any feminist potential, like let's step out of this male feminist penetrative whatever sexuality, it's something much more ominous. did you notice how you find the same thing in, now i'm really moving to lowest of the lowest, then brown novels and films? did you notice how already da vinci code no sex. you cannot screw the granddaughter of jesus christ. no. but did you notice how in angels and demons the last... fil them. something very strange happens you have. sex in the novel at the end. between langdon and dead italian scientist vittoria vetra. but not in the film. isn't it strange? once we thought hollywood adds sex to make it more commercial, now hollywood is erasing sex. i don't think there is anything progressive in this. i think it's an extremely sad tendency, whose expression is also the excess of political correctness and western buddhism and so on. the idea is this one. you know, in english and in french, there is the expression to fall in love, which precisely refers to the verb fall. we fall in love. and that's what is wonderful. love is fall. you are surprised, shocked, you open yourself to it. we are no longer ready to fall in love. we are all these fake buddhists, richard gere like buddhists, you know, like as they say in star wars, you know, don't identify yourself too much, don't attach yourself too much to worldly object, gain a distance and so on. so i really think that we are approaching an era where casual one-night stands, that's okay. a full passionate love affair ah you are over attaching yourself the spontaneous ethics today, i claim, is no longer the ethics of passionate attachment. fall in love, dedicate yourself. no, it's something like a vulgarized version. she's my friend, i appreciate her. a kind of vulgarized version of judith butler, you know. reconstruct your identity all the time, don't fixate yourself, experiment. with your life and so on and so on and it's very sad what is happening here because it's the same phenomenon at all levels what i mocked in all my books you know how we can have today beer but without alcohol coffee without caffeine sausages without fat when we also have sex well basically without sex it's called safe sex safe sex, you know. it's horrible. like one of the most depressive experiences i had is a couple of months ago i was flying to united states and that how's it called hemispheres, the plane journal of united there was a big two pages text celebrating sex. i said, let's read it. it depressed me totally. it praised sex, but you know how? if you fornicate often, it helps your leg muscles and heart. you will live longer. it even goes, the deep french kisses are good because they keep firm your mouth muscles so that when you are old, you will not suck.. it's horrible. you know maybe we lack authentic consumerism. maybe that's why we are so afraid of smoking. i don't smoke. but i think there is something... absolutely symptomatic about our obsession with smoking. it cannot be rationally explained. at the level of rational reality, i say, no problem, punish them and so on, punish. that's not my point. my point is what? i claim that what really disturbs us when you see a smoker is someone who is ready to risk it and enjoy to the end. that disturbs us. this is why this is a nice symptom. recently i read american airline companies prohibited even e-cigarettes, electronic cigarettes. you know what's the reasoning? not it's dangerous, but that by using e-cigaretteste, during the flight, you give bad example to others that you are not able to control yourself. next step is, it happened two weeks, three, four weeks ago in australia. i was shocked. it's not a joke. i thought it was a joke then i called my friends there it's true. in perth, you know, the modern west perth, australia, they have an opera. that opera decided to prohibit carmen by bizet. you know why? because the first act takes place in a tobacco history so it can be read as propaganda for tobacco. no, sorry, i claim that this attitude of, you know, like... what they called clinton sex, you know,... you like have it without fully enjoying it without i claim this is a very sad indication of an extremely controlled subjectivity emerging where basically... ultimate ultimate creep. dangerous intruder is the other as such. that's why i also oppose up to a point at least uh... uh... the topic of harassment. of course i'm against harassment when rapes happen and so on. i mean, i'm one of the few guys whom i know who is even for death penalty for rapists. i don't have any problems. i'm just saying that if you just go a little bit beneath the surface, you find that there is more hidden in this fear of harassment. harassment, even have, it's clear for me with my american friends, all these upper middle class academic harassment basically means all those loud ordinary people who smell bad, who talk dirty, blah blah blah. they shouldn't come too close to me. harassment is the very form of intolerance. it means i love blacks, but they smell bad, their music is too loud, i don't want them too close to me and so on. and that's how racism functions today. nobody almost is openly racist today. no we all say they are wonderful, the other, but but no, i don't like their spices, their music and so on and so on. okay. so, since i lose time,, as usual, maybe i will go on at this level of harassment, the other and so on, make a detour and then maybe a end i will return to this need to censor of dreams because i would like to focus on the one topic which seems to me very indicative of the tendency that i want to condemn. or to diagnose this tendency of apparent alternative radical breakthrough, but which effectively... just reproduces the structure of the existing power, what i call in my books inherent transgression. it is what? let me begin by a scene from one of my most favorite british movies, monty python's meaning of life. somewhere in the middle there is an episode where the pupils in a class await for the teacher to arrive. they are bored, they sit calmly near their benches, yawning, staring into the air. then one of them, standing close to the door, shouts, oh, the teacher is coming. and the pupils into the wild activity of shouting, throwing papers, shaking their tables, all the staff pupils are supposed to do when the teacher is absent, so that when the teacher enters... she can be annoyed and shout at them, stop this circus, quiet and so on and so on. i think the insight of this is a very deep one. that all that while children's activity, which apparently annoys thee. the teacher is really staged for his gaze. it is not spontaneous amusement. it is something performed for the teacher. and i think the same. goes for our most intense forms of enjoyment. which are not spontaneous outbursts, but something learned by imitation and acquired taste. i appeal to your memory. remember your first experience of drinking a hard liquor or smoking. as a rule, it was a slightly older peer who told you half in secret, you know what the adults are doing, whiskey, cigarettes, and then you try it and you admit it, must admit it. your first reaction was, it's horrible. how can you you learn to enjoy it. it begins as distaste. and i claim the same even goes for sex. it's the same as with drinks. if you want pleasure, you drink stupid milk or fruit juice. all other higher pleasures like whiskey is an acquired taste. the same goes for sex. but uh let me go on now into more serious domain. a similar lesson can be learned from swearing, talking really dirty. it may appear that. in the middle of a polite conversation, you get really mad. you cannot hold back anymore. you are totally frustrated, so you explode. intouit. i claim this is not how it is. i claim that precisely when apparently you lose your nerves and explode. at that point. you follow the. ritual. the formula, a clichliche. totally. i noticed how maybe i'm a madman here, but i have a ritual with my good friend. when we meet each week for a conversation and so on, for the first five minutes, we engage in a five- ten minute session of ra, tasteless, swearing, offending each other. you know, all the animal staff of and we from ex-yugoslavia, we know how to do it. i will dig your dead mother out of her grave and screw her up her ass. it's all there. and then a miracle happens. after five, ten minutes of this, we looked at each other friendly and we say, okay, now this boring ritual is behind us. now we can act like normal people and talk nicely and so on. i find this a wonderful structure, which works. but... now things get more serious. we should apply this lesson, i think, also to forms of collective violence, like gang rapes and killings. one of the terrifying effects of the non-contemporaneity, different levels of social life today in the world is the rise of violence against women. not just random violence, but systematic violence. violence which is specific to a certain social context, which follows a pattern, which transmits a clear message. for example, while we were right to be terrified at the gang rapes in india, you remember a couple of months ago, a girl was raped by five men in a bus. it was reported in all media. but as my friend arundhati roy pointed out. the cause of this unanimous outburst of moral indignation was that. the rapists were poor from the lower strata. she told me, well, if you want to be... shocked. you don't need to wait for those buses. go to bombay and look there at the prostitution ring, where, for example, you can buy relatively inexpensively girls from five years on of age, bought from poor nepal farmers as sexual slaves and so on and so on. or another phenomenon which really shocked me. the serial killings of women in ciudad juarez at the border with texas. they are not just private pathologies, but ritualized activity. i read two, three books at them and spoke with some of my mexican friends. it's horrible. in ciudad juarez there are, this is the capital of this fast assembling industry. so the ideal working class there are young single women. and of course this is a front to male... male sense of authority because you have there thousands of independent young women. so a ritual emerged. a certain number, up to 100 every year are kidnapped, serial raped, and then slowly tortured to death in a way which is a little bit too tasteless even for me. like first they cut off their breasts with scissors and so on and so on. but what i try to say is that what is so terrifying about it is that if you look at it closely and that's my point. this is not some kind of an elementary outburst of male fury. it's the clear symbolic structure. it's a social ritual. and interestingly, this is what the police tries to play down. incidentally, as you can expect it. the only person who was punished in ciudadarez still now was a mother whose daughter was killed and who complained too much. now you will say i'm playing an american racist blaming the poor mexicans. let's go to the other side. north vancouver, canada. you know canadians arrogant like we are the best of america, half america, half europe. i was told by my friends there and i even read some. uh. parliamentary investigation reports like you can find it on the web forsaken the report of the missing women commission of inquiry. by the government of british columbia from 2012. there also, close to vancouver you have some. reserves, reservations, whatever you call them, where and again. young white people go there and kidnap an indian, native american, whatever you call it, girl. they. again. rape her cheerily, torture her till death and then dump the body. it... again. that's the point i want to make. this became a ritualized activity. and what police investigation downplays is precisely this social symbolic ritual aspect. they systematically try to read it as... family matter among native americans themselves. like probably mother is a drug addict father. he's a drunkard and so on. you know, this dimension off. group ritualized activity disappears. of course, it's the same with an obvious example in our societies. like the cases of pedophilia in the catholic church. again, i think what is crucial is that it's not simply that there are pedophiles everywhere, so there are also in the catholic church. the problem is in what sense and to what degree pedophilia, ich, a kind of a what i called institutional unconscious, an obscene institutional sh. he ritual part of the. identity of catholic church and it's clear that it's like this for me from the way the catholic church in most countries reacts to it in this immediately protective way and so on and so on. now the first lesson from this, i don't have time to develop it in my books, i developed it in detail, is that when you observe a certain, analyze a certain ideology. and ideology for me is a very wide term. it's not just ideology in the sense of the big symbolic field of an elaborated theory and so on. no, ideology is for me something that penetrates and structures our everyday lives. the way i experience foreigners, the way i find certain things pleasurable, other things non-pleasurable there. for example, i read recently... i i will avoid mentioning my standard example, which i repeated so often that i am bored by it, of the structure of different toilets in different countries. but for example, recently i read a wonderful text on how the structure of kitchen sinks differs in denmark and in sweden. it may appear a totally pragmatic point. you learn it's the whole... ideology of how you perceive getting rid of that excess of food. so my first point is every ideological field is immanently, necessarily inconsistent. it has a certain set of rules. but also, the way these rules are violated is codified and you are even expected from time to time to violate in a codified way these rules. so to get an ideology... you must take into account both aspects. ep. now i want to move to illustrate this point to a more political aspect. this inconsistency of an ideico legal order in. china when i was in china, of course i asked these unpleasant questions, my colleague there, they were like half official philosophers, thinkers, like, you know, these usual stupidities, like you pretend to be still a communist country, where is the working class, where is communism, and so on and so on. and shocked me how they reacted. it's not so much that they try to squeeze out with some argumentation, which was incidentally pretty funny. i told them, okay, you pretend to be a communist country, communism means working class, where are the working class rights and so on. okay, i was immediately told that i am confusing leftism with communism. communism is a science of social development which teaches you how society develops. and marxist analysis teaches you that for china at this point, fast capitalism is the best means of development. so to be a consequent marxist, you must and so on. but there was something more fundamental. they reacted in this embarrassed way, you know, like as if i'm impolite. you don't ask these questions. can't you see that i am... that we are embarrassed and so on. and i'm not now blaming the chinese playing a racist game. the same thing happened to me back in london, one mile north from here at birkbeck college, where... half a year from now, i think so, we had a conference, the actuality of the theologico-political. and at some point there were three. panelists up there each talking their stuff, and i did something extremely tasteless, i discovered afterwards. i asked them a simple stupid question. we are here leftists who talk about religion. you all talk enthusiastically about emancipatory potential, for example, of christianity in latin america and so on. i asked them a simple question. do you believe in it or not? you know, are you just using religion as an example or in this condescending marxist way, like for us, we are dialectical materialists, but for stupid latino americans, you need religion to mobilize them and so on. or do you really believe in it? what shocked me is that they all reacted in this embarrassed way, like as if i was asking them, sorry for the tastelessness, like, in what position did you have sex the last night, you know? like one of them told me in panic, no, no, i'm here as a literary analyst, i cannot answer that. no, all, absolutely. and i think this is where we are with belief today. you know, we have beliefs. i don't think we really live in an atheist era. it's a much more complex thing. we believe maybe more than ever, but in this way that you are not ready to admit it publicly. and we have a whole set of strategies of how to displace beliefs onto others. like when i ask my jewish friends, but the same goes for my catholic friends and so on, do you really believe in it? you know and then you have a whole series of answers, no, but i act as if i believe because i respect my tradition. because i don't want to disappoint my children and so on. and here. i don't have time to elaborate it, but here wonderful notions can be mobilized. one is absolutely crucial one, a belief without believers. i think this is a fundamental category today. a certain belief can function socially without any person in the first person, as it were, actually believing in it. you know, like i read read, for example, stupid example. ask a parent when he buys santa claus. president for. his or her children, do you really believe in it? he says, i'm not crazy, i'm buying it. okay, but then ask the child. i promise you she will say, of course i'm not stupid. i just pretend to believe not to disappoint my parents and together. nobody has to believe, but it functions as a belief. and i claim it's exactly the same with most of religion today. but wait a minute. i'm not saying they don't really believe they fake. no. fake is their distance. i claim they really believe but they are not ready to admit it. we believe in precisely in now cynical era, we believe much more than we are ready to admit. so back to china. so we have this inconsistency, which is a necessary inconsistency. and what fascinates me so much is that. the outcome of this complication is that you do not have simply explicit public beliefs or norms, rules, even laws, and then what is prohibited. at a certain point, think... function in a very weird way. at a certain point, you have prohibitions which not only determine what is prohibited, but which are themselves prohibited. you have to respect them, but you have to pretend debt. they don't exist as prohibitions. i'm sorry if i stage here the same comedy as i usually do. if some of you know it, i'm sorry. like stalinism works like this. imagine, it's my golden dream imagine we are in moscow 37. i'm comrade stalin, you are the central committee, i give a big speech, you applaud as it is your duty. then we have a debate. one of you stands up and attacks me. no, this is madness. no the next day everyone will ask the question, who who was the last to see alive that guy. i will complicate it further. imagine then another guy standing up and attacking the first guy, telling it, but are you crazy? don't you know that here we are not allowed to criticize stalin? you don't do this. i claim he, the second guy, would have disappeared even faster. you see the point? it wasn't only prohibited to criticize stalin, it was absolutely even more prohibited to publicly say that it's prohibited to criticize stalin. so all the system function in, so that's my point, with every social symbolic system, you never simply have rules and what these rules prohibit? you always have a double displacement. on the one hand, you have prohibitions which are, as it were, made to be violated. of when your father tells you don't mess with girls, it usually in a male chauvinist society mean do it discreetly and so on. i mean, there are rules. with regard to which you are an idiot if you don't violate them. and then there are a much more interesting phenomenon, the opposite thing. there are things which you are permitted, even solicited to do. you can do them, you have a choice to do them, but on condition that you don't use that choice. and these are, i think, the most interesting ones. i'm not a pessimist here. what i want to say is that... because of this. y. you can sometimes fight the system! with pure naivety that you simply discount these implicit prohibitions. i'm sorry if you know this story, it's my favorite story. it happened to me, late 70s, yugoslav regime, it was communism, but not too harsh a communism? and i was a member of some student journal and okay, there were elections. there were the soviet-style elections. it wasn't like in soviet union the party always got 99.9%. it got like 80%. it was more but we knew it. so on the eve of elections, we wanted to do a small provocation and we asked ourselves what should we do? should we do the heroic thing like publishing an issue of our german. no, these were false elections, they were not really free. no. we thought first nobody would learn anything new. i mean, everyone knew this. and we decided to do something much more intelligent. we said... since the party claims that these are free elections, what if we treat them as if they are free? and we publish an extraordinary issue of our journal on the evening of the elections where, you know, the title was latest news that communists will remain in power, you know, like as if everything was uncertain and people were trembling. the reaction was incredible. we were immediately called to the central committee. it wasn't a real danger, just it was already a comedy. but and then i sympathized with theui poor guy there, the bureaucrat, because he told them, boys, don't fuck with us. you don't do things. and we told him. please tell us what did we do wrong. you said these are free elections, we treated them as free elections. he wasn't able, because of course, he wasn't allowed to say, fuck you, you know, that these are not free allowed. he was just repeating, boys. don't provoke me. don't fuck with me. but it was tragic because you know, he wasn't able to. so i think that again back to this point. what i find so fascinating. it's precisely this structure which is up to a point also, it's not just china. it's our structure today where we are free. but we are... so free that we are less and less even able to perceive where we are not free. because where are we free? we are free when we, and this is a good thing, i'm not trying to sell you some communist bullshit that this is just formal freedom and so on. no, it's nice to have this freedom of choice at the everyday level. you can choose your sex orientation, books you read, where do you travel, blah, blah. but the point is that in order to exercise this freedom, you always do it within a certain social context. and there, to co-determine, to change that context itself, i claim we are less and less free. and that's why i made such a fuss. i published a short comment in guardian, even and so on, on all these agreements that are now being prepared, tisha, tisa, and so on. the big trade agreement. hello? yeah, yeah, yeah, it's incredible. these are agreements which will determine in detail the economic coordinates of our life, which will limit incredibly the ability of governments to think. and there is no public debate. they are even, at least according to the first draft, one of this agreement, tisha, was not only secret but supposed to remain secret five years after. it's endorsement. so you see, this is the crucial point. yes, we have freedom and it's nice that we have this freedom, freedom of everyday choices and so on. but for me, nonetheless, i'm here an old-fashioned leftist guy, freedom should be also something more. the freedom also. to choose the very frame of choices. and there we know less and less, i claim on the contrary, we are approaching an era where economic decisions or decisions about war and so on, they are made absolutely behind our back. don't know what is happening. so how then does ideology function at this level? i claim it functions by trying to blame us by false individualization, which means super ego. you know the freudian supergo paradox. the more you are innocent, the more you are. guilty. how does this function? the superego pressure does not squash your individuality. superereg pressure does not mean you lose your individuality. you you become a member of the crowd, anonymous, immersed into crowd passions and so on. on the contrary, as etienne balibar wonderfully put it recently, reversing louis althusser's classic formula, superego interpolates subjects into individuals. that is to say, let's take ecology. you feel super ego. you know, it's there, five minutes, it says. but i say, why don't we reject this mechanistic western linear notion of time? you know? you are a colonialist agent here. no. my notion of time is western, non-linear. non-linear. sorry, i will finish. i'm sorry. no, i just want to say that this is for me the primary everyday form of ideology, precisely this false individualization, you know, like, don't blame institutions, look at yourself. what did you do to fight environment? did you did you recycle coke cans? did you put all the newspaper, all the paper aside where it individualizes you in this culpabilizing way and so on? that's ideology at purest today. and i think even... yes, ecology functions like this. like, you know, all this pseudo-individualizing, like, what did you do today to repay your debt to nature? did you put all newspapers into a proper recycle bin? did you put all the bottles of beer or cans of coke into a special box or whatever and so on and so on? did you use air conditioning instead of just opening the window and so on and so on? and i find, you know this, but you know what's the paradox here and that's the structural ego dimension. debt. the more. you control yourself, the more you try to be. correct in this way. the more you feel guilty, the more you discover that you are infinitely guilty. i know with my american politically correct friends, you know, like this endless self-examination, was it right to use that f-word? what if it was offending? i look that woman straight into the eye. was it already a visual rape or whatever? and i claim that the more you go in this direction, you see, the more you try to be clean. the more you feel guilty. and of course the trick of this is that at the same time and this is for me why, as i always repeat, starbucks are the ultimate ideological company today. starbucks is capitalist genius at its purest. take into account the fact that today we have this politically correct fear. nobody wants to be a pure consumerist. you feel bad. but they offer a solution. enter it. no you have usually big posters claiming 5% of our profits go for some stupid guatemala children, 5 other%. so it's a wonderful idea. you can be. peacefully a consumerist because your social duty towards nature and others it includes into the price of the commodity you know. it's perfect. capitalism and again it plays this game on of individual culpabilization and so on and so on. so if you allow me just to uh briefly conclude what i wanted to say here little two, three minutes, because i nonetheless wanted to return to politics. it's that... to really approach a future. in an open way. the first thing to do, and this is cleansing, not ethnic cleansing, but ethical cleansing of our dreams, i think we should, if precisely you want to be a leftist, you should accept to put it briefly that the 20th century is over. of course, we all know the stalinist version of communism, it's passé. although it's not simply passé. today, where stalinist communists are still in power, they are the best managers of capitalism today. but that's another irony. social democratic welfare state, i don't think we can return to it. and this is for me, if you ask me. i sympathize with them. i read piketty, i read stiglitz and so on. but they are, for me, too utopian precisely insofar as they want to be realistic. look, what does piketty want? she wants the system the way it is. she admits just to raise taxes. i claim if we are able to do this, we. in order to be able to do this, we already have to win. because he he knows very well that today capitalism is global, so you cannot do in one country. so his solution presupposes a kind of a global, at least legal economic authority which can impose worldwide measures. if this happens, we are already there, we already won. stigglitz, the same problem, where he recently says in a very nice way, the problem is not capitalism, the problem is democracy. we just have to change the laws, you know, and so on, to make dem... i mean, higher taxes, more welfare and so on. but i say it's precisely the utopia, this is what hegel means by abstract thinking. you take one measure, let's do this. but wait a minute, if you really want to do this, you soon discover that you have to do so many other things. imagine just raising taxes. okay, capital flows abroad. so what will you do? you have to either isolate your country and enforce international measures, blah, blah, blah. at the end, you have to do so many other things. it's difficult. so again state i don't think we can return to it. but also, and is with this i will don't worry too much conclude the last dream that had to fall. i'm very skeptical about it. i think it's the worst illusion it this so-called anti-representative direct local democracy. this is the real heart of the left. they are ready to drop communism, they're ready to drop social democratic welfare state, but, you know, people gathering together locally and so on. that i think doesn't work ultimately it doesn't because first in our today's predicament what we what we need. just imagine how can we fight ecology, how can we fight biogenetics, who will control it, how can we fight the problem of intellectual property, which i think is maybe a deadly, mortal problem for today's capitalism. we will need large regulatory measures which have nothing to do with. this local democracy. the second illusion is this one. the idea of, and this is where i differ from most of today's radical leftists. they still have this dream, you know, locally, cooperatives, people taking over and so on. this works up to a certain degree, this works, this direct popular mobilization, this works in emergency states. but for me, and this is my big obsession, the true problem of a revolution is the morning after. that is to say, it's relatively easy, relatively, to do big event, tahrir square or in istanbul, at gaza or whatever, or athens, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating, and we all cry, you know, how wonderful. what interests me is, and that's for me the only serious measure of a revolt or social change. when, after a month or two, things return to normal, how will we feel? the change then. what i really hate are these enthusiastic leftists who like every 10 years a big event and then they can meet once a year in the evening to drink tea and wasn it nice when we were there, thousands of us? i don't care about that. second thing, let me tell you something horrible and i don't think i'm here reactionary. i'm here proper leftist. can you imagine living in a city society where you have to be all the time engaged in some stupid local problems and participate and so on? i want to live in a society where an invisible network makes things function. i want to have peace to watch my city movies, to read books and so on. you know, this is the true challenge today. everyday life revolution. and here... i think we are in a tragic predicament because on the one hand that's why i'm still some kind of a marxist, although a very weird marxist. i developed this in many of my books. we are confronting problems where i think and sorry contemporary capitalism. doesn't have the means to cope with them. and i have here a great ally. the last time i met him, even fukuyama is no longer a fukuyamaist. she admits it. like ecology, biogenetics. you cannot do it within capitalism, the way we had it now. on the other hand, i must say i don't have any clear formulas how. to do it. it's a big challenge because, okay, now you will say, why don't simply realistically accept where we are and just stay within the system that we are in? no, i think that... what is happening now is something very dark. that gradually we are already approaching a new. almost, i'm tempted to say apartheid post-democratic society. yes, we have democracy. it's more and more irrelevant and it's clear that with growing problems and so on, what is happening now is... new forms of apartheid and connected to this new forms of, let's call it, regression of, here i'm quite a naiveif progressist, why not? regression of public, let's call it public ethical substance. you know, here i'm a terrorist, but leftist progressive terrorist. don't you agree that the measure of progress is not we can debate about anything the measure of progress for me is good progressive. dogmatism. let me take the case of rape. i wouldn't like to live in a society where i would have to argue all the time why women shouldn't be raped. i would like to live in a society where when someone proposes this ridiculous bullshit, what if women secretly enjoy it or whatever, you don't have to argue against. he's an idiot. you know. and now i'll give you another example which is more painful because it's actually it happened. wasn't the same with torture? 20 years ago, just to mention torture was okay. now we are ready to debate about it. and i think that even if we win, like those who are against torture, predominate. the catastrophe is already here because we accepted it as a topic of debate. and i claim more and more, you will see, then democratic rights are not for everyone. the result of the fall of the berlin wall, which fell when, two, three days ago, no please, is that it's what. i almost remember freud who said whenever in a dream you have many penises, it means castration, that one penis is cut off. well, okay, one penis was cut off the berlin wall, that's why we get walls everywhere today, know united states, don't be. don't be... put into sleep. by the apparent gradual progress today. i claim that we are effectively in a dangerous era, which is searching to redefine itself and if we remain within the existing coordinates, the only solution will be a new apartheid, a new racist apartheid society. it can be that it will not be direct apartheid, but like today, you will have people who are in different forms of outside, deprived of civil rights and so on and so on. and i don't have a simple solution. contrary to what some people claim, i'm not saying oh new proletarian revolution, new communist party or whatever. no. but we will be pushed into doing something. but to do this again, we have first to censor our dreams. because i think the most dangerous idea in such a situation is to rely on old dreams be it this we build our own local cooperatives or just if we return to welfare state or whatever. i think that the left needs another ideological not physical parts you know like we have still to go through the zero point. there are no easy ways out. so the situation is difficult, but precisely for this reason maybe something new will emerge. i'm very sorry if i was too long. on the other hand, i'm not sorry. what could you do thank you very much. please, please! my standard joke, don't applaud so much, spare your energy. when we communists will take power, you will have to applaud, you know. spare the energy for people's democracy, you know.
okay. the need to censor our dreams by this i simply refer to defect especially those who, those social thinkers, politicians who like to or would like to propose an alternate vision of reality, how difficult really it is to imagine an alternative. and it's a nice paradox because precisely in our era when think within so-called real life are really changing. just think about biogenetics and other technological developments. for example, what always intrigued me, i follow it closely, is how with new options of our mind being wired directly to a computer, what was once considered a magic is gradually becoming an everyday practice that you, like stephen hawking, no longer need even his famous finger, you know. you think, the computer can decode what you think and the object moves. your thoughts have a direct effect on reality, of course. the problem here is what goes out goes also in. you can be controlled in the same way and so on. what i'm saying that precisely in an epoch where almost everything appears to be possible at the level of technology or private pleasures and so on. it's more and more difficult to imagine a social alternative. it's an old thought that i often repeat. from fred jameson, how today it's much easier to imagine the end of the world, of our lives, some comet asteroid hitting the earth, than to imagine a 3% raise of taxes for healthcare care, education and so on. and my another colleague of mine, alenka zupančič from slovenia ljubljana, member of my theoretical gang, also made this point how on the one hand, practically everything seems possible today. you can travel into space. we have this tech, technological gnostic dream of the ultimate horizon we turn ourselves, our identity as selves into a virtual entity that can be simply downloaded from one hard drive to another and thus we become immortal, whatever. this is all possible. but in the level of social life and economy, practically everything is impossible. you know, you want to raise taxes a little bit, oh financial catastrophe and so on and so on. so we live in very strange times and i want to address this. i want to begin with... someone whom i appreciate but i want to quote him. his name is pankaj mishra, the well-known indian, i think. p, sorry. i appreciate him, but nonetheless, i have a critical point to make. in his recent text with the title on the twilight of the west? he presents his diagnosis of today's predicament. here comes this slightly, maybe too long quote. i quote. in the 21st century, the old spell of universal progress, whether through western-style socialism or capitalism and democracy, has been decisively broken. the global crisis, which is as much moral and intellectual as it is political and environmental, puts into question above all our long submission to western ideas of politics and economy. whether it is catastrophic wars in iraq and afghanistan, oristan disastrous interventions in libya. the financial crisis of 2008, soaring unemployment in europe, which seems like a problem with no solution, and it's likely to empower far-right parties across the continent. the unresolved crisis of the euro, hideous income disparities in both europe and the united states, the widespread suspicion that big money has corrupted democratic processes. the absurdly dysfunctional american political system, edward snowden's revelations about the nsa, or the dramatic loss of a sense of possibility for young people everywhere. all of this, separately and together, has not only severely depleted the west's moral authority, but also weakened its intellectual hegemony. the western path to modernity can no longer be regarded as normal it cannot be the standard against which historical change in other parts of the world is measured. europeans. had created their own kind of modernity in the very particular historical circumstances of the 19th and 20th century. and other people have been trying since then with varying degrees of success to imitate it. but there are and always were other ways of conceiving of the state, society, economy. and good life. they all have their own specific difficulties and challenges. nevertheless, it will be possible to understand them only through an open and sustained engagement with non-western societies and their political and intellectual traditions. such an effort, formidable in itself, would also go against every instinct of the self-regarding universalism that west has upheld for two centuries. but it will be needed if we wish to seriously confront the great problem confronting the vast majority of 7 billion human beings, how to secure a dignified and sustainable life amid deepening inequality and animosity in an interdependent world. now, this seems almost a commonplace, a doxa today, revers acceptable. well, i cannot more disagree. with it. bye. this long passage is again. render in a concise way the post-colonial common sense, the failure of the western civilization as a global model and the failure of those decolonized nations which tried to emulate it. there is nonetheless, i claim, a problem with this diagnosis. yes, the lesson of post september 11th. catastrophe is the end of the fukuyama dream of global liberal democracy. but at the level of economy. capitalism has triumphed. worldwide the third world nations which endorsed it are those which are now growing with spectacular rate. the mask of cultural diversity is sustained by the actual universalism of the global capital. so my point is, i'm tired of this post-colonial critique, know your western universalism of human rights is imposed. it's not a true universalism. i'm not talking about that universalism. i'm talking about capitalist universalism, where simply all these cultural differences are in some sense irrelevant. when a british manager and a chinese manager meet in business negotiations. yes, we can play endlessly these games when they use words like truth, peace, whatever, do they mean the same thing? it doesn't matter. the deal is done. that's the actual universalism. and i find it paradoxical when people talk about decline of the west and the end of western universalism when precisely western capitalism effectively is universal. and this new global capitalist functions, that's for me the ultimate paradox. even better, if its political supplement relies on so-called, i'm not a racist here, it has nothing to do with asia. what we falsely call asian values, a more authoritarian version. global capitalism, i claim, has no problem in accommodating itself to a plurality of local religions, cultures, traditions and so on. i think, for example, that there is no paradox in what, if i know the media, what i know from the media, if it's right, maybe you know much better than me, like now in india, modi, how is it called? how do you pronounce? modi, yes. at the same time, at least he was, i don't know. how hypocritical is he now. a pretty violent hind nationalist and a total partisan of the most ruthless global capitalism. this is global capitalism. global capitalism is not we must all eat hamburgers and so on. global the form of global capitalism is more and more narrow nationalisms. up. global capitalism, again, has no problem in accommodating this plurality of local cultures and so on. so the cruel irony of anti-eurocentrism is that on behalf of anti-colonialism, one criticizes the west at the very historical moment when global capitalism no longer needs so-called western cultural values in order to function smoothly and it's doing quite well with authoritarian alternate modernities. in short, one tends to proclaim western cultural values. that at the very moment when critically reinterpreted, of course, many of them, egalitarianism, welfare state and so on, can effectively serve as a weapon against capitalist globalization. and i'm not bluffing here. you know, for example, when i was in india, i noticed how all those sco whose mouths are full against western imperialism and so on, are usually the brahmin cultural studies people who went even up to defending hindu caste system as, you know, it's our cultural specificity. what right do you from your western imperialist perspective you have to cancel it. while on the other hand, where i immediately felt at home is with untouchables and with, how do you call them, dalits. uh. the untouchables, the lowest class with. i have some sympathies for them with how to you call them, nit, the maoist guerr nal yes. here you can see how biased around media. there are almost one million of them. and you barely don't read of them. there is a great rebellion going on in india. it's ignored. or the political struggle with which i am involved, in which i am involved, there gandhi against ambedkar, a more egalitarian tradition. you know, gandhi, i have problems with gandhi. he was a great guy. he did many great things. but you know, his attitude towards caste was, sorry, what i'm tempted to call proto-fascist. she was not for the abolition of castes. his motto was every caste is divine, they have their own role to play, their own and the dalits whom i met, the lowest of the lowest, those who clean the dry toilets, they told me, no, we don't want to keep our specific identity. prec precisely we want to disappear. we want no longer to be who we are. we don't care if you say we also have a divine role and so on. so let's go on we should bear in mind that global capitalism does not automatically push all its subjects towards hedonist permissive individualism. that we have in our countries. and the fact that in many countries which recently entered the road of rapid capitalist modernization. china, india and so on. many individuals stick to the so-called traditional pre-modern beliefs and ethics, family values, rejection of unbridled hedonism, strong ethnic identification, giving preference to community ties over individual achievement, respect for elders and so on. this in no way proves that they are not fully modern. as if people in the liberal west can afford direct and full capitalist modernization while those from less developed asian, latin american, african countries can only survive the onslaught of capitalist dynamics through the help of the crutches of traditional ties. that is to say, as if traditional values are needed when local populations are not able to survive capitalism by way of adopting the proper capitalist, liberal hedonist, individualist ethics. i think that post-colonial subaltern theorists who see in the persistence of pre-modern traditions in global capitalism and its violent modernization disruptive of traditional ties. who perceiveceiving this way global capitalism, i think, are here wrong. on the contrary, fidelity to pre-modern, so-called falsely asian values is paradoxically the very feature which allows countries like china, singapore, india, to follow the path of capitalist dynamics even more radically than western liberal countries. reference to traditional values enable individuals to justify their ruthless engagement in market competition, to justify it in ethical terms like i'm really doing it to help my parents to earn money so that my children will be able to study and so on and so on. we can say something similar about today's china, i think. it is wrong to claim that china faces the choice of becoming a truly capitalist country or of maintaining the communist rule which thwarts the full capitalist development. i claim this choice is a false one. in today's china, capitalist growth is exploding not in spite of the communist rule, but because of it. far from being an obstacle to capitalist development, the communist rule guarantees the best conditions for unbridled capitalism. here we should be effectively anti-eurocentrist. it's our prejudice that there is something like a natural marriage between capitalism and so-called western hedonist individual values. no, this marriage is dissolving today. it's approaching divorce. today, and that's for me the danger, the tragedy. we we have new forms of capitalism, china, singapore and so on, which function even more smoothly in the sense of course crazy capitalist self-destructive dynamics and have need of democratic freedoms and so on and so on. capitalism today functions even better without. democracy. so again, how in these conditions can we imagine an alternative? the problem that i see is not only that it's difficult to imagine a radical alternative. everybody knows this. although incidentally, we all know that something is wrong. and my ultimate proof here, i hope you are corrupted like me. i like hollywood blockbusters and so on. when friends are telling me that you are a stupid marxist, probably you are still influenced by your communist yugoslav past, where do you see class division? today. i tell them, i see them in hollywood. did you notice how almost all big blockbusters tell an extremely violent story of a new post-apocalyptic society with radical class divisions, hunger games, elysium and so on. my god, hollywood knows it. you know it would be very nice in this sense to read even james bond films in a symptomatic way as uh. document of our era. i'm thinking about two moments. the first one is, did you notice that james bond films traditionally are one of the few films in which you can still see the active material productive process. but you know where? in the middle of the film usually bond penetrates the bad guy's private domain. the small factory where they either process drugs, deal with diamonds, gold, there you see production, material production. and then what's the function of gr bond? he's almost a kind of an agent of those theorists of disappearing labor and so on. his function is to exploit this so that, you know, we no longer have material product and so on. the other thing that makes me sad, but i don't have time to improvise in this in grandbond films, is that do you notice a sad thing in one before, not the last one, one before quantum of solace? it was a standard feature of james bond films that at the very end you have big sex between bond and bond girl. this one where the woman, the bon girlish olga kurylenko, the ukrainian star, is the first one, remember, with no sex at the end. they just embrace they are too desperate. they go apart. why is this so fascinating? because et. because you cannot accuse it of being a conservative film. on the other hand, politically, quantum of solence is the most leftist bond that i can imagine. basically, explicitly, james bond saves morales regime from some bad multinational company which wants to monopolize water supply in bolivia. but you know why i think this is dangerous. it's not any feminist potential, like let's step out of this male feminist penetrative whatever sexuality, it's something much more ominous. did you notice how you find the same thing in, now i'm really moving to lowest of the lowest, then brown novels and films? did you notice how already da vinci code no sex. you cannot screw the granddaughter of jesus christ. no. but did you notice how in angels and demons the last... fil them. something very strange happens you have. sex in the novel at the end. between langdon and dead italian scientist vittoria vetra. but not in the film. isn't it strange? once we thought hollywood adds sex to make it more commercial, now hollywood is erasing sex. i don't think there is anything progressive in this. i think it's an extremely sad tendency, whose expression is also the excess of political correctness and western buddhism and so on. the idea is this one. you know, in english and in french, there is the expression to fall in love, which precisely refers to the verb fall. we fall in love. and that's what is wonderful. love is fall. you are surprised, shocked, you open yourself to it. we are no longer ready to fall in love. we are all these fake buddhists, richard gere like buddhists, you know, like as they say in star wars, you know, don't identify yourself too much, don't attach yourself too much to worldly object, gain a distance and so on. so i really think that we are approaching an era where casual one-night stands, that's okay. a full passionate love affair ah you are over attaching yourself the spontaneous ethics today, i claim, is no longer the ethics of passionate attachment. fall in love, dedicate yourself. no, it's something like a vulgarized version. she's my friend, i appreciate her. a kind of vulgarized version of judith butler, you know. reconstruct your identity all the time, don't fixate yourself, experiment. with your life and so on and so on and it's very sad what is happening here because it's the same phenomenon at all levels what i mocked in all my books you know how we can have today beer but without alcohol coffee without caffeine sausages without fat when we also have sex well basically without sex it's called safe sex safe sex, you know. it's horrible. like one of the most depressive experiences i had is a couple of months ago i was flying to united states and that how's it called hemispheres, the plane journal of united there was a big two pages text celebrating sex. i said, let's read it. it depressed me totally. it praised sex, but you know how? if you fornicate often, it helps your leg muscles and heart. you will live longer. it even goes, the deep french kisses are good because they keep firm your mouth muscles so that when you are old, you will not suck.. it's horrible. you know maybe we lack authentic consumerism. maybe that's why we are so afraid of smoking. i don't smoke. but i think there is something... absolutely symptomatic about our obsession with smoking. it cannot be rationally explained. at the level of rational reality, i say, no problem, punish them and so on, punish. that's not my point. my point is what? i claim that what really disturbs us when you see a smoker is someone who is ready to risk it and enjoy to the end. that disturbs us. this is why this is a nice symptom. recently i read american airline companies prohibited even e-cigarettes, electronic cigarettes. you know what's the reasoning? not it's dangerous, but that by using e-cigaretteste, during the flight, you give bad example to others that you are not able to control yourself. next step is, it happened two weeks, three, four weeks ago in australia. i was shocked. it's not a joke. i thought it was a joke then i called my friends there it's true. in perth, you know, the modern west perth, australia, they have an opera. that opera decided to prohibit carmen by bizet. you know why? because the first act takes place in a tobacco history so it can be read as propaganda for tobacco. no, sorry, i claim that this attitude of, you know, like... what they called clinton sex, you know,... you like have it without fully enjoying it without i claim this is a very sad indication of an extremely controlled subjectivity emerging where basically... ultimate ultimate creep. dangerous intruder is the other as such. that's why i also oppose up to a point at least uh... uh... the topic of harassment. of course i'm against harassment when rapes happen and so on. i mean, i'm one of the few guys whom i know who is even for death penalty for rapists. i don't have any problems. i'm just saying that if you just go a little bit beneath the surface, you find that there is more hidden in this fear of harassment. harassment, even have, it's clear for me with my american friends, all these upper middle class academic harassment basically means all those loud ordinary people who smell bad, who talk dirty, blah blah blah. they shouldn't come too close to me. harassment is the very form of intolerance. it means i love blacks, but they smell bad, their music is too loud, i don't want them too close to me and so on. and that's how racism functions today. nobody almost is openly racist today. no we all say they are wonderful, the other, but but no, i don't like their spices, their music and so on and so on. okay. so, since i lose time,, as usual, maybe i will go on at this level of harassment, the other and so on, make a detour and then maybe a end i will return to this need to censor of dreams because i would like to focus on the one topic which seems to me very indicative of the tendency that i want to condemn. or to diagnose this tendency of apparent alternative radical breakthrough, but which effectively... just reproduces the structure of the existing power, what i call in my books inherent transgression. it is what? let me begin by a scene from one of my most favorite british movies, monty python's meaning of life. somewhere in the middle there is an episode where the pupils in a class await for the teacher to arrive. they are bored, they sit calmly near their benches, yawning, staring into the air. then one of them, standing close to the door, shouts, oh, the teacher is coming. and the pupils into the wild activity of shouting, throwing papers, shaking their tables, all the staff pupils are supposed to do when the teacher is absent, so that when the teacher enters... she can be annoyed and shout at them, stop this circus, quiet and so on and so on. i think the insight of this is a very deep one. that all that while children's activity, which apparently annoys thee. the teacher is really staged for his gaze. it is not spontaneous amusement. it is something performed for the teacher. and i think the same. goes for our most intense forms of enjoyment. which are not spontaneous outbursts, but something learned by imitation and acquired taste. i appeal to your memory. remember your first experience of drinking a hard liquor or smoking. as a rule, it was a slightly older peer who told you half in secret, you know what the adults are doing, whiskey, cigarettes, and then you try it and you admit it, must admit it. your first reaction was, it's horrible. how can you you learn to enjoy it. it begins as distaste. and i claim the same even goes for sex. it's the same as with drinks. if you want pleasure, you drink stupid milk or fruit juice. all other higher pleasures like whiskey is an acquired taste. the same goes for sex. but uh let me go on now into more serious domain. a similar lesson can be learned from swearing, talking really dirty. it may appear that. in the middle of a polite conversation, you get really mad. you cannot hold back anymore. you are totally frustrated, so you explode. intouit. i claim this is not how it is. i claim that precisely when apparently you lose your nerves and explode. at that point. you follow the. ritual. the formula, a clichliche. totally. i noticed how maybe i'm a madman here, but i have a ritual with my good friend. when we meet each week for a conversation and so on, for the first five minutes, we engage in a five- ten minute session of ra, tasteless, swearing, offending each other. you know, all the animal staff of and we from ex-yugoslavia, we know how to do it. i will dig your dead mother out of her grave and screw her up her ass. it's all there. and then a miracle happens. after five, ten minutes of this, we looked at each other friendly and we say, okay, now this boring ritual is behind us. now we can act like normal people and talk nicely and so on. i find this a wonderful structure, which works. but... now things get more serious. we should apply this lesson, i think, also to forms of collective violence, like gang rapes and killings. one of the terrifying effects of the non-contemporaneity, different levels of social life today in the world is the rise of violence against women. not just random violence, but systematic violence. violence which is specific to a certain social context, which follows a pattern, which transmits a clear message. for example, while we were right to be terrified at the gang rapes in india, you remember a couple of months ago, a girl was raped by five men in a bus. it was reported in all media. but as my friend arundhati roy pointed out. the cause of this unanimous outburst of moral indignation was that. the rapists were poor from the lower strata. she told me, well, if you want to be... shocked. you don't need to wait for those buses. go to bombay and look there at the prostitution ring, where, for example, you can buy relatively inexpensively girls from five years on of age, bought from poor nepal farmers as sexual slaves and so on and so on. or another phenomenon which really shocked me. the serial killings of women in ciudad juarez at the border with texas. they are not just private pathologies, but ritualized activity. i read two, three books at them and spoke with some of my mexican friends. it's horrible. in ciudad juarez there are, this is the capital of this fast assembling industry. so the ideal working class there are young single women. and of course this is a front to male... male sense of authority because you have there thousands of independent young women. so a ritual emerged. a certain number, up to 100 every year are kidnapped, serial raped, and then slowly tortured to death in a way which is a little bit too tasteless even for me. like first they cut off their breasts with scissors and so on and so on. but what i try to say is that what is so terrifying about it is that if you look at it closely and that's my point. this is not some kind of an elementary outburst of male fury. it's the clear symbolic structure. it's a social ritual. and interestingly, this is what the police tries to play down. incidentally, as you can expect it. the only person who was punished in ciudadarez still now was a mother whose daughter was killed and who complained too much. now you will say i'm playing an american racist blaming the poor mexicans. let's go to the other side. north vancouver, canada. you know canadians arrogant like we are the best of america, half america, half europe. i was told by my friends there and i even read some. uh. parliamentary investigation reports like you can find it on the web forsaken the report of the missing women commission of inquiry. by the government of british columbia from 2012. there also, close to vancouver you have some. reserves, reservations, whatever you call them, where and again. young white people go there and kidnap an indian, native american, whatever you call it, girl. they. again. rape her cheerily, torture her till death and then dump the body. it... again. that's the point i want to make. this became a ritualized activity. and what police investigation downplays is precisely this social symbolic ritual aspect. they systematically try to read it as... family matter among native americans themselves. like probably mother is a drug addict father. he's a drunkard and so on. you know, this dimension off. group ritualized activity disappears. of course, it's the same with an obvious example in our societies. like the cases of pedophilia in the catholic church. again, i think what is crucial is that it's not simply that there are pedophiles everywhere, so there are also in the catholic church. the problem is in what sense and to what degree pedophilia, ich, a kind of a what i called institutional unconscious, an obscene institutional sh. he ritual part of the. identity of catholic church and it's clear that it's like this for me from the way the catholic church in most countries reacts to it in this immediately protective way and so on and so on. now the first lesson from this, i don't have time to develop it in my books, i developed it in detail, is that when you observe a certain, analyze a certain ideology. and ideology for me is a very wide term. it's not just ideology in the sense of the big symbolic field of an elaborated theory and so on. no, ideology is for me something that penetrates and structures our everyday lives. the way i experience foreigners, the way i find certain things pleasurable, other things non-pleasurable there. for example, i read recently... i i will avoid mentioning my standard example, which i repeated so often that i am bored by it, of the structure of different toilets in different countries. but for example, recently i read a wonderful text on how the structure of kitchen sinks differs in denmark and in sweden. it may appear a totally pragmatic point. you learn it's the whole... ideology of how you perceive getting rid of that excess of food. so my first point is every ideological field is immanently, necessarily inconsistent. it has a certain set of rules. but also, the way these rules are violated is codified and you are even expected from time to time to violate in a codified way these rules. so to get an ideology... you must take into account both aspects. ep. now i want to move to illustrate this point to a more political aspect. this inconsistency of an ideico legal order in. china when i was in china, of course i asked these unpleasant questions, my colleague there, they were like half official philosophers, thinkers, like, you know, these usual stupidities, like you pretend to be still a communist country, where is the working class, where is communism, and so on and so on. and shocked me how they reacted. it's not so much that they try to squeeze out with some argumentation, which was incidentally pretty funny. i told them, okay, you pretend to be a communist country, communism means working class, where are the working class rights and so on. okay, i was immediately told that i am confusing leftism with communism. communism is a science of social development which teaches you how society develops. and marxist analysis teaches you that for china at this point, fast capitalism is the best means of development. so to be a consequent marxist, you must and so on. but there was something more fundamental. they reacted in this embarrassed way, you know, like as if i'm impolite. you don't ask these questions. can't you see that i am... that we are embarrassed and so on. and i'm not now blaming the chinese playing a racist game. the same thing happened to me back in london, one mile north from here at birkbeck college, where... half a year from now, i think so, we had a conference, the actuality of the theologico-political. and at some point there were three. panelists up there each talking their stuff, and i did something extremely tasteless, i discovered afterwards. i asked them a simple stupid question. we are here leftists who talk about religion. you all talk enthusiastically about emancipatory potential, for example, of christianity in latin america and so on. i asked them a simple question. do you believe in it or not? you know, are you just using religion as an example or in this condescending marxist way, like for us, we are dialectical materialists, but for stupid latino americans, you need religion to mobilize them and so on. or do you really believe in it? what shocked me is that they all reacted in this embarrassed way, like as if i was asking them, sorry for the tastelessness, like, in what position did you have sex the last night, you know? like one of them told me in panic, no, no, i'm here as a literary analyst, i cannot answer that. no, all, absolutely. and i think this is where we are with belief today. you know, we have beliefs. i don't think we really live in an atheist era. it's a much more complex thing. we believe maybe more than ever, but in this way that you are not ready to admit it publicly. and we have a whole set of strategies of how to displace beliefs onto others. like when i ask my jewish friends, but the same goes for my catholic friends and so on, do you really believe in it? you know and then you have a whole series of answers, no, but i act as if i believe because i respect my tradition. because i don't want to disappoint my children and so on. and here. i don't have time to elaborate it, but here wonderful notions can be mobilized. one is absolutely crucial one, a belief without believers. i think this is a fundamental category today. a certain belief can function socially without any person in the first person, as it were, actually believing in it. you know, like i read read, for example, stupid example. ask a parent when he buys santa claus. president for. his or her children, do you really believe in it? he says, i'm not crazy, i'm buying it. okay, but then ask the child. i promise you she will say, of course i'm not stupid. i just pretend to believe not to disappoint my parents and together. nobody has to believe, but it functions as a belief. and i claim it's exactly the same with most of religion today. but wait a minute. i'm not saying they don't really believe they fake. no. fake is their distance. i claim they really believe but they are not ready to admit it. we believe in precisely in now cynical era, we believe much more than we are ready to admit. so back to china. so we have this inconsistency, which is a necessary inconsistency. and what fascinates me so much is that. the outcome of this complication is that you do not have simply explicit public beliefs or norms, rules, even laws, and then what is prohibited. at a certain point, think... function in a very weird way. at a certain point, you have prohibitions which not only determine what is prohibited, but which are themselves prohibited. you have to respect them, but you have to pretend debt. they don't exist as prohibitions. i'm sorry if i stage here the same comedy as i usually do. if some of you know it, i'm sorry. like stalinism works like this. imagine, it's my golden dream imagine we are in moscow 37. i'm comrade stalin, you are the central committee, i give a big speech, you applaud as it is your duty. then we have a debate. one of you stands up and attacks me. no, this is madness. no the next day everyone will ask the question, who who was the last to see alive that guy. i will complicate it further. imagine then another guy standing up and attacking the first guy, telling it, but are you crazy? don't you know that here we are not allowed to criticize stalin? you don't do this. i claim he, the second guy, would have disappeared even faster. you see the point? it wasn't only prohibited to criticize stalin, it was absolutely even more prohibited to publicly say that it's prohibited to criticize stalin. so all the system function in, so that's my point, with every social symbolic system, you never simply have rules and what these rules prohibit? you always have a double displacement. on the one hand, you have prohibitions which are, as it were, made to be violated. of when your father tells you don't mess with girls, it usually in a male chauvinist society mean do it discreetly and so on. i mean, there are rules. with regard to which you are an idiot if you don't violate them. and then there are a much more interesting phenomenon, the opposite thing. there are things which you are permitted, even solicited to do. you can do them, you have a choice to do them, but on condition that you don't use that choice. and these are, i think, the most interesting ones. i'm not a pessimist here. what i want to say is that... because of this. y. you can sometimes fight the system! with pure naivety that you simply discount these implicit prohibitions. i'm sorry if you know this story, it's my favorite story. it happened to me, late 70s, yugoslav regime, it was communism, but not too harsh a communism? and i was a member of some student journal and okay, there were elections. there were the soviet-style elections. it wasn't like in soviet union the party always got 99.9%. it got like 80%. it was more but we knew it. so on the eve of elections, we wanted to do a small provocation and we asked ourselves what should we do? should we do the heroic thing like publishing an issue of our german. no, these were false elections, they were not really free. no. we thought first nobody would learn anything new. i mean, everyone knew this. and we decided to do something much more intelligent. we said... since the party claims that these are free elections, what if we treat them as if they are free? and we publish an extraordinary issue of our journal on the evening of the elections where, you know, the title was latest news that communists will remain in power, you know, like as if everything was uncertain and people were trembling. the reaction was incredible. we were immediately called to the central committee. it wasn't a real danger, just it was already a comedy. but and then i sympathized with theui poor guy there, the bureaucrat, because he told them, boys, don't fuck with us. you don't do things. and we told him. please tell us what did we do wrong. you said these are free elections, we treated them as free elections. he wasn't able, because of course, he wasn't allowed to say, fuck you, you know, that these are not free allowed. he was just repeating, boys. don't provoke me. don't fuck with me. but it was tragic because you know, he wasn't able to. so i think that again back to this point. what i find so fascinating. it's precisely this structure which is up to a point also, it's not just china. it's our structure today where we are free. but we are... so free that we are less and less even able to perceive where we are not free. because where are we free? we are free when we, and this is a good thing, i'm not trying to sell you some communist bullshit that this is just formal freedom and so on. no, it's nice to have this freedom of choice at the everyday level. you can choose your sex orientation, books you read, where do you travel, blah, blah. but the point is that in order to exercise this freedom, you always do it within a certain social context. and there, to co-determine, to change that context itself, i claim we are less and less free. and that's why i made such a fuss. i published a short comment in guardian, even and so on, on all these agreements that are now being prepared, tisha, tisa, and so on. the big trade agreement. hello? yeah, yeah, yeah, it's incredible. these are agreements which will determine in detail the economic coordinates of our life, which will limit incredibly the ability of governments to think. and there is no public debate. they are even, at least according to the first draft, one of this agreement, tisha, was not only secret but supposed to remain secret five years after. it's endorsement. so you see, this is the crucial point. yes, we have freedom and it's nice that we have this freedom, freedom of everyday choices and so on. but for me, nonetheless, i'm here an old-fashioned leftist guy, freedom should be also something more. the freedom also. to choose the very frame of choices. and there we know less and less, i claim on the contrary, we are approaching an era where economic decisions or decisions about war and so on, they are made absolutely behind our back. don't know what is happening. so how then does ideology function at this level? i claim it functions by trying to blame us by false individualization, which means super ego. you know the freudian supergo paradox. the more you are innocent, the more you are. guilty. how does this function? the superego pressure does not squash your individuality. superereg pressure does not mean you lose your individuality. you you become a member of the crowd, anonymous, immersed into crowd passions and so on. on the contrary, as etienne balibar wonderfully put it recently, reversing louis althusser's classic formula, superego interpolates subjects into individuals. that is to say, let's take ecology. you feel super ego. you know, it's there, five minutes, it says. but i say, why don't we reject this mechanistic western linear notion of time? you know? you are a colonialist agent here. no. my notion of time is western, non-linear. non-linear. sorry, i will finish. i'm sorry. no, i just want to say that this is for me the primary everyday form of ideology, precisely this false individualization, you know, like, don't blame institutions, look at yourself. what did you do to fight environment? did you did you recycle coke cans? did you put all the newspaper, all the paper aside where it individualizes you in this culpabilizing way and so on? that's ideology at purest today. and i think even... yes, ecology functions like this. like, you know, all this pseudo-individualizing, like, what did you do today to repay your debt to nature? did you put all newspapers into a proper recycle bin? did you put all the bottles of beer or cans of coke into a special box or whatever and so on and so on? did you use air conditioning instead of just opening the window and so on and so on? and i find, you know this, but you know what's the paradox here and that's the structural ego dimension. debt. the more. you control yourself, the more you try to be. correct in this way. the more you feel guilty, the more you discover that you are infinitely guilty. i know with my american politically correct friends, you know, like this endless self-examination, was it right to use that f-word? what if it was offending? i look that woman straight into the eye. was it already a visual rape or whatever? and i claim that the more you go in this direction, you see, the more you try to be clean. the more you feel guilty. and of course the trick of this is that at the same time and this is for me why, as i always repeat, starbucks are the ultimate ideological company today. starbucks is capitalist genius at its purest. take into account the fact that today we have this politically correct fear. nobody wants to be a pure consumerist. you feel bad. but they offer a solution. enter it. no you have usually big posters claiming 5% of our profits go for some stupid guatemala children, 5 other%. so it's a wonderful idea. you can be. peacefully a consumerist because your social duty towards nature and others it includes into the price of the commodity you know. it's perfect. capitalism and again it plays this game on of individual culpabilization and so on and so on. so if you allow me just to uh briefly conclude what i wanted to say here little two, three minutes, because i nonetheless wanted to return to politics. it's that... to really approach a future. in an open way. the first thing to do, and this is cleansing, not ethnic cleansing, but ethical cleansing of our dreams, i think we should, if precisely you want to be a leftist, you should accept to put it briefly that the 20th century is over. of course, we all know the stalinist version of communism, it's passé. although it's not simply passé. today, where stalinist communists are still in power, they are the best managers of capitalism today. but that's another irony. social democratic welfare state, i don't think we can return to it. and this is for me, if you ask me. i sympathize with them. i read piketty, i read stiglitz and so on. but they are, for me, too utopian precisely insofar as they want to be realistic. look, what does piketty want? she wants the system the way it is. she admits just to raise taxes. i claim if we are able to do this, we. in order to be able to do this, we already have to win. because he he knows very well that today capitalism is global, so you cannot do in one country. so his solution presupposes a kind of a global, at least legal economic authority which can impose worldwide measures. if this happens, we are already there, we already won. stigglitz, the same problem, where he recently says in a very nice way, the problem is not capitalism, the problem is democracy. we just have to change the laws, you know, and so on, to make dem... i mean, higher taxes, more welfare and so on. but i say it's precisely the utopia, this is what hegel means by abstract thinking. you take one measure, let's do this. but wait a minute, if you really want to do this, you soon discover that you have to do so many other things. imagine just raising taxes. okay, capital flows abroad. so what will you do? you have to either isolate your country and enforce international measures, blah, blah, blah. at the end, you have to do so many other things. it's difficult. so again state i don't think we can return to it. but also, and is with this i will don't worry too much conclude the last dream that had to fall. i'm very skeptical about it. i think it's the worst illusion it this so-called anti-representative direct local democracy. this is the real heart of the left. they are ready to drop communism, they're ready to drop social democratic welfare state, but, you know, people gathering together locally and so on. that i think doesn't work ultimately it doesn't because first in our today's predicament what we what we need. just imagine how can we fight ecology, how can we fight biogenetics, who will control it, how can we fight the problem of intellectual property, which i think is maybe a deadly, mortal problem for today's capitalism. we will need large regulatory measures which have nothing to do with. this local democracy. the second illusion is this one. the idea of, and this is where i differ from most of today's radical leftists. they still have this dream, you know, locally, cooperatives, people taking over and so on. this works up to a certain degree, this works, this direct popular mobilization, this works in emergency states. but for me, and this is my big obsession, the true problem of a revolution is the morning after. that is to say, it's relatively easy, relatively, to do big event, tahrir square or in istanbul, at gaza or whatever, or athens, hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating, and we all cry, you know, how wonderful. what interests me is, and that's for me the only serious measure of a revolt or social change. when, after a month or two, things return to normal, how will we feel? the change then. what i really hate are these enthusiastic leftists who like every 10 years a big event and then they can meet once a year in the evening to drink tea and wasn it nice when we were there, thousands of us? i don't care about that. second thing, let me tell you something horrible and i don't think i'm here reactionary. i'm here proper leftist. can you imagine living in a city society where you have to be all the time engaged in some stupid local problems and participate and so on? i want to live in a society where an invisible network makes things function. i want to have peace to watch my city movies, to read books and so on. you know, this is the true challenge today. everyday life revolution. and here... i think we are in a tragic predicament because on the one hand that's why i'm still some kind of a marxist, although a very weird marxist. i developed this in many of my books. we are confronting problems where i think and sorry contemporary capitalism. doesn't have the means to cope with them. and i have here a great ally. the last time i met him, even fukuyama is no longer a fukuyamaist. she admits it. like ecology, biogenetics. you cannot do it within capitalism, the way we had it now. on the other hand, i must say i don't have any clear formulas how. to do it. it's a big challenge because, okay, now you will say, why don't simply realistically accept where we are and just stay within the system that we are in? no, i think that... what is happening now is something very dark. that gradually we are already approaching a new. almost, i'm tempted to say apartheid post-democratic society. yes, we have democracy. it's more and more irrelevant and it's clear that with growing problems and so on, what is happening now is... new forms of apartheid and connected to this new forms of, let's call it, regression of, here i'm quite a naiveif progressist, why not? regression of public, let's call it public ethical substance. you know, here i'm a terrorist, but leftist progressive terrorist. don't you agree that the measure of progress is not we can debate about anything the measure of progress for me is good progressive. dogmatism. let me take the case of rape. i wouldn't like to live in a society where i would have to argue all the time why women shouldn't be raped. i would like to live in a society where when someone proposes this ridiculous bullshit, what if women secretly enjoy it or whatever, you don't have to argue against. he's an idiot. you know. and now i'll give you another example which is more painful because it's actually it happened. wasn't the same with torture? 20 years ago, just to mention torture was okay. now we are ready to debate about it. and i think that even if we win, like those who are against torture, predominate. the catastrophe is already here because we accepted it as a topic of debate. and i claim more and more, you will see, then democratic rights are not for everyone. the result of the fall of the berlin wall, which fell when, two, three days ago, no please, is that it's what. i almost remember freud who said whenever in a dream you have many penises, it means castration, that one penis is cut off. well, okay, one penis was cut off the berlin wall, that's why we get walls everywhere today, know united states, don't be. don't be... put into sleep. by the apparent gradual progress today. i claim that we are effectively in a dangerous era, which is searching to redefine itself and if we remain within the existing coordinates, the only solution will be a new apartheid, a new racist apartheid society. it can be that it will not be direct apartheid, but like today, you will have people who are in different forms of outside, deprived of civil rights and so on and so on. and i don't have a simple solution. contrary to what some people claim, i'm not saying oh new proletarian revolution, new communist party or whatever. no. but we will be pushed into doing something. but to do this again, we have first to censor our dreams. because i think the most dangerous idea in such a situation is to rely on old dreams be it this we build our own local cooperatives or just if we return to welfare state or whatever. i think that the left needs another ideological not physical parts you know like we have still to go through the zero point. there are no easy ways out. so the situation is difficult, but precisely for this reason maybe something new will emerge. i'm very sorry if i was too long. on the other hand, i'm not sorry. what could you do thank you very much. please, please! my standard joke, don't applaud so much, spare your energy. when we communists will take power, you will have to applaud, you know. spare the energy for people's democracy, you know.
Cathy Newman
all right, we've got about 20 minutes left. and flavo would like to take one question at a time. so please put your hands up. i'm going to start this end of the room and come.
all right, we've got about 20 minutes left. and flavo would like to take one question at a time. so please put your hands up. i'm going to start this end of the room and come.
Slavoj Žižek
one remark to give you an idea of my broad democratic spirit. i'm always for a dialogue, but if some of you are philosophers, you know which dialogues are my preferred ones. late plato's dialogues where one guy talks all the time and the other guy only says every 10 minutes something like by zeus, you are right socrates. so let's have this type of a diary.
one remark to give you an idea of my broad democratic spirit. i'm always for a dialogue, but if some of you are philosophers, you know which dialogues are my preferred ones. late plato's dialogues where one guy talks all the time and the other guy only says every 10 minutes something like by zeus, you are right socrates. so let's have this type of a diary.
Cathy Newman
i'm afraid i can't promise that one here. but let's see. i'd like to see men and women both put their hands up, please. can we start with you?
i'm afraid i can't promise that one here. but let's see. i'd like to see men and women both put their hands up, please. can we start with you?
Slavoj Žižek
sorry.
sorry.
Darko Radosavljev
hello, good evening. my name is dark aradosavev and i have a background in contemporary dance, actually, and i'm studying my ma in art and politics at goldsmith and at lse at the moment. my question would be, in fact, i have two short questions. first question is,
hello, good evening. my name is dark aradosavev and i have a background in contemporary dance, actually, and i'm studying my ma in art and politics at goldsmith and at lse at the moment. my question would be, in fact, i have two short questions. first question is,
Cathy Newman
you might have to do one because we
you might have to do one because we
Darko Radosavljev
ah okay okay
ah okay okay
Slavoj Žižek
dialectically interconnected. yeah.
dialectically interconnected. yeah.
Cathy Newman
we're going to try and get.
we're going to try and get.
Darko Radosavljev
thank you, thank you. okay, very, very briefly. first question. i would like to come back to your... with with your yugoslavian friends where you were saying that you enjoyed the freeing perspective of insulting each other. i would like to know if you would feel the same pleasure if there was a female in this part as well and if not, why not? my second part is why do you think that the practice and the activity of reconstructing our identity keeps us from being passionate. compassionate lovers whatsoever.
thank you, thank you. okay, very, very briefly. first question. i would like to come back to your... with with your yugoslavian friends where you were saying that you enjoyed the freeing perspective of insulting each other. i would like to know if you would feel the same pleasure if there was a female in this part as well and if not, why not? my second part is why do you think that the practice and the activity of reconstructing our identity keeps us from being passionate. compassionate lovers whatsoever.
Cathy Newman
the men or female. thank you.
the men or female. thank you.
Slavoj Žižek
okay, i will be very brief. first the second one. you know, it depends. you know, one shouldn't be abstract. it depends of... i claim i was not talking about constructing ourselves in some abstract way. i was talking about this is always the problem when you have to talk fast and about many things, about how the slogan. you should reconstruct your identity permanently, rediscover yourself. how this functions in today's society. i claim it functions in this way. and that's my big, we can disagree here, but i have a great admiration for judith butler. but this is my problem with her, to put it very brutally. what she is describing as this subversive model of noatriarchal identity, we are performatively enacting our shifting identity. i agree with girl. i'm just claiming she's not describing a subversive model, but precisely the mode of subjectivity which is predominant in our societies. why does she think that she's saying something subversive? i don't think that today the predominant form of... how we form social identity is still this patriarchal identification and then you subvert it or whatever. no, father is something much more terrifying, much more oppressive for this. father today no longer tells you, be obedient, disciplined and so on. father is telling you, do you know how to be sexually active? should i teach you? discover yourself and so on, which as everyone knows is much worse. the second question, insulting and so on. well, you can believe me or not. but i can guarantee you there are definitely women in that circle in my country. but i will tell you another thing which may amuse you that i almost caused a heart attack to my friend amy goodman, democracy now, when she asked me once, how do we find reactionary racism? and i told her simply through progressive racism. she thought i'm crazy, but what i meant is, and this is the form of this humiliating. i remember in ex-yugoslavia, this was the paradise for me, almost. i don't idealize it. part of this insulting and so on was telling racist jokes. and it was wonderful because they were not jokes against the other. you know, each yugoslav nation was identified with a certain racist clichliche. macedonians are lazy, i don't know. i think, no, sorry, montegr are lazy, macedonians are thieves, bosnians are sexually obsessive, we slovenes are misers and so on. and it was so wonderful because we, it was a kind of a friendly competition. but telling each other jokes at our own expense. and each of us gladly identified with the clichliche. it was not, oh, this is a cliche. really beneath it, we are much more complex human beings. no, i like to be my cliche. and then it works in such a liberating way. don't you also feel this? i'm now appealing to your everyday experience. when i go to any country, india, china, they first give me that bullshit, we have our culture, our dish, that monument. i tell them, fuck you. tell me a dirty joke. and then the ice is broke. broken you do it. i claim that you need something like a minimal exchange of obscenities to do what i can only call with naive terms to establish an actual contact with another person. otherwise, it is this terrifying politically correct racism, you know, this like, oh, how wise you are, we western men are imperialists who exploit nature, but you have a dialogic relationship with mother nature, you know, and all the bullshit and so on. i claim that, but on the other hand, wait a minute. i'm well aware that humor as such doesn't liberate. here i violently disagree with umberto eco in his name of the rose. he's totally wrong in claiming that you know, laughter is a threat. no, if you look closely at totalitarian so-called system, laughter can also be a brutal laughter of those in power. but i claim that nonetheless, of course i'm not talking about racism in the sense of humiliating the other. but this wonderful game, you must know them, i will not repeat them, like the one i always repeat is that joke about montenegro friends are telling me all the time, you know, which is standard yugoslavia, because montenegro is an earthquake country, you know. how do a montegr guy in their lazy masturbate? he digs a hole in the earth. put his penis in and wait for the earthquake. because they are too lazy even to do the gestures and so on. and then this is wonderful. then me as a slovene, i add my obscenity, my bosnian friends had another obscenity and now you will say, what about the civil war? ah, that's my ultimate proof. already in the early 80s when nationalism was exploding, that's my ultimate proof of the progressive nature. of this joke, they disappeared. they were incompatible with real ethnic hatred. they are slowly emerging only now. in an incredibly subversive way, like in bosnia, you remember srebrenica, the terrible slaughter. i admire roians. they, not they other bosnians from srebica, they already have jokes at their own. you know, like a bosnian from germany returns to srrenica and says, oh my god, now it's peace, i want to buy land for a house there and what are the costs? and the friend tells him this is a complicated thing because, you know, when we were buying meat when we were young, it depends on, usually the butcher asks you, do you want beef with bones or not? like if you want to make a consommé, a soup, you need. no, and the french tells him there, well, it depends. if you want lent with bones, it's more expensive. you know, it's extremely tasteless, but i think that... it's not just some kind of cheap irony. is that when things are really terrifying. horrible. isn't it a fake to play this dignified role? we are all solid with you and so on. in a way, you can survive it only through obscenity. because in an obscenity, in a way, you admit sorry, i cannot deal with it. yes. you you are the boss.
okay, i will be very brief. first the second one. you know, it depends. you know, one shouldn't be abstract. it depends of... i claim i was not talking about constructing ourselves in some abstract way. i was talking about this is always the problem when you have to talk fast and about many things, about how the slogan. you should reconstruct your identity permanently, rediscover yourself. how this functions in today's society. i claim it functions in this way. and that's my big, we can disagree here, but i have a great admiration for judith butler. but this is my problem with her, to put it very brutally. what she is describing as this subversive model of noatriarchal identity, we are performatively enacting our shifting identity. i agree with girl. i'm just claiming she's not describing a subversive model, but precisely the mode of subjectivity which is predominant in our societies. why does she think that she's saying something subversive? i don't think that today the predominant form of... how we form social identity is still this patriarchal identification and then you subvert it or whatever. no, father is something much more terrifying, much more oppressive for this. father today no longer tells you, be obedient, disciplined and so on. father is telling you, do you know how to be sexually active? should i teach you? discover yourself and so on, which as everyone knows is much worse. the second question, insulting and so on. well, you can believe me or not. but i can guarantee you there are definitely women in that circle in my country. but i will tell you another thing which may amuse you that i almost caused a heart attack to my friend amy goodman, democracy now, when she asked me once, how do we find reactionary racism? and i told her simply through progressive racism. she thought i'm crazy, but what i meant is, and this is the form of this humiliating. i remember in ex-yugoslavia, this was the paradise for me, almost. i don't idealize it. part of this insulting and so on was telling racist jokes. and it was wonderful because they were not jokes against the other. you know, each yugoslav nation was identified with a certain racist clichliche. macedonians are lazy, i don't know. i think, no, sorry, montegr are lazy, macedonians are thieves, bosnians are sexually obsessive, we slovenes are misers and so on. and it was so wonderful because we, it was a kind of a friendly competition. but telling each other jokes at our own expense. and each of us gladly identified with the clichliche. it was not, oh, this is a cliche. really beneath it, we are much more complex human beings. no, i like to be my cliche. and then it works in such a liberating way. don't you also feel this? i'm now appealing to your everyday experience. when i go to any country, india, china, they first give me that bullshit, we have our culture, our dish, that monument. i tell them, fuck you. tell me a dirty joke. and then the ice is broke. broken you do it. i claim that you need something like a minimal exchange of obscenities to do what i can only call with naive terms to establish an actual contact with another person. otherwise, it is this terrifying politically correct racism, you know, this like, oh, how wise you are, we western men are imperialists who exploit nature, but you have a dialogic relationship with mother nature, you know, and all the bullshit and so on. i claim that, but on the other hand, wait a minute. i'm well aware that humor as such doesn't liberate. here i violently disagree with umberto eco in his name of the rose. he's totally wrong in claiming that you know, laughter is a threat. no, if you look closely at totalitarian so-called system, laughter can also be a brutal laughter of those in power. but i claim that nonetheless, of course i'm not talking about racism in the sense of humiliating the other. but this wonderful game, you must know them, i will not repeat them, like the one i always repeat is that joke about montenegro friends are telling me all the time, you know, which is standard yugoslavia, because montenegro is an earthquake country, you know. how do a montegr guy in their lazy masturbate? he digs a hole in the earth. put his penis in and wait for the earthquake. because they are too lazy even to do the gestures and so on. and then this is wonderful. then me as a slovene, i add my obscenity, my bosnian friends had another obscenity and now you will say, what about the civil war? ah, that's my ultimate proof. already in the early 80s when nationalism was exploding, that's my ultimate proof of the progressive nature. of this joke, they disappeared. they were incompatible with real ethnic hatred. they are slowly emerging only now. in an incredibly subversive way, like in bosnia, you remember srebrenica, the terrible slaughter. i admire roians. they, not they other bosnians from srebica, they already have jokes at their own. you know, like a bosnian from germany returns to srrenica and says, oh my god, now it's peace, i want to buy land for a house there and what are the costs? and the friend tells him this is a complicated thing because, you know, when we were buying meat when we were young, it depends on, usually the butcher asks you, do you want beef with bones or not? like if you want to make a consommé, a soup, you need. no, and the french tells him there, well, it depends. if you want lent with bones, it's more expensive. you know, it's extremely tasteless, but i think that... it's not just some kind of cheap irony. is that when things are really terrifying. horrible. isn't it a fake to play this dignified role? we are all solid with you and so on. in a way, you can survive it only through obscenity. because in an obscenity, in a way, you admit sorry, i cannot deal with it. yes. you you are the boss.
Cathy Newman
i was going to go up the back as the lady there.
i was going to go up the back as the lady there.
Slavoj Žižek
but i noticed that you privilege the right side and neglect the left.
but i noticed that you privilege the right side and neglect the left.
Cathy Newman
i started there. i'm going to finish on a high note on the left. so you better have a good question over there. lady apple.
i started there. i'm going to finish on a high note on the left. so you better have a good question over there. lady apple.
Slavoj Žižek
just be loud enough, please, so that you...
just be loud enough, please, so that you...
Cathy Newman
sorry.
sorry.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah.
yeah.
Cathy Newman
oh well did you not did red scarf did you not have your hand up .
oh well did you not did red scarf did you not have your hand up .
Slavoj Žižek
and you can
and you can
John Bird (audience member, founder of The Big Issue)
my name is john by. i started the big issue. uh i extra.
my name is john by. i started the big issue. uh i extra.
Slavoj Žižek
racist and an ex-marxist. sorry.
racist and an ex-marxist. sorry.
John Bird (audience member, founder of The Big Issue)
i can go. at the same time,.
i can go. at the same time,.
Slavoj Žižek
or no, because it does.
or no, because it does.
John Bird (audience member, founder of The Big Issue)
well. even worse, i was a catholic marxist racist, which was hard work. are you irish then? irish london irish.
well. even worse, i was a catholic marxist racist, which was hard work. are you irish then? irish london irish.
Slavoj Žižek
thank'm.
thank'm.
John Bird (audience member, founder of The Big Issue)
y. yeah.
y. yeah.
Slavoj Žižek
nicht ja.
nicht ja.
John Bird (audience member, founder of The Big Issue)
i got out of marxism about 20 years ago to start the big issue because they were incongruous, you know, they didn't go together.
i got out of marxism about 20 years ago to start the big issue because they were incongruous, you know, they didn't go together.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah.
yeah.
John Bird (audience member, founder of The Big Issue)
i got out to help the homeless, to help themselves. i'm ex-home, ex-offender, all that old shit. but the point was... um... ever since then, i've had all the marxists all over me because they take the point that you make, which is the point that you made that, oh, you know, you're feeling guilty, so you've got to go out and, you recycle this and recycle that.
i got out to help the homeless, to help themselves. i'm ex-home, ex-offender, all that old shit. but the point was... um... ever since then, i've had all the marxists all over me because they take the point that you make, which is the point that you made that, oh, you know, you're feeling guilty, so you've got to go out and, you recycle this and recycle that.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah.
yeah.
John Bird (audience member, founder of The Big Issue)
if i didn't have guilt. if i couldn't use the guilt of the middle class,
if i didn't have guilt. if i couldn't use the guilt of the middle class,
Slavoj Žižek
yeah.
yeah.
John Bird (audience member, founder of The Big Issue)
there wouldn't have been the revolutionary movement that i was involved in in the may and june days. and all sorts of things. if you don't have revolutionary guilt, you're fucked. and if you don't, we built an international movement based on the guilt of white middle class. guilt and in a way, i want to know how can we transcend that? what's the next stage? and i think that the point that you were making about this system is in many ways, it's the only thing there is at the moment. and that is to give the poor the chance of getting out of poverty. and we forget that. we forget that getting them out of poverty is an incredibly life-saving experience.
there wouldn't have been the revolutionary movement that i was involved in in the may and june days. and all sorts of things. if you don't have revolutionary guilt, you're fucked. and if you don't, we built an international movement based on the guilt of white middle class. guilt and in a way, i want to know how can we transcend that? what's the next stage? and i think that the point that you were making about this system is in many ways, it's the only thing there is at the moment. and that is to give the poor the chance of getting out of poverty. and we forget that. we forget that getting them out of poverty is an incredibly life-saving experience.
Slavoj Žižek
y. but i just, i don't know if i got you correctly. i will just answer in a more abstract way, but i still doubt if manipulating the guilt... of the upper middle classes is the right way because i think that this guilt feeling is already to such an extent inscribed into the ruling ideology. i think that's how they function today. that's how they talk. they talk, listen to bill gates and so on. all mentioned this, i mean, you know, the problem is, i don't think, you know whom you should read here. i like him. he wasn't even a marxist. fanon. fanon wrote, frantz fanon some wonderful lines here. when he say, no, the point of my struggle is not to make the white people feel guilty about the horrors they did to us and so on. on the contrary, you know, this is why also, i will tell you what's the way for me. that's why also one of my heroes is malcolm x. great guy. why? because of the x he saw something with incredible clarity. de up. x, of course, stands for the horror of slavery, they deprive you of all roots. but his unique vision, he was my god, a spontaneous rebellion, was that it's not like that hollywood city series roots, let's rediscover, you find there some tribe and they remember your grandmother, oh, i found my roots and so on. no, the malcolm x insight was that this x, being deprived of your particular roots. at the same time gives you a unique chance to be more universalist, authentically universalist than the western people themselves. big lesson for me here is south africa. i remember. still, who was their dish? nativist, let's return to our roots. buthelezi, king, who was as we know now paid by the apartheid regime. whatever critical notes we have about mandela and african national congress, at least they never succumbed to any of this. let's return to our roots stuff. so what i'm telling you is... uh. how should to put it? solidarity must be deeper. if we want just to make the well-standing white people feel guilty or whatever, it will not work. i am a pessimist here. it will not work.
y. but i just, i don't know if i got you correctly. i will just answer in a more abstract way, but i still doubt if manipulating the guilt... of the upper middle classes is the right way because i think that this guilt feeling is already to such an extent inscribed into the ruling ideology. i think that's how they function today. that's how they talk. they talk, listen to bill gates and so on. all mentioned this, i mean, you know, the problem is, i don't think, you know whom you should read here. i like him. he wasn't even a marxist. fanon. fanon wrote, frantz fanon some wonderful lines here. when he say, no, the point of my struggle is not to make the white people feel guilty about the horrors they did to us and so on. on the contrary, you know, this is why also, i will tell you what's the way for me. that's why also one of my heroes is malcolm x. great guy. why? because of the x he saw something with incredible clarity. de up. x, of course, stands for the horror of slavery, they deprive you of all roots. but his unique vision, he was my god, a spontaneous rebellion, was that it's not like that hollywood city series roots, let's rediscover, you find there some tribe and they remember your grandmother, oh, i found my roots and so on. no, the malcolm x insight was that this x, being deprived of your particular roots. at the same time gives you a unique chance to be more universalist, authentically universalist than the western people themselves. big lesson for me here is south africa. i remember. still, who was their dish? nativist, let's return to our roots. buthelezi, king, who was as we know now paid by the apartheid regime. whatever critical notes we have about mandela and african national congress, at least they never succumbed to any of this. let's return to our roots stuff. so what i'm telling you is... uh. how should to put it? solidarity must be deeper. if we want just to make the well-standing white people feel guilty or whatever, it will not work. i am a pessimist here. it will not work.
Cathy Newman
so i'm going to take charge. you should call me the boss. i'm going to take two questions and then we're going to finish up.
so i'm going to take charge. you should call me the boss. i'm going to take two questions and then we're going to finish up.
Slavoj Žižek
on the left. okay, okay, okay.
on the left. okay, okay, okay.
Cathy Newman
l it back and then...
l it back and then...
Slavoj Žižek
moderate left, tony blair and more extreme left or what yeah
moderate left, tony blair and more extreme left or what yeah
Audience Member
i have a very short question. what do you think about mr. putin? because you talk a lot about china and global capitalism without democracy. putin in end his own term. svereign democracy, which is like um when you can managing capitalism, what do you think about mr. putin? and yeah, this is my question.
i have a very short question. what do you think about mr. putin? because you talk a lot about china and global capitalism without democracy. putin in end his own term. svereign democracy, which is like um when you can managing capitalism, what do you think about mr. putin? and yeah, this is my question.
Cathy Newman
i want to take the other one too.
i want to take the other one too.
Audience Member
yeah, okay.
yeah, okay.
Slavoj Žižek
good.
good.
Cathy Newman
then there's a mic
then there's a mic
Audience Member
yeah, it was fascinating what you were saying about individualizing and the way the ideology is, we internalize it, the culpability. what is the role, in your opinion, of social media in that process? what do you mean by social media?. face internet internet. yeah.
yeah, it was fascinating what you were saying about individualizing and the way the ideology is, we internalize it, the culpability. what is the role, in your opinion, of social media in that process? what do you mean by social media?. face internet internet. yeah.
Cathy Newman
which which i was supposed to mention to you i haven't. okay, okay.
which which i was supposed to mention to you i haven't. okay, okay.
Slavoj Žižek
okay, with regard to putin, maybe i don't know enough, but i am first or i tend, i am not simply subscribing to the western view of now everything was okay, nice, and then bad putin imperialism, but basically i am opposed to putin because i simply think that he is just one of the specific forms of this new global capitalism which fits perfectly well some local nationalist ideology and so on and so on. i don't see anything the only thing that i deplore my problem with putin is not so much democracy and so on but he's not efficient enough at least if he would be efficient in the way the chinese were you know what i mean i claim that this may sound very cynical what i'm saying but from what i can judge even a the of the imminent capitalist development, i don't think he's doing very good. listen, russia remains totally dependent on export of natural resources, okay, arms help a little bit, only that it's not a productive form of capitalism. that's the problem for me. and it's just putin is just a key player. here i'm a pessimist. i spoke recently with my good friend alain badiou and he made this idea why our times are so dangerous today. we are really approaching the repetition of the europe around 1900, where you had the british empire, now america, which is the ex global power losing it, and then we have new powers at that point it was germany, today russia and china who want to also become global players and this is a situation which can give birth to a new world war, i claim. and the situation is extremely dangerous because of course everyone talks today already about new world war no? but i don't think this will help. you know the trick is that it's exactly the same as a little bit over 100 years ago. remember that for 20 years before 1914 all of europe was talking about the danger of a world war, and everybody was saying we have to avoid it. even social democracy, all of them, every year they accept the declaration. and then we know what happened. but what i want to say is that all this talking about the danger of a world war, i think there is some very obscene superstitious economy in it. it is as if we talk a lot about it, maybe it will not happen. like we talk about it, but we don't really believe in it. we wrongly think that if we talk a lot about it, it will not happen. it can happen. i think the situation is extremely dangerous today because we have a global, and i almost feel a sympathy for the united states. don't be afraid, i'm not crazy. you know, i was shocked by a recent interview by obama. who says... defending american universal policeman role. you know when he says, when there is trouble in philippines, here, there, they don't call moscow, they don't call beijing, they call us. that's how the world is. we are referred to as the global policeman. but what he didn't take into account is the perverse way in which the new centers of power exploit this so that america will end up serving as a global policeman, doing the dirty work for others. that's why obama was so offended. you remember, he wrote a kind letter toene khamenei to iran, now together, and khamenei basically in a humiliating way rejected contact and he was right, i mean, from a brutal rationalist point. let americans do the dirty work for you, fighting isis and so on, and you can even pretend to criticize them and so on i think that if america still clings to this role of global policeman. no, what did talleyrand said? it's not a crime, it's worse. it's a mistake. i would say something similar, you know, they will end up. doing dirty work for the others which at the end will hurt themselves. look, what's the actual result of the invasion of iraq? is that politically they delivered iraq to iran, their arch enemy, and so on. so i think, again, this entire situation is extremely dangerous. and i'm a pessimist. and all i can tell you is i know the situation there i supported pussy riot and so on. although for me, maybe i'm wrong, they went a little bit too far. when they... accepted when the two were liberated you know in new york i mean this is for me a matter of good manners and politeness. you don't do events with richard gere and bob geldof you know you don't go into that. i mean this is where i try to appeal to them. like yes, we support you but what about you supporting snowden and so on you know, for me, everything depends on this. pushy, r, snowden, the same struggle. if we drop this, we are lost. we are just in local conflict. because, you know, i spoke with julian assange and he told me, it's totally wrong to think snowden is now bought by putin. no, snowden is a terrible predicament. i know directly. he desperately wants to move to some western country out. he knows what dangerous situation is this. but whenever there was a movement in denmark, in sweden. immediately american pressure, it didn't work. it's the west which is keeping snowden in russia. so about facebook and so on, new media are for me, no, i can only give you the boring st and marxist line. they are for me an antagonistic phenomenon. the struggle is going within new media. okay, i have there a personal problem. when you mention facebook and twitter, i don't do them. i think it's a loss of time. i think it should be prohibited and so on. normal people. but i am well aware on the one hand, on... emancipatory potential like building networks outside state control, blah blah. i buy all that. on the other hand, i was convinced by some publications like among others, this assange's new book on it very nice theory that google is basically a privatized version of nsa and so on, you know. and this is the struggle today. i think that the struggle for this new global social media
okay, with regard to putin, maybe i don't know enough, but i am first or i tend, i am not simply subscribing to the western view of now everything was okay, nice, and then bad putin imperialism, but basically i am opposed to putin because i simply think that he is just one of the specific forms of this new global capitalism which fits perfectly well some local nationalist ideology and so on and so on. i don't see anything the only thing that i deplore my problem with putin is not so much democracy and so on but he's not efficient enough at least if he would be efficient in the way the chinese were you know what i mean i claim that this may sound very cynical what i'm saying but from what i can judge even a the of the imminent capitalist development, i don't think he's doing very good. listen, russia remains totally dependent on export of natural resources, okay, arms help a little bit, only that it's not a productive form of capitalism. that's the problem for me. and it's just putin is just a key player. here i'm a pessimist. i spoke recently with my good friend alain badiou and he made this idea why our times are so dangerous today. we are really approaching the repetition of the europe around 1900, where you had the british empire, now america, which is the ex global power losing it, and then we have new powers at that point it was germany, today russia and china who want to also become global players and this is a situation which can give birth to a new world war, i claim. and the situation is extremely dangerous because of course everyone talks today already about new world war no? but i don't think this will help. you know the trick is that it's exactly the same as a little bit over 100 years ago. remember that for 20 years before 1914 all of europe was talking about the danger of a world war, and everybody was saying we have to avoid it. even social democracy, all of them, every year they accept the declaration. and then we know what happened. but what i want to say is that all this talking about the danger of a world war, i think there is some very obscene superstitious economy in it. it is as if we talk a lot about it, maybe it will not happen. like we talk about it, but we don't really believe in it. we wrongly think that if we talk a lot about it, it will not happen. it can happen. i think the situation is extremely dangerous today because we have a global, and i almost feel a sympathy for the united states. don't be afraid, i'm not crazy. you know, i was shocked by a recent interview by obama. who says... defending american universal policeman role. you know when he says, when there is trouble in philippines, here, there, they don't call moscow, they don't call beijing, they call us. that's how the world is. we are referred to as the global policeman. but what he didn't take into account is the perverse way in which the new centers of power exploit this so that america will end up serving as a global policeman, doing the dirty work for others. that's why obama was so offended. you remember, he wrote a kind letter toene khamenei to iran, now together, and khamenei basically in a humiliating way rejected contact and he was right, i mean, from a brutal rationalist point. let americans do the dirty work for you, fighting isis and so on, and you can even pretend to criticize them and so on i think that if america still clings to this role of global policeman. no, what did talleyrand said? it's not a crime, it's worse. it's a mistake. i would say something similar, you know, they will end up. doing dirty work for the others which at the end will hurt themselves. look, what's the actual result of the invasion of iraq? is that politically they delivered iraq to iran, their arch enemy, and so on. so i think, again, this entire situation is extremely dangerous. and i'm a pessimist. and all i can tell you is i know the situation there i supported pussy riot and so on. although for me, maybe i'm wrong, they went a little bit too far. when they... accepted when the two were liberated you know in new york i mean this is for me a matter of good manners and politeness. you don't do events with richard gere and bob geldof you know you don't go into that. i mean this is where i try to appeal to them. like yes, we support you but what about you supporting snowden and so on you know, for me, everything depends on this. pushy, r, snowden, the same struggle. if we drop this, we are lost. we are just in local conflict. because, you know, i spoke with julian assange and he told me, it's totally wrong to think snowden is now bought by putin. no, snowden is a terrible predicament. i know directly. he desperately wants to move to some western country out. he knows what dangerous situation is this. but whenever there was a movement in denmark, in sweden. immediately american pressure, it didn't work. it's the west which is keeping snowden in russia. so about facebook and so on, new media are for me, no, i can only give you the boring st and marxist line. they are for me an antagonistic phenomenon. the struggle is going within new media. okay, i have there a personal problem. when you mention facebook and twitter, i don't do them. i think it's a loss of time. i think it should be prohibited and so on. normal people. but i am well aware on the one hand, on... emancipatory potential like building networks outside state control, blah blah. i buy all that. on the other hand, i was convinced by some publications like among others, this assange's new book on it very nice theory that google is basically a privatized version of nsa and so on, you know. and this is the struggle today. i think that the struggle for this new global social media
Cathy Newman
ich.
ich.
Slavoj Žižek
maybe even one of the principal forms of class struggle today. that's the big fight today. and i killed... it's undecided. i don't think, you know, i'm not the old-fashioned marxist who thinks the train of history is on our side. i'm here much more on the side of walter benjamin, i mean, you know when he heard this metaphor. riding the train of history, he said yes but. our task today is to pull the emergency brake on the train. i also am very suspicious of these metaphors that i hate, you know, like, oh, it's crisis, but we already see the light at the end of the tunnel. sorry, i'm coming from balkan. we are pessimists there. we say, of course there is a light at the end of the tunnel, which is another train coming. so i don't have a great, but i agree with you. you know what i did? i want to, it's very stupid, to avoid at the same time this. stupidly progressive on new media but at the same time this stupid pessimism we are totally controlled. i'm not so afraid of this total control because listen they know everything but they are by definition stupid. what does it help to nsa to have all this data? who will analyze this data? they don't know it. i spoke, it may surprise you when i was in israel with some guy who at least pretended to be part of the israeli establishment and he admitted to me, he told me we have millions all phone calls and computer control. but we have so much data we don't know what to do with them. so i think this is a false scare this there is a big other. everything is we are, everything is recorded. yes, it's recorded, but it's a stupid big. they don't know what to do with it.
maybe even one of the principal forms of class struggle today. that's the big fight today. and i killed... it's undecided. i don't think, you know, i'm not the old-fashioned marxist who thinks the train of history is on our side. i'm here much more on the side of walter benjamin, i mean, you know when he heard this metaphor. riding the train of history, he said yes but. our task today is to pull the emergency brake on the train. i also am very suspicious of these metaphors that i hate, you know, like, oh, it's crisis, but we already see the light at the end of the tunnel. sorry, i'm coming from balkan. we are pessimists there. we say, of course there is a light at the end of the tunnel, which is another train coming. so i don't have a great, but i agree with you. you know what i did? i want to, it's very stupid, to avoid at the same time this. stupidly progressive on new media but at the same time this stupid pessimism we are totally controlled. i'm not so afraid of this total control because listen they know everything but they are by definition stupid. what does it help to nsa to have all this data? who will analyze this data? they don't know it. i spoke, it may surprise you when i was in israel with some guy who at least pretended to be part of the israeli establishment and he admitted to me, he told me we have millions all phone calls and computer control. but we have so much data we don't know what to do with them. so i think this is a false scare this there is a big other. everything is we are, everything is recorded. yes, it's recorded, but it's a stupid big. they don't know what to do with it.
Cathy Newman
okay. sl, i don't really know what to say at the end of that.
okay. sl, i don't really know what to say at the end of that.
Slavoj Žižek
been shut up.
been shut up.
Cathy Newman
okay, been a bit of a tour de force gone all over so many different topics.
okay, been a bit of a tour de force gone all over so many different topics.
Slavoj Žižek
i will give you a chance to be a true hegelian.
i will give you a chance to be a true hegelian.
Cathy Newman
oh don't need that.
oh don't need that.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah, but you need after do something, then i will love you. after thanking them and me and all the bullshit, you thank yourself.
yeah, but you need after do something, then i will love you. after thanking them and me and all the bullshit, you thank yourself.
Cathy Newman
oh
oh
Slavoj Žižek
no, we don't want to.
no, we don't want to.
Cathy Newman
thank.
thank.
Slavoj Žižek
i love this. once i did it when i ran a conference. at the end i said, and i must congratulate to myself for a great.
i love this. once i did it when i ran a conference. at the end i said, and i must congratulate to myself for a great.
Cathy Newman
look, before i know you wouldn't give him another round of applause, but just before.
look, before i know you wouldn't give him another round of applause, but just before.
Slavoj Žižek
no, no,.
no, no,.
Cathy Newman
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we are. just gentleman. . a gentle reminder that slavoy will be available to sign books at the back in a moment. if you'd let him leave the room before you do, that would be incredibly helpful. you're going to join me to thank him once again for an amazing evening. thank.
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we are. just gentleman. . a gentle reminder that slavoy will be available to sign books at the back in a moment. if you'd let him leave the room before you do, that would be incredibly helpful. you're going to join me to thank him once again for an amazing evening. thank.