The Situation is Catastrophic but not Serious
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2011-05-09 · 1:26:09 · 11,700 words
ideologyliberalism-political-correctnessecology-climatecinema-art-culturepsychoanalysisreligion-theologycapitalismdemocracygeopolitics-warphilosophy-generaleveryday-lifehegel-dialectics
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture beginning with a critique of Bologna-style education reform and its reduction of thinking to expert problem-solving, drawing on Kant's distinction between public and private use of reason. He then moves through ideology critique of ecology (fetishist split, lifestyle ecology, geo-engineering), cinema (King's Speech, Black Swan, James Bond), sexuality and love as metaphysical encounter, and the Arab Spring as proof of universal egalitarian ideals. He concludes with a sustained argument against liberal multiculturalism in favor of a progressive Leitkultur, and against left-wing masochism that refuses to affirm European emancipatory legacy.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's Stalinist-derived term for the expert role that technocratic education reform assigns to intellectuals: fixing problems as defined by power rather than questioning how problems are framed.
A condition in which economic policy is presented as technical expertise beyond political choice, while cultural and identity matters are left to market-style tolerance, depoliticizing both domains.
as “private use of reason”
For Kant (as Žižek deploys it), private use of reason is any use of reason constrained in advance by externally given goals, including state law faculties and theology, rather than free, radical questioning.
as “leftist masochism”
Žižek's label for the liberal-left tendency to permanently foreground European guilt and celebrate other cultures, which he views as an inverted form of racism that prevents affirmation of genuinely emancipatory European legacies.
as “Holy Spirit as egalitarian community”
Žižek's theological reading: the Holy Ghost/Spirit signifies an egalitarian community in which hierarchical social relations are suspended, the institutionalization of non-hierarchical life as European legacy.
as “ideological machine”
The spontaneous mechanism by which ideology filters perception, illustrated by the analogy of a computer projecting a pre-determined image onto a person, as happens in racist perception.
The psychoanalytic process of assuming a symbolic title or role; Žižek uses it to explain the king's stutter in King's Speech, his inability to fully identify with his symbolic mandate.
as “fetishist split”
The psychoanalytic structure Žižek uses to describe how people rationally acknowledge ecological catastrophe while suspending its 'symbolic efficiency', they know but don't really take it seriously.
The degree to which a fact registers practically and emotionally in how one acts; Žižek argues ecological knowledge lacks symbolic efficiency, it is acknowledged but not acted upon.
Large-scale technological intervention in the atmosphere or oceans proposed as a substitute for economic restructuring; Žižek treats it as evidence that elites have privately conceded ecological reform has failed.
Žižek's phrase for the ecological belief that only humans can cause real catastrophes, a form of anthropocentric pride dressed as humility before nature.
Žižek's ironic label for individualized ecological practices (recycling, organic food, solar panels) that make one feel virtuous while masking the absence of real systemic change.
Implicit in Žižek's account of organic food consumption: people buy organic not for health reasons but for the surplus enjoyment of feeling good about themselves as ethical consumers.
Implicit in the coffee-without-cream and Brassed Off examples: the absent object that structures desire, what you don't get shapes what you want.
as “the thing deprived of its substance”
Illustrated by the coffee-without-cream joke: what you don't get matters as much as what you do get, the negation defines the object.
as “freedom of choice on condition you make the right choice”
Žižek's formula for ideological pseudo-freedom: you are offered a free choice but only on the condition that you choose the expected option, illustrated by the army oath anecdote.
as “sex as metaphysical act”
Žižek argues that human sexuality is not a natural instinct but the elementary form of metaphysics, an encounter with the Absolute that disrupts ordinary life, competing with religious spirituality rather than opposed to it.
Žižek reclaims this contested German term to mean not a dominant ethnic culture but the unwritten meta-rules and habits of coexistence that any functioning multicultural society requires, and which must be actively fought for.
Žižek's citation of the political science phrase to describe authoritarian capitalism, which he argues refutes the supposed natural marriage between capitalism and democracy.
as “the passion of fear”
Žižek's diagnosis of the affective logic of right-wing populism: the only political passion on offer in post-political times is fear (of immigrants, of nature, of capital).
Stories he reaches for 12
A customer asks for coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream but only milk, can he have coffee without milk? The joke turns on absence being as meaningful as presence: what you don't get determines the object.
“we don't have cream, we only have milk. So can I give you coffee without milk, not coffee without cream?”
A woman invites a man up for coffee; he says he doesn't like coffee; she says she has none, the double withdrawal of coffee produces erotic meaning far more charged than a direct proposition.
“Why don't you come up for a coffee? I don't like coffee. No problem, I don't have any.”
A French dating agency advertised 'love without fall', enabling clients to be in love without the dangerous moment of falling; Žižek reads this as the return to arranged marriage logic and the narcissistic refusal of exposure to the other.
“we will enable you to be in love without fall, without fall in love”
When a rich person invites a poor person to a restaurant, both know who will pay, but the poor person must perform the ritual of offering to pay, illustrating ideology functioning in daily life through implicit rules.
“We all know absolutely that you will pay. But it's a ritual that when the bill arrives, for some short time I have to pretend, no no no, let me pay.”
Afghanistan was once the most pluralist tolerant Muslim country, with a secular king and a strong communist party; US-Soviet proxy war produced the Afghanistan of today, showing global capitalist dynamics generating fundamentalism.
“Afghanistan was maybe the most pluralist tolerant of Near East Islam Muslim countries... The result is Afghanistan we have today.”
Kansas was once the most radical left-wing US state (antislavery movements from Lincoln's time) and is now the most fundamentalist Bible Belt state, a paradigm case of global capitalism generating fundamentalism.
“Kansas is a small American Bible Belt state which was till years ago the single most radical in the leftist sense American state”
As a student in Yugoslavia, Žižek's newspaper decided to cover fixed communist elections as if they were genuinely free, reporting 'communists will probably remain in power', and was immediately summoned by the central committee.
“Latest results, it looks like communists will probably remain in power.”
Žižek cites Kant's Metaphysics of Morals defining marriage as a contract for the mutual use of sexual organs for pleasure, followed by the argument that a wife can call the police if her husband flees because he has taken her property (his penis).
“Kant defines marriage as contract between two adults about the mutual use of their sexual organs for the purpose of pleasure”
The Egyptian revolution demonstrated that Arab masses could mobilize for universal ideals of freedom and dignity intelligible to everyone without multicultural mediation, evidence against the prejudice that they can only act on religion or nationalism.
“we were able... it was true Kantian universality—we in a way immediately knew what it is about. It's a struggle for dignity, freedom”
During WWI, Berlin telegraphed Vienna that the situation was 'serious but not catastrophic'; Vienna replied it was 'catastrophic but not serious', Žižek uses this as a formula for modern ideological denial of ecological and other crises.
“with us the situation is serious but not catastrophic... with us it's catastrophic but not serious”
Newspaper ads showing disfigured children and asking for the price of two cappuccinos to save a life function ideologically: they allow one to return to normal life feeling virtuous while doing essentially nothing.
“for the price of a couple of cappuccinos you can return to your life, really do nothing, but you can feel good”
When Gabriel appeared to Muhammad, he thought it was the devil; his first wife Khadijah convinced him it was God, Žižek uses this to argue Islam contains a moment where men cannot access truth without feminine mediation.
“you have in Islam this very interesting moment that men do not have access to truth without feminine mediation”
Works invoked 15
Ninotchka film
Ernst Lubitsch classic; Žižek uses the coffee-without-cream scene to illustrate how the absent term defines the object of desire.
The Da Vinci Code film
Used to exemplify the trend of Hollywood removing or never including sexual tension in romantic plotlines, symptomatic of narcissistic culture.
Brassed Off film
British working-class drama with Ewan McGregor; the 'no coffee/no coffee' scene is Žižek's paradigm case of double negation producing erotic surplus meaning.
Quantum of Solace film
Politically acceptable (Bond saves Morales's Bolivia from corporate water privatization) but notable as the first Bond film without sex at the end, evidence of contemporary narcissistic withdrawal.
Angels and Demons film
Cited because the Hollywood adaptation removed sex that was present in Dan Brown's novel, further evidence of Hollywood de-sexualizing content rather than adding it.
The Lost Symbol book
Described as 'one of the worst novels of all times'; cited for the complete absence of sexual attraction between its couple, illustrating narcissistic withdrawal.
Citizen Kane film
Referenced as the cultural model for William Randolph Hearst, in the context of the Hearst-editor anecdote.
The King's Speech film
Made Žižek 'totally depressive'; he argues it is ideological propaganda that presents as cure the process of making an intelligent, resistant king stupid enough to accept his symbolic mandate.
Black Swan film
Described as 'extremely reactionary'; Žižek argues it perpetuates the anti-feminist idea that women who pursue public vocation must die, while men face no such choice.
Kieślowski film read as reproducing the reactionary trope: the Polish Véronique who identifies with art drops dead; the French one who accepts the domestic role survives.
Kant's Metaphysics of Morals; Žižek cites it for the contractual definition of marriage and then pivots to the genuinely important Kantian distinction of public vs. private use of reason.
Tales of Hoffmann opera
Offenbach opera cited as the classic source of the trope that a woman who does not renounce singing dies, used to establish the reactionary genealogy of Black Swan.
2012 film
Roland Emmerich disaster film; Žižek finds ecological catastrophism an avoidance strategy, but notes with irony the film's ideological celebration of China as savior of humanity.
Emmerich film; Žižek notes appreciatively the ironic inversion where Americans beg to cross into Mexico as climate refugees.
Trainspotting film
Mentioned briefly as one of Ewan McGregor's working-class roles before he became a megastar, in the context of discussing Brassed Off.
People invoked 24
Cited alongside Merkel as a proponent of the Leitkultur concept that Žižek reclaims in a different, progressive sense.
François Guizot negative
Described as a 'French liberal economist' whose strategy was to dismiss ecology as a neo-communist trick; Žižek notes this strategy has now been abandoned by right-wing forces who use balancing instead.
North Korean leader cited as example of communist cult of personality that crossed into the supernatural (textbook claiming he did not need to urinate or defecate).
Referenced as the 'well-known agent' through whom the US channeled support against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, contributing to the fundamentalism it later fought.
Ernest Renan positive
Described as an 'enlightened rationalist proto-racist' whom Žižek doesn't like, but his ironic/comical definition of a nation as shared lies, hatred and illusions is cited approvingly.
Simone Weil positive
Cited alongside the best Christian mystics and theologians as understanding that sexuality is an elementary form of metaphysics, an absolute commitment disrupting ordinary life.
Actor cited in the analysis of The King's Speech, plays the speech therapist who functions ideologically to make the king accept his symbolic role.
Described as 'the big bad guy, the American model of Citizen Kane'; the anecdote about his editor is used to illustrate the logic of implications.
Paul Claudel positive
Conservative French Catholic whom Žižek 'appreciates very much' for understanding the metaphysical-properly religious dimension of sexuality.
Jesus Christ positive
Žižek reads Christ's rejection of family hierarchy ('if you don't hate your mother...') as instituting a radically egalitarian community outside hierarchical social relations, the root of European emancipatory legacy.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as 'my friend,' a hard-line leftist Platonist; Žižek cites Badiou's observation about the dating-agency 'love without fall' advertisement and invokes a Badiouian notion of an eternal idea of freedom erupting in Egypt.
Wolf Biermann positive
Former East German dissident, now right-wing; Žižek recounts his anecdote about neo-Nazi ecologists who rejected Hitler for building highways rather than for the Holocaust, finding it 'terrifyingly true.'
Evo Morales negative
Žižek finds Morales's statement that 'capitalism is killing Mother Earth' ridiculous, using it to critique the ecological ideology of nature as a benevolent maternal base.
Jörg Haider negative
Cited as an example of the far-right 'defenders of Europe' who are in fact Europe's greatest danger; Žižek notes he 'happily joined his creator', i.e. is dead.
Žižek mentions having written a short book on Kieślowski and uses The Double Life of Véronique to illustrate the reactionary trope that women who identify with art are destroyed.
Referenced as the Polish nationalist hard-line reaction in contrast to the liberal capitalist ruling party, exemplifying the new European political polarity.
Cited (alongside Cameron) as originator of the Leitkultur concept; Žižek defends the concept in a different sense while dissociating himself from how Merkel meant it.
Roland Emmerich negative
Director of 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow; Žižek finds the ecological catastrophism of these films an avoidance strategy, though notes with irony the ideological celebration of China in 2012.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Invoked for the concept of a 'teleological suspension of the ethical', Žižek reworks it as a 'religious sexual suspension of the ethical,' an absolute link to an absolute.
Jean-Marie Le Pen negative
Listed alongside Haider as the type of far-right figure who claims to defend European legacy while representing its true threat.
Martin Luther King Jr. positive
Cited to show that the genuine anti-racism tradition did not frame racism as a problem of tolerance but of economic exploitation and legal exclusion, used to validate Žižek's critique of liberal tolerance discourse.
Sigmund Freud positive
Freud is invoked to argue that sexuality is not a natural biological base but the original space where the animal becomes human, not naturalism but the rupture of instinct.
Immanuel Kant positive
Žižek deploys Kant's distinction between public and private use of reason as the philosophical backbone of his defence of free critical thinking against expert-driven education; also cites (with ironic appreciation) Kant's reductively contractual definition of marriage.
Muhammad positive
Cited for the Quranic position that belief cannot be forced, and for the founding narrative in which feminine mediation (Khadijah) validates prophetic truth.
What it argues
public vs. private use of reason (Kantian critique of expert-driven education)fetishist split and ideology in everyday ecological practicesexuality as metaphysical encounter vs. narcissistic withdrawalEuropean egalitarian legacy vs. conservative and liberal distortionsmulticulturalism's failure and the need for a progressive Leitkulturauthoritarian capitalism and the divorce of capitalism from democracyArab Spring as eruption of universal emancipatory idea
Dialectical moves 11
“The true defenders of Judeo-Christian legacy are not the conservatives who invoke it against Muslims—they are the true danger to it.”
The apparent defenders of European tradition are in fact its greatest threat, because they embody what is worst rather than what is noble in that tradition.
“It's catastrophic but not serious.”
The Austrian telegram split diagnoses modern ideology: people rationally acknowledge catastrophic risk but suspend its symbolic efficiency, treating it as not genuinely urgent.
“What makes sexuality human is that you take an act which in animal logic serves procreation and make it a metaphysical act—so sex without procreation is not animal, it is the most human.”
The reversal of the Catholic argument: non-procreative sexuality is not a descent to animality but the very site of human spiritual elevation.
“Those who worry that we need experts to calm down rebellious youth are not solving the problem—the way they formulate the problem is already part of the problem.”
Expert discourse on social disorder treats the symptoms while the manner of posing the question is itself the ideological mystification.
“Far from being the opposite of religion, passionate sexuality is a dangerous competing form of spirituality—not animal lust but metaphysics.”
The Catholic critique of sexuality inverts reality: when they attack sex, they are not defending spirit against nature but suppressing a rival form of transcendence.
“The only real universality today is not the universality of cultures (UNESCO multiculturalism) but universality in struggle—we fight for freedom here, you fight for freedom there.”
Abstract cultural universalism is hollow; real universality is found in concrete solidarity among emancipatory struggles, as demonstrated by Egypt.
“Not we shouldn't have Leitkultur—we should fight for a different, better Leitkultur.”
Rather than rejecting the conservative concept of a leading culture, Žižek appropriates it for a progressive universalist project.
“Hard-line communists who remain in power are now the most brutal, ruthless, efficient capitalists—they are capitalism's problem, not the left's.”
The survival of communist parties is no longer a challenge to capitalism but its exemplification, dissolving the apparent opposition.
“The mufti's argument that only women are moral agents actually represents an extreme humiliation of men, reducing them to uncontrollable animals.”
The Islamic conservative defence of male sexual aggression, read symptomatically, contains a radical denigration of men as mere instinct-driven animals.
“You are always given a freedom of choice on condition that you make the right choice.”
Ideological freedom is pseudo-freedom: the formal offer of choice is structured so that only one outcome is acceptable, as the army oath anecdote demonstrates.
“European legacy is in danger—but from those who claim to defend it, not from Muslims.”
The nationalist framing of Europe under threat inverts the actual source of danger: the anti-immigrant right destroys the egalitarian legacy it claims to protect.
Claims 22
asserts
Bologna education reform reproduces the same anti-intellectual logic as late-communist Yugoslav education reform, reducing intellectuals to expert problem-solvers serving those in power.education reform / Bologna Process
asserts
True thinking begins not by solving problems as formulated by authority but by questioning whether the formulation of the problem is itself a mystification.the nature of critical thinking
rejects
Racism and sexism are not primarily problems of tolerance but of economic exploitation and legal exclusion—framing them as tolerance issues is ideologically motivated depoliticization.liberal tolerance framework for racism
asserts
Ecology is today ultra-invested by ideology, with fetishist split preventing people from genuinely acting on acknowledged ecological threats.ecological ideology
rejects
Catastrophism about ecology is itself a way to avoid confronting the danger: if catastrophe is almost here, one can enjoy rather than act.ecological catastrophism
rejects
Lifestyle ecology (recycling, organic food, solar panels) functions as a fetishist substitute for real structural economic change, making people feel good while changing nothing.individualist ecological consumerism
rejects
Nature is not a benevolent Mother Earth but a terrifying indifferent mechanism prone to its own catastrophes independent of human intervention.ecological ideology of Mother Earth / nature as maternal base
asserts
The rapid mobilization of $750 billion for financial crisis versus the failure to fund ecological commitments reveals that capital circulation is treated as more real than ecological survival.capitalism's ideological priorities vs. ecology
asserts
King's Speech is a deeply ideological film about making an intelligent man stupid enough to function as king by persuading him to take his symbolic title seriously.ideology in King's Speech
asserts
Black Swan perpetuates the reactionary idea that while men can pursue public missions and retain private life, a woman who dedicates herself to her vocation is destroyed.ideology in Black Swan / gender
asserts
Western culture increasingly exhibits a narcissistic retreat from exposure to the other—including in sexuality and love—exemplified by sex-free romantic plotlines and the Masturbathon movement.contemporary narcissism and sexual politics
asserts
Human sexuality is not animal instinct but the elementary form of metaphysics—an absolute commitment to another person that disrupts ordinary life and competes with religious spirituality.Freudian sexuality / human sexuality vs. animal sexuality
rejects
Catholics who claim sex without procreation is animal lust are denigrating sexuality, because it is precisely non-procreative sex that distinguishes human from animal sexuality.Catholic sexual ethics / procreation requirement
asserts
The Egyptian demonstrations proved that Arab crowds can mobilize for universal ideals of freedom and dignity, not only for Islamism or nationalism, refuting multicultural condescension.Arab Spring / multiculturalism's limits
asserts
Global capitalism generates religious fundamentalism as its own byproduct, as shown by Afghanistan's and Kansas's trajectories from pluralism to fundamentalism.capitalism and fundamentalism
asserts
A new authoritarian capitalism (China, Singapore) is emerging that is more economically efficient than liberal capitalism and does not require democracy, threatening the historical marriage of capitalism and democracy.authoritarian capitalism / democracy
rejects
Liberal multiculturalism does not work because any functioning multicultural society requires a set of shared meta-rules and habits (a Leitkultur) that regulate coexistence—a purely pluralist model is an ideological illusion.liberal multiculturalism
asserts
Anti-immigrant nationalists who invoke the Judeo-Christian legacy are themselves the greatest danger to that legacy, whose core is an egalitarian non-hierarchical community.nationalism / Judeo-Christian legacy
rejects
Left-wing masochism—the reflex of European guilt that refuses to affirm any European achievement—is an inverted form of racism and should be abandoned in favor of proud universalist affirmation of emancipatory legacies.leftist Eurocentrism guilt / liberal masochism
asserts
The political landscape in Europe is shifting from center-left vs. center-right to technocratic liberal capitalism vs. anti-immigrant proto-fundamentalism, leaving no passionate emancipatory alternative.European political polarization / post-politics
rejects
China and other former communist states now functioning as efficient capitalist states are capitalism's problem to reckon with, not a vindication of communist ideals.communist nostalgia / China as communist
asserts
The critical intellectual's task is not grand systemic analysis but starting from modest everyday phenomena to reveal their ideological presuppositions.method of ideology critique
Quotes 16
“It's catastrophic but not serious.”Slavoj Žižek · fetishist split in modern ideology / ecological denial
“The very way we formulate the problem is already a mystification of the problem.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology critique / problem-formulation as mystification
“What that language teacher does is basically to make the king stupid enough to function as a king.”Slavoj Žižek · symbolic investiture / ideology in King's Speech
“You are always given a freedom of choice on condition, of course, that you make the right choice.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological pseudo-freedom
“I hereby formally order this person to freely sign the oath.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological contradiction: ordered freedom
“What makes sexuality human is that you take an act which in the animal logic serves procreation and you make it as it were a metaphysical act of assertion of an absolute link to another person.”Slavoj Žižek · human sexuality as metaphysics
“Love comes, it's a catastrophe, all your balance is lost, you are obsessed by this passion and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · love as catastrophic encounter with the Absolute
“Every culture is dirty in its own way.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-masochist universalism / rejecting Western guilt
“The only universality is: we fight for freedom here, you fight for freedom there, and you have an immediate solidarity.”Slavoj Žižek · universality in emancipatory struggle
“A nation: a big group of people connected by shared lies about their past, hatred for their enemies in the present and illusions about their future.”Slavoj Žižek · Renan's ironic definition of nation
“There is a new type of capitalism emerging which is even more efficient, economically dynamic than liberal capitalism and which functions perfectly with an authoritarian state.”Slavoj Žižek · authoritarian capitalism as divorce of capitalism and democracy
“They are doing this not bad, communist China saves humanity basically.”Slavoj Žižek · ironic reading of Roland Emmerich's 2012 ideology
“Don't worry, there will be a catastrophe, calm. You don't have to claim—because it's almost they worry that or whatever it will not be.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-catastrophist reversal: stop reassuring, acknowledge catastrophe without panic
“You know what you don't get is as important as what you do get.”Slavoj Žižek · absence structures desire / double negation
“When Catholics claim that sex without procreation is animal, they are really terribly denigrating sexuality.”Slavoj Žižek · reversal of Catholic sexual ethics
“se non vero, ben trovato—even if it's not true, it's well found, there is a truth in it.”Slavoj Žižek · on the value of illustrative myths and apocryphal stories
Transcript 2 turns
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I'm especially allergic to it because in the last decade of socialism, the communist regime in
I'm especially allergic to it because in the last decade of socialism, the communist regime in
Slavoj Žižek
ex-Yugoslavia, when they knew that they were losing economically and so on, this was the last attempt to somehow control explosion, to do a—this was again the last attempt to save the communist regime—to do the reform of high school and university education. And what is so shocking for me is that it reads like Bologna reform. So it's like we joined, we ex-communist countries, Europe, and we won. We showed them the most stupid reform which was done, of course, in these anti-intellectual terms. Like, you know, it's really—it reads like the most vulgar nomenclature communist logic. The idea was, we don't need, we don't need intellectuals who just develop their critical thoughts in their ivory tower. We need people who will be experts to solve, ordinary people, by ordinary people lead nomenclature and managers, no? To solve their problems. And that's what Bologna education is about. They openly say—now, for example, what's going on now in England, and this is not a joke. Already over ten philosophy departments were shut down. Their minister of universities—that's how it's really called, the title of the new government—said something pretty terrifying two months ago. He said that the tendency, the goal of these reforms in United Kingdom is that in the three domains of human sciences, social sciences, and art studies, if you want to study this, it is of no concern to the state. It's a matter of market exchange between you as a private individual and university as an agent of the market. It's not part of general education or whatever. So, what's behind it? As one of them, propagators from Brussels, put it very nicely, we need experts. What do they mean by this? One of them, I spoke with him at some round table in Paris, was very open. He said, because this was immediately after, you remember, those cars which were burning in the suburbs of Paris some three years ago. He said, look, we had that problem of youth in rebellion burning cars. Here, we need experts. We need psychologists to tell us what were the psychic causes, how to calm them down. We need urban planners to tell us how to—how to construct suburbs so that it's easier for the police to intervene and so on. Like, we need—but let me be here very naive, and I—I hope you admit I'm not trying to sell you any Marxist stuff. If you are an honest conservative, worried about—now I will consciously use this conservative phrase—the fate of Judeo-Christian legacy, you should worry here. Because the task of this is what? To reduce us to experts. There are problems which should be accepted the way they are formulated by those in power or with money, and we should be there as some kind of a—how shall I call it—social—again, a Stalinist term which is very appropriate here—social engineers or social psychiatrists helping those in power to fix the problem with our expertise. But isn't it a minimal reflection shows you that true thinking—not in any mystical sense, but in the sense of real authentic intellectual questioning—begins not by solving problems which others formulate to you, but to start reflecting upon a problem itself. For example, the first question you should ask is, is this really how we should perceive the problem? What if the way you formulate the problem is already part of the problem? So that the very way we formulate the problem is already a mystification of the problem. There are numerous examples here that I like to enumerate in my books, some of them even in this tragedy farce stuff. For example, this is more for United States. It's typical how whenever you mention sexism, racism, it's automatically translated into a problem of tolerance. But sorry, this is not at all self-evident. Like, read—you can find them directly on—on the internet—read or just put search through them, the speeches of Martin Luther King, who really was a fighter against racism. He practically doesn't mention tolerance. For him, it would have been humiliating to claim, we blacks want more tolerance from the white man. No, for him, racism was a problem of economic exploitation of the black, their exclusion from higher education, laws, legal regulations, and so on and so on. It wasn't a problem of tolerance. So the reason we perceive this as a problem of tolerance is, I claim, typical of our so-called post-political era where more and more economic politics is perceived as something which concerns the experts. We are just basically informed, sorry, we have to do this, that, and so on, in order to survive in today's competition and so on. And then we have these cultural matters which function precisely like nature, where you can just picture tolerance. Like, we have different religions, different sexual orientations, so all we can do is tolerate each other. This, again, is not something which goes by itself. That's the first thing to do. Or obviously, in ecology. I think ecology is today a field ultra-invested by ideology. On the one—these are just two extremes. On the one hand, it's the purely capitalist, but also Stalinist communist, if they still exist. Because did you notice how if they exist, they are the best capitalists? So when people attack me, why do you still mention communism, are you crazy, do you want back all those party congresses and so on? My answer is a clear one. Uh-uh. This—they are now your problem if you are for capitalism. Because look at the countries where hard-line communists are in power. China and so on. They are now the most brutal, ruthless, efficient capitalists you can imagine. Even Cuba is moving in that direction. The only exception would have been North Korea. But that's a very interesting example to study. Because you know North Korea is—it tells us a lot about ideology. It's the unique case where the celebration, communist celebration of the leader turned directly into supernatural. You know what I mean by this. Like all the celebration of Stalin or Mao was in some formal sense—of course it was crazy—but in a formal sense was within the limits of reason. Like even those who claimed Stalin is the greatest genius of humanity, they didn't say Stalin can fly in the air or whatever, no? Incidentally, he didn't. He was terribly afraid of flying. Okay, that's another point, no? But in North Korea, they directly made this step into supernatural. I was in Beijing a year ago, and a friend there showed me a photocopy—okay, maybe he was lying, I have to rely on him—of a—of a elementary school textbook for North Korean children where they say—it says literally—our leader, Kim Jong-il, is so pure that he doesn't need to urinate and to defecate, to go to toilet. You know, this, I almost have an appreciation for. Wouldn't it be nice if somebody were to tell you, I don't know, Kaczynski or Trump, so pure they don't have to shit and so on. It's something nice in theory, no? Okay, but what I want more seriously to say is that—so we have this push towards efficient education, education which serves social needs, which precisely only helps those in power to solve problem, not to question the way problems are formulated. But just take, for example, racism. You know, you can perceive it in an egalitarian democratic way, but you can also say the problem is how much foreigners our nation can sustain. The way you formulate problem—a problem—can already be mystification. So now, just a tiny little bit of philosophy. Immanuel Kant, whom we should not neglect, was—if nothing else, we know that Kant provided the best possible definition of marriage. If some of you are philosophers, you should know this. Kant, the great ethical radicalist, no? You know what is Kant's definition? If you don't believe me, look into his *Metaphysik der Sitten*, Metaphysics of Morals, the big book in two parts. Not *Grundlegung*, not foundations, where Kant defines marriage as contract between the two adults about the mutual use of their sexual—sexual organs for the purpose of pleasure. So no sacred union, it's purely—and now you will say this is a joke. It's not a joke, because one page after, Kant quite seriously—he was crazy, my God—goes into the question of if a husband escapes from the wife, does the wife have the right to call the police to bring him back? And he says yes, not because of love, but because he ran away with part of his body, penis, which was her ownership by marriage contract. So this as a thing that he should be brought back. Okay. Nonetheless, Kant did something great. He introduced a wonderfully counter-intuitive definition of a distinction between public and private use of reason. For Kant, private use of reason is not what we are doing here in so far as we are out of an institution, or if we meet later in a cafeteria or what. No. Private use of reason is for him use of reason which is not radical free, but it is in advance limited by some goals which are again determined in advance. So that you say we don't question this, we accept this, we just see how we can best serve this. For example, for Kant, very interestingly, all state uses of reason—for Kant, Faculty of Law and Faculty of Theology and others—are private uses of reason. For Kant, only philosophy and pure sciences where you can question legal order, religions, are—are public use of reason. I like this logic. When you are in a state colloquium about the need for rule of law or religion in schools, you are doing, for Kant, private use of reason. If two, three people gather in an apartment, without any prejudices, debating religion, you are doing public space of reason. And this is why I am so proud to be here. Because I think that, you know this big phrase which conservatives like to use today—we should defend against Muslims or whoever the Judeo-Christian legacy. Well, I don't like the politically correct leftist answer—no, we shouldn't privilege ourselves, they are all equal and so on and so on. No, I think we should stop this leftist masochism where we should always feel guilty, oh Europeans we are horrible, and then you celebrate others—those, I don't know, Indians from India, oh they have a holistic attitude towards nature, they are so much better and so on. No. I mean, maybe we should be proud for great things that European tradition brought. For example, the tradition of radical egalitarian communities where you are allowed to participate in a universal communal space independently of your particular role in the hierarchic order. This is how I read, my God, Jesus Christ. You know, if you don't hate your mother, brother, you cannot be my follower. Of course, it's not the stupidity of, I don't know, poison your father or whatever. I claim that, and some theologians with whom I debated agreed with me, that father, mother simply stand there for hierarchic social relations. The meaning of Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost, depends how you want to translate it, is precisely that an egalitarian community where these hierarchic relations are suspended is possible. There is a space outside this hierarchy. This is, you remember that famous scene from New Testament when Christ is with his followers and somebody comes in and says, ah, your family, mother, Ruth, whoever, brother are there, and he simply says no, my family is here and so on. And we know that, sorry to speak such evident obscenities, that Christ loved his mother. So it's not humiliation there or what. But this is so extremely important. I—here I totally agree with the idea that without this legacy of a radically egalitarian community, you cannot imagine democracy even. Because you know, now I will almost sound eurocentric racist. You do find elements of this in Buddhism, but it is always linked, in principle, only to individual enlightenment. It's like in enlightenment we are all the same. Yes, but in enlightenment you are in that stupid trance and so on, no? The problem is to—not just this. I mean, every rich guy would agree that spiritually we are all the same. Yeah, but who cares about that? In the real life we are not, no? But this idea that egalitarian collective is not just some ideal up there, it can be institutionalized, it can be made a form of life. This is an incredible achievement. So, you see my point? Till now at least it worked for me. Namely, when somebody conservative starts to talk about, oh, European Judeo-Christian legacy, our counter-attack again shouldn't be, no, you are eurocentric, what about the Indian wisdom or all that? No, our answer should be F, the forbidden word three point four, who are you to mention European legacy? Those who today, conservatives, pretend to act as defenders of Judeo-Christian legacy against a Muslim threat—sorry, but they are the true danger of Europe. If they imagine Europe with, I don't know, Haider who happily joined his creator, or rather is down there—with Haider, Le Pen, and so on who are now in power in France and so on. Sorry, but this precisely would have been a Europe deprived of its greatest Judeo-Christian legacy. They are the true danger. And it is here that thinking begins, with this public use of reason, this egalitarian exercise of free thinking. All emancipation begins with free thinking. And not only—like, for example, Islamists like so much to emphasize how—it is true, let's admit it, in Quran it says that your thinking is free, that nobody can force you to believe. Muhammad is totally open to this. He says nobody should be forced to believe. But the catch is precisely that you should keep this skepticism or whatever for yourself. You are not allowed to transfer into communal link a different, let's say, life practice. Now—but even here, problems are so wonderfully ambiguous. No, I'm not pleading—I mean, I think there are very interesting emancipatory potential in Islam, but also some not so emancipatory potentials. But what I like is how, if you think really with the public use of reason, without prejudices, how ambiguous things are. For example, do you remember—maybe you do, it was reported in the media some five or ten years ago—there was a big scandal in Australia where a young woman was raped and the big, whatever, mufti—I don't know name, okay, the boss of the Muslim community in Australia—defended the rapists openly. He said—he used this disgusting metaphor—he said imagine if someone on the corner of a street leaves a piece of unwrapped meat and a dog comes by and eats the meat. Whom would you blame? Not the dog, he did it automatically. You would blame the idiot who left the meat there. And then of course he makes this tasteless comparison—it's the same with a woman walking on the street not enough dressed, blame her. Okay, it's horrible. But I claim it's more ambiguous, think about it. Isn't it interesting how the presupposition, silent premise of this reasoning is an extreme denigration, humiliation of men? Only a woman is treated as a proper ethical agent. We men are reduced to some animal population. We are not guilty. You see there a woman, uh, you can't help it, you jump. Only a woman is called to to show restraint. And this is a key feature, very interesting one, of Islam. You know, for example, how Muhammad became—became a prophet? You know that when Archangel Gabriel appeared to him, Muhammad first thought this is the voice of devil. And it's his first wife Khadijah which—convinced him that this is really the voice of God, not devil. In other words, you have in Islam this very interesting moment that men do not have access to truth without feminine mediation, how shall I put it? That it's only through woman's assessment that you can be sure that what you are talking is truth. Now, there are other dark things about Islam, I'm not trying in any way to—to say—I'm just saying we should—this is the public use of reason. When you question everything, not in a destructive way, but in this open way. And again, this is the reason why sincerely I am so glad—this is why I am so glad to be here. Because I think that precisely what Kritika Polityczna is doing here is establishing kind of a public space of reason outside official institutions and so on and so on. I think that everyone, not only leftists, should be—everyone should be interested in it. Because, you know, today more than ever, in this situation where we have censorship, but not in this direct sense of censor up there prohibiting things, but it's more ingrained into our spontaneous experience, what we perceive, what we don't perceive, how we perceive problems and so on. Because you remember that example that I gave you, tasteless, of how a computer projects immediately onto, let's say, a person in front of you. But isn't something exactly like that going on, for example, in racism? Let's say you are anti-Arab or anti-Jewish. You encounter an Arab or a Jew and how will you react? It's as if your mind projects on him dirty, plotting, dangerous. This is literally the materialization of that mechanism of an—of an ideological machine. So the task today, when everybody tries to convince us we live in a post-ideological era, is not to do some big intricate analysis, but it's to—maybe that's what I always like to do—to begin with modest everyday phenomena and demonstrate the ideological presuppositions. Let me give you, if also you like me are normal human beings who like cinema, no? Did you see the two big Oscar winners, King's Speech and Black Swan? I think it's breathtaking how purely ideological both are. King's Speech made me totally depressive, because I claim that it's a movie about how to ruin an intelligent person. The king at the beginning is intelligent. Why? He stutters. Why? Because he knows that to be king is not serious, it's stupid. How can you take it seriously when somebody is telling you, by God, you were ordained to become a king or whatever? It's clear that his stuttering is not physical or emotional. It's simply a kind of—in a good anti-ideological sense—common sense which tells you, but sorry, all this is bullshit, I cannot play seriously this role. In psychoanalytic terms, the problem is that of symbolic investiture, like, can I really assume seriously that title? And what that Australian played by Geoffrey Rush—Geoffrey Rush—language teacher does is basically to make the king stupid enough to function as a king. Remember towards the end, which is the key moment of curing the king? When this common teacher sits on the king's chair and the king shouts at him, how dare you sit there? And Geoffrey Rush the teacher says, why, why shouldn't I? And you, why should you? And the king explodes, because by God's will I am the king. He remains stupid, he becomes stupid enough. He takes it seriously, he's stupid. It's very depressive message. But at least since this is male problem, the king can function as a normal person of authority, which means that you take seriously your symbolic title—king, president, whatever—but you still have private life where you flirt or whatever. Here I hate even more Black Swan. I think that beneath this mask of whatever, I don't even know of what, did you notice how you have an extremely—it's the latest version of an extremely reactionary idea, which is, to put it very simply, while man can pursue his career mission and still have a normal private life, for woman she has to make a choice. If she opts for her mission—I want to be singer, ballerina in this case—it means death. A woman pays the dedication to her public mission with death. This, as you probably know, is an old anti-feminist idea, that while men can play public roles, for a woman this means self-destruction. You know, usually it's done with singing. You know it's from Offenbach—Offenbach's—Hoffmann's Tales, where the second one, or which one, I don't know, is the first one or the third one, I always forget, in the opera, is the—the one who doesn't—doesn't want to renounce her singing and precisely the devil, the bad guy, tempts her by telling her sing, sing, and she drops dead. And to be a little bit ironic, although you know it was translated, I wrote a short book on Kieslowski, but isn't it a little bit of the same in The Double Life of Veronique? Like your Polish one wants to identify herself with art, you drop down. The other one, the French one, is a good proper woman who knows woman's role is not to fully identify, you have to remain a warm private being and so on and so on. So, again, this is our reality. And now I come to the title that you reminded me. I hope you know to what I refer in the title. It's a well-known legend—probably it's apocryphal, it didn't happen, but you know this wonderful Italian saying, *se non vero, ben trovato*, even if it's not true, it's well found, like there is a truth in it. The idea is that in the First World War, in the middle of it, there was an exchange of telegrams between German and Austrian military headquarters, between Berlin and Vienna. In Berlin they sent a telegram to Vienna: with us the situation is serious but not catastrophic. You can guess the Austrians answer: with us it's catastrophic but not serious, no? I claim that this split attitude, it's catastrophic but not serious, is more and more becoming our reality. That is to say, we rationally know there is a threat of catastrophe, but in a nice example of what in psychoanalysis we call fetishist split, we somehow suspend, let's call it the symbolic efficiency of it, you know? You rationally acknowledge it, but you block the efficiency, you don't really take it seriously. Isn't this more and more, I claim, how we deal with, for example, ecology? Everybody, or at least most of the people—maybe your politics doesn't admit it, but everyone knows the threat is quite serious. No, I am, to be very clear, I am not a catastrophist. I am not saying, you know, in one year it will be all over, you know, did you see that horrible film? The only nice moment that I liked in the film is that strange celebration of China. You know when they build those big ships and somebody says only the Chinese can do it. It's like communist China saves humanity basically, this is so. Here the director, Roland Emmerich, has a nice line in his film. Did you see his previous about global freezing, The Day After Tomorrow? This wonderful ironic inversion where you can see on Mexican borders Americans asking to be allowed and then Mexico, yeah, come in and so on. Okay, but what I want to say is that I am not preaching any kind of apocalyptic catastrophe. I think that on the contrary, when—when I meet a guy who does this kind of a panic, oh my God, you see it's coming, you know whenever something happens, like this summer is a little bit hot and they say, oh, can you imagine what it will be next year, we will all be burnt or whatever. I claim that this is maybe the most refined way to avoid confronting dangers, because if catastrophe is almost here, then let's sit and enjoy it, no? But of course they talk so much about it because, you know, it is this superficial logic, even I practice it sometimes, but not with ecology. They say you know that when sometimes there is a threat of something—you must remember this, we are all probably doing this—you talk, you think that if I talk a lot about it, I can make it sure that it will not happen, no? So I claim that our answer to those catastrophists who claim today to warn us, there will be end of the world catastrophe, our answer for them should be, no, no, you exaggerate, it's not so bad, but calm, don't worry, there will be a catastrophe, don't worry. You don't have to claim—because it's almost they worry that or whatever it will not be and so on. So again, I am not saying that. All I'm saying is the following thing: how, in what irrational way, we are dealing with ecological fate. Like in this book, Tragedy Farce, I just made this comparison. There was two years ago in Copenhagen, just before financial crisis, there was a meeting of the G-20 in Copenhagen, you may remember, for ecology. With great effort they promised, the money didn't even today appear anywhere, they promised twenty billion dollars and basically they agreed that they will meet again in two years. And this was hailed as a big success, no? Then a month or two later, there was that financial crisis. Remember how there, in a week or two, it wasn't difficult to get seven hundred fifty billions of dollars. Like it is as if, okay, we may be all dead of catastrophe, of ecological catastrophe, that's not a problem, the main thing is that capital should circulate, no, that's the real thing. That also—did you notice another thing? I don't know how much, probably here you don't even care about ecology, but for example in United States I noticed this. How—how now that they know that the danger is for the real, they no longer use the strategy, this French liberal economist, Guizot, his strategy of dismissing ecology as a kind of a neo-communist trick, like they failed there now they try to use this to fight capitalism. No, they only claim—you know, it reminds me a little bit of this right-wing, not defense but ambiguity towards Hitler. You must know this classical line of argumentation where they say, okay, we admit it, Hitler did some problematic things like kill the Jews and so on, but on the other hand, you know, trains were on time, he fought unemployment, he built highways, so we must be balanced, you know you cannot only. The best answer to this is, maybe you know it, was told to me by Wolf Biermann. He's ex-dissident, now he's right-wing and everything, but he told me that immediately after the Wende, the fall of communism, he met some East German—it's typically there in East Germany you have much more neo-Nazis than in the western part—some neo-Nazi ecologists, and in a debate he attacked them, but you are for—my God, you are for Hitler. And it's wonderful, terrifyingly wonderful, their answer. You know what they told him? They told him, no, this is not true, we reject Hitler. Why? Because Hitler did some good things like trying to kill the Jews, to get rid of the Jews, but he did also some horrible thing like all the highways which were ruining nature and so on. There is something terrifyingly true there, no? So what I'm—what I am saying is that in this time, more and more they are big powers in the media are trying to play this balancing game. Like recently I read some articles where the reasoning was this one: okay, okay, global warming, but look at the positive side. Like the North Pole ice is melting, so soon there will be a direct passage for boats from China across the North Pole much shorter to United States, so it will make much cheaper all those stupid toys that we are buying from China, you know. Or they said look, in Greenland—Greenland—there was an obscene CNN report, "The Greening of Greenland," where look, okay, there are some bad sides of global warming, but look, they can again grow vegetables in Greenland. This type of—and you know what is so sad? This demonstrates that all this is a lie. Is that this type of making it easy—like the situation is catastrophic but not serious, we can have vegetables from Greenland and so on—is accompanied by another, maybe necessary, I'm not a priori opposed to it, but nonetheless by another much darker threat—sorry, strategy. It's not again, it's not something that you don't find in the media, but it is again part of this unreported—less reported things. You just have to—no, here I am not this paranoiac. I don't think there is a big power hiding things. Everything is in the media. You just have to be patient and really read the media. You know that what is the latest thing going on, there are already innumerable committees planning it and they know it's very risky but it's a crazy radical solution—so-called geo-engineering. Silently they admit that we already missed the moment to—to reorient our economy so that we will renormalize our atmosphere, so they claim the only thing that can solve us is a direct large-scale intervention into our atmosphere. And there are already plans being made. For example, the idea is to increase the reflecting power of our atmosphere either by space lenses up there in the air or by—or by dispersing clouds of sea water or sulfur high in the air to prevent—the—all those rays or whatever ozone does, no. Or there are already plans of ocean fertilization with iron or some other nitrogen fertilizations to—to prevent—the—the dying of—so—so again the tragedy is that it's way too simple to say no we shouldn't mess with nature. Of course it's extremely dangerous. Who knows—you know who knows what can be the byproducts of this? You know, nature is stupid, there is no mother earth. As a leftist I caused a scandal when I was recently in Bolivia with this. I was received by the vice—vice-president, who is more normal type of guy, and you know recently Evo Morales, their president, made a kind of a for me ridiculous statement, like capitalism is killing Mother Earth, no? My comment was well at least one really good thing that capitalism is doing. You know what I mean by killing mother earth. Not we can do whatever we want by nature. But this precisely is one of the most dangerous ecological ideologies today. This idea that nature is some kind of a maternal base which we humans through our evil exploitative hubris disturb and then we have to pay the price. No nature, the horror of nature is that it's neither good nor bad, it's just a totally indifferent terrifying mechanism full of its own catastrophes. What Mother Nature? My God, again, my old example, maybe you know it. Think about oil. Can you even imagine what kind of a terrifying ecological catastrophe there must have been million years ago so that we have oil and coal? This is all immense amounts of organic life destroyed. So we don't need humans to cause catastrophes. We should renounce a little bit this inverted arrogance, you know, that we humans are the only ones who can cause real trouble. No, sorry, nature is evil enough—okay not in the moral sense but in this sense. So this is one way of ecological ideology. The opposite way, even more interesting, is—now I will be really evil. Usually there are some ecologists to point this out in America. I was almost not lynched but I had to run away when I said this. Because I said that often we act in a superstitious way. Like you have a vague bad feeling, something is wrong with nature with our industry, and then you engage in all these small practices. You know, you obsessively recycle paper, you buy organic food or whatever. And you know it makes you feel good, you know. Oh my God, I am doing something for Mother Nature and so on. I claim of course this is not bad, we should be doing it, but let's not take it too seriously. Intelligent ecologists are already talking about how true ecological struggle should move from this what they ironically call "lifestyle ecology." You know, you have a house with solar panels, you recycle paper and so on. I just spoke with an architect who told me, yes, but to—to construct such an ultra-modern self-reliant house, you spend more energy and so on than burning coal all your life and so on. But what I want to say is that when—just be a little bit aware when you are doing this—that it's basically the same thing as, you know, when you watch football in your apartment and then you shout and scream as if you are really helping your team to win, no? But it's this is one of the superstitions of our daily life, how—this is why we are doing this. You shout "go on our boys" and so on. Nobody hears you, but it makes you think. And I think this is—this is the same. It's a kind of a other term, other version of fetishist split. It's I know very well that this doesn't really matter, the more radical economic changes in production and so on are necessary. But I do it because it makes me feel good, it gives me awareness that I am doing something meaningful and so on. Let's be to be fair—this is where ecologists start to shout—I claim, why do you really believe that those overpriced half-rotten organic apples are so much better than good genetically manipulated apples? Maybe, but I don't think we are buying them for that. We are buying them because it makes us feel good. You see, I did something for our environment. Isn't it beautiful to be part of this great solidarity movement of people who care about environment and so on and so on? These are all, I claim, strategies of doing something to mask the fact that you are really doing nothing. You know, because you don't really have to change your lifestyle or what, no? It's just, you know, you spend a little bit more in the store buying organic food and then you think, oh, I did my duty and so on. You know, it's a little bit like, you know, all those disgusting because they are manipulative ads in newspapers—I don't know how much you have them but in United States and Western Europe we have them all the time. You see some disfigured black kid with lips broken or what, and you say, are you aware that for the price of a couple of cappuccinos if you contribute money to us you will change this life, this child's life, no? What's the true meaning of this? It is: we know horrible things are happening out there, but what we make it possible for you is that for the price of a couple of cappuccinos you can return to your life, really do nothing, but you can feel good, you know, like I'm really doing something and so on and so on. So the question here is the question of implications, of what is implied. I think the greatest and it can be even funny field of critique of ideology today is to focus on what you say or not say implicitly while saying nothing. I mean here, as you can imagine, I encounter—because I was looking for them—some wonderful examples from cinema. For example, did you see the old Ernst Lubitsch classic *Ninotchka*? A friend of mine recently drew attention to an incredibly beautiful just short exchange—listen carefully—in a cafeteria where a guy enters a cafeteria and says, "Can I get coffee without milk, please?" You know what the waiter answers? "Uh, we don't have milk." Oh sorry, he says, "Can I have coffee without cream?" The waiter answers, "You know, we don't have cream, we ran out of cream, we only have milk. So can I give you coffee without milk, not coffee without cream?" Of course this is the same coffee. But it's not. Because you know what you don't get is as important as what you do get. Let me give you another example, which I really like. It's in *Brassed Off*, an old British working class fifteen years ago melodrama with that beautiful actor Ewan McGregor, one of his roles before he became a megastar when he was still playing working class heroes like *Trainspotting*, no? It's called *Brassed Off*, about miners. But there is a wonderful erotic scene with no dirty words—in any church I could say those lines. It is, okay, the guy and the girl, they obviously attract each other, so he accompanies her to her house. And down there she tells him, "Why don't you come up for a coffee?" He says, "Okay, but it's a problem, I don't like coffee." She answers, "No problem, I don't have any." I mean it's so beautiful, without any dirty words, it means to coffee come and fuck. But what I like is that it's much more—not so much, much more refined but even much more erotic than for her simply to say let's get up, let's go to bed, no? Just you offer something, you take it back, and the result is not zero. The result is ultra-erotic tension, no, in a way. That's what we need. Or another example of this double negation where the result is not zero is—there is a wonderful old anecdote, maybe you know it, about William Randolph Hearst—you know the big bad guy, the American model of Citizen Kane, no, media like Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch. What he—there is a—again an anecdote about how he had an excellent editor of one of his newspapers, and this editor was a fanatic for twenty years, he didn't take any holiday. So Hearst came to him and told him, "Please take a holiday, you deserve it." "No, no," the guy said, "I am worried, I am worried that I'm so engaged in the work here that if I leave the newspaper for a week, everything will collapse," no? And then this is my reason, this is what I worry. Then Hearst told him, "Don't worry, everything is so well organized that if you leave, nothing will change, everything will function." Then the guy says, "This is what I worry even more about. You will know that you don't need me." No, that's the logic. And this—at this logic of implications and so on, it's a wonderful way to subvert the ruling doxa ideology, not by directly contesting it, but just by saying the same thing but somehow taking away the implication. I'm sorry, but I cannot restrain myself from telling you an old story which I already told years ago, but in Warsaw, not here again, about how—I think this was the late seventies, early eighties—no, even earlier, it was that relative liberalism of late sixties—when I was a young student and we had a kind of a student newspaper and there were elections in ex-Yugoslavia. Yugoslav communism was not as harsh as others, so it wasn't that the party candidates which were the only ones usually always got ninety-nine percent. No, in Yugoslavia it was eighty percent. But you were assured that they will always get eighty percent. Okay, so this was the night of the elections, the evening, and we wanted to do something provocative. Like one guy proposed, why don't we do a suicidal gesture, simply publish an issue and say these elections were not really free, were a fake? And then we realized but this is ridiculous. First, whom are we trying to convince? Everyone knows that they were not, no? So a guy, a colleague of mine, came to an ingenious idea. He said, why don't we just treat them elections as what communists in power claim that they are, as free elections? And report the way you would have reported on free elections. So we published an extraordinary issue of our small journal where there were with big letters on the front page: Latest results, it looks like communists will probably remain in power. Everybody is waiting for—and it was wonderful. We were immediately called to the central committee. But again, it was serious. I mean not to attack us, like the guy told—told—started to shout at us: why are you messing here, provoking us? And then we played naive idiots. We said: but you claim elections are free and we just reported that in free elections—and then so what did we do wrong? It was a beautiful. We—because that nomenclature guy, what would he say? No, you know that elections were not really free? So he just repeated he said: don't fuck with me boys, you know very well what you did. What do you mean tell us? I really started to sympathize with the guy. He wasn't even—you know, this is how I was always fascinated by these daily ideological practices. So let me add to this another story, maybe you know it, I'm sorry, this is was my almost experience which was crucial for my theoretical development. When I was in the army, we had—I don't know how it was in your army, but in—okay, you are too young, do you have now like in Slovenia, you have a professional army? Yeah, okay, so it was when I was young, professional, it was so, you know how it is after one, two weeks in the army, you get that how is it called, a moment when you really become soldier? You know all soldiers are gathered, you shout this "Yes, I swear I give my life blah blah blah" and then you have to sign. A friend of mine in the army refused to sign. And he said to the officer sitting there at a table with this big book of where you sign, he said—he asked him: is this obligatory or not? Are you ordering me to sign? The officer said: of course not, this is—you commit your life, it's your free decision. Then the guy said: then I will not sign it if it's a free decision. The officer said: well if you refuse to sign you go to prison. So they thought and then this friend of mine—it's a historical moment, I even have a photocopy of the paper—asked the officers: I will sign it if you formally order me to sign. And the officer wrote on the paper: "I thereby formally order this person to freely sign the oath." And it's—you know it's—I'm not trying to sell you this as a kind of a totalitarian trick. This is how all ideologies have this moment of where you are given a freedom of choice on condition, of course, that you make the right choice. It is always like this. Like—for—for example, you know, this brings me to another topic, which would be wonderful to go into, because there you get ideology, this topic of choices which are given to you on condition that you don't use them. You know, like okay, maybe you even know it, I'm sorry, my classical example, I wonder if you have here the same ritual. Let's say you are rich, I am poor, you invite me to a restaurant. We all know absolutely that you will pay. But in my country at least, it's a ritual that when the bill arrives, for some short time I have to pretend, no no no, let me pay. But we know very well that it's just a ritual. And I know it very well because once when I was young it happened to me that the other guy said, "Okay, if you want, you pay." Then it was horrible because I didn't have the money. I had to depend, oh my God and so on. But what I'm saying is that you see this gap between saying it explicitly and implications. This is where ideology functions in our—in our daily life. So where are we today? Oh my God, I with time I mean I just began, you know, like—let me go a little bit faster maybe here so that we don't get—lost. One thing I wanted to develop here along these lines is first—we are—let me return to that ecological example of buying organic food and so on. What makes me so sad is that the logic here, underlying logic is this narcissistic logic to make you feel good. And—it's very sad if you observe the consequences of this logic. For—for example, in the sphere of sexuality. More and more in the West, even passionate love or even passionate sexual attachment is perceived as something potentially dangerous. In the sense that, you know, you are too exposed, too open. Which is why in a typical tendency, more and more in the West people rely on marriage or dating agencies. And my friend Alain Badiou drew my attention to this. One of these agencies in France made a wonderful play with words which tells the truth. I don't know how it is in Polish, but you know in English, in French also, you—we use the word "to fall in love." So, this advert—advertisement of the agency was "With our specialists, we will enable you to be in love without fall, without fall in love." The idea is there will be no dangerous moment, you know this—okay for me at least—that's the whole point. You meet someone all of a sudden you know you are lost and so on. No danger, you will be told that person is ideal for you and so on. It's really a kind of a return to pre-modern tradition of arranged marriages. I found an agency in United States where they openly say: "Before the modern confusion, all those wise—wise relatives, uncles who determined your marriage had a great wisdom and we try to resuscitate that wisdom." Now you will say this is just an example. No, there are even trends in cinema which point in this direction. Let me give you two, three I hope funny examples. Did you see the last James Bond film, *Quantum of Solace*? Politically I would say as a leftist, okay, my God, basically James Bond saves the Morales regime in Bolivia from some the big company who wants to control water resources. So politically okay, but did you notice something? At the end, it's the first James Bond film without sex at the end between Bond and Bond girl. They just, in a very politically correct way, we had too much trauma, we don't feel like it, okay they—they part, okay. Now you will say this is an exception. No, now I go really low. Did you see any of this Dan Brown movies or did you read the novels? Did you notice how—just take *Da Vinci Code*, no sex. You have a couple, Robert Langdon the symbologist whatever and that niece, grand-grand-grand-granddaughter of Jesus Christ, Sophie Neveu, but no sex. Even the last novel, one of the worst novels of all times, *The Lost Symbol*, absolutely not even sexual attraction, nothing although there is a couple. Even worse, did you see *Angels Demons*? There in the novel there is sex between Robert Langdon again and that Vittoria Vetra, the Italian scientist. But the Hollywood movie, there is no sex. Isn't this strange? Usually we are used to Hollywood adding sex to make it more commercial. Now all of a sudden Hollywood is taking sex out. I claim that what is behind this is again this extreme narcissism where even opening yourself up to another human being in this sexually or—or love or only even sexually passionate way, it's considered too much. You have no wonder a whole movement in United States now it's called "Masturbathon." People gather in a big hall, hundreds, and you are not allowed to touch each other, they just masturbate together. And they make it very politically correct. They claim that of course when you enter you pay ten dollars and all the money goes to some stars in Guatemala. So it's about solidarity. But I find this so sad, that you are there alone in a crowd, you know. You masturbate, you—of course there is no harassment here because you are only doing it to yourself and so on. I find effectively this tendency, if you ask me, very very sad, the mode of subjectivity which we find here. And what makes me especially sad is that even Catholic Church sometimes plays this game. In what way? You know the predominant ethics today, it's more and more—the ethics of as they say in postmodern way "be true to yourself, realize your potentials" and so on. No here sorry, I'm on the side of Judeo-Christian tradition. Where precisely, and this is I think what is so great of our Western tradition—sorry this is racist for you, I don't think it is—it's that in contrast to all those religions of go deep into yourself and discover your truth, what defines our Western tradition is that the truth is out there, encountering truth is a traumatic encounter, no? It's—uh—it's painful, truth hurts like love. Like being faithful to truth doesn't mean be yourself, no it means go over yourself, step over yourself, overcome your singular stupidity towards another transcendent dimension. And I think that now we do a little bit of at least some kind of theory. This is what Freud means with sexuality. Freud focuses on sexuality not because he is a naturalist and he thinks—he thinks that sexuality is the natural base of our big being. No no, for Freud, sexuality is the original space where human being—where an animal becomes human being. Human sexuality precisely is not the sexuality of organic instinctual coupling where you do it just as part of your instincts whenever there is a period of mating. For us humans, there is no season of mating, to be vulgar we want to do it all the time and so on. What I mean is that precisely as very intelligent and the best Christian mystics and theologians knew it like Simone Weil, sexuality is, if we are talking about, it needn't even have to be love, but of course especially love but also passionate sexual lust, it's like the elementary form of metaphysics. What do I mean by this? You live your normal half-animal life and then something happens. You encounter someone and all your balance is ruined. It's the most elementary form of what maybe in Kierkegaard's terms we can call the not religious but why not, religious sexual suspension of the ethical. You just have an absolute link link to an absolute. And isn't this authentic love? I'm now referring to your most elementary experience of love. Did it happen to you to be really passionately in love? It's a catastrophe, admit it. Before falling in love, you had your life, you met friends, maybe the one-night stand here and there, you had a nice peaceful life. Then what? Love comes, it's a catastrophe, all your balance is lost, you are obsessed by this passion and so on and so on. And it's here that some Catholics, predominant not all, some of them understood this very well—and not just some leftist theologians of revolution, for example, a conservative French Catholic whom I appreciate very much, Paul Claudel, knew of this metaphysical properly even religious dimension of sexuality. Namely, I was always shocked when Catholics are telling me, "Without the goal of procreation, sexuality just animal lust." I say, my God, isn't it exactly the opposite? That animals do it for procreation. What makes sexuality human is that you take an act which in the animal logic serves procreation and you make it as it were a metaphysical act of assertion of an absolute link to another person. So, again, we should never forget when Catholics, those who don't get it, criticize—criticize sexuality, claim that sexuality in itself is just animal lust, it must be for procreation or whatever, they are not really fighting nature on behalf of spirit. They are fighting a dangerous competitive form of spirituality. And this is what makes me sad. When they claim that sex without procreation is animal, they are really terribly denigrating sexuality. I mean, now of course they usually—Catholics usually answer me in two ways: first, that of course we know that it's also sex, a deep sex in itself without procreation can be a deep spiritual experience if it's done in a more spiritual tender way like missionary position looking your partner into the eyes. No, they mystify the point. Because again they are trying to—to normalize this absolutely metaphysical traumatic dimension of sex, is this absolute commitment. Like *Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus*, like I want to have it even if everything falls apart. Every—every passion has this. So now not to really talk too long, I will somehow—okay now I will do something evil. I will start a debate by asking myself what did you want to say in the remaining part of your talk? And then I will briefly give you a condensed answer. First, I wanted, but this we know a little bit, to go into how important is what happened in Egypt precisely against this cheap multiculturalism. What I find so important in this Egyptian demonstrations is that what we thought is not possible happened. In our spontaneous prejudices, Arab crowds can only be mobilized for anti-Semitism, Islamist fundamentalism or nationalism, something like that. Here we got a big popular movement with which, in order to understand it, we didn't need any multicultural specialist. We were able—it was true Kantian universality—we in a way immediately knew what it is about. It's a struggle for dignity, freedom, and so on and so on. And this tells a lot about our own conditions, how precisely when we got what we officially wanted, we were full of anxiety. Which is why we like so much to talk about Libya. In—with Libya, the situation was renormalized. We were back in open waters, you know, the axis of evil, terrorist tyrant, suffering innocent people, justifying our military intervention and so on and so on. So again, isn't Egyptian—what happened in Egypt, isn't this nonetheless a kind of very naive but I think absolutely true proof of—almost I would say as my friend very hard-line leftist Alain Badiou who is a Platonist would have put it—there is almost, I am tempted to say, something like an eternal idea of freedom which as a miracle can explode here, there and so on? There is universality. Multiculturalism is not an entire truth. This is my first problem with multiculturalism. My—to conclude—my second problem with multiculturalism is that it doesn't work. And I did something for which I really got many attacks. I defended, but of course not in that way, the way it's meant, this Angela Merkel and Cameron idea of *Leitkultur*, leading hegemonic culture. Of course, don't be afraid, I don't defend it in the sense of, you know, we should beware of not too many Muslims, we should defend our Christian legacy and so on. No, it's much more complex. I think that in our situation there is something, maybe you know already my line I developed in the book, very sad that is happening. It should worry every democrat. Till now—first my first point—till now there was let's be clear one good thing to say about capitalism. It always sooner or later, after some time, generated a demand for democracy. You have examples like recently South Korea, Chile, where capitalism needed in order to remain functioning ten, twenty years of dictatorship, but then when things start to move in the long term, capitalism was not able to survive without democracy. My first point here is that—and this is the true lesson of China and so-called what politically people call "capitalism with Asian values," authoritarian capitalism. I don't think this holds for China, Singapore, and so on. This should worry you. Not I'm not a racist against China, I'm just saying this is a universal tendency. That there is a new type of capitalism emerging which is even more efficient, economically dynamic than liberal capitalism and which functions perfectly with an authoritarian state. Look how much better China and especially Singapore, which is soft China, like—other things, how much better they saved—they saved through this economic financial crisis precisely because the authoritarian power structure, state structure, was able to regulate much more efficiently markets and so on and so on. So this is the first problem, this internal marriage between—which sounded a natural marriage—between democracy and capitalism is approaching a divorce. Here we should start to worry. Second thing, we are obviously, as I always repeat, entering a post-political era. In what sense? In the sense that, you know, till now in Western Europe democracy usually meant you have two main parties, center-right, center-left party. And they will have some small fringe parties, communist, neo-fascist, whatever you want, but basically the green party, but the space was occupied by one center-left, center-right, social democrats or whatever and Christian democrats or whatever. Now I claim something new is more and more emerging in Europe. There is a new polarity. It's on the one hand—let's call it the pure capitalist party, a party of liberal capitalism, which is usually even pretty tolerant in abortion cultural matters and so on. And then more and more the second party is no longer this kind of a centrist center-left, center-right party but the anti-immigrant proto-fundamentalist party. I mean you have a lot of this here in Poland even. Isn't—isn't your prime minister—isn't this basically this pure liberal capitalist party and then you have this more nationalist hard-line reaction Kaczynski and so on? And you are here by far not the worst case. Look at for example even in countries that we were all celebrating, like the Scandinavian countries. More and more in them what was once twenty years ago just this extreme right we were all laughing at them is becoming the only true alternative. So that's the sad thing is either this technocratic neutral post-ideological however we call it liberal capitalism or the only passion you can have is the passion of fear. You are afraid. And it's sad how even the left tends to play this card of fear. You can fear immigrants, you can fear nature, ecology, you can fear the big capital. But if you really care for Christian legacy, you can see what this fear is. It has a precise Christian name: it's fear of the neighbor. This is anti-Christian fact. So our answer to those who worry, "Oh, Europe is in danger," we should tell them, of course, European legacy, what is most noble in European legacy, what I already described, this egalitarian radical motive of a new non-hierarchic type of community. Yes, this is in danger. But you, anti-immigrant defenders of Europe, you are the danger. What is a real threat to Europe today, to what is noble in European legacy, are not the poor Muslims. Okay, they can be annoying, I have no mercy for them if like in Germany or Berlin or Amsterdam if they try to beat homosexuals. Of course I say no multicultural tolerance here, sorry, you have to respect our laws and so on. But let's face it, these false defenders of Europe are a true threat to—to Europe. Because you know what's the problem with this anti-immigrant nationalism? There is one best definition of nation that I know. It's a comical definition of course, ironic but beautiful. It was done by a guy whom I don't like very much, he was this enlightened rationalist proto-racist, Ernest Renan, you know the French guy. You know what was his definition of a nation? A big group of people which are connected by a shared lies about their past, hatred for their enemies in the present and illusions about their future. I don't know how it is about Poland but my nation Slovenes are definitely that. We share the same illusions about our past, some extreme version of this illusion—it's a popular sub-illegitimate theory in Slovenia—to mark our distance from Yugoslavia, we are not Slavs, we are really the Etruscans. You know, founders of Rome, the original civilization. And then you have this crazy linguist, you know. Of course, you take a Slovene word with six letters, you change three letters and you change the order and of course, what a surprise, you get an Etruscan letter, word and so on, no? Then we share the same enemy hate, the same hatred. Absolutely, the irony of Slovenia is how this shared enemy—how it changes all the time. In old Yugoslavia it was more or less the Albanians who were perceived as those suspicious people who are—because Albanians had almost a monopoly on ice cream, pastries. So there were all these rumors they are poisoning us and so on. Then with Milosevic all of a sudden, it was nice, in one, two months, Albanians became the good guys and Serbs became the bad guys. Now that there is no longer—there is no longer Milosevic, it's mostly Croats that are the bad guys now, because we have a ridiculous conflict for some literally one, two square miles of border, because something a little bit close to the sea, border was defined by a certain river and then this river moved one, two hundred yards north so we lost that part, but we claim it's eternal Slovene territory, no. I have to laugh for example when some nationalists said when we proclaimed independence that the Slovene state is a final outcome of thousands of years of dreams. Well, that's a nice ethical theory because thousand years ago there were no Slovenes, no, we emerged so. When there were no Slovenes, there were already dreams about—but what I want to say is that this—we should not—that's crucial for me—we should not simply just make fun of this nationalist logic. What is crucial is to see it as an organic part of the global capitalist totality. Here we should be critical. When liberals are telling you, "Forget about your socialist dreams, the big struggle today is between liberal forces of freedom, tolerance and religious fundamentalists." I claim no, this is a false struggle, not in the paranoiac Marxist sense that they are all the same, but in the sense that it's crucial to perceive how the very global capitalist dynamics generates—generates—fundamentalism. Let me give you a clear example if you are old enough, well some of you are, you may remember. In which country today is the synonym of radical fundamentalism? Afghanistan. Sorry to tell you, I'm old enough to remember years ago, Afghanistan was maybe the most pluralist tolerant of Near East Islam Muslim countries. They had a secular pro-Western king, they had even a very strong communist party, which was maybe too strong, so strong that it took power. Then when it didn't function, you remember, Soviet Union intervened to help them, then United States through their well-known agent Osama bin Laden at that time. Then the result is Afghanistan we have today. That is to say, you can see here a country which in that indistinct pre-global state was very tolerant, became fundamentalist as the result of how it was caught in the global process. In United States, you must know it's the same. The key to United States today is, maybe you know the story, it's Kansas. Kansas is—it's a small American Bible Belt state which was till years ago the single most radical in the leftist sense American state, like all great movements against slavery and so on started there, already in Lincoln's times. Till years ago. Today it's the most radical Bible Belt fundamentalist country. So this is the true enigma: how does the very global capitalism give birth to—give birth to fundamentalism? And now, really to conclude, my point here would have been that I don't like fighting racism with this liberal multiculturalist ideology. Not in the sense that we shouldn't tolerate others too much. I claim multiculturalism the way in its liberal version, it's simply an ideological illusion. We need *Leitkultur*, but not leading culture in this Christian fundamentalist sense. Look, the problem is the following one: if you have multiple cultures, this pure model of each culture its own identity and then we just need some legal rules to—to—to regulate their interaction, it doesn't function. Because in order to have a truly functioning multiculturalism, you need a set of meta-rules, unwritten rules, implicit rules of habits, habits not laws, but habits, lifestyle which regulate how you treat your others. And this is for me a true *Leitkultur*. A true *Leitkultur* is the rules me and my Muslim friends, my Jewish friends, my Arab friends, with whomever you want, we all obey so that we can live together. This is the true fight for *Leitkultur*. For example, it's clear what Hitler did to Germany. Before, in Weimar Germany, they had a *Leitkultur* which was in a way Hitler was right, but of course in the wrong way, predominantly a kind of a secularized Jewish *Leitkultur*. And Hitler knew this is the danger for him. So he brutally suppressed it and very efficiently. It's interesting to see how many crucial writers of that time, to Hofmannsthal, Heinrich Mann, never returned, how Hitler's cleansing of German culture was efficient, it remained. But what I want to say is that you see our answer I think to fundamentalist threat or nationalism shouldn't be, no no no tolerance with others, but to actively—it should be universalist answer I claim. For example, with Egypt today. Yes, if you pose it only as a moment, problem of culture, then of course we can play this game, do we really understand them, oh how different they are. But you have there demonstrations for freedom, my God, we know, we can directly identify. The only solidarity, universality today, it's not the direct universality of cultures. This direct universality of cultures is the most boring UNESCO bullshit, you know. Oh this culture is great in this way, that culture is great in that way, I'm not interested in that. The only universality is: we fight for freedom here, you fight for freedom there, and you have an immediate solidarity if you have it, of course you have always to fight for this solidarity. So again, I—what—my plea is against this leftist masochism. Like when you say European tradition, oh you are already in one foot almost in fascism you know, or in—or in eurocentrism whatever. No, we should address—there are things we have the right, we emancipatory universal leftists, to be proud about of European legacy. And again our fight against anti-immigrant racism should not be: yes we know oh we in Europe are terrible, we did so many genocides, we should just admire other cultures and—no. Every culture is dirty in its own way. I don't think we in Europe should feel especially guilty. No, we should again, as already said, our answer to those proponents of *Leitkultur* should be: no, we propose a different, better *Leitkultur*. We should fight for *Leitkultur*. You have a *Leitkultur* of tolerance, you have a *Leitkultur* of intolerance and so on and so on. The very fact that, for example, another national group is perceived as a threat to your national identity, it's clearly a feature of the *Leitkultur*. Today we have to fight for a different *Leitkultur*. It's extremely important. We are in the—the right-wingers they claim we are in the middle of the cultural struggle. Yes we are, why not? And again, it's not enough to play this tolerance card. We have to fight for a new, more egalitarian and so on culture. And again, stop with this leftist pseudo-leftist rather I would say liberal masochism. I mean, it shocks me how—how this eternal masochism—as if West European liberals feel good only if they can demonstrate how somehow Europe is always guilty, you know, like in Libya today. Did you notice how boring typical leftist comments are? It's all these moralistic suspicions. Are we—is NATO really intervening in Libya for humanitarian reasons or are there some political economic interests behind? Of course they are, they are always. Nobody asks the question of what NATO intervention—okay they do ask but very marginally—for me the key problem is not should NATO intervene or not, it's what does this mean and I don't know—don't know enough—in Libya itself, who are these famous opponents of Gaddafi? Are they really as Gaddafi claims—I don't believe it of course—even more dangerous fundamentalists? Like Gaddafi made that unique statement which is of course a madman statement you remember, that it's like the—the—the Nazi idea of Jewish-Bolshevik plot, that behind this rebellion against him are—are Al-Qaeda and Zionists, you know like they are really the same. But and if there is a chance that this is an authentic emancipatory movement, why not give them the arms and so on? And I don't care if Europe has economic interests. It's all a question—I'm sick and tired of this European moralistic masochism, which is a fake moralism, which is—which is an inverted form of racism. So again, let's be proud, we have a lot to give to the world. Let's proudly do it, let's brutally fight for our progressive *Leitkultur*. I know I was too long, but that's life. Thank you very much.
ex-Yugoslavia, when they knew that they were losing economically and so on, this was the last attempt to somehow control explosion, to do a—this was again the last attempt to save the communist regime—to do the reform of high school and university education. And what is so shocking for me is that it reads like Bologna reform. So it's like we joined, we ex-communist countries, Europe, and we won. We showed them the most stupid reform which was done, of course, in these anti-intellectual terms. Like, you know, it's really—it reads like the most vulgar nomenclature communist logic. The idea was, we don't need, we don't need intellectuals who just develop their critical thoughts in their ivory tower. We need people who will be experts to solve, ordinary people, by ordinary people lead nomenclature and managers, no? To solve their problems. And that's what Bologna education is about. They openly say—now, for example, what's going on now in England, and this is not a joke. Already over ten philosophy departments were shut down. Their minister of universities—that's how it's really called, the title of the new government—said something pretty terrifying two months ago. He said that the tendency, the goal of these reforms in United Kingdom is that in the three domains of human sciences, social sciences, and art studies, if you want to study this, it is of no concern to the state. It's a matter of market exchange between you as a private individual and university as an agent of the market. It's not part of general education or whatever. So, what's behind it? As one of them, propagators from Brussels, put it very nicely, we need experts. What do they mean by this? One of them, I spoke with him at some round table in Paris, was very open. He said, because this was immediately after, you remember, those cars which were burning in the suburbs of Paris some three years ago. He said, look, we had that problem of youth in rebellion burning cars. Here, we need experts. We need psychologists to tell us what were the psychic causes, how to calm them down. We need urban planners to tell us how to—how to construct suburbs so that it's easier for the police to intervene and so on. Like, we need—but let me be here very naive, and I—I hope you admit I'm not trying to sell you any Marxist stuff. If you are an honest conservative, worried about—now I will consciously use this conservative phrase—the fate of Judeo-Christian legacy, you should worry here. Because the task of this is what? To reduce us to experts. There are problems which should be accepted the way they are formulated by those in power or with money, and we should be there as some kind of a—how shall I call it—social—again, a Stalinist term which is very appropriate here—social engineers or social psychiatrists helping those in power to fix the problem with our expertise. But isn't it a minimal reflection shows you that true thinking—not in any mystical sense, but in the sense of real authentic intellectual questioning—begins not by solving problems which others formulate to you, but to start reflecting upon a problem itself. For example, the first question you should ask is, is this really how we should perceive the problem? What if the way you formulate the problem is already part of the problem? So that the very way we formulate the problem is already a mystification of the problem. There are numerous examples here that I like to enumerate in my books, some of them even in this tragedy farce stuff. For example, this is more for United States. It's typical how whenever you mention sexism, racism, it's automatically translated into a problem of tolerance. But sorry, this is not at all self-evident. Like, read—you can find them directly on—on the internet—read or just put search through them, the speeches of Martin Luther King, who really was a fighter against racism. He practically doesn't mention tolerance. For him, it would have been humiliating to claim, we blacks want more tolerance from the white man. No, for him, racism was a problem of economic exploitation of the black, their exclusion from higher education, laws, legal regulations, and so on and so on. It wasn't a problem of tolerance. So the reason we perceive this as a problem of tolerance is, I claim, typical of our so-called post-political era where more and more economic politics is perceived as something which concerns the experts. We are just basically informed, sorry, we have to do this, that, and so on, in order to survive in today's competition and so on. And then we have these cultural matters which function precisely like nature, where you can just picture tolerance. Like, we have different religions, different sexual orientations, so all we can do is tolerate each other. This, again, is not something which goes by itself. That's the first thing to do. Or obviously, in ecology. I think ecology is today a field ultra-invested by ideology. On the one—these are just two extremes. On the one hand, it's the purely capitalist, but also Stalinist communist, if they still exist. Because did you notice how if they exist, they are the best capitalists? So when people attack me, why do you still mention communism, are you crazy, do you want back all those party congresses and so on? My answer is a clear one. Uh-uh. This—they are now your problem if you are for capitalism. Because look at the countries where hard-line communists are in power. China and so on. They are now the most brutal, ruthless, efficient capitalists you can imagine. Even Cuba is moving in that direction. The only exception would have been North Korea. But that's a very interesting example to study. Because you know North Korea is—it tells us a lot about ideology. It's the unique case where the celebration, communist celebration of the leader turned directly into supernatural. You know what I mean by this. Like all the celebration of Stalin or Mao was in some formal sense—of course it was crazy—but in a formal sense was within the limits of reason. Like even those who claimed Stalin is the greatest genius of humanity, they didn't say Stalin can fly in the air or whatever, no? Incidentally, he didn't. He was terribly afraid of flying. Okay, that's another point, no? But in North Korea, they directly made this step into supernatural. I was in Beijing a year ago, and a friend there showed me a photocopy—okay, maybe he was lying, I have to rely on him—of a—of a elementary school textbook for North Korean children where they say—it says literally—our leader, Kim Jong-il, is so pure that he doesn't need to urinate and to defecate, to go to toilet. You know, this, I almost have an appreciation for. Wouldn't it be nice if somebody were to tell you, I don't know, Kaczynski or Trump, so pure they don't have to shit and so on. It's something nice in theory, no? Okay, but what I want more seriously to say is that—so we have this push towards efficient education, education which serves social needs, which precisely only helps those in power to solve problem, not to question the way problems are formulated. But just take, for example, racism. You know, you can perceive it in an egalitarian democratic way, but you can also say the problem is how much foreigners our nation can sustain. The way you formulate problem—a problem—can already be mystification. So now, just a tiny little bit of philosophy. Immanuel Kant, whom we should not neglect, was—if nothing else, we know that Kant provided the best possible definition of marriage. If some of you are philosophers, you should know this. Kant, the great ethical radicalist, no? You know what is Kant's definition? If you don't believe me, look into his *Metaphysik der Sitten*, Metaphysics of Morals, the big book in two parts. Not *Grundlegung*, not foundations, where Kant defines marriage as contract between the two adults about the mutual use of their sexual—sexual organs for the purpose of pleasure. So no sacred union, it's purely—and now you will say this is a joke. It's not a joke, because one page after, Kant quite seriously—he was crazy, my God—goes into the question of if a husband escapes from the wife, does the wife have the right to call the police to bring him back? And he says yes, not because of love, but because he ran away with part of his body, penis, which was her ownership by marriage contract. So this as a thing that he should be brought back. Okay. Nonetheless, Kant did something great. He introduced a wonderfully counter-intuitive definition of a distinction between public and private use of reason. For Kant, private use of reason is not what we are doing here in so far as we are out of an institution, or if we meet later in a cafeteria or what. No. Private use of reason is for him use of reason which is not radical free, but it is in advance limited by some goals which are again determined in advance. So that you say we don't question this, we accept this, we just see how we can best serve this. For example, for Kant, very interestingly, all state uses of reason—for Kant, Faculty of Law and Faculty of Theology and others—are private uses of reason. For Kant, only philosophy and pure sciences where you can question legal order, religions, are—are public use of reason. I like this logic. When you are in a state colloquium about the need for rule of law or religion in schools, you are doing, for Kant, private use of reason. If two, three people gather in an apartment, without any prejudices, debating religion, you are doing public space of reason. And this is why I am so proud to be here. Because I think that, you know this big phrase which conservatives like to use today—we should defend against Muslims or whoever the Judeo-Christian legacy. Well, I don't like the politically correct leftist answer—no, we shouldn't privilege ourselves, they are all equal and so on and so on. No, I think we should stop this leftist masochism where we should always feel guilty, oh Europeans we are horrible, and then you celebrate others—those, I don't know, Indians from India, oh they have a holistic attitude towards nature, they are so much better and so on. No. I mean, maybe we should be proud for great things that European tradition brought. For example, the tradition of radical egalitarian communities where you are allowed to participate in a universal communal space independently of your particular role in the hierarchic order. This is how I read, my God, Jesus Christ. You know, if you don't hate your mother, brother, you cannot be my follower. Of course, it's not the stupidity of, I don't know, poison your father or whatever. I claim that, and some theologians with whom I debated agreed with me, that father, mother simply stand there for hierarchic social relations. The meaning of Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost, depends how you want to translate it, is precisely that an egalitarian community where these hierarchic relations are suspended is possible. There is a space outside this hierarchy. This is, you remember that famous scene from New Testament when Christ is with his followers and somebody comes in and says, ah, your family, mother, Ruth, whoever, brother are there, and he simply says no, my family is here and so on. And we know that, sorry to speak such evident obscenities, that Christ loved his mother. So it's not humiliation there or what. But this is so extremely important. I—here I totally agree with the idea that without this legacy of a radically egalitarian community, you cannot imagine democracy even. Because you know, now I will almost sound eurocentric racist. You do find elements of this in Buddhism, but it is always linked, in principle, only to individual enlightenment. It's like in enlightenment we are all the same. Yes, but in enlightenment you are in that stupid trance and so on, no? The problem is to—not just this. I mean, every rich guy would agree that spiritually we are all the same. Yeah, but who cares about that? In the real life we are not, no? But this idea that egalitarian collective is not just some ideal up there, it can be institutionalized, it can be made a form of life. This is an incredible achievement. So, you see my point? Till now at least it worked for me. Namely, when somebody conservative starts to talk about, oh, European Judeo-Christian legacy, our counter-attack again shouldn't be, no, you are eurocentric, what about the Indian wisdom or all that? No, our answer should be F, the forbidden word three point four, who are you to mention European legacy? Those who today, conservatives, pretend to act as defenders of Judeo-Christian legacy against a Muslim threat—sorry, but they are the true danger of Europe. If they imagine Europe with, I don't know, Haider who happily joined his creator, or rather is down there—with Haider, Le Pen, and so on who are now in power in France and so on. Sorry, but this precisely would have been a Europe deprived of its greatest Judeo-Christian legacy. They are the true danger. And it is here that thinking begins, with this public use of reason, this egalitarian exercise of free thinking. All emancipation begins with free thinking. And not only—like, for example, Islamists like so much to emphasize how—it is true, let's admit it, in Quran it says that your thinking is free, that nobody can force you to believe. Muhammad is totally open to this. He says nobody should be forced to believe. But the catch is precisely that you should keep this skepticism or whatever for yourself. You are not allowed to transfer into communal link a different, let's say, life practice. Now—but even here, problems are so wonderfully ambiguous. No, I'm not pleading—I mean, I think there are very interesting emancipatory potential in Islam, but also some not so emancipatory potentials. But what I like is how, if you think really with the public use of reason, without prejudices, how ambiguous things are. For example, do you remember—maybe you do, it was reported in the media some five or ten years ago—there was a big scandal in Australia where a young woman was raped and the big, whatever, mufti—I don't know name, okay, the boss of the Muslim community in Australia—defended the rapists openly. He said—he used this disgusting metaphor—he said imagine if someone on the corner of a street leaves a piece of unwrapped meat and a dog comes by and eats the meat. Whom would you blame? Not the dog, he did it automatically. You would blame the idiot who left the meat there. And then of course he makes this tasteless comparison—it's the same with a woman walking on the street not enough dressed, blame her. Okay, it's horrible. But I claim it's more ambiguous, think about it. Isn't it interesting how the presupposition, silent premise of this reasoning is an extreme denigration, humiliation of men? Only a woman is treated as a proper ethical agent. We men are reduced to some animal population. We are not guilty. You see there a woman, uh, you can't help it, you jump. Only a woman is called to to show restraint. And this is a key feature, very interesting one, of Islam. You know, for example, how Muhammad became—became a prophet? You know that when Archangel Gabriel appeared to him, Muhammad first thought this is the voice of devil. And it's his first wife Khadijah which—convinced him that this is really the voice of God, not devil. In other words, you have in Islam this very interesting moment that men do not have access to truth without feminine mediation, how shall I put it? That it's only through woman's assessment that you can be sure that what you are talking is truth. Now, there are other dark things about Islam, I'm not trying in any way to—to say—I'm just saying we should—this is the public use of reason. When you question everything, not in a destructive way, but in this open way. And again, this is the reason why sincerely I am so glad—this is why I am so glad to be here. Because I think that precisely what Kritika Polityczna is doing here is establishing kind of a public space of reason outside official institutions and so on and so on. I think that everyone, not only leftists, should be—everyone should be interested in it. Because, you know, today more than ever, in this situation where we have censorship, but not in this direct sense of censor up there prohibiting things, but it's more ingrained into our spontaneous experience, what we perceive, what we don't perceive, how we perceive problems and so on. Because you remember that example that I gave you, tasteless, of how a computer projects immediately onto, let's say, a person in front of you. But isn't something exactly like that going on, for example, in racism? Let's say you are anti-Arab or anti-Jewish. You encounter an Arab or a Jew and how will you react? It's as if your mind projects on him dirty, plotting, dangerous. This is literally the materialization of that mechanism of an—of an ideological machine. So the task today, when everybody tries to convince us we live in a post-ideological era, is not to do some big intricate analysis, but it's to—maybe that's what I always like to do—to begin with modest everyday phenomena and demonstrate the ideological presuppositions. Let me give you, if also you like me are normal human beings who like cinema, no? Did you see the two big Oscar winners, King's Speech and Black Swan? I think it's breathtaking how purely ideological both are. King's Speech made me totally depressive, because I claim that it's a movie about how to ruin an intelligent person. The king at the beginning is intelligent. Why? He stutters. Why? Because he knows that to be king is not serious, it's stupid. How can you take it seriously when somebody is telling you, by God, you were ordained to become a king or whatever? It's clear that his stuttering is not physical or emotional. It's simply a kind of—in a good anti-ideological sense—common sense which tells you, but sorry, all this is bullshit, I cannot play seriously this role. In psychoanalytic terms, the problem is that of symbolic investiture, like, can I really assume seriously that title? And what that Australian played by Geoffrey Rush—Geoffrey Rush—language teacher does is basically to make the king stupid enough to function as a king. Remember towards the end, which is the key moment of curing the king? When this common teacher sits on the king's chair and the king shouts at him, how dare you sit there? And Geoffrey Rush the teacher says, why, why shouldn't I? And you, why should you? And the king explodes, because by God's will I am the king. He remains stupid, he becomes stupid enough. He takes it seriously, he's stupid. It's very depressive message. But at least since this is male problem, the king can function as a normal person of authority, which means that you take seriously your symbolic title—king, president, whatever—but you still have private life where you flirt or whatever. Here I hate even more Black Swan. I think that beneath this mask of whatever, I don't even know of what, did you notice how you have an extremely—it's the latest version of an extremely reactionary idea, which is, to put it very simply, while man can pursue his career mission and still have a normal private life, for woman she has to make a choice. If she opts for her mission—I want to be singer, ballerina in this case—it means death. A woman pays the dedication to her public mission with death. This, as you probably know, is an old anti-feminist idea, that while men can play public roles, for a woman this means self-destruction. You know, usually it's done with singing. You know it's from Offenbach—Offenbach's—Hoffmann's Tales, where the second one, or which one, I don't know, is the first one or the third one, I always forget, in the opera, is the—the one who doesn't—doesn't want to renounce her singing and precisely the devil, the bad guy, tempts her by telling her sing, sing, and she drops dead. And to be a little bit ironic, although you know it was translated, I wrote a short book on Kieslowski, but isn't it a little bit of the same in The Double Life of Veronique? Like your Polish one wants to identify herself with art, you drop down. The other one, the French one, is a good proper woman who knows woman's role is not to fully identify, you have to remain a warm private being and so on and so on. So, again, this is our reality. And now I come to the title that you reminded me. I hope you know to what I refer in the title. It's a well-known legend—probably it's apocryphal, it didn't happen, but you know this wonderful Italian saying, *se non vero, ben trovato*, even if it's not true, it's well found, like there is a truth in it. The idea is that in the First World War, in the middle of it, there was an exchange of telegrams between German and Austrian military headquarters, between Berlin and Vienna. In Berlin they sent a telegram to Vienna: with us the situation is serious but not catastrophic. You can guess the Austrians answer: with us it's catastrophic but not serious, no? I claim that this split attitude, it's catastrophic but not serious, is more and more becoming our reality. That is to say, we rationally know there is a threat of catastrophe, but in a nice example of what in psychoanalysis we call fetishist split, we somehow suspend, let's call it the symbolic efficiency of it, you know? You rationally acknowledge it, but you block the efficiency, you don't really take it seriously. Isn't this more and more, I claim, how we deal with, for example, ecology? Everybody, or at least most of the people—maybe your politics doesn't admit it, but everyone knows the threat is quite serious. No, I am, to be very clear, I am not a catastrophist. I am not saying, you know, in one year it will be all over, you know, did you see that horrible film? The only nice moment that I liked in the film is that strange celebration of China. You know when they build those big ships and somebody says only the Chinese can do it. It's like communist China saves humanity basically, this is so. Here the director, Roland Emmerich, has a nice line in his film. Did you see his previous about global freezing, The Day After Tomorrow? This wonderful ironic inversion where you can see on Mexican borders Americans asking to be allowed and then Mexico, yeah, come in and so on. Okay, but what I want to say is that I am not preaching any kind of apocalyptic catastrophe. I think that on the contrary, when—when I meet a guy who does this kind of a panic, oh my God, you see it's coming, you know whenever something happens, like this summer is a little bit hot and they say, oh, can you imagine what it will be next year, we will all be burnt or whatever. I claim that this is maybe the most refined way to avoid confronting dangers, because if catastrophe is almost here, then let's sit and enjoy it, no? But of course they talk so much about it because, you know, it is this superficial logic, even I practice it sometimes, but not with ecology. They say you know that when sometimes there is a threat of something—you must remember this, we are all probably doing this—you talk, you think that if I talk a lot about it, I can make it sure that it will not happen, no? So I claim that our answer to those catastrophists who claim today to warn us, there will be end of the world catastrophe, our answer for them should be, no, no, you exaggerate, it's not so bad, but calm, don't worry, there will be a catastrophe, don't worry. You don't have to claim—because it's almost they worry that or whatever it will not be and so on. So again, I am not saying that. All I'm saying is the following thing: how, in what irrational way, we are dealing with ecological fate. Like in this book, Tragedy Farce, I just made this comparison. There was two years ago in Copenhagen, just before financial crisis, there was a meeting of the G-20 in Copenhagen, you may remember, for ecology. With great effort they promised, the money didn't even today appear anywhere, they promised twenty billion dollars and basically they agreed that they will meet again in two years. And this was hailed as a big success, no? Then a month or two later, there was that financial crisis. Remember how there, in a week or two, it wasn't difficult to get seven hundred fifty billions of dollars. Like it is as if, okay, we may be all dead of catastrophe, of ecological catastrophe, that's not a problem, the main thing is that capital should circulate, no, that's the real thing. That also—did you notice another thing? I don't know how much, probably here you don't even care about ecology, but for example in United States I noticed this. How—how now that they know that the danger is for the real, they no longer use the strategy, this French liberal economist, Guizot, his strategy of dismissing ecology as a kind of a neo-communist trick, like they failed there now they try to use this to fight capitalism. No, they only claim—you know, it reminds me a little bit of this right-wing, not defense but ambiguity towards Hitler. You must know this classical line of argumentation where they say, okay, we admit it, Hitler did some problematic things like kill the Jews and so on, but on the other hand, you know, trains were on time, he fought unemployment, he built highways, so we must be balanced, you know you cannot only. The best answer to this is, maybe you know it, was told to me by Wolf Biermann. He's ex-dissident, now he's right-wing and everything, but he told me that immediately after the Wende, the fall of communism, he met some East German—it's typically there in East Germany you have much more neo-Nazis than in the western part—some neo-Nazi ecologists, and in a debate he attacked them, but you are for—my God, you are for Hitler. And it's wonderful, terrifyingly wonderful, their answer. You know what they told him? They told him, no, this is not true, we reject Hitler. Why? Because Hitler did some good things like trying to kill the Jews, to get rid of the Jews, but he did also some horrible thing like all the highways which were ruining nature and so on. There is something terrifyingly true there, no? So what I'm—what I am saying is that in this time, more and more they are big powers in the media are trying to play this balancing game. Like recently I read some articles where the reasoning was this one: okay, okay, global warming, but look at the positive side. Like the North Pole ice is melting, so soon there will be a direct passage for boats from China across the North Pole much shorter to United States, so it will make much cheaper all those stupid toys that we are buying from China, you know. Or they said look, in Greenland—Greenland—there was an obscene CNN report, "The Greening of Greenland," where look, okay, there are some bad sides of global warming, but look, they can again grow vegetables in Greenland. This type of—and you know what is so sad? This demonstrates that all this is a lie. Is that this type of making it easy—like the situation is catastrophic but not serious, we can have vegetables from Greenland and so on—is accompanied by another, maybe necessary, I'm not a priori opposed to it, but nonetheless by another much darker threat—sorry, strategy. It's not again, it's not something that you don't find in the media, but it is again part of this unreported—less reported things. You just have to—no, here I am not this paranoiac. I don't think there is a big power hiding things. Everything is in the media. You just have to be patient and really read the media. You know that what is the latest thing going on, there are already innumerable committees planning it and they know it's very risky but it's a crazy radical solution—so-called geo-engineering. Silently they admit that we already missed the moment to—to reorient our economy so that we will renormalize our atmosphere, so they claim the only thing that can solve us is a direct large-scale intervention into our atmosphere. And there are already plans being made. For example, the idea is to increase the reflecting power of our atmosphere either by space lenses up there in the air or by—or by dispersing clouds of sea water or sulfur high in the air to prevent—the—all those rays or whatever ozone does, no. Or there are already plans of ocean fertilization with iron or some other nitrogen fertilizations to—to prevent—the—the dying of—so—so again the tragedy is that it's way too simple to say no we shouldn't mess with nature. Of course it's extremely dangerous. Who knows—you know who knows what can be the byproducts of this? You know, nature is stupid, there is no mother earth. As a leftist I caused a scandal when I was recently in Bolivia with this. I was received by the vice—vice-president, who is more normal type of guy, and you know recently Evo Morales, their president, made a kind of a for me ridiculous statement, like capitalism is killing Mother Earth, no? My comment was well at least one really good thing that capitalism is doing. You know what I mean by killing mother earth. Not we can do whatever we want by nature. But this precisely is one of the most dangerous ecological ideologies today. This idea that nature is some kind of a maternal base which we humans through our evil exploitative hubris disturb and then we have to pay the price. No nature, the horror of nature is that it's neither good nor bad, it's just a totally indifferent terrifying mechanism full of its own catastrophes. What Mother Nature? My God, again, my old example, maybe you know it. Think about oil. Can you even imagine what kind of a terrifying ecological catastrophe there must have been million years ago so that we have oil and coal? This is all immense amounts of organic life destroyed. So we don't need humans to cause catastrophes. We should renounce a little bit this inverted arrogance, you know, that we humans are the only ones who can cause real trouble. No, sorry, nature is evil enough—okay not in the moral sense but in this sense. So this is one way of ecological ideology. The opposite way, even more interesting, is—now I will be really evil. Usually there are some ecologists to point this out in America. I was almost not lynched but I had to run away when I said this. Because I said that often we act in a superstitious way. Like you have a vague bad feeling, something is wrong with nature with our industry, and then you engage in all these small practices. You know, you obsessively recycle paper, you buy organic food or whatever. And you know it makes you feel good, you know. Oh my God, I am doing something for Mother Nature and so on. I claim of course this is not bad, we should be doing it, but let's not take it too seriously. Intelligent ecologists are already talking about how true ecological struggle should move from this what they ironically call "lifestyle ecology." You know, you have a house with solar panels, you recycle paper and so on. I just spoke with an architect who told me, yes, but to—to construct such an ultra-modern self-reliant house, you spend more energy and so on than burning coal all your life and so on. But what I want to say is that when—just be a little bit aware when you are doing this—that it's basically the same thing as, you know, when you watch football in your apartment and then you shout and scream as if you are really helping your team to win, no? But it's this is one of the superstitions of our daily life, how—this is why we are doing this. You shout "go on our boys" and so on. Nobody hears you, but it makes you think. And I think this is—this is the same. It's a kind of a other term, other version of fetishist split. It's I know very well that this doesn't really matter, the more radical economic changes in production and so on are necessary. But I do it because it makes me feel good, it gives me awareness that I am doing something meaningful and so on. Let's be to be fair—this is where ecologists start to shout—I claim, why do you really believe that those overpriced half-rotten organic apples are so much better than good genetically manipulated apples? Maybe, but I don't think we are buying them for that. We are buying them because it makes us feel good. You see, I did something for our environment. Isn't it beautiful to be part of this great solidarity movement of people who care about environment and so on and so on? These are all, I claim, strategies of doing something to mask the fact that you are really doing nothing. You know, because you don't really have to change your lifestyle or what, no? It's just, you know, you spend a little bit more in the store buying organic food and then you think, oh, I did my duty and so on. You know, it's a little bit like, you know, all those disgusting because they are manipulative ads in newspapers—I don't know how much you have them but in United States and Western Europe we have them all the time. You see some disfigured black kid with lips broken or what, and you say, are you aware that for the price of a couple of cappuccinos if you contribute money to us you will change this life, this child's life, no? What's the true meaning of this? It is: we know horrible things are happening out there, but what we make it possible for you is that for the price of a couple of cappuccinos you can return to your life, really do nothing, but you can feel good, you know, like I'm really doing something and so on and so on. So the question here is the question of implications, of what is implied. I think the greatest and it can be even funny field of critique of ideology today is to focus on what you say or not say implicitly while saying nothing. I mean here, as you can imagine, I encounter—because I was looking for them—some wonderful examples from cinema. For example, did you see the old Ernst Lubitsch classic *Ninotchka*? A friend of mine recently drew attention to an incredibly beautiful just short exchange—listen carefully—in a cafeteria where a guy enters a cafeteria and says, "Can I get coffee without milk, please?" You know what the waiter answers? "Uh, we don't have milk." Oh sorry, he says, "Can I have coffee without cream?" The waiter answers, "You know, we don't have cream, we ran out of cream, we only have milk. So can I give you coffee without milk, not coffee without cream?" Of course this is the same coffee. But it's not. Because you know what you don't get is as important as what you do get. Let me give you another example, which I really like. It's in *Brassed Off*, an old British working class fifteen years ago melodrama with that beautiful actor Ewan McGregor, one of his roles before he became a megastar when he was still playing working class heroes like *Trainspotting*, no? It's called *Brassed Off*, about miners. But there is a wonderful erotic scene with no dirty words—in any church I could say those lines. It is, okay, the guy and the girl, they obviously attract each other, so he accompanies her to her house. And down there she tells him, "Why don't you come up for a coffee?" He says, "Okay, but it's a problem, I don't like coffee." She answers, "No problem, I don't have any." I mean it's so beautiful, without any dirty words, it means to coffee come and fuck. But what I like is that it's much more—not so much, much more refined but even much more erotic than for her simply to say let's get up, let's go to bed, no? Just you offer something, you take it back, and the result is not zero. The result is ultra-erotic tension, no, in a way. That's what we need. Or another example of this double negation where the result is not zero is—there is a wonderful old anecdote, maybe you know it, about William Randolph Hearst—you know the big bad guy, the American model of Citizen Kane, no, media like Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch. What he—there is a—again an anecdote about how he had an excellent editor of one of his newspapers, and this editor was a fanatic for twenty years, he didn't take any holiday. So Hearst came to him and told him, "Please take a holiday, you deserve it." "No, no," the guy said, "I am worried, I am worried that I'm so engaged in the work here that if I leave the newspaper for a week, everything will collapse," no? And then this is my reason, this is what I worry. Then Hearst told him, "Don't worry, everything is so well organized that if you leave, nothing will change, everything will function." Then the guy says, "This is what I worry even more about. You will know that you don't need me." No, that's the logic. And this—at this logic of implications and so on, it's a wonderful way to subvert the ruling doxa ideology, not by directly contesting it, but just by saying the same thing but somehow taking away the implication. I'm sorry, but I cannot restrain myself from telling you an old story which I already told years ago, but in Warsaw, not here again, about how—I think this was the late seventies, early eighties—no, even earlier, it was that relative liberalism of late sixties—when I was a young student and we had a kind of a student newspaper and there were elections in ex-Yugoslavia. Yugoslav communism was not as harsh as others, so it wasn't that the party candidates which were the only ones usually always got ninety-nine percent. No, in Yugoslavia it was eighty percent. But you were assured that they will always get eighty percent. Okay, so this was the night of the elections, the evening, and we wanted to do something provocative. Like one guy proposed, why don't we do a suicidal gesture, simply publish an issue and say these elections were not really free, were a fake? And then we realized but this is ridiculous. First, whom are we trying to convince? Everyone knows that they were not, no? So a guy, a colleague of mine, came to an ingenious idea. He said, why don't we just treat them elections as what communists in power claim that they are, as free elections? And report the way you would have reported on free elections. So we published an extraordinary issue of our small journal where there were with big letters on the front page: Latest results, it looks like communists will probably remain in power. Everybody is waiting for—and it was wonderful. We were immediately called to the central committee. But again, it was serious. I mean not to attack us, like the guy told—told—started to shout at us: why are you messing here, provoking us? And then we played naive idiots. We said: but you claim elections are free and we just reported that in free elections—and then so what did we do wrong? It was a beautiful. We—because that nomenclature guy, what would he say? No, you know that elections were not really free? So he just repeated he said: don't fuck with me boys, you know very well what you did. What do you mean tell us? I really started to sympathize with the guy. He wasn't even—you know, this is how I was always fascinated by these daily ideological practices. So let me add to this another story, maybe you know it, I'm sorry, this is was my almost experience which was crucial for my theoretical development. When I was in the army, we had—I don't know how it was in your army, but in—okay, you are too young, do you have now like in Slovenia, you have a professional army? Yeah, okay, so it was when I was young, professional, it was so, you know how it is after one, two weeks in the army, you get that how is it called, a moment when you really become soldier? You know all soldiers are gathered, you shout this "Yes, I swear I give my life blah blah blah" and then you have to sign. A friend of mine in the army refused to sign. And he said to the officer sitting there at a table with this big book of where you sign, he said—he asked him: is this obligatory or not? Are you ordering me to sign? The officer said: of course not, this is—you commit your life, it's your free decision. Then the guy said: then I will not sign it if it's a free decision. The officer said: well if you refuse to sign you go to prison. So they thought and then this friend of mine—it's a historical moment, I even have a photocopy of the paper—asked the officers: I will sign it if you formally order me to sign. And the officer wrote on the paper: "I thereby formally order this person to freely sign the oath." And it's—you know it's—I'm not trying to sell you this as a kind of a totalitarian trick. This is how all ideologies have this moment of where you are given a freedom of choice on condition, of course, that you make the right choice. It is always like this. Like—for—for example, you know, this brings me to another topic, which would be wonderful to go into, because there you get ideology, this topic of choices which are given to you on condition that you don't use them. You know, like okay, maybe you even know it, I'm sorry, my classical example, I wonder if you have here the same ritual. Let's say you are rich, I am poor, you invite me to a restaurant. We all know absolutely that you will pay. But in my country at least, it's a ritual that when the bill arrives, for some short time I have to pretend, no no no, let me pay. But we know very well that it's just a ritual. And I know it very well because once when I was young it happened to me that the other guy said, "Okay, if you want, you pay." Then it was horrible because I didn't have the money. I had to depend, oh my God and so on. But what I'm saying is that you see this gap between saying it explicitly and implications. This is where ideology functions in our—in our daily life. So where are we today? Oh my God, I with time I mean I just began, you know, like—let me go a little bit faster maybe here so that we don't get—lost. One thing I wanted to develop here along these lines is first—we are—let me return to that ecological example of buying organic food and so on. What makes me so sad is that the logic here, underlying logic is this narcissistic logic to make you feel good. And—it's very sad if you observe the consequences of this logic. For—for example, in the sphere of sexuality. More and more in the West, even passionate love or even passionate sexual attachment is perceived as something potentially dangerous. In the sense that, you know, you are too exposed, too open. Which is why in a typical tendency, more and more in the West people rely on marriage or dating agencies. And my friend Alain Badiou drew my attention to this. One of these agencies in France made a wonderful play with words which tells the truth. I don't know how it is in Polish, but you know in English, in French also, you—we use the word "to fall in love." So, this advert—advertisement of the agency was "With our specialists, we will enable you to be in love without fall, without fall in love." The idea is there will be no dangerous moment, you know this—okay for me at least—that's the whole point. You meet someone all of a sudden you know you are lost and so on. No danger, you will be told that person is ideal for you and so on. It's really a kind of a return to pre-modern tradition of arranged marriages. I found an agency in United States where they openly say: "Before the modern confusion, all those wise—wise relatives, uncles who determined your marriage had a great wisdom and we try to resuscitate that wisdom." Now you will say this is just an example. No, there are even trends in cinema which point in this direction. Let me give you two, three I hope funny examples. Did you see the last James Bond film, *Quantum of Solace*? Politically I would say as a leftist, okay, my God, basically James Bond saves the Morales regime in Bolivia from some the big company who wants to control water resources. So politically okay, but did you notice something? At the end, it's the first James Bond film without sex at the end between Bond and Bond girl. They just, in a very politically correct way, we had too much trauma, we don't feel like it, okay they—they part, okay. Now you will say this is an exception. No, now I go really low. Did you see any of this Dan Brown movies or did you read the novels? Did you notice how—just take *Da Vinci Code*, no sex. You have a couple, Robert Langdon the symbologist whatever and that niece, grand-grand-grand-granddaughter of Jesus Christ, Sophie Neveu, but no sex. Even the last novel, one of the worst novels of all times, *The Lost Symbol*, absolutely not even sexual attraction, nothing although there is a couple. Even worse, did you see *Angels Demons*? There in the novel there is sex between Robert Langdon again and that Vittoria Vetra, the Italian scientist. But the Hollywood movie, there is no sex. Isn't this strange? Usually we are used to Hollywood adding sex to make it more commercial. Now all of a sudden Hollywood is taking sex out. I claim that what is behind this is again this extreme narcissism where even opening yourself up to another human being in this sexually or—or love or only even sexually passionate way, it's considered too much. You have no wonder a whole movement in United States now it's called "Masturbathon." People gather in a big hall, hundreds, and you are not allowed to touch each other, they just masturbate together. And they make it very politically correct. They claim that of course when you enter you pay ten dollars and all the money goes to some stars in Guatemala. So it's about solidarity. But I find this so sad, that you are there alone in a crowd, you know. You masturbate, you—of course there is no harassment here because you are only doing it to yourself and so on. I find effectively this tendency, if you ask me, very very sad, the mode of subjectivity which we find here. And what makes me especially sad is that even Catholic Church sometimes plays this game. In what way? You know the predominant ethics today, it's more and more—the ethics of as they say in postmodern way "be true to yourself, realize your potentials" and so on. No here sorry, I'm on the side of Judeo-Christian tradition. Where precisely, and this is I think what is so great of our Western tradition—sorry this is racist for you, I don't think it is—it's that in contrast to all those religions of go deep into yourself and discover your truth, what defines our Western tradition is that the truth is out there, encountering truth is a traumatic encounter, no? It's—uh—it's painful, truth hurts like love. Like being faithful to truth doesn't mean be yourself, no it means go over yourself, step over yourself, overcome your singular stupidity towards another transcendent dimension. And I think that now we do a little bit of at least some kind of theory. This is what Freud means with sexuality. Freud focuses on sexuality not because he is a naturalist and he thinks—he thinks that sexuality is the natural base of our big being. No no, for Freud, sexuality is the original space where human being—where an animal becomes human being. Human sexuality precisely is not the sexuality of organic instinctual coupling where you do it just as part of your instincts whenever there is a period of mating. For us humans, there is no season of mating, to be vulgar we want to do it all the time and so on. What I mean is that precisely as very intelligent and the best Christian mystics and theologians knew it like Simone Weil, sexuality is, if we are talking about, it needn't even have to be love, but of course especially love but also passionate sexual lust, it's like the elementary form of metaphysics. What do I mean by this? You live your normal half-animal life and then something happens. You encounter someone and all your balance is ruined. It's the most elementary form of what maybe in Kierkegaard's terms we can call the not religious but why not, religious sexual suspension of the ethical. You just have an absolute link link to an absolute. And isn't this authentic love? I'm now referring to your most elementary experience of love. Did it happen to you to be really passionately in love? It's a catastrophe, admit it. Before falling in love, you had your life, you met friends, maybe the one-night stand here and there, you had a nice peaceful life. Then what? Love comes, it's a catastrophe, all your balance is lost, you are obsessed by this passion and so on and so on. And it's here that some Catholics, predominant not all, some of them understood this very well—and not just some leftist theologians of revolution, for example, a conservative French Catholic whom I appreciate very much, Paul Claudel, knew of this metaphysical properly even religious dimension of sexuality. Namely, I was always shocked when Catholics are telling me, "Without the goal of procreation, sexuality just animal lust." I say, my God, isn't it exactly the opposite? That animals do it for procreation. What makes sexuality human is that you take an act which in the animal logic serves procreation and you make it as it were a metaphysical act of assertion of an absolute link to another person. So, again, we should never forget when Catholics, those who don't get it, criticize—criticize sexuality, claim that sexuality in itself is just animal lust, it must be for procreation or whatever, they are not really fighting nature on behalf of spirit. They are fighting a dangerous competitive form of spirituality. And this is what makes me sad. When they claim that sex without procreation is animal, they are really terribly denigrating sexuality. I mean, now of course they usually—Catholics usually answer me in two ways: first, that of course we know that it's also sex, a deep sex in itself without procreation can be a deep spiritual experience if it's done in a more spiritual tender way like missionary position looking your partner into the eyes. No, they mystify the point. Because again they are trying to—to normalize this absolutely metaphysical traumatic dimension of sex, is this absolute commitment. Like *Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus*, like I want to have it even if everything falls apart. Every—every passion has this. So now not to really talk too long, I will somehow—okay now I will do something evil. I will start a debate by asking myself what did you want to say in the remaining part of your talk? And then I will briefly give you a condensed answer. First, I wanted, but this we know a little bit, to go into how important is what happened in Egypt precisely against this cheap multiculturalism. What I find so important in this Egyptian demonstrations is that what we thought is not possible happened. In our spontaneous prejudices, Arab crowds can only be mobilized for anti-Semitism, Islamist fundamentalism or nationalism, something like that. Here we got a big popular movement with which, in order to understand it, we didn't need any multicultural specialist. We were able—it was true Kantian universality—we in a way immediately knew what it is about. It's a struggle for dignity, freedom, and so on and so on. And this tells a lot about our own conditions, how precisely when we got what we officially wanted, we were full of anxiety. Which is why we like so much to talk about Libya. In—with Libya, the situation was renormalized. We were back in open waters, you know, the axis of evil, terrorist tyrant, suffering innocent people, justifying our military intervention and so on and so on. So again, isn't Egyptian—what happened in Egypt, isn't this nonetheless a kind of very naive but I think absolutely true proof of—almost I would say as my friend very hard-line leftist Alain Badiou who is a Platonist would have put it—there is almost, I am tempted to say, something like an eternal idea of freedom which as a miracle can explode here, there and so on? There is universality. Multiculturalism is not an entire truth. This is my first problem with multiculturalism. My—to conclude—my second problem with multiculturalism is that it doesn't work. And I did something for which I really got many attacks. I defended, but of course not in that way, the way it's meant, this Angela Merkel and Cameron idea of *Leitkultur*, leading hegemonic culture. Of course, don't be afraid, I don't defend it in the sense of, you know, we should beware of not too many Muslims, we should defend our Christian legacy and so on. No, it's much more complex. I think that in our situation there is something, maybe you know already my line I developed in the book, very sad that is happening. It should worry every democrat. Till now—first my first point—till now there was let's be clear one good thing to say about capitalism. It always sooner or later, after some time, generated a demand for democracy. You have examples like recently South Korea, Chile, where capitalism needed in order to remain functioning ten, twenty years of dictatorship, but then when things start to move in the long term, capitalism was not able to survive without democracy. My first point here is that—and this is the true lesson of China and so-called what politically people call "capitalism with Asian values," authoritarian capitalism. I don't think this holds for China, Singapore, and so on. This should worry you. Not I'm not a racist against China, I'm just saying this is a universal tendency. That there is a new type of capitalism emerging which is even more efficient, economically dynamic than liberal capitalism and which functions perfectly with an authoritarian state. Look how much better China and especially Singapore, which is soft China, like—other things, how much better they saved—they saved through this economic financial crisis precisely because the authoritarian power structure, state structure, was able to regulate much more efficiently markets and so on and so on. So this is the first problem, this internal marriage between—which sounded a natural marriage—between democracy and capitalism is approaching a divorce. Here we should start to worry. Second thing, we are obviously, as I always repeat, entering a post-political era. In what sense? In the sense that, you know, till now in Western Europe democracy usually meant you have two main parties, center-right, center-left party. And they will have some small fringe parties, communist, neo-fascist, whatever you want, but basically the green party, but the space was occupied by one center-left, center-right, social democrats or whatever and Christian democrats or whatever. Now I claim something new is more and more emerging in Europe. There is a new polarity. It's on the one hand—let's call it the pure capitalist party, a party of liberal capitalism, which is usually even pretty tolerant in abortion cultural matters and so on. And then more and more the second party is no longer this kind of a centrist center-left, center-right party but the anti-immigrant proto-fundamentalist party. I mean you have a lot of this here in Poland even. Isn't—isn't your prime minister—isn't this basically this pure liberal capitalist party and then you have this more nationalist hard-line reaction Kaczynski and so on? And you are here by far not the worst case. Look at for example even in countries that we were all celebrating, like the Scandinavian countries. More and more in them what was once twenty years ago just this extreme right we were all laughing at them is becoming the only true alternative. So that's the sad thing is either this technocratic neutral post-ideological however we call it liberal capitalism or the only passion you can have is the passion of fear. You are afraid. And it's sad how even the left tends to play this card of fear. You can fear immigrants, you can fear nature, ecology, you can fear the big capital. But if you really care for Christian legacy, you can see what this fear is. It has a precise Christian name: it's fear of the neighbor. This is anti-Christian fact. So our answer to those who worry, "Oh, Europe is in danger," we should tell them, of course, European legacy, what is most noble in European legacy, what I already described, this egalitarian radical motive of a new non-hierarchic type of community. Yes, this is in danger. But you, anti-immigrant defenders of Europe, you are the danger. What is a real threat to Europe today, to what is noble in European legacy, are not the poor Muslims. Okay, they can be annoying, I have no mercy for them if like in Germany or Berlin or Amsterdam if they try to beat homosexuals. Of course I say no multicultural tolerance here, sorry, you have to respect our laws and so on. But let's face it, these false defenders of Europe are a true threat to—to Europe. Because you know what's the problem with this anti-immigrant nationalism? There is one best definition of nation that I know. It's a comical definition of course, ironic but beautiful. It was done by a guy whom I don't like very much, he was this enlightened rationalist proto-racist, Ernest Renan, you know the French guy. You know what was his definition of a nation? A big group of people which are connected by a shared lies about their past, hatred for their enemies in the present and illusions about their future. I don't know how it is about Poland but my nation Slovenes are definitely that. We share the same illusions about our past, some extreme version of this illusion—it's a popular sub-illegitimate theory in Slovenia—to mark our distance from Yugoslavia, we are not Slavs, we are really the Etruscans. You know, founders of Rome, the original civilization. And then you have this crazy linguist, you know. Of course, you take a Slovene word with six letters, you change three letters and you change the order and of course, what a surprise, you get an Etruscan letter, word and so on, no? Then we share the same enemy hate, the same hatred. Absolutely, the irony of Slovenia is how this shared enemy—how it changes all the time. In old Yugoslavia it was more or less the Albanians who were perceived as those suspicious people who are—because Albanians had almost a monopoly on ice cream, pastries. So there were all these rumors they are poisoning us and so on. Then with Milosevic all of a sudden, it was nice, in one, two months, Albanians became the good guys and Serbs became the bad guys. Now that there is no longer—there is no longer Milosevic, it's mostly Croats that are the bad guys now, because we have a ridiculous conflict for some literally one, two square miles of border, because something a little bit close to the sea, border was defined by a certain river and then this river moved one, two hundred yards north so we lost that part, but we claim it's eternal Slovene territory, no. I have to laugh for example when some nationalists said when we proclaimed independence that the Slovene state is a final outcome of thousands of years of dreams. Well, that's a nice ethical theory because thousand years ago there were no Slovenes, no, we emerged so. When there were no Slovenes, there were already dreams about—but what I want to say is that this—we should not—that's crucial for me—we should not simply just make fun of this nationalist logic. What is crucial is to see it as an organic part of the global capitalist totality. Here we should be critical. When liberals are telling you, "Forget about your socialist dreams, the big struggle today is between liberal forces of freedom, tolerance and religious fundamentalists." I claim no, this is a false struggle, not in the paranoiac Marxist sense that they are all the same, but in the sense that it's crucial to perceive how the very global capitalist dynamics generates—generates—fundamentalism. Let me give you a clear example if you are old enough, well some of you are, you may remember. In which country today is the synonym of radical fundamentalism? Afghanistan. Sorry to tell you, I'm old enough to remember years ago, Afghanistan was maybe the most pluralist tolerant of Near East Islam Muslim countries. They had a secular pro-Western king, they had even a very strong communist party, which was maybe too strong, so strong that it took power. Then when it didn't function, you remember, Soviet Union intervened to help them, then United States through their well-known agent Osama bin Laden at that time. Then the result is Afghanistan we have today. That is to say, you can see here a country which in that indistinct pre-global state was very tolerant, became fundamentalist as the result of how it was caught in the global process. In United States, you must know it's the same. The key to United States today is, maybe you know the story, it's Kansas. Kansas is—it's a small American Bible Belt state which was till years ago the single most radical in the leftist sense American state, like all great movements against slavery and so on started there, already in Lincoln's times. Till years ago. Today it's the most radical Bible Belt fundamentalist country. So this is the true enigma: how does the very global capitalism give birth to—give birth to fundamentalism? And now, really to conclude, my point here would have been that I don't like fighting racism with this liberal multiculturalist ideology. Not in the sense that we shouldn't tolerate others too much. I claim multiculturalism the way in its liberal version, it's simply an ideological illusion. We need *Leitkultur*, but not leading culture in this Christian fundamentalist sense. Look, the problem is the following one: if you have multiple cultures, this pure model of each culture its own identity and then we just need some legal rules to—to—to regulate their interaction, it doesn't function. Because in order to have a truly functioning multiculturalism, you need a set of meta-rules, unwritten rules, implicit rules of habits, habits not laws, but habits, lifestyle which regulate how you treat your others. And this is for me a true *Leitkultur*. A true *Leitkultur* is the rules me and my Muslim friends, my Jewish friends, my Arab friends, with whomever you want, we all obey so that we can live together. This is the true fight for *Leitkultur*. For example, it's clear what Hitler did to Germany. Before, in Weimar Germany, they had a *Leitkultur* which was in a way Hitler was right, but of course in the wrong way, predominantly a kind of a secularized Jewish *Leitkultur*. And Hitler knew this is the danger for him. So he brutally suppressed it and very efficiently. It's interesting to see how many crucial writers of that time, to Hofmannsthal, Heinrich Mann, never returned, how Hitler's cleansing of German culture was efficient, it remained. But what I want to say is that you see our answer I think to fundamentalist threat or nationalism shouldn't be, no no no tolerance with others, but to actively—it should be universalist answer I claim. For example, with Egypt today. Yes, if you pose it only as a moment, problem of culture, then of course we can play this game, do we really understand them, oh how different they are. But you have there demonstrations for freedom, my God, we know, we can directly identify. The only solidarity, universality today, it's not the direct universality of cultures. This direct universality of cultures is the most boring UNESCO bullshit, you know. Oh this culture is great in this way, that culture is great in that way, I'm not interested in that. The only universality is: we fight for freedom here, you fight for freedom there, and you have an immediate solidarity if you have it, of course you have always to fight for this solidarity. So again, I—what—my plea is against this leftist masochism. Like when you say European tradition, oh you are already in one foot almost in fascism you know, or in—or in eurocentrism whatever. No, we should address—there are things we have the right, we emancipatory universal leftists, to be proud about of European legacy. And again our fight against anti-immigrant racism should not be: yes we know oh we in Europe are terrible, we did so many genocides, we should just admire other cultures and—no. Every culture is dirty in its own way. I don't think we in Europe should feel especially guilty. No, we should again, as already said, our answer to those proponents of *Leitkultur* should be: no, we propose a different, better *Leitkultur*. We should fight for *Leitkultur*. You have a *Leitkultur* of tolerance, you have a *Leitkultur* of intolerance and so on and so on. The very fact that, for example, another national group is perceived as a threat to your national identity, it's clearly a feature of the *Leitkultur*. Today we have to fight for a different *Leitkultur*. It's extremely important. We are in the—the right-wingers they claim we are in the middle of the cultural struggle. Yes we are, why not? And again, it's not enough to play this tolerance card. We have to fight for a new, more egalitarian and so on culture. And again, stop with this leftist pseudo-leftist rather I would say liberal masochism. I mean, it shocks me how—how this eternal masochism—as if West European liberals feel good only if they can demonstrate how somehow Europe is always guilty, you know, like in Libya today. Did you notice how boring typical leftist comments are? It's all these moralistic suspicions. Are we—is NATO really intervening in Libya for humanitarian reasons or are there some political economic interests behind? Of course they are, they are always. Nobody asks the question of what NATO intervention—okay they do ask but very marginally—for me the key problem is not should NATO intervene or not, it's what does this mean and I don't know—don't know enough—in Libya itself, who are these famous opponents of Gaddafi? Are they really as Gaddafi claims—I don't believe it of course—even more dangerous fundamentalists? Like Gaddafi made that unique statement which is of course a madman statement you remember, that it's like the—the—the Nazi idea of Jewish-Bolshevik plot, that behind this rebellion against him are—are Al-Qaeda and Zionists, you know like they are really the same. But and if there is a chance that this is an authentic emancipatory movement, why not give them the arms and so on? And I don't care if Europe has economic interests. It's all a question—I'm sick and tired of this European moralistic masochism, which is a fake moralism, which is—which is an inverted form of racism. So again, let's be proud, we have a lot to give to the world. Let's proudly do it, let's brutally fight for our progressive *Leitkultur*. I know I was too long, but that's life. Thank you very much.