The Uses and Misuses of Violence
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-11-17 · 1:32:03 · 13,034 words
ideologyrevolution-violencepsychoanalysisgeopolitics-warreligion-theologycinema-art-cultureliberalism-political-correctnesscapitalismhegel-dialecticssubjectivity
Delivered at Loyola University New Orleans, this talk offers a wide-ranging critique of ideology, violence, and political action. Žižek argues that ideology functions not through its explicit content but through the obscene unwritten rules and transgressions that underpin official norms, and that the apparently post-ideological gesture of reducing people to 'concrete human beings' is itself ideology at its purest. He moves through the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jacobin terror, the paradoxes of political correctness, pornography, and capitalist shamelessness to argue for a left politics that reclaims discipline, accepts conflict, and begins with a violent break from the enemy's hold on one's own dreams.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 25
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “fetishistic disavowal”
The structure 'je sais bien, mais quand même' (I know very well, but nevertheless) whereby one acts as if one does not know what one does know, the ideological mechanism illustrated by New Orleans knowing the disaster was coming yet acting as if it were not.
as “subject supposed to know”
The Lacanian figure of the big Other presumed to possess knowledge, here subverted in the title 'The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape', the fantasy-figure onto which dangerous agency is projected.
as “the part of no part”
The element excluded from the social totality that, precisely because it belongs nowhere, stands in for the universal, invoked here to describe New Orleans's position in relation to the United States.
The practice of unmasking the hidden presuppositions and obscene underside of official ideological proclamations, traced here back to Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians.
Not abstract propositions per se but the dense symbolic network of unwritten rules, habits, and background noise that schematizes (in the Kantian sense) those propositions into a livable world.
The Greek New Testament term from Ephesians 6, 'world rulers of this darkness', which Žižek uses to anchor Paul's formulation as the first definition of critique of ideology: the struggle is not against individuals but against the global order and its ideological mystification.
Implicitly present: the notion that abstract categories (freedom, democracy) acquire concrete social meaning only through the dense network of unwritten rules that schematize them, Žižek treats this as ideology's operative level.
The unwritten, carnivalesque underside of official ideology, dirty jokes, military ribaldry, obscene rituals, which does not undermine power but sustains it.
Used in the sense of Harry Frankfurt's concept: discourse that is indifferent to truth, Žižek deploys it ironically to show that the 'no-bullshit' attitude is itself ideology at its purest.
as “big Other”
The symbolic order, the anonymous network of social rules and norms, invoked here as what sustains ideology through its unwritten injunctions.
as “free choice on condition that you make the right choice”
The ideological mechanism of false freedom: you are offered a choice on the implicit condition that you choose the predetermined option, as in the Yugoslav army oath.
as “second-level pleasure”
Žižek's claim that pleasures like smoking, drinking hard spirits, and sex are not naturally enjoyable but are acquired through social initiation, pleasure derived from participating in a collective act of transgression rather than from the thing itself.
The mechanism by which institutions reproduce themselves not through obedience to explicit rules but through the officially prohibited (but implicitly solicited) violations of those rules, the obscene supplement that sustains the official law.
A subversive strategy of identifying with the official ideology too completely and directly, thereby exposing its contradictions, exemplified by Ayn Rand and the Jansenists.
as “anti-ideology as ideology”
The paradox that the contemporary gesture of refusing ideological categories ('I am a rich concrete human being, not just a label') is itself ideology's most effective form, as it obfuscates the political consequences of one's actions.
The ideological strategy of reducing social-political actors to 'concrete human beings with traumas, dreams, and fears,' as seen in Israeli war films and IDF PR, which obscures collective political stakes by privatizing them as psychology.
Walter Benjamin's term for founding violence that establishes a new order of rights by force, cited in the context of Moshe Dayan's frank acknowledgment that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a struggle over land won by might, not justice.
Not simply a sympathetic fellow human but, in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the uncanny proximate Other whose unfathomable desire and jouissance is threatening, illustrated by Jack Torrance in The Shining.
The anxiety provoked by the neighbor's jouissance, their intruding, excessive enjoyment that disturbs proximity, which Žižek sees as explosively growing as explicit ideological markers dissolve.
The excessive enjoyment attributed to the Other, whose proximity disturbs and threatens, linked here to the fear of the neighbor and the censoring of desire in pornography.
as “work of love”
The Christian notion that genuine love is not sentimentality but includes an element of violence or rupture, the capacity of love to injure, as also found in Brecht and the Biblical Jesus.
The shift in perspective that reveals that condemning Jacobin terror while ignoring the structural 'older and real terror' of poverty, hunger, and oppression is itself a political choice, one that de facto endorses the latter.
as “violence of non-participation”
Žižek's preferred form of emancipatory violence: not killing but the refusal to participate, the act of stopping when a situation is unbearable, contrasted with Hitler's 'pure violence of impotence'.
as “violence of impotence”
Violence exercised precisely because the agent lacks real power to change the underlying structures, exemplified by Hitler, who killed millions rather than touch capitalist relations.
The first and most painful step of liberation: breaking the libidinal investment in the enemy's fantasmatic hold, to stop dreaming dreams that are not one's own, as illustrated by Fight Club and the Albanian novel The Palace of Dreams.
Stories he reaches for 9
Ed Norton's character in Fight Club beats himself in front of his boss rather than beating the boss, Žižek reads this as the correct first gesture of liberation: attacking the fantasmatic investments that bind you to power, not the external enemy, which would just mean wanting to be boss yourself.
“before you beat others, you must beat yourself in the sense of beating out of you all that fantasmatic content which by means of which you are invested libidinally into power”
A soldier in the Yugoslav army refuses to sign the oath of free will, demanding to know if it is an order. The officer, cornered, writes him a formal order commanding him to freely sign the oath, a written document literalizing the contradiction at the heart of ideological compulsion.
“the officer wrote him on a piece of paper, an order to freely sign the oath.”
During an apartment raid, an Israeli soldier discovers that a Palestinian girl has the same name as his own daughter and shows the family his wallet photo, saying 'we are all humans.' Žižek calls this the lie embodied, the ideological gesture of finding sameness beneath difference that occludes political responsibility.
“Precisely this idea beneath differences we are really all the same. That's the lie embodied I claim.”
Contemporary 'Gonzo' pornography dispenses with narrative and constantly reminds viewers 'it's just a joke, we're just filming', Žižek argues this is deeper censorship than classical soft-core: the fear of encountering real desire or emotion in the other (the neighbor) is so intense that even the minimal narrative frame must be eliminated.
“you had to be reminded all the time no it's just a joke we are just filming... what terrible censorship this is”
At a Harvard dinner, each guest is asked to state their name, affiliation, and sexual orientation; Žižek contrasts this with the Slovenian Adriatic beach where women go topless unnoticed, arguing neither culture is more liberated, each has different zones of jouissance where the neighbor's excess is feared.
“precisely what my American friend feared is precisely this is the fear of the neighbor, this desiring otherness of jouissance”
Žižek notes that the upper two-thirds of Jacques-Louis David's painting are simply darkness, unlike a totalitarian version, which would fill that space with a utopian dream of the revolutionary future. This refusal of easy justification makes it the first step toward Malevich's Black Square.
“It's as if he precisely avoided that easy justification... Marat is almost squeezed into this squeezed into the frame.”
In The Sound of Music, the Mother Superior responds to Sister Maria's confession of sexual temptation by singing 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain', whose real message is 'go back and seduce the man.' Žižek reads this as a perfect illustration of Catholic ideology's implicit injunction to transgress its own explicit rules.
“The Mother Superior sings a song... whose message is 'Go back and seduce the guy, screw like crazy.'”
Dayan's 1956 eulogy frankly admits that Palestinians have reason to hate Israelis because Jews took their land, then concludes not with guilt but with full acceptance of the brutal destiny of war where might prevails over right, Walter Benjamin's mythic violence stated plainly.
“We have transformed the land and villages where they and their ancestors once lived into our own inheritance.”
A California high school teacher simulating a proto-fascist movement to show students how easily Nazism emerges; students spontaneously denounced one another. Žižek rejects the liberal lesson (the fascist beast lurks in everyone) and argues the experiment falsely equates emancipatory discipline with right-wing authoritarianism.
“I totally reject this reading. I think that this experiment was deeply mystifying.”
Works invoked 20
Fight Club film
Described as 'one of the greatest Hollywood movies'; Žižek rejects the reading that it is proto-fascist and argues the self-beating scene, Ed Norton hitting himself in front of his boss, is the correct first gesture of liberation from fantasmatic investment in power.
The Sound of Music film
Described ironically as 'one of the greatest movies of western civilization'; the Mother Superior's 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain' scene is a 'wonderful example of ideology', Catholicism's official prohibition concealing its obscene injunction to transgress.
Violence book
Self-reference: Žižek says he elaborates the complexity of social norms and ideology in his book Violence.
The Shining (film) film
Stephen King's novel (and implicitly Kubrick's film); cited as 'a movie and a novel which effectively can be called subtitled into the becoming of a neighbor', the normal father becomes the unfathomable monstrous neighbor.
Shoah film
Lanzmann's famous Holocaust documentary; mentioned briefly as 'the famous French documentary' to contrast it with Tsahal.
Romance film
Catherine Breillat's film; cited as an attempt to combine explicit sex with an emotionally engaging story, the right direction, but condemned to marginality because it breaks the ideological rule that you either see everything or have a serious story, not both.
The Death of Marat artwork
Jacques-Louis David's painting; praised as a 'tremendous painting' for the darkness of its upper two-thirds, read as a refusal of utopian justification and an anticipation of Malevich, following art historian Clark.
120 Days of Sodom book
The Marquis de Sade's 'most mechanical systematic work'; Žižek argues that after a certain point the permutations of perversion become totally desexualized, a pure formal logical exercise, used to show that the explicit 'enjoy everything' command fails.
Lebanon film
Samuel Maoz's film; claustrophobic tank-interior shooting is read as the ultimate ideological gesture: abstracting from the enemies and their deaths to focus entirely on the Israeli soldiers' fear and intimacy.
Piss Christ artwork
Andres Serrano's photograph; used not to attack the work but to expose the emptiness of the New York Times liberal defense of it, which Žižek shows can be applied word-for-word to justify any obscene act.
Tsahal film
Claude Lanzmann's documentary about the IDF; Žižek criticizes it for the same psychological-humanist reduction as Waltz with Bashir, 'it's all one big psychology' with no questioning of political consequences.
Waltz with Bashir film
Ari Folman's animated documentary; analyzed as ideology at its purest, the retreat into intimate psychological war experience obliterates the political stakes of the conflict.
Ephesians (Paul) other
Quoted as providing 'one of the first perfect definitions of critique of ideology': the struggle against 'the world rulers of this darkness' and 'spiritual wickedness in the heavens.'
The Palace of Dreams book
Ismail Kadare's Albanian novel; recommended as 'available in translation'; the Ottoman 'palace of dreams' that interprets citizens' dreams for the Sultan illustrates how power reproduces itself through subjects' own ideological investments.
Mark Twain's novel; quoted at length for its distinction between the 'momentary terror' of the guillotine and the 'older and real terror' of structural oppression, used to defend the Jacobin terror against liberal condemnation.
All the King's Men book
Described as 'one of the great American novels' (with reservations about some political implications); central interest is the figure of Huey Long behind it.
Danish documentary about Indonesian 1965 massacre perpetrators who publicly reenact their atrocities; described as 'one of the most depressing movies I've seen' but used to analyze the growing shamelessness of power and the role of fantasy in enabling atrocity.
Bertolt Brecht's short text; quoted for the argument that the left must be able to 'become beasts' so that fascists fear for their domination, and that goodness must include the capacity to injure.
On Bullshit book
Frankfurt's mega-bestseller essay; Žižek was 'immediately suspicious' and his suspicion was confirmed when Frankfurt named John McCain as a non-bullshitter, used to show that anti-bullshit discourse is itself ideology.
Žižek's own article about post-Katrina fantasies about New Orleans; mentioned by the introducer and tacitly endorsed by Žižek as an analysis of the subject supposed to know structure in racial fantasy.
People invoked 29
Samuel Maoz negative
Director of Lebanon; along with Waltz with Bashir, the film is analyzed as ideology at its purest through the retreat from political consequences into intimate war experience.
Mahatma Gandhi positive
Used as the counterexample to Hitler's 'violence of impotence': Gandhi's non-violent resistance is described as 'more violent than Hitler' because it genuinely interrupted the functioning of the British state, rather than leaving underlying structures intact.
Blaise Pascal positive
Praised as a Jansenist who, like Ayn Rand, 'showed the cards too openly' in relation to Catholic ideology and was later excommunicated, exemplifying over-identification as a subversive strategy.
Kazimir Malevich positive
Mentioned as the destination toward which David's Death of Marat points, the black square as the formal refusal of easy ideological content.
Ayn Rand positive
Cited approvingly as an example of over-identification: she expresses liberal-capitalist individualism so nakedly that she embarrasses the system and cannot become official ideology.
Jacques Lacan positive
Implicitly present throughout via the concepts of jouissance, the big Other, and the subject supposed to know; explicitly referenced when Žižek mentions having 'Lacanian psychoanalytic friends in Venezuela.'
Ismail Kadare positive
The Albanian novelist whose The Palace of Dreams Žižek recommends as a 'wonderful short novel' illustrating how power reproduces itself through the ideological dreams that subjects invest in.
Moshe Dayan positive
Praised for his brutal honesty in the 1956 Nahal Oz eulogy, where he frankly admits Palestinians have reason to hate Israelis and embraces the mythic violence logic of the stronger winning, contrasted favorably with today's Israeli PR spin.
Catherine Breillat positive
French director cited as attempting 'seriously artistic hardcore' (e.g., Romance), combining explicit sex with an emotionally engaging story, which Žižek treats as the right direction, though she remains marginal because the dual demand is ideologically unbearable.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as 'a good friend'; Žižek approvingly quotes Badiou's defense of political insults, 'in politics there are enemies, and why should I be prohibited from insulting them?', as a corrective to liberal prohibition of the concept of the enemy.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Described as 'a person whom I don't especially like' and a 'French new philosopher'; their debate at the New York Public Library is used to illustrate abstract ideological agreement as the sign of ideological capture.
Huey Long positive
Žižek defends Long against liberal charges of proto-fascism, calling him a genuine populist who built hospitals for Black people and broke the rule of the wealthy liberal elite, used to test the distinction between radical left and liberal.
Bertolt Brecht positive
Quoted from 'The Intellectual Beast is Dangerous' on the need for the left to 'become beasts' so fascists fear for their domination; Žižek defends Brecht against the charge of proto-totalitarianism.
Stephen King positive
The Shining is cited as illustrating the true meaning of the 'neighbor' in the Judaeo-Christian tradition: not a sympathetic fellow human but the uncanny monstrosity that the normal father becomes.
Mladen Dolar positive
Described as 'a friend of mine from Slovenia'; present at the Harvard dinner anecdote about being asked to state one's sexual orientation.
Heinrich Himmler negative
Cited for his statement that the Holocaust would be the 'most glorious chapter of German history, but a chapter which unfortunately will never be written', used to contrast Nazi shame and secrecy with the Indonesian perpetrators' public boasting, as examples of different levels of shamelessness.
T. J. Clark positive
Referred to as 'Clark, the first art historian who emphasized this', reading the darkness of the Death of Marat's upper field as proto-modern abstraction.
Leonardo Padura Fuentes positive
Cuban crime writer whose Mario Conde novels Žižek reads as 'one of the most interesting detective writers today' and as a form of zero-level ideological defense of Cuba: realistic about its failures, ethically committed to staying.
Piss Christ is used not to attack Serrano but to expose the emptiness of the New York Times liberal defense, which Žižek shows can justify anything, including a video of Žižek defecating.
Claude Lanzmann negative
His documentary Tsahal (about the IDF) is cited alongside Waltz with Bashir as an example of the psychological-humanist retreat from political analysis in representations of Israeli military power.
Hannah Arendt negative
Her distinction between power, authority, and violence is acknowledged as 'intelligent' but rejected insofar as it treats violence and power as strictly opposed; Žižek argues there is always a structurally necessary indistinction between them.
Walter Benjamin positive
His concept of 'mythic violence' (founding violence that establishes a new order of rights by force) is invoked to describe Dayan's frank acknowledgment of the logic of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
Ari Folman negative
Director of Waltz with Bashir; Žižek uses the film as a prime example of 'humanist reduction' ideology, focusing on intimate psychological experience of war while abstracting from its political stakes.
Mark Twain positive
Quoted at length from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court on the 'two reigns of terror'; Žižek uses Twain to defend the Jacobins against liberal condemnation by contrasting spectacular violence with systemic structural terror.
Harry Frankfurt negative
Author of On Bullshit; Žižek uses Frankfurt's endorsement of John McCain as a 'non-bullshitter' as evidence that the anti-bullshit discourse is itself ideology at its purest.
Jacques-Louis David positive
The Death of Marat is praised as a 'tremendous painting' for its refusal of easy utopian justification, the darkness of the upper two-thirds is read (following Clark) as an anticipation of Malevich's Black Square.
Hugo Chávez negative
Described as 'a failure in itself, in his project'; cited to make the point that in politics one must look at what pre-existing system an intervention is targeting before condemning it as anti-democratic.
Paul the Apostle positive
Žižek quotes Ephesians 6 as 'one of the first perfect definitions of critique of ideology', the struggle against 'spiritual wickedness in the heavens' as a template for critique of ideological mystification.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Invoked for the lesson that it is not enough to overthrow the external enemy, one must first overthrow the enemy's hold over one's dreams; presented as the German idealist whose insight anticipates modern revolutionary failures.
What it argues
the obscene underside of ideology and official normsfetishistic disavowal and ideological distancehumanist anti-ideology as ideologyviolence, power, and political emancipationthe Israeli-Palestinian conflict and mythic violenceinherent transgression as the glue of social orderchanging one's dreams as the first step of liberation
Dialectical moves 10
“Ideology is not abstract propositions themselves — ideology is precisely the dense background noise, the unwritten rules, which provides the concrete meaning of what you are saying.”
Ideology operates at the level of the implicit schematism that makes abstract declarations livable, not at the level of the declarations themselves.
“If there is an ideological experience at its purest, it is at the moment when we adopt the attitude of wise ironic distance and laugh at the follies we are ready to believe.”
The cynical distance that thinks it has escaped ideology is in fact ideology's most concentrated form.
“What appears to be a secret resistance to power — all the obscenities, dirty jokes — is the way power is sustained.”
The alleged transgression of the obscene underside does not subvert the official order but is its libidinal glue.
“More and more the way ideology functions today is directly as anti-ideology.”
The post-ideological gesture of appealing to concrete human richness beneath ideological labels is itself the dominant ideological form.
“The problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough — in the sense in which Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.”
True political violence is that which interrupts the underlying social structure; Hitler's spectacular killing left capitalism intact, whereas Gandhi's non-violence stopped the British state, making him the more genuinely disruptive force.
“Far from being a subversive resistance, the alleged spontaneous outbursts — swearing, carnivalesque violations — are the most codified part of the social order.”
Apparently spontaneous transgression is the most rigorously learned, scripted behavior, the point at which one is most thoroughly interpellated.
“Paradoxically, the first step in recognizing the humanity of the enemy should be to fully accept the unavoidability of taking sides — it is them or us, there is no third place above the struggle.”
Genuine recognition of the opponent's humanity requires acknowledging them as a real adversary rather than dissolving politics into competition among equals with no real stakes.
“A father who actually beats you is a ridiculous, ultimately impotent figure. With a true father with authority, violence is purely virtual.”
Real authority requires only the virtual threat of violence, the moment it actualizes itself in direct violence it reveals its own weakness.
“The task should rather be to abolish the apartheid and transform all of it — simply to accept it is one state.”
The supposedly utopian bi-national state is the only realistic solution because it names what already de facto exists; the 'realistic' two-state solution is the true fantasy.
“It is not enough to overthrow the enemy. First you must overthrow the hold the enemy has over your dreams.”
Hegel's lesson applied to revolutionary politics: the external revolution is premature without a prior internal revolution in one's fantasmatic investments.
Claims 18
asserts
Ideology resides not in abstract propositions but in the dense symbolic network of unwritten rules that schematize those propositions into a livable world.the nature of ideology
asserts
The obscene, unofficial underside of institutions — military ribaldry, dirty jokes, carnivalesque transgressions — is not resistance to power but the very mechanism through which power sustains itself.power and its obscene supplement
asserts
The ideological moment is purest precisely when we adopt an attitude of ironic distance and laugh at the follies we otherwise believe — 'no bullshit, let's see how things really are' is ideology at its most intense.cynical reason and ideological distance
asserts
The apparently post-ideological gesture of reducing people to concrete human beings beneath their ideological identities is itself ideology, because it obfuscates the political consequences of what they are doing.anti-ideology as ideology / humanist reduction
asserts
The two-state solution is not a realistic option but the main obstacle to peace; the actual situation is already a de facto bi-national state, and the task is to abolish the apartheid dimension and make it a secular bi-national state.the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
asserts
The Israeli war films 'Waltz with Bashir' and 'Lebanon,' by focusing on the intimate psychological experience of war rather than its political stakes, perform ideology at its purest.cinema and ideological humanist reduction
asserts
To condemn only Jacobin terror while ignoring the structural 'older and real terror' of poverty and oppression is itself a political choice that implicitly endorses the latter.the parallax of terror and revolutionary violence
asserts
The liberal prohibition of the category of 'enemy' paradoxically dehumanizes opponents more radically, since without the framework of a recognized enemy anything goes against those who truly disagree.liberalism and the concept of the enemy
rejects
Emancipatory politics requires accepting discipline, community, and sacrifice — categories that cannot be conceded to fascism — and the Third Wave experiment falsely equates emancipatory discipline with right-wing authoritarianism.anti-totalitarian liberal critique of discipline
asserts
Gandhi was more violent than Hitler in the relevant sense: Hitler's violence was pure impotence that left capitalist structures intact, while Gandhi interrupted the very functioning of the British state in India.the nature of effective political violence
asserts
The first step of liberation is not overthrowing the external enemy but breaking the enemy's hold on one's own dreams — changing the fantasmatic investments through which subjects are libidinally invested in the structure of power.emancipatory politics and libidinal investment
asserts
Power that must resort to direct violence is already in panic — real authority operates through the virtual threat of violence, and the moment it acts out, it admits defeat.the relationship between power, authority, and violence (Hannah Arendt's distinction)
rejects
Against Arendt, there is always a structurally necessary level of indistinction between violence and power — every power retains authority by obfuscating the violence on which it rests.Hannah Arendt's strict opposition of power and violence
asserts
The first step of politicization is to see violence where we do not even perceive it — to make visible the structural or systemic violence underlying the apparently peaceful order.systemic violence and politicization
asserts
Pleasures such as smoking, drinking hard spirits, and sex are not natural but second-level, socially acquired — what is enjoyed is participation in a collective act of transgression, not the thing in itself.the social construction of enjoyment
asserts
Ayn Rand functions as a kind of over-identification: she expresses liberal-capitalist individualism so openly that she cannot serve as official ideology and becomes an embarrassment to the system she represents.Ayn Rand and over-identification
rejects
Huey Long was not a proto-fascist but a genuine populist who achieved what the liberal elite would not — the distinction between a real radical left and a liberal is how they respond to figures like Long.the liberal critique of Huey Long
asserts
Today's globalized capitalism creates a moral vacuum in which shamelessness of power — publicly boasting of atrocities — is an emergent global phenomenon, not a local anomaly.capitalist globalization and moral disintegration
Quotes 15
“If there is an ideological experience at its purest, it is at the moment when we adopt the attitude of wise ironic distance and laugh at the follies we are ready to believe.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical distance as ideology at its purest
“Be careful when someone uses that language — 'no bullshit, cut the crap, let's go to how things really are' — it means you will get ideology at its purest.”Slavoj Žižek · the no-bullshit stance as ideological
“Our struggle is not against concrete corrupted individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification which sustains it.”Slavoj Žižek · Paul's Ephesians translated into critique of ideology
“What appears to be a secret resistance to power, all the obscenities, dirty jokes and so on, is the way power is sustained.”Slavoj Žižek · obscene underside as support of power
“More and more the way ideology functions today is directly as anti-ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-ideology as ideology's dominant contemporary form
“Precisely this idea beneath differences we are really all the same — that's the lie embodied I claim.”Slavoj Žižek · humanist reduction as ideological lie
“Soyons réalistes, demandons l'impossible — if there is a lesson to be learned from the endlessly protracted Middle East negotiations, it is that the main obstacle to peace is precisely what is offered as a realistic solution: the two separate states.”Slavoj Žižek · the two-state solution as the real utopia
“Paradoxically, the first step in recognizing the very humanity of the enemy should be to fully accept the unavoidability of taking sides in politics. It is them or us, there is no third place above the struggle.”Slavoj Žižek · recognizing the enemy as prerequisite for their humanity
“The problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough — in the sense in which Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.”Slavoj Žižek · the paradox of effective vs. impotent political violence
“What is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak?”Slavoj Žižek · structural terror vs. spectacular terror (Mark Twain)
“It is not enough to overthrow the enemy. First you must overthrow the hold the enemy has over your dreams as it were.”Slavoj Žižek · libidinal investment and the priority of changing dreams
“A power which has to resort to direct violence is a power which is already in panic.”Slavoj Žižek · violence as sign of power's impotence
“The first step of politicization is to see violence there where we do not even perceive it.”Slavoj Žižek · systemic violence and political consciousness
“You become adult when you know how to practice adultery — when you understand how the institution reproduces itself through its small transgressions, exemptions and so on.”Slavoj Žižek · adult/adultery: institutions sustained by inherent transgression
“Goodness must also be able to injure, to injure savagery.”Slavoj Žižek · Brecht on the violence required of emancipatory politics
Transcript 5 turns
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Thank you very much. I'm Lydia Voigt, Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, and on
Thank you very much. I'm Lydia Voigt, Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, and on
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behalf of Loyola University New Orleans, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome all of you here for this very special event. As part of our commitment to educational excellence and to foster learning and talent development of our students and our entire campus, Loyola has had a long tradition of inviting speakers to challenge the status quo and stimulate discourse and analysis of significant social issues and ideas and whose visit becomes an important part of our collective intellectual experience. Slavoj Zizek, who has been described as one of the most formidably brilliant political philosophers and cultural critics of our times, is that kind of guest speaker.
behalf of Loyola University New Orleans, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome all of you here for this very special event. As part of our commitment to educational excellence and to foster learning and talent development of our students and our entire campus, Loyola has had a long tradition of inviting speakers to challenge the status quo and stimulate discourse and analysis of significant social issues and ideas and whose visit becomes an important part of our collective intellectual experience. Slavoj Zizek, who has been described as one of the most formidably brilliant political philosophers and cultural critics of our times, is that kind of guest speaker.
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We have some late-breaking news. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has just named Elvis the Zizek of rock and roll. Okay. To me, there's only one real question to confront in this introduction, which is why Slavoj Zizek should be here at this particular moment, why it's so important, why I thought it was so important that he be here, and that when history is retrospectively written, that this moment will be an important moment. I think there are two reasons. One is, I think he has done more than anyone to help us understand the problem of fetishistic disavowal, as he repeats often the concept of je sais bien, mais quand même, I know very well, but nevertheless. I know, but I act as if I don't know. In a certain sense, New Orleans is the symbol of fetishistic disavowal. We are the place who knew for years what was to come, the disaster that was coming, yet people acted as if it was not coming. Even after we have the disaster that occurred, which was far less significant than the one we're still facing, President Bush could say no one could foresee the breaching of the levees. So I think in a certain sense we are the symbol of that disorder in a rather unique way. Slavoj wrote an article about New Orleans that I love very much, "The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape," which was about fantasies about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It's a very interesting title. Of course, it comes from the subject supposed to know, but there are two real meanings of subject supposed. On the one hand, we have the subject that is supposed, this is supposed to have happened in New Orleans. But the other meaning is the supposed subject as opposed to the object. Who is it that loots? Who is it that rapes? Who is the victim and who is the perpetrator? Which brings me to the other reason why I think it's so important that he's here and that he speak about violence. Who is the victim of violence? Who is the perpetrator of violence? In a certain sense, we are the symbol of violence. We have had the highest murder rate in the country. We have had rampant crime. That's the visible violence. But many people don't realize that the underlying violence is the violence of being the incarceration capital of the world. Entire generations are subjected to daily violence in OPP and other prisons of this state. Who is the victim of violence? That's the question. In a certain sense, we embody the concept that Slavoj talks about, the part of no part. People ask, are we Americans? In a certain sense, we're the bad conscience of America. We're the part that is not part. And in a certain sense, that makes us the universal part, as he pointed out. So I'm hoping that as a result of his presentation, we'll begin to understand the nature of violence and the nature of our place in a system of violence. So it's with
We have some late-breaking news. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has just named Elvis the Zizek of rock and roll. Okay. To me, there's only one real question to confront in this introduction, which is why Slavoj Zizek should be here at this particular moment, why it's so important, why I thought it was so important that he be here, and that when history is retrospectively written, that this moment will be an important moment. I think there are two reasons. One is, I think he has done more than anyone to help us understand the problem of fetishistic disavowal, as he repeats often the concept of je sais bien, mais quand même, I know very well, but nevertheless. I know, but I act as if I don't know. In a certain sense, New Orleans is the symbol of fetishistic disavowal. We are the place who knew for years what was to come, the disaster that was coming, yet people acted as if it was not coming. Even after we have the disaster that occurred, which was far less significant than the one we're still facing, President Bush could say no one could foresee the breaching of the levees. So I think in a certain sense we are the symbol of that disorder in a rather unique way. Slavoj wrote an article about New Orleans that I love very much, "The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape," which was about fantasies about New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It's a very interesting title. Of course, it comes from the subject supposed to know, but there are two real meanings of subject supposed. On the one hand, we have the subject that is supposed, this is supposed to have happened in New Orleans. But the other meaning is the supposed subject as opposed to the object. Who is it that loots? Who is it that rapes? Who is the victim and who is the perpetrator? Which brings me to the other reason why I think it's so important that he's here and that he speak about violence. Who is the victim of violence? Who is the perpetrator of violence? In a certain sense, we are the symbol of violence. We have had the highest murder rate in the country. We have had rampant crime. That's the visible violence. But many people don't realize that the underlying violence is the violence of being the incarceration capital of the world. Entire generations are subjected to daily violence in OPP and other prisons of this state. Who is the victim of violence? That's the question. In a certain sense, we embody the concept that Slavoj talks about, the part of no part. People ask, are we Americans? In a certain sense, we're the bad conscience of America. We're the part that is not part. And in a certain sense, that makes us the universal part, as he pointed out. So I'm hoping that as a result of his presentation, we'll begin to understand the nature of violence and the nature of our place in a system of violence. So it's with
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great pleasure and honor that I introduce Slavoj Zizek. Thank you very much. I am here for the third
great pleasure and honor that I introduce Slavoj Zizek. Thank you very much. I am here for the third
Slavoj Žižek
time and I really like to be here. I am very grateful for not only for incredible hospitality, the introductions, I'm also I also like very much the way my arrival was prepared, for example those T-shirts with portrait of me there. I love it because if some of you are ladies old enough to have daughters who are in dating age, I'm asking you a simple question, referring to that image of me like, would you allow that guy to take your daughter? No, never. Another thing that I like is I feel as if it were in good old totalitarian times. I have this fascist guard here. No, I mean you are free to applaud, but if you don't applaud enough they will liquidate you. No, seriously. I deeply agree with what you said, how the fight for the status of New Orleans is precisely is it part of the United States or not. If you speak to those arrogant upper-middle-class multiculturalist liberals from the North, their idea is that they sympathize with you but precisely in the same way as you sympathize with foreigners. For them, to cut a long story short, you are you are part of Latin America, practically a banana republic which by mistake ended here. The point is no, you are genuinely, maybe even more than those colleagues from the North, part of the United States. And I think that your this exceptional point, now you may disagree with me here, but nonetheless I think it didn't begin only recently. I remember already from when I was young, which means unfortunately more than thirty years ago, I discovered this area of United States through one I think of the great American novels although I don't agree with all its political implications, "All the King's Men." And it's it's for me what interested me is of course the figure of Huey Long who is behind. And I claim that you see, this is maybe one of the ways, probably some of you will disagree here with me, to test someone is he a real radical left or a liberal. Liberals are usually horrified, oh proto-fascist and so on and so on. I've read books about Huey Long. I claim this is a mistake. Huey Long was not your version of Father Coughlin, MacAfee or what and those disgusting two antisemites. He was okay, whatever you call populist, demagogue, but you know that at the same time I think he was the first one to build hospitals for black people, to give to women positions and so on. He broke he broke the rule of this very restrained, wealthy, so-called liberal elite. This has to be done. He also embodies for me in a way the limitation of American democracy. Not that ours is better in Europe, but nonetheless in the sense that a simple liberal criticism of Huey Long is too short. The tragic thing is that only a guy like Huey Long was able to do it, what had to be done. Okay, so now be prepared nonetheless for some theory. Since we are here at Loyola University and since although I'm an atheist I define myself as a Christian atheist, I would like to begin in a very religious way, but sincerely, by a quote from Paul in Ephesians He provided I think one of the first perfect definitions of critique of ideology. Maybe some of you know the quote. Here is the literal quote, okay literal, official translation. "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against leaders, against authorities, against the world rulers," the Greek term cosmocratoras, "the world rulers of this darkness, against the," wonderful expression, "spiritual wickedness in the heavens." You see, it's a wonderful expression. It's not up in heaven there is purity, down common people are dirty. No, wickedness is up there in heavens. Or, to translate Paul into today's language, our struggle is not against concrete corrupted individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification which sustains it. That's what Paul really meant, but we are in another age. So what I want to do based on this is just to go on practicing the old half-forgotten art of the critique of ideology. When then are we in ideology? When we read an ideological proclamation, big clever statement, American patriotism, socialism, democracy, we are well aware that this is not how real people experience it. In order to pass from abstract propositions to people's real lives, we have to add to the abstract propositions the unfathomable density of a life world context. And I claim ideology are not abstract propositions in themselves. Freedom, democracy, whatever, ideology is this very density of a symbolic network which I use the term here in the Kantian sense, schematizes these abstract propositions in the sense of renders them livable, provides the background for the way we concretely understand them. Take military ideology. It becomes livable, officially it's discipline, struggle for your country and so on, but I claim it becomes livable only against the background of the obscene unwritten rules and rituals, marching chants, ribald sexual innuendoes, in which it is embedded. For me, when I was young I served in my country, ex-Yugoslavia, the army and this was for me almost the moment of formation of my insights. Where to be frank I'm a kind of what you call control freak, obsessional neurotic, almost a fascist character. I like order, efficiency. So quite openly I was glad to go to the army. But then came the disappointment of my life. Army is not that. Nothing functioned. It was all one big obscenity, improvisation and so on and so on. And it took me some time to get it that this was not any kind of subversive resistance. That's how power functions. What appears to be a secret resistance to power, all the obscenities, dirty jokes and so on and so on, is the way power is sustained. Which is why my first thesis: if there is an ideological experience at its purest, it is at the moment when we adopt the attitude of wise ironic distance and laugh at the follies we are ready to believe. You know when you say no bullshit, cut the crap, let's go to how things really are. Be careful when someone uses that language, it means you will get ideology at its purest. And I can even give you an example. You know popular philosopher Harry Frankfurt who wrote the book "On Bullshit." You remember, it was a mega bestseller short essay. I immediately was suspicious and my suspicion was well justified because I read an interview with Frankfurt, probably he didn't dare to do this here, about two years ago in a German philosophical journal where they asked him, okay but give me an example, do you have an example of today in United States of a politician who is not bullshitting. He said John McCain. Here is the bullshit. So again, what is ideology? During a public debate that I had with a person whom I don't especially like, Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French new philosopher at New York Public Library, something interesting happened. First he made a pathetic case for liberal tolerance, something like would you not like to live in a society where you can make fun of the predominant religion without the fear of being killed for it, where women are free to dress the way they like and choose the partner as a partner the men they love and so on and so on. And I made, I must say, a similar pathetic case for communism. With the growing food crisis, ecological crisis and so on and so on, is there not a need to find a new way of collective action which radically differs from market as well as from state administration. The irony was that when we both stated our case in these abstract terms, we both couldn't but agree with each other. I said what should I say, no I want women to be oppressed and subject to clit of, of course I want that. And even he said, oh if this is communism then I am a communist and so on. This means that we were in ideology. You got it? Because we obliterated this dense background, as it were background noise, which on account of which when you say today things like he said, it's not just what you get. It's the whole set of unwritten rules which provide a very specific concrete meaning of what you are saying. I don't want to lose your time here, but I've elaborated this in some of my last books, I think especially in "Violence." This is a phenomenon namely which immensely fascinates me. How what a complex phenomenon social rules, norms are. Why? Rules, norms are not only simply norms which tell you how to act. For reasons which can be nicely developed in psychoanalytic theory, norms are never consistent. Whenever you want to become part of a certain collective, you discover that there are some written or unwritten, whatever, rules regulating the interaction of people who are in. But then you soon discover something else, that it's not only explicit rules which matter. What matters even more are a kind of a meta- higher level rules, rules which tell you how to deal with the explicit rules. For example, often things are officially prohibited but the true message between the lines is do it if you are not an idiot. You know like in sexuality in some countries even at the level of criminal. For example, it can be nicely demonstrated that the entire Soviet Union functioned only through smuggling, through black market and so on, so the official rules had to be violated. And if you followed the explicit rules, you were simply an idiot, you didn't get it. But a much more interesting example is the opposite one. It's not that the law or the rules prohibit something but between the lines the message is do it, it's when you are allowed, solicited even, to do something on condition that you don't really do it. You know like you are given a free choice on condition that you make the right choice, as it were. And this is another fascinating topic. I think this is the fundamental maybe zero level ideological mechanism, to give you a choice on condition that that the choice is free. In one of my early books, so I hope you don't know the example, I quoted an example precisely from the time when I was in the Yugoslav army which is very simple, even stupid, but it's wonderful how purely clinical this example is. I don't know how it is in your army but in probably in most armies it is as it was in Yugoslav army where I served where after the beginning, the first drill two, three weeks, you swear the oath. You know it's the solemn procedure, all young soldiers are gathered then you do the usual bullshit, I am ready to do everything up to dying for my country and so on and so on. Then after all of us pronouncing these words in public, each of us then had to go to a desk and sign the oath. And then a friend of mine, I wouldn't dare to do it but he did it, he was one of my heroes, when it came to signing the oath, he said no I will not sign the oath. Then the officer asked him, tell him but are you crazy, you will be arrested, you must sign it. The guy said, wait a minute, give me a clear answer. Am I obliged? Are you ordering me to sign it or not? And you know it was a magic moment where a crack in ideological edifices appeared. Because the so- the officer told him, no are you crazy, this is an oath, this is your free act. Then the guy said no, but if it's a free act I will not do it. Tell me just it's an order and I will do it. And then a miracle happened, I have a photocopy of this, the officer wrote him on a piece of paper, an order to freely sign the oath. This is this is how it functions. Okay, it's never as simple as that. I'm well aware of it. But what I'm saying is that if you want to understand an ideology, you know always look at these ambiguities. It's never what it says, it's how you relate to what it says. Where can you feel this gap at its purest? Precisely in what people usually celebrate as spontaneous outbursts. For example, you are in a formal debate then you explode, you get bored, so you do whatever, let's say you start swearing dirty words and so on. I claim if you look closely at how this functions, it has nothing to do with any kind of spontaneous explosion or whatever. Precisely these allegedly spontaneous outbursts are the most codified part of it. You must learn them. You become part of a civilization, collective, whatever, precisely when you learn these carnivalesque moments of how to how to violate the explicit rules. Let me take not only swearing but two, three other examples. For example, drinking hard alcohol or smoking. I claim there is nothing originally, if you smoke and if you remember how you learned to smoke. It's usually first when you were I don't know in your early teens in some initiatic group where somebody offers you, are you a man enough, if you are a man try, you try and I can guarantee you if you're normal, if you're an alien it's different. But there are aliens. I know two aliens in United States. Pat Buchanan is a sweet human, Pat Robertson is an alien. He doesn't believe in the modern body, he believes in those old ones, no. Pat Buchanan is purely human. Pat Robertson is purely alien. But that's another story. But I am saying that if we are human, admitted, your first the reaction first reaction was you started to cough, you didn't like it. Smoking is inherently an unpleasant experience. But then you were told, but wait a minute, that's the transgressive thing to do and so on and so on. So it comes afterwards that you start to enjoy. It's the same with drinking, if not wine at least the hard liquors. I mean they have a bitter taste, they burn, so when you have a slightly dissolute father who tells you when you are six, seven, be a man, try it. Doing a favor to your father, it's not. Then you learn. So again, it's it's strictly I claim our pleasure in this kind of things is strictly a second-level pleasure. It has more to do with how should I put it, with social group, with participating in a collective act of transgression or what. I mean, let's be frank here. If you want to drink for pure pleasure you usually do some stupid fruit juice. You don't go to whiskey or what. And I claim, but I don't have time to develop in detail that it goes the same even for sex. I can understand if you want pleasure masturbate, it's much simpler and so on and so on. I claim that collective sex, in the sense of not orgy but doing it with a partner, is strictly something you have to learn. It's a learned experience. It doesn't come it doesn't come naturally. Again, so you see my point, which is that violating the public rules is not done by a private ego but is enjoyed by the same public rules which allegedly prohibit this. This is what this is what accounts for all the snobbery of artistic taste. For example, me coming from snobbish Europe, if you like classical music, I do. And we know who are supposed to be the big guys, Beethoven, his symphonies and so on. But if you are in the close circle of those who pretend to know it, if you say if you make one of the obvious choices, no, like I like Beethoven's ninth symphony, you're considered a total idiot. The trick is to select a work which is usually neglected or considered minimal and to say ah, but this is the real one. And if you know Beethoven, the field is getting pretty narrow. When I was young, you could get away by opting a late string quartets. They are out now, too well known. Now you must go maybe because they're really hard and boring, the late piano sonatas are one of the candidates and so on, if you like them. So the point is again that it's only this slight deviation from the common wisdom which accounts for you strictly being in. And I claim the same goes to marriage. This idea of marriage as fidelity is typical adolescent idea. Since I am at a Catholic university, I would say the whole wisdom of a Catholic church is based on the idea on what there, that there is more than just the same the same root in the two words adult and adultery. You become adult when you know how to practice adultery. No, no, I mean it in a profound way, literally, when when you understand how how the institution reproduces itself through its small transgressions, exemptions and so on and so on. Let me give you the ultimate example. Did you see, to be ironic of course, one of the greatest movies of western civilization, "The Sound of Music"? Look at it. It's a wonderful example of ideology. What is the true message of the movie? You know the story, Sister Maria sent to take care of the children of von Trapp family, then she okay in the movie Julie Andrews falls in love with Baron von Trapp, Christopher Plummer. Then she falls she falls in love too much. In a panic, being sexually attracted to the to the Baron, she goes, you remember, that's the crucial scene of the film I claim. She goes to the Mother Superior and tells her I'm still tempted by the Baron, what should I do? It's a call for punishment, no? She asks make me pray, make me fast, whatever. And then there is an incredible scene which is totally obscene, I am always almost ashamed of watching it. Do you remember what happens there? The Mother Superior sings a song. An obscene song which starts like "Climb Ev'ry Mountain." And the message of that song is "Go back and seduce the guy, screw like crazy." And that's, you see, I claim there is no subversive whatever here. This is how Catholicism functions. You know like I say this with all respect and not to blame Catholicism, Protestants are even worse and so on. But like, you know, the message is not obey and don't do it. That's the explicit message. The implicit message is obey, pay lip service, and then secretly you can have all that you want. Maybe even, sorry for the obscenity, as a priest all the small boys and so on and so on. I'm strictly mean without any offense to Catholicism. I think it's a great example that effectively there must be something of what I call an inherent transgression. The cases of pedophilia are so numerous that you cannot def- account for it in this simple way like oh yes of course priests are human like others so we have them. No, they have too much of them. It's it's a much more it's a much more complex thing. But again, what I wanted to emphasize is how is how this is how religion works today. Even if you read some statements in most conservative Catholic countries. For example, recently I was in Poland. A very conservative antisemitic country. It's very difficult to meet a Polish guy who is not a Jew and who is not antisemitic. But nonetheless, I I'm was shocked about how there even Catholic fundamentalists relate to sexuality. On the one hand, they have the usual the usual dogma, you know, sex only in marriage, blah blah blah. But then it was so clear that their real message to the young people was a much more obscene one. It was look, in a permissive society where you just can do whatever you want it gets boring. We offer you this thrilling additional pleasure of giving you rules which you are not only allowed but secretly even solicited to of course not publicly to to violate and then this makes for a much more thrilling sexual experience. A couple of times a priest even openly even openly claims it. And incidentally, there is a truth in it, obviously. Like what about the opposite position, someone like Marquis de Sade? Brutally just enjoy. I mean, I hope you got it after reading for example his most mechanical systematic work, Days of Sodom." I think it's Sodom. Yeah. That how you read the cases of perversion. That after a certain number, I would say after it's totally desexualized. It becomes a pure formal logical permutation. Like you take a dog, an ox, a woman, two childs and you know how they do it. Next example, you know, you take two dogs, two women and whatever. It's totally desexualized. So again, this complexity has to be taken into account. But where are we today here? I claim today, this is more I would say a traditional ideology which you can locate at all levels. This how should I call it, two-level ideology. The first thing we should say today is that it's often the opposite. If traditional ideology functions in this way that I found some traces of it there but not only there, in Catholic ideology, and my analysis here is very abstract, sorry if it appears that I want to focus on Catholicism. I can tell you that when communists even in power were in power in my country, they were much worse and open in this hypocrisy. For example, the official ideology of ex-Yugoslavia was some kind of self-management, anti-Stalinist communism. But the point was that if you took the ruling ideology too seriously, if someone suspected you that you truly suspected you that you truly believed in it, where you usually lost your job. It was a very nice paradox, you know, of course. And this is why, if I may make another detour, this is why I like Ayn Rand. When people ask me like are you crazy or what. I like ideologies who undermine the ruling ideology not by subverting it from the outside but through what I call over-identification, as it were showing the cards too directly, too openly. That's why her status is very ambiguous. Ayn Rand, you know, she is liberal capitalist individualism at its purest, but she puts it so openly that she cannot become really the official ideology. She's an embarrassment. And guys like this are always the most interesting ones. Like in early early modern Catholicism, is the Jansenists in France, especially Blaise Pascal. This is why he was later in big trouble, excommunicated and so on. He, as it were, showed the cards in a too open way. So this is one strategy. That is to say the explicit rule of law, regulation prohibits it, the message between the lines do it discreetly and so on. But we have also the opposite operation more and more today, where the explicit message is enjoy, have a nice life and so on and prohibitions are implicit. But that's another story, I don't have time to develop it, but I think it's crucial for understanding where we are today. I think the diagnosis of some conservative religious people that we don't believe and so on, I totally don't agree with it. I think we believe more than ever today. But what I want to say is that so that you will see how this multitude of levels function. To analyze the ideological investments of a statement, you must precisely look at this obscene implicit presuppositions. Let me give you a very pathetic example. Let's suppose you read one of these famous ads, I thought I think it was even in today's US Today which I read in my hotel. You know, the photo of three disfigured with disfigured lips black children and then, you know, contribute some money, you can make a difference, you can save this child's life and so on and so on. What happens if you how should I put it, if you ask yourself but what is the true message of this message beneath the call for charity? I think in majority of cases and for the majority of us something pretty cynical. Something along the lines of I know that people are starving, living in horrible conditions around, but I don't care. And this ad is offering me a nice way out. I give the price of a couple of cappuccinos and not only I can not only I get rid of the problem, but I can also claim you see, I try to do something and so on and so on. The message is for cheap money we can as it were get rid, make you feel well and so on and so on. Okay, how where are we today with regard to all these things? I claim that more and more the way ideology functions today is directly as anti-ideology. By this I mean as a reference to how should I call it, if there is an ideological statement today it's something like you know none of us can be reduced just to some ideological category. None of us is simply a capitalist, a liberal, a Christian, an American. Beneath this each of us is a warm, rich human being with a whole wealth of traumas, dreams, fears and so on. That's what makes us real human beings. This idea that beneath public identity we are concrete rich individuals which cannot be reduced to abstract categories. Why is this ideology? Because the way this functions today I claim is to precisely obfuscate the ideologico-political consequences of what you are doing. Let me take an example maybe known to some of you. The two recent Israeli films and incidentally I'm not engaged here in Israel bashing and so on. It's a much more complex situation in the Middle East, but two films about Lebanon War. Ari Folman's animated documentary "Waltz with Bashir" and the more recent Samuel Maoz's "Lebanon." As you may know, Lebanon draws on the director's own memoirs as a young soldiers- soldier and the movie renders the war's fear and claustrophobia how most of the action is shot from within a tank. So the movie as it were abstracts from the enemies what they're doing and withdraw focus to the intimacy of war experience. I claim this is the ultimate again ideological gesture. All of a sudden the political stakes of what goes on, why are we here, are we killing Palestinians, do we have the right to be here? And I'm not saying the the the answer is necessarily no. I'm just saying that in this way which appears to be the ultimate way like forget ideologies, are you aware what horror war is, it's a wonderful way to precisely change something which is a large collective act with consequences, killing, political implications. All that matters suddenly become an intimate experience of fear and so on and so on. That's ideology at its purest. No wonder that in Israel when I visited and I often visit the country, I love it, I've encountered again and again this same strategy as part of how IDF, Israeli Defense Forces, legitimize their role. They it's very interesting and it's very intelligent I think they are doing. They are not saying Arabs are cowards, we are super soldiers, one battalion of us can take over Cairo or whatever. No, they all the time claim, as they put it, military is not in our genes. That is to say that we are people like others. We are also cowards, we can fall into a panic, we cry when there is shooting around us and so on and so on. I was witness, not literally witness, but saw on TV there a supreme example of this ideological manipulation where an Israeli special unit entered the apartment where an alleged terrorist's family lived, hoping to find the father. He was not there but mother and children were there. So what happened is that of course the the children awakened when brutally soldiers entered and started to cry and mother called her daughter by a name like come here, then the name so that I will console you. And then one of the soldiers, Israeli soldiers discovered realized that his daughter's name is the same as that Palestinian girl's name. And you know what he did? He opened his wallet and you see I have also a daughter of the same name, we are all humans and so on and so on. That's the lie embodied I claim. Precisely this idea beneath differences we are really all the same. If you want to see this ideology at its purest, I advise you to look at a film by Claude Lanzmann, you know the famous French documentary author, not the one we all know, "Shoah," but another one, "Tsahal," about Israeli defense forces. Where again it all focuses the entire movie is about this psychological dimension. No questioning of political consequences, just how did you feel in the Yom Kippur War when when Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal and then you have all this description I was crying, I was in a total panic. It's all one big it's all one big psychology. And so that where does here enter ideology? I cannot but respect, and I mean this without irony, the brutal honesty of the first generation founders of the state of Israel. How differently they were talking. All of them, that is to say the early Moshe Dayan and so on, from today's Israeli establishment. I mean, the way to to point out to today's Israel the weak points of their politics is not to criticize them from some abstract position but simply to remind them what their ancestors were, and by ancestors I don't mean the Bible, I mean simply two generations earlier, first generation Israel politicians, they were aware of it. I mean it's interestingly to read to read their statements where they clearly say it's not the question of justice. We are here, we took somebody else's land, maybe we have some right, they also have the right, and it simply a matter of war who will take it. I like this attitude. It at least honest. It openly says with none of this bullshit. And I noticed this bullshit. The nicest example of je sais bien, mais quand même, among atheist Israelis this is a standard joke, is how because do you know that Israel, this renders the country rather sympathetic for to me, you know that Israel is the most atheist country in the world? It's about they are atheists. But their their je sais bien, mais quand même is there is no God but nonetheless God gave us the land of Israel basically, yeah. Okay, so look a wonderful model of how honestly they put it. On 29th of April a group of Palestinians from Gaza crossed the border to plunder the harvest in the Nahal Oz kibbutz fields just across. Then there was Roi, a young Jewish member of the kibbutz who patrolled the fields. He tried to chase them away with the stick, he was seized by the Palestinians, carried back to the Gaza Strip, and when the next day the Palestinians gave the body to United Nations forces to return it to the Israel, his eyes had been plucked out. Moshe Dayan, then the chief of staff, delivered the eulogy at his funeral the following day. Listen to this carefully. "Let us not cast blame on the murderers today. What claim do we have against their mortal hatred of us? They have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza for the past eight years while right before their eyes we have transformed the land and villages where they and their ancestors once lived into our own inheritance. We have transformed." So you see the honesty. It's no bullshitting. It's we took the land from there, of course they hate us. Moshe Dayan says it. But now comes the mystery, the second paragraph. "It is not among the Arabs of Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roi's blood. How have we shut our eyes and refused to look squarely at our fate and see the destiny of our generation in all its brutality? Have you forgotten that this group of young people living in Nahal Oz bears the burden of Gaza's gates on its shoulders?" Obvious reference to Samson, the gates of Gaza and so on. But what's so interesting here is that you see how Dayan is reasoning. In the first paragraph, he openly admits that the Palestinians have at least some kind of right to hate the Israeli Jews since the Jews took their land. His conclusion however is not the obvious admission of one's own guilt, but to fully accept what he calls the destiny of our generation in all its brutality. That is to say to assume the burden, not guilt but burden, of the war where might will be right, where the stronger will win. The war was not about principles of justice, it was precisely an exercise in what Walter Benjamin called the mythic violence. I think if Israel were to return a little bit to this, not I'm not saying Israel should say in some stupid politically correct pro-Palestinian way sorry that we exist, we move to Europe and so on, but fundamentally how should I put it, fully admit the deadlock. That they don't have the right to simply play in the eyes of Palestinians the good guys, things would have maybe changed. Okay, many things also have to change among the Palestinians, I totally agree. Consequently I claim, let me make now a crazy proposal, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also this old motto from the the walls of Paris, "Soyons réalistes, demandons l'impossible." Let's be realistic, let's demand the impossible holds. If there is a lesson to be learned from the endlessly protracted Middle East negotiations, it is that I claim the main obstacle to peace is precisely what is offered as a realistic solution: the two separate states. Although none of the two sides really want this solution. Israel would probably prefer a little bit of West Bank that it is ready to seek to become a part of Jordan. And the Palestinians also consider the pre-67 Israel part of their land. So first let's be clear, nobody really wants the two states. But nonetheless it is somehow accepted by all of us as the only feasible solution. What both sides exclude as an impossible dream is the simplest and most obvious solution: a bi-national secular state comprising all of Israel plus the occupied territories and Gaza. Now you will say, I know what you will say, I'm crazy utopian, it's a utopian dream disqualified by the long history of hatred and violence. Here I think I have a perfect answer. It's not utopia, it's a reality. Isn't de facto the reality of today's Israel and occupied territories that it is de facto is a bi-national state? It is one state. Israel is de facto in control of it. It's controlled by one sovereign power: the state of Israel, which is then divided by internal borders. So that I claim the task should rather be to abolish the apartheid and transform all of it simply to accept it it is one state. And I am seriously advocating it. It may make so surprise you but what was for a long time a shocking idea is even accepted more and more by some still marginal parts there. You know why? Because this is the easiest solution even for the West Bank settlers. Nobody has to leave West Bank. They it's just that you accept what is de facto, one big Israel as a reality, of course with the proviso of making it de facto secular and so on and so on. Now we'll say it's still madness. Maybe is it, but then I claim we will not have a solution. It's as simple as that. Okay, let me go on with this idea of humanist no humanist just this reduction to but we are human as the form of ideology. Now I may I may disappoint some of you, but I would like to begin to conclude with an the opposite example from today's Cuba. If you want to read one of the most interesting detective writers today, it's Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer who does police procedurals set in today's Havana. His detective hero is an inspector, Mario Conde. And you know, the portrait of Cuba that you get is very realistic. I mean, it's not some idealized socialist Cuba, it's prostitution, poverty, the arrogance of ruling nomenclature and so on, even hunger, crime, prostitution. Again, so so first I thought oh my god this guy must have a nice villa in the suburbs of Miami or whatever. Then I was surprised to learn that not only he lives in Havana but he is no dissident there. He is there a big star, recognized and so on. And then I got it. This is the it's a kind of a zero level defense of today's Cuba. The message is of course revolution is screwed up, of course it's a misery, we are a lost generation. But nonetheless, and this has nothing to do with politics, it's simple ethical consistency, we must heroically accept what we are, not to escape into the dreams of Miami or whatever, but just with dignity to accept our reality, our love for this country and to go on living here. I think it's a very desperate strategy but much more effective than official propaganda. You see, this also is for me ideology. Now a next more complex step. When I what we get in this reduction of humans not to ideological categories but to concrete human being is is this what Christians call the love of a neighbor? Does this mean no don't treat the other as some abstract category, communist, socialist, capitalist, imperialist, enemy, see in him or her the neighbor, a concrete human being? No, no, no, it's much more complex here. You know in if you know truly the Judaeo-Christian tradition, you must know that neighbor is not a nice guy with whom we sympathize. Neighbor is rather like did you see there is a movie and a novel which effectively can be called subtitled into the becoming of a neighbor. It's I think Stephen King's "The Shining." When normal father becomes a neighbor by becoming this unfathomable monstrosity and so on and so on. So so my point is that precisely because ideology is explicit ideology is breaking down, we claim we live in post-ideological time, the only thing that matters is your be what you truly are and so on, authentic authentic authentic life that you should live, that the fear of the neighbor is explosively growing. How does this function? Let me give you an example which if some of you were at yesterday's debate I already mentioned it but I think I should repeat it because it's crucial. A one a little bit more than one year ago I was at Harvard with a friend of mine from Slovenia, Mladen Dolar, and at a dinner after our presentations we had some eight, nine people, we didn't know each other so an old professor who invited us said, "Okay, each of you should present himself. Please state your name, affiliation, field of work, and your sexual orientation." Okay, for my European sensibility this was a little bit stupid, no? Like it's none of your business. But what I am saying here, now comes the point, is that I am far from engaged here in the usual America bashing, no? No, no, you have your levels where you are more coming out open there as we have our own. My first association was but wait a minute, what happened when half a year ago a friend of mine from United States visited me and other Slovene friends in Slovenia, we went to the Adriatic coast to on a beach, and in Slovenia as it's in most of the Mediterranean countries now already for thirty years, topless is the standard, how should I put it. Nobody even notices it if you see women's breasts all around. But this was extremely offensive for the American friend. All so he saw, oh my god, another breast, another breast. So you see the point is that it's not that we are more civilized or whatever. The point is that each culture and it's a complex reason for why how does it function, why for you it's not a problem to publicly admit up to a point, I know, your sexual orientation but much more difficult for women to walk topless, with us nobody even notices it but and so on and so on. But what I claim is that precisely what my American friend feared is precisely this is the fear of the neighbor, this desiring otherness of jouissance which in a way invades your incredibly embarrassing stupid that narrative usually is. For example, I'm still now traumatized even thinking when I was young, one of the starter formulas was, you know, the housewife is alone at home, a plumber comes and says, "Lady, I fix the hole in kitchen," and then lady says, "But I have another hole, can you also do that?" Embarrassing. What's the lesson here? I think it's censorship. What is prohibited, to put it very simply, is to have explicit hardcore, see it all, and at the same time an, let's call it naively, emotionally engaging serious story. It's as if it would have been too much. You either have a serious story, but then you don't see it all, or you see it all, but then the story must be ridiculous. It's precisely, you know, if you see it all, this subjective engagement must be censored. Which is why, incidentally, I know that in France for example Catherine Breillat and some others try to do, let's call them seriously artistic hardcore. Like if you saw maybe her movie "Romance." You see everything in sex but at the same time engaging story. But that's why she cannot make a a real breakthrough. That's why she remains marginal. Now of course I know this is no longer the case today. But my thesis is that today it's even worse. Today today the predominant so I was informed, not that I hate hardcore but it simply too depressive to watch it, it's like a shortcut to impotence I claim. You have to and you notice it ideologically, it's so-called Gonzo, which is a form of pornography where they no longer even pretend that it's a story. A couple does it or three, four whatever, I don't want to limit myself to a couple because then I will be accused of binary logic, I think three, four of them whatever. And then, you know, they engage in a debate with the director, with the cameraman, "Am I good? Laugh." You know like to make it funny. I claim the censorship is here even more radical. It's even it's as if they are in such a panic that even even this minimal of narrative is felt as if it's too much, you had to be reminded all can you imagine what terrible censorship this is, you had to be reminded all the time no it's just a joke we are just filming and so on and so on. It's very interesting this phenomenon. The fear is precisely the fear of the neighbor I claim. Because if if in this stupid copulation that you see there, if you were to to fear that there is real desire, passion, emotion there, that would have been the neighbor. That dimension has to be suppressed. So again, the problem is how to maintain the distance towards a neighbor. Here I claim we are approaching a dangerous state because in the sense that one of the ways to keep the neighbor as a distance, the neighbor in his/her intruding proximity, are customs, habits, or rules of civility and so on and so on. But in our culture of self-exposure and so-called sincerity, authenticity, they function less and less. And incidentally, one of the signs of this failure is for me politically correct attempt to directly regulate. You know what's my problem with political correctness? Let's say how you treat the other in this sexual interaction if we are talking about politically correct view on sexuality, of course I agree with all they say. But what I'm saying is that how should I put it, it works only if it's part of our how should I put it, spontaneous customs. The moment you explicitly regulate it you undermine it in a way, you even in an immediate way support sustain aggressiveness. Something is missing in this politically correct universe where you try to regulate, to explicitly posit norms regulated and so on and so on. So the result is now unfortunately this is no longer a joke. The result is clearly in one of the most depressing movies that I've seen. It isn't yet released, a friend of mine from Denmark gave me a copy. It's a you should see when it will come out. It's a documentary called "Free Men: When Killers Make Movies," produced by Final Cut Film Production from Denmark, Copenhagen. This documentary is shot in Medan, Indonesia, in It reports on a case of obscenity which reaches the extreme. You know if you know history that in in there was a very tense situation in Indonesia. President Sukarno oscillating between communists and right-wingers. The communists tried a coup d'etat, the right immediately struck back, and then there was one of the most terrible ethnic political cleansings. Around two and a half million Chinese were slaughtered, mostly under the pretext that they were suspected communists and so on and so on. So this movie, this documentary portrays today's careers of some of the key organizers of that ethnic slaughter who are nightmarish brutal people. Now today they are of course senators, businessmen, whatever you want. Now comes the really depressing terrible thing. They don't hide anything. They publicly boast about it and with pleasure, obvious pleasure, reenact. That's so depressing about this movie. For example, one of their main guys explains to the journalist who interviews him that it took them a couple of weeks to discover which is the mode the most efficient and pleasurable way to rape a woman and at the same time kill her. No, that you need a somebody to help you who puts a wire around her head. I'm not going to details. But now comes the horror. Not only is there no shame, but they do this in front of TV, in front of TV, namely after a documentary about their life was done, they appeared on a talk show in one of the big state TV channels in Indonesia. And I couldn't believe that conversation. Like the guy explains how to rape a woman, blah blah, and then the moderator says, "What a wonderful insight! A big round of applause for this gentleman!" and so on. It's totally it's totally nightmarish. What makes it even more nightmarish but interesting is that they also report to the crucial answer to the crucial question, how were they able to do this? Their answer is, but I'm not blaming Hollywood, don't worry, American movies. They, while they were torturing, killing and so on, they even dressed as and copied their idea because they were all movie fans, they liked James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, those gangster and film noir movies from late 30s, 40s, early 50s. And they acted even dressed as those heroes. And they imagined themselves as those heroes in in action. That's always I claim the crucial point to to see how should I put it, to look at the to analyze which fantasy, which fantasmatic screen made it possible for guys like this to do what they were doing. So of course the question to ask here is what kind of society are we living in where even the minimal public shame is suppressed? You know the Nazis at least claimed no we didn't do it, denied it, and you have that famous statement by Heinrich Himmler that Holocaust, killing the Jews, will be the most glorious chapter of German history, but a chapter which unfortunately will never be written. Like we have to keep it secret. Here it's not even that, they publicly boast about it. The crucial thing here I claim is that we should avoid two traps. First, the cheap America bashing, yeah yeah you see Hollywood, the worst influence. Absolutely no, but also not the opposite mistake which would be a more even racist one: yes, those primitive Indonesians and so on and so on. I think we approach here a much more difficult question of first the let's call them in this learned term, dislocating effects of capitalist globalization. What kind of moral vacuum is created by today's global trends? Because things like this are not happening only are not happening only there, only in only in only in Indonesia. They're happening all around this gradual how should I put it, growing obscenity, shamelessness of of power and so on and so on. So if you allow me to go on with another point, this is why, faced with this let's call it shamelessness of power, maybe we who want to be the left today, I have here a very obscene proposition, but I mean it very seriously, maybe the time has come when we if we want to be realistic, I want to be a radical left, we should no longer play that role from the you know, imagine the enemy as somebody uptight conservative with dignity and we things we do something liberating if we, I don't know, talk dirty, provocations and so on. Unfortunately the power is turning more and more obscene, so maybe things like civility, decency, so maybe we should take it over. I will give you an example which maybe will hurt some of you, but the only guy who will appear an idiot is as usual me, I'm at least honest here. Do you remember, maybe some of you do, how do you remember a couple of years ago, I think even there was in at New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City there was the big retrospective Andres Serrano works There a photograph "Piss Christ" caused a scandal. It depicts a crucifix immersed in urine. And then there was even a congressional debate and so on and so on. Predictably, some left liberals defended this painting. Here is how they did it in New York Times, I quote it literally: "Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Mr. Serrano struggles against inhibitions about the human body. His use of bodily fluids is not intended to arouse disgust, but to challenge the notion of disgust where the human body is concerned. It is possible to see Mr. Serrano's use of bodily fluids as pure provocation, but you can also believe that Mr. Serrano views them as a form of purification. The fluids make us look at the images harder and consider basic religious doctrine about matter and spirit." End of quote. The problem for me with this defense is that it works all too well. Its logic covers almost everything. Here I warn you this is obscene, here comes my provocation. Let us say I, me, I were to publish a video clip depicting in detail how I shit. How the anal hole gradually gets wider then a sausage falls out, while also showing the stupidly satisfied relaxed expression of my face when the hole closes. Then you told me how can you do this vulgarity? Then here is what I will say: "Mr. Zizek struggles against the inhibitions about human body. His use of bodily excrements is not intended to arouse disgust but to challenge the notion of disgust where human body is concerned. It is possible to see Mr. Zizek's use of bodily excrements as pure provocation. But you can also believe that Mr. Zizek views them as a form of purification. The body gets purified by ejecting excrements. The excrements make us look at the images harder and consider basic religious doctrine about matter and spirit and so on and so on." You see my point, it works. So I'm not against very radical artistic provocations. I'm just saying they must really work. You know like it doesn't just work work if you say oh let's provoke and so on. Those in power are provoking us enough. We get enough provocations from there. Now this finally brings us to the big question you are probably waiting me to address: the question of violence. The great ideological divide between liberal and radical left concerns the use of so-called illegitimate violence. The radical leftist answer was developed among others by Bertolt Brecht who in his short text "The Intellectual Beast is Dangerous" writes, a quote from Brecht: "A beast is something strong, terrible, devastating. The word emits a barbarous sound. But wait a minute, does he mean this critically? No, because then the text goes on. The key question in fact is this: how can we become beasts? Beasts in such a sense that the fascists will fear for their domination. We have to understand that goodness must also be able to injure, to injure savagery." And I think that Brecht, far from being a kind of a proto-totalitarian, is here at his most critical. He is basically taking over those lines from the Bible which I, of course, appreciate more, you know all those theories of Jesus saying I don't bring I don't bring love I bring sword, I bring devastation, if you don't hate your mother and father you cannot be my follower, if you don't have a sword buy sell everything you have buy a sword and so on and so on. How to read this in conjunction with with his love your neighbor and so on and so on? I claim that we need, this is what in Christianity we call work of love. Work of love has to include some kind of violence. The whole point is what kind of violence. I would like to begin by the most elementary levels of insults. My good friend Alain Badiou recently being accused of using insults, wrote something wonderful in a letter to Le Monde I think. Here is the quote from Alain Badiou: "What characterizes politics, even if capital-parliamentarism enforces its domination up to making us forget it, is that in politics there are enemies. And why for devil's sake, if they are true enemies, should it be prohibited for me to insult them? To compare them to vultures, jackals, bulls, headless lynx and even to rats? To vipers fat or not, up to hyenas literal or not." End of quote. Why do I agree with him? Because I think that the liberal prohibition of enemies, you know oh we have no enemies there are just competitors and so on, has a very precise implication. If there are no true enemies, if there is no true struggle in politics, this means that those who really disagree with us are not simply our enemies but are excluded from the very scope of humanity so anything goes against them. Paradoxically, the first step in recognizing the very humanity of the enemy should be to fully accept the unavoidability of taking sides in politics. It is them or us, there is no third place above the struggle. For example, in Hugo Chavez, and I'm deeply critical of him, I think he is a failure already, not external failure but in a in itself in his project a failure. But nonetheless, I remember how in Chavez in Venezuela was accused of subordinating the judicial sphere to his executive power, of depriving courts of their independence. But the first thing one should ask upon hearing this accusation is, but which was the state of the judicial system Chavez was intervening into? Who dominated it politically? Was this system really a model of democratic neutrality? That is to say, I have some Lacanian psychoanalytic friends in in Venezuela who told me Chavez is horrible, he changed constitutional court. I asked them okay, what was the structure before? They admitted it was just another group extremely partial, even worse than what Chavez is doing today. Then they added, but it should have been done in a democratic way. Well why didn't they do it? I think that you know sometimes here you have to make hard choices. And effectively that's the brutal logic of politics. Sometimes how should I put it, evoking democracy at in such moments effectively means condoning the previous much worse injustice. This is what I'm tempted to call the parallax lesson of terror. This parallax was rendered perfectly, now you will say but this is my European Jacobin perversity, no no it's one of you, of your of your authors who put it in wonderful terms. None other than Mark Twain. Listen to these wonderful lines from Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." He is of course told answering to the criticism of those who rejected the Jacobin terror as horror and so on. Quote, "It's one of yours, no European decadence. There were two reigns of terror if we would remember it and consider it. The one wrought in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood. One shatters- our shudders are all for the horrors of the minor terror, the momentary terror so to speak, whereas what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by the brief terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and more over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves." End of quote. So if one deplores the Jacobin terror, one if one does only that, one thereby says yes to that older and real real terror. So that's the first thing I'm tempted to emphasize here. It's not a question, I hope you got it, it's not the question that I am advocating Jacobin terror, although de facto I am, yes but that's another story. No no, if you know let me give you my main reason, which may be weird to you, artistic. You know which is the painting of French revolution? I hope you most of us know it. The famous Jean-Louis David painting "The Death of Marat." Did you notice the strange nature of that painting? It's let's say this is the painting, the lower third you have the bathtub, the dead Marat, and then the upper two-thirds, you remember what they are? Nothing, just darkness. It's abs- it's as if he precisely avoided that easy justification. How would this same painting be done let's say in a really totalitarian regime? We would have the dead Marat but instead of seeing this darkness, it would have been filled probably let's say by a dream of the dying Marat, happy French people dancing when revolution will win. You don't find that there. It's a wonderful painting. Marat is almost as squeezed squeezed into this squeezed into the frame. And I claim, and I agree here with Clark, the first one art historian who emphasized this, it's as it were as if this is the first step towards later Malevich, all the sorry black square stuff and so on and so on. I mean it's a it's a tremendous painting. So okay, I'm trying to tell not to mention more more more obvious things, like that you know stop with terror of the French revolution. Look at the statistics. In those couple of months of terror, less people were killed than just in a couple of weeks after the Thermidor took over. The problem is just that the Jacobins chopped off a couple of high heads, king and so on, while hundreds were instantly killed afterwards. Who cares? They were nobody, nobody noticed it. Now I will make a step further, maybe even more problematic for you. What we should question here is a certain way of so-called anti-totalitarianism which I find problematic. And I will try to explain why. I would like to take as a starting point the liberal enthusiasm for the so-called "Third Wave" phenomenon. Maybe you remember it. I am I am here I am here referring to an event, I think it was in some California high school in the 60s where, you know, it's the old story, a professor wanted to teach his students how was Nazism possible. So he told them let's organize let's organize a a society where the let's organize a a movement called "The Third Wave." The professor told his students that the motto of this movement will be: strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride. He disciplined them and so on and so on, and then he himself was shocked at how students started to collaborate. They even without him asking his pupils, they even started to denounce to him some of others, you know they don't really follow the rules and so on and so on. So he was so shocked that after four days he convoked a meeting and told them, listen, this was all an experiment, it's a fake. I hope you now understand how easy it was to seduce people to become totalitarian. And then of course with liberals you get a multiple orgasm. You see how the beast is there and in any moment we can become. I totally reject this reading. I think that this experiment was deeply mystifying. And okay, I'm not going into the detail. If you want the detailed analysis read my next book. But my answer is simply this one: what is false in this experiment is that it opposes directly the so-called liberal, peaceful, tolerant openness and the universe of discipline, strength, action and so on. All that differs from liberalism into that group. Sorry, what I am tempted to say is that I can well imagine a movement which requires discipline, pride, strength through community, action and so on and which I would totally support. My god, all radical emancipatory movements also function like that. I can imagine a radical emancipatory movement which says yes, strength through discipline. Why? My gosh, because imagine a poor country because we are poor, we don't have arms, the only thing we have is our discipline, our unity and so on and so on. The trick of this operation is precisely that it throws all of it together. Emancipatory discipline is ultimately the same as the right-wing fascism, they're all the same and so on and so on. What I what I claim is that the crucial distinction is blurred here. We sometimes we need discipline, we need sacrifice and so on. We shouldn't leave all these categories to the enemy. It's my god, if you listen to some of the radical even left liberals, it is as if if you say my god, comrades, discipline, we need order. Proto-fascist, proto-totalitarian and so on. No, I don't buy this. But don't misunderstand me here. This doesn't mean I am advocating a new fascism or whatever. What I'm advocating is something much more complex. And even with violence, I'm very careful. I would say if you allow me just to conclude very briefly now. I would say one thing here. When I talk about violence, I'm not talking about act so much active violence in the sense of killing, whatever. Okay, sometimes that is needed, but I'm the first to concede it should be used purely in or at least predominantly in defensive terms. I'm saying two much more precise things. First that violence should be much more, let's call it an interactive violence, a violence of stopping when the situation is unbearable, a violence of non-participation. In this sense, I answer to that stupid polemics against me in the New Republic and I will develop it in my future book. How: yes, violence, but violence in the sense in which as I wrote to provoke my enemies, in which the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough. In what sense? Then I go on: in the sense in which Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. In what sense? Hitler's violence was pure violence of impotence. He killed millions because he didn't dare to change a little bit capitalist relations or whatever. It was clearly a violence, how should I put it, he was doing all possible things so that nothing would really change. While whatever you think about Gandhi, he really wanted to interrupt, stop the functioning of the British state in India. So this is my first point. My second point: the first violence should be directed against ourselves. By this, no no I don't mean any masochistic whipping to render us saints or whatever. But a very painful process of how should I put it, violently breaking with or getting rid, liberating ourselves from the dreams which are not our dreams, how should I put it. You know the problem the true problem as if there is a lesson to be learned from 20th century revolutions, which is why I'm the first to admit they were a total catastrophe. Maybe the greatest tragedy in humanity, the total fiasco of the of the communist left which ended in Stalinism and then in the later decadence and so on and so on. We should learn from this total ethical, political, economic and so on catastrophe. The first lesson is that as Hegel knew it, the German idealist, it's not enough to overthrow the enemy. First you must overthrow the hold the enemy has over your dreams as it were. You must not, to put it pathetically, dream dreams which are not really yours. Just one example here, a wonderful novel from ex-communist country, the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. I advise you to read it, it's available in translation. A wonderful short novel called "The Palace of Dreams." It's a story of Tabir Saray, a Palace of Dreams in the capital of an unnamed vast 19th-century Balkan empire, it's basically Turkey, modeled on Turkey. It's a crazy story, the idea is this one: in this great society, sorry, in this great palace, thousands of bureaucrats collect dreams from the entire population and interpret them and then try to isolate the central dream to give it to the to the Sultan as providing the key to the future of the country. The reason for this palace and for all the struggles among different factions about which dream will be privileged as the as the master dream is nicely spelled out in the novel. In my now I quote a short passage from the novel. "'In my opinion,' Kurt went on, Kurt is one of the heroes of the novel, 'it is the only organization in the state, this Palace of Dreams, where the darker side of its subject's consciousness enters into direct contact with the state itself. The masses don't rule, of course, but they do possess a mechanism through which they influence all the state's affairs, including its crimes, and that mechanism is the Palace of Dreams. Do you mean to say,' asks the guest, 'that the masses are to a certain extent responsible for everything that happens and so should to a certain extent be guilty about it? Yes,' said Kurt," and so on and so on. That's crucial. How every power always reproduces itself through let's call it ideological dreams, fantasies, by means of by means of which subjects themselves are in a way invested into the structure of power. And the first state of- the first step of liberation is to get rid of this hold. Let me take the extreme example. If some of you know Russian literature, you will know what I'm talking about. It even shocked me. Stalinism at its worst. But it's shocking if you read the biographies even of great dissidents. Mandelstam, Shostakovich, half dissident, okay, Pasternak and so on. How they were all incredibly fascinated by Stalin. As if with all their terrible experiences, they incredibly wanted to meet- you know that tragic story when Stalin called Pasternak asking him after Mandelstam was arrested, "Are you a friend of Mandelstam? What should we do with him?" And Pasternak tried to squeeze out, "I don't know," then Stalin said, "Tell me, we should talk." Then Pasternak says, "Yes, I would like to talk about you, about death and life, the meaning of life," and Stalin cut it and so on. The same with Mandelstam, the same with Bulgakov and so on. They they all at the level of dreams were invested. And again, the first step of liberation which of course is not physically violent, but it is, is to do this: to change your dreams, to change your dreams as it were. Which is why, incidentally, I like the movie, which some people think is proto-fascist. I think it's not. It's one of the greatest Hollywood movies: "Fight Club." I don't think it's a proto-fascist film. I think it's the lesson is precisely this: before you beat others, you must beat yourself in the sense of beating out of you all that fantasmatic content which by means of which you are invested libidinally into power. Which is why one of the ultimate shots from Hollywood is for me, you remember that scene when Ed Norton confronting his boss starts to beat himself. This is the first step of liberation. It's much more horrible than because you get my point: if he were to attack the boss directly, it would have meant screw you, I want to be boss. By beating himself he ruins the entire field. My last point, really the last. Here maybe just to conclude, I would like to make one point clear so that you will not accuse me of being confused. I use, I'm well aware that I used the term violence in an indistinct way. I did my homework, I'm well aware of this nice distinction drawn among others by Hannah Arendt between power, authority and violence. Power being let's call it the natural authority, the charisma that some people have. Authority is always a social relation. Often you don't have to have a personal charisma to have authority. You know all these stories of somebody is a jerk, an idiot, once you see he has a crown, oh it's authority. And violence... here Hannah Arendt does something intelligent: she opposes violence and power. For them, as he put it, for her as she put it in wonderful, wonderfully precise terms, violence is ineffective in the sense that it's always a sign of impotence. Violence is the resort of those who precisely don't have power. Which is why a power which has to resort to direct violence is a power which is already in panic. This may sound strange to you but if you read memoirs of how they perceived its rule, Hitler, Stalin and so on, they were all the time in total panic. That's why again they had to be continuously continuously violent. But at some so this is incidentally true even at the level of personal authority. Let's take the traditional figure of the father. I hope you get it or I hope this is also your experience, at least it's mine, that a father who actually beats you, it may hurt, but it's a ridiculous ultimately impotent figure. With a true father with authority, violence is purely virtual. You know, just a look at you, no? The moment he has to act out, take recourse to real violence, it's an admission of defeat. Okay, but where I would nonetheless disagree with Arendt is that the whole point is precisely that there is always a level of how should I put it, indistinction between violence and power. A structurally necessary breakdown of their distinction. There has to be a threat of violence behind power. And the way the power, every power retains its authority is precisely through obfuscating the violence on which it is based on which it is based. And with this I conclude: I claim that the first step of politicization is to see violence there where we do not even perceive it. Even perceive it. So what we have is terrorist violence... [audio cuts off]
time and I really like to be here. I am very grateful for not only for incredible hospitality, the introductions, I'm also I also like very much the way my arrival was prepared, for example those T-shirts with portrait of me there. I love it because if some of you are ladies old enough to have daughters who are in dating age, I'm asking you a simple question, referring to that image of me like, would you allow that guy to take your daughter? No, never. Another thing that I like is I feel as if it were in good old totalitarian times. I have this fascist guard here. No, I mean you are free to applaud, but if you don't applaud enough they will liquidate you. No, seriously. I deeply agree with what you said, how the fight for the status of New Orleans is precisely is it part of the United States or not. If you speak to those arrogant upper-middle-class multiculturalist liberals from the North, their idea is that they sympathize with you but precisely in the same way as you sympathize with foreigners. For them, to cut a long story short, you are you are part of Latin America, practically a banana republic which by mistake ended here. The point is no, you are genuinely, maybe even more than those colleagues from the North, part of the United States. And I think that your this exceptional point, now you may disagree with me here, but nonetheless I think it didn't begin only recently. I remember already from when I was young, which means unfortunately more than thirty years ago, I discovered this area of United States through one I think of the great American novels although I don't agree with all its political implications, "All the King's Men." And it's it's for me what interested me is of course the figure of Huey Long who is behind. And I claim that you see, this is maybe one of the ways, probably some of you will disagree here with me, to test someone is he a real radical left or a liberal. Liberals are usually horrified, oh proto-fascist and so on and so on. I've read books about Huey Long. I claim this is a mistake. Huey Long was not your version of Father Coughlin, MacAfee or what and those disgusting two antisemites. He was okay, whatever you call populist, demagogue, but you know that at the same time I think he was the first one to build hospitals for black people, to give to women positions and so on. He broke he broke the rule of this very restrained, wealthy, so-called liberal elite. This has to be done. He also embodies for me in a way the limitation of American democracy. Not that ours is better in Europe, but nonetheless in the sense that a simple liberal criticism of Huey Long is too short. The tragic thing is that only a guy like Huey Long was able to do it, what had to be done. Okay, so now be prepared nonetheless for some theory. Since we are here at Loyola University and since although I'm an atheist I define myself as a Christian atheist, I would like to begin in a very religious way, but sincerely, by a quote from Paul in Ephesians He provided I think one of the first perfect definitions of critique of ideology. Maybe some of you know the quote. Here is the literal quote, okay literal, official translation. "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against leaders, against authorities, against the world rulers," the Greek term cosmocratoras, "the world rulers of this darkness, against the," wonderful expression, "spiritual wickedness in the heavens." You see, it's a wonderful expression. It's not up in heaven there is purity, down common people are dirty. No, wickedness is up there in heavens. Or, to translate Paul into today's language, our struggle is not against concrete corrupted individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification which sustains it. That's what Paul really meant, but we are in another age. So what I want to do based on this is just to go on practicing the old half-forgotten art of the critique of ideology. When then are we in ideology? When we read an ideological proclamation, big clever statement, American patriotism, socialism, democracy, we are well aware that this is not how real people experience it. In order to pass from abstract propositions to people's real lives, we have to add to the abstract propositions the unfathomable density of a life world context. And I claim ideology are not abstract propositions in themselves. Freedom, democracy, whatever, ideology is this very density of a symbolic network which I use the term here in the Kantian sense, schematizes these abstract propositions in the sense of renders them livable, provides the background for the way we concretely understand them. Take military ideology. It becomes livable, officially it's discipline, struggle for your country and so on, but I claim it becomes livable only against the background of the obscene unwritten rules and rituals, marching chants, ribald sexual innuendoes, in which it is embedded. For me, when I was young I served in my country, ex-Yugoslavia, the army and this was for me almost the moment of formation of my insights. Where to be frank I'm a kind of what you call control freak, obsessional neurotic, almost a fascist character. I like order, efficiency. So quite openly I was glad to go to the army. But then came the disappointment of my life. Army is not that. Nothing functioned. It was all one big obscenity, improvisation and so on and so on. And it took me some time to get it that this was not any kind of subversive resistance. That's how power functions. What appears to be a secret resistance to power, all the obscenities, dirty jokes and so on and so on, is the way power is sustained. Which is why my first thesis: if there is an ideological experience at its purest, it is at the moment when we adopt the attitude of wise ironic distance and laugh at the follies we are ready to believe. You know when you say no bullshit, cut the crap, let's go to how things really are. Be careful when someone uses that language, it means you will get ideology at its purest. And I can even give you an example. You know popular philosopher Harry Frankfurt who wrote the book "On Bullshit." You remember, it was a mega bestseller short essay. I immediately was suspicious and my suspicion was well justified because I read an interview with Frankfurt, probably he didn't dare to do this here, about two years ago in a German philosophical journal where they asked him, okay but give me an example, do you have an example of today in United States of a politician who is not bullshitting. He said John McCain. Here is the bullshit. So again, what is ideology? During a public debate that I had with a person whom I don't especially like, Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French new philosopher at New York Public Library, something interesting happened. First he made a pathetic case for liberal tolerance, something like would you not like to live in a society where you can make fun of the predominant religion without the fear of being killed for it, where women are free to dress the way they like and choose the partner as a partner the men they love and so on and so on. And I made, I must say, a similar pathetic case for communism. With the growing food crisis, ecological crisis and so on and so on, is there not a need to find a new way of collective action which radically differs from market as well as from state administration. The irony was that when we both stated our case in these abstract terms, we both couldn't but agree with each other. I said what should I say, no I want women to be oppressed and subject to clit of, of course I want that. And even he said, oh if this is communism then I am a communist and so on. This means that we were in ideology. You got it? Because we obliterated this dense background, as it were background noise, which on account of which when you say today things like he said, it's not just what you get. It's the whole set of unwritten rules which provide a very specific concrete meaning of what you are saying. I don't want to lose your time here, but I've elaborated this in some of my last books, I think especially in "Violence." This is a phenomenon namely which immensely fascinates me. How what a complex phenomenon social rules, norms are. Why? Rules, norms are not only simply norms which tell you how to act. For reasons which can be nicely developed in psychoanalytic theory, norms are never consistent. Whenever you want to become part of a certain collective, you discover that there are some written or unwritten, whatever, rules regulating the interaction of people who are in. But then you soon discover something else, that it's not only explicit rules which matter. What matters even more are a kind of a meta- higher level rules, rules which tell you how to deal with the explicit rules. For example, often things are officially prohibited but the true message between the lines is do it if you are not an idiot. You know like in sexuality in some countries even at the level of criminal. For example, it can be nicely demonstrated that the entire Soviet Union functioned only through smuggling, through black market and so on, so the official rules had to be violated. And if you followed the explicit rules, you were simply an idiot, you didn't get it. But a much more interesting example is the opposite one. It's not that the law or the rules prohibit something but between the lines the message is do it, it's when you are allowed, solicited even, to do something on condition that you don't really do it. You know like you are given a free choice on condition that you make the right choice, as it were. And this is another fascinating topic. I think this is the fundamental maybe zero level ideological mechanism, to give you a choice on condition that that the choice is free. In one of my early books, so I hope you don't know the example, I quoted an example precisely from the time when I was in the Yugoslav army which is very simple, even stupid, but it's wonderful how purely clinical this example is. I don't know how it is in your army but in probably in most armies it is as it was in Yugoslav army where I served where after the beginning, the first drill two, three weeks, you swear the oath. You know it's the solemn procedure, all young soldiers are gathered then you do the usual bullshit, I am ready to do everything up to dying for my country and so on and so on. Then after all of us pronouncing these words in public, each of us then had to go to a desk and sign the oath. And then a friend of mine, I wouldn't dare to do it but he did it, he was one of my heroes, when it came to signing the oath, he said no I will not sign the oath. Then the officer asked him, tell him but are you crazy, you will be arrested, you must sign it. The guy said, wait a minute, give me a clear answer. Am I obliged? Are you ordering me to sign it or not? And you know it was a magic moment where a crack in ideological edifices appeared. Because the so- the officer told him, no are you crazy, this is an oath, this is your free act. Then the guy said no, but if it's a free act I will not do it. Tell me just it's an order and I will do it. And then a miracle happened, I have a photocopy of this, the officer wrote him on a piece of paper, an order to freely sign the oath. This is this is how it functions. Okay, it's never as simple as that. I'm well aware of it. But what I'm saying is that if you want to understand an ideology, you know always look at these ambiguities. It's never what it says, it's how you relate to what it says. Where can you feel this gap at its purest? Precisely in what people usually celebrate as spontaneous outbursts. For example, you are in a formal debate then you explode, you get bored, so you do whatever, let's say you start swearing dirty words and so on. I claim if you look closely at how this functions, it has nothing to do with any kind of spontaneous explosion or whatever. Precisely these allegedly spontaneous outbursts are the most codified part of it. You must learn them. You become part of a civilization, collective, whatever, precisely when you learn these carnivalesque moments of how to how to violate the explicit rules. Let me take not only swearing but two, three other examples. For example, drinking hard alcohol or smoking. I claim there is nothing originally, if you smoke and if you remember how you learned to smoke. It's usually first when you were I don't know in your early teens in some initiatic group where somebody offers you, are you a man enough, if you are a man try, you try and I can guarantee you if you're normal, if you're an alien it's different. But there are aliens. I know two aliens in United States. Pat Buchanan is a sweet human, Pat Robertson is an alien. He doesn't believe in the modern body, he believes in those old ones, no. Pat Buchanan is purely human. Pat Robertson is purely alien. But that's another story. But I am saying that if we are human, admitted, your first the reaction first reaction was you started to cough, you didn't like it. Smoking is inherently an unpleasant experience. But then you were told, but wait a minute, that's the transgressive thing to do and so on and so on. So it comes afterwards that you start to enjoy. It's the same with drinking, if not wine at least the hard liquors. I mean they have a bitter taste, they burn, so when you have a slightly dissolute father who tells you when you are six, seven, be a man, try it. Doing a favor to your father, it's not. Then you learn. So again, it's it's strictly I claim our pleasure in this kind of things is strictly a second-level pleasure. It has more to do with how should I put it, with social group, with participating in a collective act of transgression or what. I mean, let's be frank here. If you want to drink for pure pleasure you usually do some stupid fruit juice. You don't go to whiskey or what. And I claim, but I don't have time to develop in detail that it goes the same even for sex. I can understand if you want pleasure masturbate, it's much simpler and so on and so on. I claim that collective sex, in the sense of not orgy but doing it with a partner, is strictly something you have to learn. It's a learned experience. It doesn't come it doesn't come naturally. Again, so you see my point, which is that violating the public rules is not done by a private ego but is enjoyed by the same public rules which allegedly prohibit this. This is what this is what accounts for all the snobbery of artistic taste. For example, me coming from snobbish Europe, if you like classical music, I do. And we know who are supposed to be the big guys, Beethoven, his symphonies and so on. But if you are in the close circle of those who pretend to know it, if you say if you make one of the obvious choices, no, like I like Beethoven's ninth symphony, you're considered a total idiot. The trick is to select a work which is usually neglected or considered minimal and to say ah, but this is the real one. And if you know Beethoven, the field is getting pretty narrow. When I was young, you could get away by opting a late string quartets. They are out now, too well known. Now you must go maybe because they're really hard and boring, the late piano sonatas are one of the candidates and so on, if you like them. So the point is again that it's only this slight deviation from the common wisdom which accounts for you strictly being in. And I claim the same goes to marriage. This idea of marriage as fidelity is typical adolescent idea. Since I am at a Catholic university, I would say the whole wisdom of a Catholic church is based on the idea on what there, that there is more than just the same the same root in the two words adult and adultery. You become adult when you know how to practice adultery. No, no, I mean it in a profound way, literally, when when you understand how how the institution reproduces itself through its small transgressions, exemptions and so on and so on. Let me give you the ultimate example. Did you see, to be ironic of course, one of the greatest movies of western civilization, "The Sound of Music"? Look at it. It's a wonderful example of ideology. What is the true message of the movie? You know the story, Sister Maria sent to take care of the children of von Trapp family, then she okay in the movie Julie Andrews falls in love with Baron von Trapp, Christopher Plummer. Then she falls she falls in love too much. In a panic, being sexually attracted to the to the Baron, she goes, you remember, that's the crucial scene of the film I claim. She goes to the Mother Superior and tells her I'm still tempted by the Baron, what should I do? It's a call for punishment, no? She asks make me pray, make me fast, whatever. And then there is an incredible scene which is totally obscene, I am always almost ashamed of watching it. Do you remember what happens there? The Mother Superior sings a song. An obscene song which starts like "Climb Ev'ry Mountain." And the message of that song is "Go back and seduce the guy, screw like crazy." And that's, you see, I claim there is no subversive whatever here. This is how Catholicism functions. You know like I say this with all respect and not to blame Catholicism, Protestants are even worse and so on. But like, you know, the message is not obey and don't do it. That's the explicit message. The implicit message is obey, pay lip service, and then secretly you can have all that you want. Maybe even, sorry for the obscenity, as a priest all the small boys and so on and so on. I'm strictly mean without any offense to Catholicism. I think it's a great example that effectively there must be something of what I call an inherent transgression. The cases of pedophilia are so numerous that you cannot def- account for it in this simple way like oh yes of course priests are human like others so we have them. No, they have too much of them. It's it's a much more it's a much more complex thing. But again, what I wanted to emphasize is how is how this is how religion works today. Even if you read some statements in most conservative Catholic countries. For example, recently I was in Poland. A very conservative antisemitic country. It's very difficult to meet a Polish guy who is not a Jew and who is not antisemitic. But nonetheless, I I'm was shocked about how there even Catholic fundamentalists relate to sexuality. On the one hand, they have the usual the usual dogma, you know, sex only in marriage, blah blah blah. But then it was so clear that their real message to the young people was a much more obscene one. It was look, in a permissive society where you just can do whatever you want it gets boring. We offer you this thrilling additional pleasure of giving you rules which you are not only allowed but secretly even solicited to of course not publicly to to violate and then this makes for a much more thrilling sexual experience. A couple of times a priest even openly even openly claims it. And incidentally, there is a truth in it, obviously. Like what about the opposite position, someone like Marquis de Sade? Brutally just enjoy. I mean, I hope you got it after reading for example his most mechanical systematic work, Days of Sodom." I think it's Sodom. Yeah. That how you read the cases of perversion. That after a certain number, I would say after it's totally desexualized. It becomes a pure formal logical permutation. Like you take a dog, an ox, a woman, two childs and you know how they do it. Next example, you know, you take two dogs, two women and whatever. It's totally desexualized. So again, this complexity has to be taken into account. But where are we today here? I claim today, this is more I would say a traditional ideology which you can locate at all levels. This how should I call it, two-level ideology. The first thing we should say today is that it's often the opposite. If traditional ideology functions in this way that I found some traces of it there but not only there, in Catholic ideology, and my analysis here is very abstract, sorry if it appears that I want to focus on Catholicism. I can tell you that when communists even in power were in power in my country, they were much worse and open in this hypocrisy. For example, the official ideology of ex-Yugoslavia was some kind of self-management, anti-Stalinist communism. But the point was that if you took the ruling ideology too seriously, if someone suspected you that you truly suspected you that you truly believed in it, where you usually lost your job. It was a very nice paradox, you know, of course. And this is why, if I may make another detour, this is why I like Ayn Rand. When people ask me like are you crazy or what. I like ideologies who undermine the ruling ideology not by subverting it from the outside but through what I call over-identification, as it were showing the cards too directly, too openly. That's why her status is very ambiguous. Ayn Rand, you know, she is liberal capitalist individualism at its purest, but she puts it so openly that she cannot become really the official ideology. She's an embarrassment. And guys like this are always the most interesting ones. Like in early early modern Catholicism, is the Jansenists in France, especially Blaise Pascal. This is why he was later in big trouble, excommunicated and so on. He, as it were, showed the cards in a too open way. So this is one strategy. That is to say the explicit rule of law, regulation prohibits it, the message between the lines do it discreetly and so on. But we have also the opposite operation more and more today, where the explicit message is enjoy, have a nice life and so on and prohibitions are implicit. But that's another story, I don't have time to develop it, but I think it's crucial for understanding where we are today. I think the diagnosis of some conservative religious people that we don't believe and so on, I totally don't agree with it. I think we believe more than ever today. But what I want to say is that so that you will see how this multitude of levels function. To analyze the ideological investments of a statement, you must precisely look at this obscene implicit presuppositions. Let me give you a very pathetic example. Let's suppose you read one of these famous ads, I thought I think it was even in today's US Today which I read in my hotel. You know, the photo of three disfigured with disfigured lips black children and then, you know, contribute some money, you can make a difference, you can save this child's life and so on and so on. What happens if you how should I put it, if you ask yourself but what is the true message of this message beneath the call for charity? I think in majority of cases and for the majority of us something pretty cynical. Something along the lines of I know that people are starving, living in horrible conditions around, but I don't care. And this ad is offering me a nice way out. I give the price of a couple of cappuccinos and not only I can not only I get rid of the problem, but I can also claim you see, I try to do something and so on and so on. The message is for cheap money we can as it were get rid, make you feel well and so on and so on. Okay, how where are we today with regard to all these things? I claim that more and more the way ideology functions today is directly as anti-ideology. By this I mean as a reference to how should I call it, if there is an ideological statement today it's something like you know none of us can be reduced just to some ideological category. None of us is simply a capitalist, a liberal, a Christian, an American. Beneath this each of us is a warm, rich human being with a whole wealth of traumas, dreams, fears and so on. That's what makes us real human beings. This idea that beneath public identity we are concrete rich individuals which cannot be reduced to abstract categories. Why is this ideology? Because the way this functions today I claim is to precisely obfuscate the ideologico-political consequences of what you are doing. Let me take an example maybe known to some of you. The two recent Israeli films and incidentally I'm not engaged here in Israel bashing and so on. It's a much more complex situation in the Middle East, but two films about Lebanon War. Ari Folman's animated documentary "Waltz with Bashir" and the more recent Samuel Maoz's "Lebanon." As you may know, Lebanon draws on the director's own memoirs as a young soldiers- soldier and the movie renders the war's fear and claustrophobia how most of the action is shot from within a tank. So the movie as it were abstracts from the enemies what they're doing and withdraw focus to the intimacy of war experience. I claim this is the ultimate again ideological gesture. All of a sudden the political stakes of what goes on, why are we here, are we killing Palestinians, do we have the right to be here? And I'm not saying the the the answer is necessarily no. I'm just saying that in this way which appears to be the ultimate way like forget ideologies, are you aware what horror war is, it's a wonderful way to precisely change something which is a large collective act with consequences, killing, political implications. All that matters suddenly become an intimate experience of fear and so on and so on. That's ideology at its purest. No wonder that in Israel when I visited and I often visit the country, I love it, I've encountered again and again this same strategy as part of how IDF, Israeli Defense Forces, legitimize their role. They it's very interesting and it's very intelligent I think they are doing. They are not saying Arabs are cowards, we are super soldiers, one battalion of us can take over Cairo or whatever. No, they all the time claim, as they put it, military is not in our genes. That is to say that we are people like others. We are also cowards, we can fall into a panic, we cry when there is shooting around us and so on and so on. I was witness, not literally witness, but saw on TV there a supreme example of this ideological manipulation where an Israeli special unit entered the apartment where an alleged terrorist's family lived, hoping to find the father. He was not there but mother and children were there. So what happened is that of course the the children awakened when brutally soldiers entered and started to cry and mother called her daughter by a name like come here, then the name so that I will console you. And then one of the soldiers, Israeli soldiers discovered realized that his daughter's name is the same as that Palestinian girl's name. And you know what he did? He opened his wallet and you see I have also a daughter of the same name, we are all humans and so on and so on. That's the lie embodied I claim. Precisely this idea beneath differences we are really all the same. If you want to see this ideology at its purest, I advise you to look at a film by Claude Lanzmann, you know the famous French documentary author, not the one we all know, "Shoah," but another one, "Tsahal," about Israeli defense forces. Where again it all focuses the entire movie is about this psychological dimension. No questioning of political consequences, just how did you feel in the Yom Kippur War when when Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal and then you have all this description I was crying, I was in a total panic. It's all one big it's all one big psychology. And so that where does here enter ideology? I cannot but respect, and I mean this without irony, the brutal honesty of the first generation founders of the state of Israel. How differently they were talking. All of them, that is to say the early Moshe Dayan and so on, from today's Israeli establishment. I mean, the way to to point out to today's Israel the weak points of their politics is not to criticize them from some abstract position but simply to remind them what their ancestors were, and by ancestors I don't mean the Bible, I mean simply two generations earlier, first generation Israel politicians, they were aware of it. I mean it's interestingly to read to read their statements where they clearly say it's not the question of justice. We are here, we took somebody else's land, maybe we have some right, they also have the right, and it simply a matter of war who will take it. I like this attitude. It at least honest. It openly says with none of this bullshit. And I noticed this bullshit. The nicest example of je sais bien, mais quand même, among atheist Israelis this is a standard joke, is how because do you know that Israel, this renders the country rather sympathetic for to me, you know that Israel is the most atheist country in the world? It's about they are atheists. But their their je sais bien, mais quand même is there is no God but nonetheless God gave us the land of Israel basically, yeah. Okay, so look a wonderful model of how honestly they put it. On 29th of April a group of Palestinians from Gaza crossed the border to plunder the harvest in the Nahal Oz kibbutz fields just across. Then there was Roi, a young Jewish member of the kibbutz who patrolled the fields. He tried to chase them away with the stick, he was seized by the Palestinians, carried back to the Gaza Strip, and when the next day the Palestinians gave the body to United Nations forces to return it to the Israel, his eyes had been plucked out. Moshe Dayan, then the chief of staff, delivered the eulogy at his funeral the following day. Listen to this carefully. "Let us not cast blame on the murderers today. What claim do we have against their mortal hatred of us? They have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza for the past eight years while right before their eyes we have transformed the land and villages where they and their ancestors once lived into our own inheritance. We have transformed." So you see the honesty. It's no bullshitting. It's we took the land from there, of course they hate us. Moshe Dayan says it. But now comes the mystery, the second paragraph. "It is not among the Arabs of Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek Roi's blood. How have we shut our eyes and refused to look squarely at our fate and see the destiny of our generation in all its brutality? Have you forgotten that this group of young people living in Nahal Oz bears the burden of Gaza's gates on its shoulders?" Obvious reference to Samson, the gates of Gaza and so on. But what's so interesting here is that you see how Dayan is reasoning. In the first paragraph, he openly admits that the Palestinians have at least some kind of right to hate the Israeli Jews since the Jews took their land. His conclusion however is not the obvious admission of one's own guilt, but to fully accept what he calls the destiny of our generation in all its brutality. That is to say to assume the burden, not guilt but burden, of the war where might will be right, where the stronger will win. The war was not about principles of justice, it was precisely an exercise in what Walter Benjamin called the mythic violence. I think if Israel were to return a little bit to this, not I'm not saying Israel should say in some stupid politically correct pro-Palestinian way sorry that we exist, we move to Europe and so on, but fundamentally how should I put it, fully admit the deadlock. That they don't have the right to simply play in the eyes of Palestinians the good guys, things would have maybe changed. Okay, many things also have to change among the Palestinians, I totally agree. Consequently I claim, let me make now a crazy proposal, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also this old motto from the the walls of Paris, "Soyons réalistes, demandons l'impossible." Let's be realistic, let's demand the impossible holds. If there is a lesson to be learned from the endlessly protracted Middle East negotiations, it is that I claim the main obstacle to peace is precisely what is offered as a realistic solution: the two separate states. Although none of the two sides really want this solution. Israel would probably prefer a little bit of West Bank that it is ready to seek to become a part of Jordan. And the Palestinians also consider the pre-67 Israel part of their land. So first let's be clear, nobody really wants the two states. But nonetheless it is somehow accepted by all of us as the only feasible solution. What both sides exclude as an impossible dream is the simplest and most obvious solution: a bi-national secular state comprising all of Israel plus the occupied territories and Gaza. Now you will say, I know what you will say, I'm crazy utopian, it's a utopian dream disqualified by the long history of hatred and violence. Here I think I have a perfect answer. It's not utopia, it's a reality. Isn't de facto the reality of today's Israel and occupied territories that it is de facto is a bi-national state? It is one state. Israel is de facto in control of it. It's controlled by one sovereign power: the state of Israel, which is then divided by internal borders. So that I claim the task should rather be to abolish the apartheid and transform all of it simply to accept it it is one state. And I am seriously advocating it. It may make so surprise you but what was for a long time a shocking idea is even accepted more and more by some still marginal parts there. You know why? Because this is the easiest solution even for the West Bank settlers. Nobody has to leave West Bank. They it's just that you accept what is de facto, one big Israel as a reality, of course with the proviso of making it de facto secular and so on and so on. Now we'll say it's still madness. Maybe is it, but then I claim we will not have a solution. It's as simple as that. Okay, let me go on with this idea of humanist no humanist just this reduction to but we are human as the form of ideology. Now I may I may disappoint some of you, but I would like to begin to conclude with an the opposite example from today's Cuba. If you want to read one of the most interesting detective writers today, it's Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer who does police procedurals set in today's Havana. His detective hero is an inspector, Mario Conde. And you know, the portrait of Cuba that you get is very realistic. I mean, it's not some idealized socialist Cuba, it's prostitution, poverty, the arrogance of ruling nomenclature and so on, even hunger, crime, prostitution. Again, so so first I thought oh my god this guy must have a nice villa in the suburbs of Miami or whatever. Then I was surprised to learn that not only he lives in Havana but he is no dissident there. He is there a big star, recognized and so on. And then I got it. This is the it's a kind of a zero level defense of today's Cuba. The message is of course revolution is screwed up, of course it's a misery, we are a lost generation. But nonetheless, and this has nothing to do with politics, it's simple ethical consistency, we must heroically accept what we are, not to escape into the dreams of Miami or whatever, but just with dignity to accept our reality, our love for this country and to go on living here. I think it's a very desperate strategy but much more effective than official propaganda. You see, this also is for me ideology. Now a next more complex step. When I what we get in this reduction of humans not to ideological categories but to concrete human being is is this what Christians call the love of a neighbor? Does this mean no don't treat the other as some abstract category, communist, socialist, capitalist, imperialist, enemy, see in him or her the neighbor, a concrete human being? No, no, no, it's much more complex here. You know in if you know truly the Judaeo-Christian tradition, you must know that neighbor is not a nice guy with whom we sympathize. Neighbor is rather like did you see there is a movie and a novel which effectively can be called subtitled into the becoming of a neighbor. It's I think Stephen King's "The Shining." When normal father becomes a neighbor by becoming this unfathomable monstrosity and so on and so on. So so my point is that precisely because ideology is explicit ideology is breaking down, we claim we live in post-ideological time, the only thing that matters is your be what you truly are and so on, authentic authentic authentic life that you should live, that the fear of the neighbor is explosively growing. How does this function? Let me give you an example which if some of you were at yesterday's debate I already mentioned it but I think I should repeat it because it's crucial. A one a little bit more than one year ago I was at Harvard with a friend of mine from Slovenia, Mladen Dolar, and at a dinner after our presentations we had some eight, nine people, we didn't know each other so an old professor who invited us said, "Okay, each of you should present himself. Please state your name, affiliation, field of work, and your sexual orientation." Okay, for my European sensibility this was a little bit stupid, no? Like it's none of your business. But what I am saying here, now comes the point, is that I am far from engaged here in the usual America bashing, no? No, no, you have your levels where you are more coming out open there as we have our own. My first association was but wait a minute, what happened when half a year ago a friend of mine from United States visited me and other Slovene friends in Slovenia, we went to the Adriatic coast to on a beach, and in Slovenia as it's in most of the Mediterranean countries now already for thirty years, topless is the standard, how should I put it. Nobody even notices it if you see women's breasts all around. But this was extremely offensive for the American friend. All so he saw, oh my god, another breast, another breast. So you see the point is that it's not that we are more civilized or whatever. The point is that each culture and it's a complex reason for why how does it function, why for you it's not a problem to publicly admit up to a point, I know, your sexual orientation but much more difficult for women to walk topless, with us nobody even notices it but and so on and so on. But what I claim is that precisely what my American friend feared is precisely this is the fear of the neighbor, this desiring otherness of jouissance which in a way invades your incredibly embarrassing stupid that narrative usually is. For example, I'm still now traumatized even thinking when I was young, one of the starter formulas was, you know, the housewife is alone at home, a plumber comes and says, "Lady, I fix the hole in kitchen," and then lady says, "But I have another hole, can you also do that?" Embarrassing. What's the lesson here? I think it's censorship. What is prohibited, to put it very simply, is to have explicit hardcore, see it all, and at the same time an, let's call it naively, emotionally engaging serious story. It's as if it would have been too much. You either have a serious story, but then you don't see it all, or you see it all, but then the story must be ridiculous. It's precisely, you know, if you see it all, this subjective engagement must be censored. Which is why, incidentally, I know that in France for example Catherine Breillat and some others try to do, let's call them seriously artistic hardcore. Like if you saw maybe her movie "Romance." You see everything in sex but at the same time engaging story. But that's why she cannot make a a real breakthrough. That's why she remains marginal. Now of course I know this is no longer the case today. But my thesis is that today it's even worse. Today today the predominant so I was informed, not that I hate hardcore but it simply too depressive to watch it, it's like a shortcut to impotence I claim. You have to and you notice it ideologically, it's so-called Gonzo, which is a form of pornography where they no longer even pretend that it's a story. A couple does it or three, four whatever, I don't want to limit myself to a couple because then I will be accused of binary logic, I think three, four of them whatever. And then, you know, they engage in a debate with the director, with the cameraman, "Am I good? Laugh." You know like to make it funny. I claim the censorship is here even more radical. It's even it's as if they are in such a panic that even even this minimal of narrative is felt as if it's too much, you had to be reminded all can you imagine what terrible censorship this is, you had to be reminded all the time no it's just a joke we are just filming and so on and so on. It's very interesting this phenomenon. The fear is precisely the fear of the neighbor I claim. Because if if in this stupid copulation that you see there, if you were to to fear that there is real desire, passion, emotion there, that would have been the neighbor. That dimension has to be suppressed. So again, the problem is how to maintain the distance towards a neighbor. Here I claim we are approaching a dangerous state because in the sense that one of the ways to keep the neighbor as a distance, the neighbor in his/her intruding proximity, are customs, habits, or rules of civility and so on and so on. But in our culture of self-exposure and so-called sincerity, authenticity, they function less and less. And incidentally, one of the signs of this failure is for me politically correct attempt to directly regulate. You know what's my problem with political correctness? Let's say how you treat the other in this sexual interaction if we are talking about politically correct view on sexuality, of course I agree with all they say. But what I'm saying is that how should I put it, it works only if it's part of our how should I put it, spontaneous customs. The moment you explicitly regulate it you undermine it in a way, you even in an immediate way support sustain aggressiveness. Something is missing in this politically correct universe where you try to regulate, to explicitly posit norms regulated and so on and so on. So the result is now unfortunately this is no longer a joke. The result is clearly in one of the most depressing movies that I've seen. It isn't yet released, a friend of mine from Denmark gave me a copy. It's a you should see when it will come out. It's a documentary called "Free Men: When Killers Make Movies," produced by Final Cut Film Production from Denmark, Copenhagen. This documentary is shot in Medan, Indonesia, in It reports on a case of obscenity which reaches the extreme. You know if you know history that in in there was a very tense situation in Indonesia. President Sukarno oscillating between communists and right-wingers. The communists tried a coup d'etat, the right immediately struck back, and then there was one of the most terrible ethnic political cleansings. Around two and a half million Chinese were slaughtered, mostly under the pretext that they were suspected communists and so on and so on. So this movie, this documentary portrays today's careers of some of the key organizers of that ethnic slaughter who are nightmarish brutal people. Now today they are of course senators, businessmen, whatever you want. Now comes the really depressing terrible thing. They don't hide anything. They publicly boast about it and with pleasure, obvious pleasure, reenact. That's so depressing about this movie. For example, one of their main guys explains to the journalist who interviews him that it took them a couple of weeks to discover which is the mode the most efficient and pleasurable way to rape a woman and at the same time kill her. No, that you need a somebody to help you who puts a wire around her head. I'm not going to details. But now comes the horror. Not only is there no shame, but they do this in front of TV, in front of TV, namely after a documentary about their life was done, they appeared on a talk show in one of the big state TV channels in Indonesia. And I couldn't believe that conversation. Like the guy explains how to rape a woman, blah blah, and then the moderator says, "What a wonderful insight! A big round of applause for this gentleman!" and so on. It's totally it's totally nightmarish. What makes it even more nightmarish but interesting is that they also report to the crucial answer to the crucial question, how were they able to do this? Their answer is, but I'm not blaming Hollywood, don't worry, American movies. They, while they were torturing, killing and so on, they even dressed as and copied their idea because they were all movie fans, they liked James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, those gangster and film noir movies from late 30s, 40s, early 50s. And they acted even dressed as those heroes. And they imagined themselves as those heroes in in action. That's always I claim the crucial point to to see how should I put it, to look at the to analyze which fantasy, which fantasmatic screen made it possible for guys like this to do what they were doing. So of course the question to ask here is what kind of society are we living in where even the minimal public shame is suppressed? You know the Nazis at least claimed no we didn't do it, denied it, and you have that famous statement by Heinrich Himmler that Holocaust, killing the Jews, will be the most glorious chapter of German history, but a chapter which unfortunately will never be written. Like we have to keep it secret. Here it's not even that, they publicly boast about it. The crucial thing here I claim is that we should avoid two traps. First, the cheap America bashing, yeah yeah you see Hollywood, the worst influence. Absolutely no, but also not the opposite mistake which would be a more even racist one: yes, those primitive Indonesians and so on and so on. I think we approach here a much more difficult question of first the let's call them in this learned term, dislocating effects of capitalist globalization. What kind of moral vacuum is created by today's global trends? Because things like this are not happening only are not happening only there, only in only in only in Indonesia. They're happening all around this gradual how should I put it, growing obscenity, shamelessness of of power and so on and so on. So if you allow me to go on with another point, this is why, faced with this let's call it shamelessness of power, maybe we who want to be the left today, I have here a very obscene proposition, but I mean it very seriously, maybe the time has come when we if we want to be realistic, I want to be a radical left, we should no longer play that role from the you know, imagine the enemy as somebody uptight conservative with dignity and we things we do something liberating if we, I don't know, talk dirty, provocations and so on. Unfortunately the power is turning more and more obscene, so maybe things like civility, decency, so maybe we should take it over. I will give you an example which maybe will hurt some of you, but the only guy who will appear an idiot is as usual me, I'm at least honest here. Do you remember, maybe some of you do, how do you remember a couple of years ago, I think even there was in at New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City there was the big retrospective Andres Serrano works There a photograph "Piss Christ" caused a scandal. It depicts a crucifix immersed in urine. And then there was even a congressional debate and so on and so on. Predictably, some left liberals defended this painting. Here is how they did it in New York Times, I quote it literally: "Like Robert Mapplethorpe, Mr. Serrano struggles against inhibitions about the human body. His use of bodily fluids is not intended to arouse disgust, but to challenge the notion of disgust where the human body is concerned. It is possible to see Mr. Serrano's use of bodily fluids as pure provocation, but you can also believe that Mr. Serrano views them as a form of purification. The fluids make us look at the images harder and consider basic religious doctrine about matter and spirit." End of quote. The problem for me with this defense is that it works all too well. Its logic covers almost everything. Here I warn you this is obscene, here comes my provocation. Let us say I, me, I were to publish a video clip depicting in detail how I shit. How the anal hole gradually gets wider then a sausage falls out, while also showing the stupidly satisfied relaxed expression of my face when the hole closes. Then you told me how can you do this vulgarity? Then here is what I will say: "Mr. Zizek struggles against the inhibitions about human body. His use of bodily excrements is not intended to arouse disgust but to challenge the notion of disgust where human body is concerned. It is possible to see Mr. Zizek's use of bodily excrements as pure provocation. But you can also believe that Mr. Zizek views them as a form of purification. The body gets purified by ejecting excrements. The excrements make us look at the images harder and consider basic religious doctrine about matter and spirit and so on and so on." You see my point, it works. So I'm not against very radical artistic provocations. I'm just saying they must really work. You know like it doesn't just work work if you say oh let's provoke and so on. Those in power are provoking us enough. We get enough provocations from there. Now this finally brings us to the big question you are probably waiting me to address: the question of violence. The great ideological divide between liberal and radical left concerns the use of so-called illegitimate violence. The radical leftist answer was developed among others by Bertolt Brecht who in his short text "The Intellectual Beast is Dangerous" writes, a quote from Brecht: "A beast is something strong, terrible, devastating. The word emits a barbarous sound. But wait a minute, does he mean this critically? No, because then the text goes on. The key question in fact is this: how can we become beasts? Beasts in such a sense that the fascists will fear for their domination. We have to understand that goodness must also be able to injure, to injure savagery." And I think that Brecht, far from being a kind of a proto-totalitarian, is here at his most critical. He is basically taking over those lines from the Bible which I, of course, appreciate more, you know all those theories of Jesus saying I don't bring I don't bring love I bring sword, I bring devastation, if you don't hate your mother and father you cannot be my follower, if you don't have a sword buy sell everything you have buy a sword and so on and so on. How to read this in conjunction with with his love your neighbor and so on and so on? I claim that we need, this is what in Christianity we call work of love. Work of love has to include some kind of violence. The whole point is what kind of violence. I would like to begin by the most elementary levels of insults. My good friend Alain Badiou recently being accused of using insults, wrote something wonderful in a letter to Le Monde I think. Here is the quote from Alain Badiou: "What characterizes politics, even if capital-parliamentarism enforces its domination up to making us forget it, is that in politics there are enemies. And why for devil's sake, if they are true enemies, should it be prohibited for me to insult them? To compare them to vultures, jackals, bulls, headless lynx and even to rats? To vipers fat or not, up to hyenas literal or not." End of quote. Why do I agree with him? Because I think that the liberal prohibition of enemies, you know oh we have no enemies there are just competitors and so on, has a very precise implication. If there are no true enemies, if there is no true struggle in politics, this means that those who really disagree with us are not simply our enemies but are excluded from the very scope of humanity so anything goes against them. Paradoxically, the first step in recognizing the very humanity of the enemy should be to fully accept the unavoidability of taking sides in politics. It is them or us, there is no third place above the struggle. For example, in Hugo Chavez, and I'm deeply critical of him, I think he is a failure already, not external failure but in a in itself in his project a failure. But nonetheless, I remember how in Chavez in Venezuela was accused of subordinating the judicial sphere to his executive power, of depriving courts of their independence. But the first thing one should ask upon hearing this accusation is, but which was the state of the judicial system Chavez was intervening into? Who dominated it politically? Was this system really a model of democratic neutrality? That is to say, I have some Lacanian psychoanalytic friends in in Venezuela who told me Chavez is horrible, he changed constitutional court. I asked them okay, what was the structure before? They admitted it was just another group extremely partial, even worse than what Chavez is doing today. Then they added, but it should have been done in a democratic way. Well why didn't they do it? I think that you know sometimes here you have to make hard choices. And effectively that's the brutal logic of politics. Sometimes how should I put it, evoking democracy at in such moments effectively means condoning the previous much worse injustice. This is what I'm tempted to call the parallax lesson of terror. This parallax was rendered perfectly, now you will say but this is my European Jacobin perversity, no no it's one of you, of your of your authors who put it in wonderful terms. None other than Mark Twain. Listen to these wonderful lines from Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." He is of course told answering to the criticism of those who rejected the Jacobin terror as horror and so on. Quote, "It's one of yours, no European decadence. There were two reigns of terror if we would remember it and consider it. The one wrought in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood. One shatters- our shudders are all for the horrors of the minor terror, the momentary terror so to speak, whereas what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by the brief terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and more over, but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful terror which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves." End of quote. So if one deplores the Jacobin terror, one if one does only that, one thereby says yes to that older and real real terror. So that's the first thing I'm tempted to emphasize here. It's not a question, I hope you got it, it's not the question that I am advocating Jacobin terror, although de facto I am, yes but that's another story. No no, if you know let me give you my main reason, which may be weird to you, artistic. You know which is the painting of French revolution? I hope you most of us know it. The famous Jean-Louis David painting "The Death of Marat." Did you notice the strange nature of that painting? It's let's say this is the painting, the lower third you have the bathtub, the dead Marat, and then the upper two-thirds, you remember what they are? Nothing, just darkness. It's abs- it's as if he precisely avoided that easy justification. How would this same painting be done let's say in a really totalitarian regime? We would have the dead Marat but instead of seeing this darkness, it would have been filled probably let's say by a dream of the dying Marat, happy French people dancing when revolution will win. You don't find that there. It's a wonderful painting. Marat is almost as squeezed squeezed into this squeezed into the frame. And I claim, and I agree here with Clark, the first one art historian who emphasized this, it's as it were as if this is the first step towards later Malevich, all the sorry black square stuff and so on and so on. I mean it's a it's a tremendous painting. So okay, I'm trying to tell not to mention more more more obvious things, like that you know stop with terror of the French revolution. Look at the statistics. In those couple of months of terror, less people were killed than just in a couple of weeks after the Thermidor took over. The problem is just that the Jacobins chopped off a couple of high heads, king and so on, while hundreds were instantly killed afterwards. Who cares? They were nobody, nobody noticed it. Now I will make a step further, maybe even more problematic for you. What we should question here is a certain way of so-called anti-totalitarianism which I find problematic. And I will try to explain why. I would like to take as a starting point the liberal enthusiasm for the so-called "Third Wave" phenomenon. Maybe you remember it. I am I am here I am here referring to an event, I think it was in some California high school in the 60s where, you know, it's the old story, a professor wanted to teach his students how was Nazism possible. So he told them let's organize let's organize a a society where the let's organize a a movement called "The Third Wave." The professor told his students that the motto of this movement will be: strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride. He disciplined them and so on and so on, and then he himself was shocked at how students started to collaborate. They even without him asking his pupils, they even started to denounce to him some of others, you know they don't really follow the rules and so on and so on. So he was so shocked that after four days he convoked a meeting and told them, listen, this was all an experiment, it's a fake. I hope you now understand how easy it was to seduce people to become totalitarian. And then of course with liberals you get a multiple orgasm. You see how the beast is there and in any moment we can become. I totally reject this reading. I think that this experiment was deeply mystifying. And okay, I'm not going into the detail. If you want the detailed analysis read my next book. But my answer is simply this one: what is false in this experiment is that it opposes directly the so-called liberal, peaceful, tolerant openness and the universe of discipline, strength, action and so on. All that differs from liberalism into that group. Sorry, what I am tempted to say is that I can well imagine a movement which requires discipline, pride, strength through community, action and so on and which I would totally support. My god, all radical emancipatory movements also function like that. I can imagine a radical emancipatory movement which says yes, strength through discipline. Why? My gosh, because imagine a poor country because we are poor, we don't have arms, the only thing we have is our discipline, our unity and so on and so on. The trick of this operation is precisely that it throws all of it together. Emancipatory discipline is ultimately the same as the right-wing fascism, they're all the same and so on and so on. What I what I claim is that the crucial distinction is blurred here. We sometimes we need discipline, we need sacrifice and so on. We shouldn't leave all these categories to the enemy. It's my god, if you listen to some of the radical even left liberals, it is as if if you say my god, comrades, discipline, we need order. Proto-fascist, proto-totalitarian and so on. No, I don't buy this. But don't misunderstand me here. This doesn't mean I am advocating a new fascism or whatever. What I'm advocating is something much more complex. And even with violence, I'm very careful. I would say if you allow me just to conclude very briefly now. I would say one thing here. When I talk about violence, I'm not talking about act so much active violence in the sense of killing, whatever. Okay, sometimes that is needed, but I'm the first to concede it should be used purely in or at least predominantly in defensive terms. I'm saying two much more precise things. First that violence should be much more, let's call it an interactive violence, a violence of stopping when the situation is unbearable, a violence of non-participation. In this sense, I answer to that stupid polemics against me in the New Republic and I will develop it in my future book. How: yes, violence, but violence in the sense in which as I wrote to provoke my enemies, in which the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough. In what sense? Then I go on: in the sense in which Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. In what sense? Hitler's violence was pure violence of impotence. He killed millions because he didn't dare to change a little bit capitalist relations or whatever. It was clearly a violence, how should I put it, he was doing all possible things so that nothing would really change. While whatever you think about Gandhi, he really wanted to interrupt, stop the functioning of the British state in India. So this is my first point. My second point: the first violence should be directed against ourselves. By this, no no I don't mean any masochistic whipping to render us saints or whatever. But a very painful process of how should I put it, violently breaking with or getting rid, liberating ourselves from the dreams which are not our dreams, how should I put it. You know the problem the true problem as if there is a lesson to be learned from 20th century revolutions, which is why I'm the first to admit they were a total catastrophe. Maybe the greatest tragedy in humanity, the total fiasco of the of the communist left which ended in Stalinism and then in the later decadence and so on and so on. We should learn from this total ethical, political, economic and so on catastrophe. The first lesson is that as Hegel knew it, the German idealist, it's not enough to overthrow the enemy. First you must overthrow the hold the enemy has over your dreams as it were. You must not, to put it pathetically, dream dreams which are not really yours. Just one example here, a wonderful novel from ex-communist country, the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. I advise you to read it, it's available in translation. A wonderful short novel called "The Palace of Dreams." It's a story of Tabir Saray, a Palace of Dreams in the capital of an unnamed vast 19th-century Balkan empire, it's basically Turkey, modeled on Turkey. It's a crazy story, the idea is this one: in this great society, sorry, in this great palace, thousands of bureaucrats collect dreams from the entire population and interpret them and then try to isolate the central dream to give it to the to the Sultan as providing the key to the future of the country. The reason for this palace and for all the struggles among different factions about which dream will be privileged as the as the master dream is nicely spelled out in the novel. In my now I quote a short passage from the novel. "'In my opinion,' Kurt went on, Kurt is one of the heroes of the novel, 'it is the only organization in the state, this Palace of Dreams, where the darker side of its subject's consciousness enters into direct contact with the state itself. The masses don't rule, of course, but they do possess a mechanism through which they influence all the state's affairs, including its crimes, and that mechanism is the Palace of Dreams. Do you mean to say,' asks the guest, 'that the masses are to a certain extent responsible for everything that happens and so should to a certain extent be guilty about it? Yes,' said Kurt," and so on and so on. That's crucial. How every power always reproduces itself through let's call it ideological dreams, fantasies, by means of by means of which subjects themselves are in a way invested into the structure of power. And the first state of- the first step of liberation is to get rid of this hold. Let me take the extreme example. If some of you know Russian literature, you will know what I'm talking about. It even shocked me. Stalinism at its worst. But it's shocking if you read the biographies even of great dissidents. Mandelstam, Shostakovich, half dissident, okay, Pasternak and so on. How they were all incredibly fascinated by Stalin. As if with all their terrible experiences, they incredibly wanted to meet- you know that tragic story when Stalin called Pasternak asking him after Mandelstam was arrested, "Are you a friend of Mandelstam? What should we do with him?" And Pasternak tried to squeeze out, "I don't know," then Stalin said, "Tell me, we should talk." Then Pasternak says, "Yes, I would like to talk about you, about death and life, the meaning of life," and Stalin cut it and so on. The same with Mandelstam, the same with Bulgakov and so on. They they all at the level of dreams were invested. And again, the first step of liberation which of course is not physically violent, but it is, is to do this: to change your dreams, to change your dreams as it were. Which is why, incidentally, I like the movie, which some people think is proto-fascist. I think it's not. It's one of the greatest Hollywood movies: "Fight Club." I don't think it's a proto-fascist film. I think it's the lesson is precisely this: before you beat others, you must beat yourself in the sense of beating out of you all that fantasmatic content which by means of which you are invested libidinally into power. Which is why one of the ultimate shots from Hollywood is for me, you remember that scene when Ed Norton confronting his boss starts to beat himself. This is the first step of liberation. It's much more horrible than because you get my point: if he were to attack the boss directly, it would have meant screw you, I want to be boss. By beating himself he ruins the entire field. My last point, really the last. Here maybe just to conclude, I would like to make one point clear so that you will not accuse me of being confused. I use, I'm well aware that I used the term violence in an indistinct way. I did my homework, I'm well aware of this nice distinction drawn among others by Hannah Arendt between power, authority and violence. Power being let's call it the natural authority, the charisma that some people have. Authority is always a social relation. Often you don't have to have a personal charisma to have authority. You know all these stories of somebody is a jerk, an idiot, once you see he has a crown, oh it's authority. And violence... here Hannah Arendt does something intelligent: she opposes violence and power. For them, as he put it, for her as she put it in wonderful, wonderfully precise terms, violence is ineffective in the sense that it's always a sign of impotence. Violence is the resort of those who precisely don't have power. Which is why a power which has to resort to direct violence is a power which is already in panic. This may sound strange to you but if you read memoirs of how they perceived its rule, Hitler, Stalin and so on, they were all the time in total panic. That's why again they had to be continuously continuously violent. But at some so this is incidentally true even at the level of personal authority. Let's take the traditional figure of the father. I hope you get it or I hope this is also your experience, at least it's mine, that a father who actually beats you, it may hurt, but it's a ridiculous ultimately impotent figure. With a true father with authority, violence is purely virtual. You know, just a look at you, no? The moment he has to act out, take recourse to real violence, it's an admission of defeat. Okay, but where I would nonetheless disagree with Arendt is that the whole point is precisely that there is always a level of how should I put it, indistinction between violence and power. A structurally necessary breakdown of their distinction. There has to be a threat of violence behind power. And the way the power, every power retains its authority is precisely through obfuscating the violence on which it is based on which it is based. And with this I conclude: I claim that the first step of politicization is to see violence there where we do not even perceive it. Even perceive it. So what we have is terrorist violence... [audio cuts off]