The Year of Dreaming Dangerously Panel Discussion with Slavoj Zizek
Debate · Columbia University ·
2012-10-23 · 2:02:47 · 16,075 words
ideologycapitalismcommunism-socialismhegel-dialecticsrace-antisemitismfascism-populismdemocracyrevolution-violenceecology-climatecinema-art-culturelanguagephilosophy-general
Columbia panel launching Žižek's The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. Žižek opens with a methodological 'praise of chimney sweeps', the excessive third term in any classification (Kierkegaard's sweep, Marx's Bentham, the antisemitic Jew, Hegel's rebel) that, far from being empirical surplus, stands for universality/antagonism as such. He then diagnoses a contemporary Rückgängig machen, an undoing of emancipatory achievements, attacks the French anti-statist left (Balibar/Rancière/Badiou) for subtracting from state power, defends Hegelian universalism against postcolonial particularism via the logic of the fall, and argues the radical left must finally articulate a positive vision beyond capitalism even as capitalism and democracy divorce. Respondents Bruce Robbins, Lydia Liu and Stathis Gourgouris push back on ordinary politics, the dollar's symbolic order, and the revolution/reform dilemma; Q&A covers Obama, environmentalism, and Bob Avakian's communism.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 14
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The excessive third term in any classification (officers/serving-maids/chimney-sweep, freedom/equality/Bentham) that, far from being empirical surplus, stands for the difference/antagonism as such and so for universality.
as “la part des sans-part”
Rancière's 'part of no part': the excessive element formally inside the social edifice but with no proper place, which thereby stands for universality.
as “antagonism”
A real (not symbolic-differential) difference that precedes what it is the difference of; the struggle constitutes the terms rather than presupposing them.
Žižek's name for our era's retroactive annihilation of emancipatory achievements, rights re-encoded as 'privileges', racisms and antifeminisms gently returning.
His rehabilitated sense of dogma: emancipatory truths so self-evident they need not be argued; their renewed contestability is a regression, not openness.
Hegel's logic whereby spiritual purity/emergence comes only through the fall; the fall retroactively generates the specter of what it is the fall from.
His ironic label for merely Keynesian/social-democratic reform that leaves capitalism intact, the limit he refuses to stop at.
as “the true utopia”
The utopia that things can go on indefinitely the way they are, the belief that the present can continue is itself the real utopian fantasy.
Badiou/Miller's call for a master to make human animals into subjects; Žižek rejects it as a step toward cynical liberal realism.
The comfortable left posture of subtracting from power; Žižek opposes it when it means keeping the system alive and refusing to dirty one's hands.
Agamben's bare-life figure; Žižek sees capitalism increasingly needing direct classifications of people as second-class citizens rather than standard formal democracy.
Extended to include the permanently unemployed, rogue-state subjects, and excluded educated youth, all those outside the formal wage relation, to prevent the core turning proto-fascist.
Capital as an abstraction that 'turns around' indifferent to human fate, demanding its own logic be obeyed even at ecological self-destruction.
His proposed first thesis of radical environmentalism: no harmonious Mother Nature to return to, pre-human nature was already catastrophic, which makes the struggle more radical, not less.
Stories he reaches for 10
Lacan: even if every reproach a jealous husband makes about his wife is factually true, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological. Žižek applies this to antisemitism: the truth about Jews is beside the point; the pathology is in the need for the figure.
“even if all his reproaches to the wife... are true, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological.”
Chinese authorities reportedly ban time-travel and alternate-history topics in narrative media. Žižek finds this a good sign: at least those in power are still afraid of the popular imagination, unlike the West, where no prohibition is needed because we cannot imagine an alternative at all.
“prohibiting topics of time travel and alternate history in narrative media.”
Madoff was the ideal scapegoat: by personalizing the crisis in one greedy banker, the system escaped questioning. Bankers were always greedy; the real question is what changed in the system to let greed realize itself.
“he was the ideal victim. Instead of questioning the system, you had there 'oh, the look the greedy banker.'”
Accused of building a repressive police apparatus while preaching the withering of the state, Stalin replies that the dialectic is precisely that the state withers away through the strengthening of its apparatuses. Žižek calls this the worst kind of Hegelian dream, the danger of his own pro-state dialectic.
“the state is withering away through the very strengthening of its apparatuses.”
When Norwegians arrived in Iceland it was one big forest; now there are only a couple of thousand trees. The point: pre-modern peoples were not harmonious stewards, ecological destruction predates capitalism and modernity.
“when Norwegians came there in 7th century, it was one big forest. Now there are literally... just a couple thousand trees.”
Kierkegaard proposes dividing all humanity into officers (military manliness), serving maids (subordinate woman), and chimney sweeps, the inexplicable third term. Žižek adopts the chimney sweep as his formula for critical thought.
“A wit has said that one might divide mankind into officers, serving maids, and chimney sweeps.”
A 'disgusting', 'contradictory' film he likes because it imagines the impossible, people's power on Manhattan, but symptomatically can only imagine it through the film's ideological frame.
“What I like is that it imagines the impossible, people's power on Manhattan.”
Chinese officials tell Žižek they no longer talk of communism but a 'harmonious society' where everyone is in their proper place, leader, worker, teacher, wife. He replies that in Europe this is called corporate fascism.
“in a harmonious society, everyone is at his, her, or their proper place.”
Jameson's formula: we get a new asteroid movie every month, the end of life on earth is self-evident; a small change in capitalism is impossible. Žižek calls this 'ideology in practice'.
“it's much easier for us to imagine Armageddon... A small change in capitalism: impossible.”
An Indian American tells Žižek they prefer 'Indian' to 'Native American' (which implies they are nature, whites culture), and asserts: 'We Indians burned more forest and killed more buffaloes than you ever will', against the patronizing myth of the harmonious ecological native.
“We Indians burned more forest and killed more buffaloes than you ever will do.”
Works invoked 10
Capital book
The Eden-of-innate-rights (freedom/equality/property/Bentham) and general-equivalent 'animal' passages are read as chimney-sweep logics.
Don Giovanni opera
Cited for the 'Viva la libertà' entrance as the politicized counterpoint to Rossini's pre-revolutionary servant comedy.
New Left Review journal
Where T.J. Clark published the 'game of patience' diagnosis of the radical left that Žižek endorses.
A 'disgusting', 'contradictory' film he likes because it imagines the impossible, people's power on Manhattan, even as it does so symptomatically.
The Death of Marat artwork
Via T.J. Clark, named as the first modernist painting.
Harry Potter other
Used only for the Voldemort trope ('the one whose name should not be pronounced') for referring to Critchley.
The Barber of Seville opera
Rossini's defanged Figaro, the operatic dream of undoing the French Revolution, of pretending it never happened.
Le Nozze di Figaro opera
Mozart's politicized Figaro, contrasted favorably with Rossini's defanged Barber of Seville.
Fear and Trembling book
Kierkegaard's officers/serving-maids/chimney-sweeps classification is the opening model for the whole talk.
The book being launched; he dislikes the cover and calls it a quickly composed book, with editing mistakes (lost references).
People invoked 33
Hardt and Negri negative
The multitude / immediate transparent local-democracy dream is one that 'has absolutely to be abandoned'.
Bernard Madoff negative
The 'ideal victim' whose scapegoating personalized the crisis in one greedy banker and let the system off the hook.
Gianni Vattimo negative
Cited for the postmodern 'we have to be outside / subtract yourself from power' position Žižek rejects.
Jacques Lacan positive
Calls himself a 'dogmatic Lacanian'; the jealous-husband formula and 'difference as real, not symbolic-differential' structure the antisemitism analysis.
Stephen Jay Gould positive
Endorsed as a 'good Marxist Darwinist' who shows nature was already a catastrophic 'shit' before humanity, against the harmonious Mother Nature myth.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Named for the 'Deleuzian undercurrent' behind French anti-statism: state as the enemy, immediate self-transparent presentation instead.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Žižek's Marxism is 'basically anti-Fukuyama'; but he calls Fukuyama an 'honest conservative' who himself admits he is no longer a Fukuyamaist.
Judith Butler negative
Grouped with Badiou and Rancière as advocating marginal, decentralized resistances against regulated state politics.
Anne Applebaum positive
The book stages a dialogue with her: today's institutional democracy is simply not strong enough to cope with international capital.
Étienne Balibar negative
A friend ('proud to say Étienne Balibar is here, not the worst') but a target for the French anti-statist obsession with state power as the enemy.
Alain Badiou negative
Target for anti-election abstention ('madness'), the 'democracy is the enemy' line, and the master-discourse advocacy; though Žižek endorses his 'enemy is called democracy' diagnosis in the book.
Cited for homo sacer / new forms of apartheid as capitalism increasingly cannot afford standard bourgeois formal democracy.
Žižek tells him that a Syriza government would need a very strong police apparatus to stop capital flight and fascists.
Tariq Ali negative
Trashed for an Obama book with a 'proto-racist title' that is 'so shitty', expecting Obama to introduce communism.
Leon Trotsky positive
Cited for the open letter to Pavlov defending psychoanalysis, and as the model of the greatest 20th-century Marxist books being ex-post explanations of why a defeat had to happen.
Fredric Jameson positive
Cited for 'easier to imagine the end of the world than a change in capitalism' (ideology in practice) and for redefining exploitation beyond the permanent wage relation.
Bob Avakian negative
His 'new synthesis of communism' is rejected; under audience pressure Žižek commits to a public debate with his advocate Raymond Lotta in April.
T. J. Clark positive
His New Left Review piece diagnosing the left's 'game of patience' is endorsed as containing 'a grain of truth'; also praised for his piece on David's Death of Marat.
Maximilien Robespierre negative
Named as the Jacobin-totalitarian end-point of forgetting 'crab soup', the warning figure behind the liberal reading of Bentham.
Heinrich Heine negative
His 'freedom, equality, and crab soup' is the 'bad Heine', the wrong, liberal reading of the excessive element as a plea for small human pleasures; 'this is why I hate it'.
Called his 'ex-friend'; cited for the antagonism logic but personally distanced.
Jacques Rancière negative
Cited for la part des sans-part but attacked for the anti-state framing and the police/politics opposition.
Kostas Douzinas negative
An 'otherwise friend' whose two-stages argument (first revolt, then construction of the new) Žižek rejects as serving the enemy.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Attacked for the pseudo-Lacanian line that social authority is an imposture we should cynically preserve so things don't get worse.
Viktor Orbán negative
Quoted calling Hungarians a 'half-Asiatic ragtag people' who can unite only by force, a symptom of regression and of the undoing of the '56 dissident legacy.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Fear and Trembling's officers/serving-maids/chimney-sweeps triad is his opening model for the chimney-sweep logic; he 'consciously' cites the Eurocentric elitist education that knows this.
Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais positive
Source of the subversive Figaro that Mozart politicizes and Rossini defangs.
Cited for the critique that Žižek oscillates between three positions: waiting for revolution, Bartleby inaction, and modest measures.
Barack Obama positive
Defended against the radical-left 'screw Obama' fashion; healthcare reform targeted the core of American freedom-of-choice ideology and remains a traumatic point for the right.
Hugo Chávez negative
Criticized for falling into the Mother Nature mythology trap, claiming capitalism in the 17th century 'killed mother nature'.
Joseph Stalin negative
Quoted on the state withering away through the strengthening of its repressive apparatuses, the 'worst kind of Hegelian dream' and the danger of Žižek's own pro-state dialectic.
Karl Marx positive
Capital's 'Eden of innate rights' (freedom/equality/property/Bentham) and the general-equivalent 'animal' are read as chimney-sweep logics; Žižek repeatedly calls himself a Marxist.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek's 'big love'; the fall logic and the rebel/excessive-part-as-universality are central; he sides with Hegel against Marx on not knowing the consequences of our acts in advance.
What it argues
the chimney sweep: the excessive element that universalizes a classificationRückgängig machen: the undoing of emancipatory achievementsdogmatism as progress: self-evident emancipatory truthsagainst anti-statism: the left must engage state powerHegel's fall and postcolonial universalismthe left's missing positive vision beyond capitalismthe capitalism-democracy divorceenvironmentalism as a field of struggle: nature doesn't exist
Dialectical moves 9
“the chimney sweep... does not stand for the empirical surplus over the big difference... this excessive element stands precisely for the difference as such”
The third, comical term in a classification is not leftover but is the antagonism itself, and therefore the universal.
“Bentham, precisely as this ridiculous excess, is the totalizing moment”
The comical addition retroactively defines what the big categories (freedom, equality) mean in bourgeois society.
“even if all his reproaches to the wife... are true, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological”
Antisemitism is structurally like jealousy: its truth-content about Jews is irrelevant to its pathological form.
“at the beginning is not immediacy, it's just a confused multitude. Then you have the fall, and the fall retroactively generates the specter of what it is the fall from”
Hegel's fall: loss retroactively posits what was 'lost'; there is no authentic immediacy prior to alienation.
“it is only through this imposition of foreign language, through the loss of their authentic being, that this authentic being emerged”
The colonizer's language is the condition of authentic postcolonial subjectivity, not its negation.
“the true utopia today is the utopia that things can go on indefinitely the way they are”
The real utopian fantasy is the belief that the present can continue; the apparently non-utopian position is the utopia.
“bankers were always greedy. The problem is what changed in the system that they were able to realize their greediness”
Don't blame the banker's greed; ask what system-change enabled it, the system, not the vice, is the object.
“the state is withering away through the very strengthening of its apparatuses, especially apparatuses of repression”
Cites Stalin's dialectic as the worst kind of Hegelian dream, the danger of his own pro-state dialectic carried to parody.
“those who are out, rogue states, permanently unemployed and so on, have to be brought together in a wider definition of working class”
The excluded are not outside class but its expanding core; refusing to widen the definition cedes the core to fascism.
Claims 17
asserts
Every living classification needs an excessive 'chimney sweep' element that does not stand for empirical surplus but for the difference/antagonism as such.classification/universality
reframes
The Jew in antisemitism is not a description of real Jews but the fantasy figure that holds the fascist social edifice together; debating 'are Jews really like that' already concedes the ground.antisemitism
asserts
Certain emancipatory achievements (no torture, equality of women, anti-racism) should function as self-evident dogmas; their renewed contestability is a regression.dogmatism/progress
asserts
We live in an era of Rückgängig machen, the undoing of emancipatory gains, visible even in Scandinavian and post-communist Europe.emancipation
rejects
The left must not subtract from state power; the fundamental struggle is within society over capitalism, not state-versus-society.anti-statism (Balibar/Rancière/Badiou)
reframes
The imposition of the colonizer's language is the condition of possibility for authentic emancipation, not a loss to be mourned.postcolonialism/universalism
asserts
The radical left must articulate a positive vision beyond capitalism rather than hide in moralizing critique or comfortable resistance.left strategy
asserts
That we can more easily imagine the end of the world than a small change in capitalism is ideology in practice.ideology/imagination
reframes
The dismantling of the welfare state may be inscribed in global capitalist trends, not merely the work of bad conservatives.welfare state
asserts
Capitalism and democracy are divorcing; authoritarian-capitalist regimes (China, Singapore) show capitalism no longer needs democracy.capitalism/democracy
rejects
Resistance that only 'keeps the system alive' and avoids dirtying one's hands should be opposed.resistance (Critchley)
asserts
Environmentalism is itself a field of struggle; the first thesis of radical environmentalism is that 'nature doesn't exist' as harmonious Mother Nature.ecology
reframes
The notion of the working class must be redefined to include the structurally excluded, or the existing core can turn proto-fascist.class
rejects
Blaming greedy bankers like Madoff misses the point; bankers were always greedy — the question is what in the system changed to let greed run.moralizing critique
rejects
It is madness to abstain from all elections; some elections matter and the left must not miss them.elections (contra Badiou)
asserts
Obama's healthcare reform targeted the core of American 'freedom of choice' ideology and deserves left credit despite compromises.Obama/healthcare
asserts
The greatest Marxist books of the 20th century are convincing explanations of why a defeat had to happen; the left must move beyond that posture.Marxist historiography
Quotes 15
“Don't forget the chimney sweep.”Slavoj Žižek · chimney sweep as formula of critical thought
“the true utopia today is the utopia that things can go on indefinitely the way they are”Slavoj Žižek · the true utopia
“it's much easier for us to imagine Armageddon — the end of life on earth, nothing more self-evident. A small change in capitalism: impossible. This is ideology in practice.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology in practice (Jameson)
“My communism is not, 'Ooh, Comrade Stalin come back.'”Slavoj Žižek · what his communism is not
“capitalism is not devil, I'm here a Marxist, it's arguably the most dynamic system in the history of humanity”Slavoj Žižek · Marxist but non-demonizing view of capitalism
“Bentham, precisely as this ridiculous excess, is the totalizing moment.”Slavoj Žižek · the excessive element as totalizing
“at the beginning is not immediacy, it's just a confused multitude. Then you have the fall, and the fall retroactively generates the specter of what it is the fall from.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's fall retroactively posits immediacy
“it is only through this imposition of foreign language, through the loss of their authentic being, that this authentic being emerged.”Slavoj Žižek · the fall as condition of authenticity
“bankers were always greedy. The problem is what changed in the system that they were able to realize their greediness.”Slavoj Žižek · system over vice (Madoff)
“the first thesis of radical environmentalism should be nature doesn't exist”Slavoj Žižek · radical environmentalism
“Mother Nature is a heavy bitch.”Slavoj Žižek · against Mother Nature mythology
“this excessive element stands precisely for the difference as such”Slavoj Žižek · chimney sweep = the difference itself
“the Jew is not just the empirical complication, it stands for this antagonism as such”Slavoj Žižek · the Jew as antagonism in antisemitism
“I expose myself like Jesus Christ to the evil judges to attack me.”Slavoj Žižek · self-presentation before the panel
“It's thinking interesting how you get either very general ideas, like my god, people are telling me 'we want money to serve people, not people to serve money.' Well, thanks. Hitler would have agreed with it.”Slavoj Žižek · vague left slogans are worthless
Transcript 82 turns
unknown
Welcome and I thank you all for coming. I'm Stathis Gourgouris, I'm the director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and as a colleague, first of all, I want to thank the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Dean of the Graduate School, Carlos Alonso, for taking this initiative on behalf of the students to invite here one of the most provocative thinkers of our time, Slavoj Žižek.
Welcome and I thank you all for coming. I'm Stathis Gourgouris, I'm the director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and as a colleague, first of all, I want to thank the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Dean of the Graduate School, Carlos Alonso, for taking this initiative on behalf of the students to invite here one of the most provocative thinkers of our time, Slavoj Žižek.
unknown
Yes, yes, you actually get it, definitely.
Yes, yes, you actually get it, definitely.
unknown
Well, you know, as you see, I've been asked to serve as a moderator for today's gathering, and you understand that moderating Žižek is an impossible event. And given the historical situation and the subject, partly the subject of what we're going to talk about, to have a Greek acting as the agent of moderation is well, I don't know, what's beyond the impossible, Slavoj? It is indeed a great and personal pleasure to welcome Slavoj Žižek, a dear friend whom I've known for more than twenty years and whose work has always been inspiring to me since my earliest writings. Although we don't always agree, as of course is also known. I'll get to these points of agreement and disagreement when it's my turn to speak, but let me just say that even in disagreement, an encounter with Slavoj's thought is always eye-opening and in ways that are often quite unexpected. Slavoj Žižek, as you all know, is a great polemical thinker, at least in the best sense of that word, which I think restores philosophy's earliest dimensions as a political art, as an unsettling, troubling art in the sphere of public contention. That is, before philosophy became a vehicle for personal and solitary contemplation, an art of comfort, as it were. So in this sense, Slavoj's thought deliberately provokes disagreement. In fact, he hates the culture of agreement, as he'll tell us several times, and rightfully so given its legacy as a mechanism of appeasement and depoliticization, certainly in the society that we live in. Slavoj writes about everything and at superhuman speed and scale, so to list all his works here would be, I think, a disservice, for it would take time away from the real thing. But since the convention demands it, let me name in entirely arbitrary and totally self-centered fashion the works I value the most, not because I necessarily agree with them: The Sublime Object of Ideology, which I think is a sublime book to which we all must periodically return, Tarrying with the Negative, The Indivisible Remainder, The Ticklish Subject. These works are essentially philosophical works of an extraordinary kind. One of the things I admire about Slavoj's thinking particularly—I'm talking about myself, self-centered in this way—is his thinking of Hegel and on Hegel. I think restoring, or perhaps even creating in the best sense again, the radicalness of Hegelian thinking against a lot of, I think, fashionable simplifications. I go on: The Puppet and the Dwarf and The Fragile Absolute, these two books are the books on Christianity, with which I disagree rather profoundly. Then First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and a small volume that followed it called Violence. These books are really central to our discussion today. And more recently, three books: In Defense of Lost Causes, Living in the End of Times, and now The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, the publication of which has brought us here today. Again, as I mentioned, this doesn't even measure to a fourth of Slavoj Žižek's total work, but as I said, we have Slavoj live here so we'll get on with it. We have a very simple procedure.
Well, you know, as you see, I've been asked to serve as a moderator for today's gathering, and you understand that moderating Žižek is an impossible event. And given the historical situation and the subject, partly the subject of what we're going to talk about, to have a Greek acting as the agent of moderation is well, I don't know, what's beyond the impossible, Slavoj? It is indeed a great and personal pleasure to welcome Slavoj Žižek, a dear friend whom I've known for more than twenty years and whose work has always been inspiring to me since my earliest writings. Although we don't always agree, as of course is also known. I'll get to these points of agreement and disagreement when it's my turn to speak, but let me just say that even in disagreement, an encounter with Slavoj's thought is always eye-opening and in ways that are often quite unexpected. Slavoj Žižek, as you all know, is a great polemical thinker, at least in the best sense of that word, which I think restores philosophy's earliest dimensions as a political art, as an unsettling, troubling art in the sphere of public contention. That is, before philosophy became a vehicle for personal and solitary contemplation, an art of comfort, as it were. So in this sense, Slavoj's thought deliberately provokes disagreement. In fact, he hates the culture of agreement, as he'll tell us several times, and rightfully so given its legacy as a mechanism of appeasement and depoliticization, certainly in the society that we live in. Slavoj writes about everything and at superhuman speed and scale, so to list all his works here would be, I think, a disservice, for it would take time away from the real thing. But since the convention demands it, let me name in entirely arbitrary and totally self-centered fashion the works I value the most, not because I necessarily agree with them: The Sublime Object of Ideology, which I think is a sublime book to which we all must periodically return, Tarrying with the Negative, The Indivisible Remainder, The Ticklish Subject. These works are essentially philosophical works of an extraordinary kind. One of the things I admire about Slavoj's thinking particularly—I'm talking about myself, self-centered in this way—is his thinking of Hegel and on Hegel. I think restoring, or perhaps even creating in the best sense again, the radicalness of Hegelian thinking against a lot of, I think, fashionable simplifications. I go on: The Puppet and the Dwarf and The Fragile Absolute, these two books are the books on Christianity, with which I disagree rather profoundly. Then First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and a small volume that followed it called Violence. These books are really central to our discussion today. And more recently, three books: In Defense of Lost Causes, Living in the End of Times, and now The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, the publication of which has brought us here today. Again, as I mentioned, this doesn't even measure to a fourth of Slavoj Žižek's total work, but as I said, we have Slavoj live here so we'll get on with it. We have a very simple procedure.
unknown
Slavoj will speak for half an hour, right? Then my dear colleagues here, Bruce Robbins, who is the Old Dominion Professor in the Humanities in the department of English and Comparative Literature, will speak first. Professor Lydia Liu, Wun Tsun Tam Professor of East Asian Languages and also Comparative Literature and Society, will speak next. And I will speak after for no more than ten minutes, fifteen max. As I say, I have the impossible task of moderating, I'll try to do the best I can. And then the floor will be open or Slavoj will of course feel free to protest whatever we have to say or find interesting things to say about it and then we can certainly open it up for questions, which is really what why we're here for. So Slavoj, the floor is yours.
Slavoj will speak for half an hour, right? Then my dear colleagues here, Bruce Robbins, who is the Old Dominion Professor in the Humanities in the department of English and Comparative Literature, will speak first. Professor Lydia Liu, Wun Tsun Tam Professor of East Asian Languages and also Comparative Literature and Society, will speak next. And I will speak after for no more than ten minutes, fifteen max. As I say, I have the impossible task of moderating, I'll try to do the best I can. And then the floor will be open or Slavoj will of course feel free to protest whatever we have to say or find interesting things to say about it and then we can certainly open it up for questions, which is really what why we're here for. So Slavoj, the floor is yours.
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. Proud to be here. Let's see what will happen. I am basically, in the last years already, returning to philosophy. I'm less and less, frankly, interested in all this political stuff, although my books somehow appear, not clear to me how. So I would nonetheless—I mean, the book is the book, your judgment, so I don't want to give some general introduction or—I hate the cover, but that's another story. I want to do something else. I want to make just a couple of short five-minute interventions. First one, a little bit longer about a methodological question of classification, which could have been subtitled "In Praise of Chimney Sweeps," if you know Kierkegaard you know what I mean. And then a couple of, well as you would have put it, provocative, consciously problematic points, which will also concern violence. So, let me begin. It may appear difficult, you know it's usual to say we don't need that mechanic classification but a living thought. Nonetheless, one should ask how does a thought which is really living, not in any irrational sense but in a more Hegelian sense, how does it affect classifications? In other words, if we really want to think critically, what do we do with classifications? By classifications, I simply mean subdivisions, categorizations like political space, left, right, or ruling class, exploited class, whatever. I think that here, in a strange way, the three great post-Hegelians—okay, the third one is more a poet, but nonetheless—Kierkegaard, Marx, and Heinrich Heine come together. They do the same thing. First, Kierkegaard. My god, if you have a minimum of, now I'm consciously Eurocentric elitist of education, you know what I'm referring to, referring to. There is in Kierkegaard's, I think, Fear and Trembling—sorry, I hope this one, yeah—a wonderful passage where Kierkegaard proposes the subdivision of entire humanity into three categories. If you are human, you have to be one of these three. Quote: "A wit has said that one might divide mankind into officers, serving maids, and chimney sweeps. To my mind, this remark is not only witty but profound, and it would require a great speculative talent to devise a better classification," and so on and so on. So the first insight is: this classification has an immediate social, but also sexual foundation. It's not as crazy as it appears. Because officer stands for assertive, military, manliness, and so on, and serving maid is the model of a servant, subordinated woman. Now of course, the point is what does the chimney sweep do here? Why he has to be added? Because I think this would be my formula of critical thought: don't forget the chimney sweep. Why? Let's look to Marx. Marx does something similar when, even two times, first, both times in Capital, in the first chapter—no, sorry, this one is not the first chapter, it's later in Capital—when Marx describes the market exchange between workers and capitalists as, I quote: "The very Eden paradise of the innate rights of man. There alone rule freedom, equality, property, and Bentham." That's Marx. You know, on market we are all equal, free, blah blah, and Bentham. That's the chimney sweep element here. I think that one should nonetheless, maybe correct here Marx, I think the formula would have worked much better with just three elements: freedom, equality, and Bentham. Why? Because Bentham is for Marx, as he says, the name Bentham stands for the fact that, I quote again, "the only force that brings them," people on the market, "together and puts them in relation with each other is the selfishness, the private interest of each of them," and so on and so on. So of course the original triad is freedom, equality, fraternity. Fraternity gets to use Lacan's term, suppressed, repressed, verdrängt, replaced with Bentham. Then there is another weird classification by Marx when he introduces the topic of general equivalent. He writes, again towards the end of the first chapter of Capital, I quote: "It is," when we are dealing with general equivalent, ultimately money, "it is as if, alongside and external to lions, tigers, rabbits, and all others, actual animals which form, when grouped together, the various kind, species, subspecies, families, and so on of the animal kingdom, it is as if alongside all this, there existed in addition the animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom." And I think again, this is the logic and we should strictly read together, I think, the two paradoxes of classification by Marx. Or to go, or maybe we can even, so that you will see what I'm aiming at, improvise other cases like let's take social division. It's not enough to say we have, I don't know, to simplify it of course, capitalists and workers. In order for society to function ideologically, of course, you need a chimney sweep. That's for example the logic of antisemitism. You know, it's capitalists, workers, and Jews. The idea being if you erase the Jew, then you would have beautiful subdivision, harmony, everyone at his, her, their own place. The Jew comes, introduces chaos, or whatever. Or, I think the same paradoxical category in Hegel is rebel. So we have all the Stände, the estates, and then rebel. Rebel as the excessive element which designates those who, as our friend who cannot be here sadly, Étienne Balibar would have put it, no, rebel is the element which is formally part of the social edifice but doesn't have a proper place within it. Or as Jacques Rancière puts it, la part des sans-part, the part with no part within it. Now, what Hegel knew but didn't always recognize and failed to recognize precisely apropos rebel is that precisely this excessive part, almost excremental, stands for universality as such. So back to Marx. You know, when Marx speaks about Bentham, we should be very careful not to misread this along the lines of a similar classification by Heinrich Heine, where he said that—and I think this is the bad Heine, because of which Marx didn't like Heine towards the end of Heine's life—namely, Heine said somewhere that every normal German—he meant it positively—should value above everything else freedom, equality, and crab soup. Crab soup of course stands for, and this is why I hate it, that, you know, as liberals would have put it against totalitarians, don't focus only on the big ideals, show understanding for small human pleasures, weaknesses. If you are too fanatical, if you forget about crab soup, or what crab soup stands for, you end up as some Robespierre or Jacobin totalitarian and so on. It's in a way, you know, like don't—it's okay to have ideals but be realist, small weaknesses, small pleasures. But I think this is precisely the wrong reading. Because the excessive element, Bentham, does not stand for this kind of a human common sense but on the contrary, it stands for the excessive element which, in a way, colorizes, provides a mode, a tone, the color for the entire totality. That is to say, for Marx, Bentham is not just a comical addition. Bentham means, yeah yeah, we have equality, legal order, freedom, but Bentham says retroactively what all the big categories effectively mean in a bourgeois society. Bentham, precisely as this ridiculous excess, is the totalizing moment. So again, this would be, that I don't lose time, my first conclusion: like, don't forget the chimney sweep. And this, the chimney sweep—that's crucial now—does not mean be human, take bear in mind the plurality, you cannot be dogmatic. No, the chimney sweep, this excessive element, doesn't stand for the empirical surplus over the big difference. Like, we have workers and capitalists but society is not as simple as that, there are always others, marginal—no, this excessive element stands precisely for the difference as such. I will try to explain this through the logic, very briefly, of antisemitism. You know what's the paradox of, for example, maybe you are too young but maybe if you remember once there was a time when we talked about left and right in politics, no? And this is a nice example of what Marx called, of what Lacan or my ex-friend Ernesto Laclau would have called, antagonistic relationship, where in a paradoxical way the difference precedes what it is the difference of. This may appear a cheap paradox but again, let me explain it through left and right politically. The distinction between left and right is not only a distinction of the political space into two blocks. It's a different logic of the entire political space. If you ask a right-winger how does he perceive the entire social body, he would have given you probably a different articulation than the left-winger. Usually, traditionally, the right-winger would be more organicist, he would say first I am not a right-winger, I'm stable center and all others are extremist, destabilizing. While a left-winger would have said no, society as such is characterized by a central antagonism and so on and so on. But so you see the logic. This is what Lacan would have meant by difference not as a simple symbolic differential but as real. That it's not that we have worker, capitalist, they fight. They fight for their very difference, for what their difference means. There is no neutral notion of society where you can distinguish naively workers and capitalists which would be independent of you taking side, being engaged in the struggle. And my point is that, for example, in antisemitism, the Jew is not just the empirical complication, it stands for this antagonism as such. Because as you know, if you know minimally about fascism, there, as they make it clear, without the Jew, which of course stands for social antagonism, those plots, we wouldn't have class struggle. We would have, that's the Nazi ideal, a social harmony between different parts, everyone at his, her, their own place. Or as they told me when I was in China, not our friend Wang Hui but some others, oh I had a wonderful experience in Shanghai, I remember, they told me but we no longer talk about communism here, we talk about a harmonious society, this Confucian bullshit. Okay. So I asked them, cut the crap, what do you mean by it? And they gave me a—they told me in a harmonious society, everyone is at his, her, or their proper place. Leader is a good leader, worker a good worker, teacher a good teacher, wife a good wife, and so on. And I exploded. I said this is wonderful, we no longer have all those problems of multicultural understanding. In Europe, we call this corporate fascism, what's the problem, and so on, we understand. So but no, you see the point how you need the Jew—by Jew, I mean the antagonistic tension which fascism projects onto the Jew, Jew as a fantasy image of antisemites of course—you need the Jew to—you need the figure of the Jew for the relationship to become antagonistic. Okay, my first point. My second point now to complicate things a little bit. Nothing to do with the first one. You know, the Germans have this wonderful expression *Rückgängig machen*, which is usually translated with to annul, to cancel, to unhitch, but I think it would be much nicer to read it as undoing, retroactively annihilating. Now I'm not bullshitting, I think that our times are precisely the times of such an undoing of emancipatory achievements. And I mean this at every, at a very elementary level. How, how do I mean it? First, to give you an idea, I love classical music, I cannot—you know who would be the pure opera composer of undoing? Rossini. Compare Mozart's *Le nozze di Figaro* and Rossini's *Barber of Seville*. Mozart is politicized. You remember in *Don Giovanni*, that big entry of *Don Giovanni*, "Viva la libertà" and everyone. While the whole—this is why Rossini stopped composing after counterrevolution. The whole dream of Rossini is let's pretend that there was no French Revolution. We can simply return—you know, Rossini's Figaro is not that potentially subversive figure of Beaumarchais and Mozart. It's a kind of a—this premodern, prerevolutionary topic of a tricky servant playing with the master or whatever and so on and so on. So who would be then today's Rossini? First, I think it's all around Europe. I'm tired of America bashing, I'm going back to Europe where, apropos Greece, even in Northern Europe—you know what I'm trying to impart you is this weird feeling and I want to praise dogmatism now. I think we the left should celebrate dogmatism. What do I mean by this? That in a good sense dogmatism, it's that I think sometimes dogmatism is even one of the best indicators of, if I may use this term, progress. What do I mean by this? Imagine a society where we would have to argue all the time should women, should we allow women to be raped or not. And you—no, sorry, I would like to live in a society where if someone advocates, you know all the bullshit, women secretly like it, they are just hypocritical, blah blah, you don't argue, the guy simply appears as an eccentric jerk or whatever, it's to such an extent our second nature to accept this. And this is what makes me sad today, at least in Europe. Statements, emancipatory achievements in racism, antifeminism, and so on, which had the status of this type of self-evident dogma, you simply accept it, like we don't torture people, women are equal, no racism and so on. It's no longer so self-evident. They are gently, gently returning. In post-communist Eastern Europe, even in celebrated Scandinavian countries and so on and so on. I think this is a phenomenon which should worry us very much. Or at the level of political and social logic, how imperceptibly the achievements which made certain rights simple rights are reinterpreted as privileges. This is a nice symptom: a friend just emailed me from England that now, very recently, the British government, conservative, issued an order that in all legal or state proclamations, documents, you no longer use the term unemployed. You use the term workless. And of course the gain is clear. First, workless gently resonates with worthless, without, you know, like... Point two: if you say unemployed, the implication is that you would like to work, you just cannot get employment. No. If you say workless, it pushes you imperceptibly towards Greece, you know. Sorry, my joke, you know what I mean. Like lazy people who—no, as I call to my friends to annoy them, this is not racism, this is cultural anthropology, what I'm doing now. No, sorry, quite seriously. You know what is my defense, would you agree? I don't know if I use this, that when you Greeks, which is of course false—I even once engaged in a very vulgar geopolitical logic. It's so primitive, but when we hear all this bullshit, you know, you Greeks lazy and so on. Listen, I'm ashamed to say this, but maybe there are countries where nature too much fruit falling down makes you lazy. Yeah, but you are not this. But you have this—but you have what do you mean, you know, you have this mountainous area, it's very—even following this very vulgar logic, you are not lazy. But my great—no no no, my main point is the following one. I know that this is the wrong topic, that's my point, that in the same way as the moment you accept, for example, debating a Nazi, that that antisemitism is about real properties of Jews, and then you start argue, no but you are wrong, Jews are not really like that, you've sold your soul to the devil, I claim. Because you know, the point of antisemitism that we should analyze, it's not: let's look at it, are Jews really like that. This doesn't matter. The point is why does the Nazi subject need the figure of the Jew to bring together, to hold together his entire political edifice? I would like to apply now to this Lacan's well-known slogan that about jealous husband, that even if all his reproaches to the wife that she's sleeping around with other men are true, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological. So again, okay, let me slowly conclude. You know who would be another clear case of this regression here? I was quite shocked. You know what now three months ago Victor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, you know what he said? He said that Hungary will probably have to invent, I quote, a new type of political system instead of democracy. He says cooperation is a question of force, not of intention. Perhaps there are countries where things can work that way, for example, in Scandinavia, but such a half-Asiatic ragtag people as we Hungarians are can unite only if there is force. I found this wonderful. I remember in '56, when Soviet tanks were advancing on Budapest, the most famous, quoted by all liberals with, with tears and intellectual orgasm, are the famous telegram, you know, saying to the West when Russian tanks advanced: "We are defending Europe here." Now we have a guy who presents himself as the ultimate radical successor of these dissidents and who all of a sudden claim: no no, we are not Europe, we are Asiatic and so on. Isn't this a strange era where the term Asiatic ragtag people is used as a positive signation? And so on. So quickly, I... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My next point would have been critical, I hope it's made clearly enough in the book, that many French political theorists, from Balibar—my friend, I'm proud to say Étienne Balibar is here not the worst—Rancière and Badiou, I'm critical to all of them. I don't like their obsession with state power. It is as if, you know, state is the enemy and you have here all this Deleuzian undercurrent. State is representation, we need immediate self-transparent presentation, local democracy or whatever. And then the idea is, let me quote I think it is one of the Gianni Vattimo, who said we have to be outside. This is a postmodern idea. The idea is that I must subtract myself from the game of power. I claim that if there is a lesson from the ongoing economic crisis, is that no, we should not exactly rehabilitate state power but see that the fundamental struggle is not in this Deleuzian/Badiouan way—I know they're not the same, on consciously I put them together—of big state apparatus there, the enemy. No, I'm here a Marxist. The big struggle is the struggle about capitalism, which is precisely in society. Which is why ironically if you say "oh, the state, we should withdraw," again a distance at the state. Well, Rick Santorum would certainly applaud, applaud to this. No, the point today is, okay, in the long term abolish the state, but are there ways today to use the state with all contradictions that this involves? This is why sincerely, I'm not lying here, I sincerely admired Syriza in Greece. Because they were not afraid to take the risk of—if God helped, it didn't help them—take power. You know, it's so comfortable to enjoy this position of distance and, you know, and then this you follow the greatest tradition of Marxism of the 20th century, which is—did you notice this sad fact, that all the greatest Marxist books of the 20th century, historically, are very convincing explanation of why a defeat had to happen. Marxists were always the best of, like Trotsky on Stalin and so on and so on. So that would be my first point. Maybe it's time to refocus from this—now I will be even evil and put all of them together—Judith Butler, Badiou, I know they hate each other, Rancière, you know, this idea state, centralized, regulated, marginal resistances and so on and so on. No, again the conflict is within society. Second thing, ah, I'm approaching the end but just another maybe even stronger provocation. I think that also what concerning universality, I think and postcolonialism, now I wonder if you will swallow this. When I was in India I got as I always do, I got involved in polemics with their Brahmin elite, you know who are all for justice but then you mention "what about castes and untouchables, what about equality," and you are immediately accused of ideological imperialism, you want to impose on us West values and so on. And one of them said—now comes a nice ideological point for me at least—one of them told me, "But are you aware that we are here already formally debating with you in an underprivileged position? We Indians, a great nation, even to make our point, we are compelled to speak in an imposed language of the colonizer. So even to assert ourselves, we have to assume the form of the opponent," and so on and so on. Well, first I gently reminded them that English is also not my, typically they overlooked that, like you know, me from a small shitty nation, two million, it's not a problem. Big India, of course. But I tried to make another point which didn't pass well there. That—now I come to Hegel, my big love—I agree the imposition of English toward posits an obstacle to whatever this means, let's call it hypothetically authentic Indian spirit in Hegelian terms. But I claim something else, that it is only through this imposition of foreign language, through the loss of their authentic being, that this authentic being emerged. If you take away the English language, you not—you don't get authentic India. You get the bullshit of local cultures, blah blah whatever, which is not what emancipatory postcolonial Indians are fighting for. And that's the beautiful Hegelian point made in a wonderful way by Hegel already apropos Christianity. Hegel says that the originality of Christianity is not God is even better, no, it's the fall. It's that—Hegel says clearly—the fall, okay, but what is the fall, fall from? That act, spiritual purity, emerges only through the fall. Before the fall paradise is stupid animality and so on. So you see this is Hegel's logic. Forget about all that bullshit which then is to be deconstructed, you have an immediacy which is alienated, fall. No, at the beginning is not immediacy, it's just a confused multitude. Then you have the fall, and the fall retroactively generates the specter of what it is the fall from. So it's a much more, a much more complex logic here. So now, just surprise really to conclude, my last point. And here I will try to provoke all of you. I think that—I have quotes on the last two pages of the book, but due to some editing mistake I was pissed off because of this, the references disappeared—T.J. Clark, the well-known art theorist who incidentally did a wonderful piece on Jean-Louis David's *The Death of Marat* as the first modernist painting. He published a text in a couple of months ago in *New Left Review*, where he says something very simple but I think there is a grain of truth in it. That basically whatever remained of radical left in the last decades was playing the game of patience, patience. Okay, we live in apparent prosperity but the time will come when there will be crisis and then our moment. Okay, now the crisis is here and protests, whatever. I don't see any, even—I know we cannot propose a detailed program now or whatever—but at least a vague general vision of what the left wants. Correct me if I'm wrong. I was—I'm asking them not demanding some ridiculous what will be your first law, your second law, but very basic questions like: Do you want capitalism, just capitalism, what I ironically refer to capitalism with a human face, in the same way that once we wanted social—like, you know, this Keynesian stuff, you know, more healthcare, more education and so on, or do you want move beyond? If you want move beyond, what? Some kind of a nationalization, democratic nation state, or some kind of—or even this eternal dream, which I think has absolutely to be abandoned, of immediate transparent democracy, you know this Negri, Hardt, multitude, local communities, prerepresentation, they work and so on and so on. What do you want? It's thinking interesting how you get either very general ideas, like my god, people are telling me "we want money to serve people, not people to serve money." Well, thanks. Hitler would have agreed with it. Because money which doesn't own—serve people is owned by the Jews and so on, you know. So no, I'm not blaming these leftists and so on. I'm saying that the problem is serious. And then precisely now when there is a movement like with Syriza and so on. My god, you know, like my otherwise friend Costas Douzinas from London attacked me, I claim in a typical Marxist way of two stages. He said "No, Slavoj, now we are in a stage of revolt. Next will be the stage of construction of the new. You are asking questions too early, and now this serves the enemy," no? But then I told him, because I was there, this was one week before Syriza elections, I was "So what, I should wait one week or whatever, you know." Like what I think is that maybe we have to start to think to offer something when we have explosions of unrest. Of course not simple formulas, nationalize whatever, but nonetheless these basic questions and I'm very open here, non-dogmatic, you know. Like is capitalism here to stay? Can we imagine a move beyond capitalism? In what sense? I think we can and should because if you ask me, look at the mess with intellectual property, it's in the long term the ruin of capitalism. Look at ecology. If we don't invent some kind of a even transnational global collective action, we are doomed and so on. How to do it and so on. I think it's the time to draw—this is why as a pure irony I really wanted to two years ago when there was that big guy Bernard Madoff or what, you know, to write—to celebrate him. No, I'm not crazy, but saying how false it was, he was the ideal victim. Instead of questioning the system, you had there "oh, the look the greedy banker." My god, bankers were always greedy. The problem is what changed in the system that they were able to realize their greediness. So again, it's a very modest conclusion. That ideological struggle is going on more than ever. This new common—the fact that we cannot imagine alternatives is in itself a sign of ideological victory of opponents. Here we have nothing to envy China. I mention in one of my books—conclusion, I promise—lastly, that in China half a year ago, friends told me, "My god, but I have here a friend, is it true or not? Friends did tell me this," that the Chinese authorities passed a law basically prohibiting topics of time travel and alternate history in narrative media. I claim this is great thing, you know why? Because if it's true, because at least those authorities are afraid that, you know, if you play with alternate history, this of course gives you an idea how things might be different, you know. The point is that this is a good sign in the sense that those in power are still at least afraid of people's imagination. We thus there is no prohibition needed because we cannot even imagine it, as Fred Jameson put long ago, it's much easier for us to imagine Armageddon—every month we have a new novel or movie about, you know, asteroid hitting the earth, whatever—the end of life on earth, nothing more self-evident. A small change in capitalism: impossible. This is ideology in practice. So just I'm saying, you know, the moment is dangerous and the very reason on account of which I'm a pessimist, I'm also a little bit an optimist. As I say in the book, the true utopia today is the utopia that things can go on indefinitely the way they are, you know. All this is all I'm saying. My communism is not, "Ooh, Comrade Stalin come back." My communism is this: capitalism is not devil, I'm here a Marxist, it's arguably the most dynamic system in the history of humanity. But strange things are happening with capitalism today. In some countries, China, Singapore, we have capitalism which is even more dynamic than our Western capitalism, but it obviously doesn't need too much of democracy. So I claim there is a divorce on the horizon in this eternal marriage between capitalism and democracy. We are approaching a zero point, ecology and so on, things cannot go on the way they do. So this is all my Marxism. It's basically anti-Fukuyama. But wait a minute, Fukuyama is an half-honest conservative, he himself the last time I met him told me he is no longer a Fukuyamaist. No no no, he is honest conservative. He told me, "Why are you looking at that machine? We are living people, not machines here," you know. "He has no—there's nothing on it." "Ah, I see the void." Yeah. No, sorry, quite seriously. You know for me the true dilemma today is are we Fukuyamaists, which means liberal democratic capitalism is the ultimate frame, we can make it more Keynesian, more blah blah, but we remain, or should we begin to ask more radical questions? I think A, we should, but B, that's why I'm not a conservative, not in the sense of return to some past tradition. We should go through this zero level of capitalism. That's all. It was confused, but I'm sorry, now I expose myself like Jesus Christ to the evil judges to attack me. Thank you very much. Let me say on behalf of myself and my fellow panelists, we did not know what Slavoj Žižek was going to say. That's true. This is how he greeted me. What will you say? You just want to talk without telling us, you know. Sorry, sir. This wasn't an accusation. I love to hear you talk about whatever. I just didn't know what it was going to be and I'm not stupid enough to think that I'm capable of responding to Slavoj Žižek on the fly, right? Not a good idea. However, I'm feeling a little bit stupid now because what I wrote down bears almost no relation to what he just said. Then you are like Obama responding Romney in the first debate, go on. I'm going to try to be a little livelier than that, actually. Right, so, um, it'll sound a little bit weird, especially because I believe I agreed with every, every single thing that Slavoj just said. Which is however not exactly the same thing as what he says in his book, which I highly recommend, but is a little different. Okay. So, this is the written out part. One reason why I'm glad of the existence of Slavoj Žižek is because he's taken on the project of refashioning common sense. Refashioning common sense is a project that we in the academy are often content to defer indefinitely, if we recognize it at all, and this even though it offers the most plausible answer to the question of why we do what we do is ultimately worth doing, if indeed it is ultimately worth doing. Another reason why I'm glad of the existence of Slavoj Žižek is because he addresses himself to common sense in the name of Hegel, which is quite a trick. In order to do this he plays down the Fukuyama end of history Hegel in favor of a Hegel who teaches us to look at the messiness of the present dialectically, which is to say neither condemning it moralistically on the one hand, nor on the other hand missing the signs that the present can and will turn into something very different. A third reason why I'm really glad of the existence of Slavoj Žižek is that he speaks unapologetically in the name of secularism and universalism, and it takes some courage to do that these days. A fourth reason why I'm glad of his existence is that for him the name of the problem, the problem, is capitalism, something that needs saying. Yet also because he says it in a Hegelian or dialectical spirit that allows us to see some unexpected possibilities and even virtues in it. For all its recent unsteadiness, capitalism does not seem ready to disappear anytime soon, and for someone who takes it as the problem, it's therefore tempting to judge ordinary politics to be more or less trivial and unworthy of our time and effort. I think—and this really is a reference to the book and not to what you just heard—that Slavoj sometimes succumbs to that temptation, a temptation that in what you just heard is kind of pushed off onto Balibar, Rancière, and Badiou. Since a respondent cannot just bless the speaker's existence but must also perform his function of responding, this is what I'll use my time to bother Slavoj about. In my own view, capitalism has to be named as the problem and fought without thereby discrediting ordinary politics and even the existing institutions that if you look, you will see are the result of past political conflicts, and even if those institutions clearly do among other kinds of work, the work of maintaining capitalism. This seems to me a properly Hegelian position and even Slavoj Žižek's own position, though in the book he doesn't really say so. What he says about politics in *The Year of Dreaming Dangerously* is ambivalent, perhaps as is perhaps inevitable for someone reporting on Occupy and speaking on behalf of revolution. I'm ambivalent about politics myself, but not quite as ambivalent as he is. And in this election season, I worry that any category that's as comfortably postponed as revolution will sound cool to people in part because it doesn't demand that they get up off their behinds right now and do something. I'm pretty sure that slogans like communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat are not going to get anyone around here to campaign against Mitt Romney. I'll bet you ten thousand dollars. I raise to twenty. Okay, my god. In his discussion of Greece and Italy, Slavoj notes that politicians in those countries have been replaced by depoliticized technocrats. And that things there and elsewhere are moving toward the suspension of political democracy. It seems very clear he thinks this is a bad thing and that political democracy in these countries is worth defending. Elsewhere in the book, however, he seems equally convinced that political democracy is not worth defending, that it's just a distraction. I quote, "Badiou hit the mark with his apparently weird claim, today the enemy is not called empire or capital, it's called democracy." So this is Slavoj again, "It's the democratic illusion, the acceptance of democratic procedures as the sole framework for any possible change, that blocks any
Thank you very much. Proud to be here. Let's see what will happen. I am basically, in the last years already, returning to philosophy. I'm less and less, frankly, interested in all this political stuff, although my books somehow appear, not clear to me how. So I would nonetheless—I mean, the book is the book, your judgment, so I don't want to give some general introduction or—I hate the cover, but that's another story. I want to do something else. I want to make just a couple of short five-minute interventions. First one, a little bit longer about a methodological question of classification, which could have been subtitled "In Praise of Chimney Sweeps," if you know Kierkegaard you know what I mean. And then a couple of, well as you would have put it, provocative, consciously problematic points, which will also concern violence. So, let me begin. It may appear difficult, you know it's usual to say we don't need that mechanic classification but a living thought. Nonetheless, one should ask how does a thought which is really living, not in any irrational sense but in a more Hegelian sense, how does it affect classifications? In other words, if we really want to think critically, what do we do with classifications? By classifications, I simply mean subdivisions, categorizations like political space, left, right, or ruling class, exploited class, whatever. I think that here, in a strange way, the three great post-Hegelians—okay, the third one is more a poet, but nonetheless—Kierkegaard, Marx, and Heinrich Heine come together. They do the same thing. First, Kierkegaard. My god, if you have a minimum of, now I'm consciously Eurocentric elitist of education, you know what I'm referring to, referring to. There is in Kierkegaard's, I think, Fear and Trembling—sorry, I hope this one, yeah—a wonderful passage where Kierkegaard proposes the subdivision of entire humanity into three categories. If you are human, you have to be one of these three. Quote: "A wit has said that one might divide mankind into officers, serving maids, and chimney sweeps. To my mind, this remark is not only witty but profound, and it would require a great speculative talent to devise a better classification," and so on and so on. So the first insight is: this classification has an immediate social, but also sexual foundation. It's not as crazy as it appears. Because officer stands for assertive, military, manliness, and so on, and serving maid is the model of a servant, subordinated woman. Now of course, the point is what does the chimney sweep do here? Why he has to be added? Because I think this would be my formula of critical thought: don't forget the chimney sweep. Why? Let's look to Marx. Marx does something similar when, even two times, first, both times in Capital, in the first chapter—no, sorry, this one is not the first chapter, it's later in Capital—when Marx describes the market exchange between workers and capitalists as, I quote: "The very Eden paradise of the innate rights of man. There alone rule freedom, equality, property, and Bentham." That's Marx. You know, on market we are all equal, free, blah blah, and Bentham. That's the chimney sweep element here. I think that one should nonetheless, maybe correct here Marx, I think the formula would have worked much better with just three elements: freedom, equality, and Bentham. Why? Because Bentham is for Marx, as he says, the name Bentham stands for the fact that, I quote again, "the only force that brings them," people on the market, "together and puts them in relation with each other is the selfishness, the private interest of each of them," and so on and so on. So of course the original triad is freedom, equality, fraternity. Fraternity gets to use Lacan's term, suppressed, repressed, verdrängt, replaced with Bentham. Then there is another weird classification by Marx when he introduces the topic of general equivalent. He writes, again towards the end of the first chapter of Capital, I quote: "It is," when we are dealing with general equivalent, ultimately money, "it is as if, alongside and external to lions, tigers, rabbits, and all others, actual animals which form, when grouped together, the various kind, species, subspecies, families, and so on of the animal kingdom, it is as if alongside all this, there existed in addition the animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom." And I think again, this is the logic and we should strictly read together, I think, the two paradoxes of classification by Marx. Or to go, or maybe we can even, so that you will see what I'm aiming at, improvise other cases like let's take social division. It's not enough to say we have, I don't know, to simplify it of course, capitalists and workers. In order for society to function ideologically, of course, you need a chimney sweep. That's for example the logic of antisemitism. You know, it's capitalists, workers, and Jews. The idea being if you erase the Jew, then you would have beautiful subdivision, harmony, everyone at his, her, their own place. The Jew comes, introduces chaos, or whatever. Or, I think the same paradoxical category in Hegel is rebel. So we have all the Stände, the estates, and then rebel. Rebel as the excessive element which designates those who, as our friend who cannot be here sadly, Étienne Balibar would have put it, no, rebel is the element which is formally part of the social edifice but doesn't have a proper place within it. Or as Jacques Rancière puts it, la part des sans-part, the part with no part within it. Now, what Hegel knew but didn't always recognize and failed to recognize precisely apropos rebel is that precisely this excessive part, almost excremental, stands for universality as such. So back to Marx. You know, when Marx speaks about Bentham, we should be very careful not to misread this along the lines of a similar classification by Heinrich Heine, where he said that—and I think this is the bad Heine, because of which Marx didn't like Heine towards the end of Heine's life—namely, Heine said somewhere that every normal German—he meant it positively—should value above everything else freedom, equality, and crab soup. Crab soup of course stands for, and this is why I hate it, that, you know, as liberals would have put it against totalitarians, don't focus only on the big ideals, show understanding for small human pleasures, weaknesses. If you are too fanatical, if you forget about crab soup, or what crab soup stands for, you end up as some Robespierre or Jacobin totalitarian and so on. It's in a way, you know, like don't—it's okay to have ideals but be realist, small weaknesses, small pleasures. But I think this is precisely the wrong reading. Because the excessive element, Bentham, does not stand for this kind of a human common sense but on the contrary, it stands for the excessive element which, in a way, colorizes, provides a mode, a tone, the color for the entire totality. That is to say, for Marx, Bentham is not just a comical addition. Bentham means, yeah yeah, we have equality, legal order, freedom, but Bentham says retroactively what all the big categories effectively mean in a bourgeois society. Bentham, precisely as this ridiculous excess, is the totalizing moment. So again, this would be, that I don't lose time, my first conclusion: like, don't forget the chimney sweep. And this, the chimney sweep—that's crucial now—does not mean be human, take bear in mind the plurality, you cannot be dogmatic. No, the chimney sweep, this excessive element, doesn't stand for the empirical surplus over the big difference. Like, we have workers and capitalists but society is not as simple as that, there are always others, marginal—no, this excessive element stands precisely for the difference as such. I will try to explain this through the logic, very briefly, of antisemitism. You know what's the paradox of, for example, maybe you are too young but maybe if you remember once there was a time when we talked about left and right in politics, no? And this is a nice example of what Marx called, of what Lacan or my ex-friend Ernesto Laclau would have called, antagonistic relationship, where in a paradoxical way the difference precedes what it is the difference of. This may appear a cheap paradox but again, let me explain it through left and right politically. The distinction between left and right is not only a distinction of the political space into two blocks. It's a different logic of the entire political space. If you ask a right-winger how does he perceive the entire social body, he would have given you probably a different articulation than the left-winger. Usually, traditionally, the right-winger would be more organicist, he would say first I am not a right-winger, I'm stable center and all others are extremist, destabilizing. While a left-winger would have said no, society as such is characterized by a central antagonism and so on and so on. But so you see the logic. This is what Lacan would have meant by difference not as a simple symbolic differential but as real. That it's not that we have worker, capitalist, they fight. They fight for their very difference, for what their difference means. There is no neutral notion of society where you can distinguish naively workers and capitalists which would be independent of you taking side, being engaged in the struggle. And my point is that, for example, in antisemitism, the Jew is not just the empirical complication, it stands for this antagonism as such. Because as you know, if you know minimally about fascism, there, as they make it clear, without the Jew, which of course stands for social antagonism, those plots, we wouldn't have class struggle. We would have, that's the Nazi ideal, a social harmony between different parts, everyone at his, her, their own place. Or as they told me when I was in China, not our friend Wang Hui but some others, oh I had a wonderful experience in Shanghai, I remember, they told me but we no longer talk about communism here, we talk about a harmonious society, this Confucian bullshit. Okay. So I asked them, cut the crap, what do you mean by it? And they gave me a—they told me in a harmonious society, everyone is at his, her, or their proper place. Leader is a good leader, worker a good worker, teacher a good teacher, wife a good wife, and so on. And I exploded. I said this is wonderful, we no longer have all those problems of multicultural understanding. In Europe, we call this corporate fascism, what's the problem, and so on, we understand. So but no, you see the point how you need the Jew—by Jew, I mean the antagonistic tension which fascism projects onto the Jew, Jew as a fantasy image of antisemites of course—you need the Jew to—you need the figure of the Jew for the relationship to become antagonistic. Okay, my first point. My second point now to complicate things a little bit. Nothing to do with the first one. You know, the Germans have this wonderful expression *Rückgängig machen*, which is usually translated with to annul, to cancel, to unhitch, but I think it would be much nicer to read it as undoing, retroactively annihilating. Now I'm not bullshitting, I think that our times are precisely the times of such an undoing of emancipatory achievements. And I mean this at every, at a very elementary level. How, how do I mean it? First, to give you an idea, I love classical music, I cannot—you know who would be the pure opera composer of undoing? Rossini. Compare Mozart's *Le nozze di Figaro* and Rossini's *Barber of Seville*. Mozart is politicized. You remember in *Don Giovanni*, that big entry of *Don Giovanni*, "Viva la libertà" and everyone. While the whole—this is why Rossini stopped composing after counterrevolution. The whole dream of Rossini is let's pretend that there was no French Revolution. We can simply return—you know, Rossini's Figaro is not that potentially subversive figure of Beaumarchais and Mozart. It's a kind of a—this premodern, prerevolutionary topic of a tricky servant playing with the master or whatever and so on and so on. So who would be then today's Rossini? First, I think it's all around Europe. I'm tired of America bashing, I'm going back to Europe where, apropos Greece, even in Northern Europe—you know what I'm trying to impart you is this weird feeling and I want to praise dogmatism now. I think we the left should celebrate dogmatism. What do I mean by this? That in a good sense dogmatism, it's that I think sometimes dogmatism is even one of the best indicators of, if I may use this term, progress. What do I mean by this? Imagine a society where we would have to argue all the time should women, should we allow women to be raped or not. And you—no, sorry, I would like to live in a society where if someone advocates, you know all the bullshit, women secretly like it, they are just hypocritical, blah blah, you don't argue, the guy simply appears as an eccentric jerk or whatever, it's to such an extent our second nature to accept this. And this is what makes me sad today, at least in Europe. Statements, emancipatory achievements in racism, antifeminism, and so on, which had the status of this type of self-evident dogma, you simply accept it, like we don't torture people, women are equal, no racism and so on. It's no longer so self-evident. They are gently, gently returning. In post-communist Eastern Europe, even in celebrated Scandinavian countries and so on and so on. I think this is a phenomenon which should worry us very much. Or at the level of political and social logic, how imperceptibly the achievements which made certain rights simple rights are reinterpreted as privileges. This is a nice symptom: a friend just emailed me from England that now, very recently, the British government, conservative, issued an order that in all legal or state proclamations, documents, you no longer use the term unemployed. You use the term workless. And of course the gain is clear. First, workless gently resonates with worthless, without, you know, like... Point two: if you say unemployed, the implication is that you would like to work, you just cannot get employment. No. If you say workless, it pushes you imperceptibly towards Greece, you know. Sorry, my joke, you know what I mean. Like lazy people who—no, as I call to my friends to annoy them, this is not racism, this is cultural anthropology, what I'm doing now. No, sorry, quite seriously. You know what is my defense, would you agree? I don't know if I use this, that when you Greeks, which is of course false—I even once engaged in a very vulgar geopolitical logic. It's so primitive, but when we hear all this bullshit, you know, you Greeks lazy and so on. Listen, I'm ashamed to say this, but maybe there are countries where nature too much fruit falling down makes you lazy. Yeah, but you are not this. But you have this—but you have what do you mean, you know, you have this mountainous area, it's very—even following this very vulgar logic, you are not lazy. But my great—no no no, my main point is the following one. I know that this is the wrong topic, that's my point, that in the same way as the moment you accept, for example, debating a Nazi, that that antisemitism is about real properties of Jews, and then you start argue, no but you are wrong, Jews are not really like that, you've sold your soul to the devil, I claim. Because you know, the point of antisemitism that we should analyze, it's not: let's look at it, are Jews really like that. This doesn't matter. The point is why does the Nazi subject need the figure of the Jew to bring together, to hold together his entire political edifice? I would like to apply now to this Lacan's well-known slogan that about jealous husband, that even if all his reproaches to the wife that she's sleeping around with other men are true, his jealousy is nonetheless pathological. So again, okay, let me slowly conclude. You know who would be another clear case of this regression here? I was quite shocked. You know what now three months ago Victor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, you know what he said? He said that Hungary will probably have to invent, I quote, a new type of political system instead of democracy. He says cooperation is a question of force, not of intention. Perhaps there are countries where things can work that way, for example, in Scandinavia, but such a half-Asiatic ragtag people as we Hungarians are can unite only if there is force. I found this wonderful. I remember in '56, when Soviet tanks were advancing on Budapest, the most famous, quoted by all liberals with, with tears and intellectual orgasm, are the famous telegram, you know, saying to the West when Russian tanks advanced: "We are defending Europe here." Now we have a guy who presents himself as the ultimate radical successor of these dissidents and who all of a sudden claim: no no, we are not Europe, we are Asiatic and so on. Isn't this a strange era where the term Asiatic ragtag people is used as a positive signation? And so on. So quickly, I... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My next point would have been critical, I hope it's made clearly enough in the book, that many French political theorists, from Balibar—my friend, I'm proud to say Étienne Balibar is here not the worst—Rancière and Badiou, I'm critical to all of them. I don't like their obsession with state power. It is as if, you know, state is the enemy and you have here all this Deleuzian undercurrent. State is representation, we need immediate self-transparent presentation, local democracy or whatever. And then the idea is, let me quote I think it is one of the Gianni Vattimo, who said we have to be outside. This is a postmodern idea. The idea is that I must subtract myself from the game of power. I claim that if there is a lesson from the ongoing economic crisis, is that no, we should not exactly rehabilitate state power but see that the fundamental struggle is not in this Deleuzian/Badiouan way—I know they're not the same, on consciously I put them together—of big state apparatus there, the enemy. No, I'm here a Marxist. The big struggle is the struggle about capitalism, which is precisely in society. Which is why ironically if you say "oh, the state, we should withdraw," again a distance at the state. Well, Rick Santorum would certainly applaud, applaud to this. No, the point today is, okay, in the long term abolish the state, but are there ways today to use the state with all contradictions that this involves? This is why sincerely, I'm not lying here, I sincerely admired Syriza in Greece. Because they were not afraid to take the risk of—if God helped, it didn't help them—take power. You know, it's so comfortable to enjoy this position of distance and, you know, and then this you follow the greatest tradition of Marxism of the 20th century, which is—did you notice this sad fact, that all the greatest Marxist books of the 20th century, historically, are very convincing explanation of why a defeat had to happen. Marxists were always the best of, like Trotsky on Stalin and so on and so on. So that would be my first point. Maybe it's time to refocus from this—now I will be even evil and put all of them together—Judith Butler, Badiou, I know they hate each other, Rancière, you know, this idea state, centralized, regulated, marginal resistances and so on and so on. No, again the conflict is within society. Second thing, ah, I'm approaching the end but just another maybe even stronger provocation. I think that also what concerning universality, I think and postcolonialism, now I wonder if you will swallow this. When I was in India I got as I always do, I got involved in polemics with their Brahmin elite, you know who are all for justice but then you mention "what about castes and untouchables, what about equality," and you are immediately accused of ideological imperialism, you want to impose on us West values and so on. And one of them said—now comes a nice ideological point for me at least—one of them told me, "But are you aware that we are here already formally debating with you in an underprivileged position? We Indians, a great nation, even to make our point, we are compelled to speak in an imposed language of the colonizer. So even to assert ourselves, we have to assume the form of the opponent," and so on and so on. Well, first I gently reminded them that English is also not my, typically they overlooked that, like you know, me from a small shitty nation, two million, it's not a problem. Big India, of course. But I tried to make another point which didn't pass well there. That—now I come to Hegel, my big love—I agree the imposition of English toward posits an obstacle to whatever this means, let's call it hypothetically authentic Indian spirit in Hegelian terms. But I claim something else, that it is only through this imposition of foreign language, through the loss of their authentic being, that this authentic being emerged. If you take away the English language, you not—you don't get authentic India. You get the bullshit of local cultures, blah blah whatever, which is not what emancipatory postcolonial Indians are fighting for. And that's the beautiful Hegelian point made in a wonderful way by Hegel already apropos Christianity. Hegel says that the originality of Christianity is not God is even better, no, it's the fall. It's that—Hegel says clearly—the fall, okay, but what is the fall, fall from? That act, spiritual purity, emerges only through the fall. Before the fall paradise is stupid animality and so on. So you see this is Hegel's logic. Forget about all that bullshit which then is to be deconstructed, you have an immediacy which is alienated, fall. No, at the beginning is not immediacy, it's just a confused multitude. Then you have the fall, and the fall retroactively generates the specter of what it is the fall from. So it's a much more, a much more complex logic here. So now, just surprise really to conclude, my last point. And here I will try to provoke all of you. I think that—I have quotes on the last two pages of the book, but due to some editing mistake I was pissed off because of this, the references disappeared—T.J. Clark, the well-known art theorist who incidentally did a wonderful piece on Jean-Louis David's *The Death of Marat* as the first modernist painting. He published a text in a couple of months ago in *New Left Review*, where he says something very simple but I think there is a grain of truth in it. That basically whatever remained of radical left in the last decades was playing the game of patience, patience. Okay, we live in apparent prosperity but the time will come when there will be crisis and then our moment. Okay, now the crisis is here and protests, whatever. I don't see any, even—I know we cannot propose a detailed program now or whatever—but at least a vague general vision of what the left wants. Correct me if I'm wrong. I was—I'm asking them not demanding some ridiculous what will be your first law, your second law, but very basic questions like: Do you want capitalism, just capitalism, what I ironically refer to capitalism with a human face, in the same way that once we wanted social—like, you know, this Keynesian stuff, you know, more healthcare, more education and so on, or do you want move beyond? If you want move beyond, what? Some kind of a nationalization, democratic nation state, or some kind of—or even this eternal dream, which I think has absolutely to be abandoned, of immediate transparent democracy, you know this Negri, Hardt, multitude, local communities, prerepresentation, they work and so on and so on. What do you want? It's thinking interesting how you get either very general ideas, like my god, people are telling me "we want money to serve people, not people to serve money." Well, thanks. Hitler would have agreed with it. Because money which doesn't own—serve people is owned by the Jews and so on, you know. So no, I'm not blaming these leftists and so on. I'm saying that the problem is serious. And then precisely now when there is a movement like with Syriza and so on. My god, you know, like my otherwise friend Costas Douzinas from London attacked me, I claim in a typical Marxist way of two stages. He said "No, Slavoj, now we are in a stage of revolt. Next will be the stage of construction of the new. You are asking questions too early, and now this serves the enemy," no? But then I told him, because I was there, this was one week before Syriza elections, I was "So what, I should wait one week or whatever, you know." Like what I think is that maybe we have to start to think to offer something when we have explosions of unrest. Of course not simple formulas, nationalize whatever, but nonetheless these basic questions and I'm very open here, non-dogmatic, you know. Like is capitalism here to stay? Can we imagine a move beyond capitalism? In what sense? I think we can and should because if you ask me, look at the mess with intellectual property, it's in the long term the ruin of capitalism. Look at ecology. If we don't invent some kind of a even transnational global collective action, we are doomed and so on. How to do it and so on. I think it's the time to draw—this is why as a pure irony I really wanted to two years ago when there was that big guy Bernard Madoff or what, you know, to write—to celebrate him. No, I'm not crazy, but saying how false it was, he was the ideal victim. Instead of questioning the system, you had there "oh, the look the greedy banker." My god, bankers were always greedy. The problem is what changed in the system that they were able to realize their greediness. So again, it's a very modest conclusion. That ideological struggle is going on more than ever. This new common—the fact that we cannot imagine alternatives is in itself a sign of ideological victory of opponents. Here we have nothing to envy China. I mention in one of my books—conclusion, I promise—lastly, that in China half a year ago, friends told me, "My god, but I have here a friend, is it true or not? Friends did tell me this," that the Chinese authorities passed a law basically prohibiting topics of time travel and alternate history in narrative media. I claim this is great thing, you know why? Because if it's true, because at least those authorities are afraid that, you know, if you play with alternate history, this of course gives you an idea how things might be different, you know. The point is that this is a good sign in the sense that those in power are still at least afraid of people's imagination. We thus there is no prohibition needed because we cannot even imagine it, as Fred Jameson put long ago, it's much easier for us to imagine Armageddon—every month we have a new novel or movie about, you know, asteroid hitting the earth, whatever—the end of life on earth, nothing more self-evident. A small change in capitalism: impossible. This is ideology in practice. So just I'm saying, you know, the moment is dangerous and the very reason on account of which I'm a pessimist, I'm also a little bit an optimist. As I say in the book, the true utopia today is the utopia that things can go on indefinitely the way they are, you know. All this is all I'm saying. My communism is not, "Ooh, Comrade Stalin come back." My communism is this: capitalism is not devil, I'm here a Marxist, it's arguably the most dynamic system in the history of humanity. But strange things are happening with capitalism today. In some countries, China, Singapore, we have capitalism which is even more dynamic than our Western capitalism, but it obviously doesn't need too much of democracy. So I claim there is a divorce on the horizon in this eternal marriage between capitalism and democracy. We are approaching a zero point, ecology and so on, things cannot go on the way they do. So this is all my Marxism. It's basically anti-Fukuyama. But wait a minute, Fukuyama is an half-honest conservative, he himself the last time I met him told me he is no longer a Fukuyamaist. No no no, he is honest conservative. He told me, "Why are you looking at that machine? We are living people, not machines here," you know. "He has no—there's nothing on it." "Ah, I see the void." Yeah. No, sorry, quite seriously. You know for me the true dilemma today is are we Fukuyamaists, which means liberal democratic capitalism is the ultimate frame, we can make it more Keynesian, more blah blah, but we remain, or should we begin to ask more radical questions? I think A, we should, but B, that's why I'm not a conservative, not in the sense of return to some past tradition. We should go through this zero level of capitalism. That's all. It was confused, but I'm sorry, now I expose myself like Jesus Christ to the evil judges to attack me. Thank you very much. Let me say on behalf of myself and my fellow panelists, we did not know what Slavoj Žižek was going to say. That's true. This is how he greeted me. What will you say? You just want to talk without telling us, you know. Sorry, sir. This wasn't an accusation. I love to hear you talk about whatever. I just didn't know what it was going to be and I'm not stupid enough to think that I'm capable of responding to Slavoj Žižek on the fly, right? Not a good idea. However, I'm feeling a little bit stupid now because what I wrote down bears almost no relation to what he just said. Then you are like Obama responding Romney in the first debate, go on. I'm going to try to be a little livelier than that, actually. Right, so, um, it'll sound a little bit weird, especially because I believe I agreed with every, every single thing that Slavoj just said. Which is however not exactly the same thing as what he says in his book, which I highly recommend, but is a little different. Okay. So, this is the written out part. One reason why I'm glad of the existence of Slavoj Žižek is because he's taken on the project of refashioning common sense. Refashioning common sense is a project that we in the academy are often content to defer indefinitely, if we recognize it at all, and this even though it offers the most plausible answer to the question of why we do what we do is ultimately worth doing, if indeed it is ultimately worth doing. Another reason why I'm glad of the existence of Slavoj Žižek is because he addresses himself to common sense in the name of Hegel, which is quite a trick. In order to do this he plays down the Fukuyama end of history Hegel in favor of a Hegel who teaches us to look at the messiness of the present dialectically, which is to say neither condemning it moralistically on the one hand, nor on the other hand missing the signs that the present can and will turn into something very different. A third reason why I'm really glad of the existence of Slavoj Žižek is that he speaks unapologetically in the name of secularism and universalism, and it takes some courage to do that these days. A fourth reason why I'm glad of his existence is that for him the name of the problem, the problem, is capitalism, something that needs saying. Yet also because he says it in a Hegelian or dialectical spirit that allows us to see some unexpected possibilities and even virtues in it. For all its recent unsteadiness, capitalism does not seem ready to disappear anytime soon, and for someone who takes it as the problem, it's therefore tempting to judge ordinary politics to be more or less trivial and unworthy of our time and effort. I think—and this really is a reference to the book and not to what you just heard—that Slavoj sometimes succumbs to that temptation, a temptation that in what you just heard is kind of pushed off onto Balibar, Rancière, and Badiou. Since a respondent cannot just bless the speaker's existence but must also perform his function of responding, this is what I'll use my time to bother Slavoj about. In my own view, capitalism has to be named as the problem and fought without thereby discrediting ordinary politics and even the existing institutions that if you look, you will see are the result of past political conflicts, and even if those institutions clearly do among other kinds of work, the work of maintaining capitalism. This seems to me a properly Hegelian position and even Slavoj Žižek's own position, though in the book he doesn't really say so. What he says about politics in *The Year of Dreaming Dangerously* is ambivalent, perhaps as is perhaps inevitable for someone reporting on Occupy and speaking on behalf of revolution. I'm ambivalent about politics myself, but not quite as ambivalent as he is. And in this election season, I worry that any category that's as comfortably postponed as revolution will sound cool to people in part because it doesn't demand that they get up off their behinds right now and do something. I'm pretty sure that slogans like communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat are not going to get anyone around here to campaign against Mitt Romney. I'll bet you ten thousand dollars. I raise to twenty. Okay, my god. In his discussion of Greece and Italy, Slavoj notes that politicians in those countries have been replaced by depoliticized technocrats. And that things there and elsewhere are moving toward the suspension of political democracy. It seems very clear he thinks this is a bad thing and that political democracy in these countries is worth defending. Elsewhere in the book, however, he seems equally convinced that political democracy is not worth defending, that it's just a distraction. I quote, "Badiou hit the mark with his apparently weird claim, today the enemy is not called empire or capital, it's called democracy." So this is Slavoj again, "It's the democratic illusion, the acceptance of democratic procedures as the sole framework for any possible change, that blocks any
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radical transformation of capitalist relations." So this seems to me a little disingenuous. Who believes that existing political institutions offer
radical transformation of capitalist relations." So this seems to me a little disingenuous. Who believes that existing political institutions offer
Slavoj Žižek
the sole framework for change? I don't think I've ever heard such a thing, certainly not from anyone
the sole framework for change? I don't think I've ever heard such a thing, certainly not from anyone
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who
who
Slavoj Žižek
cares about transforming
cares about transforming
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capitalist relations. On the other hand, calling democracy "the enemy," as Badiou does—and note, democracy rather than capital—is a sort of cheap shot that almost seems intended to make people stay home, perhaps enjoying some bit of witty social commentary in their living rooms. It doesn't seem coincidental that the phrase "dictatorship
capitalist relations. On the other hand, calling democracy "the enemy," as Badiou does—and note, democracy rather than capital—is a sort of cheap shot that almost seems intended to make people stay home, perhaps enjoying some bit of witty social commentary in their living rooms. It doesn't seem coincidental that the phrase "dictatorship
Slavoj Žižek
of the proletariat" is resuscitated on the same page where Slavoj endorses Badiou's argument, I quote, "against participation in democratic voting." Slavoj says that we do
of the proletariat" is resuscitated on the same page where Slavoj endorses Badiou's argument, I quote, "against participation in democratic voting." Slavoj says that we do
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not get to vote on who owns what. This seems pretty plausible until you ask yourself whether it's actually true. Weren't we voting on who owns what when we voted in the graduated income tax? Isn't that what we would be voting on if we were to vote in, for example, a much higher tax on capital gains, or a tax on financial transactions, or a hundred percent inheritance tax, or if we were to reinstitute a decent welfare system? Speaking of which, should we really be indifferent to the ongoing dismantling of the welfare state? This dismantling, Slavoj says in the book, is not the betrayal of a noble idea, but, quote, "a failure that retroactively enables us to discern a fatal flaw of the very notion of the welfare state." What's the fatal flaw? The idea that capitalism can be made, quote, "socially responsible." I think this is wrong, not because I'm sure that capitalism can be made socially responsible, but because it's entirely about ideas. The dismantling of the welfare state is worth fighting, not because the welfare state was or is a noble idea, but because people's lives are being wrecked these days by the withdrawal of social services. Better to be agnostic about the fate of capitalism in the long term, who can responsibly say that they really know for sure? In the meantime, and the meantime is where we live in a state of uncertainty about the future in which we're obliged to make our choices nationally and globally, all we need is the assurance that some political efforts do have results, even when the idea behind them is not the noblest one one could conceive. The motto "fail again, fail better" is exact. Some failures really are better than other failures and the welfare state is one of them. Was the manifesto of the Spanish *indignados* really mistaken in demanding a right to housing, health, education, and unemployment, that Canadian stuff that was referred to? Did this really confer too much legitimacy on the state? In his analysis of populist anti-statism in the US, Slavoj says very correctly, I quote, "Large corporations are delighted at evangelical attacks on the state when the state tries to regulate media mergers, put restrictions on energy companies, strengthen air pollution regulations, protect wildlife and limit logging in the national parks, etc., etc." He doesn't seem to draw any conclusions from these state activities
not get to vote on who owns what. This seems pretty plausible until you ask yourself whether it's actually true. Weren't we voting on who owns what when we voted in the graduated income tax? Isn't that what we would be voting on if we were to vote in, for example, a much higher tax on capital gains, or a tax on financial transactions, or a hundred percent inheritance tax, or if we were to reinstitute a decent welfare system? Speaking of which, should we really be indifferent to the ongoing dismantling of the welfare state? This dismantling, Slavoj says in the book, is not the betrayal of a noble idea, but, quote, "a failure that retroactively enables us to discern a fatal flaw of the very notion of the welfare state." What's the fatal flaw? The idea that capitalism can be made, quote, "socially responsible." I think this is wrong, not because I'm sure that capitalism can be made socially responsible, but because it's entirely about ideas. The dismantling of the welfare state is worth fighting, not because the welfare state was or is a noble idea, but because people's lives are being wrecked these days by the withdrawal of social services. Better to be agnostic about the fate of capitalism in the long term, who can responsibly say that they really know for sure? In the meantime, and the meantime is where we live in a state of uncertainty about the future in which we're obliged to make our choices nationally and globally, all we need is the assurance that some political efforts do have results, even when the idea behind them is not the noblest one one could conceive. The motto "fail again, fail better" is exact. Some failures really are better than other failures and the welfare state is one of them. Was the manifesto of the Spanish *indignados* really mistaken in demanding a right to housing, health, education, and unemployment, that Canadian stuff that was referred to? Did this really confer too much legitimacy on the state? In his analysis of populist anti-statism in the US, Slavoj says very correctly, I quote, "Large corporations are delighted at evangelical attacks on the state when the state tries to regulate media mergers, put restrictions on energy companies, strengthen air pollution regulations, protect wildlife and limit logging in the national parks, etc., etc." He doesn't seem to draw any conclusions from these state activities
Slavoj Žižek
either about the progressive politics that
either about the progressive politics that
unknown
led
led
unknown
to them—because they weren't going to come about without a
to them—because they weren't going to come about without a
unknown
push from progressive politics—that seems to me a non-negligible success story. Or about the possibility that more pressure from the left could lead to further state intervention in the market, which is to say more success. On the contrary, he makes such goals seem not worth bothering about, not all the time, but often enough for it to be worth mentioning. At its most extreme, this becomes the imperative to abstain from acts of resistance on the grounds that acts of resistance, quote, "only keep the system alive." Okay, acts of resistance only keep the system alive. This sounds cleverly counter-intuitive, but I would really need to see some evidence that it's true before I let it decide how I'm going to conduct myself. I would not like to see it take over our common sense and I don't really think Slavoj would either. Thanks. I've spent the past two days reading and thinking about this book. And what is this book about? Like many of us, Žižek is trying to make sense of the current global economic crisis and the state of capitalism itself. But he's impatient, as you have heard, with the liberal proposals of government regulations or financial reform, or their attachment to the idea of the welfare state. By the same token, he's also impatient and he rejects the moralizing indictment of greed, excess, corruption, and any kind of arguments made on behalf of human nature. The question that he puts to us in this book is this: is our playing with the capitalist beast really the only imaginable game in town? The answer is no. Why? Because the capitalist system can no longer find an immanent level of self-regulated stability and its circuit threatens to run out of control, right? This is a Marxist position. Our task then is to begin by identifying the real game, that is to relearn what politics is, to reidentify, to reconceptualize the political in our time. To do that, Žižek wants us to rethink the notion of class struggle, which he argues, quote, "stands for the irreducible political moment at the very heart of the economic." He's rethinking the relationship between the political and the economic. For him, although he doesn't really emphasize this in his presentation, class struggle is not the ultimate referent and the horizon of meaning of all other social struggles, as it was for classic Marxism, and he made it very clear today that he's not—there's no going back to the earlier Marxist moment. What then is his idea of class struggle? He says it's the structuring principle that allows us to account for the inconsistent plurality of the ways in which other kinds of antagonisms can be articulated into chains of equivalences. This is a very interesting idea. Now, we really have to change gear in in our thinking about the social picture. Here Žižek introduces an important distinction between the logic of antagonism and the logic of recognition of difference. Just as he refuses to play the game of difference and cultural relativism, Žižek refuses to let himself get caught up in the liberal dilemma of how much tolerance can we afford in a multicultural and globalized world. Instead, he suggests that the only way out is to resuscitate the legacy of radical and universal emancipation, namely: do not simply respect others, but offer them a common struggle, since our most pressing problems today are the problems that we have in common. One of the best
push from progressive politics—that seems to me a non-negligible success story. Or about the possibility that more pressure from the left could lead to further state intervention in the market, which is to say more success. On the contrary, he makes such goals seem not worth bothering about, not all the time, but often enough for it to be worth mentioning. At its most extreme, this becomes the imperative to abstain from acts of resistance on the grounds that acts of resistance, quote, "only keep the system alive." Okay, acts of resistance only keep the system alive. This sounds cleverly counter-intuitive, but I would really need to see some evidence that it's true before I let it decide how I'm going to conduct myself. I would not like to see it take over our common sense and I don't really think Slavoj would either. Thanks. I've spent the past two days reading and thinking about this book. And what is this book about? Like many of us, Žižek is trying to make sense of the current global economic crisis and the state of capitalism itself. But he's impatient, as you have heard, with the liberal proposals of government regulations or financial reform, or their attachment to the idea of the welfare state. By the same token, he's also impatient and he rejects the moralizing indictment of greed, excess, corruption, and any kind of arguments made on behalf of human nature. The question that he puts to us in this book is this: is our playing with the capitalist beast really the only imaginable game in town? The answer is no. Why? Because the capitalist system can no longer find an immanent level of self-regulated stability and its circuit threatens to run out of control, right? This is a Marxist position. Our task then is to begin by identifying the real game, that is to relearn what politics is, to reidentify, to reconceptualize the political in our time. To do that, Žižek wants us to rethink the notion of class struggle, which he argues, quote, "stands for the irreducible political moment at the very heart of the economic." He's rethinking the relationship between the political and the economic. For him, although he doesn't really emphasize this in his presentation, class struggle is not the ultimate referent and the horizon of meaning of all other social struggles, as it was for classic Marxism, and he made it very clear today that he's not—there's no going back to the earlier Marxist moment. What then is his idea of class struggle? He says it's the structuring principle that allows us to account for the inconsistent plurality of the ways in which other kinds of antagonisms can be articulated into chains of equivalences. This is a very interesting idea. Now, we really have to change gear in in our thinking about the social picture. Here Žižek introduces an important distinction between the logic of antagonism and the logic of recognition of difference. Just as he refuses to play the game of difference and cultural relativism, Žižek refuses to let himself get caught up in the liberal dilemma of how much tolerance can we afford in a multicultural and globalized world. Instead, he suggests that the only way out is to resuscitate the legacy of radical and universal emancipation, namely: do not simply respect others, but offer them a common struggle, since our most pressing problems today are the problems that we have in common. One of the best
unknown
historical examples I can think of—there are many, not many such struggles—is the international brigades from countries during the Spanish Civil War where all of a sudden people became colorblind when they fought fascism side by side. Last fall, Žižek gave a speech at Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement. Parts of that speech have been incorporated into one of the book chapters called "Occupy Wall Street, or, The Violent Silencing of a New Beginning." That's the—that's the chapter title. In this chapter, he defends the movement against a number of familiar charges such as "oh, do these people—do these people have a program? Oh, do they have a vision?" and so on and so forth. And he points out two important aspects of this movement. One: the contemporary popular discontent is with capitalism as a system, not with any particular corrupt form of this system. Two: the contemporary form of representative multi-party democracy is incapable of dealing with capitalist excesses. In other words, democracy has to be reinvented. That's the language that that he uses in the book. Now this is a genuine problem for reflection and for theoretical innovation, but it has been strangely perverted by a number of—by the media and by a number of theorists. In this chapter, Žižek analyzes a—a discussion of how globalization has destroyed democracy. And it's one of those perversions that he highlights for us. Now those people who see a connection between globalization and the weakening of democracy seem to turn a blind eye to the logic of capitalism when they, for example, claim, quote, "globalization has begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracy." This sounds a bit strange. Okay, so it—it sounds like a threat is coming from the outside. The question: is it simply another way of saying that the United States is an empire in decline? Now these are not equivalent statements, but they seem to imply each other. That leads to the second point I wanted to bring up. I've—I've, although I found many of Žižek's reflections extremely interesting and insight—insightful, I would however push his psychoanalytical diagnosis of capitalism in a somewhat different direction. I—I would probably not put it in the Lacanian real where Žižek locates the problem, but in the symbolic order where capitalism truly thrives. And I will conclude here. Now my question is: what do we make of the changing situation of the dollar? That's really the realm of the symbolic for capitalism and the American financial dominance in the world. And earlier you were speaking about using the states. Now, are some states using themselves? Give you an example. At the fourth BRICS summit in New Delhi—that was last spring, perhaps—the member countries agreed to work towards currency swaps when trading among themselves. The quantitative easing since the financial crisis has made many countries vulnerable and they realize there's this immense risk involved in holding the dollar. For China, there's a general trend according to analysts, there's a general trend in recent years to internationalize the RMB, or Yuan. At the end of last year, of China's total trade was settled in Yuan, not in dollar, with countries and regions, and this was a huge jump up from where the percentage was only A report by HSBC in estimated half of China's trade with emerging market countries by would be conducted
historical examples I can think of—there are many, not many such struggles—is the international brigades from countries during the Spanish Civil War where all of a sudden people became colorblind when they fought fascism side by side. Last fall, Žižek gave a speech at Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement. Parts of that speech have been incorporated into one of the book chapters called "Occupy Wall Street, or, The Violent Silencing of a New Beginning." That's the—that's the chapter title. In this chapter, he defends the movement against a number of familiar charges such as "oh, do these people—do these people have a program? Oh, do they have a vision?" and so on and so forth. And he points out two important aspects of this movement. One: the contemporary popular discontent is with capitalism as a system, not with any particular corrupt form of this system. Two: the contemporary form of representative multi-party democracy is incapable of dealing with capitalist excesses. In other words, democracy has to be reinvented. That's the language that that he uses in the book. Now this is a genuine problem for reflection and for theoretical innovation, but it has been strangely perverted by a number of—by the media and by a number of theorists. In this chapter, Žižek analyzes a—a discussion of how globalization has destroyed democracy. And it's one of those perversions that he highlights for us. Now those people who see a connection between globalization and the weakening of democracy seem to turn a blind eye to the logic of capitalism when they, for example, claim, quote, "globalization has begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracy." This sounds a bit strange. Okay, so it—it sounds like a threat is coming from the outside. The question: is it simply another way of saying that the United States is an empire in decline? Now these are not equivalent statements, but they seem to imply each other. That leads to the second point I wanted to bring up. I've—I've, although I found many of Žižek's reflections extremely interesting and insight—insightful, I would however push his psychoanalytical diagnosis of capitalism in a somewhat different direction. I—I would probably not put it in the Lacanian real where Žižek locates the problem, but in the symbolic order where capitalism truly thrives. And I will conclude here. Now my question is: what do we make of the changing situation of the dollar? That's really the realm of the symbolic for capitalism and the American financial dominance in the world. And earlier you were speaking about using the states. Now, are some states using themselves? Give you an example. At the fourth BRICS summit in New Delhi—that was last spring, perhaps—the member countries agreed to work towards currency swaps when trading among themselves. The quantitative easing since the financial crisis has made many countries vulnerable and they realize there's this immense risk involved in holding the dollar. For China, there's a general trend according to analysts, there's a general trend in recent years to internationalize the RMB, or Yuan. At the end of last year, of China's total trade was settled in Yuan, not in dollar, with countries and regions, and this was a huge jump up from where the percentage was only A report by HSBC in estimated half of China's trade with emerging market countries by would be conducted
unknown
using
using
unknown
currency swaps. In other words, the report went on, quote, "nearly two trillion US dollars' worth of trade, trade flows, could be settled in RMB annually, making it one of the top three global trading currencies." End of quote. It is important to notice that the world's second and third largest economies, China and Japan, announced their currency swap agreement a number of—some months ago, less than a year ago. And that agreement was to take effect in June this year, took effect in June this year. One analyst says that this swap is more—is one more nail in the coffin of the dollar as the international reserve currency. What does it mean then? What it means is that countries like China and Japan would stop paying their annual tribute to the imperial center, like being forced to buy bonds. What would happen to the master discourse, back to the Lacanian language? What is the political implication here? How would the US defend the dollar? Now finally, would the US go to war or proxy wars to defend the hegemony—hegemony of the dollar at all costs? So I wanted to put these questions to you, maybe you have already thought about these questions. Thank you. Now you will, you know in Hollywood films when the good guy is beaten and already lays down, lying down, a bad guy comes and adds this, the last kick in the head, you know. That's your coup de grâce. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, well I haven't prepared any comments because I'm a lazy Greek. Well, actually I knew that Slavoj would never be able to anticipate what he would say, so I didn't think it would be wise to prepare comments. However, I did read this book and there are a lot of—a lot of things in it that I find provocative. There are various things I disagree with. This, you know, in some ways is not unusual. I would like to address some of the things that Slavoj said actually here, also in reference to the book, and you know, you'll see I, and perhaps not surprisingly, our comments echo each other. First of all, I should say just unequivocally what I share with Slavoj. I share his uncompromising critique of liberalism and representative democracy. I think that the world that we live in today shows the—the bankruptcy of this road. Bankruptcy here is a kind of interesting word. With what would you replace it? How? We'll get to—we'll get to exactly that. Okay, okay. I definitely share his critique of a certain kind of postmodern depoliticization, which is also linked to a certain kind of, you know, consumerist atomization and of course in that sense, incapacitation of the people's will in order to—to of course defend what they have. No doubt, and I think that's common, that's something we probably many of us share here, is the desire for a new radical imagination, the most difficult thing, but we share the desire. And finally, the—he—I do share his commitment to troubling categories, to a certain kind of, perhaps a certain kind of epistemological anarchy, which is literally troubling in—in both—in also in relation to a certain kind of difficulty in responding. Now, there are three pairs that are for me crucial here that we need to deal with. One is something that's already been discussed, is that the—the
currency swaps. In other words, the report went on, quote, "nearly two trillion US dollars' worth of trade, trade flows, could be settled in RMB annually, making it one of the top three global trading currencies." End of quote. It is important to notice that the world's second and third largest economies, China and Japan, announced their currency swap agreement a number of—some months ago, less than a year ago. And that agreement was to take effect in June this year, took effect in June this year. One analyst says that this swap is more—is one more nail in the coffin of the dollar as the international reserve currency. What does it mean then? What it means is that countries like China and Japan would stop paying their annual tribute to the imperial center, like being forced to buy bonds. What would happen to the master discourse, back to the Lacanian language? What is the political implication here? How would the US defend the dollar? Now finally, would the US go to war or proxy wars to defend the hegemony—hegemony of the dollar at all costs? So I wanted to put these questions to you, maybe you have already thought about these questions. Thank you. Now you will, you know in Hollywood films when the good guy is beaten and already lays down, lying down, a bad guy comes and adds this, the last kick in the head, you know. That's your coup de grâce. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, well I haven't prepared any comments because I'm a lazy Greek. Well, actually I knew that Slavoj would never be able to anticipate what he would say, so I didn't think it would be wise to prepare comments. However, I did read this book and there are a lot of—a lot of things in it that I find provocative. There are various things I disagree with. This, you know, in some ways is not unusual. I would like to address some of the things that Slavoj said actually here, also in reference to the book, and you know, you'll see I, and perhaps not surprisingly, our comments echo each other. First of all, I should say just unequivocally what I share with Slavoj. I share his uncompromising critique of liberalism and representative democracy. I think that the world that we live in today shows the—the bankruptcy of this road. Bankruptcy here is a kind of interesting word. With what would you replace it? How? We'll get to—we'll get to exactly that. Okay, okay. I definitely share his critique of a certain kind of postmodern depoliticization, which is also linked to a certain kind of, you know, consumerist atomization and of course in that sense, incapacitation of the people's will in order to—to of course defend what they have. No doubt, and I think that's common, that's something we probably many of us share here, is the desire for a new radical imagination, the most difficult thing, but we share the desire. And finally, the—he—I do share his commitment to troubling categories, to a certain kind of, perhaps a certain kind of epistemological anarchy, which is literally troubling in—in both—in also in relation to a certain kind of difficulty in responding. Now, there are three pairs that are for me crucial here that we need to deal with. One is something that's already been discussed, is that the—the
unknown
relation—I'm not going to say antagonism, so as not to fall into the Laclau thing—between capitalism and democracy. It seems to me that capitalism and democracy are quintessentially incompatible, and they've always been so. And the fact that they may seem to go together is itself a certain kind of ideological—I'm using shorthand language, we can obviously tease out ideological—process in which of course what we call liberalism has played the greatest hand. Liberalism is the most glorious attempt to create an adherence between two domains, I don't know what to call them, that are structurally incompatible. And we are living in the—in the times of undoing, as Slavoj said, where this incompatibility, which I think I repeat is structural, has never been more evident. The second thing is the relation between dogma and doxa. And I understand very, very well why Slavoj is in some ways teasing us here and provoking us to think dogmatically. I understand his frustration with the fact that these are the endless deliberation on—in a kind of parliament of opinion, right? Where things can go on and we can discuss every little thing at length and not in fact make a decision about it. I think that's—I mean, his—his frustration is—I share his frustration. But my argument would be that—the—that the gravity of a decision is even greater and in many ways more radical when in fact these chaotic circulation and contention of opinion is in play. And that when you introduce dogma as a kind of principle that authorizes what you say, you in fact open the door for the defeat of democracy in the way, of course, I've argued in the first pair. I remind you that the very concept orthodoxy is actually a contradiction in terms. There can never be a correct doxa. There can never actually be a position, an opinion—and opinion here is not just some kind of light thing, okay? An opinion is a commitment to a position. It is in fact a decision. There can never be a decision that is correct in and of itself. It is always something that takes place in the field of contention, and in this respect is essential to any democratic thinking. The third pair is one that I consider to be a false dilemma. It has been really a kind of a haunting thing to—certainly the Marxist tradition. And that is the—the—the—what is been seen as antagonistic pair between revolution and reform. And my argument would be that that is a false dilemma. And we understand why it exists, we understand what its significance was for a Bolshevik critique of—of—of—a Leninist critique of—of social democracy and so on and so forth. But the argument would be that in a sense, there can never be a revolution that is a sort of tabula rasa position. I mean, that's a dream that we can of course have every right to dream, and indeed dream dangerously, but it can never be more than a dream—which is not to say that dreams are not material, important, etc. Because even in the most radical revolutionary moment, something that the very thing that is annihilated leaves a remainder, which is something that is part of whatever is
relation—I'm not going to say antagonism, so as not to fall into the Laclau thing—between capitalism and democracy. It seems to me that capitalism and democracy are quintessentially incompatible, and they've always been so. And the fact that they may seem to go together is itself a certain kind of ideological—I'm using shorthand language, we can obviously tease out ideological—process in which of course what we call liberalism has played the greatest hand. Liberalism is the most glorious attempt to create an adherence between two domains, I don't know what to call them, that are structurally incompatible. And we are living in the—in the times of undoing, as Slavoj said, where this incompatibility, which I think I repeat is structural, has never been more evident. The second thing is the relation between dogma and doxa. And I understand very, very well why Slavoj is in some ways teasing us here and provoking us to think dogmatically. I understand his frustration with the fact that these are the endless deliberation on—in a kind of parliament of opinion, right? Where things can go on and we can discuss every little thing at length and not in fact make a decision about it. I think that's—I mean, his—his frustration is—I share his frustration. But my argument would be that—the—that the gravity of a decision is even greater and in many ways more radical when in fact these chaotic circulation and contention of opinion is in play. And that when you introduce dogma as a kind of principle that authorizes what you say, you in fact open the door for the defeat of democracy in the way, of course, I've argued in the first pair. I remind you that the very concept orthodoxy is actually a contradiction in terms. There can never be a correct doxa. There can never actually be a position, an opinion—and opinion here is not just some kind of light thing, okay? An opinion is a commitment to a position. It is in fact a decision. There can never be a decision that is correct in and of itself. It is always something that takes place in the field of contention, and in this respect is essential to any democratic thinking. The third pair is one that I consider to be a false dilemma. It has been really a kind of a haunting thing to—certainly the Marxist tradition. And that is the—the—the—what is been seen as antagonistic pair between revolution and reform. And my argument would be that that is a false dilemma. And we understand why it exists, we understand what its significance was for a Bolshevik critique of—of—of—a Leninist critique of—of social democracy and so on and so forth. But the argument would be that in a sense, there can never be a revolution that is a sort of tabula rasa position. I mean, that's a dream that we can of course have every right to dream, and indeed dream dangerously, but it can never be more than a dream—which is not to say that dreams are not material, important, etc. Because even in the most radical revolutionary moment, something that the very thing that is annihilated leaves a remainder, which is something that is part of whatever is
unknown
instituted
instituted
unknown
next. This Slavoj
next. This Slavoj
unknown
has talked about—talked about at length in many of his books. So that in fact, revolutionary is always a reforming—it is an giving form to something, another form to something that has previously existed. Now, I'm not suggesting, obviously, reform as any kind of tinkering or adjustment of something that exists in the kind of way that a certain kind of liberal politics, a certain kind of managerial politics, actually as Slavoj says correctly, implies. I am arguing about radical politics. Radical politics is a politics of form. It engages—it's a poetic politics, it's a politics of poiesis, of creating form, and there's no way that form can be created in the absence of forms, okay? Therefore the dilemma of revolution and reform is in fact a false dilemma. Now, this is—so I'm obviously arguing—remember the first one, capitalism versus democracy—obviously I'm arguing in favor of democracy. Slavoj's work in this is kind of equivocal because he argues against democracy sometimes for right reasons. Obviously any concept of democracy that exists today deserves to be criticized. That's part of the problem, the word is tainted. And one might be—it might be reasonable to say that democracy is no longer useful as a word and we should just simply give it up. That's fine, so long as we invent a word in its place that somehow taps at a certain radical meaning. Communism could be that word, so long as as it is deprived of practically its entire history. And the only thing that we would be able to save would be the tradition of anarcho-syndicalism, a certain kind of workers' councils communism and so on. But communists are now in power in many of the most successful capitalist systems today. That's crucial. Exactly. Therefore communism is a problematic name as well. So let's not play with the names, let's—but I think there is no doubt about the fact that—that what he demands and what he—he has in relation to also his experience in—in Greek politics recently is actually something that we share. And the—and the examples that he brought, the demand for a new left governmentality—I mean, you can certainly throw out the word, I don't mean to be
has talked about—talked about at length in many of his books. So that in fact, revolutionary is always a reforming—it is an giving form to something, another form to something that has previously existed. Now, I'm not suggesting, obviously, reform as any kind of tinkering or adjustment of something that exists in the kind of way that a certain kind of liberal politics, a certain kind of managerial politics, actually as Slavoj says correctly, implies. I am arguing about radical politics. Radical politics is a politics of form. It engages—it's a poetic politics, it's a politics of poiesis, of creating form, and there's no way that form can be created in the absence of forms, okay? Therefore the dilemma of revolution and reform is in fact a false dilemma. Now, this is—so I'm obviously arguing—remember the first one, capitalism versus democracy—obviously I'm arguing in favor of democracy. Slavoj's work in this is kind of equivocal because he argues against democracy sometimes for right reasons. Obviously any concept of democracy that exists today deserves to be criticized. That's part of the problem, the word is tainted. And one might be—it might be reasonable to say that democracy is no longer useful as a word and we should just simply give it up. That's fine, so long as we invent a word in its place that somehow taps at a certain radical meaning. Communism could be that word, so long as as it is deprived of practically its entire history. And the only thing that we would be able to save would be the tradition of anarcho-syndicalism, a certain kind of workers' councils communism and so on. But communists are now in power in many of the most successful capitalist systems today. That's crucial. Exactly. Therefore communism is a problematic name as well. So let's not play with the names, let's—but I think there is no doubt about the fact that—that what he demands and what he—he has in relation to also his experience in—in Greek politics recently is actually something that we share. And the—and the examples that he brought, the demand for a new left governmentality—I mean, you can certainly throw out the word, I don't mean to be
Slavoj Žižek
Foucauldian—but nonetheless let's again I'm using this shorthand language, the left can no longer afford to remain in some kind of stable opposition, some kind of utopian opposition to whatever is the status quo. It does have to take itself
Foucauldian—but nonetheless let's again I'm using this shorthand language, the left can no longer afford to remain in some kind of stable opposition, some kind of utopian opposition to whatever is the status quo. It does have to take itself
unknown
seriously and to be accountable for governing, to—to—to overcome its the taboo on
seriously and to be accountable for governing, to—to—to overcome its the taboo on
unknown
governing—I
governing—I
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think the taboo on governing is only—only the left has such a taboo. No other, let's say, political position in the history of politics has had this—this taboo. Your anarcho-syndicalist a little bit. Indeed, indeed. This obviously will come out. So when Slavoj asks correctly that we must think—is asking for a new kind of left imagination, correctly he's saying, "well give us—give us something that is new." The demand of course, as he knows, is paradoxical. It is in fact an impossible demand. On the one hand there has to be a demand, because otherwise the left is defeated, it's caught in its own phantoms. At the same time, the demand is impossible in so far as it cannot actually have an answer, and
think the taboo on governing is only—only the left has such a taboo. No other, let's say, political position in the history of politics has had this—this taboo. Your anarcho-syndicalist a little bit. Indeed, indeed. This obviously will come out. So when Slavoj asks correctly that we must think—is asking for a new kind of left imagination, correctly he's saying, "well give us—give us something that is new." The demand of course, as he knows, is paradoxical. It is in fact an impossible demand. On the one hand there has to be a demand, because otherwise the left is defeated, it's caught in its own phantoms. At the same time, the demand is impossible in so far as it cannot actually have an answer, and
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he was very careful, he said "I don't want simple plans, one, two, three," but even any kind of articulation would inevitably go back into the significations in fact that that Bruce brought about. Meaning just the same thing with revolution and reform. Just like we cannot in fact say that revolution is a tabula rasa gesture, the same way that we cannot say that a new left imagination cannot, let's say, must be barred from invoking elements that are already in existence. So we are caught in a very difficult situation. Let's say in very concrete terms in Greece, pardon me for a second to use a concrete example, it's not one of those small things but—the let's say if God, as you said, next time around does his work and Syriza wins the elections, one of the first things that it would have to do, one of the first things that it would have to do very concrete thing here, it would have to police what has been essentially a—a broad anomie throughout Greek society. And in order—in order to police this great—great anomie, it has to purge the police of certain elements that actually keep it lawless, okay? Now this is a task of policing, and we don't get into Rancière necessarily, but it is an act of policing, we forget Rancière, which is—would have to be an element of what we can call radical left governmentality. Something that would raise all kinds of questions about what is this—is this left reformist, has it sold out, is it in fact compromised, is it become bourgeois revisionist, or what have you. So I think whatever answer is given to his correct demand for us to give answers will inevitably taint itself, dirty itself by having to plunge into significations, political significations that already exist. And that is the play of democracy. The play of democracy is dangerous, dirty, messy, and in fact uncertain and and and not—not in that sense a clean utopian project. That's it. Can I ask you a question and give you more time? You said at the beginning when I interrupted you, I apologize sincerely, first time, when you said "yeah, yeah, beyond democracy, what?" then you said, when I asked him but what comes instead of representative democracy, you said, "Oh, oh, it will come later." Fuck you, I didn't see. Tell me. Where? Show me. Did did you see anything of—again you avoided the problem with police. You said, "Ah we have to purge the police." Yes, with another strong police. No. Yes, the only way. That's what I had a long debate with with who is the guy, my god, Tsipras. I told him, "Are you aware capital will try if you win, capital will try to leave the country and so on. You will need a very strong police apparatus." Now I explained to him of course this doesn't mean we need the greatest genius of 20th century Comrade Stalin. But this is a challenge, how to do it in a
he was very careful, he said "I don't want simple plans, one, two, three," but even any kind of articulation would inevitably go back into the significations in fact that that Bruce brought about. Meaning just the same thing with revolution and reform. Just like we cannot in fact say that revolution is a tabula rasa gesture, the same way that we cannot say that a new left imagination cannot, let's say, must be barred from invoking elements that are already in existence. So we are caught in a very difficult situation. Let's say in very concrete terms in Greece, pardon me for a second to use a concrete example, it's not one of those small things but—the let's say if God, as you said, next time around does his work and Syriza wins the elections, one of the first things that it would have to do, one of the first things that it would have to do very concrete thing here, it would have to police what has been essentially a—a broad anomie throughout Greek society. And in order—in order to police this great—great anomie, it has to purge the police of certain elements that actually keep it lawless, okay? Now this is a task of policing, and we don't get into Rancière necessarily, but it is an act of policing, we forget Rancière, which is—would have to be an element of what we can call radical left governmentality. Something that would raise all kinds of questions about what is this—is this left reformist, has it sold out, is it in fact compromised, is it become bourgeois revisionist, or what have you. So I think whatever answer is given to his correct demand for us to give answers will inevitably taint itself, dirty itself by having to plunge into significations, political significations that already exist. And that is the play of democracy. The play of democracy is dangerous, dirty, messy, and in fact uncertain and and and not—not in that sense a clean utopian project. That's it. Can I ask you a question and give you more time? You said at the beginning when I interrupted you, I apologize sincerely, first time, when you said "yeah, yeah, beyond democracy, what?" then you said, when I asked him but what comes instead of representative democracy, you said, "Oh, oh, it will come later." Fuck you, I didn't see. Tell me. Where? Show me. Did did you see anything of—again you avoided the problem with police. You said, "Ah we have to purge the police." Yes, with another strong police. No. Yes, the only way. That's what I had a long debate with with who is the guy, my god, Tsipras. I told him, "Are you aware capital will try if you win, capital will try to leave the country and so on. You will need a very strong police apparatus." Now I explained to him of course this doesn't mean we need the greatest genius of 20th century Comrade Stalin. But this is a challenge, how to do it in a
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non-Stalinist way. Well that's you know—so you're not disagreeing with me? I said that I said—no no. I just would like a hint. You said so emphatically, "Slavoj, it will come later." Well that's what I said. What? It is a certain kind of anarcho-syndicalism. I mean in—in Barcelona. Syriza is in power, what would you do? Well I said the very first thing would be to create a certain kind of lawful society, right? By purging police—by purging police of fascist elements—I agree—and policing. And policing. Creating a good police. Why don't you want to say that? Why don't you want to say that? An extremely strong, even expanded police will be needed. Why are you afraid to say this? I'm not afraid to say that, I said it. The—Now you sound like Obama avoiding Romney. You know, I am against dogma, so my positions will change very rapidly in the course of a conversation. Ah I know, I know, I know where you will end. You know what Stalin said when he was accused: "You communists are for withering away of the state, but my god look your police apparatus." And Stalin said: "You don't get it, the dialectic is that paradoxically the state is withering away through the very strengthening of its apparatuses, especially apparatuses of repression." Yeah but that's—that's the worst kind of Hegelian dream. I mean you know that. No no, but quite seriously. Listen let me apologize. Let me apologize. It's but nonetheless I hope you see it, it's not a joke what I'm talking about. Syriza, if they were to win power, they would have to do something. Yes what? Not only that, one of—one of the other things that they would have to do—Purge the police. Replace it with what? My god don't avoid the problem. No we said that, I mean that the first—what did you say? That's why I said—that's why the first thing I said was the police. I mean think about that, I mean when I've said that to my friends in Syriza, they understand. What do you mean by police? A new stronger police. Yes, absolutely, a police that would be able to keep the fascists from running around doing whatever they want, that they would actually send to prison all kinds of corrupt, not just simply politicians but basically corrupt people in all kinds of sectors of society and so on and so forth. The point though is that that for the left to act in this fashion is overcoming an extraordinary taboo. It is a kind of activity that—I totally agree, cannot agree more—that raises questions as to whether it still—it still is the left. Which is something that is not we can kind of go around here and have fun but—but in real, in the world out there, in the political sphere, this is not—this is not a simple thing. And and also its results are not at this point even conceivable. We don't really know. I mean, so we're talking about not just simply dreaming dangerously but acting dangerously and that is really what is democratic about it. That's what
non-Stalinist way. Well that's you know—so you're not disagreeing with me? I said that I said—no no. I just would like a hint. You said so emphatically, "Slavoj, it will come later." Well that's what I said. What? It is a certain kind of anarcho-syndicalism. I mean in—in Barcelona. Syriza is in power, what would you do? Well I said the very first thing would be to create a certain kind of lawful society, right? By purging police—by purging police of fascist elements—I agree—and policing. And policing. Creating a good police. Why don't you want to say that? Why don't you want to say that? An extremely strong, even expanded police will be needed. Why are you afraid to say this? I'm not afraid to say that, I said it. The—Now you sound like Obama avoiding Romney. You know, I am against dogma, so my positions will change very rapidly in the course of a conversation. Ah I know, I know, I know where you will end. You know what Stalin said when he was accused: "You communists are for withering away of the state, but my god look your police apparatus." And Stalin said: "You don't get it, the dialectic is that paradoxically the state is withering away through the very strengthening of its apparatuses, especially apparatuses of repression." Yeah but that's—that's the worst kind of Hegelian dream. I mean you know that. No no, but quite seriously. Listen let me apologize. Let me apologize. It's but nonetheless I hope you see it, it's not a joke what I'm talking about. Syriza, if they were to win power, they would have to do something. Yes what? Not only that, one of—one of the other things that they would have to do—Purge the police. Replace it with what? My god don't avoid the problem. No we said that, I mean that the first—what did you say? That's why I said—that's why the first thing I said was the police. I mean think about that, I mean when I've said that to my friends in Syriza, they understand. What do you mean by police? A new stronger police. Yes, absolutely, a police that would be able to keep the fascists from running around doing whatever they want, that they would actually send to prison all kinds of corrupt, not just simply politicians but basically corrupt people in all kinds of sectors of society and so on and so forth. The point though is that that for the left to act in this fashion is overcoming an extraordinary taboo. It is a kind of activity that—I totally agree, cannot agree more—that raises questions as to whether it still—it still is the left. Which is something that is not we can kind of go around here and have fun but—but in real, in the world out there, in the political sphere, this is not—this is not a simple thing. And and also its results are not at this point even conceivable. We don't really know. I mean, so we're talking about not just simply dreaming dangerously but acting dangerously and that is really what is democratic about it. That's what
Slavoj Žižek
I consider. Here I am on Hegel's side against Marx. I agree with you, we
I consider. Here I am on Hegel's side against Marx. I agree with you, we
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are making steps and we
are making steps and we
Slavoj Žižek
cannot pretend that from some high position we know even the consequences, I agree. Exactly. Therefore the floor is
cannot pretend that from some high position we know even the consequences, I agree. Exactly. Therefore the floor is
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still yours. No, thank you. First I must say that I'm pleasantly surprised by this debate and I partially assume responsibility for criticism—I mean, responsibility in the sense that you were right in pointing out some—because I agree that obviously, at least if you read this book immediately, there are what prima facie cannot but appear as
still yours. No, thank you. First I must say that I'm pleasantly surprised by this debate and I partially assume responsibility for criticism—I mean, responsibility in the sense that you were right in pointing out some—because I agree that obviously, at least if you read this book immediately, there are what prima facie cannot but appear as
Slavoj Žižek
inconsistencies. Like, in the chapter on Occupy Wall Street, I defend the lack
inconsistencies. Like, in the chapter on Occupy Wall Street, I defend the lack
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of program emphatically. I said, I use that metaphor which I like very much of boxing clinching. You know what is clinching in boxing? When opponent can't beat you, he said, "Let's talk," embraces you, you know. And I knew immediately in the middle of Wall Street, you remember, Clinton came and said, "Guys, I'm with you, but please give us concrete proposals, what do you want?" No, at this level concrete proposals would have meant to use the bombastic dogmatic terms to speak the language of the enemy. You know, we need time. But at the same time, you know what's my problem? Let me now be very concrete and now, not to talk too long, I will also try to connect this to
of program emphatically. I said, I use that metaphor which I like very much of boxing clinching. You know what is clinching in boxing? When opponent can't beat you, he said, "Let's talk," embraces you, you know. And I knew immediately in the middle of Wall Street, you remember, Clinton came and said, "Guys, I'm with you, but please give us concrete proposals, what do you want?" No, at this level concrete proposals would have meant to use the bombastic dogmatic terms to speak the language of the enemy. You know, we need time. But at the same time, you know what's my problem? Let me now be very concrete and now, not to talk too long, I will also try to connect this to
Slavoj Žižek
answering you. I agree
answering you. I agree
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this is a very important problem and process, BRICS, United States. And to be cynical, but to be with great bitterness, I think that every honest leftist should advocate, start to collect money to build a statue to George Bush the Younger. Because he succeeded in eight years, the real result of his politics was that to a large extent the United States lost its hegemonic role. Look where are now. Super superpower, they cannot even control a shitty state, Afghanistan and so on, I mean out. But, you know where I'm maybe, maybe have a different accent? Yes, I agree with your description of the process. I agree what you mention with how—I describe the process, it was how is it called, that your guy economist whom I quote... Varoufakis? Yeah, yeah, this like that we are really in a kind of a neo-Spartan system more than Rome where the whole world was basically—yeah, was basically financing United States by minimum one—one billion dollars daily of income. But who knows what will the new world be? What—now to the beginning, I—I agree with practically all what you said. I don't know if I used it in the book, this was a very quickly composed book, but I agree, no, I and I agree with you this reform/revolution. You know what? I will now give you an example which I hope you will all like from my own youth where, I'm not saying I was a mega-dissident but mid-level, like enough to be—enough to be jobless, not enough to be arrested, to put it in brutal terms, no? And I remember how, for example, in the last years of communism, those were not stupid communists in power. So if you provided a radical critique of the
this is a very important problem and process, BRICS, United States. And to be cynical, but to be with great bitterness, I think that every honest leftist should advocate, start to collect money to build a statue to George Bush the Younger. Because he succeeded in eight years, the real result of his politics was that to a large extent the United States lost its hegemonic role. Look where are now. Super superpower, they cannot even control a shitty state, Afghanistan and so on, I mean out. But, you know where I'm maybe, maybe have a different accent? Yes, I agree with your description of the process. I agree what you mention with how—I describe the process, it was how is it called, that your guy economist whom I quote... Varoufakis? Yeah, yeah, this like that we are really in a kind of a neo-Spartan system more than Rome where the whole world was basically—yeah, was basically financing United States by minimum one—one billion dollars daily of income. But who knows what will the new world be? What—now to the beginning, I—I agree with practically all what you said. I don't know if I used it in the book, this was a very quickly composed book, but I agree, no, I and I agree with you this reform/revolution. You know what? I will now give you an example which I hope you will all like from my own youth where, I'm not saying I was a mega-dissident but mid-level, like enough to be—enough to be jobless, not enough to be arrested, to put it in brutal terms, no? And I remember how, for example, in the last years of communism, those were not stupid communists in power. So if you provided a radical critique of the
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system, communism worse than fascism, Marx ultra-terrible—no problem. There was a dissident as a profession in some liberal communist countries like Yugoslavia, Hungary. The deal was: say theoretically all that you want, just don't mess too much in detail with concrete—that was the deal. You were allowed
system, communism worse than fascism, Marx ultra-terrible—no problem. There was a dissident as a profession in some liberal communist countries like Yugoslavia, Hungary. The deal was: say theoretically all that you want, just don't mess too much in detail with concrete—that was the deal. You were allowed
Slavoj Žižek
to be a professional dissident, go to the West, explaining how communism is the greatest, all that Ernst Nolte stuff, you know, Nazism is just a reaction of communists, the... to com... blah blah. But for example, don't ask to change that specific law which punishes the—the délit d'opinion, opinion, or whatever. You know, like, in such a situation to forget about big radical demands but to ask just "Why didn't you change a little bit the penal law which regulates..." was a much more radical measure than big demands or whatever. And at this now it will surprise you, I don't know what is in the book, what is not, but in this way I agree with you, Bruce, when you mentioned Obama. I know it's so fashionable by those who consider themselves relatively radical left in the United States to, if I may express myself plastically, to screw Obama from all positions, no? Disappointment blah blah. And I don't agree with them. Like, Tariq
to be a professional dissident, go to the West, explaining how communism is the greatest, all that Ernst Nolte stuff, you know, Nazism is just a reaction of communists, the... to com... blah blah. But for example, don't ask to change that specific law which punishes the—the délit d'opinion, opinion, or whatever. You know, like, in such a situation to forget about big radical demands but to ask just "Why didn't you change a little bit the penal law which regulates..." was a much more radical measure than big demands or whatever. And at this now it will surprise you, I don't know what is in the book, what is not, but in this way I agree with you, Bruce, when you mentioned Obama. I know it's so fashionable by those who consider themselves relatively radical left in the United States to, if I may express myself plastically, to screw Obama from all positions, no? Disappointment blah blah. And I don't agree with them. Like, Tariq
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Ali published a book with proto-racist title like "Obama, you take the mask off," you know all that bullshit. Listen, that book is so shitty, it's
Ali published a book with proto-racist title like "Obama, you take the mask off," you know all that bullshit. Listen, that book is so shitty, it's
Slavoj Žižek
written as what did
written as what did
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he expect, that Obama will introduce communism here or what? I—I know that healthcare reform ended up as an incredible—too much compromise blah blah. But listen, I'm not ready to—to stop praising Obama
he expect, that Obama will introduce communism here or what? I—I know that healthcare reform ended up as an incredible—too much compromise blah blah. But listen, I'm not ready to—to stop praising Obama
Slavoj Žižek
for—this was such an important ideological operation, critical. The whole debate about healthcare, which did target the very core of what I call standard American ideology, this
for—this was such an important ideological operation, critical. The whole debate about healthcare, which did target the very core of what I call standard American ideology, this
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mystified notion of freedom of choice. What Americans in this
mystified notion of freedom of choice. What Americans in this
Slavoj Žižek
Republican version tend to forget is that okay, freedom of choice is a nice thing, but are you aware that in today's complex society, actual freedom of choice, you need an incredibly complex state apparatus, ethical rules, and so on and so on? Like, to be vulgar, freedom of choice means I can take a walk on Broadway and go to this movie or
Republican version tend to forget is that okay, freedom of choice is a nice thing, but are you aware that in today's complex society, actual freedom of choice, you need an incredibly complex state apparatus, ethical rules, and so on and so on? Like, to be vulgar, freedom of choice means I can take a walk on Broadway and go to this movie or
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to that restaurant. This means I can count on a certain
to that restaurant. This means I can count on a certain
Slavoj Žižek
efficiency of police, I can count on certain politeness of people and so on and so on. So here again, I think that no wonder that Obama still is such
efficiency of police, I can count on certain politeness of people and so on and so on. So here again, I think that no wonder that Obama still is such
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an incredibly
an incredibly
Slavoj Žižek
traumatic point for American right. You
traumatic point for American right. You
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know all those mad points which are symptomatic for me like, you know, like I think over of Americans think that Obama is secretly a Muslim or whatever. This is an—an
know all those mad points which are symptomatic for me like, you know, like I think over of Americans think that Obama is secretly a Muslim or whatever. This is an—an
Slavoj Žižek
indication. So no, I—you
indication. So no, I—you
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know Peter Hallward already made this critique of me, he said I oscillate between three positions: A, waiting some big bloody revolution, B, Bartleby, doing nothing, C, modest measures. My idea is why choose? There are definitely—yeah, of course not, no yeah—there are moments when one has to be pragmatic.
know Peter Hallward already made this critique of me, he said I oscillate between three positions: A, waiting some big bloody revolution, B, Bartleby, doing nothing, C, modest measures. My idea is why choose? There are definitely—yeah, of course not, no yeah—there are moments when one has to be pragmatic.
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There are moments when you fight Hitler where you don't say negotiation, no, either he's dead or we die to Hitler. And there are moments where—where the whole field is so mystified. And I can give you examples, not the traditional one. For example, when you have the whole country caught in some pseudo-patriotic fervor. At that point you can only withdraw, and your silence will be noted. You know, so this is not a choice. So to go on, very
There are moments when you fight Hitler where you don't say negotiation, no, either he's dead or we die to Hitler. And there are moments where—where the whole field is so mystified. And I can give you examples, not the traditional one. For example, when you have the whole country caught in some pseudo-patriotic fervor. At that point you can only withdraw, and your silence will be noted. You know, so this is not a choice. So to go on, very
Slavoj Žižek
quickly. Democracy. Again, yes, I may
quickly. Democracy. Again, yes, I may
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appear inconsistent but as you did. All I'm
appear inconsistent but as you did. All I'm
Slavoj Žižek
saying is this: A, of course as far as
saying is this: A, of course as far as
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we can save it. I'm not crazy and
we can save it. I'm not crazy and
Slavoj Žižek
I'm involved in fights in Europe. Believe it or not, we are now—I am tired of simple America bashing, you know, we civilized Europeans come here. What is happening now in Europe with this terrifying reform of the entire education system, subordinating all academia to factories for experts, for those in power, all that stuff. We have to fight all of it. I just claim two things. That when—listen, crucial is in the book, if there are couple of pages that are I prefer, remember those pages where I engage in a dialogue with Anne Applebaum? Who on the one hand agrees: today's democracy, the way we have it institutionally, it's simply not strong enough to cope with international capital and so on and so on. That's all I'm saying. In this sense only I made, I'm ironic there, I even don't agree with Badiou. If you remember correctly, I Badiou is totally against participation in any election. I think this is madness. I think that even if we accept, which is already maybe too much for me, that most of the elections are pseudo-elections, are like "Will you drink Coke or Pepsi" or, you know. But from time to time they are elections which matter. And it's madness to miss—to miss—to miss those elections. So you know what's only my point? But we are all coming to this. I hope, if I were to be a believer, which in contrast to some orthodox Greeks as I suspect you are not, I would say I'm praying for—let's save—what I'm afraid of is that the demise of welfare state, I wonder to what extent is it simply the politics of some bad conservatives which can be undone with social democratic or whatever victory, or to what extent is it a stronger tendency inscribed in global capitalist trends? I think that this attempt to—let's return to it—as to resistance, when you were—no no no, resistance, this is, I know, big problem with the guy whose name I don't want to pronounce, who wrote a book infinitely demanding and to whom I prefer to refer to as Voldemort is referred to in Harry Potter, "those who—the one whose name should not be pronounced," no? The name is C and D, no? You know, here we agree. What resist? I oppose resistance if it means what you said, this comfortable left, we don't want to dirty our hands, we have—only in this way I'm against resistance. We went through that, what you said capitalism, democracy incompatible. A, it's not so simple. Even Marx has shown that nonetheless the only democracy which falls and formal as it is, in the long term functioned more or less with all limitations, wasn't nonetheless the democracy engendered by capitalism? Show me any other system of democracy which—not those enthusiastic two months where workers' councils were in power but—so I agree with you, there is incompatibility now because... Dogma. You know, we play with words here. I'm not using dogma in the sense of Central Committee says women should not be raped or what. I mean dogma in a much more positive sense of this, how should I put it, things which are so clear to you that you don't even find it worthy debating them. And I don't think "Yes, we should have doxa, doxa," but if somebody tells me "Sorry, fighting racism, the equality of blacks is not a doxa," it should be "We don't debate it." I tend to agree with it. And false dilemma, revolution, reform. I agree with you, I agree with you. All right, great, thank you Slavoj. I—I think that it's safest to take two or three questions, three questions, and then Slavoj can answer them all because you know likelihood they would be—In the spirit of democratic socialism, centralism, did you distribute questions and now your friends—Yeah yeah, they're all planted, they're all planted. Yeah yeah, been approved by—I just worried that yeah yeah. Please, please. Yeah, my name is Raymond Lotta. I'm a political economist and advocate for Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism. I want to address a brief comment and question to Slavoj Žižek. It is true that the world is a horror, but it is not true as you allege that the first wave of socialist revolutions, especially Maoist China, was a failure. And it is wrong, it is harmful, and it is unconscionable that you are seeking to use your stature to try to close the door on the way out of this horror and madness, which is Avakian's new synthesis of communism and its strategy for revolution. Now, in print and in several public forums, I have challenged you to a debate about the history and prospects for communist revolution. Nothing could be more important, this is about the future of humanity, the emancipation of humanity. So my question to you, Slavoj, is why have you refused to have this debate and can we hear right here and now decide on a time and place to have this crucial debate? No, you can get to attack actually, let's hear the other—Okay okay, but I will definitely answer, okay, yeah please. Oh, I see, sorry, we'll go that way, that's the—yeah, it's a sort of false democratic solution. At least you started with the left side, on the left side. You know this question you raised about, you know, the whole alliance between capitalism and democracy, do you think it was largely possible because you know of colonies in the first, you know, which created this excess wealth for Europe and North America and later the economic domination where it went on for about fifty, sixty years? And do you think for Europe to sustain all its welfare state now, it really has to radically change its structure? I mean the present structure of capitalism with colonies, with no colonies, with you know economic domination waning, that structure has to change from within to actually preserve those equal rights that you talk about that you should, that we should preserve as dogmas. Thank you. Hi, yeah, I had a question, I'm also very upset person. Um, and I have a question: why, I read this book and then you were talking about sociopathy, love, and about the event. And I was wondering those kind of solutions besides from communism that you spoke about, their relation for me can be only established through psychoanalysis. And, you know, I'm wondering what's your take on establishing relation, for example, between event and sociopathy and love besides from theological, you know, way. Thank you. This—okay, can I briefly answer. First the last one. This, my answer here may surprise you, but I'm, as a dogmatic Lacanian, I'm almost opposed to too much, too quick—too quick reference to psychoanalysis. I—you know what gave me this idea, yeah, that I noticed how on the—in contrast to the common opinion that Marxists didn't tolerate psychoanalysis, it's much more complex. The first kindergarten psychoanalytic in the world, you know who did it? Keira Knightley, that is to say Sabina Spielrein, after the film ends, in Kremlin, in Kremlin, in '22 or '3, for nomenklatura. This is why then Trotsky wrote an open letter to Pavlov, antibolshevik, to arouse in him a more merciful attitude towards psychoanalysis. No, you know where I just don't agree, and I hope we all agree here, with praising—putting too much hope into psychoanalysis. You know why traditional Marxists like psychoanalysis? Because they have a certain simplistic vision. Capitalism crisis, working class will arouse and so on. And then this doesn't happen and instead of questioning their socio-economic analysis, they say "Oh, this is because of ideological manipulations, psychoanalysis can explain this," you know, like. They put the blame on psychoanalysis. This here again, I see the problem. And I don't see in—you know, this is very complex question that you started now. We don't have now time to go into it because for example in psychoanalytic terms, no, I have here a slight disagreement with my otherwise good friend Alain Badiou who recently, in a book co-published by Elizabeth—her name should not be pronounced, no?—advocated, celebrated the discourse of the master. He says, I was quite shocked literally that we remain, you know, Badiou speaks dismissively of human animals, liberal utilitarians. For a human animal to become truly a subject, dedicated to a human cause, you need a master. Well I think if this is the conclusion, then we can close our stores and become cynical liberal realists, you know. Because from here there is only one step to what Jacques-Alain Miller now advocates that the Lacanian position is pseudo-Lacanian position that social authority is an imposture illusion but we should cynically learn that appearances shouldn't be too much disturbed because then things get even worse, you know. Like the same disgusting lecture as of the film that I liked because precisely it's disgusting film, so contradictory: *Batman: The Dark Knight Rises*. What I like is that it imagines the impossible, people's power on Manhattan, but how can the film imagine it? It's deeply symptomatic. So again this is too complex. Let's go to this—sorry, what the colleague comrade there said about this colony, democracy. Again, this was a very good, very complex question. I would say this: that maybe even more important than this divorce between democracy, capitalism is for me—I will just give you briefly my thesis, a very pessimistic one but there are clear signs. Till now, it at least appeared, although it was never true, that Marx was right when, you remember, Marx's vision of exploitation is within the formal frame of freedom in the bourgeois sense, no? That is to say, you are red worker, I'm black capitalist, I employ you, we are both formally free, but actually because you lazy Greek breeded ten children, you need money so you have to work for me, blah blah. Okay. I claim now comes the more serious stuff. I claim that isn't it that today capitalism—this is why I think we have all this new forms of what Agamben calls *homo sacer*, new forms of apartheid, apartheid and so on—that capitalism can less and less afford even what traditional Marxists called the standard bourgeois formal democracy? It more and more needs direct classification of some people as second-hand, second-class citizens and so on and so on. I—this is what I see as a—as a dangerous tendency. Now, to the first question. It all depends on on on what do you think as failure. I never said, first I admit my god, everybody is attacking my—that afterward even Badiou exploded to Mao, but my god, I basically praise their Cultural Revolution. Remember? I'm quoting fanatically, celebrating it. All I'm saying is that the fact that the way it ended now, I think it's too simple with Deng Xiaoping reforms and so on, it's too simple to read this for me as a betrayal of some authentic revolutionary moment. I think that here I'm more of a Hegelian if you want. The fact that it ended the way it ended points to some weakness which had to be there from the very beginning. As to this debate, okay, I sincerely apologize because I'm at least not an open liar. I admit to you that I promised you a debate, was it about a year ago, I think? No? Yes, you should have a debate. We will, we will, and I will tell you when. I say this publicly here so that I commit myself. We will—I will be here for three weeks in April. In April we will have this debate. And I here commit myself. But just don't bring, don't bring your
I'm involved in fights in Europe. Believe it or not, we are now—I am tired of simple America bashing, you know, we civilized Europeans come here. What is happening now in Europe with this terrifying reform of the entire education system, subordinating all academia to factories for experts, for those in power, all that stuff. We have to fight all of it. I just claim two things. That when—listen, crucial is in the book, if there are couple of pages that are I prefer, remember those pages where I engage in a dialogue with Anne Applebaum? Who on the one hand agrees: today's democracy, the way we have it institutionally, it's simply not strong enough to cope with international capital and so on and so on. That's all I'm saying. In this sense only I made, I'm ironic there, I even don't agree with Badiou. If you remember correctly, I Badiou is totally against participation in any election. I think this is madness. I think that even if we accept, which is already maybe too much for me, that most of the elections are pseudo-elections, are like "Will you drink Coke or Pepsi" or, you know. But from time to time they are elections which matter. And it's madness to miss—to miss—to miss those elections. So you know what's only my point? But we are all coming to this. I hope, if I were to be a believer, which in contrast to some orthodox Greeks as I suspect you are not, I would say I'm praying for—let's save—what I'm afraid of is that the demise of welfare state, I wonder to what extent is it simply the politics of some bad conservatives which can be undone with social democratic or whatever victory, or to what extent is it a stronger tendency inscribed in global capitalist trends? I think that this attempt to—let's return to it—as to resistance, when you were—no no no, resistance, this is, I know, big problem with the guy whose name I don't want to pronounce, who wrote a book infinitely demanding and to whom I prefer to refer to as Voldemort is referred to in Harry Potter, "those who—the one whose name should not be pronounced," no? The name is C and D, no? You know, here we agree. What resist? I oppose resistance if it means what you said, this comfortable left, we don't want to dirty our hands, we have—only in this way I'm against resistance. We went through that, what you said capitalism, democracy incompatible. A, it's not so simple. Even Marx has shown that nonetheless the only democracy which falls and formal as it is, in the long term functioned more or less with all limitations, wasn't nonetheless the democracy engendered by capitalism? Show me any other system of democracy which—not those enthusiastic two months where workers' councils were in power but—so I agree with you, there is incompatibility now because... Dogma. You know, we play with words here. I'm not using dogma in the sense of Central Committee says women should not be raped or what. I mean dogma in a much more positive sense of this, how should I put it, things which are so clear to you that you don't even find it worthy debating them. And I don't think "Yes, we should have doxa, doxa," but if somebody tells me "Sorry, fighting racism, the equality of blacks is not a doxa," it should be "We don't debate it." I tend to agree with it. And false dilemma, revolution, reform. I agree with you, I agree with you. All right, great, thank you Slavoj. I—I think that it's safest to take two or three questions, three questions, and then Slavoj can answer them all because you know likelihood they would be—In the spirit of democratic socialism, centralism, did you distribute questions and now your friends—Yeah yeah, they're all planted, they're all planted. Yeah yeah, been approved by—I just worried that yeah yeah. Please, please. Yeah, my name is Raymond Lotta. I'm a political economist and advocate for Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism. I want to address a brief comment and question to Slavoj Žižek. It is true that the world is a horror, but it is not true as you allege that the first wave of socialist revolutions, especially Maoist China, was a failure. And it is wrong, it is harmful, and it is unconscionable that you are seeking to use your stature to try to close the door on the way out of this horror and madness, which is Avakian's new synthesis of communism and its strategy for revolution. Now, in print and in several public forums, I have challenged you to a debate about the history and prospects for communist revolution. Nothing could be more important, this is about the future of humanity, the emancipation of humanity. So my question to you, Slavoj, is why have you refused to have this debate and can we hear right here and now decide on a time and place to have this crucial debate? No, you can get to attack actually, let's hear the other—Okay okay, but I will definitely answer, okay, yeah please. Oh, I see, sorry, we'll go that way, that's the—yeah, it's a sort of false democratic solution. At least you started with the left side, on the left side. You know this question you raised about, you know, the whole alliance between capitalism and democracy, do you think it was largely possible because you know of colonies in the first, you know, which created this excess wealth for Europe and North America and later the economic domination where it went on for about fifty, sixty years? And do you think for Europe to sustain all its welfare state now, it really has to radically change its structure? I mean the present structure of capitalism with colonies, with no colonies, with you know economic domination waning, that structure has to change from within to actually preserve those equal rights that you talk about that you should, that we should preserve as dogmas. Thank you. Hi, yeah, I had a question, I'm also very upset person. Um, and I have a question: why, I read this book and then you were talking about sociopathy, love, and about the event. And I was wondering those kind of solutions besides from communism that you spoke about, their relation for me can be only established through psychoanalysis. And, you know, I'm wondering what's your take on establishing relation, for example, between event and sociopathy and love besides from theological, you know, way. Thank you. This—okay, can I briefly answer. First the last one. This, my answer here may surprise you, but I'm, as a dogmatic Lacanian, I'm almost opposed to too much, too quick—too quick reference to psychoanalysis. I—you know what gave me this idea, yeah, that I noticed how on the—in contrast to the common opinion that Marxists didn't tolerate psychoanalysis, it's much more complex. The first kindergarten psychoanalytic in the world, you know who did it? Keira Knightley, that is to say Sabina Spielrein, after the film ends, in Kremlin, in Kremlin, in '22 or '3, for nomenklatura. This is why then Trotsky wrote an open letter to Pavlov, antibolshevik, to arouse in him a more merciful attitude towards psychoanalysis. No, you know where I just don't agree, and I hope we all agree here, with praising—putting too much hope into psychoanalysis. You know why traditional Marxists like psychoanalysis? Because they have a certain simplistic vision. Capitalism crisis, working class will arouse and so on. And then this doesn't happen and instead of questioning their socio-economic analysis, they say "Oh, this is because of ideological manipulations, psychoanalysis can explain this," you know, like. They put the blame on psychoanalysis. This here again, I see the problem. And I don't see in—you know, this is very complex question that you started now. We don't have now time to go into it because for example in psychoanalytic terms, no, I have here a slight disagreement with my otherwise good friend Alain Badiou who recently, in a book co-published by Elizabeth—her name should not be pronounced, no?—advocated, celebrated the discourse of the master. He says, I was quite shocked literally that we remain, you know, Badiou speaks dismissively of human animals, liberal utilitarians. For a human animal to become truly a subject, dedicated to a human cause, you need a master. Well I think if this is the conclusion, then we can close our stores and become cynical liberal realists, you know. Because from here there is only one step to what Jacques-Alain Miller now advocates that the Lacanian position is pseudo-Lacanian position that social authority is an imposture illusion but we should cynically learn that appearances shouldn't be too much disturbed because then things get even worse, you know. Like the same disgusting lecture as of the film that I liked because precisely it's disgusting film, so contradictory: *Batman: The Dark Knight Rises*. What I like is that it imagines the impossible, people's power on Manhattan, but how can the film imagine it? It's deeply symptomatic. So again this is too complex. Let's go to this—sorry, what the colleague comrade there said about this colony, democracy. Again, this was a very good, very complex question. I would say this: that maybe even more important than this divorce between democracy, capitalism is for me—I will just give you briefly my thesis, a very pessimistic one but there are clear signs. Till now, it at least appeared, although it was never true, that Marx was right when, you remember, Marx's vision of exploitation is within the formal frame of freedom in the bourgeois sense, no? That is to say, you are red worker, I'm black capitalist, I employ you, we are both formally free, but actually because you lazy Greek breeded ten children, you need money so you have to work for me, blah blah. Okay. I claim now comes the more serious stuff. I claim that isn't it that today capitalism—this is why I think we have all this new forms of what Agamben calls *homo sacer*, new forms of apartheid, apartheid and so on—that capitalism can less and less afford even what traditional Marxists called the standard bourgeois formal democracy? It more and more needs direct classification of some people as second-hand, second-class citizens and so on and so on. I—this is what I see as a—as a dangerous tendency. Now, to the first question. It all depends on on on what do you think as failure. I never said, first I admit my god, everybody is attacking my—that afterward even Badiou exploded to Mao, but my god, I basically praise their Cultural Revolution. Remember? I'm quoting fanatically, celebrating it. All I'm saying is that the fact that the way it ended now, I think it's too simple with Deng Xiaoping reforms and so on, it's too simple to read this for me as a betrayal of some authentic revolutionary moment. I think that here I'm more of a Hegelian if you want. The fact that it ended the way it ended points to some weakness which had to be there from the very beginning. As to this debate, okay, I sincerely apologize because I'm at least not an open liar. I admit to you that I promised you a debate, was it about a year ago, I think? No? Yes, you should have a debate. We will, we will, and I will tell you when. I say this publicly here so that I commit myself. We will—I will be here for three weeks in April. In April we will have this debate. And I here commit myself. But just don't bring, don't bring your
unknown
gang to interrupt me. Ah ah! No, no no, you just make this gesture which in my Stalinist experience means—but what can I do when people will
gang to interrupt me. Ah ah! No, no no, you just make this gesture which in my Stalinist experience means—but what can I do when people will
Slavoj Žižek
spontaneously protest? Okay Slavoj. I promise I publicly say this. April,
spontaneously protest? Okay Slavoj. I promise I publicly say this. April,
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the first three weeks of April I
the first three weeks of April I
unknown
am here. Okay, do you want to take some—we have about ten minutes or so, less. Well okay, we still can. Let's take three questions please—please be—be brief. Maybe I could just start with the first question, there was something that echoed with me that for—One question per person. Yeah, but maybe he is a divided subject, maybe he is a divided subject. Sorry, sorry. I feel for a lot of the world, a lot of the working people, the world really is a horror here and I just wanted to put forward my interpretation of this and ask you if you think that's accurate where I think, Žižek, you were very more concrete about advocating a more revolutionary path for people to take, and the other comment—commentators
am here. Okay, do you want to take some—we have about ten minutes or so, less. Well okay, we still can. Let's take three questions please—please be—be brief. Maybe I could just start with the first question, there was something that echoed with me that for—One question per person. Yeah, but maybe he is a divided subject, maybe he is a divided subject. Sorry, sorry. I feel for a lot of the world, a lot of the working people, the world really is a horror here and I just wanted to put forward my interpretation of this and ask you if you think that's accurate where I think, Žižek, you were very more concrete about advocating a more revolutionary path for people to take, and the other comment—commentators
Slavoj Žižek
advocated
advocated
unknown
more of a reformist alternative. But overall, this was a panel very focused
more of a reformist alternative. But overall, this was a panel very focused
Slavoj Žižek
on reform,
on reform,
unknown
on theory. And I look at the audience, very much an intellectual academic audience, and I see a real separation between the actual issues here, the experience of a lot of people in the world who actually have to deal not just with being jobless and out of the academia but really have no choice and very little path. And I wanted to question the composition of everybody in the panel of being almost entrenched in a certain identity that really hesitates from really unifying
on theory. And I look at the audience, very much an intellectual academic audience, and I see a real separation between the actual issues here, the experience of a lot of people in the world who actually have to deal not just with being jobless and out of the academia but really have no choice and very little path. And I wanted to question the composition of everybody in the panel of being almost entrenched in a certain identity that really hesitates from really unifying
unknown
with the more working-class united language and practical approach to these issues here. I
with the more working-class united language and practical approach to these issues here. I
unknown
think that there's a dangerous separation that's reflective of our times here and I want to ask you if you what you think about that. Do we do again first the three, yeah. Um, so, I—I tend to agree with a lot of your analyses but on one—one point um I think that we—we disagree so I just wanted to hear some more about what
think that there's a dangerous separation that's reflective of our times here and I want to ask you if you what you think about that. Do we do again first the three, yeah. Um, so, I—I tend to agree with a lot of your analyses but on one—one point um I think that we—we disagree so I just wanted to hear some more about what
Slavoj Žižek
you think about this, apropos our elections. Um, a lot of people on the left right now, not enough
you think about this, apropos our elections. Um, a lot of people on the left right now, not enough
unknown
probably, are—are
probably, are—are
Slavoj Žižek
saying that given that sort of Obama is on a lot of points working against what you would call like public use of reason, like privatization, um increased national
saying that given that sort of Obama is on a lot of points working against what you would call like public use of reason, like privatization, um increased national
unknown
security state, etc., um
security state, etc., um
Slavoj Žižek
austerity, i.e., undoing the gains of past struggle. So like, in this scenario, what is the argument against um the Bartleby choice? Against like sort of visible um dissent either as sort of abstention or voting third party, etc., as the on—as a as a route towards demystification of the field? Thank you. My question is about environmentalism, which might be considered an alternative way of thinking. And certainly a lot of the people I spoke to at Occupy London mentioned environmentalism as their alternative vision, and one in which would seriously question the trajectory of capitalism. But on the other hand the media has been reporting the—crisis in Europe as—actually negating the rather more as they see it sort of nebulous question of global warming. Perfect, nice questions. Let me go step by step. What you said about the first question about working class and so on. My god, I am deeply—okay, I don't want to use this word in a pathetic way, I mean it very simply, solidary with this. It's crucial, I know. All I'm saying is this, and I think this part where I go into this more in detail was deleted from the book at the beginning that: I agree, although he is not the greatest genius in economy, there are many things he doesn't know, he being Fred Jameson. But in one of his texts on Hegel, even he developed, on Capital, something interesting. He says that, yeah, that today we have among other things to redefine the notion of exploitation. In the sense that to be exploited in the classical Marxist sense, you have a permanent job but the extra profit is taken by—is, at least in some countries, almost a privileged position. You know, so that the idea is that to be born in a country which is so-called rogue country, to be—already you know, there are—there is an incredible amount of people today who at—that's the tragedy of Europe which exploded in Greece but we are all in Europe in the same shit. You have for example literally millions of young people, highly educated, who are becoming aware in advance that there is not a minimal chance for them to get jobs and so on. And I think that somehow all this, those who are out, rogue states, permanently unemployed and so on, have to be brought together in a wider definition of working class, working class. This I see as the only way of avoiding—if we don't do this, we will get something very dangerous. That the core of the working class which still exists can become the fascist working, proto-fascist working class opposing others and so on and so on. So again, that would be my first point. Second point, US elections. Again, yes it's a good question and I don't have here an a priori dogmatic answer. Yes, when there is a false choice, and there are many false choices, it is very important to demystify it. The problem is to what extent is such a demystification effective? Do we really do it? And more seriously, you know, like—this was basically the reaction of communists in Germany in They are a monument to me, like, who cares, even better if Hitler wins, because at the—in this case this will totally—they used the term—demystify the situation. None of social democratic bullshitters, now the situation is clear: we communists here, the Nazis there, at the end we will win. Well to put it cynically, at the end Hitler did lose, but quite many things happened in between. Environmentalism. I agree with you, but absolutely, but with one catch. That nonetheless in the same way that we all agree that we should absolutely not fetishize democracy—even Badiou, it may interest you, now became softer and changed his terminology and accepts there is something basically good in democracy, people get old and they get soft, you know. I told him see you in Gulag and so on, but... Okay, but
austerity, i.e., undoing the gains of past struggle. So like, in this scenario, what is the argument against um the Bartleby choice? Against like sort of visible um dissent either as sort of abstention or voting third party, etc., as the on—as a as a route towards demystification of the field? Thank you. My question is about environmentalism, which might be considered an alternative way of thinking. And certainly a lot of the people I spoke to at Occupy London mentioned environmentalism as their alternative vision, and one in which would seriously question the trajectory of capitalism. But on the other hand the media has been reporting the—crisis in Europe as—actually negating the rather more as they see it sort of nebulous question of global warming. Perfect, nice questions. Let me go step by step. What you said about the first question about working class and so on. My god, I am deeply—okay, I don't want to use this word in a pathetic way, I mean it very simply, solidary with this. It's crucial, I know. All I'm saying is this, and I think this part where I go into this more in detail was deleted from the book at the beginning that: I agree, although he is not the greatest genius in economy, there are many things he doesn't know, he being Fred Jameson. But in one of his texts on Hegel, even he developed, on Capital, something interesting. He says that, yeah, that today we have among other things to redefine the notion of exploitation. In the sense that to be exploited in the classical Marxist sense, you have a permanent job but the extra profit is taken by—is, at least in some countries, almost a privileged position. You know, so that the idea is that to be born in a country which is so-called rogue country, to be—already you know, there are—there is an incredible amount of people today who at—that's the tragedy of Europe which exploded in Greece but we are all in Europe in the same shit. You have for example literally millions of young people, highly educated, who are becoming aware in advance that there is not a minimal chance for them to get jobs and so on. And I think that somehow all this, those who are out, rogue states, permanently unemployed and so on, have to be brought together in a wider definition of working class, working class. This I see as the only way of avoiding—if we don't do this, we will get something very dangerous. That the core of the working class which still exists can become the fascist working, proto-fascist working class opposing others and so on and so on. So again, that would be my first point. Second point, US elections. Again, yes it's a good question and I don't have here an a priori dogmatic answer. Yes, when there is a false choice, and there are many false choices, it is very important to demystify it. The problem is to what extent is such a demystification effective? Do we really do it? And more seriously, you know, like—this was basically the reaction of communists in Germany in They are a monument to me, like, who cares, even better if Hitler wins, because at the—in this case this will totally—they used the term—demystify the situation. None of social democratic bullshitters, now the situation is clear: we communists here, the Nazis there, at the end we will win. Well to put it cynically, at the end Hitler did lose, but quite many things happened in between. Environmentalism. I agree with you, but absolutely, but with one catch. That nonetheless in the same way that we all agree that we should absolutely not fetishize democracy—even Badiou, it may interest you, now became softer and changed his terminology and accepts there is something basically good in democracy, people get old and they get soft, you know. I told him see you in Gulag and so on, but... Okay, but
unknown
what I want to say is that but environmentalism, you know, it's also still, how
what I want to say is that but environmentalism, you know, it's also still, how
Slavoj Žižek
should I
should I
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put it,
put it,
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such a—I hate this word, it's part of the jargon postmodern of the 60s—floating signifier, you
such a—I hate this word, it's part of the jargon postmodern of the 60s—floating signifier, you
Slavoj Žižek
know. It can be used, in
know. It can be used, in
unknown
for example, do you know that some conservatives in Europe use environmentalism as, you know, we cannot afford welfare state, nature itself cannot—cannot sustain it and so on? So you know you have almost as many environmentalisms as you have political orientations. You can have capitalist environmentalism, which has its minimal points, I violently disagree but... It's true that in at least some Stalinist communist countries, the environmental catastrophe was much worse. Look at East Germany and so on. So you can have capitalist environmentalism which says yes, it's a big problem, but we should use market mechanisms, taxation and so on. You can have conservative environmentalism, the scene is modernity, and it's interesting how even with some leftists like Hugo Chávez they fall too much into this trap. I quote him in another book where Chávez said the catastrophe began in 17th
for example, do you know that some conservatives in Europe use environmentalism as, you know, we cannot afford welfare state, nature itself cannot—cannot sustain it and so on? So you know you have almost as many environmentalisms as you have political orientations. You can have capitalist environmentalism, which has its minimal points, I violently disagree but... It's true that in at least some Stalinist communist countries, the environmental catastrophe was much worse. Look at East Germany and so on. So you can have capitalist environmentalism which says yes, it's a big problem, but we should use market mechanisms, taxation and so on. You can have conservative environmentalism, the scene is modernity, and it's interesting how even with some leftists like Hugo Chávez they fall too much into this trap. I quote him in another book where Chávez said the catastrophe began in 17th
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century—whoo-hoo and before there were golden times or what—and that capitalism killed mother nature. You know what was my reaction? I was in Bolivia. My reaction was, "At least one good thing that capitalism did," you know? Because I think that all this mythology of Mother Nature is the most dangerous, sorry to use the Stalinist term, reactionary
century—whoo-hoo and before there were golden times or what—and that capitalism killed mother nature. You know what was my reaction? I was in Bolivia. My reaction was, "At least one good thing that capitalism did," you know? Because I think that all this mythology of Mother Nature is the most dangerous, sorry to use the Stalinist term, reactionary
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revision... So you see what I mean. We—I am basically of course for linking environmental crisis to the necessity of, not simply necessity of capitalist expansion, but to what Marx detected very nicely as this almost pseudo-spiritual indifference
revision... So you see what I mean. We—I am basically of course for linking environmental crisis to the necessity of, not simply necessity of capitalist expansion, but to what Marx detected very nicely as this almost pseudo-spiritual indifference
Slavoj Žižek
of capital. Capital is capital turns around and it doesn't matter if we all die, what happens to work... blah blah. You know, it's capitalism works as an abstraction. So I agree with this. But nonetheless, I think things are to be avoided. First, especially here, any return to some pre-modern harmony is madness. In the sense that we should nonetheless never forget how many environmental horrors were done—look take Iceland. You know that when Norwegians came there in 7th century, it was one big forest. Now there are literally in whole Iceland just a couple of thousand trees, all—and the Spanish... Canary Islands and so on. So and I met, this was my lifetime experience in Missoula, Montana some fifteen years ago, a an Indian American. I consciously hate the term Native Americans. Because these guys told me why. You know the joke? I'm sorry if I repeat it, but it's my favorite. They told me "If you call us Native Americans, what does this mean? You are culture Americans and we are nature? And also they told me we much prefer Indians, at least our name is a monument to white man's stupidity, you know. They thought they were in India, you know." No, and they told me—this was for me the genuine assertion—they told me, "Fuck you white people, you think you do some ecological damage? We Indians burned more forest and killed more buffaloes than you ever will do." No, they were not joking. The deep insight in this joke was that they were well aware of patronizing—patronizing racism in this pseudo-oh, you Indians with a holistic attitude in harmony with nature, for us we are Cartesian, we just exploit nature, you go out and—like as some white idiots like to say—a Native American does mining, but before he digs into the earth, he listens to what the earth has to say, and only if he feels invited he does it, you know. No you know what I mean, so yes, I agree with you, but don't forget that environmentalism itself is a—is a—is a—is a field of struggle. I think that the first rule of really radical environmentalism, as I said in some of my other—I agree with you there are too many books—where I said the first thesis of radical environmentalism should be nature doesn't exist. No no, not in the sense of some Fichte, we just think it construct—but in nature in this mystified sense of some harmony that then we bad humans with our hubris destroyed. You should really read a good Marxist Darwinist, Stephen J. Gould, who depicted in a wonderful way what a catastrophic shit nature was already before we—and again this doesn't mean so fuck it, we can do whatever we want. No, it makes our struggle even more radical and dangerous because we don't have a stable maternal place to return to. That's the lesson. It's not "we screwed it up and now you know we should listen," I always hate that, when there is a tornado, "don't you hear in these sounds of tornado wind the cry of Mother Nature at our raping it" and so on, you know? Like Mother Nature is a heavy bitch. Thank you. Thank you Slavoj, and thank you for coming.
of capital. Capital is capital turns around and it doesn't matter if we all die, what happens to work... blah blah. You know, it's capitalism works as an abstraction. So I agree with this. But nonetheless, I think things are to be avoided. First, especially here, any return to some pre-modern harmony is madness. In the sense that we should nonetheless never forget how many environmental horrors were done—look take Iceland. You know that when Norwegians came there in 7th century, it was one big forest. Now there are literally in whole Iceland just a couple of thousand trees, all—and the Spanish... Canary Islands and so on. So and I met, this was my lifetime experience in Missoula, Montana some fifteen years ago, a an Indian American. I consciously hate the term Native Americans. Because these guys told me why. You know the joke? I'm sorry if I repeat it, but it's my favorite. They told me "If you call us Native Americans, what does this mean? You are culture Americans and we are nature? And also they told me we much prefer Indians, at least our name is a monument to white man's stupidity, you know. They thought they were in India, you know." No, and they told me—this was for me the genuine assertion—they told me, "Fuck you white people, you think you do some ecological damage? We Indians burned more forest and killed more buffaloes than you ever will do." No, they were not joking. The deep insight in this joke was that they were well aware of patronizing—patronizing racism in this pseudo-oh, you Indians with a holistic attitude in harmony with nature, for us we are Cartesian, we just exploit nature, you go out and—like as some white idiots like to say—a Native American does mining, but before he digs into the earth, he listens to what the earth has to say, and only if he feels invited he does it, you know. No you know what I mean, so yes, I agree with you, but don't forget that environmentalism itself is a—is a—is a—is a field of struggle. I think that the first rule of really radical environmentalism, as I said in some of my other—I agree with you there are too many books—where I said the first thesis of radical environmentalism should be nature doesn't exist. No no, not in the sense of some Fichte, we just think it construct—but in nature in this mystified sense of some harmony that then we bad humans with our hubris destroyed. You should really read a good Marxist Darwinist, Stephen J. Gould, who depicted in a wonderful way what a catastrophic shit nature was already before we—and again this doesn't mean so fuck it, we can do whatever we want. No, it makes our struggle even more radical and dangerous because we don't have a stable maternal place to return to. That's the lesson. It's not "we screwed it up and now you know we should listen," I always hate that, when there is a tornado, "don't you hear in these sounds of tornado wind the cry of Mother Nature at our raping it" and so on, you know? Like Mother Nature is a heavy bitch. Thank you. Thank you Slavoj, and thank you for coming.