Toronto International Film Festival
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2016-05-24 · 1:45:45 · 14,224 words
cinema-art-cultureideologygeopolitics-warliberalism-political-correctnesscapitalismrace-antisemitismreligion-theologydemocracysexuality-genderhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisphilosophy-general
A Q&A at York University (Toronto, associated with a film and philosophy conference) in which Žižek begins with a sustained reflection on what it means for film to 'think' through the tension between form and content, illustrating with Hitchcock, Altman, Lars von Trier, Chaplin, Spielberg, and others. He then pivots to the refugee crisis and multiculturalism, arguing that the West bears primary responsibility for displacement through economic neo-colonialism and military intervention, while also insisting that left-liberals must openly confront cultural tensions (honor killings, gender norms) rather than suppress them. The talk closes with a discussion of anarcho-syndicalism, state power, ecology, and the paradox of Stalinist atomization.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 18
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Genuine film analysis that demonstrates an inner necessity for the story to be told in its precise formal way, including camera, soundtrack, and structure, as opposed to using the story as a mere illustration of a pre-existing thesis.
as “form-content tension”
The site of genuine cinematic thinking: when a film's formal elements (camera movement, soundtrack, editing) counteract or exceed the narrative content rather than merely illustrating it.
An open, plural universe of contingent encounters with no controlling God, identified by Žižek as the implicit philosophy embodied in the multi-narrative form of Altman's Short Cuts.
The idea that films think not by illustrating philosophical theses but immanently, through the autonomy of their formal choices, especially where form subverts or exceeds narrative content.
as “God's view / impossible point-of-view shot”
A Hitchcockian camera procedure where an apparently objective overhead 'God's view' shot suddenly reveals itself as the subjective point-of-view of a malevolent agent, implicating the viewer's gaze in evil.
as “Hitchcockian gnostic theology”
Žižek's reading of Hitchcock's implicit theology: God is ignorant and impotent, and divine intervention takes the form of Norman Bates-style violence rather than salvation.
The structural Lacanian logic whereby accessing one register (explicit visual content in pornography) requires foreclosing another (authentic emotional investment), illustrating castration as a condition of desire.
as “libidinal undercurrent”
The unconscious Oedipal/sexual plot that sustains audience investment in catastrophe or blockbuster films, the 'true story' of paternal jealousy or filial desire that runs beneath the official narrative of comets, aliens, or war.
Žižek's characterization of ISIS as an empty screen of evil that multiple competing powers (Iran, Saudi Arabia, the West, Russia) use instrumentally to pursue their real geopolitical agonisms.
as “masochist leftist attitude”
The European left tendency to attribute every Third World problem to Western neo-colonialism, thereby infantilizing non-Western peoples by denying them genuine historical agency and existential projects.
as “economic neo-colonialism”
The contemporary form of colonial extraction whereby global capitalism, including China and South Korea, not only the West, maintains Third World countries in dependency by exploiting their natural resources and buying their fertile land.
The trap in debates on refugees and Islam where one is either accused of racism for raising cultural tensions or of left-liberal cowardice for suppressing them, Žižek insists both arms must be rejected.
The obscene practices of violating a culture's explicit rules that are nonetheless constitutive of that culture's identity, illustrated here by Catholic Church pedophilia and KKK lynching as the obscene supplement of Christian respectability.
A paradoxical contemporary figure who uses the language of women's and gay rights to justify anti-refugee positions, appropriating progressive discourse in the service of reactionary politics.
Hegel's concept of the shared communal spirit of customs, mores, and unwritten rules, invoked to critique American individualism's blindness to the institutional background that enables individual freedom.
as “good alienation”
State-provided universal services (like healthcare) that free individuals from constant anxious self-management, paradoxically expanding rather than limiting freedom by allowing reliance on an external structure.
The Lacanian-psychoanalytic notion that even God (as figured in the Tiger Woods joke) has an ideal ego he identifies with, meaning identity is always split and displaced from itself.
The symbolic order / network of shared norms implicitly invoked when Žižek discusses how communities reproduce themselves through shared customs and unwritten rules.
Stories he reaches for 14
A Roma girl fled to the police to escape arranged marriage; the Roma community leader correctly argued that such marriages are the very core of community reproduction, if stopped, the community disappears in two generations. This poses an irreducible political dilemma that cannot be dissolved by multicultural dialogue.
“if you take this from us, in two generations we are finito”
Heydrich stated before the Final Solution was decided that Jews are a great creative nation whom Germany wishes well, just not in Germany, and should be helped to establish their state in Palestine. Žižek uses this to show the hypocritical history behind European pro-Zionism.
“Jews are a great creative nation. We wish them all the best, just not here in Germany.”
Norwegian terrorist Breivik's manifesto is openly anti-semitic (Jews are a problem, Hitler did the work in Europe) yet simultaneously pro-Israel (support them there, just not here), exemplifying the logic of politically correct anti-immigration that uses the 'other' as a convenient screen.
“He's at the same time openly anti-semitic... but at the same time he's totally pro-Israel.”
The caste-prescribing Laws of Manu, already disintegrating under Muslim influence in 17th-18th century India, was deliberately reprinted throughout the 19th century by British colonizers to restore ancient order as a tool of social control, the paradigmatic case of capitalism instrumentalizing local tradition.
“British colonizers... got it the best way to control India is to restore their ancient order which will keep them under discipline”
In gonzo pornography, actors directly address the camera while performing sex, constantly signaling 'we are not acting seriously', an intensified form of the same structural censorship as in narrative pornography, now even more explicit in its disavowal.
“Gonzo means actors themselves while doing it, sex, directly address camera... 'Am I good now? Should I move my leg like that?'”
Žižek warns the audience he prefers the format of late Plato's dialogues where one person speaks all the time and the other says every few minutes 'By Zeus, so it is, yes Socrates.'
“By Zeus, so it is, yes Socrates. So let's have this type of a dialogue.”
Most American hotels skip the 13th floor, jumping straight from 12 to 14, apparently to avoid bad luck, Žižek finds this horifying because it is as though they are trying to cheat God, who obviously knows the real floor number.
“My god, this is horrible for me... Whom are they cheating, you know what I mean.”
In Deep Impact, Téa Leoni's father divorced her mother and married a young woman; the comet that threatens Earth is the displaced expression of the daughter's fury, resolved when she embraces her father and both are swept away by the comet's tidal wave.
“the whole narrative interest is sustained nonetheless by this melodramatic story”
Officially a disaster film about a comet, Armageddon's true libidinal story is the father's (Bruce Willis) jealousy at his daughter (Liv Tyler) being with another man (Ben Affleck); the father sacrifices himself and blesses the couple, resolving the Oedipal conflict.
“at some libidinal level, it's really a story about father's jealousy, his inability to let his daughter go”
In hardcore pornography, the plumber-style stupid narrative is not accidental incompetence but a structural necessity: to see all sexually explicit content, the authentic emotional dimension must be sabotaged, an illustration of the Lacanian veil/choice at its purest.
“You can see it all but chop-chop you will not get serious emotions... Lacanian veil of castration, veil, choice at its purest.”
Žižek argues that the Congo's abundant coltan and minerals are precisely what makes it a 'heart of darkness', if the minerals vanished, the country would be more peaceful, because global capitalism's extraction is the cause of its decay.
“imagine that all the minerals disappear from the ground of Congo. I claim it would have been a much more peaceful, better state.”
Hegel claimed the spiritual result of the Peloponnesian War is that Thucydides wrote his book about it, the crazy idealist notion that real historical events happen so that a great work can be written.
“things in reality happen so that then a book can be written about them”
Across E.T., Schindler's List, War of the Worlds, and Jurassic Park, the true narrative is the transformation of a bad father into a good father, the official Holocaust or alien plots are vehicles for this libidinal story.
“the true story is the restoration of paternal authority. And you cannot take this away.”
When radical leftists accused Palestinian rapper Tamer Nafar of enabling Islamophobic narratives by singing about honor killings, he replied that his critics do so in English for their English professors; he sings in Arabic for his people to protect women.
“You who criticize me, you do this in English to get points from your English professors. I in my country, I sing in Arab to protect our women.”
Works invoked 23
Vertigo film
Used to illustrate the ontological justification of cities by films (San Francisco exists for Vertigo) and as a case of Hitchcock's radical second-half perspective reversal.
Psycho film
The Arbogast staircase sequence cited as possibly the best example of thinking in cinema; also discussed for Hitchcock's censorship battles over the toilet shot rather than the shower murder.
Melancholia film
Žižek loves it as a 'very happy movie' because humanity disappears; offered as an example of Lars von Trier's better films.
The Birds film
The Bodega Bay fire sequence analyzed as the second example of Hitchcock's God's view/impossible POV procedure, turning the viewer's neutral observing gaze into the evil gaze of the birds.
To Be or Not to Be film
Described as possibly ontologically the best film imaginable ('is there ontologically even possible to imagine a better film'); one of the Lubitsch works Žižek's group is writing new volumes on.
Schindler's List film
Analyzed as another Spielberg entry in the bad-father-to-good-father arc: Liam Neeson's Schindler moves from exploiting Jews (bad father) to saving them (good father).
The Laws of Manu book
Described as 'one of the most horrible books of all times' for its detailed caste prescriptions; used to illustrate how British colonizers deliberately revived and printed it throughout the 19th century to reinforce social control.
Short Cuts film
Praised as a great American classic; the multi-narrative structure is read as embodying a Spinozean/Deleuzian ontology that serves as the optimistic formal counterpoint to the despairing content of suburban L.A. life.
Armageddon film
Implicitly dismissed as 'bullshit' but analyzed as the paradigm case of a disaster film whose true libidinal story is paternal jealousy and the father blessing his daughter's relationship.
Deep Impact film
Called 'that bullshit Deep Impact' but given the clearest possible libidinal reading: the comet is the displaced expression of a daughter's fury at her father's remarriage.
War of the Worlds film
Tom Cruise begins as a bad father and through helping his children becomes a good father, another Spielberg paternal-authority restoration narrative.
Breaking the Waves film
Used as a key example of form-content tension: the handheld documentary form is the necessary condition that makes the ultra-romantic narrative bearable rather than unbearable kitsch.
Mentioned as one of Badiou's inexplicable film loves that Žižek says he cannot pardon; implies it crosses a limit of aesthetic tolerance for him.
City Lights film
Žižek's favorite Chaplin film; the ten-second musical excess after the final gaze exchange is cited as a perfect example of form enacting what content cannot directly show.
Žižek says he hates the alien (would like to squash it) but analyzes E.T. as a boy's dream of restoring the family by replacing the absent father with a good father figure.
Children of Men film
Mentioned as a film that foregrounds the refugee crisis/immigration from its opening, connecting apocalyptic themes to contemporary politics.
Jurassic Park film
Sam Neill begins as a bad father (scares children) and through the dinosaur threat becomes a good father, Žižek suggests subtle details point in this direction.
Praised as 'simply fucking a good movie'; used to illustrate the lesson that retelling stories differently to fit current circumstances is itself the authentic indigenous tradition, against white liberal fetishization of originals.
The famous beach love scene with Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster is invoked by contrast with the Deep Impact scene where the daughter and father are swept away by the 'slightly bigger wave' of the comet's tsunami.
Junction 48 film
Described as courageous for showing authentic Palestinian feminist movements from within Palestinian society; Žižek defends it against critics who said it should have foregrounded Israeli complicity or avoided honor-killing themes.
High-Rise film
A questioner recommended it to Žižek; he had not yet seen it and could not comment.
Jesting Pilate book
Aldous Huxley's 1920s India travelogue; Žižek says he 'doesn't like him as a writer' but the content is 'pleasurable' and valuable for illustrating how British colonizers used the concession of Indian spiritual superiority to maintain material domination.
Pacific Rim film
Praised specifically for its foregrounding of dirty, rotting, materially present robots, in contrast to the clean CGI standard of blockbusters; connects to the analysis of Hays Code censorship of physical dirt.
People invoked 38
Udi Aloni positive
Described as a 'good Israeli friend' from top Zionist establishment; director of Junction 48; the film is praised for addressing Palestinian feminist struggles from the inside.
Mentioned as the Prime Minister under whose government Shulamit Aloni served as progressive Minister of Culture.
Mahatma Gandhi positive
Praised for being honest enough to confront the problem of organizing a secret police in democratic India; Žižek says he is very critical of Gandhi generally but appreciates this honest reckoning with state power.
Mentioned briefly at the very end of the talk; credited with some wonderful dirty jokes; mentioned in the context of a joke format.
Lars von Trier positive
Praised for Melancholia (Žižek calls it a 'happy movie' because humanity disappears) and for the theoretically astute explanation of why Breaking the Waves needed its jarring documentary form; described as 'a little bit crazy' but admired.
Charlie Chaplin positive
City Lights is Žižek's favorite Chaplin film; its musical excess after the final gaze is cited as a perfect example of form expressing what the narrative content cannot.
Mentioned as part of the Frankfurt School in the context of describing the Eastern European conspiracy theory that Adorno and Horkheimer were organized by communists to destroy Western morality.
Jacques Lacan positive
The Lacanian veil of castration is used to explain the structure of pornographic censorship; the broader Lacanian framework of the real, fantasy, and the unconscious undergirds the entire film analysis approach.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Invoked positively in identifying Short Cuts' form as embodying a Deleuzian open-universe ontology; also mentioned as part of the broader group of thinkers on film and philosophy.
Guillermo del Toro positive
Pacific Rim praised specifically for its foregrounding of dirty, rotting, breaking-down material presence in the robots, contrasted with the clean CGI of most blockbusters.
Cited in the context of his controversial statement that 'Hitler was a Zionist'; Žižek neither defends nor fully condemns the statement but uses it as an entry point for discussing the strange historical coalition of fundamentalist Christianity and Zionism.
Shulamit Aloni positive
Udi Aloni's mother; founding figure of Israeli progressivism; as Minister of Culture under Rabin, first introduced acknowledgment of Palestinian suffering in Israeli school curricula.
Nancy Fraser positive
Cited positively for a book on how many American feminists supported the Iraq War on grounds that it would liberate Muslim women, though the opposite turned out to be the result.
Antonio Negri negative
Žižek argues that Negri's concept of the multitude presupposes an efficient state network to function; challenged Negri to give one example of a multitude functioning without state infrastructure; Negri offered the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which Žižek doubts.
Alain Badiou positive
Described as a 'very good friend' with whom Žižek has running jokes; Badiou's fondness for Armageddon and Bridges of Madison County is teased; Badiou's concept of courage/fidelity-to-event is mentioned.
Described as 'disgusting' but given grudging credit for the argument that Europeans, having done horrible things to Jews, should give them part of Bavaria rather than Palestine, exposing the hypocrisy of European pro-Zionism.
Benedictus de Spinoza positive
Invoked to characterize the open, plural, non-theistic universe expressed in Altman's Short Cuts multi-narrative form.
Mentioned as having told Žižek that even private meetings of two advisors were known in Brussels within half an hour, illustrating the need for serious state intelligence capacity.
Malcolm X positive
Described as Žižek's 'true hero': Malcolm X's use of the X (lack of roots) as an opportunity for a more genuine universalism rather than a nostalgic restoration of African identity.
Benjamin Netanyahu negative
Cited for inviting French Jews to emigrate to Israel after minor troubles in France; Žižek notes that French anti-semitic right-wingers reacted with enthusiasm to this, revealing the uncomfortable coalition between Zionism and anti-semitism.
Anders Behring Breivik negative
Called 'that jerk'; analyzed for the paradox of being simultaneously openly anti-semitic and pro-Zionist, exemplifying the logic of the politically correct anti-immigrant.
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Described as ingenious; Žižek's 'Slovene gang' is working on new volumes on Lubitsch; To Be or Not to Be cited as possibly the greatest film ontologically possible.
Kostas Douzinas negative
Described as an 'ex-friend'; argued for a new Greek logic of open public gatherings (everyone speaks for five minutes) as an alternative to centralized decision-making; Žižek mocked this as inadequate for dealing with European pressure on Syriza.
Robert Altman positive
Short Cuts is praised as a Spinozean/Deleuzian formal achievement whose multi-narrative structure embodies an optimistic open-universe ontology that counterpoints the despairing content.
Krzysztof Kieślowski positive
Decalogue cited as one of the few cases where Žižek considers he has done genuine immanent film analysis.
Reinhard Heydrich negative
Described as 'the really bad guy'; quoted near-literally saying Jews are a great creative nation Germany wishes well, just not in Germany, and should go to Palestine, to illustrate the hypocritical anti-semitic underpinning of early European pro-Zionism.
David Bordwell negative
Mentioned as a formalist critic who thinks Žižek is 'a total idiot'; Žižek says he 'up to a point' appreciates Bordwell but distinguishes his own formalism (which includes the message delivered by formal autonomy) from Bordwell's.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Žižek's central cinematic reference point; analyzes his God's view/impossible POV shot procedure across Psycho and The Birds as the paradigm case of genuine thinking in cinema; Hitchcock built narratives around pre-existing formal ideas.
Tamer Nafar positive
Palestinian rapper and lead actor in Junction 48; personal friend; praised for his self-irony (hummus anecdote) and courageous defense against accusations of enabling Islamophobia at Columbia.
Co-mentioned with Adorno in the Frankfurt School conspiracy theory context.
Aldous Huxley positive
Jesting Pilate travelogue cited as revealing how British colonial administrators praised Indian spirituality precisely to maintain material domination; Žižek says he 'doesn't like him as a writer' but finds the content valuable.
Cited as evidence that Venezuelan 'local community organizing' depended entirely on the big boss Chávez with the army behind him, illustrating that apparent anarchist successes conceal state power.
Previously analyzed by Žižek but now described as something he is 'much more critical about'; cited as one of the limited cases where he may have done immanent analysis.
Steven Spielberg positive
Žižek offers a sustained libidinal reading of Spielberg's films as all being about the restoration of paternal authority beneath their official narratives (Holocaust, aliens, dinosaurs); used analytically, not evaluated aesthetically.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for the idealist claim that things in reality happen so books can be written about them; Sittlichkeit invoked against American individualism; treated as a fundamental intellectual resource.
Described as a friend who criticized Junction 48 for lacking a class-struggle perspective on Israeli complicity in Palestinian honor killings; Žižek largely agrees with the criticism but questions the conclusion drawn from it.
Percy Bysshe Shelley positive
Identified as a 'true leftist' with wonderful revolutionary texts; his theory of poetic indirection is noted as coinciding with Žižek's film theory; Marx's comment that Shelley would have remained 'ours' is cited.
Jean-Paul Sartre positive
Cited by name when making the point that non-Western peoples are never merely passive victims but always have existential projects: 'I speak like Sartre here.'
What it argues
form-content tension as the site of cinematic thinkingthe refugee crisis and Western geopolitical responsibilitymulticulturalism, honor killings, and the limits of left-liberal silencethe necessity of state power against anarcho-syndicalisminherent transgression as the obscene underside of institutionslibidinal undercurrents beneath disaster and catastrophe filmscolonial capitalism's instrumentalization of local tradition
Dialectical moves 11
“Far from simply illustrating the narrative content, form tells more—it tells even what is excluded and censored in the content.”
Genuine cinematic thinking resides not in what a film says but in the excess delivered by the autonomy of its formal choices over its narrative.
“Hardcore pornography shows everything and is thereby the most obfuscating, censored form: the price of seeing all is that authentic emotional investment is foreclosed.”
Apparent directness (pornographic explicitness) is the most radical form of censorship because it forecloses the Other register (genuine desire) as the condition of access.
“Ostensibly about catastrophe out there, disaster films are truly about the libidinal Oedipal drama that is marginal on the edge but provides the hermeneutic key.”
What appears secondary (the family melodrama) is in fact structurally primary: the catastrophe is the displaced form of the sexual-familial conflict.
“ISIS, far from really functioning as the arch-enemy, is a kind of pseudo-enemy that all the sides are using to fight each other.”
ISIS's apparent status as the supreme enemy is inverted: it is an empty screen that enables existing antagonisms to be prosecuted by proxy.
“Not fetishize the traditional culture on account of our fidelity to their authentic original: the original tradition is itself to always retell in a new way.”
The demand for fidelity to indigenous originals is white ideology; the authentic tradition is precisely the practice of creative transformation.
“Stalinism wasn't collectivist; in reality it was an extremely atomized survivalist brutal society—the collective spirit at the surface conceals radical individual survivalism underneath.”
The apparent collectivism of Stalinist systems is their opposite at the level of lived experience: precisely because nothing functioned, everyday life was brutally individualist.
“Universal state healthcare is not a limitation of freedom but its condition—the good alienation that frees you from having to worry.”
What appears as the state restricting individual freedom (collectivized healthcare) is inverted: it is the condition of genuine freedom by relieving individuals of constant anxious self-management.
“Our own anti-immigrant fundamentalists, not the refugees, are the true threat to Europe.”
The figure designated as the internal enemy (refugees/Muslims) is inverted with the domestic right-wing populists who represent the genuine danger to European values.
“Global capitalism was, from the very beginning and not in an authentic sense but in the worst possible sense, multiculturalist.”
Multiculturalism is not the opposite of capitalism but its historical instrument: colonial powers preserved local traditions precisely to maintain subordination.
“Malcolm X's X means we don't have our roots—and that is not a loss but a unique chance of freedom, to be more authentically universal.”
What appears as deprivation (lacking roots, being named X) is revalued as an opportunity for a more genuine universalism than the West's pseudo-universal.
“A culture is defined not only by its explicit rules but by the obscene practices of violating these rules—the inherent transgression.”
A culture's official norms do not exhaust its identity; its constitutive obscene underside (KKK violence within Christian America, clerical pedophilia within the Church) is equally defining.
Claims 21
asserts
Ninety percent of what Žižek himself writes about cinema merely illustrates a theoretical point using the story, rather than performing genuine immanent analysis of the film as such.Žižek's own limitations as a film theorist
asserts
Films think not by illustrating philosophical theses but immanently, through the tension between their formal choices and their narrative content.film as a mode of thinking
asserts
Hitchcock constructed his narratives to fit pre-existing formal ideas—camera movements and gestures—rather than vice versa, which is why his films achieve genuine cinematic thinking.Hitchcock's method and the primacy of form
asserts
The apparent directness of hardcore pornography is in fact the most obfuscating form of censorship: you see everything explicit but pay for it with the foreclosure of authentic emotional investment.pornography and the logic of directness vs. censorship
asserts
The true narrative interest of blockbuster catastrophe films is sustained by an underlying libidinal Oedipal drama (paternal jealousy, filial fury), which is the hermeneutic key to reading them.ideology and libidinal economy of disaster films
asserts
The primary responsibility for the refugee crisis lies with Western powers at two levels: economic neo-colonialism that destroys states, and military interventions that created ISIS and destabilized Syria, Iraq, and Libya.refugee crisis and Western responsibility
asserts
The scandal that Gulf states (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Emirates) take zero refugees from directly neighboring conflict zones tells us something crucial about the geopolitical background of the crisis.Gulf states and the refugee crisis
asserts
ISIS functions not as a genuine arch-enemy but as a pseudo-enemy and empty screen of evil through which existing great-power and regional antagonisms (Iran vs. Saudi Arabia, Russia vs. West) are played out.ISIS and geopolitical function
asserts
The left-liberal refusal to openly debate cultural problems with refugees—for fear of giving ammunition to racists—will hand power to the anti-immigrant right in Europe.left-liberal silence on cultural tensions
asserts
Non-Western peoples are not passive victims but agents with genuine existential projects; the masochist leftist attribution of all Third World problems to Western causation is itself a form of racism.agency, Third World politics, and the left
asserts
Global capitalism has always been multiculturalist in the worst sense: colonial powers deliberately preserved local traditional hierarchies (including the Laws of Manu caste system) precisely because they served control.capitalism and multiculturalism
asserts
European right-wing anti-immigrant parties that invoke women's and gay rights are hypocrites whose domestic policies are often more conservative than those of the Muslim immigrants they target.European populism and gender politics
asserts
Anarcho-syndicalism has never succeeded in replacing state power, and the challenges of biogenetics and ecology require large, centralized, even coercive decisions that no community-based model can provide.anarcho-syndicalism and state power
asserts
Local anarchist or communal freedoms only function against the background of a smoothly running institutional network organized by some form of central authority.the institutional precondition of local freedom
asserts
Stalinism was not genuinely collectivist but produced extreme atomized survivalist individualism at the everyday level, because nothing actually functioned in the system.Stalinism and collectivism
asserts
Universal state healthcare is an instance of 'good alienation': rather than limiting freedom, it frees individuals from constant anxious calculation about illness and enables them to pursue their lives.socialist state services and freedom
asserts
The emerging de facto alliance between hardline Zionists and Gulf Muslim fundamentalists (the Turkey-Israel-Saudi Arabia axis) against Iran reveals how strange contemporary geopolitical bedfellows have become.Middle East geopolitics and ideological contradictions
asserts
Malcolm X's insight was not to restore African roots but to seize the X—the erasure of roots—as an opportunity for a genuinely new, more universal egalitarianism.Malcolm X, identity, and universalism
asserts
The film Junction 48 is politically important because it shows authentic Palestinian feminist movements for women's rights from within Palestinian society, complicating the binary of Western liberalism versus Arab patriarchy.Junction 48, Palestinian feminism, and multiculturalism
asserts
American intervention in Iraq paradoxically expelled the Christian minority that had survived under Saddam and worsened the situation for women—the exact opposite of its stated liberation goals.consequences of the Iraq War
asserts
Fetishizing indigenous traditions as authentically original is itself a form of white racism; for many indigenous cultures, retelling stories in new ways to fit present circumstances is the tradition.cultural authenticity and indigenous tradition
Quotes 17
“things in reality happen so that then a book can be written about them”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian idealist ontology of art over reality
“You can see it all but chop-chop you will not get serious emotions... It's Lacanian veil of castration, veil, choice at its purest.”Slavoj Žižek · pornographic explicitness as the purest form of censorship
“the true story is the restoration of paternal authority. And you cannot take this away.”Slavoj Žižek · libidinal Oedipal undercurrent in Spielberg films
“ISIS, far from really functioning as the arch-enemy, is something—it's a kind of a pseudo-enemy that all the sides are using to fight each other.”Slavoj Žižek · ISIS as empty screen of geopolitical agonism
“Arabs are not just passive victims. They have certain projects. They are, I speak like Sartre here, we are never just passive participants in a situation.”Slavoj Žižek · against masochist leftist self-culpability; Third World agency
“Global capitalism was, not in an authentic sense but in the worst possible sense, multiculturalist.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism's use of multiculturalism as a tool of domination
“Malcolm X saw something in extremely revolutionary wonderful way: that his idea was what if this X, which means we lack our roots, offers us a unique chance of freedom?”Slavoj Žižek · lack of roots as opportunity for genuine universalism
“You who criticize me, you do this in English to get points from your English professors. I in my country, I sing in Arab to protect our women.”Slavoj Žižek · authentic political engagement vs. Western academic posturing (Tamer Nafar)
“our own anti-immigrant fundamentalists in Europe, they not the refugees are the true threat to Europe”Slavoj Žižek · inversion: the real enemy is the domestic right, not refugees
“A culture is defined not only by its explicit rules, but by obscene practices of violating these rules.”Slavoj Žižek · inherent transgression as constitutive of cultural identity
“in order to start counting you need zero, you need ground. That's their problem.”Slavoj Žižek · American individualism's blindness to Sittlichkeit / institutional ground
“The tragedy of Stalinism was precisely that because it didn't function... at the everyday level, it was an extremely atomized survivalist brutal society.”Slavoj Žižek · Stalinist collectivism as atomized survivalism in practice
“you know what Malcolm X did with it? It was not, 'Oh we must restore our roots'... what if this X... offers us a unique chance of freedom? To be more authentically universal.”Slavoj Žižek · Malcolm X's X as emancipatory lack of roots
“The only chance for Syriza would have been to organize a much more efficient secret police.”Slavoj Žižek · realpolitik necessity of state coercive apparatus even for the left
“without this tension between narrative and the form, the narrative would be unbearable kitsch”Slavoj Žižek · formal discord as the condition of aesthetic seriousness
“it can be slum but you shouldn't smell the dirt”Slavoj Žižek · Hays Code censorship of materiality / raw physical reality
“if there ever was a scandal, this is the one. Immediately beneath the crisis region, Iraq and Syria, you have... Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Emirates. Extremely rich countries. How many refugees are they taking? None.”Slavoj Žižek · Gulf states taking zero refugees as geopolitical scandal
Transcript 58 turns
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So welcome Slavoj back to Toronto. As some of you may know, this is an event related to York's conference for the last two days on film and philosophy. We're going to try to do some at least rough justice to both film and contemporary politics this evening. Starting with film, we may get more or less organically to contemporary politics, and if we don't, we'll just abruptly switch gears at some point. But we might start off, Slavoj, talking about your approach, in some sense, to film. There's coming out of this conference, which was concerned with the articulation of film and philosophy, you seem to be part, in some sense, of a group of thinkers who in recent years and decades have considered, in some sense, film as a kind of thinking, as a mode of thinking. Thinkers from Deleuze to Marie-José Mondzain, Rodowick, Nancy, Badiou, etc. But you might be distinctive among this group in your Lacanian approach—that is to say, foregrounding the unconscious, fantasy, the real—and perhaps not everyone in the audience is familiar with the coordinates of your way of approaching film, Marx, Lacan, etc., but perhaps we could hear from you, you know, how you think you do and should approach films, from the most immediate pleasurable reactions to the most rigorous sort of analyses.
So welcome Slavoj back to Toronto. As some of you may know, this is an event related to York's conference for the last two days on film and philosophy. We're going to try to do some at least rough justice to both film and contemporary politics this evening. Starting with film, we may get more or less organically to contemporary politics, and if we don't, we'll just abruptly switch gears at some point. But we might start off, Slavoj, talking about your approach, in some sense, to film. There's coming out of this conference, which was concerned with the articulation of film and philosophy, you seem to be part, in some sense, of a group of thinkers who in recent years and decades have considered, in some sense, film as a kind of thinking, as a mode of thinking. Thinkers from Deleuze to Marie-José Mondzain, Rodowick, Nancy, Badiou, etc. But you might be distinctive among this group in your Lacanian approach—that is to say, foregrounding the unconscious, fantasy, the real—and perhaps not everyone in the audience is familiar with the coordinates of your way of approaching film, Marx, Lacan, etc., but perhaps we could hear from you, you know, how you think you do and should approach films, from the most immediate pleasurable reactions to the most rigorous sort of analyses.
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. First, my gratitude to Matthew, to you, to all the organizers. I'm really glad and proud to be here. Just the ontological question you should ask is this one. One of my favorite quotes from Hegel is where he says that the spiritual result of the Peloponnesian War, you know, in ancient Greece tragedy states, is that Thucydides wrote the book on the Peloponnesian War. I like this crazy idealist notion that things in reality happen so that then a book can be written about them. And I think that, of course, if we have to choose, should thousands of people die for a book, of course, the answer is always no. But things are more complex. Think about Shakespeare. Isn't it from our perspective the justification of all Tudor England is basically what matters is Shakespeare wrote the plays, which are much more interesting than reality? And I'm ready to go further here and say, I provoked them when I was in San Francisco, I said that are you aware that your city was created so that the only ontological justification of Vertigo is for Hitchcock to shoot—sorry, I already said for San Francisco exists for Hitchcock's movie. Now, I wonder, do you already have such a movie? So you are ontologically not yet—not yet. I know that some shitty big things like Superman and so on were shot here, but something is missing here for me. Still search for it. Okay, more seriously,
Thank you very much. First, my gratitude to Matthew, to you, to all the organizers. I'm really glad and proud to be here. Just the ontological question you should ask is this one. One of my favorite quotes from Hegel is where he says that the spiritual result of the Peloponnesian War, you know, in ancient Greece tragedy states, is that Thucydides wrote the book on the Peloponnesian War. I like this crazy idealist notion that things in reality happen so that then a book can be written about them. And I think that, of course, if we have to choose, should thousands of people die for a book, of course, the answer is always no. But things are more complex. Think about Shakespeare. Isn't it from our perspective the justification of all Tudor England is basically what matters is Shakespeare wrote the plays, which are much more interesting than reality? And I'm ready to go further here and say, I provoked them when I was in San Francisco, I said that are you aware that your city was created so that the only ontological justification of Vertigo is for Hitchcock to shoot—sorry, I already said for San Francisco exists for Hitchcock's movie. Now, I wonder, do you already have such a movie? So you are ontologically not yet—not yet. I know that some shitty big things like Superman and so on were shot here, but something is missing here for me. Still search for it. Okay, more seriously,
unknown
I'm not so sure that I am really
I'm not so sure that I am really
Slavoj Žižek
able to do it, philosophy film, so I would first like to be very frank and self-critical. Incidentally, if I talk too much, just cut me short, okay? Let's be frank. In to percent, I would have said, of stuff that I write about cinema, it's not really immanently about cinema. Either I just refer to the story or to a scene to illustrate a theoretical point, or a little bit better but still not enough, I simply use cinema to make as a tool to analyze our ideological predicament. For example, that's what I try to do with some Batman movies, Nolan's Batman movies and so on and so on. It's nice as far as it goes, but it's not yet an immanent analysis. Because with many things that not only me but also others who write about movies, with many things that they do, you can always make this vicious experiment. Imagine that there is no movie but just the basic story of the movie, and the whole analysis stands. So it's not really about the movie. And I think there are just a couple of times where I do maybe something more. Some, not all, of my Hitchcock analysis, what I did on Krzysztof Kieślowski, Decalogue and so on, some of the stuff that I did on Tarkovsky, although I'm today much more critical about Tarkovsky, and maybe a little bit about Matrix and so on, but more or less that's all, I think. And now I will go a step further and say that in my usual analysis, it's not really philosophy film. I'm proposing, advocating a certain thesis about our society, ideology, or even more general philosophical thesis, and I really just illustrate it. The what philosophers who claim that cinema can think, what they mean is, I think, something much more radical. Films can think, this does not mean that they illustrate philosophical theses or whatever. No, they think immanently, which means for me, I'm here an old Marxist formalist, in their very form. You have a certain narrative scene or whatever. Immanent analysis begins when you demonstrate not only how form matters in the sense that there is an inner necessity for that story to be told in that precise way—and I'm talking here not only about general narrative structure but about camera movements, soundtrack and so on—but even a step further. And here for me, thinking begins, a real one. I was always fascinated by movies where there is a subtle tension between narrative content and the form, the way the form is told. Where form does not simply illustrate the narrative content but counteracts it, even subverts it in a way. I'm sorry now if—but I hope not most of you—some of you know the examples that I will mention now, but that's the reason why I'm a great admirer of—not all of them, but some of—Robert Altman's movies like Short Cuts. I think that as to its content, and most critics remained at that level, if you saw, it's one of the great American classics, Short Cuts, I think. It's, you know, all this intersection of seven, eight story lines. It's, as we say in the usual superficial Marxist critic terms, it's the despair of the middle class everyday life in L.A. area, suburb, this suburban silent despair of daily life. So where is the counterpoint? Because, and that's the beauty of it, the way I read the movie, it's not at the level of content that some character nonetheless shows the path to what brighter future or whatever. It's the form itself which is very Spinozean, this ten, eight—no, they are eight or nine narrative lives intersecting, this universe of contingent encounters where, okay, they can be tragic, but they can also bring new hope. You know, this pluralistic, open universe of—it's a really a kind of a Spinozean or even Deleuzian ontology, and at this level I like it. It's not a work controlled by God. It's open multiple reality with contingent encounters which can be tragic but also can bring luck. And this universe in itself, the narrative structure of the movie, is the optimist counterpoint, I claim. You know, so again, it's not that you discover that beneath the terrible despair of everyday life there is hope, what, of a socialist revolution in L.A., I don't know what. The form itself brings a different message. Now, so that you will not say that I dream, I will give you another example. I hope you already know it because, you know, I don't have any problem with enjoying big blockbusters. I'm not a fetishist of those boring art movies which, when they are over, you are glad that they are over, and then you celebrate it just as a kind of superstitious measure. I will talk about it so that I don't have to see it again or whatever. But there are art movies which are really good and I really enjoy them. One of them, if you allow me this detour since we are where we are, is—and I'm not giving you some multicultural bullshit, oh, native Americans, Inuits, what a great nation. No, it's simply fucking a good movie. Did you see The Fast Runner, yours? I really, I simply enjoyed it. And I hope I can repeat a story why I like it. I hope you don't yet know it. It was a big lesson against—against superficial leftist critique. I read, I mean, I heard some people who were friends with the producer send to me literally a box, all the materials about the movie. And there I read something wonderful. The director of the movie, who now unfortunately died, I think. You know the story, so we'll not go into it. But some idiot, idiot, I mean white liberal politically correct pseudo-leftist critic reproached the movie for succumbing to Hollywood commercialization. Because you know the movie stages an old Inuit legend, and the movie changes the ending. In, so I read, the original Inuit legend ends tragically. They all more or less kill each other. In the movie, it's just that the two bad guys are not even killed, they are just excommunicated and so on. It's a much softer open ending. So the reproach was, "But you are not faithful to the original, you succumb to Hollywood commercialism" and so on. Oh my god, the guy, the Inuit director gave a perfect answer. He said, "No, you are a white racist here," he says. "Because you don't see that retelling the story always in a different way to fit the present circumstances, that's our Inuit tradition. Your notion of faithful, being faithful to the original, this is your white people ideology. You don't get it how our original native logic works. It's very opportunistic. We, because we are the original traditional people, we don't relate to our culture, we don't fetishize it into this original tradition and so on. You know, we manipulate it to tell the story always in a new way and so on and so on." She gave a wonderful lesson, which is, don't fetishize the traditional culture on account of our fidelity, their authentic and so on and so on. So just a—maybe I should slowly approach the ending of this part just to give you some other examples of what I mean. Lars von Trier, okay, he is a little bit crazy, but some of his movies, not all, I like. Melancholia, I love it. Because I'm a pessimist, I think it's a very happy movie. Humanity disappears, what more do you want? We are a stain on the—but you know, I read an interview with him where he explains Breaking the Waves in a wonderful way. Because you know what's the paradox of the movie, if you've seen it? The narrative is ultra-romantic. Passionate love, all that and so on. But the form is totally in discord with it. First, it's not what you expect with romantic movie, this you know, art smooth movement, gliding smooth camera or whatever. No, it's done almost as a documentary. Handheld camera, rough cuts which are not even well coordinated and so on. And he says something very interesting. He says that without this tension between narrative and the form, the narrative would be unbearable kitsch. That the function only to be shot in such a way which counteracts the narrative, only in this way can you do such a narrative. Or the opposite example that I like, in many melodramas, even classic Hollywood melodramas, you have a certain narrative which is stupidly excessively romantic. If you were to stage it directly, it would have been ridiculous. So you downplay it at the level of how it is acted, but the excess is then—reenters in music. You know, what you couldn't show you enact it in music, and I find this a very interesting point where it's not simply that, you got the point, that music illustrates the action. No, music brings out what was too strong for the action, what was not allowed to be enacted directly. You know who did this in a wonderful way? I love the movie. The great Chaplin classic, my best Chaplin, I think, City Lights. You remember at the end, this triumphant exchange of gazes, then you have the end, but the music goes on for some ten seconds. It's as if you have an excess there. So it's very naive, I know, primitive what I'm telling you now, and we can go on more in details, but you see my point. Here film is thinking, I think, where the form, the form of a film has its own dynamic which does not simply faithfully render illustrates the narrative content but tells more. Tells even what is excluded, censored in the content and so on. This tension between form and content is where cinematic thinking is located. And this I think is—although he is overinterpreted, I'm getting tired of it—my Slovene gang, we are now moving from Hitchcock to our now, I know you know all it, but he is ingenious. For example, we now try to do new volumes on Ernst Lubitsch, who is, I mean, like one asks the question to be or not to be, is there ontologically even possible to imagine a better film and so on, you know. But what I want to say is that this—this tension, you find it in a masterful way in Hitchcock. Because you know how do you see that Hitchcock was thinking in films? Alfred Hitchcock, it's very interesting to read all these books, the making of, how did he do it? The original idea was as a rule not the narrative content. He imagined a certain purely formal movements, a certain movement of a camera, a certain gesture and so on. And then he, with the help of scenario writers, constructed a story to fit this formal movements. And what I regret now, three minutes, two minutes I will stop, what I regret is that, and it's my responsibility, that we were not able to show you here a very traditional clip, the second murder, second, Arbogast from Hitchcock's Psycho. I think this is a wonderful example, maybe the best I know, of thinking in cinema. You know Arbogast climbs the stairs in mother's house and you have the standard Hitchcockian exchange of point-of-view shot, Arbogast observing the stairs and the objective shot of Arbogast climbing up. Okay, this is the standard way to create tension. But then you know that famous twisted movement, the camera goes up and you see this famous what they call God's view. And then when the creature enters and starts to step with a knife, Arbogast, you get into the point-of-view impossible point-of-view shot of this creature. This is I think one of the elementary matrixes of Hitchcock, and the first thing to do, I did this in my—our collective Hitchcock volume, is I was surprised to discover how systematically Hitchcock resorted to the same procedure. For example, in The Birds, when you have that famous scene when fire explodes, some gasoline station explodes, there is big fire in Bodega Bay. You have Tippi Hedren looking at the gasoline station exploding, this standard subjective-objective shot. Then you have the famous shot up there, so-called God's view shot from above. And then Hitchcock does something absolutely ingenious. You first think this is an objective shot, like establishing shot, just—but then from behind one bird enters, another bird enters, and the objective shot all of a sudden turns into a point-of-view shot. And this affects you as a viewer. You thought you are just identified with the camera, "Oh now we see it all," then you see your gaze is evil embodied. It's—so I claim there is a whole Hitchcockian gnostic theology in this. How you know, Hitchcockian theology is a very dark one. Is that God is an ignorant stupid God, and when he intervenes it's Norman Bates is divine intervention and so on. And it's also narratively true. Like another way Hitchcock is thinking—and then you have to stop me, otherwise it will end bad—there is something that the two films share that we all know and love, Vertigo and Psycho. Both films can be imagined in a much shorter version around half. Look how perfectly it would have worked. Imagine Psycho which stops under shower—Marion under shower—just before the shower murder. It works perfectly. It's a morality story about a girl who out of despair steals money, then runs away, there in the shape of Norman Bates she sees what is ahead of her, the horror, and she withdraws and cleans herself, like she was on the brink of—it works perfectly. Vertigo is the same. It's the when Madeleine falls, so we think, from the tower and we see Scotty, James Stewart, in total despair. Imagine that the movie's a short one-hour movie stops at that point. It's a perfect shitty psychological melodrama of how out of excessive love, because of the pressure put on her, how Scotty kills the woman he loves and so on and so on. It works perfectly, but then you have part two, a total shift of perspective and so on and so on. You see these things interest me, and I am not here formalist in the—maybe, I'm not sure, although he thinks I'm a total idiot I still up to a point appreciate him, David Bordwell. But formalist in a different sense, in the sense that you see, to understand the film you should include into its content the message delivered by the autonomy of form. It's at that level that true thinking in cinema happens. If I don't stop now I will never stop. Okay, let's—let's arbitrarily stop you there, and but my next question might follow a bit on what you've just said about the working of form. You were speaking this afternoon a bit about indirection and how in works of art there's—you had a preference for works of art that operated in some sense indirectly, that if they tried to present some moral or political message in too direct form, that would in a sense constitute the failure of the work of art. That happens to be Percy Shelley's actually theory of poetry, very explicitly. Really? Although I like Shelley, who doesn't. He was the true leftist, you know, his wonderful revolutionary text. Yes, pure leftist politics but a theory of indirection as a—as poetry. But isn't this what we all want as leftist art theorists, Marxists? The best of both worlds, yeah. Right. Sorry, you know what Marx said? Here Marx was right. He said for us progressives it was good that Byron died early, but it was bad that Shelley died early. Because Byron would have become conservative, Shelley would have been ours. Sorry, I'm sorry, go on please. So would you say that that film through its form-content relation, is that a way that it's working indirectly? Or how—I mean, you talked also this afternoon a bit and in your recent work about films that quite apart from their expressed political views will somehow reproduce a world, class difference, etc., but often in film just in an indirect way. And I was wondering if—so trying to get us more or less organically from film to politics, the way politics is represented in film more or less directly. I agree with what you're saying, but as you are I'm totally sure aware, the point does not mean that this indirect way simply means don't say directly for some stupid that we are advocating some stupid artificial games and so on and so on. The true art would have been to show things directly, but in such a way that you become aware that what you see directly is not really the thing that we were aiming at. For example, I don't—don't be afraid, I'm not a pervert. I don't watch hardcore pornography. But I must admit it fascinated me always. You know why? Because it's maybe the most paradoxical genre that you can imagine. On the one hand is, "Oh we see everything," you know. Yes, we see everything, but at the same time a) it's the most codified genre that you can imagine. I know because I saw a good friend's documentary on not the making of Psycho, Vertigo, but the making of a hardcore movie. Where they say how again how absolutely codified it is. For example the standard heterosexual hardcore movie, you know, you present the two people, first you have masturbation dreaming about each other, then the big act, first cunnilingus—it's absolutely codified. Then, now I will tell you something that may shock you. Dean MacCannell, a Californian friend of mine, I lost contact of him now, wrote a wonderful analysis of—it's disgusting I warn you, but it's wonderful—of the expressions of women's face during sexual act in hardcore movies. And he discovered there is nothing spontaneous about it, it's strictly codified, even a kind of a Greimasian semiotic square, four expressions are codified. And then I learned from people who are doing these movies that it's—they even have, I forgot them, terms about them. One is the one you would have expected, the ecstasy, "Oh yes more," whatever. Then things get much more interesting. The next expression is what I'm tempted to call in Habermasian terms the instrumental
able to do it, philosophy film, so I would first like to be very frank and self-critical. Incidentally, if I talk too much, just cut me short, okay? Let's be frank. In to percent, I would have said, of stuff that I write about cinema, it's not really immanently about cinema. Either I just refer to the story or to a scene to illustrate a theoretical point, or a little bit better but still not enough, I simply use cinema to make as a tool to analyze our ideological predicament. For example, that's what I try to do with some Batman movies, Nolan's Batman movies and so on and so on. It's nice as far as it goes, but it's not yet an immanent analysis. Because with many things that not only me but also others who write about movies, with many things that they do, you can always make this vicious experiment. Imagine that there is no movie but just the basic story of the movie, and the whole analysis stands. So it's not really about the movie. And I think there are just a couple of times where I do maybe something more. Some, not all, of my Hitchcock analysis, what I did on Krzysztof Kieślowski, Decalogue and so on, some of the stuff that I did on Tarkovsky, although I'm today much more critical about Tarkovsky, and maybe a little bit about Matrix and so on, but more or less that's all, I think. And now I will go a step further and say that in my usual analysis, it's not really philosophy film. I'm proposing, advocating a certain thesis about our society, ideology, or even more general philosophical thesis, and I really just illustrate it. The what philosophers who claim that cinema can think, what they mean is, I think, something much more radical. Films can think, this does not mean that they illustrate philosophical theses or whatever. No, they think immanently, which means for me, I'm here an old Marxist formalist, in their very form. You have a certain narrative scene or whatever. Immanent analysis begins when you demonstrate not only how form matters in the sense that there is an inner necessity for that story to be told in that precise way—and I'm talking here not only about general narrative structure but about camera movements, soundtrack and so on—but even a step further. And here for me, thinking begins, a real one. I was always fascinated by movies where there is a subtle tension between narrative content and the form, the way the form is told. Where form does not simply illustrate the narrative content but counteracts it, even subverts it in a way. I'm sorry now if—but I hope not most of you—some of you know the examples that I will mention now, but that's the reason why I'm a great admirer of—not all of them, but some of—Robert Altman's movies like Short Cuts. I think that as to its content, and most critics remained at that level, if you saw, it's one of the great American classics, Short Cuts, I think. It's, you know, all this intersection of seven, eight story lines. It's, as we say in the usual superficial Marxist critic terms, it's the despair of the middle class everyday life in L.A. area, suburb, this suburban silent despair of daily life. So where is the counterpoint? Because, and that's the beauty of it, the way I read the movie, it's not at the level of content that some character nonetheless shows the path to what brighter future or whatever. It's the form itself which is very Spinozean, this ten, eight—no, they are eight or nine narrative lives intersecting, this universe of contingent encounters where, okay, they can be tragic, but they can also bring new hope. You know, this pluralistic, open universe of—it's a really a kind of a Spinozean or even Deleuzian ontology, and at this level I like it. It's not a work controlled by God. It's open multiple reality with contingent encounters which can be tragic but also can bring luck. And this universe in itself, the narrative structure of the movie, is the optimist counterpoint, I claim. You know, so again, it's not that you discover that beneath the terrible despair of everyday life there is hope, what, of a socialist revolution in L.A., I don't know what. The form itself brings a different message. Now, so that you will not say that I dream, I will give you another example. I hope you already know it because, you know, I don't have any problem with enjoying big blockbusters. I'm not a fetishist of those boring art movies which, when they are over, you are glad that they are over, and then you celebrate it just as a kind of superstitious measure. I will talk about it so that I don't have to see it again or whatever. But there are art movies which are really good and I really enjoy them. One of them, if you allow me this detour since we are where we are, is—and I'm not giving you some multicultural bullshit, oh, native Americans, Inuits, what a great nation. No, it's simply fucking a good movie. Did you see The Fast Runner, yours? I really, I simply enjoyed it. And I hope I can repeat a story why I like it. I hope you don't yet know it. It was a big lesson against—against superficial leftist critique. I read, I mean, I heard some people who were friends with the producer send to me literally a box, all the materials about the movie. And there I read something wonderful. The director of the movie, who now unfortunately died, I think. You know the story, so we'll not go into it. But some idiot, idiot, I mean white liberal politically correct pseudo-leftist critic reproached the movie for succumbing to Hollywood commercialization. Because you know the movie stages an old Inuit legend, and the movie changes the ending. In, so I read, the original Inuit legend ends tragically. They all more or less kill each other. In the movie, it's just that the two bad guys are not even killed, they are just excommunicated and so on. It's a much softer open ending. So the reproach was, "But you are not faithful to the original, you succumb to Hollywood commercialism" and so on. Oh my god, the guy, the Inuit director gave a perfect answer. He said, "No, you are a white racist here," he says. "Because you don't see that retelling the story always in a different way to fit the present circumstances, that's our Inuit tradition. Your notion of faithful, being faithful to the original, this is your white people ideology. You don't get it how our original native logic works. It's very opportunistic. We, because we are the original traditional people, we don't relate to our culture, we don't fetishize it into this original tradition and so on. You know, we manipulate it to tell the story always in a new way and so on and so on." She gave a wonderful lesson, which is, don't fetishize the traditional culture on account of our fidelity, their authentic and so on and so on. So just a—maybe I should slowly approach the ending of this part just to give you some other examples of what I mean. Lars von Trier, okay, he is a little bit crazy, but some of his movies, not all, I like. Melancholia, I love it. Because I'm a pessimist, I think it's a very happy movie. Humanity disappears, what more do you want? We are a stain on the—but you know, I read an interview with him where he explains Breaking the Waves in a wonderful way. Because you know what's the paradox of the movie, if you've seen it? The narrative is ultra-romantic. Passionate love, all that and so on. But the form is totally in discord with it. First, it's not what you expect with romantic movie, this you know, art smooth movement, gliding smooth camera or whatever. No, it's done almost as a documentary. Handheld camera, rough cuts which are not even well coordinated and so on. And he says something very interesting. He says that without this tension between narrative and the form, the narrative would be unbearable kitsch. That the function only to be shot in such a way which counteracts the narrative, only in this way can you do such a narrative. Or the opposite example that I like, in many melodramas, even classic Hollywood melodramas, you have a certain narrative which is stupidly excessively romantic. If you were to stage it directly, it would have been ridiculous. So you downplay it at the level of how it is acted, but the excess is then—reenters in music. You know, what you couldn't show you enact it in music, and I find this a very interesting point where it's not simply that, you got the point, that music illustrates the action. No, music brings out what was too strong for the action, what was not allowed to be enacted directly. You know who did this in a wonderful way? I love the movie. The great Chaplin classic, my best Chaplin, I think, City Lights. You remember at the end, this triumphant exchange of gazes, then you have the end, but the music goes on for some ten seconds. It's as if you have an excess there. So it's very naive, I know, primitive what I'm telling you now, and we can go on more in details, but you see my point. Here film is thinking, I think, where the form, the form of a film has its own dynamic which does not simply faithfully render illustrates the narrative content but tells more. Tells even what is excluded, censored in the content and so on. This tension between form and content is where cinematic thinking is located. And this I think is—although he is overinterpreted, I'm getting tired of it—my Slovene gang, we are now moving from Hitchcock to our now, I know you know all it, but he is ingenious. For example, we now try to do new volumes on Ernst Lubitsch, who is, I mean, like one asks the question to be or not to be, is there ontologically even possible to imagine a better film and so on, you know. But what I want to say is that this—this tension, you find it in a masterful way in Hitchcock. Because you know how do you see that Hitchcock was thinking in films? Alfred Hitchcock, it's very interesting to read all these books, the making of, how did he do it? The original idea was as a rule not the narrative content. He imagined a certain purely formal movements, a certain movement of a camera, a certain gesture and so on. And then he, with the help of scenario writers, constructed a story to fit this formal movements. And what I regret now, three minutes, two minutes I will stop, what I regret is that, and it's my responsibility, that we were not able to show you here a very traditional clip, the second murder, second, Arbogast from Hitchcock's Psycho. I think this is a wonderful example, maybe the best I know, of thinking in cinema. You know Arbogast climbs the stairs in mother's house and you have the standard Hitchcockian exchange of point-of-view shot, Arbogast observing the stairs and the objective shot of Arbogast climbing up. Okay, this is the standard way to create tension. But then you know that famous twisted movement, the camera goes up and you see this famous what they call God's view. And then when the creature enters and starts to step with a knife, Arbogast, you get into the point-of-view impossible point-of-view shot of this creature. This is I think one of the elementary matrixes of Hitchcock, and the first thing to do, I did this in my—our collective Hitchcock volume, is I was surprised to discover how systematically Hitchcock resorted to the same procedure. For example, in The Birds, when you have that famous scene when fire explodes, some gasoline station explodes, there is big fire in Bodega Bay. You have Tippi Hedren looking at the gasoline station exploding, this standard subjective-objective shot. Then you have the famous shot up there, so-called God's view shot from above. And then Hitchcock does something absolutely ingenious. You first think this is an objective shot, like establishing shot, just—but then from behind one bird enters, another bird enters, and the objective shot all of a sudden turns into a point-of-view shot. And this affects you as a viewer. You thought you are just identified with the camera, "Oh now we see it all," then you see your gaze is evil embodied. It's—so I claim there is a whole Hitchcockian gnostic theology in this. How you know, Hitchcockian theology is a very dark one. Is that God is an ignorant stupid God, and when he intervenes it's Norman Bates is divine intervention and so on. And it's also narratively true. Like another way Hitchcock is thinking—and then you have to stop me, otherwise it will end bad—there is something that the two films share that we all know and love, Vertigo and Psycho. Both films can be imagined in a much shorter version around half. Look how perfectly it would have worked. Imagine Psycho which stops under shower—Marion under shower—just before the shower murder. It works perfectly. It's a morality story about a girl who out of despair steals money, then runs away, there in the shape of Norman Bates she sees what is ahead of her, the horror, and she withdraws and cleans herself, like she was on the brink of—it works perfectly. Vertigo is the same. It's the when Madeleine falls, so we think, from the tower and we see Scotty, James Stewart, in total despair. Imagine that the movie's a short one-hour movie stops at that point. It's a perfect shitty psychological melodrama of how out of excessive love, because of the pressure put on her, how Scotty kills the woman he loves and so on and so on. It works perfectly, but then you have part two, a total shift of perspective and so on and so on. You see these things interest me, and I am not here formalist in the—maybe, I'm not sure, although he thinks I'm a total idiot I still up to a point appreciate him, David Bordwell. But formalist in a different sense, in the sense that you see, to understand the film you should include into its content the message delivered by the autonomy of form. It's at that level that true thinking in cinema happens. If I don't stop now I will never stop. Okay, let's—let's arbitrarily stop you there, and but my next question might follow a bit on what you've just said about the working of form. You were speaking this afternoon a bit about indirection and how in works of art there's—you had a preference for works of art that operated in some sense indirectly, that if they tried to present some moral or political message in too direct form, that would in a sense constitute the failure of the work of art. That happens to be Percy Shelley's actually theory of poetry, very explicitly. Really? Although I like Shelley, who doesn't. He was the true leftist, you know, his wonderful revolutionary text. Yes, pure leftist politics but a theory of indirection as a—as poetry. But isn't this what we all want as leftist art theorists, Marxists? The best of both worlds, yeah. Right. Sorry, you know what Marx said? Here Marx was right. He said for us progressives it was good that Byron died early, but it was bad that Shelley died early. Because Byron would have become conservative, Shelley would have been ours. Sorry, I'm sorry, go on please. So would you say that that film through its form-content relation, is that a way that it's working indirectly? Or how—I mean, you talked also this afternoon a bit and in your recent work about films that quite apart from their expressed political views will somehow reproduce a world, class difference, etc., but often in film just in an indirect way. And I was wondering if—so trying to get us more or less organically from film to politics, the way politics is represented in film more or less directly. I agree with what you're saying, but as you are I'm totally sure aware, the point does not mean that this indirect way simply means don't say directly for some stupid that we are advocating some stupid artificial games and so on and so on. The true art would have been to show things directly, but in such a way that you become aware that what you see directly is not really the thing that we were aiming at. For example, I don't—don't be afraid, I'm not a pervert. I don't watch hardcore pornography. But I must admit it fascinated me always. You know why? Because it's maybe the most paradoxical genre that you can imagine. On the one hand is, "Oh we see everything," you know. Yes, we see everything, but at the same time a) it's the most codified genre that you can imagine. I know because I saw a good friend's documentary on not the making of Psycho, Vertigo, but the making of a hardcore movie. Where they say how again how absolutely codified it is. For example the standard heterosexual hardcore movie, you know, you present the two people, first you have masturbation dreaming about each other, then the big act, first cunnilingus—it's absolutely codified. Then, now I will tell you something that may shock you. Dean MacCannell, a Californian friend of mine, I lost contact of him now, wrote a wonderful analysis of—it's disgusting I warn you, but it's wonderful—of the expressions of women's face during sexual act in hardcore movies. And he discovered there is nothing spontaneous about it, it's strictly codified, even a kind of a Greimasian semiotic square, four expressions are codified. And then I learned from people who are doing these movies that it's—they even have, I forgot them, terms about them. One is the one you would have expected, the ecstasy, "Oh yes more," whatever. Then things get much more interesting. The next expression is what I'm tempted to call in Habermasian terms the instrumental
unknown
reason expression. It's you know, the woman with her lips tight looking down, like "Oh my god, one another effort, it's hard work," we know this, we are in the middle of hard work. The third expression is even more—it's indifference. Woman is chewing gum, "don't"—and this is part of erotic play. A true femme fatale must play indifference, you know. And then the last one, which is the most dangerous one, it's also absolutely codified, is while the man is doing the hard work, the woman is looking at him with an ironic smile like "Haha is this all you can do?" or whatever,
reason expression. It's you know, the woman with her lips tight looking down, like "Oh my god, one another effort, it's hard work," we know this, we are in the middle of hard work. The third expression is even more—it's indifference. Woman is chewing gum, "don't"—and this is part of erotic play. A true femme fatale must play indifference, you know. And then the last one, which is the most dangerous one, it's also absolutely codified, is while the man is doing the hard work, the woman is looking at him with an ironic smile like "Haha is this all you can do?" or whatever,
Slavoj Žižek
you know. So you see even there the intimate domain, it's a
you know. So you see even there the intimate domain, it's a
unknown
perfectly structured semantic series of oppositions and so on. But so you think you see everything directly. No, I developed long ago this point. You pay the price. It's heavy censored.
perfectly structured semantic series of oppositions and so on. But so you think you see everything directly. No, I developed long ago this point. You pay the price. It's heavy censored.
Slavoj Žižek
It was like this and even now it is in the majority of hardcore
It was like this and even now it is in the majority of hardcore
unknown
movies. You know, I'm sorry if you know this story but
movies. You know, I'm sorry if you know this story but
Slavoj Žižek
I really I think it holds, this example of mine. I
I really I think it holds, this example of mine. I
unknown
remember
remember
Slavoj Žižek
when I was young in my adolescence, big experience, the first hardcore movies. What shocked me is how utterly—I'm talking
when I was young in my adolescence, big experience, the first hardcore movies. What shocked me is how utterly—I'm talking
unknown
about this long one hour and the half full movie—how utterly stupid the story is. You know, they had to use a story. It's—I remember, sorry for retelling this, but I was so shocked, you know, it's extreme vulgarity. Like I remember once a how do you call it? The guy who regulates water supply, who does pipes and so on. Plumber, sorry, a plumber fixes the kitchen and then the housewife comes to him and says, "Okay you fix that hole, but I have another hole to be fixed. Can you"—you know like you are just embarrassed. And then it got to me. They are not so stupid. The price you pay for it, for seeing all, is that it must be sabotaged at the psychological level. It must be—it is as if to have both of it, authentic investment and direct hardcore sex, it wouldn't work. It's Lacanian veil of castration, veil, choice at its purest. You
about this long one hour and the half full movie—how utterly stupid the story is. You know, they had to use a story. It's—I remember, sorry for retelling this, but I was so shocked, you know, it's extreme vulgarity. Like I remember once a how do you call it? The guy who regulates water supply, who does pipes and so on. Plumber, sorry, a plumber fixes the kitchen and then the housewife comes to him and says, "Okay you fix that hole, but I have another hole to be fixed. Can you"—you know like you are just embarrassed. And then it got to me. They are not so stupid. The price you pay for it, for seeing all, is that it must be sabotaged at the psychological level. It must be—it is as if to have both of it, authentic investment and direct hardcore sex, it wouldn't work. It's Lacanian veil of castration, veil, choice at its purest. You
Slavoj Žižek
can see it all but chop-chop you will not get serious emotions, I mean faked but to be taken as serious. The proof is another one. I know Catherine Breillat and so on. There is a whole series of directors today who try to do this, to do a serious melodrama even psychological drama. But it's typical how it doesn't catch on, how it remains marginal. Now, you will say but as I was brutally said at some point, but listen you must be pretty old because this type of movies, plumber, are no longer made for years, no? And then I asked them, but what is going on? And they told me gonzo movies, which are even worse censorship. You know what is in gonzo movies? The definition is I think that actors don't even pretend that they are part of a narrative. Gonzo means actors themselves while doing it, sex, directly address camera and refer to it. You know all this irony, "Am I good now? Should I move my leg like that?" I think this is an even worse censorship. It is that you have to get the message all the time, "We are not acting seriously," and so on and so on. So you see this is how we should correct that notion about directness. Sometimes directness in this sense, okay we think about sex but we show it all, is—is the most obfuscating—is the most obfuscating thing that there is. And you know what I was really thinking, if you allow me another detour, when I was thinking about directness, it was at how—at how at the most elementary level to analyze, for example, catastrophe movies is to not to be too fascinated by those old today digitally done usually scenes of catastrophe and so on. I claim that all these movies should be read through some Oedipal or sexual frame which may appear to be marginal on the edge, but it provides the hermeneutic key. For example, to be stupid. Did you see, I'm ashamed to mention it but an evil step at my very good friend Alain Badiou. Did you see Armageddon, that Ben Affleck, Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler? I mean, with Badiou we have this running joke, I always talk around evil things about him. You know when he developed the notion of courage, fidelity to event, he admitted to me frankly he was thinking about Armageddon. No, Badiou has some strange friends with some movies. He likes Armageddon, he likes—Armageddon I pardon him, but the other of his choices I will never pardon him. He likes Bridges of the Madison County. Sorry, that's too much, even I, you may not believe it, I have a limit, you know. But let's go to these movies. Isn't it clear, remember Armageddon, that officially it's about the usual bullshit. A gigantic comet or whatever some stupid rock approaching Earth and will humanity save itself by exploding it? But then you have the melodrama. Basically Ben Affleck is screwing Liv Tyler who is—who is Bruce Willis' daughter, and it's the fury of the father. At the end when he, father, sacrifices himself, he gives the two of them a blessing. So at some libidinal level, it's really a story about father's jealousy, his inability to let his daughter go. And at some different libidinal level, all that bullshit about comets and so on is about father's fury. Even more directly, my favorite example. Did you see Mimi Leder directed it with Téa Leoni that bullshit Deep Impact? There it's absolutely clear that again the comet threatening Earth, it's Téa Leoni, her father played by Maximilian Schell divorced her mother and married a young woman. It's daughter's fury and jealousy. Because then the end, one of the final scenes of the movie is wonderful when the comet which will not destroy Earth, it's more—is approaching, he the daughter joins his father somewhere there in Hamptons on the East Coast of the United States and they embrace and then you see the gigantic wave from the comet which hit the ocean approaching them and she embraces him and says, "Oh daddy," and they are both swept away, they die both. I always think that this scene should be interpreted against the background of another famous scene of lovers on the beach. You remember the famous scene between Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity? This like two lovers soft waves. Here you get a slightly bigger wave, how shall I put it. But you see what I'm trying to tell you here, that although the movie is officially about catastrophe and so on, but it has this inner tension because the whole narrative interest is sustained nonetheless by this melodramatic story so that although the catastrophe is within the narrative space of the film, objective out there, but the libidinal meaning of the catastrophe is defined with this libidinal—and you know which is for me, with this I will end again I announce it, the author which now he moves in a different direction but for a long time he was playing this game. That's my very simplistic but I think I'm right reading of the most of the early films of Steven Spielberg. What is E.T.? He's a marriage couple mediator. I think it's absolutely crucial that you remember at the beginning this is a divorced family. Father is in Mexico and it's always traumatic shall we call him to Mexico and so on. Father abandoned them. At the end, you remember what is the final scene of the movie? E.T. going home—I hate that freak, I mean, if you ask me I would like to squash with my boots that freak. But why can E.T. go home? Because among the scientists who are bad, you notice one is the good scientist and when E.T.'s ship is leaving, he is already holding his hand around mother's shoulders and so on. So at the libidinal level, it's really the boy's dream how to re-establish family. How to pass from bad father to good father. And if you use this as a clue, incredible things are discovered. Like Schindler's List. It's clearly Liam Neeson children, first he is a bad father exploiting Jews, he turns into a good father. Up to, for example, you remember the War of the Worlds. The whole problem is Tom Cruise begins as a bad father at the end through helping the children blah blah he turns into a good father. And I think even Jurassic Park has this subtle logic. I think it's that O'Neill, how is it called, the New Zealand actor? Sam Neill, yeah. He is at the beginning the bad father, you know scaring the children and so on, and through that threat he turns into a good father. There are many details which point in this direction. So I like reading Spielberg in this way. The movies can be about Holocaust, Auschwitz, about this, about that, the end of the world. But the true story is the restoration of paternal authority. And you cannot take this away. If you take this away, you get a flat boring movie. It's just something which appears as secondary, but it's absolutely crucial to how we relate to that movie. Thanks. I was worried during the discussion of gonzo pornography that it might be hard to get to the refugee crisis, but—but in between— Can I tell you something very sad? Very sad. Which now I'm not joking. Unfortunately, there is a connection. Hardcore—some hardcore pornographic parts of movie industry are already trying to get cheap actors from refugees. You know reality is evil. Sorry, yeah. No, it's not surprising. Yeah. But you mentioned catastrophe films and backstage we were talking about Guillermo del Toro who's apparently somewhere in the building or around TIFF this evening. There's a big wave in Pacific Rim. I imagine you saw that—that movie. Yeah and I liked it. You know why? Again the formal level. Sorry to interrupt you. Did you notice the difference is that in all these Star Wars type movies, or even Transformers, it's very simple material thing. Even if they are gigantic metallic figures, they run smoothly. Everything is so clean, smooth. While what fascinated me in Pacific Rim is how all these gigantic to fight the invaders, robots, whatever they have, they are dirty, they are rotting, they break down. All—it's incredible how this raw dirty material presence is accentuated there. This fascinates me because, you know that at this level we find one of the most interesting coincidences between Hays Code and Soviet Union, harsh Stalinist censorship. At this level of raw materiality, I think Hays Code was even worse. In the sense that you know, everything was censored, especially it was prohibited, like there were some movies, you remember in the thirties Sam Goldwyn was doing them, about—about slums, poor people and so on. But I read in a book on Sam Goldwyn that censors absolutely insisted that how shall I put it, it can be slum but you shouldn't smell the dirt. Like you know, that it should look clean slum, like the floor, the ground should be clean and so on and so on. And this—and this materiality of you shouldn't smell the rot, the dirt, was absolutely crucial. It lasted up to Hitchcock. I read this in who did, Steven Rebello, The Making of Psycho, that the greatest of Hitchcock's problems in Psycho with censorship was not as you maybe you expect, shower murder, blood, no. But you remember at the end when Vera Miles looks into the toilet to show the toilet from the inside. You know, for a moment he picks up a piece of paper then where it says whatever. But this was where he had to do all the negotiation, and it was absolutely insisted that you show from above the toilet, the inside, just for the split of a second, that it should be absolutely clean and so on and so on. So again at this level I appreciate greatly Pacific Rim. And I was sad that even commercially that it didn't—it was a hit but not a real hit, no? I mean, so-so. Sorry, I interrupted you please go on. I'm not really sorry of course but I pretend to be sorry. So in recent years you've—you've written about end times. I don't know if we need an update if we are still in end times or when when exactly, but historically everyone announcing end times has been wrong from St. Paul to the recent present. But now, you know perhaps we're facing the first moment where it's actually real. And we get—we get a spate of apocalyptic films, catastrophe films, and interestingly—and this is the perhaps not too hokey bridge to your recent work—a lot of them foreground the refugee crisis. So Children of Men, of which we saw a clip, begins not with the most—the most obvious explicit problem facing that world as the—the non-production of new children, but with immigration. Chaotic immigration. And you've—you've written famously now about—about the refugee crisis and multiculturalism. It's fair to say that there's a lot of resistance to some of your work, partly clearly part of at least part of it is a misunderstanding. But here you are in the—in the home of official multiculturalism since and and you see refugee crisis and multiculturalism as linked issues in some way, I think. And Canada has been prominent in the precise number of refugees it will take in distinct on the world stage or in the array of countries of who is taking none—you've been critical of Qatar and Saudi Arabia etc. Which take none. Which is precisely a ontological scandal for me. Precisely none. Zero. Listen, beneath—sorry to interrupt—but listen, if if there ever was a scandal, this is the one. Immediately beneath the crisis region, Iraq and Syria, you have what? Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Emirates. Extremely rich countries. How many refugees are they taking? None. This tells you a lot. No, no, no, to avoid a misunderstanding, I'm not saying this tells you a lot how this is all an Arab plot to invade Europe or whatever. But it tells you nonetheless a lot of the entire complex geopolitical background. And the other mystery is for me ISIS. Let's be serious. ISIS are a couple of thousand of people there playing their games. If superpowers were really intent of destroying ISIS, it can be done in a month without any problem. I claim that ISIS, far from really functioning as the
can see it all but chop-chop you will not get serious emotions, I mean faked but to be taken as serious. The proof is another one. I know Catherine Breillat and so on. There is a whole series of directors today who try to do this, to do a serious melodrama even psychological drama. But it's typical how it doesn't catch on, how it remains marginal. Now, you will say but as I was brutally said at some point, but listen you must be pretty old because this type of movies, plumber, are no longer made for years, no? And then I asked them, but what is going on? And they told me gonzo movies, which are even worse censorship. You know what is in gonzo movies? The definition is I think that actors don't even pretend that they are part of a narrative. Gonzo means actors themselves while doing it, sex, directly address camera and refer to it. You know all this irony, "Am I good now? Should I move my leg like that?" I think this is an even worse censorship. It is that you have to get the message all the time, "We are not acting seriously," and so on and so on. So you see this is how we should correct that notion about directness. Sometimes directness in this sense, okay we think about sex but we show it all, is—is the most obfuscating—is the most obfuscating thing that there is. And you know what I was really thinking, if you allow me another detour, when I was thinking about directness, it was at how—at how at the most elementary level to analyze, for example, catastrophe movies is to not to be too fascinated by those old today digitally done usually scenes of catastrophe and so on. I claim that all these movies should be read through some Oedipal or sexual frame which may appear to be marginal on the edge, but it provides the hermeneutic key. For example, to be stupid. Did you see, I'm ashamed to mention it but an evil step at my very good friend Alain Badiou. Did you see Armageddon, that Ben Affleck, Bruce Willis, Liv Tyler? I mean, with Badiou we have this running joke, I always talk around evil things about him. You know when he developed the notion of courage, fidelity to event, he admitted to me frankly he was thinking about Armageddon. No, Badiou has some strange friends with some movies. He likes Armageddon, he likes—Armageddon I pardon him, but the other of his choices I will never pardon him. He likes Bridges of the Madison County. Sorry, that's too much, even I, you may not believe it, I have a limit, you know. But let's go to these movies. Isn't it clear, remember Armageddon, that officially it's about the usual bullshit. A gigantic comet or whatever some stupid rock approaching Earth and will humanity save itself by exploding it? But then you have the melodrama. Basically Ben Affleck is screwing Liv Tyler who is—who is Bruce Willis' daughter, and it's the fury of the father. At the end when he, father, sacrifices himself, he gives the two of them a blessing. So at some libidinal level, it's really a story about father's jealousy, his inability to let his daughter go. And at some different libidinal level, all that bullshit about comets and so on is about father's fury. Even more directly, my favorite example. Did you see Mimi Leder directed it with Téa Leoni that bullshit Deep Impact? There it's absolutely clear that again the comet threatening Earth, it's Téa Leoni, her father played by Maximilian Schell divorced her mother and married a young woman. It's daughter's fury and jealousy. Because then the end, one of the final scenes of the movie is wonderful when the comet which will not destroy Earth, it's more—is approaching, he the daughter joins his father somewhere there in Hamptons on the East Coast of the United States and they embrace and then you see the gigantic wave from the comet which hit the ocean approaching them and she embraces him and says, "Oh daddy," and they are both swept away, they die both. I always think that this scene should be interpreted against the background of another famous scene of lovers on the beach. You remember the famous scene between Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity? This like two lovers soft waves. Here you get a slightly bigger wave, how shall I put it. But you see what I'm trying to tell you here, that although the movie is officially about catastrophe and so on, but it has this inner tension because the whole narrative interest is sustained nonetheless by this melodramatic story so that although the catastrophe is within the narrative space of the film, objective out there, but the libidinal meaning of the catastrophe is defined with this libidinal—and you know which is for me, with this I will end again I announce it, the author which now he moves in a different direction but for a long time he was playing this game. That's my very simplistic but I think I'm right reading of the most of the early films of Steven Spielberg. What is E.T.? He's a marriage couple mediator. I think it's absolutely crucial that you remember at the beginning this is a divorced family. Father is in Mexico and it's always traumatic shall we call him to Mexico and so on. Father abandoned them. At the end, you remember what is the final scene of the movie? E.T. going home—I hate that freak, I mean, if you ask me I would like to squash with my boots that freak. But why can E.T. go home? Because among the scientists who are bad, you notice one is the good scientist and when E.T.'s ship is leaving, he is already holding his hand around mother's shoulders and so on. So at the libidinal level, it's really the boy's dream how to re-establish family. How to pass from bad father to good father. And if you use this as a clue, incredible things are discovered. Like Schindler's List. It's clearly Liam Neeson children, first he is a bad father exploiting Jews, he turns into a good father. Up to, for example, you remember the War of the Worlds. The whole problem is Tom Cruise begins as a bad father at the end through helping the children blah blah he turns into a good father. And I think even Jurassic Park has this subtle logic. I think it's that O'Neill, how is it called, the New Zealand actor? Sam Neill, yeah. He is at the beginning the bad father, you know scaring the children and so on, and through that threat he turns into a good father. There are many details which point in this direction. So I like reading Spielberg in this way. The movies can be about Holocaust, Auschwitz, about this, about that, the end of the world. But the true story is the restoration of paternal authority. And you cannot take this away. If you take this away, you get a flat boring movie. It's just something which appears as secondary, but it's absolutely crucial to how we relate to that movie. Thanks. I was worried during the discussion of gonzo pornography that it might be hard to get to the refugee crisis, but—but in between— Can I tell you something very sad? Very sad. Which now I'm not joking. Unfortunately, there is a connection. Hardcore—some hardcore pornographic parts of movie industry are already trying to get cheap actors from refugees. You know reality is evil. Sorry, yeah. No, it's not surprising. Yeah. But you mentioned catastrophe films and backstage we were talking about Guillermo del Toro who's apparently somewhere in the building or around TIFF this evening. There's a big wave in Pacific Rim. I imagine you saw that—that movie. Yeah and I liked it. You know why? Again the formal level. Sorry to interrupt you. Did you notice the difference is that in all these Star Wars type movies, or even Transformers, it's very simple material thing. Even if they are gigantic metallic figures, they run smoothly. Everything is so clean, smooth. While what fascinated me in Pacific Rim is how all these gigantic to fight the invaders, robots, whatever they have, they are dirty, they are rotting, they break down. All—it's incredible how this raw dirty material presence is accentuated there. This fascinates me because, you know that at this level we find one of the most interesting coincidences between Hays Code and Soviet Union, harsh Stalinist censorship. At this level of raw materiality, I think Hays Code was even worse. In the sense that you know, everything was censored, especially it was prohibited, like there were some movies, you remember in the thirties Sam Goldwyn was doing them, about—about slums, poor people and so on. But I read in a book on Sam Goldwyn that censors absolutely insisted that how shall I put it, it can be slum but you shouldn't smell the dirt. Like you know, that it should look clean slum, like the floor, the ground should be clean and so on and so on. And this—and this materiality of you shouldn't smell the rot, the dirt, was absolutely crucial. It lasted up to Hitchcock. I read this in who did, Steven Rebello, The Making of Psycho, that the greatest of Hitchcock's problems in Psycho with censorship was not as you maybe you expect, shower murder, blood, no. But you remember at the end when Vera Miles looks into the toilet to show the toilet from the inside. You know, for a moment he picks up a piece of paper then where it says whatever. But this was where he had to do all the negotiation, and it was absolutely insisted that you show from above the toilet, the inside, just for the split of a second, that it should be absolutely clean and so on and so on. So again at this level I appreciate greatly Pacific Rim. And I was sad that even commercially that it didn't—it was a hit but not a real hit, no? I mean, so-so. Sorry, I interrupted you please go on. I'm not really sorry of course but I pretend to be sorry. So in recent years you've—you've written about end times. I don't know if we need an update if we are still in end times or when when exactly, but historically everyone announcing end times has been wrong from St. Paul to the recent present. But now, you know perhaps we're facing the first moment where it's actually real. And we get—we get a spate of apocalyptic films, catastrophe films, and interestingly—and this is the perhaps not too hokey bridge to your recent work—a lot of them foreground the refugee crisis. So Children of Men, of which we saw a clip, begins not with the most—the most obvious explicit problem facing that world as the—the non-production of new children, but with immigration. Chaotic immigration. And you've—you've written famously now about—about the refugee crisis and multiculturalism. It's fair to say that there's a lot of resistance to some of your work, partly clearly part of at least part of it is a misunderstanding. But here you are in the—in the home of official multiculturalism since and and you see refugee crisis and multiculturalism as linked issues in some way, I think. And Canada has been prominent in the precise number of refugees it will take in distinct on the world stage or in the array of countries of who is taking none—you've been critical of Qatar and Saudi Arabia etc. Which take none. Which is precisely a ontological scandal for me. Precisely none. Zero. Listen, beneath—sorry to interrupt—but listen, if if there ever was a scandal, this is the one. Immediately beneath the crisis region, Iraq and Syria, you have what? Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Emirates. Extremely rich countries. How many refugees are they taking? None. This tells you a lot. No, no, no, to avoid a misunderstanding, I'm not saying this tells you a lot how this is all an Arab plot to invade Europe or whatever. But it tells you nonetheless a lot of the entire complex geopolitical background. And the other mystery is for me ISIS. Let's be serious. ISIS are a couple of thousand of people there playing their games. If superpowers were really intent of destroying ISIS, it can be done in a month without any problem. I claim that ISIS, far from really functioning as the
unknown
arch-enemy, is something—it's a kind of a pseudo-enemy that all
arch-enemy, is something—it's a kind of a pseudo-enemy that all
Slavoj Žižek
the sides are using
the sides are using
unknown
to fight each other. It's just the empty screen of evil through which other—other agonisms
to fight each other. It's just the empty screen of evil through which other—other agonisms
Slavoj Žižek
tensions are played out. For
tensions are played out. For
unknown
example, I don't
example, I don't
Slavoj Žižek
know, Iran versus Saudi Arabia, Russia versus the West and so on and so on. So it's an extremely complex situation and—okay, you finish your questions so that I don't— I'm done. I'm—it's an opportunity for you to clarify your position in some sense. No, okay, I was accused of many
know, Iran versus Saudi Arabia, Russia versus the West and so on and so on. So it's an extremely complex situation and—okay, you finish your questions so that I don't— I'm done. I'm—it's an opportunity for you to clarify your position in some sense. No, okay, I was accused of many
unknown
sins. One of them is big racist, Islamophobic, Eurocentrist and so on and so on. But I see—first let me clarify my point. I repeat this again and again, three theses. The first one, the main responsibility for the refugee crisis lies with us, the West, the Western powers. At two levels we have this
sins. One of them is big racist, Islamophobic, Eurocentrist and so on and so on. But I see—first let me clarify my point. I repeat this again and again, three theses. The first one, the main responsibility for the refugee crisis lies with us, the West, the Western powers. At two levels we have this
unknown
responsibility. First, the economic one. Again, I always
responsibility. First, the economic one. Again, I always
Slavoj Žižek
mention this country which is the ultimate horror for me today, Congo, Republic of Congo. It's a country very wealthy, coltan, other minerals, and it's presented as kind of a heart of darkness. Yeah, but this heart of darkness is fully included into global economy. In this, you know, all those local warlords there are selling the stuff to mineral companies whatever. What I want to say is this, that this decay, ruin, failed states in Africa, this is not just some primitivism there. It's clearly—it's elementary to quote Sherlock Holmes—it's linked to the way global capitalism relates to, exploits, whatever you say, those countries. For example, I can tell you that imagine that all the minerals disappear from the ground of Congo. I claim it would have been—and this is the tragedy for them—a much more peaceful, better state. And it's the same in many other countries. When we hear about religious conflicts and so on, usually there are Western interests behind and so on and so on. So first, we should talk openly frankly about what for the lack of better term we can call economic neocolonialism. And nobody is clean here. We shouldn't blame only the West. For example, I celebrate China, it's incredible what economic success they are, but the way they are acting recently in some African countries, Latino American countries and others, it's clear absolute economic neocolonialism also. So they are also doing it. Or another horrible thing for me. You know what some Asian countries and Arab countries—here exceptionally we are not so guilty—like I think South Korea is doing it, Saudi Arabia and so on. They are buying large tracts of the best fertile land in some African countries from Mozambique to Madagascar, even in Somalia, sorry not Somalia but Eritrea and so on. And they use it mostly even for industrial plants to export and so on. I mean, this—so this is one, the economic aspect. Second aspect are these geopolitical interventions, war and so on and so on. To tell the—without military American intervention in Iraq, to cut a long story short, there wouldn't have been ISIS, there wouldn't have been a—what goes on now in—in Syria. Without the stupid Western intervention in Libya, there wouldn't have been what is going on now in Libya and so on and so on. It's just—this is for me elementary, and especially I want to emphasize the tragedy of Iraq. It's almost a comical tragedy, the ultimate stupidity. Namely,
mention this country which is the ultimate horror for me today, Congo, Republic of Congo. It's a country very wealthy, coltan, other minerals, and it's presented as kind of a heart of darkness. Yeah, but this heart of darkness is fully included into global economy. In this, you know, all those local warlords there are selling the stuff to mineral companies whatever. What I want to say is this, that this decay, ruin, failed states in Africa, this is not just some primitivism there. It's clearly—it's elementary to quote Sherlock Holmes—it's linked to the way global capitalism relates to, exploits, whatever you say, those countries. For example, I can tell you that imagine that all the minerals disappear from the ground of Congo. I claim it would have been—and this is the tragedy for them—a much more peaceful, better state. And it's the same in many other countries. When we hear about religious conflicts and so on, usually there are Western interests behind and so on and so on. So first, we should talk openly frankly about what for the lack of better term we can call economic neocolonialism. And nobody is clean here. We shouldn't blame only the West. For example, I celebrate China, it's incredible what economic success they are, but the way they are acting recently in some African countries, Latino American countries and others, it's clear absolute economic neocolonialism also. So they are also doing it. Or another horrible thing for me. You know what some Asian countries and Arab countries—here exceptionally we are not so guilty—like I think South Korea is doing it, Saudi Arabia and so on. They are buying large tracts of the best fertile land in some African countries from Mozambique to Madagascar, even in Somalia, sorry not Somalia but Eritrea and so on. And they use it mostly even for industrial plants to export and so on. I mean, this—so this is one, the economic aspect. Second aspect are these geopolitical interventions, war and so on and so on. To tell the—without military American intervention in Iraq, to cut a long story short, there wouldn't have been ISIS, there wouldn't have been a—what goes on now in—in Syria. Without the stupid Western intervention in Libya, there wouldn't have been what is going on now in Libya and so on and so on. It's just—this is for me elementary, and especially I want to emphasize the tragedy of Iraq. It's almost a comical tragedy, the ultimate stupidity. Namely,
unknown
Americans
Americans
Slavoj Žižek
intervened, and
intervened, and
unknown
incidentally,
incidentally,
Slavoj Žižek
this is one of the very dark chapters of American feminism.
this is one of the very dark chapters of American feminism.
unknown
Nancy Fraser wrote a good book on it, how many American feminists supported American intervention, it will bring freedom from Muslim oppression to women of Iraq. Where unfortunately it's the exact opposite. Because whatever Saddam was, and he was a monster, his regime up to the end when he started to flirt with Islam to get support, his regime was basically Arab nationalist secular one. And at least his record with women was way above the usual Arab standards. Women got many public posts, they were educated and so on and so on. This is now the situation of women as the result of American intervention is much worse. There is another paradox. Under Saddam there were around million of Christians in Iraq. Who, if they didn't mess with politics of course, they—no problem, they lived there. Now the result of American occupation, because the public order police disintegrated and Islamic Muslim
Nancy Fraser wrote a good book on it, how many American feminists supported American intervention, it will bring freedom from Muslim oppression to women of Iraq. Where unfortunately it's the exact opposite. Because whatever Saddam was, and he was a monster, his regime up to the end when he started to flirt with Islam to get support, his regime was basically Arab nationalist secular one. And at least his record with women was way above the usual Arab standards. Women got many public posts, they were educated and so on and so on. This is now the situation of women as the result of American intervention is much worse. There is another paradox. Under Saddam there were around million of Christians in Iraq. Who, if they didn't mess with politics of course, they—no problem, they lived there. Now the result of American occupation, because the public order police disintegrated and Islamic Muslim
unknown
militias took over, and Muslim—Christians began to feel the pressure, already around I think three quarters of Christians left the country. So that's the result. Much worse situation for women and—it's nice irony, a Western Christian country invades Iraq and the result is Christians are out. I mean no, what Islam was not able to do in thousands of years and so on. So what I'm saying is that all this background has to be taken into account. But, but, but, there is a but. Don't on the other hand don't patronize the Arabs, in the sense of—you know, it's very popular in Europe this how do I call it, masochist leftist attitude. Whenever something bad happens in the third world, it must be the consequence of
militias took over, and Muslim—Christians began to feel the pressure, already around I think three quarters of Christians left the country. So that's the result. Much worse situation for women and—it's nice irony, a Western Christian country invades Iraq and the result is Christians are out. I mean no, what Islam was not able to do in thousands of years and so on. So what I'm saying is that all this background has to be taken into account. But, but, but, there is a but. Don't on the other hand don't patronize the Arabs, in the sense of—you know, it's very popular in Europe this how do I call it, masochist leftist attitude. Whenever something bad happens in the third world, it must be the consequence of
Slavoj Žižek
neocolonialism, we are to be blamed and so on. No, this is stupid, I'm sorry to tell you. Arabs are not just passive victims. They have certain projects. They are, I speak like Sartre here, we are never just passive participants in a situation. We react even when we are in a worst situation through certain let's call it existential project. So we—so I think that this type of self-culpability, we are responsible for everything and so on, it's not such a simple stuff. For example, what Saudi Arabia, let's forget about ISIS, I don't worry about so-called terror. But for example what Saudi Arabia is doing and some other countries, it's clearly not that they are victims, it's a well-defined religious-political project and so on. Second point is that, and here things get really problematic, of course there are cultural problems with refugees. And the predominant idea among left-liberals in Europe is, let's not talk about it. It will be—it will be exploited by racists to screw—I think no, we should treat them as adults, we should absolutely openly, clearly address all the problems. Otherwise we will have anti-immigrant right in power in Europe. Let me give you and I will not use Muslims because they are not the only ones. It's I think general trend in the world today towards reassertion of religious fundamentalism. In United States, in most of Europe, especially the part of Europe which is mine—post-communist countries. Look, the problem
neocolonialism, we are to be blamed and so on. No, this is stupid, I'm sorry to tell you. Arabs are not just passive victims. They have certain projects. They are, I speak like Sartre here, we are never just passive participants in a situation. We react even when we are in a worst situation through certain let's call it existential project. So we—so I think that this type of self-culpability, we are responsible for everything and so on, it's not such a simple stuff. For example, what Saudi Arabia, let's forget about ISIS, I don't worry about so-called terror. But for example what Saudi Arabia is doing and some other countries, it's clearly not that they are victims, it's a well-defined religious-political project and so on. Second point is that, and here things get really problematic, of course there are cultural problems with refugees. And the predominant idea among left-liberals in Europe is, let's not talk about it. It will be—it will be exploited by racists to screw—I think no, we should treat them as adults, we should absolutely openly, clearly address all the problems. Otherwise we will have anti-immigrant right in power in Europe. Let me give you and I will not use Muslims because they are not the only ones. It's I think general trend in the world today towards reassertion of religious fundamentalism. In United States, in most of Europe, especially the part of Europe which is mine—post-communist countries. Look, the problem
unknown
I see it in this way. It happened in Slovenia I think some ten years ago. A girl from Gypsy, Roma, Roma is the term today,
I see it in this way. It happened in Slovenia I think some ten years ago. A girl from Gypsy, Roma, Roma is the term today,
Slavoj Žižek
from Roma family escaped to some public institution, police, I don't know, claimed that she was years old, that her parents wanted her to marry this prearranged marriages and she doesn't want to. And then of course all the feminists supported her. But then it was really tragic to hear the how do you call him, the boss whatever of the Roma community, who said, "Listen, here multiculturalism really begins. The way we do our arranged marriages, this is the very core of our community. If you take this from us, in two generations we are finito. We will be maybe useful to dance some stupid folkloric dances to to do our kitchen and so on, but we as a community are over." So I ask you what would you have done here? I claim that we have to recognize the problem. There is a problem here, a girl comes to the police. What would you have done? Would you protect her or would you return her to her family? If you do that, you can be sure she would be punished and married, but what would you do? And just don't tell me that through some cultural dialogue it can be done. You have to act now. Tell me, what would you have done? Because it is true, no way out, that if you protect her, you really lay the foundations for the destruction of their community. They are totally right here. These arranged marriages are the very core of how their community is reproducing itself. And we have massively the same problem today in Germany. I saw on German TV, on a left channel, Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen, ZDF, which is—first is right, second is left, more Social Democratic, so it's not right-wing propaganda, that this the same situation that I described now happens around at least times per year in Germany. A girl from Turkish or other third-world so-called communities runs to the police, she wants to—I don't know, she doesn't want to be covered, she wants to marry a German guy, have a birth—whatever it doesn't matter, she feels oppressed. And you know that Germany deals with this discreetly how? They opened already over secret homes for them where it's really like witness protection. They gave them new names and so on and so on. So again, then Arabs protest, they claim you are not tolerating our traditional family structure. All I'm saying, and for this I am accused of being racist or whatever, is—of course I'm well aware that we should not simply impose our Western values. I know all the story how our Western values are not really universal, even if they officially use universal terms. You know, human rights are twisted in a certain way. For example, they privilege individual rights or whatever and so on and so on. All I'm saying is we are dealing here with problems, and the way to act is to address these problems also critically towards ourselves. I'm not even saying that we are absolutely right here. I'm saying that it would have been a catastrophe not to openly address these problems. And don't tell me these are marginal problems, because this is cultural identity is an incredibly strong factor. This, this, this is ideology today. Not what gods we believe, but how we deal with women, with men, how we eat, what is tolerable, what kind of speech is tolerable. For example, as I wrote in other of my texts, when we—when Muslims protested so much about some, I don't know, those Islam caricatures and so on and so on, we in the West, the defense was, "Oh they don't have any sense of irony, blah blah, our sense of humor." No, I'm much more of a pessimist here. Every civilization has certain, let's call them untouchable points. It cannot be tolerated that you talk like that about that. For example, and I'm not saying that this is not good, right, but for example when Western people claimed oh with us you can make fun of everything. Well, fuck you, make fun of Holocaust and you will see what—and it's good that we cannot make fun of Holocaust. Let me be clear. I'm just saying that it's not simply we are open, Arabs are not. So what do we do here? How to deal with—all I'm saying my message is just these are serious problems, which should be openly debated, not just washed away. And maybe now we can see the movie because I think this movie by my good Israeli friend Udi Aloni—he comes from top Jewish Zionist establishment. His mother, Shulamit Aloni, was one of the founding sisters whatever women fought in '48. Then she was very progressive later. She was the Minister of Culture in Yitzhak Rabin government and she did something wonderful. Under her reign, for the first time in Israel, when they presented to school children the history of Israel, Arab Palestinian suffering was also mentioned, addressed and so on, all that stuff. But this movie is a movie about an Arab rock singer—I know him, he's my friend, Tamer Nafar, who is also in reality a rapper rapper, and he plays the leading role also a rapper who is organizing a concert among Palestinians and in Israel—these are Israeli Palestinians, those who remained in Israel after '47—and the problem is that they have a girl singer and her family is putting pressure on her that he that it's intolerable for them to sing in public. The idea is they will kill her if they do it. And the movie ends up in an ambiguous but rather pessimistic way. So the reason I love this movie—I'm not saying it's the greatest movie of all times and so on—is that it addresses something that it's going on and it's typical how our media ignore it. You know, Palestinians are not just some primitive fundamentalists. You have very strong—very strong movement for women's rights, for against honor killings on the West Bank and so on and so on. And I think the way to act is to connect to this. This film is for me a proof, because Udi Aloni directed it but all the actors he is part almost of the Palestinian scene there. It's how you know, usually we see the opposition: we in the West want women's rights and we despise Muslims to be primitive; Muslims despise our logic of women's rights as Western decadent, they want traditional patriarchy. No, the scene is much more complex. We have today our own fundamentalists and they have their own feminism. And the really big crucial thing would have been to find a link here. If we don't find a common denominator between our struggle for gay rights, women's rights and so on and the Palestinian struggle for freedom—if these fights remain opposite: Western liberals don't want to have anything to do with their struggle because they are fundamentalists and opposite—we are lost. This is why this movie is a courageous movie and after we see the clip I can tell you of the polemics raised by this movie. I had been getting a signal that we should switch to Q&A. Do we have time for that? Yes. So if we could cue the— Will we have time? Yep. It's very stupid. He thinks that it would spoil, but the ending—okay to spoil it I will of course tell you what's the ending. The ending's that—the movie is much more amusing, and it's full of music and from now on the last quarter of an hour it's all music and the girl gets ready, she goes to the concert. Not quite. We see her leaving the house but in front of the house we see her two brothers basically getting ready to kill her, no, waiting for—and now if I may just conclude I want to make a point which should be a—it's very sad. You can immediately check it on—on on on internet. This movie and Tamer Nafar, the singer, caused great polemics here and in Palestine. Some so-called radical leftists criticized the movie. For example, Tamer Nafar visited New York, I think a year, a year and a half ago, and gave a concert before this movie where he has also one of his popular songs is for Palestinians protesting against this honor killings of girls who stray from the—straight road. And the accusation was that we shouldn't talk about it because if we do it, we just that this will be exploited in the West to confirm that Arabs are really conservative and so on. And critics went on, "If you—if there really are honor killings, Israelis are to be blamed because they really tolerate them and support conservative Arabs" and so on and so on. I'm totally perplexed at this critic. And you can read it in my book, Tamer Nafar, he was attacked for this and he gave a wonderful dignified answer at Columbia University where he said, "You who criticize me, you do this in English to—to to to get points from your English professors. I in my country, I sing in Arab to protect our women" and so on and so on. So—what is—what about this argument? Then some my friends criticized me. I appreciate them, for example Jamil Khader wrote an email where he has a more elaborate criticism. He reproaches this film for not bringing in the right class struggle perspective of global capitalism. Okay I was a little bit perplexed, like "Fuck it, what should—should they all the time say, listen we are part of the global class struggle?" Then I asked him, "Fuck you, what do you mean by this?" His answer was that the movie doesn't make it clear the Israeli complicity in this honor killings. Now my answer is this one. I basically agree with it, not just in the case of Israel. But this already is the first lesson that we should learn politically. Global capitalism does not work in the way of we should all eat hamburgers, Western culture and so on. From the very beginning till now, global capitalism was, not in an authentic sense but in the worst possible sense, multiculturalist. Global capitalism knew from the very beginning that the best way to keep the colonized in their subordinate position is to leave them in their local culture. For example, I know the story from India how the most horrible books, one of them of most of of all times, The Laws of Manu, which prescribes describes in detail the rules of castes and so on and everything: if you belong to this caste you should make love in that way, you should wipe your penis after orgasm in that way—it's madness, total, like for a bureaucratic guy like me it's pure pleasure, you know, everything is regulated. But, but you know what you learn, that in 17th century and 18th, caste system was already to a large degree under Muslim influence who were dominating India disintegrating. And this book, Laws of Manu, was rediscovered, printed throughout the 19th century by British colonizers because they got it the best way to control India is to restore their ancient order which will keep them under discipline and so on and so on. So again, colonizers didn't want to destroy local traditions, "you should all become like us." No, they were terribly afraid of this. Not only this but you should read a book, it's pleasurable although I don't like him as a writer, Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate. His travelogue, he visited India in 1920s. And it's wonderful what he learned there. He says that all these top British administrators, colonial in India, they were always ready to admit that we in the West we are vulgar secular materialist civilization—ugh!—a simple Indian, Indian farmer, poor, praying, has more authentic spirituality than all of us and so on and so on. They were always ready to concede this. But god help us if these Indians want to study technology, become like us and so on and so on. So again, sticking back re—I think that that's why, I'm sorry if I repeat my old story which must be known to you, that's why my true hero is Malcolm X. You know what is X? X means we don't have our roots. But you know what Malcolm X did with it? It was not, "Oh we must restore our roots," this is the stuff for Hollywood, for TV, Alex Haley, big series. I think Malcolm X saw something in extremely revolutionary wonderful way: that his idea was what if this X, which means we lack our roots, offers us a unique chance of freedom? To be more authentically universal, reinvent a new universal space so that we will be the true universal egalitarians, not the Western people and so on. That's the crucial struggle today. So again back to the movie then I stop. I totally agree with this criticism that there is a complicity and this complicity is now even open. I mean, if you are listening to latest political news, something crazy is happening. There is now a new axis I called it ironically Axis of Evil emerging. Be careful what is happening now in the Middle East. Turkey-Israel-Saudi Arabia. Isn't this a nice paradox? The most fundamentalist, at least it pretends to be, Saudi Arabia's really a big banking mafia family investing money, but they pretend—they are already coordinating their activity, their generals are meeting for years, Saudi Arabia and Israel against Iran and so on. So—so again, this is true. But—but I don't see the conclusion because that's precisely the point of the film, that precisely because the most traditional Muslim oppression of women is precisely in order to prevent integration, in order to keep things at a distance, is fully tolerated—in what sense tolerated? I was told that for example when in an honor killing Palestinian girl is killed, Israeli police doesn't do anything basically and so on and so on. But that's why we should jump out of joy when you have an authentic movement for women's rights in—among Palestinians themselves. And this is what is happening. That's why I don't see the logic of that criticism of the film: "it doesn't mention the complicity of Israel." My god, it does all the time. What is is just saying is that if we really want to win at least the ideological battle against Zionism, it's not by sticking to our old Arab traditions, but fighting for our women's rights is part of fighting for our political freedom. And this is the true message of the film, which is why again I think it's so important this film. And also Tamer Nafar, he deserves to become a star simply I think, because he's an incredibly you know what surprised me is the sheer common
from Roma family escaped to some public institution, police, I don't know, claimed that she was years old, that her parents wanted her to marry this prearranged marriages and she doesn't want to. And then of course all the feminists supported her. But then it was really tragic to hear the how do you call him, the boss whatever of the Roma community, who said, "Listen, here multiculturalism really begins. The way we do our arranged marriages, this is the very core of our community. If you take this from us, in two generations we are finito. We will be maybe useful to dance some stupid folkloric dances to to do our kitchen and so on, but we as a community are over." So I ask you what would you have done here? I claim that we have to recognize the problem. There is a problem here, a girl comes to the police. What would you have done? Would you protect her or would you return her to her family? If you do that, you can be sure she would be punished and married, but what would you do? And just don't tell me that through some cultural dialogue it can be done. You have to act now. Tell me, what would you have done? Because it is true, no way out, that if you protect her, you really lay the foundations for the destruction of their community. They are totally right here. These arranged marriages are the very core of how their community is reproducing itself. And we have massively the same problem today in Germany. I saw on German TV, on a left channel, Zweite Deutsche Fernsehen, ZDF, which is—first is right, second is left, more Social Democratic, so it's not right-wing propaganda, that this the same situation that I described now happens around at least times per year in Germany. A girl from Turkish or other third-world so-called communities runs to the police, she wants to—I don't know, she doesn't want to be covered, she wants to marry a German guy, have a birth—whatever it doesn't matter, she feels oppressed. And you know that Germany deals with this discreetly how? They opened already over secret homes for them where it's really like witness protection. They gave them new names and so on and so on. So again, then Arabs protest, they claim you are not tolerating our traditional family structure. All I'm saying, and for this I am accused of being racist or whatever, is—of course I'm well aware that we should not simply impose our Western values. I know all the story how our Western values are not really universal, even if they officially use universal terms. You know, human rights are twisted in a certain way. For example, they privilege individual rights or whatever and so on and so on. All I'm saying is we are dealing here with problems, and the way to act is to address these problems also critically towards ourselves. I'm not even saying that we are absolutely right here. I'm saying that it would have been a catastrophe not to openly address these problems. And don't tell me these are marginal problems, because this is cultural identity is an incredibly strong factor. This, this, this is ideology today. Not what gods we believe, but how we deal with women, with men, how we eat, what is tolerable, what kind of speech is tolerable. For example, as I wrote in other of my texts, when we—when Muslims protested so much about some, I don't know, those Islam caricatures and so on and so on, we in the West, the defense was, "Oh they don't have any sense of irony, blah blah, our sense of humor." No, I'm much more of a pessimist here. Every civilization has certain, let's call them untouchable points. It cannot be tolerated that you talk like that about that. For example, and I'm not saying that this is not good, right, but for example when Western people claimed oh with us you can make fun of everything. Well, fuck you, make fun of Holocaust and you will see what—and it's good that we cannot make fun of Holocaust. Let me be clear. I'm just saying that it's not simply we are open, Arabs are not. So what do we do here? How to deal with—all I'm saying my message is just these are serious problems, which should be openly debated, not just washed away. And maybe now we can see the movie because I think this movie by my good Israeli friend Udi Aloni—he comes from top Jewish Zionist establishment. His mother, Shulamit Aloni, was one of the founding sisters whatever women fought in '48. Then she was very progressive later. She was the Minister of Culture in Yitzhak Rabin government and she did something wonderful. Under her reign, for the first time in Israel, when they presented to school children the history of Israel, Arab Palestinian suffering was also mentioned, addressed and so on, all that stuff. But this movie is a movie about an Arab rock singer—I know him, he's my friend, Tamer Nafar, who is also in reality a rapper rapper, and he plays the leading role also a rapper who is organizing a concert among Palestinians and in Israel—these are Israeli Palestinians, those who remained in Israel after '47—and the problem is that they have a girl singer and her family is putting pressure on her that he that it's intolerable for them to sing in public. The idea is they will kill her if they do it. And the movie ends up in an ambiguous but rather pessimistic way. So the reason I love this movie—I'm not saying it's the greatest movie of all times and so on—is that it addresses something that it's going on and it's typical how our media ignore it. You know, Palestinians are not just some primitive fundamentalists. You have very strong—very strong movement for women's rights, for against honor killings on the West Bank and so on and so on. And I think the way to act is to connect to this. This film is for me a proof, because Udi Aloni directed it but all the actors he is part almost of the Palestinian scene there. It's how you know, usually we see the opposition: we in the West want women's rights and we despise Muslims to be primitive; Muslims despise our logic of women's rights as Western decadent, they want traditional patriarchy. No, the scene is much more complex. We have today our own fundamentalists and they have their own feminism. And the really big crucial thing would have been to find a link here. If we don't find a common denominator between our struggle for gay rights, women's rights and so on and the Palestinian struggle for freedom—if these fights remain opposite: Western liberals don't want to have anything to do with their struggle because they are fundamentalists and opposite—we are lost. This is why this movie is a courageous movie and after we see the clip I can tell you of the polemics raised by this movie. I had been getting a signal that we should switch to Q&A. Do we have time for that? Yes. So if we could cue the— Will we have time? Yep. It's very stupid. He thinks that it would spoil, but the ending—okay to spoil it I will of course tell you what's the ending. The ending's that—the movie is much more amusing, and it's full of music and from now on the last quarter of an hour it's all music and the girl gets ready, she goes to the concert. Not quite. We see her leaving the house but in front of the house we see her two brothers basically getting ready to kill her, no, waiting for—and now if I may just conclude I want to make a point which should be a—it's very sad. You can immediately check it on—on on on internet. This movie and Tamer Nafar, the singer, caused great polemics here and in Palestine. Some so-called radical leftists criticized the movie. For example, Tamer Nafar visited New York, I think a year, a year and a half ago, and gave a concert before this movie where he has also one of his popular songs is for Palestinians protesting against this honor killings of girls who stray from the—straight road. And the accusation was that we shouldn't talk about it because if we do it, we just that this will be exploited in the West to confirm that Arabs are really conservative and so on. And critics went on, "If you—if there really are honor killings, Israelis are to be blamed because they really tolerate them and support conservative Arabs" and so on and so on. I'm totally perplexed at this critic. And you can read it in my book, Tamer Nafar, he was attacked for this and he gave a wonderful dignified answer at Columbia University where he said, "You who criticize me, you do this in English to—to to to get points from your English professors. I in my country, I sing in Arab to protect our women" and so on and so on. So—what is—what about this argument? Then some my friends criticized me. I appreciate them, for example Jamil Khader wrote an email where he has a more elaborate criticism. He reproaches this film for not bringing in the right class struggle perspective of global capitalism. Okay I was a little bit perplexed, like "Fuck it, what should—should they all the time say, listen we are part of the global class struggle?" Then I asked him, "Fuck you, what do you mean by this?" His answer was that the movie doesn't make it clear the Israeli complicity in this honor killings. Now my answer is this one. I basically agree with it, not just in the case of Israel. But this already is the first lesson that we should learn politically. Global capitalism does not work in the way of we should all eat hamburgers, Western culture and so on. From the very beginning till now, global capitalism was, not in an authentic sense but in the worst possible sense, multiculturalist. Global capitalism knew from the very beginning that the best way to keep the colonized in their subordinate position is to leave them in their local culture. For example, I know the story from India how the most horrible books, one of them of most of of all times, The Laws of Manu, which prescribes describes in detail the rules of castes and so on and everything: if you belong to this caste you should make love in that way, you should wipe your penis after orgasm in that way—it's madness, total, like for a bureaucratic guy like me it's pure pleasure, you know, everything is regulated. But, but you know what you learn, that in 17th century and 18th, caste system was already to a large degree under Muslim influence who were dominating India disintegrating. And this book, Laws of Manu, was rediscovered, printed throughout the 19th century by British colonizers because they got it the best way to control India is to restore their ancient order which will keep them under discipline and so on and so on. So again, colonizers didn't want to destroy local traditions, "you should all become like us." No, they were terribly afraid of this. Not only this but you should read a book, it's pleasurable although I don't like him as a writer, Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate. His travelogue, he visited India in 1920s. And it's wonderful what he learned there. He says that all these top British administrators, colonial in India, they were always ready to admit that we in the West we are vulgar secular materialist civilization—ugh!—a simple Indian, Indian farmer, poor, praying, has more authentic spirituality than all of us and so on and so on. They were always ready to concede this. But god help us if these Indians want to study technology, become like us and so on and so on. So again, sticking back re—I think that that's why, I'm sorry if I repeat my old story which must be known to you, that's why my true hero is Malcolm X. You know what is X? X means we don't have our roots. But you know what Malcolm X did with it? It was not, "Oh we must restore our roots," this is the stuff for Hollywood, for TV, Alex Haley, big series. I think Malcolm X saw something in extremely revolutionary wonderful way: that his idea was what if this X, which means we lack our roots, offers us a unique chance of freedom? To be more authentically universal, reinvent a new universal space so that we will be the true universal egalitarians, not the Western people and so on. That's the crucial struggle today. So again back to the movie then I stop. I totally agree with this criticism that there is a complicity and this complicity is now even open. I mean, if you are listening to latest political news, something crazy is happening. There is now a new axis I called it ironically Axis of Evil emerging. Be careful what is happening now in the Middle East. Turkey-Israel-Saudi Arabia. Isn't this a nice paradox? The most fundamentalist, at least it pretends to be, Saudi Arabia's really a big banking mafia family investing money, but they pretend—they are already coordinating their activity, their generals are meeting for years, Saudi Arabia and Israel against Iran and so on. So—so again, this is true. But—but I don't see the conclusion because that's precisely the point of the film, that precisely because the most traditional Muslim oppression of women is precisely in order to prevent integration, in order to keep things at a distance, is fully tolerated—in what sense tolerated? I was told that for example when in an honor killing Palestinian girl is killed, Israeli police doesn't do anything basically and so on and so on. But that's why we should jump out of joy when you have an authentic movement for women's rights in—among Palestinians themselves. And this is what is happening. That's why I don't see the logic of that criticism of the film: "it doesn't mention the complicity of Israel." My god, it does all the time. What is is just saying is that if we really want to win at least the ideological battle against Zionism, it's not by sticking to our old Arab traditions, but fighting for our women's rights is part of fighting for our political freedom. And this is the true message of the film, which is why again I think it's so important this film. And also Tamer Nafar, he deserves to become a star simply I think, because he's an incredibly you know what surprised me is the sheer common
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sense, funny nature. Like the last time I talked with him when he was in New York, Tamer Nafar, they his punk, his
sense, funny nature. Like the last time I talked with him when he was in New York, Tamer Nafar, they his punk, his
Slavoj Žižek
group, they were invited by some college there, and after their performance, the college served them a meal, a reception, and what did they get? Hummus and all that bullshit. And Tamer told me, "It's horror, I eat that shit all the time. I came here to United States to get corrupted with hamburgers and so on, now I have to eat the same shit as my home." You see that's the guys I like, full of irony and so on. I mean, Palestine my experience is a wonderful
group, they were invited by some college there, and after their performance, the college served them a meal, a reception, and what did they get? Hummus and all that bullshit. And Tamer told me, "It's horror, I eat that shit all the time. I came here to United States to get corrupted with hamburgers and so on, now I have to eat the same shit as my home." You see that's the guys I like, full of irony and so on. I mean, Palestine my experience is a wonderful
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country. Okay I will conclude
country. Okay I will conclude
Slavoj Žižek
just with one joke that we go on. The best respectful religious joke that I heard, maybe you know it from some of my earlier books, was among the Christians of Palestine. Very tender jokes that I like about Jesus Christ, like just one not obscene one, I love it. I heard this from a Christian Palestinian. I like this total historical inaccuracy. Jesus Christ gets tired of it, his preaching his preaching, and he takes one of the apostles, let's take go to Galilee Sea and close to it, let's play golf. Okay Christ is playing golf there, he makes a hit, misses it, the ball falls into the sea, lake water. Okay Christ being Christ, he of course walks there on the water, reaches, comes back. And then the apostle says, "But listen Jesus, this is a very difficult hit, you will probably fail, even who is your big player, the black guy?" "Tiger Woods." "Even Tiger Woods wouldn't maybe be able to do it." And Jesus said, "Haha fuck Tiger, I am God, I can do it." So he hit it again, it goes again into the water. So he walks on the water again, and at that I like this total historical confusion. At that point a group of American tourists come there with a bus and are surprised, like "What is that guy doing walking on water, no?" And they approach the apostle and says, "But who's that jerk guy? What does he think that he is, Jesus Christ?" You know what apostle answers? "No, it's much worse, he thinks he is Tiger Woods," you know. This is such a wonderful theoretically correct joke, you know, that even the God is decentered, even Jesus Christ had a decentered ideal ego that he failed and so on. And you should have been there, this joke was not meant as a dirty obscenity, the guy was deeply religious. No, so again there there is hope, that's the tragedy of Palestine. That they are to cut a long story short, they are the Jews among the Arabs. The most dynamic, educated and so on and so on, and I it's a desperate situation. Okay but let me stop let's go. Okay, so in principle we're out of time, but we have—we will make time for questions. So as I understand it there'll be microphones on either side of the cinema, so we'll start—maybe you have to—to ask a question raise your hand and get a microphone. But while we are looking for that, be careful about the questions. You know an old joke of mine but I like to repeat it. I love dialogues, but I'm a philosopher and I love late Plato's dialogues. If you know them, you know how they are structured. One guy talks all the time and the other guy says every minutes, "By Zeus, so it is, yes Socrates." So let's have this type of a dialogue. Okay, please. In that spirit I should start by saying I mostly agree with what you're saying, but I— Let's go to what you don't agree. Yeah, so it's mostly the sense of kind of ontological certainty you're attaching to this category of honor killing. And I'm speaking as someone who grew up in Egypt and immigrated here, and prepared to say that the society over there is both more misogynist and misogynist in a different way, but I never heard of an honor killing before moving to the West. Obviously there is violence against women, obviously it is cultural in some way, but I can't think of a murder that's not cultural, and I don't see why we need to distinguish that type of violence from—as somehow ontologically separate from violence against women. I totally agree with you and the reason I focused on honor killings is that this movie is about them. But what you are saying here in my book against the double blackmail I do exactly this. I even mention your glorious country here, didn't you have one of the most terrifying examples, I don't know in detail the story, but some Inuit or whatever prostitute was killed with a knife and there there her torso—her torso was displayed there and so on? I cannot imagine anything more aggressive. So again, not only would I put it into the wider Arab context of misogynism and so on, I would even have said that it's part of a global tendency. Do you think we Christians are maybe at some points better but maybe at some points worse? We have our own horrors. Look at, for example—and here I also was get in trouble in Europe—look at Catholic Church pedophilia in Europe. It's so massive that you cannot believe it. We are not talking about a crazy priest here, there. We are literally talking about thousands of cases. It's so expanded that everyone knows this, that it's not simply pedophiles are everywhere so if you have priests it's natural that they are also there. In some obscene way, it's part of the church identity. It's what I called it's inherent transgression, it it inherent transgression. You know, because for me a culture is defined not only by its explicit rules, but by obscene practices of violating these rules. Like my standard example, Ku Klux Klan in the twenties. It was Christianity, white men values and so on, and it was, "It's Saturday evening let's go and lynch some black guys let's rape" whatever, and this what always—so along these lines we should not only link I totally agree violence against women with Islam, but we should go into all of cultures. Are we maybe we are better but we should definitely I'm not so sure be critical about ourselves all cultures. I go to the end and say something which in today in the world of today's ideological fashions it's very unpopular. Namely, Buddhism. I have a great respect for Buddhism. But usually Islamophobes claim, "Why do you always mention Islam? For example Buddhists, they don't have terror," although they protest in Tibet and so on. Sorry guys, bad news, they do have terror. I know at least of two countries, three: Thailand, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. Where there are organized Buddhist gangs killing Tamils, they were doing it in Sri Lanka, in Thailand killing others and so on and so on. So I think we should be with regard to this—we should absolutely avoid this Western superiority moralism however however we call it. So again, what you said—yes, a priori I must then sincerely, I'm not playing any polite games, I'm a vulgar guy I'm never polite, I sincerely apologize and accept what you said. The only thing I can say is that I spoke about honor killings because the fucking movie speaks about them. That was my source there. But I totally agree with you even at another level, that it's I was always suspicious of privileging one form of whatever we call it violence against women crime to obfuscate a more general violence, you know. Like I totally agree with you when you say, okay honor killings, but isn't it that the whole of society is penetrated, dispersed by violence against women? And my problem is the following one. I think that the populist anti-immigrant conservatives which are now getting stronger and stronger in Europe, I had to laugh so much how when right-wingers in Europe protest immigrants, they say, "But they don't respect women's rights and so on and so on." Haha look who is talking! These same people in internal European politics are usually even more conservative than Muslims who are arriving. Like what is happening in Poland now, the demonstrations to even close all the loopholes for for abortion. Poland already has strict anti-abortion laws, but it had three loopholes: if it was rape, if it endangers mother's life, and if the child unborn child is a monster, a freak whatever. Now they want to close even these loopholes and unconditionally prohibit abortion. Or or look at all this neoconservative wave in Russia, although Eastern Europe, Poland and so on Hungary pretend to be afraid of, hate Russia, but it's strange how close to it they are culturally. It's this same backlash, and it's there is now even what is gradually emerging is some kind of general conspiracy theory. Maybe you've heard about it. It goes on like this. Communism failed in 1920s there was no European revolution, and then communists smashed Stalin whoever Comintern and decided to do something. Their result was communism failed because communists underestimated the strength of Catholic identity, stable ethics, family life. So they decided in order for us to get a second chance to win, we must first destroy from within Christianity and family life. So, that's it's ridiculous but I love these conspiracy theories. The theory is then that communists directly organized the constitution of Frankfurt school, Adorno Horkheimer, to do this job of cultural self-destruction of the West. And the ultimate monster here is gender theory. Gender theory is the ultimate tool, and in the same of destroying morally the West. And what I find it so wonderful in a terrifying sense is that now you would have said, but wait a minute, then they should be close to Muslim fundamentalists. No, they still remain Islamophobic because they have a totally paranoiac view that
just with one joke that we go on. The best respectful religious joke that I heard, maybe you know it from some of my earlier books, was among the Christians of Palestine. Very tender jokes that I like about Jesus Christ, like just one not obscene one, I love it. I heard this from a Christian Palestinian. I like this total historical inaccuracy. Jesus Christ gets tired of it, his preaching his preaching, and he takes one of the apostles, let's take go to Galilee Sea and close to it, let's play golf. Okay Christ is playing golf there, he makes a hit, misses it, the ball falls into the sea, lake water. Okay Christ being Christ, he of course walks there on the water, reaches, comes back. And then the apostle says, "But listen Jesus, this is a very difficult hit, you will probably fail, even who is your big player, the black guy?" "Tiger Woods." "Even Tiger Woods wouldn't maybe be able to do it." And Jesus said, "Haha fuck Tiger, I am God, I can do it." So he hit it again, it goes again into the water. So he walks on the water again, and at that I like this total historical confusion. At that point a group of American tourists come there with a bus and are surprised, like "What is that guy doing walking on water, no?" And they approach the apostle and says, "But who's that jerk guy? What does he think that he is, Jesus Christ?" You know what apostle answers? "No, it's much worse, he thinks he is Tiger Woods," you know. This is such a wonderful theoretically correct joke, you know, that even the God is decentered, even Jesus Christ had a decentered ideal ego that he failed and so on. And you should have been there, this joke was not meant as a dirty obscenity, the guy was deeply religious. No, so again there there is hope, that's the tragedy of Palestine. That they are to cut a long story short, they are the Jews among the Arabs. The most dynamic, educated and so on and so on, and I it's a desperate situation. Okay but let me stop let's go. Okay, so in principle we're out of time, but we have—we will make time for questions. So as I understand it there'll be microphones on either side of the cinema, so we'll start—maybe you have to—to ask a question raise your hand and get a microphone. But while we are looking for that, be careful about the questions. You know an old joke of mine but I like to repeat it. I love dialogues, but I'm a philosopher and I love late Plato's dialogues. If you know them, you know how they are structured. One guy talks all the time and the other guy says every minutes, "By Zeus, so it is, yes Socrates." So let's have this type of a dialogue. Okay, please. In that spirit I should start by saying I mostly agree with what you're saying, but I— Let's go to what you don't agree. Yeah, so it's mostly the sense of kind of ontological certainty you're attaching to this category of honor killing. And I'm speaking as someone who grew up in Egypt and immigrated here, and prepared to say that the society over there is both more misogynist and misogynist in a different way, but I never heard of an honor killing before moving to the West. Obviously there is violence against women, obviously it is cultural in some way, but I can't think of a murder that's not cultural, and I don't see why we need to distinguish that type of violence from—as somehow ontologically separate from violence against women. I totally agree with you and the reason I focused on honor killings is that this movie is about them. But what you are saying here in my book against the double blackmail I do exactly this. I even mention your glorious country here, didn't you have one of the most terrifying examples, I don't know in detail the story, but some Inuit or whatever prostitute was killed with a knife and there there her torso—her torso was displayed there and so on? I cannot imagine anything more aggressive. So again, not only would I put it into the wider Arab context of misogynism and so on, I would even have said that it's part of a global tendency. Do you think we Christians are maybe at some points better but maybe at some points worse? We have our own horrors. Look at, for example—and here I also was get in trouble in Europe—look at Catholic Church pedophilia in Europe. It's so massive that you cannot believe it. We are not talking about a crazy priest here, there. We are literally talking about thousands of cases. It's so expanded that everyone knows this, that it's not simply pedophiles are everywhere so if you have priests it's natural that they are also there. In some obscene way, it's part of the church identity. It's what I called it's inherent transgression, it it inherent transgression. You know, because for me a culture is defined not only by its explicit rules, but by obscene practices of violating these rules. Like my standard example, Ku Klux Klan in the twenties. It was Christianity, white men values and so on, and it was, "It's Saturday evening let's go and lynch some black guys let's rape" whatever, and this what always—so along these lines we should not only link I totally agree violence against women with Islam, but we should go into all of cultures. Are we maybe we are better but we should definitely I'm not so sure be critical about ourselves all cultures. I go to the end and say something which in today in the world of today's ideological fashions it's very unpopular. Namely, Buddhism. I have a great respect for Buddhism. But usually Islamophobes claim, "Why do you always mention Islam? For example Buddhists, they don't have terror," although they protest in Tibet and so on. Sorry guys, bad news, they do have terror. I know at least of two countries, three: Thailand, Bhutan and Sri Lanka. Where there are organized Buddhist gangs killing Tamils, they were doing it in Sri Lanka, in Thailand killing others and so on and so on. So I think we should be with regard to this—we should absolutely avoid this Western superiority moralism however however we call it. So again, what you said—yes, a priori I must then sincerely, I'm not playing any polite games, I'm a vulgar guy I'm never polite, I sincerely apologize and accept what you said. The only thing I can say is that I spoke about honor killings because the fucking movie speaks about them. That was my source there. But I totally agree with you even at another level, that it's I was always suspicious of privileging one form of whatever we call it violence against women crime to obfuscate a more general violence, you know. Like I totally agree with you when you say, okay honor killings, but isn't it that the whole of society is penetrated, dispersed by violence against women? And my problem is the following one. I think that the populist anti-immigrant conservatives which are now getting stronger and stronger in Europe, I had to laugh so much how when right-wingers in Europe protest immigrants, they say, "But they don't respect women's rights and so on and so on." Haha look who is talking! These same people in internal European politics are usually even more conservative than Muslims who are arriving. Like what is happening in Poland now, the demonstrations to even close all the loopholes for for abortion. Poland already has strict anti-abortion laws, but it had three loopholes: if it was rape, if it endangers mother's life, and if the child unborn child is a monster, a freak whatever. Now they want to close even these loopholes and unconditionally prohibit abortion. Or or look at all this neoconservative wave in Russia, although Eastern Europe, Poland and so on Hungary pretend to be afraid of, hate Russia, but it's strange how close to it they are culturally. It's this same backlash, and it's there is now even what is gradually emerging is some kind of general conspiracy theory. Maybe you've heard about it. It goes on like this. Communism failed in 1920s there was no European revolution, and then communists smashed Stalin whoever Comintern and decided to do something. Their result was communism failed because communists underestimated the strength of Catholic identity, stable ethics, family life. So they decided in order for us to get a second chance to win, we must first destroy from within Christianity and family life. So, that's it's ridiculous but I love these conspiracy theories. The theory is then that communists directly organized the constitution of Frankfurt school, Adorno Horkheimer, to do this job of cultural self-destruction of the West. And the ultimate monster here is gender theory. Gender theory is the ultimate tool, and in the same of destroying morally the West. And what I find it so wonderful in a terrifying sense is that now you would have said, but wait a minute, then they should be close to Muslim fundamentalists. No, they still remain Islamophobic because they have a totally paranoiac view that
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Muslim fundamentalism is not an agent in itself, it is secretly organized by European communist mafia to ruin Europe. That it's not really a religious phenomenon, it's all an attempt
Muslim fundamentalism is not an agent in itself, it is secretly organized by European communist mafia to ruin Europe. That it's not really a religious phenomenon, it's all an attempt
Slavoj Žižek
to ruin Europe and so on and so on. Now you may laugh about it, but you know what makes me afraid is that you may laugh about it in the same way that—it's always good to know this—till like all Germany was mostly laughing at Hitler, no? Then they stopped laughing, no? So again again my sincere apologies and again I always insist on this. Let's not fetishize Muslims, because when people tell me,
to ruin Europe and so on and so on. Now you may laugh about it, but you know what makes me afraid is that you may laugh about it in the same way that—it's always good to know this—till like all Germany was mostly laughing at Hitler, no? Then they stopped laughing, no? So again again my sincere apologies and again I always insist on this. Let's not fetishize Muslims, because when people tell me,
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read me in the sense of "but we should throw Muslim fundamentalists out" and so on, I said
read me in the sense of "but we should throw Muslim fundamentalists out" and so on, I said
Slavoj Žižek
no, it's much more complex because
no, it's much more complex because
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but what will we do with our own fundamentalists, no? I would much more like to throw them out, no? Because I think that our own fundamentalists, anti-immigrant now in Europe, they not the refugees are the true threat to Europe. Imagine Europe run by Le Pen in France and so on, if there is anything in Europe worth fighting for, they are the true threat to it. I'm afraid I'm afraid of them. What I'm especially afraid of is that they're now getting much more civilized. You are getting a paradoxical figure of
but what will we do with our own fundamentalists, no? I would much more like to throw them out, no? Because I think that our own fundamentalists, anti-immigrant now in Europe, they not the refugees are the true threat to Europe. Imagine Europe run by Le Pen in France and so on, if there is anything in Europe worth fighting for, they are the true threat to it. I'm afraid I'm afraid of them. What I'm especially afraid of is that they're now getting much more civilized. You are getting a paradoxical figure of
Slavoj Žižek
politically correct anti-immigrants. You know they say, "We are open for women's rights, gay rights, that's why we should limit refugees because they threaten this," and it's disgusting because in their—and you have the same confusion. It's crucial to read it, you know where? You remember when Ken Livingstone, the ex-Labour Mayor of London, was accused on anti-semitism—of anti-semitism? He—okay, he said it a little bit too brutally and it's not true in that sense—that Hitler was a Zionist. Okay, it's not the most tasteful statement you can imagine. But he was at some point not right, but what I want to say is this. What made me paranoiac years ago is how at a certain point the American religious fundamentalist right, which by its nature should be anti-semitic, became pro-Zionist. Not pro-Jewish, but pro-Zionist. That is to say—and you have the same—you remember Breivik, that jerk who killed people in Norway? It's very interesting to read his text, my friend from Norway translated me some parts. He's at the same time openly anti-semitic, he openly says how Jews are a problem, Hitler did the work we don't have that threat in Europe, but England and US have that threat. But at the same time he's totally pro-Israel. So he said we should throw the Jews out of Europe but support them there. And this is why it's for me very tragic after some minor troubles in France, Netanyahu invited French Jews, "You are no longer safe there, come to Israel." You know what was the reaction in French anti-semitic right-wing, not openly but with you know press? "Wonderful! We also know this, yes! Out of Europe, Jews!" you know. So it's this very weird dangerous coalition which started already and I don't blame the Jews here, it was horror, but it's very interesting to read what the Nazis were saying before deciding on Holocaust. For example in the really bad guy, Reinhard Heydrich who was shot in Prague, he said—I quote it almost literally—"Jews are a great creative nation. We wish them all the best, just not here in Germany. And we should help them to go to Palestine and establish their state there and we wish them all the luck there" and so on and so on. It's—so again, do not misunderstand me. I in no way blame the Jews, they were the—what I'm saying is just that there is always this hypocritical remainder in European support for Israel. Basically we like the Jews to go to Israel and here, although he is disgusting, but here it's the only moment where I found a little bit sympathy for Ahmadinejad where he said, "Okay, you Europeans did horrible things to Jews, but why don't you give them part of Bavaria or part of Germany? You know it's like I steal money from you and I pay you by giving to you what is not mine." There is something so hypocritical about this, you know, "let's let's get rid of them." Which is why it doesn't surprise me what is happening now with Saudi Arabia and Israel. This silent de facto coalition between hardline Zionists and hardline Muslim fundamentalists. Slavoj, you almost get your wish of no questions, but we'll take one more, right? One more brief question and maybe a brief answer. And then I will give a brief Buddhist bullshit answer, like you know those Zen Buddhist wisdoms like clap with one hand or whatever like to make you think, okay please. We talked earlier today, actually before the session, and you actually mentioned how, well first of all I said how I'm from Iran and we had this little conversation. You are the Jasmine? Yes. The for me you will remain the Tea Girl, Jasmine tea. Okay let's go on. Awesome. And I just, well I just came out watching the movie High-Rise and— I haven't seen it, I'm sorry. What's that? I haven't seen the movie, just to tell you I'm sorry. Oh well I—I strongly suggest you watch it and I want to know how you think what you think about it. But anyways, I personally want to know what you think about anarcho-syndicalism, because today you told us in a masterclass how you want to sit kind of in the background and think about like, "oh you know I just want to sit back and let other people decide for us in a community," and I just wanted to know if we as filmmakers, or if we as artists, want to sit back, how do we make decisions for our future? I mean I adore you, but at the same time I want to know. I know when you say you adore me, it means you are sharpening your knife behind your back. I hope so. No, but can I ask you and then you can go on a very—this is my big problem with anarcho-syndicalism. Show me one, I just cannot imagine one example of how it worked, taking over the state, replacing the state whatsoever. Give me one example of anarcho-syndicalism in power. I wasn't—I wasn't thinking about the one in power because I just question power in general, but I was hoping that you— Sorry, in what sense, I will immediately, in what sense are you questioning power in general? Just opposing it? Or do you think humanity could be reorganized so that we all live together without power? Without power, of course. And I was as an example I was hoping for you to kind of explain how Spain in the Civil—Civil Wars during the 1930s could kind of like overcome that situation. Yeah, but precisely the Spain would have been my example. Because I know there were couples of anarcho-syndicalists and so on and so on, but then we know we know what happens. Okay then I will put it in another way. The challenges that we are facing today, biogenetics: the only way out, the only way to control the horror of private companies or states doing it, making terrible experiments, is with large very powerful state or another agency controlling it, limiting it and so on. Very brutal control. Otherwise, horrors are already happening. I hear all the time from my friends who have friends rumors about how you know, screw atomic arms. Now we are in that level of biogenetic arms, how to manipulate brains so that you don't—so that's my first problem. Second problem, ecology. I cannot imagine how to fight it, how to confront ecological challenges without a mega large decisions acts. Millions of people will have to be moved and so on and so on. And I just want to know—yes it functions the way you said, at a local level communities and so on and so on. But even isn't it that even for those communities to function, somebody has to provide the basic service, which means water, electricity, education and so on and so on. For example, in today's confused situation, I think the most dangerous thing is to abolish universal obligatory state education and to say, oh each community can organize its own education and so on and so on. Society will explode, rich people will become even different race. So you see you see what I mean. And this was also my polemics with friendly with Toni Negri, who says multitude multitude. Then I told him but your notion of multitude functions only if an efficient state power is already there. Then I asked him a simple question: I claimed all examples that you list of multitude—like he is fascinated with modern dynamic digital capitalism—presuppose the invisible network of state institutions. I told him give me one example of a multitude which functioned or at least tried to function without a state network. And then he thought and he mentioned Chinese Cultural Revolution, where I have a great doubts about that about that example. You know, you know what I mean. What I'm claiming again is that we live in a global world, which means that yes, I'm not making fun of what you said. It's wonderful to have local communities anarchically self-organized and so on and so on. But I claim this only works against the background of some kind of a net of institutions, manners and so on, which which have to be organized by some okay, I wouldn't say higher authority. Precisely the way you described it, these artistic communities and so on and so on. Are you aware how many things have to function for an anarcho-artistic community to be able to to dwell, to do its work? And I think the true challenge is here, it's how I agree with I'm not celebrating states, I agree with you that the way it functions today it's okay stupid terms not good. But wouldn't our task be precisely how to what to do with global power, how to change it and so on. For example, usually friends are telling me Venezuela—oh there it worked, local communities organizing themselves. And then I start to laugh and say, yes but you had the big boss Chavez with the army and so on, you know. It's
politically correct anti-immigrants. You know they say, "We are open for women's rights, gay rights, that's why we should limit refugees because they threaten this," and it's disgusting because in their—and you have the same confusion. It's crucial to read it, you know where? You remember when Ken Livingstone, the ex-Labour Mayor of London, was accused on anti-semitism—of anti-semitism? He—okay, he said it a little bit too brutally and it's not true in that sense—that Hitler was a Zionist. Okay, it's not the most tasteful statement you can imagine. But he was at some point not right, but what I want to say is this. What made me paranoiac years ago is how at a certain point the American religious fundamentalist right, which by its nature should be anti-semitic, became pro-Zionist. Not pro-Jewish, but pro-Zionist. That is to say—and you have the same—you remember Breivik, that jerk who killed people in Norway? It's very interesting to read his text, my friend from Norway translated me some parts. He's at the same time openly anti-semitic, he openly says how Jews are a problem, Hitler did the work we don't have that threat in Europe, but England and US have that threat. But at the same time he's totally pro-Israel. So he said we should throw the Jews out of Europe but support them there. And this is why it's for me very tragic after some minor troubles in France, Netanyahu invited French Jews, "You are no longer safe there, come to Israel." You know what was the reaction in French anti-semitic right-wing, not openly but with you know press? "Wonderful! We also know this, yes! Out of Europe, Jews!" you know. So it's this very weird dangerous coalition which started already and I don't blame the Jews here, it was horror, but it's very interesting to read what the Nazis were saying before deciding on Holocaust. For example in the really bad guy, Reinhard Heydrich who was shot in Prague, he said—I quote it almost literally—"Jews are a great creative nation. We wish them all the best, just not here in Germany. And we should help them to go to Palestine and establish their state there and we wish them all the luck there" and so on and so on. It's—so again, do not misunderstand me. I in no way blame the Jews, they were the—what I'm saying is just that there is always this hypocritical remainder in European support for Israel. Basically we like the Jews to go to Israel and here, although he is disgusting, but here it's the only moment where I found a little bit sympathy for Ahmadinejad where he said, "Okay, you Europeans did horrible things to Jews, but why don't you give them part of Bavaria or part of Germany? You know it's like I steal money from you and I pay you by giving to you what is not mine." There is something so hypocritical about this, you know, "let's let's get rid of them." Which is why it doesn't surprise me what is happening now with Saudi Arabia and Israel. This silent de facto coalition between hardline Zionists and hardline Muslim fundamentalists. Slavoj, you almost get your wish of no questions, but we'll take one more, right? One more brief question and maybe a brief answer. And then I will give a brief Buddhist bullshit answer, like you know those Zen Buddhist wisdoms like clap with one hand or whatever like to make you think, okay please. We talked earlier today, actually before the session, and you actually mentioned how, well first of all I said how I'm from Iran and we had this little conversation. You are the Jasmine? Yes. The for me you will remain the Tea Girl, Jasmine tea. Okay let's go on. Awesome. And I just, well I just came out watching the movie High-Rise and— I haven't seen it, I'm sorry. What's that? I haven't seen the movie, just to tell you I'm sorry. Oh well I—I strongly suggest you watch it and I want to know how you think what you think about it. But anyways, I personally want to know what you think about anarcho-syndicalism, because today you told us in a masterclass how you want to sit kind of in the background and think about like, "oh you know I just want to sit back and let other people decide for us in a community," and I just wanted to know if we as filmmakers, or if we as artists, want to sit back, how do we make decisions for our future? I mean I adore you, but at the same time I want to know. I know when you say you adore me, it means you are sharpening your knife behind your back. I hope so. No, but can I ask you and then you can go on a very—this is my big problem with anarcho-syndicalism. Show me one, I just cannot imagine one example of how it worked, taking over the state, replacing the state whatsoever. Give me one example of anarcho-syndicalism in power. I wasn't—I wasn't thinking about the one in power because I just question power in general, but I was hoping that you— Sorry, in what sense, I will immediately, in what sense are you questioning power in general? Just opposing it? Or do you think humanity could be reorganized so that we all live together without power? Without power, of course. And I was as an example I was hoping for you to kind of explain how Spain in the Civil—Civil Wars during the 1930s could kind of like overcome that situation. Yeah, but precisely the Spain would have been my example. Because I know there were couples of anarcho-syndicalists and so on and so on, but then we know we know what happens. Okay then I will put it in another way. The challenges that we are facing today, biogenetics: the only way out, the only way to control the horror of private companies or states doing it, making terrible experiments, is with large very powerful state or another agency controlling it, limiting it and so on. Very brutal control. Otherwise, horrors are already happening. I hear all the time from my friends who have friends rumors about how you know, screw atomic arms. Now we are in that level of biogenetic arms, how to manipulate brains so that you don't—so that's my first problem. Second problem, ecology. I cannot imagine how to fight it, how to confront ecological challenges without a mega large decisions acts. Millions of people will have to be moved and so on and so on. And I just want to know—yes it functions the way you said, at a local level communities and so on and so on. But even isn't it that even for those communities to function, somebody has to provide the basic service, which means water, electricity, education and so on and so on. For example, in today's confused situation, I think the most dangerous thing is to abolish universal obligatory state education and to say, oh each community can organize its own education and so on and so on. Society will explode, rich people will become even different race. So you see you see what I mean. And this was also my polemics with friendly with Toni Negri, who says multitude multitude. Then I told him but your notion of multitude functions only if an efficient state power is already there. Then I asked him a simple question: I claimed all examples that you list of multitude—like he is fascinated with modern dynamic digital capitalism—presuppose the invisible network of state institutions. I told him give me one example of a multitude which functioned or at least tried to function without a state network. And then he thought and he mentioned Chinese Cultural Revolution, where I have a great doubts about that about that example. You know, you know what I mean. What I'm claiming again is that we live in a global world, which means that yes, I'm not making fun of what you said. It's wonderful to have local communities anarchically self-organized and so on and so on. But I claim this only works against the background of some kind of a net of institutions, manners and so on, which which have to be organized by some okay, I wouldn't say higher authority. Precisely the way you described it, these artistic communities and so on and so on. Are you aware how many things have to function for an anarcho-artistic community to be able to to dwell, to do its work? And I think the true challenge is here, it's how I agree with I'm not celebrating states, I agree with you that the way it functions today it's okay stupid terms not good. But wouldn't our task be precisely how to what to do with global power, how to change it and so on. For example, usually friends are telling me Venezuela—oh there it worked, local communities organizing themselves. And then I start to laugh and say, yes but you had the big boss Chavez with the army and so on, you know. It's
unknown
so again, I'm just
so again, I'm just
Slavoj Žižek
perplexed you know by like, do you even have an idea through association of communities or what? For example, you have a
perplexed you know by like, do you even have an idea through association of communities or what? For example, you have a
unknown
country, whole country which is on the edge of disappearing because
country, whole country which is on the edge of disappearing because
Slavoj Žižek
of drought and so on and so on. Or parts of
of drought and so on and so on. Or parts of
unknown
the country getting infertile and so on and so on. And
the country getting infertile and so on and so on. And
Slavoj Žižek
you have to make in this case strong central
you have to make in this case strong central
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decisions.
decisions.
Slavoj Žižek
People will be moved from here
People will be moved from here
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to there. Greece faced the same problem. I had there big conflict with my ex-friend Costas Douzinas who said, "You philosophers don't see, there is a new logic in Greece. It's no longer the old centralized logic of decisions. We have big public gatherings, everyone is allowed to talk, but not for not more than five minutes." Then I told him, "Okay
to there. Greece faced the same problem. I had there big conflict with my ex-friend Costas Douzinas who said, "You philosophers don't see, there is a new logic in Greece. It's no longer the old centralized logic of decisions. We have big public gatherings, everyone is allowed to talk, but not for not more than five minutes." Then I told him, "Okay
Slavoj Žižek
I see, when Syriza will take power what will you do? You will have a problem, European pressure, and then you will organize a big gathering and everybody will talk for five minutes and so on, no?" I I told them Syriza guys, no, you should think in brutal terms. The only chance for Syriza would have been to organize—I'm not
I see, when Syriza will take power what will you do? You will have a problem, European pressure, and then you will organize a big gathering and everybody will talk for five minutes and so on, no?" I I told them Syriza guys, no, you should think in brutal terms. The only chance for Syriza would have been to organize—I'm not
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afraid to say it—a much
afraid to say it—a much
Slavoj Žižek
more efficient secret police and so on. You need this! They were literally terrorized. Varoufakis told me, he discovered that when he was alone in a room
more efficient secret police and so on. You need this! They were literally terrorized. Varoufakis told me, he discovered that when he was alone in a room
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with his two two confidential advisors, half an hour later in Brussels they knew what they were talking about and so on. So—how to do all this? You know why
with his two two confidential advisors, half an hour later in Brussels they knew what they were talking about and so on. So—how to do all this? You know why
Slavoj Žižek
I, although I'm very critical of him, why I appreciate Gandhi, Mahatma? He was honest enough to confront this problem and some Indian friend sent it to me, he wrote a very interesting text of how to organize spy service, secret service in democratic India. And I would very much there is not a trace of irony in what I will say now, I would love to hear from you how should anarcho-syndicalist community organize their secret police and so on. There is no irony in what I'm saying here because—you you like how to put it, quite often when we feel free in our authentic community, again that's my basic message, we forget the thick background of institutions and so on, that they all have to function smoothly so that we can enjoy our local freedoms. And that's I think the problem in not your but South American ideology. Because to conclude with this joke I love it, did you notice but maybe where are you here are you Americans or Europeans? You are more Europeans, I think. When you enter a building, what is the floor you enter from the street? Is it ground or you start with one? Ground. You are civilized because the problem with United States is that you know first floor is our ground floor. And that's their problem. They don't know that in order to start counting you need zero, you need ground. That's their problem. That's why they are atheists in a wrong way. You know in what sense? Another American stupidity, I think you are not or you are also having it here, when you have high-rise hotels, what do you do with 13th floor? Usually in most of the American hotels where I was, they jump over it. no? My god, this is horrible for me. My like as if God doesn't know that is really Like whom are they cheating, you know what I mean. So you know now in more serious terms, that's the problem with American individualism. It is not aware of what of the full power of what Hegel called *Sittlichkeit*, the shared communal spirit of customs, mores, unwritten rules and so on and so on all that. That's why for example they have such problems with even with health care. And I always wanted to ask you, often my not friends they are not my friends but people with whom I talk who are more to the right claim, "Oh look at Canada, your universal health care is a mega fiasco." Is it or not? Okay, there is no simple answer, but my answer would probably be this. Of course there may be problems, corruption, blah blah. But you see, this is what Americans don't see. It's organized by state, centralized and so on. But precisely it doesn't limit your freedom. It's the good alienation. Why? Because you don't have to worry. You can somehow rely. I don't have to think all the time what if I get cancer and so on. I can somehow rely on it that the state will take care of it. That's for me not the limitation of freedom. Of course you can play this game and claim but if you if you abolish universal health care, don't you gain a new freedom of choosing what kind of health care you want? Yes, but fuck you, I don't want that freedom. I want freedom to do my—you know, you know, this is where we should fight for socialist legacy, not new Stalinism or whatever. The tragedy of Stalinism was precisely that because it didn't function, it was—that's so nice about it, it's totally wrong that idea that Stalinism was collectivist and so on. No, at the everyday level, it was an extremely atomized survivalist brutal society. Nothing functioned, you couldn't rely on it. So you know that's the paradox of Stalinism. It wasn't some collectivism where everything was taken care of. In principle yes, but in reality no, nothing functioned. So even now in North Korea, I read a wonderful travelogue of someone who knew a little bit more of North Korea, where he says forget about those parades and so on. In everyday life, it's absolute despair. You have to find your way, smuggle this, steal that, do that. The reality of this collective spirit of North Korea is extremely brutal individualist survivalism. I'm afraid our five minutes is up, so we arbitrarily have to call this to a halt. So— You know which bad joke I wanted to make about you? So why don't you finish—who did that with a—you are Ian Balfour. So with what declaration will you finish, you know? Derrida made that joke years ago. Ah, he also made that joke. Oh but some of Derrida's jokes are wonderful. The dirty ones. That's another story. Can we thank Slavoj Žižek? And I'm grateful to you, thank you very much. Ah, he already did
I, although I'm very critical of him, why I appreciate Gandhi, Mahatma? He was honest enough to confront this problem and some Indian friend sent it to me, he wrote a very interesting text of how to organize spy service, secret service in democratic India. And I would very much there is not a trace of irony in what I will say now, I would love to hear from you how should anarcho-syndicalist community organize their secret police and so on. There is no irony in what I'm saying here because—you you like how to put it, quite often when we feel free in our authentic community, again that's my basic message, we forget the thick background of institutions and so on, that they all have to function smoothly so that we can enjoy our local freedoms. And that's I think the problem in not your but South American ideology. Because to conclude with this joke I love it, did you notice but maybe where are you here are you Americans or Europeans? You are more Europeans, I think. When you enter a building, what is the floor you enter from the street? Is it ground or you start with one? Ground. You are civilized because the problem with United States is that you know first floor is our ground floor. And that's their problem. They don't know that in order to start counting you need zero, you need ground. That's their problem. That's why they are atheists in a wrong way. You know in what sense? Another American stupidity, I think you are not or you are also having it here, when you have high-rise hotels, what do you do with 13th floor? Usually in most of the American hotels where I was, they jump over it. no? My god, this is horrible for me. My like as if God doesn't know that is really Like whom are they cheating, you know what I mean. So you know now in more serious terms, that's the problem with American individualism. It is not aware of what of the full power of what Hegel called *Sittlichkeit*, the shared communal spirit of customs, mores, unwritten rules and so on and so on all that. That's why for example they have such problems with even with health care. And I always wanted to ask you, often my not friends they are not my friends but people with whom I talk who are more to the right claim, "Oh look at Canada, your universal health care is a mega fiasco." Is it or not? Okay, there is no simple answer, but my answer would probably be this. Of course there may be problems, corruption, blah blah. But you see, this is what Americans don't see. It's organized by state, centralized and so on. But precisely it doesn't limit your freedom. It's the good alienation. Why? Because you don't have to worry. You can somehow rely. I don't have to think all the time what if I get cancer and so on. I can somehow rely on it that the state will take care of it. That's for me not the limitation of freedom. Of course you can play this game and claim but if you if you abolish universal health care, don't you gain a new freedom of choosing what kind of health care you want? Yes, but fuck you, I don't want that freedom. I want freedom to do my—you know, you know, this is where we should fight for socialist legacy, not new Stalinism or whatever. The tragedy of Stalinism was precisely that because it didn't function, it was—that's so nice about it, it's totally wrong that idea that Stalinism was collectivist and so on. No, at the everyday level, it was an extremely atomized survivalist brutal society. Nothing functioned, you couldn't rely on it. So you know that's the paradox of Stalinism. It wasn't some collectivism where everything was taken care of. In principle yes, but in reality no, nothing functioned. So even now in North Korea, I read a wonderful travelogue of someone who knew a little bit more of North Korea, where he says forget about those parades and so on. In everyday life, it's absolute despair. You have to find your way, smuggle this, steal that, do that. The reality of this collective spirit of North Korea is extremely brutal individualist survivalism. I'm afraid our five minutes is up, so we arbitrarily have to call this to a halt. So— You know which bad joke I wanted to make about you? So why don't you finish—who did that with a—you are Ian Balfour. So with what declaration will you finish, you know? Derrida made that joke years ago. Ah, he also made that joke. Oh but some of Derrida's jokes are wonderful. The dirty ones. That's another story. Can we thank Slavoj Žižek? And I'm grateful to you, thank you very much. Ah, he already did
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it. I thought
it. I thought
Slavoj Žižek
even that everyone—
even that everyone—