Versus Cornel West
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2005-11-10 · 2:18:10 · 19,754 words
with Cornel West
ideologyreligion-theologypsychoanalysiscapitalismhegel-dialecticsphilosophy-generalsubjectivityliberalism-political-correctness
Žižek delivers a lecture at Princeton (with Cornel West as respondent) on the structure of belief in contemporary society, arguing that belief is never located where we think it is, neither in explicit avowal nor in private conviction, but objectified in social practice and institutional ritual. He analyzes commodity fetishism, Buddhist-capitalism parallels, Stalinist eschatology, fundamentalism, and the Christian moment of God's self-abandonment on the cross to argue that true belief today functions through displacement onto others and through cynical distance. The Q&A extends into biogenetics and human freedom, the symbolic function, and the Paulinian community as a model for emancipatory politics.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 13
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Rousseau's distinction between simple self-interest (benign) and pathological self-love driven by envy, the desire to ruin the other's enjoyment even at cost to oneself.
Implicitly at work in the logic of envy: destroying the other's enjoyment becomes more important than one's own enjoyment, which raw utilitarian models of justice cannot account for.
The symbolic order or impersonal agency that can hold beliefs on behalf of subjects, illustrated by the question 'does the chicken know?'
The site of ideological illusion is not in what people consciously believe but in the social reality itself, we act as if commodities have magical powers even when we know they are mere social products.
as “objectified belief”
Belief that is externalized into ritual, practice, or institutional structure so that it functions independently of the subject's conscious conviction, the machine believes for you.
as “symbolic function”
The capacity to take a fiction seriously as fiction, to wager on an absurd counter-factual belief, which Žižek sees as the minimum of civilization now in decline.
as “institutional unconscious”
A set of implicit presuppositions, desires, and beliefs disavowed by an institution's official ideology but inscribed in the institution's practical logic itself (e.g., pedophilia in the Catholic Church).
The Schellingian-Hegelian metaphor for the excessive, chaotic core of subjectivity, darkness as the very heart of the subject rather than an external threat, marking the shift from Enlightenment to German Idealism.
Paul's community of believers living in emergency time as a model of a third social logic, neither hedonist individualism nor traditional hierarchy, applicable to emancipatory politics today.
as “the problem turns its own solution”
The Hegelian move in which the gap that separates man from God is revealed to be internal to God himself, abandonment by God is already a form of identification with Christ.
An absurd counter-factual wager (e.g., human dignity, racial equality) that cannot be grounded in empirical knowledge and must be posited unconditionally as the basis of emancipatory politics.
as “parallax view”
Žižek mentions his forthcoming book The Parallax View, signaling his concept of irreducible perspectival antagonism that cannot be unified into a single view.
The psychoanalytic mechanism whereby a subject misperceives an other as possessing knowledge or wisdom, illustrated by Being There's gardener who is taken for a sage.
Stories he reaches for 9
Bohr had a horseshoe above his door. A visitor asked: surely you don't believe in that superstition? Bohr replied: of course not, but I was told it works even if you don't believe in it. Illustrates objectified/mechanical belief.
“of course i do not believe in it. but i have it because i was told that it works also if you don't believe it.”
The TV laughs for you; when the show ends you are relieved as if you laughed, even though you only stared. Illustrates how an external machine can perform emotional/subjective functions on our behalf.
“the tv laughed for you and it worked as if you did it.”
In old Yugoslavia, ethnic jokes (Slovenes as misers, Montenegrins as lazy, Bosnians as sexually obsessed) functioned not as racism but as a form of solidary obscene exchange. Their disappearance in the early 1980s, as ethnic tensions rose, was for Žižek a negative proof of their cohesive social function.
“the moment we lost this, it was won.”
A mental patient convinced he is a grain of corn is cured and knows he is a man, but immediately returns trembling because a chicken is at the door, the chicken doesn't know. Used to show that belief is not in consciousness but in the Other/practice.
“of course i know that, replies the patient, but does the chicken know?”
Chesterton's Orthodoxy: when Christ cries 'why hast thou forsaken me,' it is the only moment in any religion where God himself is an atheist, forsaken by God. Žižek uses this to argue for Christianity's unique internal split.
“only one religion in which god seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”
The Marx Brothers joke: 'this man looks like an idiot, acts like an idiot, this shouldn't deceive you, he is an idiot.' Žižek applies it to religious believers: 'he looks as if he believes, acts as if he believes, this shouldn't deceive you, he really believes.' And the same applies to atheists.
“this man looks as if he believes, he acts as if he believes, but this shouldn't deceive you, he really believes.”
Pascal said: kneel down and pray and belief will come. Žižek inverts: kneel down and you don't come to believe yourself, you outsource belief to the ritual, which now believes for you.
“kneel down and you will make another belief. another agency or whatever, belief for you.”
In a 'creative' Bosnian music class, students name an image then a matching Beethoven piece: a girl says 'forest/Pastoral,' a boy says 'war/Eroica,' the Bosnian boy says (with obscene wordplay) 'Für Elise.' Illustrates the spirit of ethnic self-parody and solidary obscenity.
“i want to hear the dirty jokes from you”
In the film Leap of Faith, a con-artist faith healer performs tricks, but at the end actually performs a miracle and is shattered. Žižek prefers this to Graham Greene's naive treatment: the greatest shock for a religious person is to discover it really works.
“the greatest shock for a religious person is to discover that it really works.”
Works invoked 16
Capital book
Žižek quotes the opening of the commodity fetishism chapter and the passage imagining commodities speaking as central to his argument about objectified ideology.
The Parallax View book
Žižek mentions his forthcoming book as containing 200 pages of detailed dialogue with brain sciences/philosophy of mind including Dennett.
Tristan und Isolde opera
Wagner's opera is invoked as a parallel to the North Korean propaganda story: both are operatic enactments, not literal claims, illustrating the non-literal structure of performative proclamation.
Orthodoxy book
Quoted at length for the claim that Christianity is the only religion in which God is momentarily an atheist, the cry from the cross.
The Fragile Absolute book
Mentioned by Cornel West as a text where Žižek defends the Christian legacy; cited in the context of this talk.
The Age of Innocence film
Used to illustrate the 'fake innocence' of knowing but performing not-knowing, the disappearing symbolic function.
Žižek criticizes the film for missing the comedy/joke of Christianity and calls it essentially pagan; also mockingly describes it as 'the greatest monument to southern California sado-gay community.'
Cited to articulate the non-literal, non-metaphorical structure of symbolic belief, analogized to polite social formulas.
Leap of Faith film
The film with Steve Martin is praised for the way it inverts the Graham Greene structure and shows the true shock: the con-artist faith healer is shattered when the miracle actually happens.
Being There film
Praised for resisting the temptation to humanize the gardener-protagonist; his maintained monstrosity makes it a pure illustration of Lacanian transference.
Žižek recommends the rarely-read anthropology section where Hegel shows madness as inherent in the emergence of human mind.
Graham Greene's novel is criticized as too naive in its structure of atheist shocked by miracle; Žižek's counter-model is the believer shocked to discover it really works.
History of Madness book
Žižek sides with Derrida's critique of Foucault's reading, arguing Foucault's reading is extremely fine but ultimately fails to detect the trans-historical moment of madness at the cogito's core.
Žižek praises it as at least a good collection; invokes Kierkegaard's idea that incarnation is a comical event (the small dog entering instead of the expected king).
Žižek uses this documentary to argue that Buddhist ontology serves as the perfect ideology of virtual capitalism, not its critique.
Described (via Cornel West) as a key text highlighting the traumatic monstrous core of the modern subject that shattered the older form of German idealism.
People invoked 29
Mel Gibson negative
Žižek criticizes The Passion of the Christ for missing the comedy/joke of Christianity and being essentially a pagan film; also quips it is 'the greatest monument to southern California sado-gay community.'
Alenka Zupančič positive
Described as Žižek's 'Slovene Lacanian party member colleague'; her forthcoming book on Hegel and comedy extends Žižek's chicken joke structure to God himself.
Graham Greene negative
Greene's The End of the Affair is criticized as too naive: his model (atheist shocked by miracle) should be inverted, the real shock is for the believer to discover it works.
Blaise Pascal positive
Žižek inverts the Pascalian wager: not 'kneel and you'll believe' but 'kneel and the ritual believes for you,' outsourcing belief to a mechanical practice.
Jacques Derrida positive
Žižek sides with Derrida in the Foucault debate, crediting him with detecting a trans-historical moment of madness at the core of the cogito.
Žižek says 'I hate Friedrich Hayek' but concedes his point that capitalism's apparent irrationality and contingency is what makes its inequalities palpable, a 'dialectical observation.'
Richard Wagner positive
Act III of Tristan und Isolde is invoked as a parallel to the North Korean propaganda story, both are operatic enactments not meant as literal truth claims.
Jacques Lacan positive
Implicitly invoked through the logic of the big Other and de-centered belief; explicitly referenced when Žižek explains the film Being There as an illustration of transference and 'desire is the desire of the Other.'
Henry James positive
Žižek expresses deep admiration for late James novels as preserving the 'kingdom of faked innocence', the dying art of knowing but performing not-knowing.
John Rawls negative
Žižek calls Rawls's theory of justice 'catastrophically wrong' for ignoring envy and ressentiment and assuming purely egotistic rational actors behind the veil of ignorance.
Tenzin Gyatso negative
Cited as evidence that fundamentalists already internalize Western standards: the Dalai Lama justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of happiness and pain-avoidance.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Described as Žižek's 'preferred Catholic theologian'; his Orthodoxy is quoted extensively for the claim that Christianity is the only religion in which God is for a moment an atheist.
Gilles Deleuze negative
Implicitly criticized for de-historicizing Nietzsche, erasing his reactionary politics, as an example of postmodernist selective historicization.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Fukuyama's attempt to ground human dignity in biological/genetic structure in his book on biogenetics is called 'crazy' by Žižek: grounding dignity in genetics immediately devalues it.
Mentioned as one of the brain-science/philosophy of mind authors Žižek engages with in The Parallax View, saying he has 'great appreciation' for today's brain sciences without accepting naive reductionism.
Ágnes Heller positive
Žižek recounts Heller's testimony from Auschwitz about the function of the myth of an 'ethical other' in the barracks as key evidence for de-centered belief.
Featured in the Buddhist documentary as an economist describing global capital as a 'continuous set of movements', used as an example of how Buddhist ontology maps onto financial capitalism.
Alain Badiou positive
Implicitly referenced in the discussion of Paul's community of believers and the egalitarian logic of emergency time; Žižek says 'I agree with Alain' on the Paulinian community.
Donald Davidson negative
Žižek criticizes the belief-desire model of rational action Davidson systematized, arguing it generates ridiculous caricatures when applied to so-called fundamentalist terrorists.
Michel Foucault negative
In the Foucault-Derrida debate on madness and the cogito, Žižek sides with Derrida: Foucault's reading is extremely fine but ultimately wrong in historicizing the trans-historical moment of madness at the core of subjectivity.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling positive
Žižek endorses the 1809 Treatise on Human Freedom as the text that introduced the traumatic monstrous core into idealism; cited via Cornel West's response.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited for his vision of incarnation as comedy (the gap between expected king and arriving small dog), and for the idea that authentic action requires taking on a mask more seriously than one's 'real' self.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau positive
Cited for the distinction between simple egotism (benign) and pathological amour propre driven by envy, the desire to ruin others' enjoyment, as the true source of evil.
Cornel West positive
Žižek describes West as a 'good friend' who shares his orientation of combining progressive politics with a positive attitude toward religion; he responds to West's challenges substantively and with warmth.
Paul Veyne positive
Žižek cites Veyne's book Did the Ancient Greeks Believe in Their Myths? to articulate a model of symbolic belief that is neither literal nor merely metaphorical, closer to the mode of social politeness.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Žižek criticizes Habermas's opposition to biogenetics as avoiding the real problem: once we admit we can change psychic characteristics with drugs, we already accept that autonomy is just a chemical effect.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek defends the continued relevance of Marx's commodity fetishism theory as targeting precisely the paradox of objectified belief in social practice.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek defends the materialist reading of Hegel's self-consciousness concept and uses Hegel's Freudian slip on the filioque controversy as the basis for his own theological reading of the Trinity.
Žižek criticizes postmodernists' selective historicization: they over-historicize Wagner but de-historicize Nietzsche, ignoring his reactionary politics and fear of the Paris Commune.
What it argues
the structure of belief and its displacement onto othersobjectified ideology and commodity fetishismBuddhism as ideology of virtual capitalismChristianity's atheist moment and God's self-abandonmentfundamentalism as the collapse of belief into knowledgethe decline of the symbolic functionPaulinian community as model of emancipatory politics
Dialectical moves 8
“The very injustice of capitalism is precisely what makes it palpable to the majority—far from being intolerable, its contingency is what allows people to accept their failure.”
Capitalism's lack of justice is not a bug but the mechanism of its popular acceptance.
“The only critical lesson Buddhism offers about virtual capitalism is that we should not engage with it—which makes Buddhism the perfect ideology of capitalism, not its critique.”
Buddhist inner distance is not an antidote to capitalism but its ideal psychic supplement.
“Today, for an ideology to function it must not be taken seriously by its subjects—too much belief kills ideology; cynical distance is ideology's own mode of operation.”
Post-ideological cynicism is not beyond ideology but ideology's contemporary form.
“The site of commodity fetishism is not in our beliefs but in our social reality itself—we act as if commodities are magical even though we know they are not.”
The illusion is not in consciousness but in practice, inverting the standard ideology-critique model.
“Fundamentalists are not those who believe most intensely—they are precisely those who no longer believe, having replaced faith with positive knowledge.”
The most 'religious' people have already betrayed religion by treating articles of faith as empirical facts.
“In Christianity, it is not that man is abandoned by God, but that God is abandoned by God—the gap between man and God is reflected into God himself.”
The Incarnation introduces an internal split into the divine itself, making Christianity the only religion with an atheist moment in God.
“The problem of abandonment by God turns into its own solution: at the very point of total abandonment you identify with Christ, and the gap that separates you from God is already part of divinity.”
The Hegelian move where the extreme of alienation is the moment of reunion.
“Wisdom, not evil, is the true enemy of Christianity—all pagan ethics end in the wisdom of restoring cosmic balance, while Christianity posits truth as partial and one-sided.”
Christianity's radicality lies in refusing the consolation of holistic cosmic justice.
Claims 15
asserts
Belief today is not located in conscious conviction but is objectified in social practice—we believe through what we do, not what we think.the structure of contemporary belief and ideology
asserts
Buddhist ontology (no fixed reality, just flux of perception) functions as the perfect ideology of virtual capitalism by legitimizing inner distance toward the capitalist game.Buddhism and capitalism
asserts
Marx's commodity fetishism does not mean people are duped into false beliefs they secretly don't hold—the illusion is in their actual social practice, not in their conscious beliefs.commodity fetishism and ideology critique
rejects
Rawls's theory of justice is catastrophically wrong because it ignores envy and ressentiment, assuming people are simple egotists.Rawlsian justice and the veil of ignorance
asserts
Capitalism is tolerated precisely because of its injustice—its contingency allows people to not blame themselves for failure.capitalism's social acceptability
rejects
So-called Islamic fundamentalist terrorists do not literally believe in the 72 virgins; applying the belief-desire model of rationality to them produces ridiculous caricatures.standard rational-intentionalist accounts of fundamentalist terrorism
asserts
Fundamentalists secretly consider themselves inferior to the West and already measure themselves by Western standards—they lack, not excess, a sense of cultural superiority.the psychology of fundamentalism
asserts
Fundamentalism and postmodern cynicism share the same pathology: the decline of the symbolic function, the inability to take a fiction seriously as fiction.fundamentalism and postmodern cynicism
asserts
True fundamentalists do not believe—they treat articles of faith as positive empirical knowledge, eliminating the existential wager that constitutes genuine belief.the distinction between belief and knowledge in fundamentalism
asserts
Christianity's unique contribution is that the gap between man and God is reflected back into God himself—at the moment of 'Father, why hast thou forsaken me,' God is momentarily atheist.Christianity's atheist moment and the crucifixion
asserts
For ideology to function today it must not be taken seriously by its subjects—cynical distance is not a resistance to ideology but its very mode of operation.ideology in the post-ideological era
asserts
Translating ethical questions (human dignity, racial equality) into questions of empirical knowledge is self-defeating and concedes the ground to the very position one wants to combat.ethics, knowledge, and anti-racism
asserts
What dies on the cross is not the Son but the Father—the old God of cosmic authority—making the Holy Spirit a truly novel form of divine community.Hegel's reading of the Trinity and the crucifixion
asserts
Wisdom (the ethics of restoring cosmic balance) is the common endpoint of all paganism; Christianity is uniquely anti-wisdom, positing truth as partial and one-sided.Christianity versus pagan ethics and wisdom
asserts
Derrida was right against Foucault in detecting a trans-historical moment of madness at the very core of the cogito.the Foucault-Derrida debate on madness and the cogito
Quotes 14
“no wonder such buddhism can function as the perfect ideology of today's virtual capitalism. it allows us to participate in the capitalist game with an inner distance, with our fingers crossed, as it were.”Slavoj Žižek · Buddhism as ideology of virtual capitalism
“of course i know that, replies the patient, but does the chicken know?”Slavoj Žižek · belief displaced onto the Other / the big Other
“it's not that they don't know it but still they are doing it—the illusion is not in what people think, but in what they do.”Slavoj Žižek · commodity fetishism / ideology in practice
“today, for an ideology, in order to function, it must not be taken seriously by its subject.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical distance as ideology's own mode
“for me the most elementary ideological statement is the statement: but i'm not just a slave of ideology. i'm also a human person. there is something more in me—this minimal distance.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological distance as ideology's purest form
“only one religion in which god seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity's internal atheist moment
“the fact that capitalism is not just—far from being something which makes it more intolerable—is precisely what makes it palpable for the majority.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism's injustice as its popular foundation
“of course i do not believe in it. but i have it because i was told that it works also if you don't believe it.”Slavoj Žižek · objectified / mechanical belief
“wisdom is for me best exemplified in proverbs. and proverbs are for me the ultimate vulgarity.”Slavoj Žižek · anti-wisdom stance / Christianity vs. pagan ethics
“i think that what ritual allows you is, as it were, to get rid of your belief... the ritual is doing it for you.”Slavoj Žižek · ritual as outsourcing of belief
“the moment we lost this [solidary ethnic jokes], it was won.”Slavoj Žižek · obscene solidarity and the disappearance of the symbolic function in Yugoslavia
“truth is partial, truth is one-sided. truth is imbalance.”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity's anti-holistic logic / the Leninist moment
“grace comes from outside. grace is not here... it's not you deserve it.”Slavoj Žižek · Protestant grace vs. self-realization
“he remains monstrous to the end.”Slavoj Žižek · transference and the void of the Other (Being There)
Transcript 82 turns
Host
what. i.'d like to our sponsors the center for, of humanities, department of,. english, german, religion, and slavic school, in african american studies, american studies, european cultural studies. thank. das. this the first series, the second which will in corn us and will take place next march 28th at 4.30. i. without further ado, i'd like to present the chair of the c session for me. thank you. it. is? and here's the. thank.
what. i.'d like to our sponsors the center for, of humanities, department of,. english, german, religion, and slavic school, in african american studies, american studies, european cultural studies. thank. das. this the first series, the second which will in corn us and will take place next march 28th at 4.30. i. without further ado, i'd like to present the chair of the c session for me. thank you. it. is? and here's the. thank.
Moderator
welcome everyone. thank you, andrea. it's a great treat and pleasure to welcome two such extraordinarily public and engaged intellectuals to princeton. it's a rare occasion and i'm really happy to be here with you. one of the particular side effects, benefits of introducing such well-known figures is that it makes the job of the moderator rather easy. i really don't have to tell you much about it either since you've read the books, heard them on the radio, seen the movies. and now we'll hear them tonight in the exchange that i'm looking forward to as much as you are. in order to facilitate that exchange from undue interruptions, i would ask that you turn off your cell phones or have them vibrate also so quietly. the format of the evening is slavo zijjak will present his lecture, followed by a response by colonel west, to which slavo zijjak will then respond. after which we'll open the discussion to your questions. during the question period, there will be two gentlemen with microphones running around. please address your questions to the m so we can all hear them and try to make them succinct so as many people as possible can have a chance to engage tonight's presentation. so without further ado, please join me in welcoming slavin.
welcome everyone. thank you, andrea. it's a great treat and pleasure to welcome two such extraordinarily public and engaged intellectuals to princeton. it's a rare occasion and i'm really happy to be here with you. one of the particular side effects, benefits of introducing such well-known figures is that it makes the job of the moderator rather easy. i really don't have to tell you much about it either since you've read the books, heard them on the radio, seen the movies. and now we'll hear them tonight in the exchange that i'm looking forward to as much as you are. in order to facilitate that exchange from undue interruptions, i would ask that you turn off your cell phones or have them vibrate also so quietly. the format of the evening is slavo zijjak will present his lecture, followed by a response by colonel west, to which slavo zijjak will then respond. after which we'll open the discussion to your questions. during the question period, there will be two gentlemen with microphones running around. please address your questions to the m so we can all hear them and try to make them succinct so as many people as possible can have a chance to engage tonight's presentation. so without further ado, please join me in welcoming slavin.
Host
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Slavoj Žižek
i don't have to press anybody. it hope this works. thank you very much for this invitation. i'm especially pleased, although a little bit afraid out of respect that my response will be my good friend cornel west, because i also share his basic orientation, which is to combine progressive political engagement with certain, at least one can say, positive attitude or appropriate of religious topic, religious stance and so on. i also think we can follow that. uh. that path which makes us a minority maybe in today's progressive academia but i think wait till 20 years when we'll take power and then.
i don't have to press anybody. it hope this works. thank you very much for this invitation. i'm especially pleased, although a little bit afraid out of respect that my response will be my good friend cornel west, because i also share his basic orientation, which is to combine progressive political engagement with certain, at least one can say, positive attitude or appropriate of religious topic, religious stance and so on. i also think we can follow that. uh. that path which makes us a minority maybe in today's progressive academia but i think wait till 20 years when we'll take power and then.
Host
i.
i.
Slavoj Žižek
okay. let's do some serious work today. i don't want to go into the direction of that unfortunate movie on me because i only seen it once and then my idea was like would you allow your daughter, would you allow that guy to take your daughter to a movie no i mean okay so let me start. i really want to talk about belief. you will immediately learn it's not a big surprise what the chickens are from the title. but believe, what do we mean? what do we believe, especially how how do we believe? today. uh. i think that our predicament. with regards to belief. finds its perfect expression in a documentary that i saw recently called sand castles, buddhism and global. finally, it's a documentary by alexander oie, i'm not sure i pronounce it correctly. it's a documentary which combines commentaries from economist arnold but, sociologist saskia assassin and the tibetan buddhist teacher zhong garkchen rininppo. sassen and booth discuss the gigantic scope, power as well as social and economic effects of global finance. capital markets now valued at an estimated 83 trillion dollars exist within a system based purely on self-interest. in which herd behavior, often based on rumors, can inflate or destroy the value of companies or whole economies in a matter of hours. then the tibetan buddhist counters them with ruminations about the nature of human perception, illusion, desire and enlightenment. i release your attachment two. something that is not there in reality but is only a perception. this statement is supposed to throw a new light on the mad dance of zillion dollars speculations. now, echoing the buddhist notion that there is no self, only a stream of continuous perceptions, saskia ass comments about global capital. quote, it's not that there are 83 trillion. it is essentially a continuous set of movements. it disappears and it reappears. so, itler. you got the point. that the ontology, as it were. that is forced on you, imposed on you. if you participate in these financial deals, speculations on future, etc etc., is basically the buddhist ontology, no substantial reality, the fragility of reality and so on. the problem here is, of course, how are we to read this parallel between the buddhist ontology and the structure of virtual capitalism's universe? the film tends towards the humanist reading. seen through a buddhist lens, the exuberance of global financial wealth is illusory. divorced from objective reality. the very real human suffering. created by deals made on trading floors and in boardrooms invisible to most of us if however, that's now my critical reaction. if one accepts the premise that. the value of material wealth and one's experience of reality is subjective. and that desire place the crucial role in both daily life and neoliberal economics. is it not possible to draw? from. it the... exact opposite conclusion. is it not that our traditional life world was based on the naive realist, substantialist notions of external reality composed of fixed objects? while the unheard of dynamics of virtual capitalism confronts us with the illusory nature of reality. when you see that a rumor can a rumor can. cause the collapse of whole economies and so on and so on. isn't this a wonderful lesson? on the fragility of our notion of reality again, what better proof of the non-substantial character of reality than a gigantic fortune which can dissolve into nothing in a couple of hours due to a sudden false rumor? consequently, why complain that financial speculations with futures are divorced from objective reality when the basic premise of the buddhist ontology is that there is no objective reality in the first place? the only critical lesson to be drawn from the buddhist perspective about today's virtual capitalism is that one should be aware that we are dealing with a mere theater of shadows, with non-substantial virtual entities, and consequently that we should not fully engage ourselves in the capitalist game. that we should play the game with an inner distance virtual capitalism could thus act as the first step towards liberation. it confronts us with the fact that the cause of our suffering and enslavement is not objective reality itself. there is no such thing, but our desire, our craving for material things, our excessive attachment to them. all one has to do after one gets rid of the false notion of substantialist reality is to renounce desire itself to adopt the attitude of inner peace and distance. no wonder such buddhism can function as the perfect ideology of today's virtual capitalism. it allows us to participate in the capitalist game with an inner distance, with our fingers crossed, as it were. i hope you got my point. i'm not praising capitalism. on the contrary. i am. rather criticizing if not buddhism itself, at least a certain use of it. i think, again, that it's kind of a... ontology which says, you know, there is no fixed reality, it's just a flux of perception, renounce the notion of substantialist reality, there is no self, you don't exist and so on, the world is just a game that this is the perfect attitude for today's capitalism. that is to say... what? that is to say that this kind of a disbelieving attitude, don't take the game seriously, don't engage yourself fully. this is what is needed if the system is to function smoothly today let me give you... the opposite experience. when the new pope, the german cardinal joseph ratzinger was elected, now i think he's benedict xvi. some of my friends were shocked and their reproach was my god, but this guy really believes in. deck. christ incarnation and so on and so on. . i mean, uh... and this tells us a lot about how this kind of buddhist western buddhists, skeptical attitude. it all around us like we are almost shocked if some. if we discover that that somebody really believes. i don't know how it is in your country, but i know that in europe recently there were some interesting. sociological inquiries where they asked people, thousands of people a series of questions. they started with are you a christian. okay, eighty% said yes. then later, not immediately afterwards but like half an hour later, to confuse them, they ask them the same question but in a different form, just asking a more specific question which is part of the fundamental christian dogma. like, do you believe that there was 2,000 years ago a guy walking around palestine who was the son of god. 5% believe it. so... what did they mean by this? first one. but so how does this structure? let me be very specific here. my claim is not they don't really believe it. my claim is that this is how. today. belief itself is structured. we all know the marx brothers standard joke story. this man looks as an idiot, he acts as an idiot, this shouldn't deceive you, he is an idiot. i think this is how the shock we discover when we see a religious person. it would be this man looks as if he believes, he acts as if he believes, but this shouldn't deceive you, he really believes. we are always surprised when we see this. and my teaching will be that the same goes also for atheists. it's also, he looks, he acts as an atheist, but it's always a shock to discover that. the guy you are talking to really is an eight-day. that is to say, i don't know what's your experience, but my experience is whenever i find a person like postmodern theorists who are supposed to be atheists and so on. then i will not name names. i'm not in mccarthy business, but let me tell you that some of the very big names are on my list. like the god deconstruct god blah. then i ask them, but do you really? accept that there is. nothing, no god and so on. practically all of them. again, i can give you almost who is who in the construction theory and so on. practically, tell me, of course i don't believe in institutional religion. of course i don't believe that there is somebody up there, god. but you never know, maybe i have deep respect for sy. there is some higher force maybe, and so on and so on. i mean, it's very difficult to find a person who would look you straight into the eye and say, no, i really don't believe. but my other surprise is that it's similar with... religious people, i mean people who are officially religious, i like to ask them the opposite question, logical. but do you really believe? and often i get the same, no, it's not a matter of belief, it's more how important this is, how... it makes you feel good, to cut a long story short it makes you feel richer and so on and so on. i claim that it functions, and i will later try to explain how it functions through this speech. so it is as if to really believe to have this deep belief, you have to... put up an atheist. front. musk then or the other way around to be skeptical you have to superficially appear as religious. maybe you know some plays and novels by graham green like the end of the affair, where he focuses on the topic of the traumatic impact on a non-believer. of a miracle. like in the end of the affair also in one drama you have a total non-believer who is then totally shocked, shattered when he or she, you maybe saw the movie with rafe fe and julian moore and so on, like an atheist encountering a miracle. but i think that he's too naive here, graham green. i think that the true example would be the one, i don't agree with him politically, i don't even like him, but it's an interesting film. namely, did you see with steve martin? leap of faith. but you have a fake con artist of this miracle healer and so on and so on. ent then... he's doing tricks and so on, cheating with his magic healings, but at the end he does it and he's totally shattered. he discovers that he really can do a miracle and he's totally shattered. i think that the greatest... shock for a religious person is to discover that it really works. and this is how today it functions. and it's the same with psychoanalysts. many of my psychanalytic friends are by nature skeptical and from time to time they are shocked. they tell me, my god, but it really works, this interpretation. the whole life should be this, no? so,,... this is what interests me. belief. it is impossible. to do it. directly. somehow we have to take a distance. is. take a distance towards it. eh. so... now let me make a point clear here. my thesis is not that nobody really believes today and so on and so on. it's much more complex. i think that that belief is not where we think it is. for example let us take. some a think where you would think there is no belief there. like. stalinist i think the underlying structure is deeply religious, not in the stupid superficial sense. communism is a new belief. they believed in paradise on earth, in historical necessity. but it's something else. for example when you read reports on stalinist purges, how they justified it and so on and so on. you always get in stalinist texts what? in theology is referred to as the perspective of final judgment. the idea is today it may appear confused to you, we are doing horrible things. killing innocent people but at some point later when there will be communism we will be able to look back and to recognize know as if at some point in the future what would it. there will be kind of a final historical judgment. where? every event, every act will get its proper place. and i think this perspective is absolutely crucial for stalinist communism. that's the first thing to say. the second thing, now i want to go into a more tricky water, when we are dealing with beliefs. we should really be careful about what people believe when they say they believe and so on and so on. the problem i ran into is how our western standard liberal theory of beliefs and meaning precisely when it tries to understand the cultural other is usually at its most racist what i'm referring here to is, for example, the standard theory developed among others most systematically by donald davidson. the standard theory according to which human acts are rational intentional, that they are accountable in the terms of beliefs and desires of the. agent you know to simplify the idea is you do something because you have first you desire something and then you have certain beliefs about the reality. you think if i do this, the result will be what i desire. now this may appear almost a self-evident theory. but if you apply it... this theory to so-called suicidal terrorist acts. you get totally crazy. image. for example, we end up attributing to fundamentalist terrorists, the most ridiculous beliefs. as if. the arab terrorists really mean that they will get the, how many of them, 70 or 400 virgins waiting for them in paradise. whatever and so on and so on. i think that again this is not this is not the structure. this is not the structure. you don't have to believe this very theory. which again is supposed to understand the other like if we are to understand the terrorists we should look at their structure of beliefs ends up making them ridiculous idiots. let me give you an extreme example here recently i read a book. about. the korean war. and then i found there a wonderful quote from a... official north korea communist propaganda from 52. describing one great hero and how he died for fatherland. here is literally the quote. the hero. kang ho yung. was seriously wounded in both arms and both legs in the kamakh hill battle. be attentive here. he couldn't move neither legs nor arms totally. so he rolled into the midst of the enemy. with a hand grenade in his mouth. and wipe them out. shouting my arms and legs were broken. imagine shouting but... my arms and legs are broken. but on the contrary my spirit. retaliatory spirit against you imperialist scoundrels is now a thousand times stronger i will show the unbending fighting will of a member of the workers' party of korea and unflinching we firmly pledge to the party and our beloved leader kim il sok. now, okay, it's easy to make fun of this. it's non-realistic. the guy, first, how could he even how could he put the bomb roll and make this long official proclamation and so on and so on. it. however uh. what if we are reading this in a wrong way? what if the mistake here is the same as that of the anthropologists who impute to so-called primitive aboriginals. uh yeah who celebrate some animal as their ancestor, the belief that they. are really descended from that animal my proposal is why not read this passage the scene that i described which effectively sounds operatic, like a scene from the opera, in its ridiculous, pathetic character. why not read it in a way similar to listening to, for example, act three of richard wagner's opera tristan und isolde, where, i mean, it's easy to laugh at the other, but what happens in act three of tristan is in a way more impossible and ridiculous. if you know it, tristan is mortally wounded and then he's singing an extremely difficult area much longer than this proclamation. it lasts about 50 minutes no? so, okay, we all know. that's not meant, but what if this scene is meant in the same way? imagine this scene as an... es an operatic scene. as if... and an aria. in. in other words... if you were to ask a korean north korean guy, but do you really think this happened? he would probably say, are you stupid? of course not. this is just meant to articulate our will to fight and blah blah blah. no so again, belief is not in this sense literally. a. this is not how it functions and i claim especially with so-called fundamentalists, don't make idiots of them. another problem that i have with so called fundamentalism is that it generated in our media in our reaction uh. another great misunderstanding i don't think that the so-called fundamentalist islamic terror is grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization and so on and so on i think that now i will say something politically incorrect and very brutal, that the problem with-called so-called, i have problems with these designations, fundamentalist terrorists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. like, obviously, if you read hitler's mein kampf, it's obvious that hitler's problem is that he has problems with jew. he considers himself inferior. which is why our condescending, politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more furious and feeds their ressentiment. the problem is not cultural difference. but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that they. secretly already internalize our standards and measure themselves by them and this clearly goes also for for example dalai lama who justifies the tibetan buddhism. in western terms of the pursuit of happiness, the avoidance of pain and so on and so on. so paradoxically, i think what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of true racist conviction into their own superiority, if you want. another thing. that. should be stressed here where i think the reference to terrorism is crucial is that we should totally abandon this opposition which is forced on us as if in ethics. we should oppose those who are ready to sacrifice themselves for a larger common good and utilitarians, hedonists and so on and so on. we can learn here a lot i think already from the good old rousseau h? rousseau, who distinguished clearly between simple egotism and the pathological amour propre, self-love. his idea is that there is nothing bad in simple egotism, caring for yourself, for your pleasures. the result is always good, and it's even easy to generate morality out of this. the problem of evil is not hedonism. it's not i want to have a good time. as he does it in a very precise way, rousseau. he point... he... demonstrate how... the problem is when. destroying the enemy, the problem is that of envy. when destroying the enemy, preventing the other to enjoy becomes for you more important than your own enjoyment. and when you get caught into the logic of... better to ruin others' enjoyment than for me to enjoy. so the point is here that the logic of envy. it has nothing to do with hedonism and all this stuff. which is why now i will make a more concrete statement here, which is why i think john rawls's theory of justice is catastrophically wrong. it works only on the assumption that people are simply egotists. it works only if you suspend envy and... rentiment. that is to say, you know probably rawls's model of a just society where social inequalities are tolerated only insofar as they are based on natural inequalities which are considered contingent, not marriage, and, you know, this rawlsian test that you should, the veil of ignorance test, you should make a judgment without knowing what is your position. to directly formulate the result, certain inequalities, some people earning more and so on, should be tolerated. only if they. help also the lowest. the poorest, the lowest. so that in this way you can justify it. okay, you can earn more or whatever than others, but also the lowest one will profit. will profit from it. it sounds very reasonable. so. first, we only get inequalities which are justified by helping also the poorest the lowest in social hierarchy and point two. this the privileges of some people being richer and so on are not justified. through some old hierarchies or whatever, but only in your natural. capacities. how would this work in real life? i think it would have meant a total catastrophe. why? because imagine that you are the the... the lowest, the poor one. you would of course be frustrated the others have more than you. but you would even be deprived of the right to protest because it would be clear that you are less than the others because of your natural inabilities and not only this, but the others are richer than you. basically, in order to help you, i claim that the moment you introduce envy, the logic of envy, it explodes. it's a formula for disaster. in other words, i think that i don't know, probably you have the same stories, but... the logic of desire, which is the logic of envy, is totally ignored here. like, there is an anecdote in my own country, in slovenia, about a farmer, a peasant, who is given a choice by a good witch or a magician. he will. the god, whatever, all-powerful person will give him the peasant. one cow and to his neighbor two cows. or take from him one cow and from his neighbor he will take two cows. of course the peasant immediately chooses the second option. or in slovenia we have even a more morbid version. the witch or the magician tells the farmer, i will do to you whatever you want, but i warrant you, i will do it twice to your neighbor. you know what immediately the farmer response, take one of my eyes. you will take both the neighbor and so on and so on. what's the lesson of this? now, don't misunderstand me. i hate friedrich hayek. but here he was right. where he emphasized how it is much easier to accept inequalities. if one can claim that they result from an impersonal blind force. so. hayek claims the good thing about irrationality of the market success or failure in capitalism. you know, this idea that it's not really... you are intelligent, whatever. there is always an element of contingency, of chance, who fails, who succeeds on the market. is that it allows me precisely to perceive my failure or success as basically undeserved. contingent. so. the fact that capitalism is not just. far from being something which makes it more intolerable is precisely what makes it palpable. for the majority. because can you imagine what horrible the situation would be for you if you would have to accept that i failed because i am an idiot or whatever. but if i say, okay, basically it's not my fault, market forces are impenetrable, crazy, it makes it much easier to swallow it. that's, i think, nonetheless a nice dialectical observation how the very injustice capitalism is accepted by people not because it's just. no, those who are more intelligent, blah, blah, blah, succeed. if it were to be just, it would explode long ago. what makes it palpable is its very injustice and that we know that it's unjust. in this sense, we can, as it were, accept our own failure as something which is not our own responsibility. so much about this now let me return to belief uh. what is the basic, what's then the structure of belief? if it's never clear what we believe, how it functions and so on and so on. now we come to the chicken. it's an old story, you know it. i will just give a new twist to it. you know this old classical joke about a man who believes himself to be a grain of corn seed, whatever. he is taken to the mental institution where doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. however, when he is cured, convinced that he is not a grain but a man and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately... comes back. trembling. thereared there is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that the chicken will eat him. the doctor says, of course, dear fellow, you know very well that you are not a grain but amen. of course i know that, replies the patient, but does the chicken know? now you will say that's a joke. no, i will try to prove it now in the second paragraph that this is exactly how it works. for example, this is what psychoanalysis is about. it's easy to convince you. death your symptoms are just effects of your repressed traumas and so on and so on. but the problem is to convince the unconscious, which is, as it were... the chicken in you. how does this work? even with marxism. i think that this is what marx was. which is why i think marx should still be read. this is what marx was targeting. precisely, i claim this paradox of belief is what marx was targeting in his good old-fashioned, but i think we should return to it, theory of so-called commodity fetishism. let me quote you the first. sentence, or the first two sentences of this subdivision4 of the chapter one of capital, the fetishism of the commodity and its secret. quote, a commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious trivial thing, but its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. everybody reads this passage, but are you aware how strange it is? what marx does here exactly the opposite of what one would expect from a well precisely a marxist social critic. the idea is you take... mystified ideological edifice religious fantasy whatever and you try to reduce it to real-life phenomena economic political processes you try to show how even these most mystical sublime phenomena are generated by the real life struggles, production, and so on. that's the usual idea of critique of ideology, to show how ideological phenomena are generated by real life. but marx is saying here. almost the opposite. that the problem is not to reduce sublime phenomena to ordinary reality. the problem is to become aware of the, as it were, metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties of the theological dimension of what appears to us as ordinary reality itself. this is for mark. commodity. commodity fetishism. commodity fetishism is not you think you are dealing with something mystical, commodity, whatever, but in reality, as we put it, commodity is just an ordinary object, part of social exchange and so on and so on. you think you are dealing with an ordinary object. but... in reality, no, that's the whole problem, in what kind of reality there is this theological aspect of commodity. so... that's my formula. let us say a critical marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism. the marxist reproach. the the bourgeois subject is not a commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people. the actual marxist reproach is rather. you may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations, that for example, money is just a kind of voucher entiting you to a part of social product. but this is not how things really seem to you, in your social reality. by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity appears to you as a magical object. endowed with social powers in other words sorry, to go back. what just to explain this to make it absolutely clear so we have three levels not two we don't simply have. this is my central point. we don't simply have reality and illusion, illusory beliefs. it's not that in reality a commodity is. a social product, some object becomes a commodity because of its role in social exchange. but we idiots are victims of commodity fetishism and think this is an inherent value. there is something magic in a commodity or money. no! the paradox is much nicer in marx. commodity is in reality just an ordinary object who functions as money, commodity because of social relations. and this is what we think also. so, what we think is close to reality, if you want. but the site of commodity fetishism is not our beliefs, it's our social reality itself. we act. eshif. we embody our belief in our social exchange. wait, you know, it's a little bit the same as, let us say your father is an idiot. or no, let... this is too obvious example. let us take anti-seemitism, our late capitalist liberal anti-semitism. jews are people like others. and we think they are. but nonetheless... when you encounter a jew, most of us. but not only a druid, you can replace druids with all other races and so on and so on. whenever there is a racism. it. you treat them in your social exchange itself your anti-semitic or other racist prejudices are embodied so you got the point. when marx defines ideology as. they es they don't know it but still they are doing it. it doesn't mean the stupidity of. they don't know what they are doing. they are doing one thing, but they think they misperceive what they are doing. it's that. the illusion is not in what people think, but in what they do. they don't see the illusion. that they follow in what they are doing. let us say that you are of another race. i as a white liberal, which i am more but letta said, oh, i like blacks, blah, blah, blah. but then through some hints you get my racism. literally. you see, i don't know, i am not aware of beliefs which i practice in my act. that's the side of ideological illusion of marx. and you got my point here, how? contemporary cynicism uses this gap. of course at the level of explicit belief of our explicit conviction we can be open blah blah blah but and at that level, maybe we live in a post-ideological era. what interests me is ideology which is embodied in material life itself, in social exchanges and so on and so on. so let me go on. so, uh... uh we can... we can imagine. a marxist commodity fetishism version of the story about chicken. a bourgeois subject is visiting a course of marxism where he is taught about commodity fetishism. however, after the finished course, he comes back to his teacher complaining that he is still the victim of commodity fetishism. the teacher tells him, but you know now how things stand, that commodities are only expressions of social relations, there is nothing magic about them. and then, of course, the pupil replies, of course, i know that, but the commodities i'm dealing with do not know it. that's commodity fetishism. now you will say i'm dreaming. maybe, but marx is dreaming with me. here is a famous quote from capital when marx says the same thing. where he invokes this wonderful metaphor of commodities themselves talking to each other. a quote, if commodities could speak. they would say this our use value may interest men but it does not belong to us as objects what does belong to us as objects however is our value our own intercourse as commodities proof it and so on and so on. so again. the true task is not to convince people that commodities are just ordinary objects and so on, but as it were to convince the commodities. that is to say, to get rid of ideology which is embodied. in our real social interaction not to change the way we speak about commodities but to change the way commodities speak among themselves as it were we can go here even a step further, my slovene lakian. party member colleague alka zupancic did this in a book which will appear soon on heggelland comedy we can repeat the same story. now i come to my central point of chicken and so on. about gotott aproppos god himself, let's imagine a society of enlightened revolutionary terror where a man is put in prison because he believes in god. with different measures, with kind of ideological brainwashing and so on, he is brought to knowledge that god does not exist. they convince him. then he is dismissed. but then soon he comes running back and he explained that he scared of being punished by god. then the teacher, terrorist teacher tells him, but what's the problem? we cured you. you know that god doesn't exist, of course. what's the reply? you can guess it. i know it, but does god know it? that he doesn't exist. now you will say i'm joking here. i'm not. let me... now give you. my final point, this is why my attachment to christian legacy, and i speak here as an eight, it's so passionate. i follow here my preferred catholic theologist gilbert keith chesterton. who claim that precisely and only in christianity god does know. d. at the moment of father, father, you know, on the cross, why did you forsake me? here is a wonderful quote from chesterton's orthodoxy quote. when the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven. it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross, the cry which confessed that god was forsaken of god. and now let the revolutionaries choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. they will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. no. the matter grows too difficult for human speech, but let the atheists themselves choose a god. they will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation. only one religion in which god seemed for an instant to be an atheist. that's the unique element of christianity for chesterton. if we take seriously that, father, why have you forsaken me and so on, it's not simply. men are abandoned by god and so on. it's god himself is for a moment abandoned by god. that is to say, the gap between man and god is as it were, reflected into god himself. and that's the difficult thing to accept. which is why i think that christianity in this sense is much closer to this kind of atheist position than the standard atheism, which is that of all my friends, the culture atheism, which is, of course, using the cultural reference. all my jewish friends say, i ask them, why don't you eat this good pork sausage? you know, i don't believe it, but you know, it's part of my cultural inheritance and so on and so on. know you don't do it out of. bel believe you say, i just follow the traditions, the rituals and so on and so on. uh... uh. another way you can detect. d! j i coll it. disscenter or whatever. de-centered belief, belief which socially functions even when you deny it. uh be through displacing this belief onto another it's incredible how often. people are really not a problem for for them not to believe but you... need to have another people whom you suppose he believes. and that the critical moment is not for you to discover that you don't believe, but to discover that this other who as it were, believed for you does not believe. and i'm not here making fun. i mean, this can get extremely serious. for example, maybe you heard about her. she was teaching for some time at new school. she's still there, agnes keller, the hungarian look she told me a wonderful story. okay, wonderful, i mean theoretically wonderful, in reality terrifying. when she was, i mean, she was in auschwitz, she has the numbers and so on. she told me that how there in every cell, every building. there was a myth. you know, most of the people there, the majority of the people were, let's call them survivalists. totally shattered. you only focused on your survival. you followed certain rules, but within these rules you could steal for others and so on. when you lose even this survivalist attitude, you regress to the level of so-called musulman and muslims, living dead. you simply didn't care. but nonetheless she told me in every barack. there was a myth, a belief that never in your barack, but in the nearby barack. there was somebody who was not simply only keen on his or her survival somebody who still remained even in these horrible circumstances an ethical person sacrificed himself, helped others and so on and so on and then she told me something interesting the most dangerous moment was when you discovered, as unfortunately you almost always did, that this other doesn't exist, that it's a myth, like you, in some work. in group, you meet this other and you discover that a death that he's like us, just a survivalist. at that point, usually you broke down, you regressed to the level of musulman of of ironically, they were called muslims. this is, okay, western racism. you know why? because in the western imaginary of the early 20th century, muslims were supposed to be these people totally abandoning themselves in faith, just obeying destiny. you just prayed, prayed, and accept everything. and these people who were totally broken, the living dead, they just did like this. they didn't even act. so ironically, nice case of practical racism they will quote much. but the interesting point is that you got my point that even in order to be a... cruel survival. you need that. another guy to be, as it were good for you. you needed to believe i may be. i, may be evil. egotisch! because another one is good for me, as it were. if you needed that even to support your egotist attitude. and it's incredible how often you find this. at different levels for example i read an interesting research uh... recently, about... sexual promiscuity, how most of the people who engage in orgies and so on, they can be extremely wild doing i don't know what. but usually, nonetheless, they always have another one who, as it were, has to remain pure. for them. it's usually their children or their like i can do with triple penetration, name it, whatever, but don't touch my son or don't touch my mother. there is somebody else who has to remain. p. so, uh... let me go on here. how then? what's the structure here? the structure of this objectified belief, that's my lesson here. beliefs today, more than ever, precisely in our cynical post-ideological blah, blah, blah era how, beliefs are objectified. you can, as it were, believe without believing. you just practice belief with your act. there is a wonderful anecdote, maybe known to some of you, about niels bohr, you know, copenhagen, the guy, who i think was very intelligent, also in theological matters. you know that i think that he provided a perfect answer to your own guy here, princeton einstein. no, you know the famous god't play dice. but you know what niels bhr answer to einstein was? don't tell god what to do. no, i think it's correct. okay, there is another, i think, even much better anecdote about... niels b. h. who? a friend visited him in a countryside house and saw it was an old farmer house, saw above the entrance the horseshoe on the entrance door. i don't know if it's here also, but in europe this is kind of a superstitious object, like it brings luck if you have a horseshoe. okay, so the surprised visitor uh. asked niels bohr, why do you have that? my god, i thought you were a scientist. do you really believe in this? you know nielsborg gave a perfect answer. of course i'm not an idiot. of course, i do not believe in it. but i have it because i was told that it works also if you don't believe it. that's how it works today. we don't believe it, but it works even if if you don't believe it. in other work. uh. this brings us back to my big theological reference this notion of objectified beliefs to pascal i think that pascal you know the pascalian slogan interpreted endlessly by almost all french, it is as if the entire french marxism is a version of pascalian theology. you know the pascalian famousables, like pascal is basically the first theorist of alcoholics and anonymous. fake it till you make it. that is to say, you don't believe, no problem. do as if you believe, kneel down, pray, and believe will come by itself. but i think that from today's experience we should turn around pascal. it's more complex. the logic is not. kneel down end. and kneel down and you will believe but kneel down and you will make another belief. another agency or whatever, belief for you. that is to say. one can say that how put... the problem is not, the truly traumatic thing is not to believe, but to believe seriously, too much. and i think that what ritual allows you is, as it were, to get rid of your belief. the idea is, are you too haunted by religious experience? do you really believe? is it too horrible of you? my god, i really experienced god and so on. not a problem. practice a ritual and then it will get mechanized and you can think about masturbation, whatever you want. you know, the ritual is doing it for you. it's the same thing, as i don't want to repeat it here, that i immensely like, which i think is one of the greatest 20th century invention can laughter on tv. you know, where the tv set literally laughs for you. now, i may be an idiot here, but for me it really works in the sense that let's say in the evening you come home, you are tired as a dog, you put on tv, you get a stupid show, friends, whatever, cheers, can laughter. what's the magic? the magic is i totally disagree with people who claim that the function of can laughter you know, laughter on tv soundtrack itself, is that to make, in this idiotic imitation to make you laugh. it's simply not true. again, i spoke with some researchers who told me, no, people don't, it doesn't function in this way. no, the point is precisely that you are rid of even the duty to laugh. so what's the point? that's the magic. the magic is that, maybe i'm the idiot here, but i'm afraid only i'm not, is's that when the show is over, you just start as an idiot, nonetheless you are relieved as if you laughed. that's the magic of it. the tv laughed for you and it worked as if you did it. and i think that this is even. the nice old catholic manipulation with marriage it's too much for you to really love a partner. it's too intense. it's unbearable. you know how difficult it is truly to be in love. like it ruins your life. it's a catastrophe. i mean. the days, get married, you have a ritual and then you can start to dream, to cheat, whatever. you get the minimum distance of the ritual. it. so, uh... oh my god, i have so many other things, but nonetheless, slowly i will conclude it. so again, to conclude, my first big thesis is that dysfunctioning of ideology. well? you are even not aware of your own beliefs. that is to say, it is not as in the classical idea we have of ideology. you officially believe, follow the blah blah blah, but secretly you daydream about or even you are not aware how secretly you are atheist, while desires and so on and so on. today i claim the situation is almost the opposite one. we are officially hedonists, we don't care and so on and so on. because... we believe, well, not deep in ourselves, i'm not playing this game of deep discovery, because we believe in our acts, we practice beliefs, which is why not only it doesn't hurt the official ideology if you don't explicitly believe, my thesis is much stronger, it's that today, for an ideology, in order to function, it must be... it must not be taken seriously by its subject. it. too much you must keep a distance to watch. wirklich frei... for me, the most elementary ideological statement. is the statement but i'm not just... a slave of ideology. i'm also a human person. there is something more in me, this minimal distance. where do you find this distance? for example,... this is for me one of the signs of ideology at its purest. if you buy a book. of a popular author. and you know, on the back side of the cover you usually get this short description of the author he published these books, blah blah blah and then to humanize the author did you notice it? you have usually then two, three lines about some private life. in her, now i read a detective novel, she is the best for me, of patricia hesmithith, and it said at the end, in her free time, ms. hemith is gardening and taking care of her cats. this is ideology, this signal. so i tried to do with my last book, the publisher rejected it, to twist this just to shock people, to add, in his free time, professor gk is surfing. surfing the internet for child pornography and and teaching his son to pull out legs of spiders or something like this. just to show it how this is the falsity itself. this distance, this distance is it. okay, now the final twist, the final question. if we have this cynical functioning of ideology and so on and so on. but what about... so-called fundamentalism then isn't nonetheless then fundamentalism so-called fundamentalism, a good thing in the sense of my god they date. at least really believe. no. why not? let me be very precise here. uh i think that fundamentalism and the utmost postmodern cynicism share something. what i call the decline of the symbolic function. what for me is the symbolic function is that you take. a fiction, seriously. in the sense of, do you know this old story? i think it was first, you find it in some marivaux comedy, then it's quoted by kant, and later and then it's even later you find a version with marx brothers, this famous anecdote of husband unexpectedly returning home, he finds his wife in bed with another. man and the wife said, now you have to choose. if you truly love me, there is nobody here. if you truly love me, you will believe my words, not your eyes. this is what we do. this minimum is the minimum of civilization. uh... even if you know belief is always a minimally absurd belief. now, okay, this is a ridiculous example, but let me give you a much more beautiful tragic example. most most sketchy one almost. you know the diaries of anna frank? there is a famous passage there where she says, in spite of all the horrors that the germans are doing, i still believe in essential divine goodness of every human person. this is a clear act of some kind of absurd wager. belief has always the moment of this crazy decision, crazy counterfact. w wager. in spite of all the evidence, i believe it. and i think this kind of belief should be reasserted even today. isn't the whole topic, insofar as we accept it, it's more problematic of human rights, human equality. it's this kind of a crazy wager in spite of all the differences that i see i accept it as a wager humans are fundamentally. dignified this is... this is an article of faith and i don't think it's anything ideological about it. what i'm claiming is that the cynical functioning of ideology, where you no longer have this faith in symbolic. beliefs where you simply instrumentalized ideology and with fundamentalists. they do the same. for both of them. they no longer trust. disbelief. of course, it's obvious in what sense? cynics don't believe. they simply don't believe. even if they practice beliefs. they don't believe. that's clear. but now you will tell me, but what about fundamentalists? ah, a true fundamentalist, i think. literally. does not believe. in what sense? no, it's not in a deep paradox. what i'm... aiming at here is the difference between belief and knowledge. namely, what gave me this idea is i met some of the so-called fundamentalists and what shocked me is with what is. the the more they are fundamentalists, the more they like modern sciences, cyberspace and so on and so on. why? because for them... now i will try to be as clear as possible. for an authentic christian to say. christ has arisen from death and so on. it's an absurd article of faith. for them it's a simple fact you know what i mean? they don't treat it as this pathetic, impossible, existential wager. which is why, for example, you know this very interesting story of the turin shroud you know it was allegedly proven that it is false in the 14teenth century now those who claim it's true have. i another version that nonetheless there are some problems with that atomic decay how may but i think that a true christian. should be horrified at the prospect that this may turn out to be true because my god, if it really is christ's blood there. you have a nightmare perspective. it like the first evil idea that comes to your mind. let's look at the dna then and see who really is the father. no, i mean, then you will probably discover that it's some arab servant and so on, no whatever. so it for them... but it's not only this opportunism. it's rather dead. they feel in a correct way, christians, that... this article of faith is not it's not a matter in this sense of knowledge, while for fundamentalists, it is simply a matter of knowledge. for them there is... there is no problem here. religious statements are for them statements about simple positive facts. they read the bible literally. this crazy. decision of. in spite of all the facts and so on, i choose to believe. in human rights, equality and so on and so on. they don't have that one, which is why, and i think this is a much more, not only. funny, but... cool. correct. critique of so-called fundamentalism. it is not, as people usually claim that fundamentalism poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge and so on and so on. this is the superficial appearance. no with crazy theories against evolution, blah, blah blah. no. i think that the fundamental threat that they pose is the threat to believe itself. they are, if you want to read a text where really the last traces of true authentic belief disappeared, it's the fundamentalist text. again, we are in the field of knowledge there. articles of faith are treated as simple positive knowledge that's the true danger and it's a very nice paradoxical situation in a way where those who pretend to be again. the most religious ones have already betrayed religion. okay. what i wanted to do is to just to report to you into what i wanted to do. but i will cut it short now because i speak little. one thing i wanted to explore also is... the structure of this disavowed materialized beliefs. i think that we have at this level what i'm tempted to call the institutional unconscious. in the sense, not in any mystical jungian sense of collective unconscious, but a set of implicit presuppositions, desires, beliefs, which are... this about. by an official ideological edifice, but are part of the. institutional logic and here we also enter a very painful domain for some catholics at least because for example i'm more and more convinced that all these cases of pedophilia paedophilia scandals among the catholics prove that this pedophilia is not simply. something which happens to catholics to catholic priests as a simple fact of life in the sense of even if i become a priest what can i do? i'm still human, so this haunts me and so on and so on. i can even, to be extremely vicious, imagine an ordinary heterosexual guy who becomes a priest and then turns slowly into a pedophilia because it's something in the logic, it's not the private unconscious. set of unwritten obscene rules inscribed into the institution itself. that's one line i wanted to pursue another line, which is my favorite philosophical line. i don't have time for it. it's to define this knowledge, this implicit knowledge that we possess without knowing it, if you want, or rather, sorry, now i'm making a mistake. i was criticizing this implicit belief in the hegelian terms of self-consciousness. namely... i was surprised. reading hegel's theory of state. about how precise hegel is there when hegel says that the state is a... yeah. that state is a self-consciousness of the people and so on and so on. usually hegel is read there as kind of a ridiculous spiritualist. implying a kind of a mega-spiritual, mystical spiritual subject, whatever, who runs the show behind. no. what hegel? means is something very materialist there. for hegel, self-consciousness simply means refractive registration in the sense of you don't. do it you at the same time register it reflectively as a symbolic act what do i mean let me give you a totally vulgar example most of the people who have jeans war jeans today are for example in slovenia my country many people, now it's fashionable to have landrovers and so on and so on. people live in the city and travel mostly from the suburb to the center, but in a land rover. so they don't need it. so it's in order, as it were, to make a statement. you know what i mean? it's not just a utilitarian fact. even or precisely when you are dealing with objects which declare themselves as pure utility. it's not fashion, it's just useful. but they already declare their you. this is for hegel self-consciousness. it has nothing to do with. individual individual awareness. for hegel, this means that the state is not just an instrument, but has to register, declare its status through public rituals and so on and so on. and hegel is here very materialist when he emphasizes that this has nothing to do with people effectively being aware of it. hegel, in some of his notes, which were only now published to his philosophy of right, evokes an example of a state parade, for example, state ritual. where even if all the individuals are thinking about their private affairs whatever not aware still the ritual as such is self-consciousness of the state. in this sense, to give you an idea, in the hegelian sense, the symptom is the subject's self-consciousness. let us say i'm convinced in. something whatever. but then through a symptom i undermine it. let's say i think i love my wife but i produce a symptom which embodies my. secret, disavowed, i'm not aware of it, hatred, whatever of my wife. uh. d symptom ich. in the hegelian sense the moment of my self-consciousness in this sense... you know what i mean? we have again, a certain knowledge of which i'm not aware but which exists out there. exists out there objectively. show. all these paradoxes. i think again are crucial for how ideology functions today the reason i engaged in this way is to again to make you sceptical about this easy disposition of ideological positions today where as if the opposition is between, i don't know, fundamentalist belief or liberal skepticism, hedonism and so on and so on. it's not like this. i think that it's not like this. in in a way precisely. cynics or hedonists are usually in their practice itself, believers. so again, i think that this strange category of belief which exists objectified in our acts, even if we publicly mock it, make fun of it and so on and so on, it's the key to analyze today's society, the key to how ideology functions in a post-ideological era. i'm sorry if i was... too long, but on the other hand, i'm not sorry because that's my nature. thanks very much.
okay. let's do some serious work today. i don't want to go into the direction of that unfortunate movie on me because i only seen it once and then my idea was like would you allow your daughter, would you allow that guy to take your daughter to a movie no i mean okay so let me start. i really want to talk about belief. you will immediately learn it's not a big surprise what the chickens are from the title. but believe, what do we mean? what do we believe, especially how how do we believe? today. uh. i think that our predicament. with regards to belief. finds its perfect expression in a documentary that i saw recently called sand castles, buddhism and global. finally, it's a documentary by alexander oie, i'm not sure i pronounce it correctly. it's a documentary which combines commentaries from economist arnold but, sociologist saskia assassin and the tibetan buddhist teacher zhong garkchen rininppo. sassen and booth discuss the gigantic scope, power as well as social and economic effects of global finance. capital markets now valued at an estimated 83 trillion dollars exist within a system based purely on self-interest. in which herd behavior, often based on rumors, can inflate or destroy the value of companies or whole economies in a matter of hours. then the tibetan buddhist counters them with ruminations about the nature of human perception, illusion, desire and enlightenment. i release your attachment two. something that is not there in reality but is only a perception. this statement is supposed to throw a new light on the mad dance of zillion dollars speculations. now, echoing the buddhist notion that there is no self, only a stream of continuous perceptions, saskia ass comments about global capital. quote, it's not that there are 83 trillion. it is essentially a continuous set of movements. it disappears and it reappears. so, itler. you got the point. that the ontology, as it were. that is forced on you, imposed on you. if you participate in these financial deals, speculations on future, etc etc., is basically the buddhist ontology, no substantial reality, the fragility of reality and so on. the problem here is, of course, how are we to read this parallel between the buddhist ontology and the structure of virtual capitalism's universe? the film tends towards the humanist reading. seen through a buddhist lens, the exuberance of global financial wealth is illusory. divorced from objective reality. the very real human suffering. created by deals made on trading floors and in boardrooms invisible to most of us if however, that's now my critical reaction. if one accepts the premise that. the value of material wealth and one's experience of reality is subjective. and that desire place the crucial role in both daily life and neoliberal economics. is it not possible to draw? from. it the... exact opposite conclusion. is it not that our traditional life world was based on the naive realist, substantialist notions of external reality composed of fixed objects? while the unheard of dynamics of virtual capitalism confronts us with the illusory nature of reality. when you see that a rumor can a rumor can. cause the collapse of whole economies and so on and so on. isn't this a wonderful lesson? on the fragility of our notion of reality again, what better proof of the non-substantial character of reality than a gigantic fortune which can dissolve into nothing in a couple of hours due to a sudden false rumor? consequently, why complain that financial speculations with futures are divorced from objective reality when the basic premise of the buddhist ontology is that there is no objective reality in the first place? the only critical lesson to be drawn from the buddhist perspective about today's virtual capitalism is that one should be aware that we are dealing with a mere theater of shadows, with non-substantial virtual entities, and consequently that we should not fully engage ourselves in the capitalist game. that we should play the game with an inner distance virtual capitalism could thus act as the first step towards liberation. it confronts us with the fact that the cause of our suffering and enslavement is not objective reality itself. there is no such thing, but our desire, our craving for material things, our excessive attachment to them. all one has to do after one gets rid of the false notion of substantialist reality is to renounce desire itself to adopt the attitude of inner peace and distance. no wonder such buddhism can function as the perfect ideology of today's virtual capitalism. it allows us to participate in the capitalist game with an inner distance, with our fingers crossed, as it were. i hope you got my point. i'm not praising capitalism. on the contrary. i am. rather criticizing if not buddhism itself, at least a certain use of it. i think, again, that it's kind of a... ontology which says, you know, there is no fixed reality, it's just a flux of perception, renounce the notion of substantialist reality, there is no self, you don't exist and so on, the world is just a game that this is the perfect attitude for today's capitalism. that is to say... what? that is to say that this kind of a disbelieving attitude, don't take the game seriously, don't engage yourself fully. this is what is needed if the system is to function smoothly today let me give you... the opposite experience. when the new pope, the german cardinal joseph ratzinger was elected, now i think he's benedict xvi. some of my friends were shocked and their reproach was my god, but this guy really believes in. deck. christ incarnation and so on and so on. . i mean, uh... and this tells us a lot about how this kind of buddhist western buddhists, skeptical attitude. it all around us like we are almost shocked if some. if we discover that that somebody really believes. i don't know how it is in your country, but i know that in europe recently there were some interesting. sociological inquiries where they asked people, thousands of people a series of questions. they started with are you a christian. okay, eighty% said yes. then later, not immediately afterwards but like half an hour later, to confuse them, they ask them the same question but in a different form, just asking a more specific question which is part of the fundamental christian dogma. like, do you believe that there was 2,000 years ago a guy walking around palestine who was the son of god. 5% believe it. so... what did they mean by this? first one. but so how does this structure? let me be very specific here. my claim is not they don't really believe it. my claim is that this is how. today. belief itself is structured. we all know the marx brothers standard joke story. this man looks as an idiot, he acts as an idiot, this shouldn't deceive you, he is an idiot. i think this is how the shock we discover when we see a religious person. it would be this man looks as if he believes, he acts as if he believes, but this shouldn't deceive you, he really believes. we are always surprised when we see this. and my teaching will be that the same goes also for atheists. it's also, he looks, he acts as an atheist, but it's always a shock to discover that. the guy you are talking to really is an eight-day. that is to say, i don't know what's your experience, but my experience is whenever i find a person like postmodern theorists who are supposed to be atheists and so on. then i will not name names. i'm not in mccarthy business, but let me tell you that some of the very big names are on my list. like the god deconstruct god blah. then i ask them, but do you really? accept that there is. nothing, no god and so on. practically all of them. again, i can give you almost who is who in the construction theory and so on. practically, tell me, of course i don't believe in institutional religion. of course i don't believe that there is somebody up there, god. but you never know, maybe i have deep respect for sy. there is some higher force maybe, and so on and so on. i mean, it's very difficult to find a person who would look you straight into the eye and say, no, i really don't believe. but my other surprise is that it's similar with... religious people, i mean people who are officially religious, i like to ask them the opposite question, logical. but do you really believe? and often i get the same, no, it's not a matter of belief, it's more how important this is, how... it makes you feel good, to cut a long story short it makes you feel richer and so on and so on. i claim that it functions, and i will later try to explain how it functions through this speech. so it is as if to really believe to have this deep belief, you have to... put up an atheist. front. musk then or the other way around to be skeptical you have to superficially appear as religious. maybe you know some plays and novels by graham green like the end of the affair, where he focuses on the topic of the traumatic impact on a non-believer. of a miracle. like in the end of the affair also in one drama you have a total non-believer who is then totally shocked, shattered when he or she, you maybe saw the movie with rafe fe and julian moore and so on, like an atheist encountering a miracle. but i think that he's too naive here, graham green. i think that the true example would be the one, i don't agree with him politically, i don't even like him, but it's an interesting film. namely, did you see with steve martin? leap of faith. but you have a fake con artist of this miracle healer and so on and so on. ent then... he's doing tricks and so on, cheating with his magic healings, but at the end he does it and he's totally shattered. he discovers that he really can do a miracle and he's totally shattered. i think that the greatest... shock for a religious person is to discover that it really works. and this is how today it functions. and it's the same with psychoanalysts. many of my psychanalytic friends are by nature skeptical and from time to time they are shocked. they tell me, my god, but it really works, this interpretation. the whole life should be this, no? so,,... this is what interests me. belief. it is impossible. to do it. directly. somehow we have to take a distance. is. take a distance towards it. eh. so... now let me make a point clear here. my thesis is not that nobody really believes today and so on and so on. it's much more complex. i think that that belief is not where we think it is. for example let us take. some a think where you would think there is no belief there. like. stalinist i think the underlying structure is deeply religious, not in the stupid superficial sense. communism is a new belief. they believed in paradise on earth, in historical necessity. but it's something else. for example when you read reports on stalinist purges, how they justified it and so on and so on. you always get in stalinist texts what? in theology is referred to as the perspective of final judgment. the idea is today it may appear confused to you, we are doing horrible things. killing innocent people but at some point later when there will be communism we will be able to look back and to recognize know as if at some point in the future what would it. there will be kind of a final historical judgment. where? every event, every act will get its proper place. and i think this perspective is absolutely crucial for stalinist communism. that's the first thing to say. the second thing, now i want to go into a more tricky water, when we are dealing with beliefs. we should really be careful about what people believe when they say they believe and so on and so on. the problem i ran into is how our western standard liberal theory of beliefs and meaning precisely when it tries to understand the cultural other is usually at its most racist what i'm referring here to is, for example, the standard theory developed among others most systematically by donald davidson. the standard theory according to which human acts are rational intentional, that they are accountable in the terms of beliefs and desires of the. agent you know to simplify the idea is you do something because you have first you desire something and then you have certain beliefs about the reality. you think if i do this, the result will be what i desire. now this may appear almost a self-evident theory. but if you apply it... this theory to so-called suicidal terrorist acts. you get totally crazy. image. for example, we end up attributing to fundamentalist terrorists, the most ridiculous beliefs. as if. the arab terrorists really mean that they will get the, how many of them, 70 or 400 virgins waiting for them in paradise. whatever and so on and so on. i think that again this is not this is not the structure. this is not the structure. you don't have to believe this very theory. which again is supposed to understand the other like if we are to understand the terrorists we should look at their structure of beliefs ends up making them ridiculous idiots. let me give you an extreme example here recently i read a book. about. the korean war. and then i found there a wonderful quote from a... official north korea communist propaganda from 52. describing one great hero and how he died for fatherland. here is literally the quote. the hero. kang ho yung. was seriously wounded in both arms and both legs in the kamakh hill battle. be attentive here. he couldn't move neither legs nor arms totally. so he rolled into the midst of the enemy. with a hand grenade in his mouth. and wipe them out. shouting my arms and legs were broken. imagine shouting but... my arms and legs are broken. but on the contrary my spirit. retaliatory spirit against you imperialist scoundrels is now a thousand times stronger i will show the unbending fighting will of a member of the workers' party of korea and unflinching we firmly pledge to the party and our beloved leader kim il sok. now, okay, it's easy to make fun of this. it's non-realistic. the guy, first, how could he even how could he put the bomb roll and make this long official proclamation and so on and so on. it. however uh. what if we are reading this in a wrong way? what if the mistake here is the same as that of the anthropologists who impute to so-called primitive aboriginals. uh yeah who celebrate some animal as their ancestor, the belief that they. are really descended from that animal my proposal is why not read this passage the scene that i described which effectively sounds operatic, like a scene from the opera, in its ridiculous, pathetic character. why not read it in a way similar to listening to, for example, act three of richard wagner's opera tristan und isolde, where, i mean, it's easy to laugh at the other, but what happens in act three of tristan is in a way more impossible and ridiculous. if you know it, tristan is mortally wounded and then he's singing an extremely difficult area much longer than this proclamation. it lasts about 50 minutes no? so, okay, we all know. that's not meant, but what if this scene is meant in the same way? imagine this scene as an... es an operatic scene. as if... and an aria. in. in other words... if you were to ask a korean north korean guy, but do you really think this happened? he would probably say, are you stupid? of course not. this is just meant to articulate our will to fight and blah blah blah. no so again, belief is not in this sense literally. a. this is not how it functions and i claim especially with so-called fundamentalists, don't make idiots of them. another problem that i have with so called fundamentalism is that it generated in our media in our reaction uh. another great misunderstanding i don't think that the so-called fundamentalist islamic terror is grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization and so on and so on i think that now i will say something politically incorrect and very brutal, that the problem with-called so-called, i have problems with these designations, fundamentalist terrorists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. like, obviously, if you read hitler's mein kampf, it's obvious that hitler's problem is that he has problems with jew. he considers himself inferior. which is why our condescending, politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more furious and feeds their ressentiment. the problem is not cultural difference. but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that they. secretly already internalize our standards and measure themselves by them and this clearly goes also for for example dalai lama who justifies the tibetan buddhism. in western terms of the pursuit of happiness, the avoidance of pain and so on and so on. so paradoxically, i think what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of true racist conviction into their own superiority, if you want. another thing. that. should be stressed here where i think the reference to terrorism is crucial is that we should totally abandon this opposition which is forced on us as if in ethics. we should oppose those who are ready to sacrifice themselves for a larger common good and utilitarians, hedonists and so on and so on. we can learn here a lot i think already from the good old rousseau h? rousseau, who distinguished clearly between simple egotism and the pathological amour propre, self-love. his idea is that there is nothing bad in simple egotism, caring for yourself, for your pleasures. the result is always good, and it's even easy to generate morality out of this. the problem of evil is not hedonism. it's not i want to have a good time. as he does it in a very precise way, rousseau. he point... he... demonstrate how... the problem is when. destroying the enemy, the problem is that of envy. when destroying the enemy, preventing the other to enjoy becomes for you more important than your own enjoyment. and when you get caught into the logic of... better to ruin others' enjoyment than for me to enjoy. so the point is here that the logic of envy. it has nothing to do with hedonism and all this stuff. which is why now i will make a more concrete statement here, which is why i think john rawls's theory of justice is catastrophically wrong. it works only on the assumption that people are simply egotists. it works only if you suspend envy and... rentiment. that is to say, you know probably rawls's model of a just society where social inequalities are tolerated only insofar as they are based on natural inequalities which are considered contingent, not marriage, and, you know, this rawlsian test that you should, the veil of ignorance test, you should make a judgment without knowing what is your position. to directly formulate the result, certain inequalities, some people earning more and so on, should be tolerated. only if they. help also the lowest. the poorest, the lowest. so that in this way you can justify it. okay, you can earn more or whatever than others, but also the lowest one will profit. will profit from it. it sounds very reasonable. so. first, we only get inequalities which are justified by helping also the poorest the lowest in social hierarchy and point two. this the privileges of some people being richer and so on are not justified. through some old hierarchies or whatever, but only in your natural. capacities. how would this work in real life? i think it would have meant a total catastrophe. why? because imagine that you are the the... the lowest, the poor one. you would of course be frustrated the others have more than you. but you would even be deprived of the right to protest because it would be clear that you are less than the others because of your natural inabilities and not only this, but the others are richer than you. basically, in order to help you, i claim that the moment you introduce envy, the logic of envy, it explodes. it's a formula for disaster. in other words, i think that i don't know, probably you have the same stories, but... the logic of desire, which is the logic of envy, is totally ignored here. like, there is an anecdote in my own country, in slovenia, about a farmer, a peasant, who is given a choice by a good witch or a magician. he will. the god, whatever, all-powerful person will give him the peasant. one cow and to his neighbor two cows. or take from him one cow and from his neighbor he will take two cows. of course the peasant immediately chooses the second option. or in slovenia we have even a more morbid version. the witch or the magician tells the farmer, i will do to you whatever you want, but i warrant you, i will do it twice to your neighbor. you know what immediately the farmer response, take one of my eyes. you will take both the neighbor and so on and so on. what's the lesson of this? now, don't misunderstand me. i hate friedrich hayek. but here he was right. where he emphasized how it is much easier to accept inequalities. if one can claim that they result from an impersonal blind force. so. hayek claims the good thing about irrationality of the market success or failure in capitalism. you know, this idea that it's not really... you are intelligent, whatever. there is always an element of contingency, of chance, who fails, who succeeds on the market. is that it allows me precisely to perceive my failure or success as basically undeserved. contingent. so. the fact that capitalism is not just. far from being something which makes it more intolerable is precisely what makes it palpable. for the majority. because can you imagine what horrible the situation would be for you if you would have to accept that i failed because i am an idiot or whatever. but if i say, okay, basically it's not my fault, market forces are impenetrable, crazy, it makes it much easier to swallow it. that's, i think, nonetheless a nice dialectical observation how the very injustice capitalism is accepted by people not because it's just. no, those who are more intelligent, blah, blah, blah, succeed. if it were to be just, it would explode long ago. what makes it palpable is its very injustice and that we know that it's unjust. in this sense, we can, as it were, accept our own failure as something which is not our own responsibility. so much about this now let me return to belief uh. what is the basic, what's then the structure of belief? if it's never clear what we believe, how it functions and so on and so on. now we come to the chicken. it's an old story, you know it. i will just give a new twist to it. you know this old classical joke about a man who believes himself to be a grain of corn seed, whatever. he is taken to the mental institution where doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. however, when he is cured, convinced that he is not a grain but a man and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately... comes back. trembling. thereared there is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that the chicken will eat him. the doctor says, of course, dear fellow, you know very well that you are not a grain but amen. of course i know that, replies the patient, but does the chicken know? now you will say that's a joke. no, i will try to prove it now in the second paragraph that this is exactly how it works. for example, this is what psychoanalysis is about. it's easy to convince you. death your symptoms are just effects of your repressed traumas and so on and so on. but the problem is to convince the unconscious, which is, as it were... the chicken in you. how does this work? even with marxism. i think that this is what marx was. which is why i think marx should still be read. this is what marx was targeting. precisely, i claim this paradox of belief is what marx was targeting in his good old-fashioned, but i think we should return to it, theory of so-called commodity fetishism. let me quote you the first. sentence, or the first two sentences of this subdivision4 of the chapter one of capital, the fetishism of the commodity and its secret. quote, a commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious trivial thing, but its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. everybody reads this passage, but are you aware how strange it is? what marx does here exactly the opposite of what one would expect from a well precisely a marxist social critic. the idea is you take... mystified ideological edifice religious fantasy whatever and you try to reduce it to real-life phenomena economic political processes you try to show how even these most mystical sublime phenomena are generated by the real life struggles, production, and so on. that's the usual idea of critique of ideology, to show how ideological phenomena are generated by real life. but marx is saying here. almost the opposite. that the problem is not to reduce sublime phenomena to ordinary reality. the problem is to become aware of the, as it were, metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties of the theological dimension of what appears to us as ordinary reality itself. this is for mark. commodity. commodity fetishism. commodity fetishism is not you think you are dealing with something mystical, commodity, whatever, but in reality, as we put it, commodity is just an ordinary object, part of social exchange and so on and so on. you think you are dealing with an ordinary object. but... in reality, no, that's the whole problem, in what kind of reality there is this theological aspect of commodity. so... that's my formula. let us say a critical marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism. the marxist reproach. the the bourgeois subject is not a commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people. the actual marxist reproach is rather. you may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations, that for example, money is just a kind of voucher entiting you to a part of social product. but this is not how things really seem to you, in your social reality. by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity appears to you as a magical object. endowed with social powers in other words sorry, to go back. what just to explain this to make it absolutely clear so we have three levels not two we don't simply have. this is my central point. we don't simply have reality and illusion, illusory beliefs. it's not that in reality a commodity is. a social product, some object becomes a commodity because of its role in social exchange. but we idiots are victims of commodity fetishism and think this is an inherent value. there is something magic in a commodity or money. no! the paradox is much nicer in marx. commodity is in reality just an ordinary object who functions as money, commodity because of social relations. and this is what we think also. so, what we think is close to reality, if you want. but the site of commodity fetishism is not our beliefs, it's our social reality itself. we act. eshif. we embody our belief in our social exchange. wait, you know, it's a little bit the same as, let us say your father is an idiot. or no, let... this is too obvious example. let us take anti-seemitism, our late capitalist liberal anti-semitism. jews are people like others. and we think they are. but nonetheless... when you encounter a jew, most of us. but not only a druid, you can replace druids with all other races and so on and so on. whenever there is a racism. it. you treat them in your social exchange itself your anti-semitic or other racist prejudices are embodied so you got the point. when marx defines ideology as. they es they don't know it but still they are doing it. it doesn't mean the stupidity of. they don't know what they are doing. they are doing one thing, but they think they misperceive what they are doing. it's that. the illusion is not in what people think, but in what they do. they don't see the illusion. that they follow in what they are doing. let us say that you are of another race. i as a white liberal, which i am more but letta said, oh, i like blacks, blah, blah, blah. but then through some hints you get my racism. literally. you see, i don't know, i am not aware of beliefs which i practice in my act. that's the side of ideological illusion of marx. and you got my point here, how? contemporary cynicism uses this gap. of course at the level of explicit belief of our explicit conviction we can be open blah blah blah but and at that level, maybe we live in a post-ideological era. what interests me is ideology which is embodied in material life itself, in social exchanges and so on and so on. so let me go on. so, uh... uh we can... we can imagine. a marxist commodity fetishism version of the story about chicken. a bourgeois subject is visiting a course of marxism where he is taught about commodity fetishism. however, after the finished course, he comes back to his teacher complaining that he is still the victim of commodity fetishism. the teacher tells him, but you know now how things stand, that commodities are only expressions of social relations, there is nothing magic about them. and then, of course, the pupil replies, of course, i know that, but the commodities i'm dealing with do not know it. that's commodity fetishism. now you will say i'm dreaming. maybe, but marx is dreaming with me. here is a famous quote from capital when marx says the same thing. where he invokes this wonderful metaphor of commodities themselves talking to each other. a quote, if commodities could speak. they would say this our use value may interest men but it does not belong to us as objects what does belong to us as objects however is our value our own intercourse as commodities proof it and so on and so on. so again. the true task is not to convince people that commodities are just ordinary objects and so on, but as it were to convince the commodities. that is to say, to get rid of ideology which is embodied. in our real social interaction not to change the way we speak about commodities but to change the way commodities speak among themselves as it were we can go here even a step further, my slovene lakian. party member colleague alka zupancic did this in a book which will appear soon on heggelland comedy we can repeat the same story. now i come to my central point of chicken and so on. about gotott aproppos god himself, let's imagine a society of enlightened revolutionary terror where a man is put in prison because he believes in god. with different measures, with kind of ideological brainwashing and so on, he is brought to knowledge that god does not exist. they convince him. then he is dismissed. but then soon he comes running back and he explained that he scared of being punished by god. then the teacher, terrorist teacher tells him, but what's the problem? we cured you. you know that god doesn't exist, of course. what's the reply? you can guess it. i know it, but does god know it? that he doesn't exist. now you will say i'm joking here. i'm not. let me... now give you. my final point, this is why my attachment to christian legacy, and i speak here as an eight, it's so passionate. i follow here my preferred catholic theologist gilbert keith chesterton. who claim that precisely and only in christianity god does know. d. at the moment of father, father, you know, on the cross, why did you forsake me? here is a wonderful quote from chesterton's orthodoxy quote. when the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven. it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross, the cry which confessed that god was forsaken of god. and now let the revolutionaries choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. they will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. no. the matter grows too difficult for human speech, but let the atheists themselves choose a god. they will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation. only one religion in which god seemed for an instant to be an atheist. that's the unique element of christianity for chesterton. if we take seriously that, father, why have you forsaken me and so on, it's not simply. men are abandoned by god and so on. it's god himself is for a moment abandoned by god. that is to say, the gap between man and god is as it were, reflected into god himself. and that's the difficult thing to accept. which is why i think that christianity in this sense is much closer to this kind of atheist position than the standard atheism, which is that of all my friends, the culture atheism, which is, of course, using the cultural reference. all my jewish friends say, i ask them, why don't you eat this good pork sausage? you know, i don't believe it, but you know, it's part of my cultural inheritance and so on and so on. know you don't do it out of. bel believe you say, i just follow the traditions, the rituals and so on and so on. uh... uh. another way you can detect. d! j i coll it. disscenter or whatever. de-centered belief, belief which socially functions even when you deny it. uh be through displacing this belief onto another it's incredible how often. people are really not a problem for for them not to believe but you... need to have another people whom you suppose he believes. and that the critical moment is not for you to discover that you don't believe, but to discover that this other who as it were, believed for you does not believe. and i'm not here making fun. i mean, this can get extremely serious. for example, maybe you heard about her. she was teaching for some time at new school. she's still there, agnes keller, the hungarian look she told me a wonderful story. okay, wonderful, i mean theoretically wonderful, in reality terrifying. when she was, i mean, she was in auschwitz, she has the numbers and so on. she told me that how there in every cell, every building. there was a myth. you know, most of the people there, the majority of the people were, let's call them survivalists. totally shattered. you only focused on your survival. you followed certain rules, but within these rules you could steal for others and so on. when you lose even this survivalist attitude, you regress to the level of so-called musulman and muslims, living dead. you simply didn't care. but nonetheless she told me in every barack. there was a myth, a belief that never in your barack, but in the nearby barack. there was somebody who was not simply only keen on his or her survival somebody who still remained even in these horrible circumstances an ethical person sacrificed himself, helped others and so on and so on and then she told me something interesting the most dangerous moment was when you discovered, as unfortunately you almost always did, that this other doesn't exist, that it's a myth, like you, in some work. in group, you meet this other and you discover that a death that he's like us, just a survivalist. at that point, usually you broke down, you regressed to the level of musulman of of ironically, they were called muslims. this is, okay, western racism. you know why? because in the western imaginary of the early 20th century, muslims were supposed to be these people totally abandoning themselves in faith, just obeying destiny. you just prayed, prayed, and accept everything. and these people who were totally broken, the living dead, they just did like this. they didn't even act. so ironically, nice case of practical racism they will quote much. but the interesting point is that you got my point that even in order to be a... cruel survival. you need that. another guy to be, as it were good for you. you needed to believe i may be. i, may be evil. egotisch! because another one is good for me, as it were. if you needed that even to support your egotist attitude. and it's incredible how often you find this. at different levels for example i read an interesting research uh... recently, about... sexual promiscuity, how most of the people who engage in orgies and so on, they can be extremely wild doing i don't know what. but usually, nonetheless, they always have another one who, as it were, has to remain pure. for them. it's usually their children or their like i can do with triple penetration, name it, whatever, but don't touch my son or don't touch my mother. there is somebody else who has to remain. p. so, uh... let me go on here. how then? what's the structure here? the structure of this objectified belief, that's my lesson here. beliefs today, more than ever, precisely in our cynical post-ideological blah, blah, blah era how, beliefs are objectified. you can, as it were, believe without believing. you just practice belief with your act. there is a wonderful anecdote, maybe known to some of you, about niels bohr, you know, copenhagen, the guy, who i think was very intelligent, also in theological matters. you know that i think that he provided a perfect answer to your own guy here, princeton einstein. no, you know the famous god't play dice. but you know what niels bhr answer to einstein was? don't tell god what to do. no, i think it's correct. okay, there is another, i think, even much better anecdote about... niels b. h. who? a friend visited him in a countryside house and saw it was an old farmer house, saw above the entrance the horseshoe on the entrance door. i don't know if it's here also, but in europe this is kind of a superstitious object, like it brings luck if you have a horseshoe. okay, so the surprised visitor uh. asked niels bohr, why do you have that? my god, i thought you were a scientist. do you really believe in this? you know nielsborg gave a perfect answer. of course i'm not an idiot. of course, i do not believe in it. but i have it because i was told that it works also if you don't believe it. that's how it works today. we don't believe it, but it works even if if you don't believe it. in other work. uh. this brings us back to my big theological reference this notion of objectified beliefs to pascal i think that pascal you know the pascalian slogan interpreted endlessly by almost all french, it is as if the entire french marxism is a version of pascalian theology. you know the pascalian famousables, like pascal is basically the first theorist of alcoholics and anonymous. fake it till you make it. that is to say, you don't believe, no problem. do as if you believe, kneel down, pray, and believe will come by itself. but i think that from today's experience we should turn around pascal. it's more complex. the logic is not. kneel down end. and kneel down and you will believe but kneel down and you will make another belief. another agency or whatever, belief for you. that is to say. one can say that how put... the problem is not, the truly traumatic thing is not to believe, but to believe seriously, too much. and i think that what ritual allows you is, as it were, to get rid of your belief. the idea is, are you too haunted by religious experience? do you really believe? is it too horrible of you? my god, i really experienced god and so on. not a problem. practice a ritual and then it will get mechanized and you can think about masturbation, whatever you want. you know, the ritual is doing it for you. it's the same thing, as i don't want to repeat it here, that i immensely like, which i think is one of the greatest 20th century invention can laughter on tv. you know, where the tv set literally laughs for you. now, i may be an idiot here, but for me it really works in the sense that let's say in the evening you come home, you are tired as a dog, you put on tv, you get a stupid show, friends, whatever, cheers, can laughter. what's the magic? the magic is i totally disagree with people who claim that the function of can laughter you know, laughter on tv soundtrack itself, is that to make, in this idiotic imitation to make you laugh. it's simply not true. again, i spoke with some researchers who told me, no, people don't, it doesn't function in this way. no, the point is precisely that you are rid of even the duty to laugh. so what's the point? that's the magic. the magic is that, maybe i'm the idiot here, but i'm afraid only i'm not, is's that when the show is over, you just start as an idiot, nonetheless you are relieved as if you laughed. that's the magic of it. the tv laughed for you and it worked as if you did it. and i think that this is even. the nice old catholic manipulation with marriage it's too much for you to really love a partner. it's too intense. it's unbearable. you know how difficult it is truly to be in love. like it ruins your life. it's a catastrophe. i mean. the days, get married, you have a ritual and then you can start to dream, to cheat, whatever. you get the minimum distance of the ritual. it. so, uh... oh my god, i have so many other things, but nonetheless, slowly i will conclude it. so again, to conclude, my first big thesis is that dysfunctioning of ideology. well? you are even not aware of your own beliefs. that is to say, it is not as in the classical idea we have of ideology. you officially believe, follow the blah blah blah, but secretly you daydream about or even you are not aware how secretly you are atheist, while desires and so on and so on. today i claim the situation is almost the opposite one. we are officially hedonists, we don't care and so on and so on. because... we believe, well, not deep in ourselves, i'm not playing this game of deep discovery, because we believe in our acts, we practice beliefs, which is why not only it doesn't hurt the official ideology if you don't explicitly believe, my thesis is much stronger, it's that today, for an ideology, in order to function, it must be... it must not be taken seriously by its subject. it. too much you must keep a distance to watch. wirklich frei... for me, the most elementary ideological statement. is the statement but i'm not just... a slave of ideology. i'm also a human person. there is something more in me, this minimal distance. where do you find this distance? for example,... this is for me one of the signs of ideology at its purest. if you buy a book. of a popular author. and you know, on the back side of the cover you usually get this short description of the author he published these books, blah blah blah and then to humanize the author did you notice it? you have usually then two, three lines about some private life. in her, now i read a detective novel, she is the best for me, of patricia hesmithith, and it said at the end, in her free time, ms. hemith is gardening and taking care of her cats. this is ideology, this signal. so i tried to do with my last book, the publisher rejected it, to twist this just to shock people, to add, in his free time, professor gk is surfing. surfing the internet for child pornography and and teaching his son to pull out legs of spiders or something like this. just to show it how this is the falsity itself. this distance, this distance is it. okay, now the final twist, the final question. if we have this cynical functioning of ideology and so on and so on. but what about... so-called fundamentalism then isn't nonetheless then fundamentalism so-called fundamentalism, a good thing in the sense of my god they date. at least really believe. no. why not? let me be very precise here. uh i think that fundamentalism and the utmost postmodern cynicism share something. what i call the decline of the symbolic function. what for me is the symbolic function is that you take. a fiction, seriously. in the sense of, do you know this old story? i think it was first, you find it in some marivaux comedy, then it's quoted by kant, and later and then it's even later you find a version with marx brothers, this famous anecdote of husband unexpectedly returning home, he finds his wife in bed with another. man and the wife said, now you have to choose. if you truly love me, there is nobody here. if you truly love me, you will believe my words, not your eyes. this is what we do. this minimum is the minimum of civilization. uh... even if you know belief is always a minimally absurd belief. now, okay, this is a ridiculous example, but let me give you a much more beautiful tragic example. most most sketchy one almost. you know the diaries of anna frank? there is a famous passage there where she says, in spite of all the horrors that the germans are doing, i still believe in essential divine goodness of every human person. this is a clear act of some kind of absurd wager. belief has always the moment of this crazy decision, crazy counterfact. w wager. in spite of all the evidence, i believe it. and i think this kind of belief should be reasserted even today. isn't the whole topic, insofar as we accept it, it's more problematic of human rights, human equality. it's this kind of a crazy wager in spite of all the differences that i see i accept it as a wager humans are fundamentally. dignified this is... this is an article of faith and i don't think it's anything ideological about it. what i'm claiming is that the cynical functioning of ideology, where you no longer have this faith in symbolic. beliefs where you simply instrumentalized ideology and with fundamentalists. they do the same. for both of them. they no longer trust. disbelief. of course, it's obvious in what sense? cynics don't believe. they simply don't believe. even if they practice beliefs. they don't believe. that's clear. but now you will tell me, but what about fundamentalists? ah, a true fundamentalist, i think. literally. does not believe. in what sense? no, it's not in a deep paradox. what i'm... aiming at here is the difference between belief and knowledge. namely, what gave me this idea is i met some of the so-called fundamentalists and what shocked me is with what is. the the more they are fundamentalists, the more they like modern sciences, cyberspace and so on and so on. why? because for them... now i will try to be as clear as possible. for an authentic christian to say. christ has arisen from death and so on. it's an absurd article of faith. for them it's a simple fact you know what i mean? they don't treat it as this pathetic, impossible, existential wager. which is why, for example, you know this very interesting story of the turin shroud you know it was allegedly proven that it is false in the 14teenth century now those who claim it's true have. i another version that nonetheless there are some problems with that atomic decay how may but i think that a true christian. should be horrified at the prospect that this may turn out to be true because my god, if it really is christ's blood there. you have a nightmare perspective. it like the first evil idea that comes to your mind. let's look at the dna then and see who really is the father. no, i mean, then you will probably discover that it's some arab servant and so on, no whatever. so it for them... but it's not only this opportunism. it's rather dead. they feel in a correct way, christians, that... this article of faith is not it's not a matter in this sense of knowledge, while for fundamentalists, it is simply a matter of knowledge. for them there is... there is no problem here. religious statements are for them statements about simple positive facts. they read the bible literally. this crazy. decision of. in spite of all the facts and so on, i choose to believe. in human rights, equality and so on and so on. they don't have that one, which is why, and i think this is a much more, not only. funny, but... cool. correct. critique of so-called fundamentalism. it is not, as people usually claim that fundamentalism poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge and so on and so on. this is the superficial appearance. no with crazy theories against evolution, blah, blah blah. no. i think that the fundamental threat that they pose is the threat to believe itself. they are, if you want to read a text where really the last traces of true authentic belief disappeared, it's the fundamentalist text. again, we are in the field of knowledge there. articles of faith are treated as simple positive knowledge that's the true danger and it's a very nice paradoxical situation in a way where those who pretend to be again. the most religious ones have already betrayed religion. okay. what i wanted to do is to just to report to you into what i wanted to do. but i will cut it short now because i speak little. one thing i wanted to explore also is... the structure of this disavowed materialized beliefs. i think that we have at this level what i'm tempted to call the institutional unconscious. in the sense, not in any mystical jungian sense of collective unconscious, but a set of implicit presuppositions, desires, beliefs, which are... this about. by an official ideological edifice, but are part of the. institutional logic and here we also enter a very painful domain for some catholics at least because for example i'm more and more convinced that all these cases of pedophilia paedophilia scandals among the catholics prove that this pedophilia is not simply. something which happens to catholics to catholic priests as a simple fact of life in the sense of even if i become a priest what can i do? i'm still human, so this haunts me and so on and so on. i can even, to be extremely vicious, imagine an ordinary heterosexual guy who becomes a priest and then turns slowly into a pedophilia because it's something in the logic, it's not the private unconscious. set of unwritten obscene rules inscribed into the institution itself. that's one line i wanted to pursue another line, which is my favorite philosophical line. i don't have time for it. it's to define this knowledge, this implicit knowledge that we possess without knowing it, if you want, or rather, sorry, now i'm making a mistake. i was criticizing this implicit belief in the hegelian terms of self-consciousness. namely... i was surprised. reading hegel's theory of state. about how precise hegel is there when hegel says that the state is a... yeah. that state is a self-consciousness of the people and so on and so on. usually hegel is read there as kind of a ridiculous spiritualist. implying a kind of a mega-spiritual, mystical spiritual subject, whatever, who runs the show behind. no. what hegel? means is something very materialist there. for hegel, self-consciousness simply means refractive registration in the sense of you don't. do it you at the same time register it reflectively as a symbolic act what do i mean let me give you a totally vulgar example most of the people who have jeans war jeans today are for example in slovenia my country many people, now it's fashionable to have landrovers and so on and so on. people live in the city and travel mostly from the suburb to the center, but in a land rover. so they don't need it. so it's in order, as it were, to make a statement. you know what i mean? it's not just a utilitarian fact. even or precisely when you are dealing with objects which declare themselves as pure utility. it's not fashion, it's just useful. but they already declare their you. this is for hegel self-consciousness. it has nothing to do with. individual individual awareness. for hegel, this means that the state is not just an instrument, but has to register, declare its status through public rituals and so on and so on. and hegel is here very materialist when he emphasizes that this has nothing to do with people effectively being aware of it. hegel, in some of his notes, which were only now published to his philosophy of right, evokes an example of a state parade, for example, state ritual. where even if all the individuals are thinking about their private affairs whatever not aware still the ritual as such is self-consciousness of the state. in this sense, to give you an idea, in the hegelian sense, the symptom is the subject's self-consciousness. let us say i'm convinced in. something whatever. but then through a symptom i undermine it. let's say i think i love my wife but i produce a symptom which embodies my. secret, disavowed, i'm not aware of it, hatred, whatever of my wife. uh. d symptom ich. in the hegelian sense the moment of my self-consciousness in this sense... you know what i mean? we have again, a certain knowledge of which i'm not aware but which exists out there. exists out there objectively. show. all these paradoxes. i think again are crucial for how ideology functions today the reason i engaged in this way is to again to make you sceptical about this easy disposition of ideological positions today where as if the opposition is between, i don't know, fundamentalist belief or liberal skepticism, hedonism and so on and so on. it's not like this. i think that it's not like this. in in a way precisely. cynics or hedonists are usually in their practice itself, believers. so again, i think that this strange category of belief which exists objectified in our acts, even if we publicly mock it, make fun of it and so on and so on, it's the key to analyze today's society, the key to how ideology functions in a post-ideological era. i'm sorry if i was... too long, but on the other hand, i'm not sorry because that's my nature. thanks very much.
Cornel West
and so it is with brother sthoff that he's eclectic to the core. how does one make sense of all of these fascinating moments and moments which trying to weave things together. so i'm going to try to take this moment to be a bit pedagogical. trying to say something educational in the sense of the context to grasp what you have given us. because as a public intellectual who transgresses the... disciplinary division of knowledge in art. there therefore there's no way that we can subsume what you have just presented under any discipline.
and so it is with brother sthoff that he's eclectic to the core. how does one make sense of all of these fascinating moments and moments which trying to weave things together. so i'm going to try to take this moment to be a bit pedagogical. trying to say something educational in the sense of the context to grasp what you have given us. because as a public intellectual who transgresses the... disciplinary division of knowledge in art. there therefore there's no way that we can subsume what you have just presented under any discipline.
Slavoj Žižek
in other words, it was a total confusion.
in other words, it was a total confusion.
Cornel West
because certain disciplines are highly confused, so it might be providing certain illumination and understanding much better. absolutely. but it also... is a way of traversing various publics that your mode of presentation, the very genre itself. brings us in, it lures us in, it summons us in to your discourse so that it's both academic, but it's also journalistic, it's also popular culture, it's also high culture, it's anecdotal, it's full of jokes, but there's a deep sense of the comic that's operating. but what i want to highlight first and foremost, is the philosophical framework. and it has so much to do with the story about the chicken. what i've always loved about your work. is that you are unabashedly old-fashioned in your philosophical orientation. what i mean by that. is that in a moment in which, especially on the left, people are post-marxist and postmodern and post-psychoanalytic, you are modern to the core. when he writes phrases like german idealism is the unsurpassable horizon of our philosophical experience. so from kant to hegel, that's where the good stuff actually resides. can play footing. with various postmodernernist writers, but when you want substance. you're going to have to go back to the german idealists, what were the german idealists dealing with? well, let's just look briefly at your favorite text, i think, or one of your favorite texts, the great texts of 1809. of schelling's treatise on the essence of human fruit. it's the text that hein says. shattered hegel's logic before hegel published the text. undermin the older form of german idealism. why? precisely because like the chicken in us, it highlights the traumatic core. of... the modern subject. and in many ways. what i see in your work is the centrality of the catastrophic. the monstrous and the traumatic. and even jacques lacan is a kind of means by which you'd force us to come to terms with the traumatic. and posternist modes of cynicism and relativism and nihilism and so forth are simply modes of evasion. that somehow don't want us to come to terms with that traumatic core. and what's distinctive about that text of 1809 is not only the text was written. at a moment in which his wife was dying. care lot. who was the wife of august schlegel, he had seduced. after having been engaged to her daughter.
because certain disciplines are highly confused, so it might be providing certain illumination and understanding much better. absolutely. but it also... is a way of traversing various publics that your mode of presentation, the very genre itself. brings us in, it lures us in, it summons us in to your discourse so that it's both academic, but it's also journalistic, it's also popular culture, it's also high culture, it's anecdotal, it's full of jokes, but there's a deep sense of the comic that's operating. but what i want to highlight first and foremost, is the philosophical framework. and it has so much to do with the story about the chicken. what i've always loved about your work. is that you are unabashedly old-fashioned in your philosophical orientation. what i mean by that. is that in a moment in which, especially on the left, people are post-marxist and postmodern and post-psychoanalytic, you are modern to the core. when he writes phrases like german idealism is the unsurpassable horizon of our philosophical experience. so from kant to hegel, that's where the good stuff actually resides. can play footing. with various postmodernernist writers, but when you want substance. you're going to have to go back to the german idealists, what were the german idealists dealing with? well, let's just look briefly at your favorite text, i think, or one of your favorite texts, the great texts of 1809. of schelling's treatise on the essence of human fruit. it's the text that hein says. shattered hegel's logic before hegel published the text. undermin the older form of german idealism. why? precisely because like the chicken in us, it highlights the traumatic core. of... the modern subject. and in many ways. what i see in your work is the centrality of the catastrophic. the monstrous and the traumatic. and even jacques lacan is a kind of means by which you'd force us to come to terms with the traumatic. and posternist modes of cynicism and relativism and nihilism and so forth are simply modes of evasion. that somehow don't want us to come to terms with that traumatic core. and what's distinctive about that text of 1809 is not only the text was written. at a moment in which his wife was dying. care lot. who was the wife of august schlegel, he had seduced. after having been engaged to her daughter.
Slavoj Žižek
no very leftist politically. after. death.
no very leftist politically. after. death.
Cornel West
in reactionary that's true. it's absolutely right. but i mean, and i say this because it's a way of trying to historicize. and concretize what we're talking about. because what this text is fundamentally about is what are the ways in which we talk about. the traumatic. the catastrophic. the monstrous. be it in terms of our individual psyche, or be it in terms of our culture, larger civilization. i mean, there's no accident that the text that i would highly recommend to each and every one of you called the fragile absolute. why is the christian legacy worth fighting for? various references in some ways in the text. and he didn't get a chance to read the whole text because he gave me a slightly different text, which i appreciate because it's just so... creative can say your mind moving building on building on what i read, but in that particular text, what i also saw. is how easy it is to settle for trite formulations that somehow somehow don. force us, don't compel us to wrestle with these very, very dark centers. inside of ourselves or inside of our society. now what is the significance of this? well, one thing is that one has to move backwards in order to move forward. that is to say, if we're going to go back to wrestling with the old problematic of german idealism, what does it really mean to be homeless? what does it mean to acknowledge the ineradicability of the non-rational? what if reality and being itself is impenetrable? what does it mean to actually confront the facts. of the intractability of the unfathomable. is that just empty rhetoric? not at all. it means, in fact, that somehow we've got to either learn how to confront and cope with the traumatic or we will forever remain on the surfaces and the move. toward the 19th century. towards shelling. for german idealism. who wrestling with forms of alienation and the traumatic and the catastrophic go hand in hand with the return to mars. not in any simplistic way. you can see the reading itself is sophisticated. but all the postmodernist talks. the downplay class, the downplay empire. similar modes of evasion because we don't want to deal with the traumatic core at the very center of our own lives and civilization. and we in america have a very different religious profile, as you know. 96% of fellow citizens in this country, my fellow citizens in this country, believe in god. 80% believe jesus christ is the son of god. 51%. talk on intimate terms with god at least four times a week. and you say, well, does it cut deep? is it just objectified? are the fundamentalists in some ways simply on the surface and not enacting any kind of authentic conviction? well, i don't know, when you look at the debate about abortion, you see some pretty deep intensity of people who been believe. and in fact, a woman is sacrifice. in fact, i'm willing to... sometimes confront their enemies, sometimes trash their enemies. very intense. and there's a sense in which part of the liberal project is just to lower the temperature so that they don't kill each other. and not edge each other's throat. but at the same time, you see that... the religiosity that you're talking about, so much of it market driven, as it were, so much of it obsessed with upward mobility, so much of it not really confronting the deeper traumatic core. at the very beginning of this nation and given its enactment thereafter. does, i think, provide some ground for what you're saying. i think my question to you in part would be, what would be an example, a constructive positive example of the kind of belief that you would want to promote? i know that usually it's a certain kind of psychoanalytic practice and certainly usually it's a certain kind of anti-capitalist practice or even sophisticated marxist praxis. but i want to hear a bit more about how that is enacted, where you see it at work in our society in slovenia, in europe, or what have you. so that would be one question. the second question i want to raise would be the question about the... about that lying on the cross though, my god, my god, why has i forsaken me? now you know that that's mark 15,34, and it echoes the first verse of psalm 22. that judaism already has within it a very, very rich tradition. of the dormant god, the sleeping god, the absent god. the god that seems to be far removed. in fact, when you look further, for the long and verse, it says, my god, my god, why is thou forsaking me? why is i so far from my call for help, my cry for help? why one knife. my word soaring. now you see that kind of talk. one does find in pascal. the day los abscondes.
in reactionary that's true. it's absolutely right. but i mean, and i say this because it's a way of trying to historicize. and concretize what we're talking about. because what this text is fundamentally about is what are the ways in which we talk about. the traumatic. the catastrophic. the monstrous. be it in terms of our individual psyche, or be it in terms of our culture, larger civilization. i mean, there's no accident that the text that i would highly recommend to each and every one of you called the fragile absolute. why is the christian legacy worth fighting for? various references in some ways in the text. and he didn't get a chance to read the whole text because he gave me a slightly different text, which i appreciate because it's just so... creative can say your mind moving building on building on what i read, but in that particular text, what i also saw. is how easy it is to settle for trite formulations that somehow somehow don. force us, don't compel us to wrestle with these very, very dark centers. inside of ourselves or inside of our society. now what is the significance of this? well, one thing is that one has to move backwards in order to move forward. that is to say, if we're going to go back to wrestling with the old problematic of german idealism, what does it really mean to be homeless? what does it mean to acknowledge the ineradicability of the non-rational? what if reality and being itself is impenetrable? what does it mean to actually confront the facts. of the intractability of the unfathomable. is that just empty rhetoric? not at all. it means, in fact, that somehow we've got to either learn how to confront and cope with the traumatic or we will forever remain on the surfaces and the move. toward the 19th century. towards shelling. for german idealism. who wrestling with forms of alienation and the traumatic and the catastrophic go hand in hand with the return to mars. not in any simplistic way. you can see the reading itself is sophisticated. but all the postmodernist talks. the downplay class, the downplay empire. similar modes of evasion because we don't want to deal with the traumatic core at the very center of our own lives and civilization. and we in america have a very different religious profile, as you know. 96% of fellow citizens in this country, my fellow citizens in this country, believe in god. 80% believe jesus christ is the son of god. 51%. talk on intimate terms with god at least four times a week. and you say, well, does it cut deep? is it just objectified? are the fundamentalists in some ways simply on the surface and not enacting any kind of authentic conviction? well, i don't know, when you look at the debate about abortion, you see some pretty deep intensity of people who been believe. and in fact, a woman is sacrifice. in fact, i'm willing to... sometimes confront their enemies, sometimes trash their enemies. very intense. and there's a sense in which part of the liberal project is just to lower the temperature so that they don't kill each other. and not edge each other's throat. but at the same time, you see that... the religiosity that you're talking about, so much of it market driven, as it were, so much of it obsessed with upward mobility, so much of it not really confronting the deeper traumatic core. at the very beginning of this nation and given its enactment thereafter. does, i think, provide some ground for what you're saying. i think my question to you in part would be, what would be an example, a constructive positive example of the kind of belief that you would want to promote? i know that usually it's a certain kind of psychoanalytic practice and certainly usually it's a certain kind of anti-capitalist practice or even sophisticated marxist praxis. but i want to hear a bit more about how that is enacted, where you see it at work in our society in slovenia, in europe, or what have you. so that would be one question. the second question i want to raise would be the question about the... about that lying on the cross though, my god, my god, why has i forsaken me? now you know that that's mark 15,34, and it echoes the first verse of psalm 22. that judaism already has within it a very, very rich tradition. of the dormant god, the sleeping god, the absent god. the god that seems to be far removed. in fact, when you look further, for the long and verse, it says, my god, my god, why is thou forsaking me? why is i so far from my call for help, my cry for help? why one knife. my word soaring. now you see that kind of talk. one does find in pascal. the day los abscondes.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah
yeah
Cornel West
that's very different atheistic talk. that's not ps, that's not psalms 14th chapter. the.
that's very different atheistic talk. that's not ps, that's not psalms 14th chapter. the.
Slavoj Žižek
heart. there is no god.
heart. there is no god.
Cornel West
that's a very, very different level of discourse. and so the question becomes whether chesterton is misleading you in saying this is an atheistic moment as opposed to very much like the 32nd chapter of genesis, like jacob wrestling in the darkness, not knowing what way to go, enacting a level of angst which is genuine, but yet not in any way atheistic. and if that's true, then maybe the atheistic moment is more of what nietzsche thought, which is... saturday after good friday. the death itself. not the words on the cross, but the death itself of that god. and not knowing that he's just suddenly coming. you know, terr of sambecca to waiting for godot. now, if that's true, then we might then have to revise what you said about this distinctive feature of the christian faith somehow being... a religion in which the atheistic moment is uttered by the god and god's self, and it might actually be very close to... your own hero, my hero in some ways too, shelly. you're talking about when you actually look at the life of god, what was it about the emergence of god that you see, the emergence of man in the life of god that seems to be grounded on a certain kind of derangement and catastrophe in which things are out of joint, almost echoes of hamlet here. and haven't been in and haven't been harmonic since. and that's a.
that's a very, very different level of discourse. and so the question becomes whether chesterton is misleading you in saying this is an atheistic moment as opposed to very much like the 32nd chapter of genesis, like jacob wrestling in the darkness, not knowing what way to go, enacting a level of angst which is genuine, but yet not in any way atheistic. and if that's true, then maybe the atheistic moment is more of what nietzsche thought, which is... saturday after good friday. the death itself. not the words on the cross, but the death itself of that god. and not knowing that he's just suddenly coming. you know, terr of sambecca to waiting for godot. now, if that's true, then we might then have to revise what you said about this distinctive feature of the christian faith somehow being... a religion in which the atheistic moment is uttered by the god and god's self, and it might actually be very close to... your own hero, my hero in some ways too, shelly. you're talking about when you actually look at the life of god, what was it about the emergence of god that you see, the emergence of man in the life of god that seems to be grounded on a certain kind of derangement and catastrophe in which things are out of joint, almost echoes of hamlet here. and haven't been in and haven't been harmonic since. and that's a.
Slavoj Žižek
very.
very.
Cornel West
space, it seems to me to reside. i think it cuts much deeper than the chesterton-like move that i see you following.
space, it seems to me to reside. i think it cuts much deeper than the chesterton-like move that i see you following.
Slavoj Žižek
okay.
okay.
Cornel West
on the second point. hear me.
on the second point. hear me.
Slavoj Žižek
let me just end.
let me just end.
Cornel West
and i want to say open this up for questions and so forth. but see, when i read you and listen to you and say, how fascinating it is to see. someone philosophically old-fashioned and politically revolutionary. and culturally so playful and personally so charismatic. and having significant impact. here and around the world. i mean, that's a very rare kind of moment. it's a sense in which it would be fascinating to engage in a... jik an analysis of jik's praxis. and try to understand the emergence of your own discourse and practice at this particular moment. and what kinds of silences and what kinds of insights. can be called from. what you're doing but that's a much larger question but i just throw that out before we open the up
and i want to say open this up for questions and so forth. but see, when i read you and listen to you and say, how fascinating it is to see. someone philosophically old-fashioned and politically revolutionary. and culturally so playful and personally so charismatic. and having significant impact. here and around the world. i mean, that's a very rare kind of moment. it's a sense in which it would be fascinating to engage in a... jik an analysis of jik's praxis. and try to understand the emergence of your own discourse and practice at this particular moment. and what kinds of silences and what kinds of insights. can be called from. what you're doing but that's a much larger question but i just throw that out before we open the up
Slavoj Žižek
i will try. yes, ready. now, em, do we applaud to you also?. i'm really grateful. the only problem i have is that my got to answer you, you know,. i will just try to mark some. first, i deeply agree with what you said about this moment of madness monstrous. and here, it's a much more detailed poleics. i cannot go now into technical details, but in the big debate, you know, about k talk history of madness between foucault and derida.
i will try. yes, ready. now, em, do we applaud to you also?. i'm really grateful. the only problem i have is that my got to answer you, you know,. i will just try to mark some. first, i deeply agree with what you said about this moment of madness monstrous. and here, it's a much more detailed poleics. i cannot go now into technical details, but in the big debate, you know, about k talk history of madness between foucault and derida.
Cornel West
mm.
mm.
Slavoj Žižek
in spite of all the extreme finesse of foucault's reading. i basically think that derida was right there. in detecting a kind of a trans-historical moment of madness in the very core of subjectivity incognito.
in spite of all the extreme finesse of foucault's reading. i basically think that derida was right there. in detecting a kind of a trans-historical moment of madness in the very core of subjectivity incognito.
Cornel West
mm.
mm.
Slavoj Žižek
c cogito himself. and here we come to what you mentioned, because already in kant, but later in fichte, in schelling, in hegel. this explodes again i think the best sign index of the shift from enlightenment to german idealism is the change, fundamental change in the metaphor for the subject. for in enlightenment, the subject is the light of reason, whatever. and when you are haunted by darkness, darkness tries to invade into you from the outside. but with german idealism... with schelling and hegel explicitly. they both refer to that mystical language night of the world. night, darkness is the term for the very excessive, crazy. core of subjectivity. and here not only schelling but hegel should be reread the lesser known hegel. for example if you look at hegel's encyclopedia, third part, philosophy of spirit. things that almost nobody reads, like the very beginning anthropology. wer hegel. tries to develop how human mind. emerges out out of this immersion into animal feeling and so on he has there wonderful 20 pages of notes. reconstructed afterwards from his improvisations at his lect course about how madness is inherent there. and how the whole then of civilized mind language is a desperate attempt to contain this madness. we don't have time to go into this. what you mentioned about historicizing and so on. may i make a brief remark which always fascinated me. what i found always so fascinating with so-called likestruction is post and so it's how selective they are in their historicizing. like, for example, wagner-nzsche. wagner richard wagner is over-historized, you know. you look at parsifal, of course, the wound is historically decoded as sphilis, every statement of wagner is put in context to prove wagner hitler and so on. but then we get to nietzsche and it's unbelievable how the way postmodernernists like nietzsche, redeem nietzsche is by telling, i mean we tend to forget that when nietzsche talked about master slave,. it totally disappeared from our view how deeply involved nietzsche was in political happenings of his day, to put it clearly, very reactionary political attitudes. for example, the nightmare which haunted nietzsche was the paris commune. this was for him the ultimate slave rebellion. he even believed the rumor which afterwards proved false that the rebels of paris commune are burning louvre, whatever. so, again. it's interesting how if you, for example, deleuze and so on, nietzsche is totally non. i mean, with all others, you know, you look at every reference to the historical context to prove whatever nietzsche. okay, but we don't have time for this. let's go to that moment. i'm so sorry, we don't have time to go more into it. you know, my paradox would be the following one, and we agree here more than it may appear. when i say atheism, paradoxic, what i try to assert is and we'll try to be precise here. atheism as a moment in divine life itself. what i'm totally opposed to is this simplistic, stupid feuerbach reading of christianity as the incarnation of christ means that really god becomes man, but in this stupid sense that, you know, humanity is the truth of god. we just have to accept that. that god was our fantasy and so on. i totally, i i agree with you. i totally rejected what i found so fascinating in this story, father, have you forsaken me and so on. okay, you may find it before. i know all these references. but again, the point is that god is saying it here. and i had three years ago an interesting debate in vienna with some bishops even and i asked them a simple stupid, vulgar question. i like this stupid keep which are embarrassing. when christ says, father, father, why have you forsaken me, is he... bluffing or does he mean it seriously? if he is bluffing, that is to say secretly he knows, that's only the state. so to impress the humans i will join my dad happily there. if he knows this and he is just bluffing then it's a fake. we are in gnosticism and so on. but if it's serious then literally for a moment god is lost for himself. like, you know, there is kind of a split in god, which is god, you know, then the consequences are radical here. and here... here here i attempt to agree this is the book that i'm writing now, purely theological book hegel christianity. my starting point is a wonderful slip of tongue. mistake by hegel. you know what is the distinction between what was the theological cause, superficially at least, which triggered the in fourth century or when50 later the split between orthodox eastern church and western christianity is this, how do you call it the question of the son and the holy spirit no for the orthodox, who who is where does the holy spirit originate from for the orthodox it's only from the father both son and father sorry both son and holy spirit emanate only from the father. forum. western christians, it's from father and sh together. the east wanted the mon absolute, as they put it, the theologologists, to maintain the absolute monarchy of the father. now, hegel does something incredible. it's a truly freudian slip. when he reports on this, he makes a mistake. he says that the distinction is that for the orthodox, the holy spirit originates from father and son, and for us in the west, only from the son. i agree with hegel. that's my point. my reading is that nonetheless hegel is right when the point is what dies on the cross? hegel thesis is not the son. it's not that god's representative dies and that what dies on the cross is father himself. it's not simply that this would be the pagan reading, and if you accept this reading, then christianity is just another of these old, boring, osiris, stupid stories. from time to time, god sends a messenger, this messenger dies, returns, comes again. christianity is not this. it's a cut one-time event. and what dice is the old got? himself and which is why we have then holy spirit which is something totally unique. so again, i agree with you we don't have that okay speaking about now when you mention these jokes and so on, let me tell you a detail. i'm here very personal at two levels. first recently, a wonderful book was published with, okay, at least it's good as a collection, kierkegaard and humor. where how for kierkegaard also humor was crucial, not in the simple sense you have to be popular and to introduce christianity, blah, blah, but... kierkegaard has this tremendous vision of christianity as a comedy. not comedy in the simple sense of dante's divina commedia. comedy is what ends well. but in a more radical sense that... incarnation. embiment it's a comical event kierkegaard has this wonderful idea that imagine uh. from far king is coming and then you know this stupid elementary comical scene and then instead of a king entering when trumpets announced it, people looking, a small dog enters no. kirkegaard chess, my godott. this is incarnation. you expect a big god, you get an ordinary guy there. that this gap between christ as the poor ordinary guy and divinity, it's a comical gap. and i think this is what reactionary fundamentalists miss. the problem for me with mel gibson's passion is that he misses the joke of christianity, which is why it's a pagan film, i think. okay, another thing is that, of course, it's the greatest monument to southern california sadoo gay community. but that's another story. but what i'm saying is that another very personal moment here. for me about zo is that it's precisely my own political experience in ex-yugoslavia, you know the terrible civil war. in the first half of the nins you remember, my god, three hundred,000 people killed. in... europe where... i don't know why i didn't expect it as if europeans are not even worse. but what i'm saying is that what traumatized me is the progressive. absolutely progressive i claim the role of dirty political racist jokes. in what sense? uh... in old yugoslavia, you know, five, six republics, nations, ethnic groups, whatever you call them. it was, of course, in the races imaginary identified with a certain feature, like the slovenes were misers, montenegr people were lazy, bosnians ser is kind of cunning, sexually obsessed, and so on. and you know how this function. it didn't function in a racist way. we were not telling jokes about others. when i met my serb bosnian and montenegro friends. i told them a joke about but it was more a kind of a solidary exchange of obscenities. like i tell you my dirty and this means we are above this for me. disgusting politically correct. oh, i admire your food, your rituals. this is for me no, i want to hear the dirty jokes from you,? and a negative proof of this. incredible is that in early early 80s onwards when ethnic tensions started to explode, very interesting. these strokes disappeared. this is for me a kind of an absolute negative proof. that they played. i think again, they were not racist jokes in the sense of making it was just is know isnn't this also your elementary experience? if you meet a person of another race, orientation, whatever, as long as you play this game, who, i respect you, blah, blah, blah, that's for me repressed racism. only when you go at this level of, how to put it, exchanging obscenities. you are there. you are truly a friend where you do that. now you will ask me, but how do you know that this is not, nonetheless, it can be misinterpreted as a racism or scoff, but you have to take that risk. that is the leap of faith, how should i put it? and there are wonderful, there is a wonderful logic of these jokes. for example, we slovenes are misers in our own. perspective the standard slovene joke i don't know is that an old farmer rich farmer is dying. all the families is gathered around him. daughters, grandsons, and he asked, is everybody here? he told me, yes, grandma. then the farmer asks, if everybody is here in this room with me, why isn't the light on there in the corridor? then montenegro are lazy. and they have wonderful politically correct, dirty jokes like, you know, montenegro, you must know is also an earthquake territory. so how does a montegr guy masturbate? he digs a hole in the earth. puts his penis in and waits for the earthquake because he's too lazy to... bosnians are the nicest because bosnia, ah, with montenegro you have some very philosophically deep jokes. more interesting about like, why does the montenegro guy put as his table, night table, a full and an empty glass of water? because he's too lazy to think if he will be thirsty or not during the night. but you know what's nice? he has to have to mark the non thirstyirst also an empty glass. this is almost as intelligent as that george bush one, tomorrow the future will look better or not. but and bosnians, i prefer them because in a very nice way, bosnians play with their own image, which is a racist. but they gladly totally identify with it of being this kind of obsessed with sex in this primitive cunning way. so there is a wonderful dirty story but not too incorrect. you can swallow it. you know the only thing it's presupposed is you have to know that beethoven piano kick everybody knows his composition for eliza, für eliza. you know that. okay, okay. so the story is that now in bosnia they try to be modern and they have classical music teaching, which is no longer this old learn by hard, blah, blah, but creative. so there is a class and the teacher says, now we will talk about beethoven. each of you should say. first, some thought image. person and then name a beethoven composition which fits you no so first the girl says yes bam forest what pastoral symphony nature okay okay then a boy said war revolution heroism eroica third symphony then the bosnian guy comes and says now i have to be vulgar a prick long hard like this why for eliza no the spirit. that was for me the reality of this brotherhood celebrated of you. the moment we lost this, it was one. it was won. and this is, i think, what sometimes we miss with this politically correct respect like native americans, you have to respect them. i don't care about their holistic attitude to life or whatever. i want to hear their dirty jokes because i really like like, just one phrase, the last one. here i'm very traditional. when you say what would be this belief? i'm very simple. take any, here i'm even more traditional than you think. don't you find this crazy belief in every big emancipatory political project? like wasn't such kind of a crazy belief at work in, for example, taintouverture, haiti revolution, this revolution? don't you find in all of them this kind of a in all radical political projects? here i see a parallel between... this is what interests me in, for example, paul the paulinian community of believers. i agree with alain. the polian community of believers living in this emergency state at the end of time, it is not only a theological theory, it is an answer to a very precise historical deadlock. there were two models of, let's say, social. logic, impulse pulse. time on the one hand, romans, their decadent hed individualism, blah blah blah. on the empire, on the other hand jews, traditional jews which were for him. it's kind of a traditional logic here and so on. it's basically the same alternatives as today. either you play. this game of individualism, hedonism, or old traditional communities. and what paul offered is a third logic of community. community community of believers is something which is neither this individualistic, hedonistic assemblage of individuals nor the traditional hierarchical, whatever religious community. it's a different logic, this egalitarian emergency state logic. and maybe we need a little bit of depth today.
c cogito himself. and here we come to what you mentioned, because already in kant, but later in fichte, in schelling, in hegel. this explodes again i think the best sign index of the shift from enlightenment to german idealism is the change, fundamental change in the metaphor for the subject. for in enlightenment, the subject is the light of reason, whatever. and when you are haunted by darkness, darkness tries to invade into you from the outside. but with german idealism... with schelling and hegel explicitly. they both refer to that mystical language night of the world. night, darkness is the term for the very excessive, crazy. core of subjectivity. and here not only schelling but hegel should be reread the lesser known hegel. for example if you look at hegel's encyclopedia, third part, philosophy of spirit. things that almost nobody reads, like the very beginning anthropology. wer hegel. tries to develop how human mind. emerges out out of this immersion into animal feeling and so on he has there wonderful 20 pages of notes. reconstructed afterwards from his improvisations at his lect course about how madness is inherent there. and how the whole then of civilized mind language is a desperate attempt to contain this madness. we don't have time to go into this. what you mentioned about historicizing and so on. may i make a brief remark which always fascinated me. what i found always so fascinating with so-called likestruction is post and so it's how selective they are in their historicizing. like, for example, wagner-nzsche. wagner richard wagner is over-historized, you know. you look at parsifal, of course, the wound is historically decoded as sphilis, every statement of wagner is put in context to prove wagner hitler and so on. but then we get to nietzsche and it's unbelievable how the way postmodernernists like nietzsche, redeem nietzsche is by telling, i mean we tend to forget that when nietzsche talked about master slave,. it totally disappeared from our view how deeply involved nietzsche was in political happenings of his day, to put it clearly, very reactionary political attitudes. for example, the nightmare which haunted nietzsche was the paris commune. this was for him the ultimate slave rebellion. he even believed the rumor which afterwards proved false that the rebels of paris commune are burning louvre, whatever. so, again. it's interesting how if you, for example, deleuze and so on, nietzsche is totally non. i mean, with all others, you know, you look at every reference to the historical context to prove whatever nietzsche. okay, but we don't have time for this. let's go to that moment. i'm so sorry, we don't have time to go more into it. you know, my paradox would be the following one, and we agree here more than it may appear. when i say atheism, paradoxic, what i try to assert is and we'll try to be precise here. atheism as a moment in divine life itself. what i'm totally opposed to is this simplistic, stupid feuerbach reading of christianity as the incarnation of christ means that really god becomes man, but in this stupid sense that, you know, humanity is the truth of god. we just have to accept that. that god was our fantasy and so on. i totally, i i agree with you. i totally rejected what i found so fascinating in this story, father, have you forsaken me and so on. okay, you may find it before. i know all these references. but again, the point is that god is saying it here. and i had three years ago an interesting debate in vienna with some bishops even and i asked them a simple stupid, vulgar question. i like this stupid keep which are embarrassing. when christ says, father, father, why have you forsaken me, is he... bluffing or does he mean it seriously? if he is bluffing, that is to say secretly he knows, that's only the state. so to impress the humans i will join my dad happily there. if he knows this and he is just bluffing then it's a fake. we are in gnosticism and so on. but if it's serious then literally for a moment god is lost for himself. like, you know, there is kind of a split in god, which is god, you know, then the consequences are radical here. and here... here here i attempt to agree this is the book that i'm writing now, purely theological book hegel christianity. my starting point is a wonderful slip of tongue. mistake by hegel. you know what is the distinction between what was the theological cause, superficially at least, which triggered the in fourth century or when50 later the split between orthodox eastern church and western christianity is this, how do you call it the question of the son and the holy spirit no for the orthodox, who who is where does the holy spirit originate from for the orthodox it's only from the father both son and father sorry both son and holy spirit emanate only from the father. forum. western christians, it's from father and sh together. the east wanted the mon absolute, as they put it, the theologologists, to maintain the absolute monarchy of the father. now, hegel does something incredible. it's a truly freudian slip. when he reports on this, he makes a mistake. he says that the distinction is that for the orthodox, the holy spirit originates from father and son, and for us in the west, only from the son. i agree with hegel. that's my point. my reading is that nonetheless hegel is right when the point is what dies on the cross? hegel thesis is not the son. it's not that god's representative dies and that what dies on the cross is father himself. it's not simply that this would be the pagan reading, and if you accept this reading, then christianity is just another of these old, boring, osiris, stupid stories. from time to time, god sends a messenger, this messenger dies, returns, comes again. christianity is not this. it's a cut one-time event. and what dice is the old got? himself and which is why we have then holy spirit which is something totally unique. so again, i agree with you we don't have that okay speaking about now when you mention these jokes and so on, let me tell you a detail. i'm here very personal at two levels. first recently, a wonderful book was published with, okay, at least it's good as a collection, kierkegaard and humor. where how for kierkegaard also humor was crucial, not in the simple sense you have to be popular and to introduce christianity, blah, blah, but... kierkegaard has this tremendous vision of christianity as a comedy. not comedy in the simple sense of dante's divina commedia. comedy is what ends well. but in a more radical sense that... incarnation. embiment it's a comical event kierkegaard has this wonderful idea that imagine uh. from far king is coming and then you know this stupid elementary comical scene and then instead of a king entering when trumpets announced it, people looking, a small dog enters no. kirkegaard chess, my godott. this is incarnation. you expect a big god, you get an ordinary guy there. that this gap between christ as the poor ordinary guy and divinity, it's a comical gap. and i think this is what reactionary fundamentalists miss. the problem for me with mel gibson's passion is that he misses the joke of christianity, which is why it's a pagan film, i think. okay, another thing is that, of course, it's the greatest monument to southern california sadoo gay community. but that's another story. but what i'm saying is that another very personal moment here. for me about zo is that it's precisely my own political experience in ex-yugoslavia, you know the terrible civil war. in the first half of the nins you remember, my god, three hundred,000 people killed. in... europe where... i don't know why i didn't expect it as if europeans are not even worse. but what i'm saying is that what traumatized me is the progressive. absolutely progressive i claim the role of dirty political racist jokes. in what sense? uh... in old yugoslavia, you know, five, six republics, nations, ethnic groups, whatever you call them. it was, of course, in the races imaginary identified with a certain feature, like the slovenes were misers, montenegr people were lazy, bosnians ser is kind of cunning, sexually obsessed, and so on. and you know how this function. it didn't function in a racist way. we were not telling jokes about others. when i met my serb bosnian and montenegro friends. i told them a joke about but it was more a kind of a solidary exchange of obscenities. like i tell you my dirty and this means we are above this for me. disgusting politically correct. oh, i admire your food, your rituals. this is for me no, i want to hear the dirty jokes from you,? and a negative proof of this. incredible is that in early early 80s onwards when ethnic tensions started to explode, very interesting. these strokes disappeared. this is for me a kind of an absolute negative proof. that they played. i think again, they were not racist jokes in the sense of making it was just is know isnn't this also your elementary experience? if you meet a person of another race, orientation, whatever, as long as you play this game, who, i respect you, blah, blah, blah, that's for me repressed racism. only when you go at this level of, how to put it, exchanging obscenities. you are there. you are truly a friend where you do that. now you will ask me, but how do you know that this is not, nonetheless, it can be misinterpreted as a racism or scoff, but you have to take that risk. that is the leap of faith, how should i put it? and there are wonderful, there is a wonderful logic of these jokes. for example, we slovenes are misers in our own. perspective the standard slovene joke i don't know is that an old farmer rich farmer is dying. all the families is gathered around him. daughters, grandsons, and he asked, is everybody here? he told me, yes, grandma. then the farmer asks, if everybody is here in this room with me, why isn't the light on there in the corridor? then montenegro are lazy. and they have wonderful politically correct, dirty jokes like, you know, montenegro, you must know is also an earthquake territory. so how does a montegr guy masturbate? he digs a hole in the earth. puts his penis in and waits for the earthquake because he's too lazy to... bosnians are the nicest because bosnia, ah, with montenegro you have some very philosophically deep jokes. more interesting about like, why does the montenegro guy put as his table, night table, a full and an empty glass of water? because he's too lazy to think if he will be thirsty or not during the night. but you know what's nice? he has to have to mark the non thirstyirst also an empty glass. this is almost as intelligent as that george bush one, tomorrow the future will look better or not. but and bosnians, i prefer them because in a very nice way, bosnians play with their own image, which is a racist. but they gladly totally identify with it of being this kind of obsessed with sex in this primitive cunning way. so there is a wonderful dirty story but not too incorrect. you can swallow it. you know the only thing it's presupposed is you have to know that beethoven piano kick everybody knows his composition for eliza, für eliza. you know that. okay, okay. so the story is that now in bosnia they try to be modern and they have classical music teaching, which is no longer this old learn by hard, blah, blah, but creative. so there is a class and the teacher says, now we will talk about beethoven. each of you should say. first, some thought image. person and then name a beethoven composition which fits you no so first the girl says yes bam forest what pastoral symphony nature okay okay then a boy said war revolution heroism eroica third symphony then the bosnian guy comes and says now i have to be vulgar a prick long hard like this why for eliza no the spirit. that was for me the reality of this brotherhood celebrated of you. the moment we lost this, it was one. it was won. and this is, i think, what sometimes we miss with this politically correct respect like native americans, you have to respect them. i don't care about their holistic attitude to life or whatever. i want to hear their dirty jokes because i really like like, just one phrase, the last one. here i'm very traditional. when you say what would be this belief? i'm very simple. take any, here i'm even more traditional than you think. don't you find this crazy belief in every big emancipatory political project? like wasn't such kind of a crazy belief at work in, for example, taintouverture, haiti revolution, this revolution? don't you find in all of them this kind of a in all radical political projects? here i see a parallel between... this is what interests me in, for example, paul the paulinian community of believers. i agree with alain. the polian community of believers living in this emergency state at the end of time, it is not only a theological theory, it is an answer to a very precise historical deadlock. there were two models of, let's say, social. logic, impulse pulse. time on the one hand, romans, their decadent hed individualism, blah blah blah. on the empire, on the other hand jews, traditional jews which were for him. it's kind of a traditional logic here and so on. it's basically the same alternatives as today. either you play. this game of individualism, hedonism, or old traditional communities. and what paul offered is a third logic of community. community community of believers is something which is neither this individualistic, hedonistic assemblage of individuals nor the traditional hierarchical, whatever religious community. it's a different logic, this egalitarian emergency state logic. and maybe we need a little bit of depth today.
Cornel West
that's why you call yourself a paulinian serialist.
that's why you call yourself a paulinian serialist.
Slavoj Žižek
it. but.
it. but.
Cornel West
characterization of your position. yesian material.
characterization of your position. yesian material.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah, but again, what do i mean by materialism? things are here, i agree with you, things are here very, very complex in the sense that, you know, all these words. what does it mean to be atheist to believe today? i totally agree here with you. i totally agree here with you that it's not as simple as now we proclaim that man is the secret that allows us to decode god and we do this simple reduction. this doesn't work, of course. okay. sorry if i was too long again. yeah
yeah, but again, what do i mean by materialism? things are here, i agree with you, things are here very, very complex in the sense that, you know, all these words. what does it mean to be atheist to believe today? i totally agree here with you. i totally agree here with you that it's not as simple as now we proclaim that man is the secret that allows us to decode god and we do this simple reduction. this doesn't work, of course. okay. sorry if i was too long again. yeah
Moderator
so i think we have time for a few questions. if you would like to ask a question, please wait for the microphone. we have some questions or symptomatically obst jokes.
so i think we have time for a few questions. if you would like to ask a question, please wait for the microphone. we have some questions or symptomatically obst jokes.
Slavoj Žižek
thank. .
thank. .
Audience Member 2
um. so obviously a lot of sort of the question of religion is why people getting it. questions. so i was wondering what both of you, i guess, think is... professor, we were talking a lot about how you know, the people that say they don't believe actually do say actually really don't. so i was wondering what you think is sort the cause of fact that in of what does it do to people and why are people thinking they believe they don? what are the you at?
um. so obviously a lot of sort of the question of religion is why people getting it. questions. so i was wondering what both of you, i guess, think is... professor, we were talking a lot about how you know, the people that say they don't believe actually do say actually really don't. so i was wondering what you think is sort the cause of fact that in of what does it do to people and why are people thinking they believe they don? what are the you at?
Slavoj Žižek
this is a very good question but an extremely complex one because first to put it, i don't think there is my first point here would have been that i don't think there is a symmetry here in the sense that simply those who believe really don't believe, those who pretend to be atheists really believe and so on. i think the fundamental... the fundamental fact for me is... uh. what i'm trying to isolate in this way, but i didn't have time to develop it in detail, is... what is changing today? in our functioning of belief. i nonetheless claim that something fundamental is changing today in the sense of the, how should i call it uh. paradoxically we believe more endless. today, what we are less and less able, i claim, is to. practice this. purely symbolic belief. what do i mean by this? do you perhaps know the book by a wonderful book by paul vain did the ancient greeks believe in their myth. which is... their own myths. and his answer is in a way, of course no. ancient greeks were not idiots to think if you climb to the top of the mount olympus you will there encounter zeus and so on. but also, that's crucial. it's wrong to say that geus was just for them a metaphor of some force and so on and so on. it's not like that. it's something much more mysterious and i think the closest we can get to it is politeness. like, for example, i don't know, i meet somebody who is not really my friend and i say, nice to meet you. now, and how are you? nice to meet you. we both know that i don't mean it seriously. not only this, but did you notice how when i say, how are you? the other is expected to say, well, not only this, but... if the other were to take my question literally, it would be even too intrusive. my god, what right does somebody whom i barely know to ask me how am i? it's none of his business. but the whole of our cultural identity, whatever. resides in the fact that although you don't mean it literally, it's not hypocrisy. the psychotic is perhaps a definition of psychotic is the one who thinks then it must be hypocrisy. it's possible that what you are saying is literally a lie. i don't really care how are you. i'm not really glad to see you, but nonetheless it's not hypocrisy. you can lie sincerely, how should i put it? and i think that this, something fundamental, i think is changing at this level. so it's not simply... believe, non-believe. it's what these terms mean that is changing and so on. i know i didn't answer your question, but i just wanted to give you this elementary background as to what is really what is really the problem that is haunting me. to put it in another way, did you, for example, the example that i like to evoke always of that edith wharton story, age of innocence. what who is innocent there? i'm now as a primitive barbarian talking in the movie terms. it's the vinona ryder character. that is to say, the young wife. in what sense is she innocent? she is perceived by her husband who has the affair with count olenska, michel fe.
this is a very good question but an extremely complex one because first to put it, i don't think there is my first point here would have been that i don't think there is a symmetry here in the sense that simply those who believe really don't believe, those who pretend to be atheists really believe and so on. i think the fundamental... the fundamental fact for me is... uh. what i'm trying to isolate in this way, but i didn't have time to develop it in detail, is... what is changing today? in our functioning of belief. i nonetheless claim that something fundamental is changing today in the sense of the, how should i call it uh. paradoxically we believe more endless. today, what we are less and less able, i claim, is to. practice this. purely symbolic belief. what do i mean by this? do you perhaps know the book by a wonderful book by paul vain did the ancient greeks believe in their myth. which is... their own myths. and his answer is in a way, of course no. ancient greeks were not idiots to think if you climb to the top of the mount olympus you will there encounter zeus and so on. but also, that's crucial. it's wrong to say that geus was just for them a metaphor of some force and so on and so on. it's not like that. it's something much more mysterious and i think the closest we can get to it is politeness. like, for example, i don't know, i meet somebody who is not really my friend and i say, nice to meet you. now, and how are you? nice to meet you. we both know that i don't mean it seriously. not only this, but did you notice how when i say, how are you? the other is expected to say, well, not only this, but... if the other were to take my question literally, it would be even too intrusive. my god, what right does somebody whom i barely know to ask me how am i? it's none of his business. but the whole of our cultural identity, whatever. resides in the fact that although you don't mean it literally, it's not hypocrisy. the psychotic is perhaps a definition of psychotic is the one who thinks then it must be hypocrisy. it's possible that what you are saying is literally a lie. i don't really care how are you. i'm not really glad to see you, but nonetheless it's not hypocrisy. you can lie sincerely, how should i put it? and i think that this, something fundamental, i think is changing at this level. so it's not simply... believe, non-believe. it's what these terms mean that is changing and so on. i know i didn't answer your question, but i just wanted to give you this elementary background as to what is really what is really the problem that is haunting me. to put it in another way, did you, for example, the example that i like to evoke always of that edith wharton story, age of innocence. what who is innocent there? i'm now as a primitive barbarian talking in the movie terms. it's the vinona ryder character. that is to say, the young wife. in what sense is she innocent? she is perceived by her husband who has the affair with count olenska, michel fe.
Moderator
he.
he.
Slavoj Žižek
she is perceived as the one who is just the naive wife. at the end, as you know, after she died, we learned that she knew it all the time. she just pretended not to know. this is the innocence. it's not the innocence of you don't know. you don't. you know but pretend not to know, as it were. this i claim that this is what is disappearing today. and here i am, again, paradoxically, if you want, very... very conservative. this is why i admire novels, especially late novels of henry james, where you have this kingdom of this kind of a fakeaked innocence or whatever, that people never state clearly, everything is implied and so on and so on. so again, this very fundamental question interests me. how it's not simply people believe less, but it changing, what does it mean? to believe. the question in the back.
she is perceived as the one who is just the naive wife. at the end, as you know, after she died, we learned that she knew it all the time. she just pretended not to know. this is the innocence. it's not the innocence of you don't know. you don't. you know but pretend not to know, as it were. this i claim that this is what is disappearing today. and here i am, again, paradoxically, if you want, very... very conservative. this is why i admire novels, especially late novels of henry james, where you have this kingdom of this kind of a fakeaked innocence or whatever, that people never state clearly, everything is implied and so on and so on. so again, this very fundamental question interests me. how it's not simply people believe less, but it changing, what does it mean? to believe. the question in the back.
Audience Member 1
oh yeah, my question, i came down, i guess, because i wanted to ask a good question. and that's not a very good reason to come down, because i was very fascinated by what you said and intellectually curious in so many ways it's hard for me to express this, but i guess my question is, no the moment in which humanity becomes aware of its inner frailness or its fragility or its it's tragic, kind of a tragic sense of being... when all the other maybe... easy answers are stripped away from me. i'm sorry. like what then do we cling to? i mean, couldn't that really be belief itself, that darkness there? and in a sense, the only way to express it is utter abandonment. i mean, that's to say, what if real belief is not? something that can be expressed. it's not something that can, as soon as it comes out of your mouth, it can be misunderstood or manipulated or destroyed. what if word and deed are one in action and you just live it and that's the way that you manifest your being, manifest your beliefs. not as like a computer program, but as a human being that defies any kind of systematic. definition.
oh yeah, my question, i came down, i guess, because i wanted to ask a good question. and that's not a very good reason to come down, because i was very fascinated by what you said and intellectually curious in so many ways it's hard for me to express this, but i guess my question is, no the moment in which humanity becomes aware of its inner frailness or its fragility or its it's tragic, kind of a tragic sense of being... when all the other maybe... easy answers are stripped away from me. i'm sorry. like what then do we cling to? i mean, couldn't that really be belief itself, that darkness there? and in a sense, the only way to express it is utter abandonment. i mean, that's to say, what if real belief is not? something that can be expressed. it's not something that can, as soon as it comes out of your mouth, it can be misunderstood or manipulated or destroyed. what if word and deed are one in action and you just live it and that's the way that you manifest your being, manifest your beliefs. not as like a computer program, but as a human being that defies any kind of systematic. definition.
Slavoj Žižek
uh. that's again a nice question, but my god, you're asking me too. why can't you ask me a simple question where i can answer yes and no? because this is so complex, but you know what would be my answer here? i think, i'm not sure, i got your point, but here i, where i feel indebted to jewish-christ legacy and so on, is that... what i didn't get in you is when you say this unity of act and so on, you just leave it, okay, but in what way more precisely? because for me, h the put. the big opposition is, do we adopt the gnostic way, which is truth is in you, you just have to withdraw into yourself, discover it, unearth it, or is... to quote x-files, truth out there. that is to say, it's traumatic. encounter. and what i like, okay, i like it's a vulgar term here, where i deeply identify with jewish-christ christian legacy is that precisely truth is something traatically encountered. truth is outside. it's not that you look deep in yourself and it's your self-realization and so on and so on. truth is... something you struggle with which traumatizes you. truth is something very traumatic in this sense. no sorry, just in this sense, what fascinated me always is... precisely. how,... k put. what way to act? for me and kierkegaard was deeply aware of this it is precisely. to adopt a certain mask not to be yourself, but quite on the opposite. to adopt a certain mask role and take it more seriously, more seriously than what you are.
uh. that's again a nice question, but my god, you're asking me too. why can't you ask me a simple question where i can answer yes and no? because this is so complex, but you know what would be my answer here? i think, i'm not sure, i got your point, but here i, where i feel indebted to jewish-christ legacy and so on, is that... what i didn't get in you is when you say this unity of act and so on, you just leave it, okay, but in what way more precisely? because for me, h the put. the big opposition is, do we adopt the gnostic way, which is truth is in you, you just have to withdraw into yourself, discover it, unearth it, or is... to quote x-files, truth out there. that is to say, it's traumatic. encounter. and what i like, okay, i like it's a vulgar term here, where i deeply identify with jewish-christ christian legacy is that precisely truth is something traatically encountered. truth is outside. it's not that you look deep in yourself and it's your self-realization and so on and so on. truth is... something you struggle with which traumatizes you. truth is something very traumatic in this sense. no sorry, just in this sense, what fascinated me always is... precisely. how,... k put. what way to act? for me and kierkegaard was deeply aware of this it is precisely. to adopt a certain mask not to be yourself, but quite on the opposite. to adopt a certain mask role and take it more seriously, more seriously than what you are.
Audience Member 1
right, we have to do that. everyone has a they have to pursue. but i'm just saying, what if everything said, there's still desire. i mean, it's like in ecclesiastes when he says, no. i i had slaves, i had my handmaidens and i was great and i built all these solomon's pools. he's living a luscious life and it was all stripped away, it's all vanity. and vstein said that whenever i open a text and it begins this text is wisdom, no matter what creed or language it's written in, be it sanskrit, asian, hebrew, arabic, zoo, i don't know what, but if it's labeled wisdom, it's going to start out with vanity, emptiness. and what is in ecclesiastes is that there's all these paradoxes. he goes through, you know, there's a time for war time peace. he goes through all that. but what is left? there's desire. and the desire is for remain imm mortal. the desire is for immortality that's expressed. through sexual population teaching, to. i this is constantly there, that desire has to me. but for rest
right, we have to do that. everyone has a they have to pursue. but i'm just saying, what if everything said, there's still desire. i mean, it's like in ecclesiastes when he says, no. i i had slaves, i had my handmaidens and i was great and i built all these solomon's pools. he's living a luscious life and it was all stripped away, it's all vanity. and vstein said that whenever i open a text and it begins this text is wisdom, no matter what creed or language it's written in, be it sanskrit, asian, hebrew, arabic, zoo, i don't know what, but if it's labeled wisdom, it's going to start out with vanity, emptiness. and what is in ecclesiastes is that there's all these paradoxes. he goes through, you know, there's a time for war time peace. he goes through all that. but what is left? there's desire. and the desire is for remain imm mortal. the desire is for immortality that's expressed. through sexual population teaching, to. i this is constantly there, that desire has to me. but for rest
Slavoj Žižek
yeah,. expressing a mask. yeah, but again here i would complicate matters first when you say desire is for immortality. maybe, but i am here. closer to kierkegaard, who claimed that this is the precise meaning of kierkegaard's sickness unto death. it's that our deepest desire is not, we are afraid of immortality. immortality is something horrible. what is easiest for us to accept is, okay, i'm just a piece of dust and so on and so on. the second thing is that when you say wisdom, okay, the first thing that, okay, but with christianity nonetheless, for me, the crucial fact is grace. faith, grace. but grace comes from outside. grace is not here i follow protestantism. grace, it's not... you know, this bargain with grace comes from outside. it's not you deserve it. it's not for me,... uh. uh all this, i think that there is... the whole christian legacy, it's totally foreign to this idea which is now very popular okay for the last 50 years we are playing certain social roles we should learn to drop them and to give the expression to your true self and so on and so on. i think there is a deep truth in at least my experience of how those new ages who pretend to you know, drop off their false masks and speak as what they really are. paradoxically, they sound to me as total puppets, as dolls. you know, then they give you this mantra, i'm at peace with myself. no, i think that that's the ultimate christian legacy, that the ultimate authentic position is that you accept this split. you accept that salvation comes from outside. it's not self-discovery.
yeah,. expressing a mask. yeah, but again here i would complicate matters first when you say desire is for immortality. maybe, but i am here. closer to kierkegaard, who claimed that this is the precise meaning of kierkegaard's sickness unto death. it's that our deepest desire is not, we are afraid of immortality. immortality is something horrible. what is easiest for us to accept is, okay, i'm just a piece of dust and so on and so on. the second thing is that when you say wisdom, okay, the first thing that, okay, but with christianity nonetheless, for me, the crucial fact is grace. faith, grace. but grace comes from outside. grace is not here i follow protestantism. grace, it's not... you know, this bargain with grace comes from outside. it's not you deserve it. it's not for me,... uh. uh all this, i think that there is... the whole christian legacy, it's totally foreign to this idea which is now very popular okay for the last 50 years we are playing certain social roles we should learn to drop them and to give the expression to your true self and so on and so on. i think there is a deep truth in at least my experience of how those new ages who pretend to you know, drop off their false masks and speak as what they really are. paradoxically, they sound to me as total puppets, as dolls. you know, then they give you this mantra, i'm at peace with myself. no, i think that that's the ultimate christian legacy, that the ultimate authentic position is that you accept this split. you accept that salvation comes from outside. it's not self-discovery.
Audience Member 1
let's let a couple of other people speak, okay? we can continue this.
let's let a couple of other people speak, okay? we can continue this.
Slavoj Žižek
a little bit later, okay? so
a little bit later, okay? so
Audience Member 1
yeah. let
yeah. let
Slavoj Žižek
this i think ially, you may disagree. i think this is i think i think.
this i think ially, you may disagree. i think this is i think i think.
Audience Member 1
and. being. nothing are.
and. being. nothing are.
Slavoj Žižek
r. okay, we don't have time to go into it. my immediate answer would be that i this but i doubt if this really is a christian position, because the christian position is that i don't have to go to god, god came to me. you know, that's the ultimate, and it's very difficult to accept it for a christian. christ is not... an image, a messenger of god. christ was an ordinary, dirty, bad-sm smelling, unwashed, whatever you want, individual flesh who was walking there. you don't meet god there in this charismatic. you met god there. you met god there. and i think this is how i read then holy spirit and so on. we don't need this horrible thing. god is here in the community of believers. i don't think we need all that stuff about this i i'll put it in another way. i think that this image of god you terrified me god. this is the evil god. this is evil god. this is for me the definition almost of this is the god of judgment. this is the god of judgment, the terrorizing god. okay, but my god, we don't have time. thank.
r. okay, we don't have time to go into it. my immediate answer would be that i this but i doubt if this really is a christian position, because the christian position is that i don't have to go to god, god came to me. you know, that's the ultimate, and it's very difficult to accept it for a christian. christ is not... an image, a messenger of god. christ was an ordinary, dirty, bad-sm smelling, unwashed, whatever you want, individual flesh who was walking there. you don't meet god there in this charismatic. you met god there. you met god there. and i think this is how i read then holy spirit and so on. we don't need this horrible thing. god is here in the community of believers. i don't think we need all that stuff about this i i'll put it in another way. i think that this image of god you terrified me god. this is the evil god. this is evil god. this is for me the definition almost of this is the god of judgment. this is the god of judgment, the terrorizing god. okay, but my god, we don't have time. thank.
Audience Member 1
one question here. i short. but lot about's.
one question here. i short. but lot about's.
Slavoj Žižek
sorry, about?
sorry, about?
Audience Member 1
how about albert? yeah yeah,, yeah. it seems to me that he's sort of provided a solution to the exact dilemma that he proposed before the was proposed. you talked about the decline symbolic proposition. and there are two groups of people on the other side the symbolic are the fundamental on the one side and the true atheist post-modists on the other side, as far as i understand what you said. and in between there's of who's muddling through who still believes in the symbolic. it has this remnant of it which throughout history. and so essentially what he was saying is that... we can't take things can things absolutely literally. that can't become belief for us and that of belief. that people on both sides of this. so doing. so can we have one solution, which is to say that we understand that we will never achieve knowledge, but we must eternally try to achieve knowledge to that is in this. and that's supposed to be one.'s going offer a different solution somehow, which is that we have to go back and what professor west said about standing gramm in the face. not talking around anymore, but looking at it directly. it seems to me that that's what again returning to taking things face down and moving them directly. in other words, if there's a psychology in those you... those are the perpet finest of fellowship. and those who retain the symbolic function and those who approach decline aren fundamentalists. aren't we supposed to be trying to make fundamentalists out of all of us? and that's my asking question.
how about albert? yeah yeah,, yeah. it seems to me that he's sort of provided a solution to the exact dilemma that he proposed before the was proposed. you talked about the decline symbolic proposition. and there are two groups of people on the other side the symbolic are the fundamental on the one side and the true atheist post-modists on the other side, as far as i understand what you said. and in between there's of who's muddling through who still believes in the symbolic. it has this remnant of it which throughout history. and so essentially what he was saying is that... we can't take things can things absolutely literally. that can't become belief for us and that of belief. that people on both sides of this. so doing. so can we have one solution, which is to say that we understand that we will never achieve knowledge, but we must eternally try to achieve knowledge to that is in this. and that's supposed to be one.'s going offer a different solution somehow, which is that we have to go back and what professor west said about standing gramm in the face. not talking around anymore, but looking at it directly. it seems to me that that's what again returning to taking things face down and moving them directly. in other words, if there's a psychology in those you... those are the perpet finest of fellowship. and those who retain the symbolic function and those who approach decline aren fundamentalists. aren't we supposed to be trying to make fundamentalists out of all of us? and that's my asking question.
Slavoj Žižek
maybe i didn't get correctly your point. just to return to the fragment that i think got about learning to face things and so on and so on. of course. everything depends on what exactly do you mean by facing things and so on and so on. where i'm skeptical about it is i deeply agree with you, this monster dramatic kernel and so on, but nonetheless, i don't think we should fetishize it in the guise of this typical postmodern meat, which is... truth is horrible. there is some central horror, the thing like edgar allan poe that maelstrom or water or whatever, and then, you know, this nietzschean problematic of... do we dare to face it or not and so on. i think that what if you put know, it's a little bit the same for me as with male soish approach to women. i think that the ultimate male myth is dead. beneath this feminine hysteria, masks and so on, there is some primordial radical woman, which can either be this sublime göetheike, ewig weibliche, eternal feminine, or some all-devoring kali, whatever, mother and so on. but what if there is nothing? you know what i mean? the thing itself for me is a gap. it's a gap. it's not, for me, how should i put it, but this now it's too much of a pure philosophy. again,... i not i don't believe that all our plurality of symbolic universes and so on are... attempts not to confront the thing and so on. no, i think that this thing itself is in a way the ultimate myth. but again, my position here is not the postmodern one, another one which be there is no ultimate materiality, there are just multiple narratives, stories we are telling. no, everything is not just a narrative but nonetheless, what is more than a narrative, kputin? it's not some tremendous dramatic thing there. it's just a certain gap antagonagonism cut as it were.
maybe i didn't get correctly your point. just to return to the fragment that i think got about learning to face things and so on and so on. of course. everything depends on what exactly do you mean by facing things and so on and so on. where i'm skeptical about it is i deeply agree with you, this monster dramatic kernel and so on, but nonetheless, i don't think we should fetishize it in the guise of this typical postmodern meat, which is... truth is horrible. there is some central horror, the thing like edgar allan poe that maelstrom or water or whatever, and then, you know, this nietzschean problematic of... do we dare to face it or not and so on. i think that what if you put know, it's a little bit the same for me as with male soish approach to women. i think that the ultimate male myth is dead. beneath this feminine hysteria, masks and so on, there is some primordial radical woman, which can either be this sublime göetheike, ewig weibliche, eternal feminine, or some all-devoring kali, whatever, mother and so on. but what if there is nothing? you know what i mean? the thing itself for me is a gap. it's a gap. it's not, for me, how should i put it, but this now it's too much of a pure philosophy. again,... i not i don't believe that all our plurality of symbolic universes and so on are... attempts not to confront the thing and so on. no, i think that this thing itself is in a way the ultimate myth. but again, my position here is not the postmodern one, another one which be there is no ultimate materiality, there are just multiple narratives, stories we are telling. no, everything is not just a narrative but nonetheless, what is more than a narrative, kputin? it's not some tremendous dramatic thing there. it's just a certain gap antagonagonism cut as it were.
Moderator
yeah
yeah
Slavoj Žižek
in the narrative itself. and this is in a way how i read but i don't have time to go into it now. the message of christianity for me, it's okay, we start with this experience of drought. you say job, the guy who blah blah blah, who is, incidentally, that's for me an extremely interesting story because it's usually totally misread. like usually job is perceived as somebody who allowed himself to be screwed by god, but you know, yeah, i accept everything. no, read it. he's protesting all the time, job. no, he's i think okay, i think that the key to it is to say that what happened to job, am i totally abandoned by god? that this gap that separates me from god is transposed into god himself. that's for me the unheard of thing of christianity. so let me be here very careful. with other religions, when you are abandoned by god, the point is how through your deification, sacrifice, mystical education. to rejoin god. christianity has basically a different solution. when i feel totally abandoned by god, how do i rejoin god? not by miraculously turning the thing around. oh, but suddenly things turn better, but... to accept how at that very point where i'm totally abandoned by god. i identify with christ who was also a bum. you know what i mean? the gap that the very gap that separates me from god is part of divinity itself. so as it were, put it, and here i use very precise hegelian terms. the problem turns its own solution. and i think, at least as far as i know, that this is unique to christianity. all others have this boring problematic then how to rejoin god. but in the very utmost abandonment, you are. already. already close to god. and again, i think that this is something unheard of. but when you said about kami and so on, you know, the problem again that i have there is... the problem of maybe i mis read kam. but he is for me a little bit too close to wisdom. and... there is something in my nature, probably genetically determined, in my aversion to wisdom. wisdom for me, as you know, we will never get the thing, but you must learn. to get this kind of a wisdom of resignation in the sense of resigning. even, unfortunately, some of the lacanians buy this, as if the lesson of lan is it the true object of desire is always lost. you must accept symbolic estr loss. no, i think that the whole point of christianity for me, new testament, what are the new... christianity is for me the religion of antique wisdom. it's not wisdom. all paganism ends up in wisdom. we return to das, everything goes up and goes down and so on. you know it's kind of ultimately we all lose and so on and so on. but but i don't accept this position of wisdom. wisdom is for me always there is for me something disgusting in wisdom. wisdom is for me best best exemplified in proverbs. and proverbs are for me the ultimate vulgarity in the sense that anything can be covered and justified by proverbs. let us say you have to do something which is risky. you do it, you succeed. what happens? there will be a wise guy who will tell you, of course, as we say, don't you have, you also must have. we have in slovenia proverbverbs says only those who risk profit, like something like... the wisdom no okay let us then say that you take the risk and you fail again your wise guy will come and will tell you some version of we can in slovene a wonderful vulgar proverb you cannot urinate against the wind like don't take it you know what i mean this is wisdom for me anything can be justified and so on and so on i think that again the unique thing about christianity is precisely that it's not this position of wisdom. it's in a way, how should i put it? all the other pagan ethics are the ethics of cosmic justice. some thing introduces an imbalance into the world. the point is then how to restore balance. it's basically a very organic ethics. it's the ethics of... you want to be to match the ethics of fighting the excess. for example, you want to be too much, but tragically you fail. but i think that christ himself is an access. the only in christian have this crazy idea, which is for me, in my madness, i read it almost as a kind of a leninist message, that truth is partial. pagan ethics is... always has this position of to be above differences. no, the idea is, you know, you say this, i say this, truth is holistic, compromise, and so on. only in christianity you have basically this idea, no, truth is partial, truth is one-sided. truth is imbalance. university
in the narrative itself. and this is in a way how i read but i don't have time to go into it now. the message of christianity for me, it's okay, we start with this experience of drought. you say job, the guy who blah blah blah, who is, incidentally, that's for me an extremely interesting story because it's usually totally misread. like usually job is perceived as somebody who allowed himself to be screwed by god, but you know, yeah, i accept everything. no, read it. he's protesting all the time, job. no, he's i think okay, i think that the key to it is to say that what happened to job, am i totally abandoned by god? that this gap that separates me from god is transposed into god himself. that's for me the unheard of thing of christianity. so let me be here very careful. with other religions, when you are abandoned by god, the point is how through your deification, sacrifice, mystical education. to rejoin god. christianity has basically a different solution. when i feel totally abandoned by god, how do i rejoin god? not by miraculously turning the thing around. oh, but suddenly things turn better, but... to accept how at that very point where i'm totally abandoned by god. i identify with christ who was also a bum. you know what i mean? the gap that the very gap that separates me from god is part of divinity itself. so as it were, put it, and here i use very precise hegelian terms. the problem turns its own solution. and i think, at least as far as i know, that this is unique to christianity. all others have this boring problematic then how to rejoin god. but in the very utmost abandonment, you are. already. already close to god. and again, i think that this is something unheard of. but when you said about kami and so on, you know, the problem again that i have there is... the problem of maybe i mis read kam. but he is for me a little bit too close to wisdom. and... there is something in my nature, probably genetically determined, in my aversion to wisdom. wisdom for me, as you know, we will never get the thing, but you must learn. to get this kind of a wisdom of resignation in the sense of resigning. even, unfortunately, some of the lacanians buy this, as if the lesson of lan is it the true object of desire is always lost. you must accept symbolic estr loss. no, i think that the whole point of christianity for me, new testament, what are the new... christianity is for me the religion of antique wisdom. it's not wisdom. all paganism ends up in wisdom. we return to das, everything goes up and goes down and so on. you know it's kind of ultimately we all lose and so on and so on. but but i don't accept this position of wisdom. wisdom is for me always there is for me something disgusting in wisdom. wisdom is for me best best exemplified in proverbs. and proverbs are for me the ultimate vulgarity in the sense that anything can be covered and justified by proverbs. let us say you have to do something which is risky. you do it, you succeed. what happens? there will be a wise guy who will tell you, of course, as we say, don't you have, you also must have. we have in slovenia proverbverbs says only those who risk profit, like something like... the wisdom no okay let us then say that you take the risk and you fail again your wise guy will come and will tell you some version of we can in slovene a wonderful vulgar proverb you cannot urinate against the wind like don't take it you know what i mean this is wisdom for me anything can be justified and so on and so on i think that again the unique thing about christianity is precisely that it's not this position of wisdom. it's in a way, how should i put it? all the other pagan ethics are the ethics of cosmic justice. some thing introduces an imbalance into the world. the point is then how to restore balance. it's basically a very organic ethics. it's the ethics of... you want to be to match the ethics of fighting the excess. for example, you want to be too much, but tragically you fail. but i think that christ himself is an access. the only in christian have this crazy idea, which is for me, in my madness, i read it almost as a kind of a leninist message, that truth is partial. pagan ethics is... always has this position of to be above differences. no, the idea is, you know, you say this, i say this, truth is holistic, compromise, and so on. only in christianity you have basically this idea, no, truth is partial, truth is one-sided. truth is imbalance. university
Cornel West
but you've got that in judaism before you even get the christian juda.
but you've got that in judaism before you even get the christian juda.
Slavoj Žižek
here we enter a very problematic topic. i'm not ready to go into it now because then i'm either accused of being either anti-semitic or anti-christian. you always get in trouble here. my favorite reply to this and to conclude maybe is another i quoted in one of my books, dirty joke, which is for me a perfect joke because it's totally ambiguous. and i ask you a question, how do you read it? it's a joke about a rabbi who his son spent too much money, attacks him horrible son and rabbi turns to god. father, what do i tell me god, what should i do with my son? father, god answers, do as i did, write a new testament. now, i ask you a simple question. is this a joke of jews making fun of stupid christians? or is this a joke of christians, how, oh, this is only how the jews can understand that, blah blah blah. it's unbelievable how i get whenever almost 50-50. no and so... that would be the problem here, how to...
here we enter a very problematic topic. i'm not ready to go into it now because then i'm either accused of being either anti-semitic or anti-christian. you always get in trouble here. my favorite reply to this and to conclude maybe is another i quoted in one of my books, dirty joke, which is for me a perfect joke because it's totally ambiguous. and i ask you a question, how do you read it? it's a joke about a rabbi who his son spent too much money, attacks him horrible son and rabbi turns to god. father, what do i tell me god, what should i do with my son? father, god answers, do as i did, write a new testament. now, i ask you a simple question. is this a joke of jews making fun of stupid christians? or is this a joke of christians, how, oh, this is only how the jews can understand that, blah blah blah. it's unbelievable how i get whenever almost 50-50. no and so... that would be the problem here, how to...
Moderator
very patient. government it so dangerous about the eradication of belief in the acknowledgement of actual real knowledge of the existence and person of god. you said that is very dangerous. fundamentalist myself. so i'm just wondering if you could be you may already answered the question, so i follow i just missed it. so could you go more?
very patient. government it so dangerous about the eradication of belief in the acknowledgement of actual real knowledge of the existence and person of god. you said that is very dangerous. fundamentalist myself. so i'm just wondering if you could be you may already answered the question, so i follow i just missed it. so could you go more?
Slavoj Žižek
no, okay. let's avoid the term dangerous. what i'm only saying is that uh. what i'm only saying is that for me... what is precious about belief is precisely this way this kka put it. wager. existential wager on accepting the absurd, the impossible. and that for me is all that belief is about and i don't even mean only believe in the here the sense of religious belief, but even political belief and so on and so on. and i think that dangerous in the sense of... i think that all emancipatory politics is lost without this. this type of belief. let's take the question of racism, for example. i claim that without this kind of article of faith, you get lost in this, okay, maybe you blacks and us whites, maybe we are the same, maybe we are not. let's first measure our brains. what if we discover that i or you have, you know what i mean? you cannot approach it this way. you have to posit an act of belief. to give you another example. what i mean by belief, a totally different one. for example, in germany. in i often refer to this example in my books. in germany, in let's say we are in germany 33, 34, and you debate with your friend who is anti-semitic, you are not, and then... you propose look, we are talking about jews in abstract. let's simply look at the jews. let's see how they really are. i claim the moment. let's precisely transpose the debate into the terms of knowledge. i claim the moment you do this, you are lost. you miss the point. you already concede the point to anti-semitism because the moment you put it in the terms of how the jews really are, the result is clear. you will discover that, okay, of course the nazis exaggerate a little bit jews are not so bad but there are many bad jews and so on. it is true. i mean, are we aware how we always make fun of the nazis of blah blah. but are we aware and this is for me not an argument for nazism. how many of their statements were true? for example, when they claimed that 80% of lawyers in berlin are jews, 60% of journalists are jews. drs have a crucial influence. i'm very sorry, but this was true. no? and my point is precisely but in no way it justifies anti you know what i mean the moment you translate this fundamental how call it, ethical religious question into questions of knowledge, you are lost. the tragic example here for me is francis fukuyama's, it's no longer the last book, that's on, what's the title, freedom something, on biogenetics and the dangers of biogenetics, where he tries to bio he tries to ground human dignity, directly in our knowledge about human nature. and the result for me is crazy he claims that his argument against biogenetic interventions is dead. our experience as free agents and so on is only possible with a certain genome biological structure. so we shouldn't mess in it but doesn't he see that this very reasoning undermines it because the moment you say that our human dignity is based in certain genetic structure, you already. devalue it. i mean, what kind of dignity is this if it's just a matter of, you know, that's the problem for me, or even, for example, here i have a fundamental problem with some religious people with catholics especially who are so opposed to and i would provoke you, do you have an answer to this? namely, they are on the one hand opposed to biogenetic interventions, blah blah blah. and their argument is usually because man is not just an object, biological mechanism who can be manipulated, man has an immortal soul, blah, blah, blah. my answer is... reply to this is reaction is totally common sense one. wait a minute, if man has an immortal soul, then why prohibit biogenetic intervention? we only mess with the body there, no? you know what i mean? it's very strange logic. the logic is man has an immortal soul. which cannot be affected by biogenetic experiments, so let's not do the experiment. what? what's the point? the only intelligent answer that the priest gave me, it's the radio theory answer. it's really intelligent. the idea is that our body to our soul. it's like the radio. to the program that you hear. it's true that the program is not in the radio.
no, okay. let's avoid the term dangerous. what i'm only saying is that uh. what i'm only saying is that for me... what is precious about belief is precisely this way this kka put it. wager. existential wager on accepting the absurd, the impossible. and that for me is all that belief is about and i don't even mean only believe in the here the sense of religious belief, but even political belief and so on and so on. and i think that dangerous in the sense of... i think that all emancipatory politics is lost without this. this type of belief. let's take the question of racism, for example. i claim that without this kind of article of faith, you get lost in this, okay, maybe you blacks and us whites, maybe we are the same, maybe we are not. let's first measure our brains. what if we discover that i or you have, you know what i mean? you cannot approach it this way. you have to posit an act of belief. to give you another example. what i mean by belief, a totally different one. for example, in germany. in i often refer to this example in my books. in germany, in let's say we are in germany 33, 34, and you debate with your friend who is anti-semitic, you are not, and then... you propose look, we are talking about jews in abstract. let's simply look at the jews. let's see how they really are. i claim the moment. let's precisely transpose the debate into the terms of knowledge. i claim the moment you do this, you are lost. you miss the point. you already concede the point to anti-semitism because the moment you put it in the terms of how the jews really are, the result is clear. you will discover that, okay, of course the nazis exaggerate a little bit jews are not so bad but there are many bad jews and so on. it is true. i mean, are we aware how we always make fun of the nazis of blah blah. but are we aware and this is for me not an argument for nazism. how many of their statements were true? for example, when they claimed that 80% of lawyers in berlin are jews, 60% of journalists are jews. drs have a crucial influence. i'm very sorry, but this was true. no? and my point is precisely but in no way it justifies anti you know what i mean the moment you translate this fundamental how call it, ethical religious question into questions of knowledge, you are lost. the tragic example here for me is francis fukuyama's, it's no longer the last book, that's on, what's the title, freedom something, on biogenetics and the dangers of biogenetics, where he tries to bio he tries to ground human dignity, directly in our knowledge about human nature. and the result for me is crazy he claims that his argument against biogenetic interventions is dead. our experience as free agents and so on is only possible with a certain genome biological structure. so we shouldn't mess in it but doesn't he see that this very reasoning undermines it because the moment you say that our human dignity is based in certain genetic structure, you already. devalue it. i mean, what kind of dignity is this if it's just a matter of, you know, that's the problem for me, or even, for example, here i have a fundamental problem with some religious people with catholics especially who are so opposed to and i would provoke you, do you have an answer to this? namely, they are on the one hand opposed to biogenetic interventions, blah blah blah. and their argument is usually because man is not just an object, biological mechanism who can be manipulated, man has an immortal soul, blah, blah, blah. my answer is... reply to this is reaction is totally common sense one. wait a minute, if man has an immortal soul, then why prohibit biogenetic intervention? we only mess with the body there, no? you know what i mean? it's very strange logic. the logic is man has an immortal soul. which cannot be affected by biogenetic experiments, so let's not do the experiment. what? what's the point? the only intelligent answer that the priest gave me, it's the radio theory answer. it's really intelligent. the idea is that our body to our soul. it's like the radio. to the program that you hear. it's true that the program is not in the radio.
Audience Member 1
yeah
yeah
Slavoj Žižek
but to hear the program, the radio must be properly tuned. you know what i mean so if we do biogenetic manipulations we may put. the radio out of tune so that we will no longer get the message and so on and so on. okay, i don't find this answer satisfactory, but it gets problematic here. so, again, what i'm saying, but it is a serious question, i agree with you. the question for me is, and here i see a big failure with... habermas and some others who oppose biogenetics, but... the way i think they oppose it is that they simply avoid the problem their logic is the following one our human identity is based on certain notions of autonomy, freedom, responsibility and so on. if we do biogenetic manipulations, we undermine this very. but for me. the question is not simple as simple as that because the moment we can do this we already accept that basically we are not. autonomous free and the true dilemma is then, do we accept the fact that we are not free? or do we ignore it in order to... maintain the illusion that we are free for example when people say it's not fair to enhance your abilities with some drugs and so on that in this way you treat, like if you do an exam, it's not fair to, you know whatever. but the true tragedy for me is that... the moment you accept that you can change your... psychic. characteristics with the dr. this means... even if you don't do it. that you already accept. that your psychic characteristics are if there are something that can be manipulated with chemical. elements. it means they are basically just an effect of some other chemical combination there. so you already accept it. so for me, this is for me a true problem of biogenetics and so on. to put it in pathetic terms, how to save freedom? can freedom be saved? but if we, i think it can be. and to make a little bit of propaganda, in a book of mine which will appear call it the parallax view, i have, it may surprise some of you, i have 200 pages of detailed. dialogue, but it's a one-sided dialogue. they will.
but to hear the program, the radio must be properly tuned. you know what i mean so if we do biogenetic manipulations we may put. the radio out of tune so that we will no longer get the message and so on and so on. okay, i don't find this answer satisfactory, but it gets problematic here. so, again, what i'm saying, but it is a serious question, i agree with you. the question for me is, and here i see a big failure with... habermas and some others who oppose biogenetics, but... the way i think they oppose it is that they simply avoid the problem their logic is the following one our human identity is based on certain notions of autonomy, freedom, responsibility and so on. if we do biogenetic manipulations, we undermine this very. but for me. the question is not simple as simple as that because the moment we can do this we already accept that basically we are not. autonomous free and the true dilemma is then, do we accept the fact that we are not free? or do we ignore it in order to... maintain the illusion that we are free for example when people say it's not fair to enhance your abilities with some drugs and so on that in this way you treat, like if you do an exam, it's not fair to, you know whatever. but the true tragedy for me is that... the moment you accept that you can change your... psychic. characteristics with the dr. this means... even if you don't do it. that you already accept. that your psychic characteristics are if there are something that can be manipulated with chemical. elements. it means they are basically just an effect of some other chemical combination there. so you already accept it. so for me, this is for me a true problem of biogenetics and so on. to put it in pathetic terms, how to save freedom? can freedom be saved? but if we, i think it can be. and to make a little bit of propaganda, in a book of mine which will appear call it the parallax view, i have, it may surprise some of you, i have 200 pages of detailed. dialogue, but it's a one-sided dialogue. they will.
Cornel West
yeah.
yeah.
Slavoj Žižek
three. . with dennet and all of them, i go in detail into, no, i have a great appreciation of today's brain sciences. i'm not that arrogant european who dismiss them in this easy transcendental way. you know, they are naive reductionists. i think there are wonderful things happening in them. but i think that they... sorry,... do you want to ask? i will stop, sorry.
three. . with dennet and all of them, i go in detail into, no, i have a great appreciation of today's brain sciences. i'm not that arrogant european who dismiss them in this easy transcendental way. you know, they are naive reductionists. i think there are wonderful things happening in them. but i think that they... sorry,... do you want to ask? i will stop, sorry.
Moderator
we have to really for only one last very brief question, okay? there are lots of people who want to speak, but we really have to stop because's a lot of people have to go.
we have to really for only one last very brief question, okay? there are lots of people who want to speak, but we really have to stop because's a lot of people have to go.
Audience Member 3
that.
that.
Moderator
one.
one.
Audience Member 3
yeah. yeah. this, this is a question with reference to the documentary that was released you last week.
yeah. yeah. this, this is a question with reference to the documentary that was released you last week.
Slavoj Žižek
oh my god. i haven't seen it. it's too traumatic for me.
oh my god. i haven't seen it. it's too traumatic for me.
Audience Member 1
thank.
thank.
Slavoj Žižek
ah, you mean that dead of night, no.
ah, you mean that dead of night, no.
Audience Member 1
the
the
Slavoj Žižek
yeah, yeah.
yeah, yeah.
Audience Member 1
i was wondering if you might say a few words as to why that movie.
i was wondering if you might say a few words as to why that movie.
Slavoj Žižek
there.
there.
Audience Member 1
yeah,.
yeah,.
Slavoj Žižek
first you mean by... i don't get it. you mean it was on the list where did i select that movie?. sorry.
first you mean by... i don't get it. you mean it was on the list where did i select that movie?. sorry.
Audience Member 1
.
.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah know, don't put too much into that. i mean, i selected it because my wife wanted to see it. no know, this is an an example of what laccon means desire is the desire of the other. no but more seriously, the reason i like the movie is nonetheless that it's clearly a movie about trans you saw the movie, i hope, about transference, a guy, you remember, a total idiot who was all the time in that house, gardener and so on, and he's misperceived as a wise guy at the end even considered to become the president. and so how... how? you find yourself at the right place and you this pure idea of it's not what you really are. this is what is called transference. but the reason i admire the movie is that it resisted a certain temptation. the temptation would have been to paint the character played by peter stas as the gardener paint him as a guy who is just an ordinary, warm human being. he remains monstrous to the end.
yeah know, don't put too much into that. i mean, i selected it because my wife wanted to see it. no know, this is an an example of what laccon means desire is the desire of the other. no but more seriously, the reason i like the movie is nonetheless that it's clearly a movie about trans you saw the movie, i hope, about transference, a guy, you remember, a total idiot who was all the time in that house, gardener and so on, and he's misperceived as a wise guy at the end even considered to become the president. and so how... how? you find yourself at the right place and you this pure idea of it's not what you really are. this is what is called transference. but the reason i admire the movie is that it resisted a certain temptation. the temptation would have been to paint the character played by peter stas as the gardener paint him as a guy who is just an ordinary, warm human being. he remains monstrous to the end.
Cornel West
hmm
hmm
Slavoj Žižek
i like this in the movie, that it's not the cheap hollywood, you know, an ordinary guy. it's this monstrosity which is maintained to the end. on the other hand, i mean, no, no, i was looking for different films there, which unfortunately they didn't have. so there are much darker secrets there. ladies and gentlemen.
i like this in the movie, that it's not the cheap hollywood, you know, an ordinary guy. it's this monstrosity which is maintained to the end. on the other hand, i mean, no, no, i was looking for different films there, which unfortunately they didn't have. so there are much darker secrets there. ladies and gentlemen.
Moderator
j.
j.
Cornel West
just. let's we get college.
just. let's we get college.
Slavoj Žižek
cool.
cool.
Cornel West
you.
you.
Slavoj Žižek
thank.
thank.