We’re Only Human
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-10-20 · 1:20:27 · 11,386 words
ideologypsychoanalysiscinema-art-culturecapitalismreligion-theologyliberalism-political-correctnessrace-antisemitismgeopolitics-wardemocracyhegel-dialectics
Žižek delivers a lecture on the critique of ideology, arguing that ideology today operates not through explicit rules but through its own obscene underside, unwritten rules, solicited transgressions, and false humanization. He traces ideology through examples ranging from charity advertising and organic food consumption to Hollywood films, Abu Ghraib, Israeli cinema, and the Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura, ultimately arguing that beliefs function socially even when nobody sincerely holds them. He closes by connecting these analyses to the healthcare debate, anti-Semitism, and the necessity of a prior 'spiritual violence' aimed at oneself before any genuine political transformation.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 22
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The practice, rooted in Paul's Ephesians, of exposing how power operates not through flesh-and-blood enemies but through structural mystification, 'the spiritual wickedness in the heavens.'
as “kosmokratoras”
Greek term from Paul's Ephesians for 'world rulers of this darkness,' which Žižek uses to restate the object of ideology critique as structural power and mystification rather than corrupt individuals.
as “background noise of ideology”
The unstated contextual density that ideology strips away when it reduces a statement to an abstract appealing essence, making it seem universally agreeable while obscuring what is actually at stake.
as “two-level rules”
Every social space has explicit rules and a second set of meta-rules dictating how to deal with (violate or follow) those explicit rules; full membership requires knowing both.
as “subject supposed to know”
Implicitly at stake in Žižek's examples of ideology: the subject who 'knows' the real rules (about transgression, charity, etc.) while appearing not to.
The unofficial, unspoken transgressive injunctions (marching chants, fraternity rituals, Abu Ghraib performances) that are the necessary complement to official ideology and constitute the true site of identification.
as “solicited transgression”
The paradoxical structure in which subjects are officially permitted or even enjoined to transgress, on the condition that they do not take the permission fully literally, prohibition that functions as a covert injunction to do the prohibited thing discreetly.
Hollywood's self-censorship rules of the 1930s-40s, which Žižek invokes as an example of the two-level rule system: explicit prohibition of sex with a codified visual language (smoking after fade-out) that signals what is forbidden.
The contemporary mechanism whereby ideology presents itself as its own opposite, as the appeal to authentic human identity beneath all political and ideological labels.
The claim that we live beyond ideology, which Žižek treats as itself the highest form of ideology: the appeal to a human core beneath all labels is precisely how ideology disguises itself today.
The ideological operation that foregrounds the inner humanity of perpetrators or soldiers in order to erase political and ethical responsibility for what they are actually doing.
The narrative script a subject constructs to justify and simultaneously obfuscate the horror of what they are doing; inner authenticity is not the truth of the subject but the primordial form of self-deception.
as “impersonal belief”
Beliefs that function at the social-structural level even though no individual subject sincerely holds them in the first person, ideology no longer requires personal conviction to be operative.
as “big Other”
Implicitly present in Žižek's account of ideology as the structural site for beliefs that function without any individual believer, democracy, Santa Claus, where the social order 'believes' in place of subjects.
The pre-sexual libidinal organization Žižek identifies in Kung Fu Panda's hero Po, whose drive is eating rather than sex or power, representing a regressive ideological substitution for mature desire.
as “decaffeinated Dalai Lama”
Žižek's label for the dominant contemporary ideology of enlightened hedonism: be authentic, realize your potentials, enjoy life, Eastern spirituality stripped of its bite and repackaged for consumer self-help.
A post-1968 stage of capitalism that integrates the critique of consumerism and alienation by fusing commodity consumption with humanitarian or ecological caring, so that the act of buying is simultaneously an act of social responsibility.
The ideological surplus of meaning Starbucks and similar brands attach to commodity purchase, making the buyer feel they are participating in an entire ethical world when simply buying a coffee.
Ulrich Beck's concept invoked by Žižek to capture how contemporary risks (ecological, seismic) are generated by human activity itself, making our situation one of opaque self-generated threats rather than external catastrophes.
The neoliberal reframing of precarity (short-term contracts, dismantled welfare) as new freedoms and opportunities for self-reinvention, converting structural insecurity into a consumer lifestyle choice.
Anti-Semitic ideology must be fought at the level of fantasy/dreams rather than facts, because the anti-Semitic picture of the Jew is a constitutive fantasy that holds the subject's identity together.
The first necessary act of genuine radicalism: a violence aimed at oneself, transforming one's own dreams and fantasies, before any external political transformation can succeed.
Stories he reaches for 18
A friend visiting Bohr's country house asks why a physicist has a horseshoe above the door to ward off evil spirits. Bohr replies: 'Of course I don't believe in it, but I was told it works even if you don't believe in it.' Classic illustration of belief functioning independently of conviction.
“Of course I don't believe in it, that this really prevents evil spirits to enter, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”
Teitaro Suzuki justified Japanese imperial aggression in China in the 1930s and provided Zen instructions for how to kill without psychological difficulty: by reaching enlightenment one sees substantial reality as illusion and can experience stabbing as a mere 'intersubjective dance' in which one is a pure observer.
“here is my hand moving around in the intersubjective interpersonal dance, and as a part of the same dance, your body gets stuck into it. I am for nothing in it.”
Lacan's formula that pathological jealousy is pathological regardless of its factual truth, what matters is why the subject needs the fantasy of the unfaithful wife to maintain their subjective consistency. Žižek applies this to anti-Semitism.
“his jealousy is pathological even if it's true that his wife is doing this. Because what makes it pathological, it's not is it true or not, but why does he need that”
A British Lacanian analyst's formula: in X-Files, all the alien events happen 'out there' to cover up the fact that nothing happens between Mulder and Scully. Žižek extends this to Da Vinci Code (Jesus must have slept with Mary Magdalene so Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou don't have to) and the James Bond film Quantum of Solace (no sex at all).
“all this has to happen because... to cover up the fact that nothing goes on here between the two of them.”
An older man invites someone to dinner; both know he will pay; the guest must nonetheless briefly resist when the check arrives. Once Žižek resisted too long and had to pay. The ritual illustrates offers that must be made knowing they will (and must) be refused.
“you both know that your offer... is in a way hypocritical. But we must go through this ritual.”
The architect of the Holocaust played late Beethoven string quartets in a private quartet before his assassination in Prague, possibly with authentic musicality, coexisting without contradiction with his role as mass murderer, proving no necessary link between inner experience and ethical horror.
“Maybe he played them with a real authenticity, blah blah, and nonetheless he was able to do it.”
The film simultaneously presents orientalist Buddhist wisdom and mocks it, yet the ideology survives the mockery. At the end, Po discovers there is no secret ingredient, 'to make something special, you just have to believe it's special', which is the formula for how beliefs function today: enacted without sincere conviction.
“there is no special ingredient. It's only you. To make something special, you just have to believe it's special.”
Adults pretend to believe in Santa for the children; children pretend to believe for the parents and presents. The chain of mutual pretense demonstrates that belief functions as a social structure even though no one believes sincerely in the first person.
“you can see a belief functions as element of a social network. It functions except although even if nobody effectively in the first person believes.”
Father Joseph, Richelieu's counselor, deliberately prolonged the Thirty Years' War to prevent German unification (Aldous Huxley argues this enabled WWI and WWII), while writing beautiful mystical meditations in the evenings. Huxley's disturbed response led him to turn to Zen, which Žižek then deconstructs with D.T. Suzuki.
“in the evening, metaphorically, after doing this dirty work, he wrote the most beautiful mystical meditations”
Chinese seismologists reportedly found that the massive lakes created by the Three Gorges Dam increased pressure on tectonic strata, contributing to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, exemplifying the contemporary condition where human activity generates opaque, uncontrollable catastrophic risks.
“these earthquakes were probably the product of human activity.”
Edward Norton's character confronts his boss and beats himself rather than the boss, Žižek reads this as the proper first act of radical politics: spiritual violence directed inward, transforming one's own dreams before acting on the world.
“That's how you should begin: change your dreams.”
Meir's formula for belief, she does not believe directly but believes in those who believe, exemplifies the impersonal structure of ideology: nobody needs to believe in the first person for belief to function socially.
“Jewish people believe in God, and I believe in Jewish people.”
For every pair of shoes purchased, Toms gives a pair to a child in need, the formula that lets consumerism justify itself: the more you consume, the more the excluded benefit.
“you may engage in consumerism because the more you do it, the more also those who are excluded profit by it.”
Sister Maria returns to the convent seeking punishment for her desire for Baron von Trapp; the Mother Superior instead sings 'Climb Every Mountain,' which Žižek reads as an obscene injunction to go back and consummate the desire, the Church ideology codes: obey the surface rules, do it discreetly, and your sex life will be better.
“the Mother Superior starts to sing a song... 'Climb Ev'ry Mountain'... Which means almost literally: go back, seduce and screw the guy.”
Television charity ads showing malnourished children from Africa or Guatemala with the message 'for the price of two cappuccinos you can change a child's life', Žižek argues these function to reassure the affluent they need not change anything structural, and in fact serve to keep the poor 'there' rather than here.
“we pay charity, charities, not so much to help those out there, but to make sure that they remain there, that they don't come.”
First-time smokers cough and find it disgusting; first whiskey is bitter. Both must be learned as initiatory rites. Žižek extends this to sex itself: at the deepest level it is a transgressive-enforced duty, not pure pleasure, otherwise masturbation would be preferred.
“I claim it's the same with drinking... if you want pure pleasure, masturbation is much better.”
US military marching chants combine open obscenities with nonsense rhymes (e.g. from An Officer and a Gentleman); Žižek uses them to show that the real identification within a closed community is formed through its transgressive rituals, not its explicit rules.
“I don't know but I've been told that Eskimo pussy is rather cold.”
At NYU, Žižek filled his office-hour signup sheet with invented names so no students would come and he could go to the movies, illustrating that university is 'a nice place without students.'
“university is a nice place without students”
Works invoked 26
The Parallax View book
Mentioned by Hillary Neroni as one of Žižek's books in the introduction.
The Da Vinci Code film
Used via Darian Leader's formula: the grand Jesus-Mary narrative is there to cover up the absence of sexual relation between the protagonists.
Fight Club film
Called 'one of my favorite Hollywood movies' and explicitly defended against the 'proto-fascist propaganda' charge; Edward Norton's self-beating scene is read as the model for the first act of radical politics.
Casablanca film
Called a movie Žižek 'more sincerely likes'; the deliberately ambiguous fade-out between Bogart and Bergman is analyzed as the film's consciously double-register address to the viewer.
Quantum of Solace film
Cited as the first James Bond film with no sex, part of the analysis of Hollywood's gradual abandonment of the couple-creation formula.
Zen at War book
Brian Victoria's documentation of Japanese Zen Buddhism's complicity in 1930s-40s imperialism; used to refute the idea that Eastern spirituality is ethically superior to Christianity.
The Sound of Music film
Called 'one of the great masterpieces of Western civilization'; the Mother Superior's 'Climb Every Mountain' scene is read as an obscene covert injunction to consummate desire, exemplifying solicited transgression.
Angels and Demons film
Cited as another Dan Brown adaptation with no sexual tension despite an attractive lead, part of the Hollywood pattern of disappearing sexuality.
Kung Fu Panda film
Called 'a perfect, almost clinical example' of how ideology functions: beliefs survive their own mockery, and the 'no secret ingredient' ending crystallizes impersonal belief.
The X-Files tv
Used via Darian Leader's formula: all the alien events cover up the fact that nothing sexual happens between the two protagonists.
The Lost Symbol book
Dan Brown novel Žižek read and found very bad even by Brown's own standards; noted the absence of any sexual tension.
Grey Eminence book
Aldous Huxley's historical study of Père Joseph; called 'a wonderful historical research'; used to illustrate the disconnection between mystical inner life and political-ethical horror.
Shoah film
Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust documentary; Žižek calls it 'ideology at its purest' (a surprising characterization, likely ironic or comparative, applying to its model of interview that Tsahal then applied to IDF).
Mentioned by Hillary Neroni in introduction.
The Ticklish Subject book
Mentioned by Hillary Neroni in introduction.
Referenced as the source of a marching chant lyric used to illustrate the obscene underside of military culture.
Jonathan Littell's novel; used positively as a specimen of humanizing ideology, the Holocaust executioner presented as ordinary, and linked to Hannah Arendt's banality of evil.
Cited for Lacan's formula 'the picture that I see is in my eye, but I am also in the picture', used to conclude the analysis of anti-Semitic fantasy.
Lebanon film
Samuel Maoz's film shot entirely from inside a tank; called 'ideology at its purest' for occluding political context behind the soldier's inner experience.
Stage Fright film
Hitchcock film from 1948-49 with Marlene Dietrich; Fredric Jameson chose it as his 'obvious Hitchcock failure that is the true masterpiece' for the unfinished book project.
Topaz film
Hitchcock's 1960s anti-Communist drama; Žižek's own choice for 'obvious failure that is the true masterpiece', described as 'the lowest you can go.'
Tsahal film
Claude Lanzmann's documentary of IDF soldiers; called 'ideology at its purest' for the same reason as Lebanon, humanizing the soldiers while erasing their political actions.
Waltz with Bashir film
Ari Folman's animated documentary; cited alongside Lebanon as ideology-as-humanization in Israeli cinema.
Ephesians (Paul) book
Opened with as the 'shortest definition of ideology critique'; Paul's 'kosmokratoras' formula is used to ground the entire lecture's argument.
Book Žižek read (author forgotten) about how Nazis justified their actions to themselves; called 'absolutely crucial' for demonstrating how perpetrators construct beautiful self-justifying narratives, the fundamental lie.
Risk Society book
Ulrich Beck's book; Žižek partially endorses its argument that contemporary risks are self-generated by human activity.
People invoked 25
Leader of a group of Indonesian killers in the 1966 massacres, who publicly boasts about torture and rape methods in the documentary 'Free Men'; used to illustrate the moral vacuum produced by capitalist globalization.
17th-century French politician-priest and Richelieu's counselor who prolonged the Thirty Years' War while writing authentic mystical meditations; used to illustrate the disconnection between inner spiritual life and political evil.
Samuel Maoz negative
Director of Lebanon, which Žižek calls 'ideology at its purest' for presenting war entirely from inside the Israeli soldier's subjective experience while erasing all political context.
Introducer at the event; described as 'my old friend Hillary'; she is a professor of film and television studies.
Cited as the benchmark of authentic Christian mysticism against which Père Joseph's writings are measured.
Jacques Lacan positive
Twice cited directly: the formula on pathological jealousy (it is pathological regardless of truth) and the Seminar XI formula ('the picture is in my eye but I am in the picture'), both used to ground the analysis of anti-Semitism.
Brian Victoria positive
Zen Buddhist author of Zen at War, which documents the Japanese Zen community's complicity in 1930s-40s imperialism; Žižek relies on it to support his critique of Suzuki.
Described as 'anti-Zionist Jewish filmmaker' whom Žižek defended in a Jerusalem public debate; the audience's attack on Allen in anti-Semitic terms illustrates Žižek's thesis about Zionism.
Mentioned as Père Joseph's superior in the context of the Grey Eminence discussion.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Described as a 'hard-line liberal anti-Communist' who debated Žižek at NYPL; their mutual agreement in abstract terms is used as proof both were operating within ideology.
Jonathan Littell positive
Author of Les Bienveillantes; Žižek treats the novel as a perfect clinical specimen of post-ideological humanizing ideology, reading it as a sophisticated demonstration of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil thesis.
Fredric Jameson positive
Described as 'my good friend Fred Jameson'; co-planner with Žižek of an unfinished book project on Hitchcock 'failure' films, Jameson's choice being Stage Fright.
Golda Meir positive
Žižek credits her formula ('Jewish people believe in God, and I believe in Jewish people') as the first clear articulation of impersonal belief, nobody believes directly, but belief functions through a chain of delegation.
D. T. Suzuki negative
Zen popularizer who in the 1930s justified Japanese imperial aggression and provided Zen techniques for killing without guilt; used to demolish Huxley's faith that Eastern spirituality is ethically safer than Christianity.
Cuban crime novelist whose critical portrayal of Cuban misery is nonetheless supported by the state because its underlying message is ideological fidelity to Cuba; Žižek reads his work as 'a really, really very refined mode of ideology.'
Darian Leader positive
Described as 'British Lacanian psychoanalyst'; provided the formula that in X-Files all the alien events happen to cover up the fact that nothing goes on between the two protagonists.
Claude Lanzmann negative
Director of Shoah (called 'ideology at its purest') and Tsahal; the Tsahal model of endless IDF soldier interviews about subjective fear is cited as exemplary of humanizing ideology.
Hannah Arendt positive
Invoked approvingly: her point that behind terrifying acts you find ordinary human beings (banality of evil) underlies Žižek's critique of humanizing ideology.
The Holocaust architect who played Beethoven string quartets with apparent authenticity; used to illustrate that inner experience and political-ethical horror are disconnected.
Ari Folman negative
Director of Waltz with Bashir, cited alongside Lebanon as an example of ideological humanization in Israeli cinema.
Niels Bohr positive
Physicist who kept a horseshoe above his door 'because it works even if you don't believe in it', used to illustrate impersonal belief.
Dan Brown negative
Žižek claims to 'measure him by his own standards' and finds his novels very bad, especially The Lost Symbol; used to illustrate the Hollywood formula of no-sex coupled with grand narrative.
Ulrich Beck positive
German sociologist, Risk Society; Žižek partially agrees with Beck's argument that contemporary risks are generated by our own activity, though does not endorse him wholesale.
Aldous Huxley positive
Author of Grey Eminence, which Žižek calls 'a wonderful historical research'; Huxley's disturbance at Père Joseph's mystic-politician duality led him to Zen, which Žižek then critiques.
Paul the Apostle positive
Žižek opens with Paul's Ephesians ('kosmokratoras') as the shortest definition of ideology critique: the struggle is not against individuals but against structural power and mystification.
What it argues
ideology as its own obscene undersidethe two-level structure of rules: explicit and unwrittenbeliefs that function without anyone sincerely believing themhumanization as ideological mystificationcultural capitalism and the commodification of altruismfreedom of choice as neoliberal ideologythe necessity of self-transformation before political action
Dialectical moves 10
“ideology today appears as its own opposite, as non-ideology, as the reference to the core of our human identity beneath all ideological labels”
The most effective form of ideology presents itself as the absence of ideology, pure humanism, which is why appeals to shared humanity are ideological through and through.
“the true question is not are Jews really like that? The true question is why does the anti-Semitic subject need the figure of the Jew?”
Fighting racism by contesting its factual claims concedes the wrong terrain; the operative question is the structural function the fantasy plays for the subject.
“universal healthcare if anything provides for people much more freedom”
Reframes the neoliberal claim that healthcare choice means freedom: collective provision is the precondition of real freedom, not its negation.
“Zionism is the ultimate today's Zionism is the ultimate stage of anti-Semitism”
Contemporary Zionism reproduces the same exclusionary logic against diaspora Jews that 19th-century anti-Semites used against Jews, making it the dialectical culmination of what it opposes.
“the so-called spontaneous outbursts are absolutely even more maybe also regulated by rules. They are not a matter of spontaneous enjoyment. No, they have to be learned.”
Apparent transgression is not outside ideology but its most rule-governed dimension; the more hedonistically transgressive, the more thoroughly it must be learned.
“to enjoy, if you drink for pleasure, you don't drink whiskey... I claim the same happens — it's the same even for sex. At the deepest level, it's not pleasure, it's some kind of a transgressive-enforced duty”
Enjoyment in culture is not natural but commanded, a duty dressed as pleasure, which is why it must be trained and why masturbation would be 'more pleasurable' than sex.
“a husband is jealous of his wife... his jealousy is pathological even if it's true that his wife is doing this”
Lacan's formula, endorsed by Žižek: the truth or falsehood of the content is irrelevant; what matters is the structural function the fantasy performs for the subject's consistency.
“what those guys in prison there by annoying, torturing and so on prisoners, they were effectively staging there this obscene underground other side of not only military — I will even — I even claim maybe cultural life”
Abu Ghraib is not an aberration but the staging of the constitutive obscene underside that official American culture simultaneously produces and disavows.
“you who are lucky to live relatively safe lives... we offer you a simple way out. For the price of a couple of cappuccinos, you can even feel well for it and you can forget about it”
Charity advertising functions not to help the poor but to license the affluent to remain indifferent by providing a cheap emotional substitute for structural change.
“we pay charity, charities, not so much to help those out there, but to make sure that they remain there, that they don't come”
The true function of charitable giving is to maintain the global status quo, keeping the poor at a distance, not to alleviate it.
Claims 20
asserts
Ideology operates not primarily through explicit rules but through the unwritten meta-rules that govern how to deal with (including how to violate) the explicit rules.structure of ideology
asserts
The obscene transgressive underside of official rules — marching chants, fraternity rituals, Abu Ghraib — is not a deviation from ideology but its constitutive supplement and the true site of identification.ideology and transgression
asserts
The appeal to shared humanity beneath all ideological labels ('we are all just human beings') is itself ideology at its purest today, precisely because it erases the political consequences of what agents are actually doing.post-ideological humanism
asserts
The inner life — the authentic stories subjects tell about themselves — is not the truth of the subject but constitutively a fundamental lie that obscures the reality of what they are doing.subjectivity and authenticity
asserts
Reinhard Heydrich's authentic performance of Beethoven string quartets and his role as Holocaust architect coexist without contradiction, showing there is no necessary link between inner authentic experience and the ethical horror of one's political acts.authenticity and ethics
asserts
D.T. Suzuki's Zen Buddhist justification of Japanese aggression against China in the 1930s demonstrates that Eastern spirituality provides no more ethical guarantee than Christianity.religion and violence
asserts
Israeli films like Lebanon perform ideology at its purest by presenting war through the inner suffering of the soldier, erasing all political and historical context of what is being done to Palestinians.Israeli cinema and ideology
asserts
Cuban authorities rationally support Leonardo Padura Fuentes because his deeply critical novels ultimately deliver an ideological message: stay in Cuba with heroic fidelity rather than escaping to Miami.Cuban ideology and literature
asserts
Beliefs function socially even when no individual sincerely holds them — ideology does not require personal conviction to operate, only structural enactment.the social functioning of belief
asserts
Cultural capitalism, exemplified by Starbucks and Toms shoes, has integrated the critique of consumerism by fusing commodity purchase with humanitarian and ecological caring into a single act.cultural capitalism
asserts
Universal healthcare would increase rather than decrease actual freedom because meaningful freedom requires a stable background of institutional guarantees, just as using water and electricity does.healthcare and freedom
asserts
The neoliberal reframing of precarious labor and dismantled welfare as new freedoms of self-reinvention is ideology at its purest.neoliberal ideology of choice
asserts
Anti-Semitism cannot be defeated at the level of facts (disputing whether Jews are 'really like that') but only at the level of dreams and fantasy, by asking why the anti-Semitic subject needs the figure of the Jew.anti-Semitism
asserts
Contemporary Zionism is the ultimate stage of anti-Semitism in the sense that Zionists deploy exactly the same logic of exclusion against diaspora Jews that 19th-century anti-Semites deployed against Jews generally.Zionism and anti-Semitism
asserts
Genuine radical political movements must begin with a spiritual violence directed at oneself — transforming one's own dreams — rather than immediately rushing to external action.revolutionary praxis
asserts
The failure of 20th-century revolutions (including the Soviet Union) stems from the fact that they won politically but did not transform the dreams they were dreaming.Soviet Union and revolutionary failure
asserts
Charity advertising ('for the price of two cappuccinos') functions ideologically to reassure affluent consumers that they can continue their comfortable lives without addressing the structural causes of global poverty.charity and ideology
asserts
The real reason we buy organic food is not that we believe it is less poisonous but to produce a reflexive feeling of being part of something meaningful — a form of fake profit without real cost.organic consumerism and ideology
asserts
Abu Ghraib staged the obscene underground other side of American military and cultural life, not a deviation from it.Abu Ghraib and American ideology
asserts
The ongoing Indonesian massacres documentary (The Act of Killing / 'Free Men') reveals a moral vacuum created by capitalist globalization dismantling traditional ethics, not merely primitive local culture.Indonesia massacres and capitalist globalization
Quotes 20
“ideology is precisely such a reduction to the simplified essence which conveniently forgets what comes up with it as the price to be paid, the let's call it background noise which provides the density of the actual meaning of a statement.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology strips away background noise
“we pay charity, charities, not so much to help those out there, but to make sure that they remain there, that they don't come.”Slavoj Žižek · charity as containment of the poor
“to truly be in, you must not only follow the rules, but there is a very codified way, nothing contingent about it, of how you softly here and there violate the explicit rules.”Slavoj Žižek · the unwritten meta-rules of social membership
“university is a nice place without students”Slavoj Žižek · sardonic anti-pedagogy
“ideology today appears as its own opposite, as non-ideology, as the reference to the core of our human identity beneath all ideological labels.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology masquerading as post-ideology
“an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard... Would you also say: Adolf Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his story?”Slavoj Žižek · the limit of humanist dialogue
“I don't see any continuity, any necessary link between our inner experience, authentic as it may be, and let's call it maybe the social political consequences, the horror of what we are doing.”Slavoj Žižek · inner authenticity does not entail ethical goodness
“fundamentally our innermost identity in the sense of the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves are not the truth. They are even as a rule a lie.”Slavoj Žižek · the fundamental lie of inner identity
“Jewish people believe in God, and I believe in Jewish people.”unknown · Golda Meir's formula for impersonal belief
“of course I don't believe in it, that this really prevents evil spirits to enter, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”Slavoj Žižek · Niels Bohr on belief that functions without conviction
“to make something special, you just have to believe it's special.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology of self-actualization as the logic of belief without content
“if you want pure pleasure, masturbation is much better. So all I am trying to say is that this makes the whole of culture.”Slavoj Žižek · enjoyment in culture as transgressive duty, not natural pleasure
“your laughter now — this is what makes us subjects of power. There's absolutely nothing sub — we played their games.”Slavoj Žižek · ideological interpellation through complicit laughter
“the true question is not are Jews really like that? The true question is why does the anti-Semitic subject need the figure of the Jew?”Slavoj Žižek · fighting anti-Semitism at the level of fantasy, not facts
“the picture that I see is in my eye, it's my fantasy, but I am also in the picture.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan on the subject constituted by its own fantasy
“don't think that ideology doesn't matter today. Precisely today in our at-most cynical era and so on, we are more deep in ideology than we ever were.”Slavoj Žižek · cynicism does not dissolve ideology
“Zionism is the ultimate today's Zionism is the ultimate stage of anti-Semitism.”Slavoj Žižek · Zionism reproduces the logic of anti-Semitism
“they won, but they didn't win in the dreams they were dreaming.”Slavoj Žižek · why 20th-century revolutions ultimately failed
“what if you really want to do something today, you should not succumb too quickly to this idea 'Oh children are starving, let's do something.' Yeah, of course we should, but first we should change ourselves. First we should put in order our dreams.”Slavoj Žižek · spiritual self-transformation precedes political action
“that's how you should begin: change your dreams.”Slavoj Žižek · Fight Club / the first act of radical politics
Transcript 5 turns
unknown
My name is
My name is
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Hillary Neroni. I'm a professor of film and television studies in the English department and we are very excited today to, um, introduce, I'm very excited to introduce our guest today is Slavoj Žižek. Slavoj is a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. He is a professor at the European Graduate School. He also has taught semester-long seminars at universities around the globe. One such seminar called Violence and Ethics was where I met him as a graduate student now too long ago, been a while, where I learned that the image that he uses to describe himself as a professor who writes fake names into his office hour slots is completely false. He's a very generous teacher. Sorry, then. As we saw this morning, um, in his Q&A with students. He has published over books, including Tarrying with the Negative, The Ticklish Subject, and The Parallax View. If I were to describe what his books do, I would say that they stage an engagement between philosophy and culture. In this engagement, he has a unique ability to see the speculative identity between, for example, let's say Hegel and the new film for example. Um, in light of this idea, I would like to tell you one brief story about him. One time I ran into him in an airport where I actually think he does most of his writing these days. And I found him reading the recently released biography of Monica Lewinsky. Upon seeing me, he joked that he should have had the dust jacket of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason hiding the biography. But as his talk today will undoubtedly show, it only requires a slight change in perspective to see the one as the other. So please join me again in thanking Slavoj for coming
Hillary Neroni. I'm a professor of film and television studies in the English department and we are very excited today to, um, introduce, I'm very excited to introduce our guest today is Slavoj Žižek. Slavoj is a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. He is a professor at the European Graduate School. He also has taught semester-long seminars at universities around the globe. One such seminar called Violence and Ethics was where I met him as a graduate student now too long ago, been a while, where I learned that the image that he uses to describe himself as a professor who writes fake names into his office hour slots is completely false. He's a very generous teacher. Sorry, then. As we saw this morning, um, in his Q&A with students. He has published over books, including Tarrying with the Negative, The Ticklish Subject, and The Parallax View. If I were to describe what his books do, I would say that they stage an engagement between philosophy and culture. In this engagement, he has a unique ability to see the speculative identity between, for example, let's say Hegel and the new film for example. Um, in light of this idea, I would like to tell you one brief story about him. One time I ran into him in an airport where I actually think he does most of his writing these days. And I found him reading the recently released biography of Monica Lewinsky. Upon seeing me, he joked that he should have had the dust jacket of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason hiding the biography. But as his talk today will undoubtedly show, it only requires a slight change in perspective to see the one as the other. So please join me again in thanking Slavoj for coming
Slavoj Žižek
today. Thanks. Does this work? Okay, thanks very much. I'm really glad to be here, also to be with my old friends Hillary and Todd. Just one correction, Hillary: that story was true. The problem was that students were annoying me at NYU. I was lucky enough to have many students who didn't know each other. So I figured out if you don't wait for office hours, you put your names—you put your names there on a sheet so that you know each stage is minutes—and then since they didn't know each other,
today. Thanks. Does this work? Okay, thanks very much. I'm really glad to be here, also to be with my old friends Hillary and Todd. Just one correction, Hillary: that story was true. The problem was that students were annoying me at NYU. I was lucky enough to have many students who didn't know each other. So I figured out if you don't wait for office hours, you put your names—you put your names there on a sheet so that you know each stage is minutes—and then since they didn't know each other,
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I filled it myself with invented names so I went to the
I filled it myself with invented names so I went to the
Slavoj Žižek
movies there. That's how you gain time to do your work. As you know, for me to be frank, university is a nice place without students, sorry to be so surprised that show. Okay, let's nonetheless serious talk. What I want to provide today is simply a couple of examples of practicing the old, half-forgotten art of the critique of ideology. The shortest definition of what critique of ideology is, was I think perhaps provided by Paul, the one from the Bible, who in Ephesians wrote, listen to this—I'll try to read this text. This is Paul speaking: "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against leaders, against authorities, against the world rulers (kosmokratoras in Greek) of this darkness, against the," wonderful expression, "the spiritual wickedness in the heavens." End of quote. Or to translate it into today's language, our struggle is not primarily against concrete corrupt individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification which sustains it. What then is ideology? When are we in ideology? Let me give you an example from my own public life. During a debate with Bernard-Henri Lévy at New York Public Library a year or so ago, Henri Lévy made a pathetic case for liberal tolerance. Something like: would you not like to live in a society where you can make fun of the predominant religion without the fear of being killed for it, where women are free to dress the way they like and choose a man they like—they love and so on and so on—while I made a similarly pathetic case for Communism. With the growing food crisis, ecological crisis, and so on and so on, is there not a need to find a new way of collective action which radically differs from market as well as from state administration? So what happened? The irony of the situation was that when we both stated our case in such abstract terms, we both couldn't but agree with each other. What should I say? "No, I want women to be oppressed, not to marry the man they love"? And even Bernard-Henri Lévy, a hard-line liberal anti-Communist, ironically remarked that if this is Communism, what I said, even he is a Communist. Now, this mutual understanding was the proof that we were both knee-deep in ideology. Ideology is precisely such a reduction to the simplified essence which conveniently forgets what comes up with it as the price to be paid, the let's call it background noise which provides the density of the actual meaning of a statement. This is why, for example, I claim you get now in our media, newspapers, TV, all those charity ads, you remember? Some, usually a black child or a native child from Guatemala, from Africa, with I don't know, crippled, distorted and so on, and then comes the message: something like, "you can make difference for the price of a couple of cappuccinos" or whatever to make this child's life for the better. Why is this ideology? Because again, in abstract, of course, my God, we should all be doing it, what's wrong with it? What's wrong with it, I claim, is the concrete message in it, which is, if we read it a little bit cynically: you who are lucky to live relatively safe lives and so on and so on, I know you feel bad because of the hunger horrors and so on in which you even in a not direct way but indirectly participate, we offer you a simple way out. For the price of a couple of cappuccinos, you can even feel well for it and you can forget about it. Like, the message is that you—I claim we pay charity, charities, not so much to help those out there, but to make sure that they remain there, that they don't come. Or another example of ideology. Most of us probably are buying organic food. Now in itself, this is of course okay. But ask yourself deeply: why are you really buying it? I don't think you really believe that all those half-rotten apples which cost twice the normal that we all love, normally genetically manipulated apples and so on, that they are really any less poisonous. Maybe they are. But I don't think this is why we buy it. There's a certain reflexivity in it. We buy organic apples because it makes you feel good. "I'm—our Mother Earth is in danger, I'm part of a wonderful movement to do something." It's this sense of fake profit. I did my thought—doing something without paying any serious price and so on and so on. So the first conclusion here is: you know, every, not only ideological, every field of meaning, or more specifically, every space of rules which regulate interaction within a certain community—from large national communities up to families and so on—I claim that the rules in such a space are always, let's call them, two-level rules. You have the explicit rules: do this, don't do that, you may do this and so on. And, this is for me crucial, you always get rules which are a kind of a second-level rules, rules which tell you how to deal with the explicit rules. This is why, give you a popular example—okay, today is no longer popular—when ordinary people still thought that those from the upper classes have true manners and they tried to learn these manners, you had you know all those courses: we can teach you how to behave among the elite and so on. Why you always fail? Because you simply don't fit in in learning those rules. Because you do learn the rules, but you do not learn the unwritten rules which tell you how to violate the explicit rules. If you are a member of any community regulated with such rules, you know that to truly be in, you must not only follow the rules, but there is a very codified way, nothing contingent about it, of how you softly here and there violate the explicit rules. In both directions: A, there are rules, prohibitions, which are literally meant not to be respected, like you are simply an idiot if you follow the rules. Now this differs from different cultures. In some cultures like pay the taxes and so on, if you don't try to avoid paying taxes you are considered an idiot and so on. Or especially in sexuality, for example, most of the prohibitions, the standard prohibitions, at least the conservative patriarchal ones, are basically half-hidden injunctions to do it but do it discreetly. And it would be wonderful and of course but you don't have time to do it to show you how ideology functions at this level. How official ideology are not only the explicit rules which you then you are allowed a space for for playing a little bit with them, the resistance undermining it. Official ideology is the entire space of what is explicitly said and the implicit. So, before I give you a couple of examples, just also the opposite case, which I find even more interesting. Especially at universities—I don't know your experience, maybe you are a big exception—but everywhere where I was, I encounter much more interesting the opposite example: things that you are not only allowed to do, but even solicited to do on condition that you don't really do them. You know, to cut a long story short, you are given a certain freedom, but God help you if you take that too literally and you actually do it. The mystery is here—we don't have time to go into it—the mystery of appearance. Why don't those in power simply directly tell you "you should do it"? Why do they play this game of maintaining the appearances? For example, let's take a harsh totalitarian regime, Soviet Union in the 1930s. I don't know if you know that in the Soviet Constitution of '34 or '35 when Stalin won, not only was there guaranteed, it says bombastically, Soviet Union guarantees its citizenship the right to organize a political party, it even says that the state has the duty to provide any group of citizens who want a political party with means to do it, with offices, with newspaper and so on and so on. Of course if you just tried to do it, you were arrested. Why, why this rule of appearances? And are we aware to what extent even our daily lives are penetrated with this paradoxical condition? What is politeness? Politeness is precisely a complex network of making offers that you know they will be rejected. The example I use all the time: let's say an older guy who has money—I don't mean a pedophile, just—invites you to dinner. It's clear absolutely to both of you that he will pay, for she, I should say. But it's the usual ritual, at least in my country, I don't know how it's here, that you know when the bill check arrives, for a little bit you have to resist. Now, yes, I know what you will say, and yes, it did happen to me. Once you resist a little bit too long—"Okay, if you insist," and so on. But you know what's the mystery? You see the mystery. The mystery is that you both know that he will pay, but you both know that your offer or my in this case to pay is in a way hypocritical. But we must go through this ritual. Or, I mean, there are—one cannot even cover all the examples. And then we come to more mysterious examples of this soliciting pleasure—prohibitions which solicit. For example, let me just take an obvious example, one of the great masterpieces of Western civilization, I hope you saw the movie, The Sound of Music. I hope I don't have to engage in the boring exercise of telling, okay, if you know the movie, you know probably which scene, at least I even now shock at what kind of obscenity this scene really is. You remember a little bit less than half into the movie, Sister Maria, who gets a crush with the Baron von Trapp, escapes back to the monastery? She's in love with the Baron and cannot stand it and so on. There she still desires the Baron whose children she was serving and goes to the Mother Superior and tells her like, "What should I do? I still have sinful desires," like she goes there with a plea to be properly punished so that she will control her desires, like I don't know, put me on fasting, whatever. And then comes the obscene moment. I hope you remember it when instead of admonishing her—I really couldn't believe it—the Mother Superior starts to sing a song. You remember which one? "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" and so on. Which means almost literally: go back, seduce and screw the guy. And I think this is how, if you really read a certain type of church ideology between the lines, they are not telling you "no sex," they are telling you effectively: accept our superficial rules, pay lip service to them, and your sex life done discreetly will be even better. I think they know how they are doing it. It's entire culture constructed in this way. Maybe this is, but I doubt more typical, I doubt appealing for Catholics than for Protestants. You know, this idea of do it discreetly and everything is pardoned and so on and so on. So another example, I repeat it, but it's from a rather unknown book of mine, so I hope you don't know it, which I find perfect for this. I go again, another movie which I more sincerely like, I hope you saw it, Casablanca, of course. You remember two-thirds into the movie, just a small scene, Ingrid Bergman in the middle of the night comes to Humphrey Bogart to Rick's Cafe and, of course, to get—to ask for those famous visas for Portugal and so on. Then something happens. They start to talk remembering their love affair in Paris a year or two ago, then they embrace, then a fade-out. We see for two or three seconds the tower of the Casablanca airport, just the light turning around, then we jump back into the room where they are no longer embraced, but it's just continue the same conversation. What's important here? Well, the important thing is, of course, the stupid vulgar question: did they do it or not? That is to say, those two seconds and a half, are they only—are they only here to mark the passage of real time, or are they here to signal the whole, I don't know, half an hour? However, what's so interesting in the movie—if you look it—is that it's not so much that it's not clear what happens. The movie rather gives you signals, a whole series of signals which point first in the direction they did do it, then in the direction they didn't do it. It's consciously contradictory. First, notice that—that—notice that afterwards they are smoking. I hope you know this, that Hays Code, Hollywood rules in the '30s and '40s, because explicit sex was prohibited, after a coupling scene, if you have a fade-out and afterwards if you return to smoking, it was quite—quite unambiguous signal that there was sex. And a whole series of other obvious, like even that phallic primitive statue of the tower of the airport, whatever. But then you have the whole series of signs that they didn't do it. Like, the same conversation seems to go on, there is no bed, no ruffled surface, everything clean and so on and so on. So I think the movie consciously plays a double game. The message is: I know you have dirty desires, but I will allow you, as if the movie talks to you, addresses you, I will allow you this—to play this hypocritical game. On the one hand, I will make you safe from any reproaches from the moral ideological agency. If, imagine, ideology as an agent asking you, "How—how do you dare to watch such a dirty movie?" You say, "But nothing happened, they just talked and so on." But at the same time, I will give you very specifically all the series of signals so that you can do all your dirty imagination and so on and so on. I don't know if you know, but there is a short story by an author I forgot who he was, who wrote a short story again called As Time Goes By, which focuses precisely on the paradox of this scene. It's a 20-page short story where first it's the beginning of that scene, Ingrid Bergman arrives. The last half a page is the conversation we hear. And in between, pages of extremely open hardcore of what they were doing. But what is nice is that the short story does even something really nasty. It reinterprets in the terms of hardcore pornography some of the sayings, you know, these legendary sayings from the movie. You know we all know—we all know this famous Humphrey Bogart phrase to his lady, "Here's to you, kid." You know how it then happens? In the middle of lovemaking, he gives her her his—his penis to her mouth and says, "Here's to you, kid." But now, you know what I am saying. Now I am doing a dirty trick. Your laughter now—and okay, my dirty trick to you—this is what makes us subjects of power. There's absolutely nothing sub—no, we didn't screw, we didn't squeeze their balls, so to speak. We played their games. Ideology is not just the explicit story. It's not just "nothing happens" and then you think you play some subversive games whatever by imagining. Ideology includes both levels: the explicit and the unspoken obscenity. This is how—this is how I read—not in any America-bashing way, in a way I claim in Europe we are even worse—what happened in Abu Ghraib. I claim that what those guys in prison there by annoying, torturing and so on prisoners, they were effectively staging there this obscene underground other side of not only military—I will even—I even claim maybe cultural life. Namely, look, if you remember some of the first photos from Abu Ghraib came out, you remember the famous one: one of the prisoners like in women's plain dresses attached to some cords and so on. I did an experiment: I showed that photo to a friend of mine who was at some holiday, didn't see this photo, and I asked him, "What is this?" He told me, "Well, in New York, this sounds like some Off-Off-Broadway avant-garde theater performance." You know, again our army, Yugoslav Army was bad, Russian Army, Yugoslav Army was even worse. But for you, you know all these military rituals, fragging, the obscenity of songs. This for me always fascinated me. For example, this so-called, I think maybe I'm wrong, they are called marching chants. You know these songs that Marines or other soldiers sing while marching on training and which are very interesting. They combine open vulgarities—brutal obscenities with nonsense rhymes. Like, okay, an innocent one, I think it's from that movie An Officer and a Gentleman, something like: "I don't know but I've been told that Eskimo pussy is rather cold." Total nonsense. But again, my point is this is not just something which happens by in a closed military community. That's the—the point of true identification. When you want to learn to analyze how a certain closed community functions, don't look at the explicit rules. Look at this as it were secret rituals and so on and so on. And again, please don't accuse me of America-bashing. If anything, what happened to me, or what I was witnessing in ex-Yugoslav Army, it's too much to say here, much more further. Okay, so let me go on. The next point I want to make here is that this is why, you know, when you analyze a community, when you witness something that we may call spontaneous transgressive outburst so to say, or transgressive behavior—when you break off and you explode in whatever way—I think we should not take this as a spontaneous outburst in contrast to rules. No, these so-called spontaneous outbursts are absolutely even more maybe also regulated by rules. They are not a matter of spontaneous enjoyment. No, they have to be learned. The more transgressive hedonistic they appear, they have to be learned. Let me just take two, three supreme cases. Smoking. How, maybe you do remember, I don't because I'm a madman, not because—I didn't—I never smoked in my life, but don't take me for a crazy guy, not because I wanted to remain pure, because I just don't like it. I don't know, but all my friends told me and I am in the same thing. You know how it usually happened when you were first seduced, if you were into smoking? Usually as a kind of a small transgressive initiatory experience. You know, like you are small on elementary school, some friend tells you, "Yeah, this is what adults do, try it," and so on. And admit it is always the same story. First, you start coughing, you didn't like it—"Bah, it's disgusting." Then you literally have to learn to enjoy as part of the initiatory ritual. I claim it's the same with drinking. Everyone who tries whiskey for the first time, the first reaction is always "It's bitter, it's disgusting." Then you learn you have to enjoy it. I think it's clear that to enjoy, if—if you drink for pleasure, you—you don't drink whiskey, my God, you drink some stupid fruit juice or whatever. And I claim the same happens—it's the same even for sex. At the deepest level, it's not pleasure, it's some kind of a more—some kind of a transgressive-enforced duty. I mean, if you want pure pleasure, masturbation is much better. So all I am trying to say is that—is that—this makes the whole of culture. How you obey the rules through all those transgressive carnival, adults—adults whatever and so on and so on. Incidentally as an amusing remark, I think the same even goes for music club. For example, I love classical music and I have many friends who love it. But how do you signal that you are really in part of an elite circle? It's not by if you follow the commonly accepted judgments, you appear an idiot. The way to do is to take a great—I'm not giving you instructions—take a great composer but ignore his masterpieces. Like, you will say Beethoven, "I like the Ninth Symphony, I like the late string quartets," you are barbarian. You must say, "Yeah, but there is one piano piece nobody knows from the middle age and this is the masterwork." Or for example, with my good friend Fred Jameson and some others, we even wanted to do a book—we just didn't get enough collaborators—of playing this game with Alfred Hitchcock's films. The idea was each of us should select—each of us should select an—a—a Hitchcock thriller which is obviously a failure and play the game "Ah, but this is the true masterpiece." Fred's, I'm sure you don't know it, Fred's selection was Stage Fright, that failure from '48, '49 with Marlene Dietrich. Mine was even the lowest you can go—Topaz, that anti-Communist drama whatever from—from the '60s. So this is that complication. So if we return from this short detour to my basic point. So we take into account these complications. How does ideology function today, especially with regard to the claim that we live in a post-ideological era? I claim that—I will try to explain why—ideology today appears as its own opposite, as non-ideology, as the reference to the core of our human identity beneath all ideological labels. This is how it works in art, in politics. You can be sure you are in ideology when somebody says, "Listen, let's forget about all the stupid political, religious labels. Ultimately, are we not ordinary human beings? We all share the same fears, the same passions," and so on and so on. To give you an example of this fall—the best example I can think of is a book recently translated into English, which was a tremendous bestseller first in France, then in Germany, now here also—Jonathan Littell, Les Bienveillantes. I think the translation is The Kindly Ones. It's a slightly too long, almost pages, first-person narrative of a Holocaust executioner, a mid-level SS officer who did it all. But of course in a consciously provocative way, the book presents him as a normal, warm human being like all of us. He has his fears, his sometimes disgusted, you see all his doubts, fears and so on and so on. And of course the book does not justify him, but the—the—the insight of the book is a deeper one, I think. It is that, you know, Hannah Arendt already made a similar point as was right. When you are witnessing terrifying acts, don't fall into the trap of thinking that behind the acts you will encounter some kind of a demonic entity, a superman of evil. No, you encounter just ordinary beings with all their fears and so on. You know, everybody as we put it has a human side. Stalin loved her daughter, Hitler liked to talk to children giving them chocolate, whatever and so on and so on. We are all humans. And here comes my next conclusion, which I think, I will try to show immediately why, has even political implications. If there is the a most basic lesson of psychoanalysis, it is that what we usually refer to as the wealth of our inner lives, there is nothing authentic about it. This is constitutively a priori almost a lie. You know this famous postmodern, deconstructionist, whatever definition, anti-substantialist definition of human identity in the sense of we are nothing but stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. I think it's not quite true, because we are telling these stories, but these stories are fundamentally lies to obfuscate the reality—the reality of what we are doing. What do I mean by it? You remember the—a—a saying, an allegedly deep thought which I think was pronounced in a dialogue by a partisan of the Middle East dialogue. It sounds so deep, listen: "An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard." It sounds very deep, no? Like, I stigmatize you as an enemy because I wasn't able to listen to you. I just reify you as some monster. Then if I listen to your side of the story, I see you are human like me, you have your dreams, your fears and so on, and I see you as a human being. This is all very nice. It has a limit. The limit is what? Well, we reach this limit when we simply replace the general term "enemy" with a concrete name. Would you also say: Adolf Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his story? No, the answer is his story was just a lie which he made to justify and at the same time avoid the horror of what he was doing. And this is incidentally almost the most difficult thing to do, and the most tragic even, when you analyze a certain ideological constellation. You know, for example, I recently read the book—I forgot who wrote it, I bought it at some book face—The Nazi Ethic. No, it wasn't Men's Obscenity. The book did something which is absolutely crucial to do. It looked at how did the Nazis justify to themselves what they were doing. And of course you find a very beautiful, sometimes very beautiful narrative full of almost, I tend to say, authentic insights and so on and so on. But again, the truth is not there, that's on what I insist. It's not that when I want to judge you, the rule is I should look deep into you and try to understand what you thought you were doing. Of course I should, but I will not arrive at any fundamental truth in this way. I will rather arrive at something that I have tempted to call the fundamental lie, the script that you construct to yourself. This is why we have all these horrible examples. Take the architect of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich, before he was killed in Prague in '42. You know what's so shocking in even reading the biography of this guy? Do you know that in his spare time he was meeting with three other friend officers of SS, he was a very good violin player, and they were playing in a string quartet late Beethoven's string quartets, which are maybe one of the tops, tops in the classical music. Now, what I tragically claim is that you cannot say, "Oh, but it must have been non-authentic." No, that's very difficult to accept. Maybe he played them with a real authenticity, blah blah, and nonetheless he was able to do it. And okay, I will not repeat here my old examples, but I have many of them, even more tragic. For example, in the West, it's my old story, maybe you don't know it, did you read Aldous Huxley's Grey Eminence? It's a wonderful historical research into early 17th century French politician priest, Père Joseph, Father Joseph. He was a counselor to Cardinal Richelieu at the time of the Thirty Years' War in Europe, which devastated Europe terribly, to between Protestants and Catholics. If there is a guy who can be retroactively isolated as the origin of Nazism, it's this guy, believe it or not. Because what he did is that he concluded a pact between France and Protestant Sweden against Catholic Austrian Empire just to prevent the unification of Germany. He succeeded, which is why Germany delayed its constitution as a nation-state, which was the ultimate condition of First World War and then Second World War. So again, the meanest politician ordering tortures, poisons, reasons, whatever. But now comes the horrible thing which fascinated Aldous Huxley: in the evening, metaphorically, after doing this dirty work, he wrote the most beautiful mystical meditations, absolutely at the level of who are our biggest hits, Saint Theresa of Avila and so on and so on. And this is what bothered Aldous Huxley. Is it possible? How could a guy who was obviously an authentic mystic, how could he be doing that? Huxley thought it's not possible, there must have been something false not only in his Père Joseph mystic but also in Christianity itself for playing this so—so Huxley thought Zen Buddhism, Oriental mysticism is better. I'm not saying it's worse, but I'm saying it's not even better. It's not better. Again, read the book to which I refer always, it's a guy called Brian Victoria, who is himself a Zen Buddhist, Zen at War. He looks at how the Zen community in Japan around the—literally over million then I think related to Japanese war imperialism in the '30s and '40s, attack on China and so on. What he noticed was that they were all justifying it, large majority. Not only this, so not only supporting it but actively justifying it. For example, one, a guy whom many of you maybe know because he was popular when we were young in the hippie times, D.T. Isaacs—Teitaro Suzuki, the great popularizer of Zen in the West. Yes, in the late '30s, he was writing texts where he fully justified Japanese aggression on China. He even tried to provide through Zen Buddhism instructions into how to cope with the act of killing. His idea was that for us ordinary people with a minimum of decency, you know, it's not so easy to kill. Like, we can dream of killing, but to have a concrete person in front of you, it can be difficult to step on the person. So he mobilized the entire Zen machinery and he said: this happens only if you remain caught within the illusion of false reality where you know the story. You think you are the agent, you believe in substantial reality. But he says if you reach the level of story of Buddhist enlightenment, then things appear in a different way. If you are still caught into the limits of your false self, then you experience it like "you are there, I am here, I am now stabbing you," this is horrible. But then he says, "if I reach enlightenment and see the vanity of substantial reality, then I can experience the same scene in a totally different way." Something like: I'm for nothing in it, I'm a pure observer. I don't—not even I go—here is my hand moving around in the intersubjective interpersonal dance, and as a part—as a part of the same dance, your body gets stuck into it. I am for nothing in it. And again, don't misunderstand me. I am not blaming Suzuki. He was authentic. The lesson is just: I don't see any continuity, as it were, any necessary link between our inner experience, authentic as it may be, and let's call it maybe the social political consequences, the horror of what we are doing. I claim that fundamentally our innermost identity in the sense of the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves are not the truth. They are even as a rule a lie. In this sense, I claim this withdrawal from external reality in the sense of "let's look into the depth of your personality, you as a concrete human being" is false. And so let's go to give you another example, to the very opposite end of the Nazis—and I'm not claiming in any way that they are the same, quite on the contrary—but to see how, of course, at a much more modest level, but nonetheless we find something similar, for example, in today's Israel. Let's look at the movies. Did you see the last two Israeli films which were a big success, Ari Folman's animated documentary Waltz with Bashir and Samuel Maoz's Lebanon? Lebanon is especially typical here I think. You know it presents the experience of an ordinary Israeli soldier in the Lebanon war when he was in a tank penetrating deep into Lebanon. And almost the entire movie shot from the perspective within inside a tank—all the horrors, the claustrophobia and so on and so on. I think this is ideology at its purest because under the pretext of "forget about ideology, war is horrible, we need that horrible experience, nonsense." You know, all the historical background—what was he doing there, who was he killing, children and so on—it all disappears. All of a sudden it becomes the story of your inner suffering, fears, of your inner experience and so on and so on. So it's pretty sad to report how Israeli Army—I know because I was there, I have there many friends, I visit often there—how IDF, Israeli Defense Forces, play this game endlessly. For example, they don't present themselves as superheroes like, "Oh, one battalion of us can take Cairo in one afternoon if we want" and so on. No, they always emphasize: war is not in our genes, we are human like you, we are afraid, we urinate—I remember long interviews in the movie which I think is ideology at its purest, you know Claude Lanzmann Shoah, but you know he did later another movie called Tsahal, which is the name for Israeli Defense Forces, endless interview along the model of Shoah with Israeli soldiers, their memories about the '73 Yom Kippur War. And it's all about this concrete experience. They tell how they even urinated, they were totally scared—like an endless variation on "we are human." But I claim this precisely allows you to obliterate the political consequences of what you are doing and so on. Let me give you another example which I must say really shocked me. When I was in Israel, they reported of a strange incident. A group of anti-terrorist soldiers entered an apartment where they suspected—that—an alleged terrorist is hiding. They found only his family there, wife and children. Among the children a daughter, of course terrified that soldiers breaking in, started to cry and the mother, to calm her down, called her by her name, her name and bit what—and then one of the Israeli soldiers breaking in discovered that he has a daughter with the same name. And of course he pulled out his wallet and, "You see mother, I have the same—I have the same daughter—I have the same name." You see the message: "Oh, we are human," and so on and so on. But I claim in that situation this was an obscenity, in that situation to emphasize in that sense humanity. So again now so that you will not say that I am only taking as it were Nazis and God forbid to confuse them Israelis, I will also give you an interesting example from the opposite side politically. You know that in today's Cuba they have a certain even relatively at high-level quality detective novels, some—the biggest—their biggest export name is a writer called Leonardo Padura Fuentes, who writes police procedurals, four of them or even five are translated, you can get them in better bookstores. The hero is Mario Conde, a police officer in today's Havana. The books are so critical—I mean critical at least in the sense of presenting all the misery of today's Cuba, they are a lost generation, misery, hunger, prostitution, nepotism and so on—so that I thought, my God, it would be nice to visit this guy in a nice villa in the suburbs of Miami or what, no? I was surprised to learn that no, he is—he is—he is in Cuba and not even as a tough dissident. He is totally accepted, supported by state media and so on. So asked myself "what's going on?" And I think it is—from the standpoint of their interest, Cuban authorities are right in supporting him. Because first of all, in spite of all the criticism, the basic message at this human level of—of Leonardo Padura is what? It is: okay, we screwed it up, it's a misery, we are a lost generation and so on, but the true patriot hero stays here with bitterness but heroism. "Don't dream about Miami, we are from here, we should heroically go on here." You know this totally without—without any apparently in a totally non-ideological way like cut the bullshit about socialism and so on, but nonetheless you know, "be faithful to you, stay here, don't escape into dreams," and so on and so on. It's I claim a really, really very refined mode of ideology. Where do you find a similar ideology? Now we go to more crazy orders, a little bit on movies. Maybe you know this part then I will go to other examples. My first example would have been—did you see the movie, I did it six times because of my small son, Kung Fu Panda. That's ideology at its quite—I think it's a perfect, almost clinical example of how we function in our societies. If you saw the movie, you know, the big fat kung fu panda called Po, who wants to become a kung fu warrior and succeeds. But okay, the point is that the movie moves at two levels. First, you have all this orientalist Western Buddhist element, you know: fate, choice, fidelity, hero and so on, all this, how shall I put it, religious-military background. At the same time, you must have noticed how the movie is full of most commonsensical, brutal humor jokes at its own expense—at the expense of this ideology. It makes fun continuously of these Buddhist wisdoms and so on and so on. But then something extremely interesting, which is that in spite of all this, the ideology—this pseudo-Buddhism, mystique—survives. You can make fun of it, but nonetheless it functions. And this is the mystery. This is I think how beliefs function today. Nobody really believes. If you ask anyone, "Do you believe?" everyone would tell you, "Are you insane? Are you crazy? Why should I believe?" But beliefs, how shall I put it, they socially function. We have the paradox of beliefs which as it were circulate, nobody believes in them, but they function. The one who first provided this formula was—and I appreciate her for that—was the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. You know, when she was asked "Do you believe in God?" You know what she said? It's a nice formula. She said, "Jewish people believe in God, and I believe in Jewish people." You know what this means? This is not the usual Stalinist logic where your reasoning is "ordinary people need to believe." No, I claim nobody has to believe and belief functions. How does this function? Imagine, let's take the most simple example. Imagine Christmas. Of course you don't believe in Santa Claus, my God, you have to provide yourself the presents, but when somebody asks you "Do you believe in Santa Claus?" you will probably say "No, I just pretend because of my children, not to disappoint them." Now, if I ask alone, not with you there in front of you, your children, I'm sure they will say "Of course I don't believe, I just pretend not to disappoint my parents and get the presents." And it goes on endlessly, I claim. So you can see a belief functions as element of a social network. It functions except although even if nobody effectively in the first person believes. And this message is wonderfully formulated at the end of Kung Fu Panda, where Kung Fu the Po the panda looks for the secret ingredient that would make him a hero. In his ordinary life, he just helps his father who runs a restaurant where they make a special soup, a noodle soup, and father claims that he—there is a special ingredient to that soup. And at the end, the father tells him the secret: there is no special ingredient. It's only you. To make something special, you just have to believe it's special. And then he discovers it's the same for becoming a warrior. This means precisely what I was saying: there is no special belief, no special quality. It functions even if you know that there is nothing. It functions if you, as it were, follow it as if it functions. This is how our beliefs function today. At the cynical level, you can laugh at everything, but I claim that nonetheless beliefs function. Like—I'm again sorry if I repeat a story which I'm repeating all around for years—Niels Bohr, quantum physics, probably you know it, made a wonderful comment. He had a country—a house in the countryside of Denmark, an old wooden farmer's house with above the entrance door a horseshoe. I don't know how it is here, in Europe a horseshoe above the entrance doors is a superstitious sign preventing evil spirits to enter the house. So a friend, another scientist visited him and said, "But wait a minute, are you stupid? I mean, why do you have this? Do you believe in it?" Niels Bohr said, "Of course not." Then the friend asked him, "But why do you have it here?" You know what Niels Bohr answered? "Of course I don't believe in it, that this really prevents evil spirits to enter, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." This is how beliefs—nobody believes in democracy, blah blah, but we somehow accept it at the social level that it works. So again, before we dismiss fundamentalism and all that as crazy people who believe, let's first set the things straight. I claim that we believe in a way more than ever, just in this more impersonal—in this more impersonal way. From here, one could have go on in analyzing Hollywood as a part towards our ideological constellation. Like there is another feature which I think pretty crucial in Kung Fu Panda: no lady, no girl, no love interest. All you have in the universe of Panda is this mystical wisdom and then a kind of a—how shall I call it—oral-anal pre-pre-sexual primitivity. The drive of the hero, the—the panda, is not sex, power, it's eating. He eats like a pig. He's kind of an oral-anal economy. It's so typical, I don't know, probably the authors—they are not idiots—were aware of it that you know he is called Po, P-O. I mean in German *Po* is a common term for ass, no? P-O. I mean—so what I am saying is that sexuality is excluded. And I don't know what this means, but did you notice how in many recent films—and I'm not saying this simply means less sexuality, I don't know what it—what—sexuality—Hollywood starts to violate its own old rule of how shall I call it of creating the couple? For example, this was what was so mysterious in The Da Vinci Code. You know already years ago a friend of mine, French—sorry, British Lacanian psychoanalyst Darian Leader told me something wonderful. He told me, you remember X-Files, if you watch some of them. He provided a wonderful formula for X-Files. He said, why do all these things happen out there, you know the formula, the truth is out there, here an alien, there an alien. He says: to cover up the fact that nothing goes on here between the two of them. You know, no sex, because all this has to happen because—and I claim it's exactly the same formula for The Da Vinci Code. At least the movie: poor Jesus Christ has to screw Mary or what to cover up the fact that they don't do it. If you notice, okay, it's between Tom Hanks and who is that French girl that I don't like, whatever, Audrey Tautou, no sex here. And then it goes further in movies even more than in the novels. Take the earlier novel, Angels Demons. The way it was made into a movie, if you saw it, again no sex, although the girl is quite attractive if you allow me a sexist remark, quite die—nice, but nothing happens, no sex. And then if you read—I did, I almost killed myself, it's—all those novels, and I measure him, Dan Brown, by his own standards, it's so bad, this Lost Symbol—but remember there is just another older lady, there is not even a minimal—a minimal sexual tension. I find this very strange what is happening in—in Hollywood that they are—that they are moving in this direction. Because I even found the same—did you notice that the same happens for the first time in entire James Bond, in the last James Bond, Quantum of Solace? No sex. Just at the end they discover they are both too shattered or whatever. So—why am I saying this? Because one of the standard formulas of Hollywood which I developed in my book on Titanic and elsewhere is that whenever you have a big dramatic story, it can be about the end of the world or whatever, it's always enframed by the logic of creating a couple. Like it goes up to The subtitle of could have been how a young what is he, failed writer, John Cusack, lost and regained his wife and so on. To—to—to make him to go further, even two couples are created: the daughter Tandie Newton also gets a good colored guy so that—but so—this formula how it gradually disappears. And it plays a—a crucial role this formula. What I'm saying is not that simply we should obliterate all the historical background, fighting the Nazis and so on, but it's that what makes the film as it were attractive, the cause of our desire, is this apparently marginal feature that all the official topic of the movie which is in the foreground, you know how to break the Nazi code, is—generated our interest because it's always in this kind of a dialogue, constant dialogue with its frame, which is the enigma of sexual relationship, the enigma of a woman and so on and so on. Okay, let me now go on to my final, or slowly approaching the end element which is, what if we live in this so-called post-ideological era where they say forget about big ideological phrases, be authentic who you are, enjoy life and so on, or as they put it today? Because I think our predominant ideology today is more some kind of an enlightened hedonism, which is decaffeinated Dalai Lama, how shall I put it, Dalai Lama popularized. You know, be truly yourself, realize your potentials and so on. I think what is—the reason for it is that we find ourselves in a stage which can be called cultural capitalism. I think something did change with capitalism after '68. Capitalism somehow integrated all the critique—critique of consumerism, alienation and so on—and functioned in a new—functioned in a new way now. The two dimensions which were until now opposed, on the one hand the dimension of your consumerism—"I want this product to enjoy" and so on—and the dimension of caring for society, let's call it the—the—altruistic humanitarian ideological dimension, they are more and more combined. How? Well, if you visit Starbucks you will immediately notice it, because Starbucks is maybe the company which most directly exploits this. They are masters in it. You know what they are doing. All the time they are bombarding you by something like: when you buy a cappuccino with us, you don't buy just a cappuccino, you buy much more. And they enumerate it: A, you buy an authentic community. They know—they openly manipulate Starbucks this ideological cliché that in our societies we no longer town councils or public places, they are no longer here, we are just isolated individuals. The idea is: we will provide an ersatz community for you. Then they go on: we only grow our coffee beans from organic—we only buy it from organic farms, we give money there to educate, to bring water to them and so on and so on. So you know the idea being all this—I cannot but call it—semantic density. Like you don't just buy a coffee, you are made aware that you buy a whole ideological experience of caring for others and so on and so on. I claim that this is absolutely crucial for today's capitalism, that as it were consumerism tries to recuperate its own opposite. You know, it's no longer "I do this, I consume, but I have to do something else to do something good." No, they offer you a much better choice: "consume and you will at the same time act as a humanitarian caring for Mother Nature, caring for others," and so on and so on. This formula reached recently almost its climax with two cases. First, maybe you've heard about Toms shoes, a company founded in for shoes. Their formula is "one for one," as they call it. They claim for every pair of shoes you buy with them, another pair of shoes will be given to again some starving children, I don't know where and so on and so on. It's a wonderful formula. It gives you at its best: you may engage in consumerism because the more you do it, the more also those who are excluded profit by it. Or another absurd: Coca-Cola—sorry, Pepsi—recently started a publicity—with the formula, I quote it: "Pepsi was always about refreshment, but what if instead of just refreshing people, Pepsi helps to refresh the world?" So the idea is that when you buy a Coke, you get the right to vote to send your ideas about what to do to help people. And then when these ideas will be gathered, they will be again put to vote and you will be able to choose which idea, "helping starving people here, preserving nature there," will be—will be put—will be put to use. So even have—even you even have the as it were the element of democracy here. What are the further consequences of it? Here with Pepsi, of course, Pepsi plays to the end the logic of—what—what one cannot call but—the logic of freedom of choice. And with this I would like to conclude, because I think that the fight that we have now in United States, this ideological fight about healthcare reform, is an important fight because what it focuses on is precisely the freedom of choice. And things are complex here. Okay, do not misunderstand me. I'm totally on the side of those who are for the reform. What I just wanted to say is that in a what sense things are getting complex today. In the good old days, the main argument against the ideology of free choice was this vulgarized Marxist one: "Yes, we are given choices but only the unimportant choices, Pepsi or Coke or whatever, we are not given the real choices." This is up to a point true. But I think, then some sociologists like the German one, Ulrich Beck in his well-known book on the risk society, they—I don't agree wholly with them, but they nonetheless point that out something at how the status of choice, risk, catastrophes changed today. It changed in what way? In the sense that today we perceive as—risks in our era of new uncertainties, not only—not simply something which will hit us from outside, like a gigantic asteroid or whatever. We are more and more aware that there may be risks which we are generated or threats by our own activity. So you see the problem is not so much that we don't have a choice, but that we have a choice but—and I don't think here, I am critical of the big companies, but that we can simply put all the blame on the big companies. But the situation is simply not transparent. Okay, basically of course I accept the—the global warming argument, but things are so complicated. We are—it's not that we have too much—too much power, okay humanity as such. We the consequences of our own activity are impenetrable to ourselves. We are effectively—we are so strong that we can even change nature, but we are not aware of how are we doing it. For example, I read—I got a message recently from a friend from China who told me that even these big earthquakes, you remember a year and a half ago or when they had in the Sichuan province inside the big earthquake? And then now more and more—they don't make it public—but nonetheless more and more admit that these earthquakes were probably the product of human activity. You know how? You remember China is building those gigantic Three Gorges Dams or what. The idea is that the gigantic lakes they created have changed so much with high pressure—pressure on different strata there—that they if not caused the earthquake at least contributed to it. So again that's the first element of radical insecurity today. And—the second point I want to emphasize here is how—and this is again ideology at its purest—how the very uncertainties caused by the gradual dismantling of welfare state are then sold to us as new freedoms. For example, we all know that more and more we are forced to make just one, two, three years' contracts. It's more and more difficult to get a long-term job. But instead of—this—then we are told, "Why don't instead of being afraid of it, why don't you take this as a new opportunity to reinvent yourself every two, three years, to make a choice," and so on and so on. Or with healthcare. At least in Europe where they are also slowly, we already had it, dismantling—well—healthcare, the reasoning is again: this gives you new choices. This give you a choice to choose, you know, do you want to spend more and take a risk or you want to be absolutely sure spend less whatever and so on and so on. This I think is ideology at its purest. Why? Because—two, three points only almost old-fashioned Marxist points I want to make here. As it is clear not only to Marxists but even to old-fashioned communitarians and so on, you know freedom—actual freedom of choice, personal freedoms that we all cherish—is something which works only, more and more in our complex society, only against the background of the very complex network of state guarantees, rules, customs, civility and so on and so on. Do you know how many things has to function in the background so that you have your freedom? And I think that if you approach it in this way, then universal healthcare if anything provides for people much more freedom. In what sense? The comparison I'm tempted to make is with water and electricity. I mean, you probably notice that all of us, maybe in some states or cities it's different, but I think practically everywhere—everywhere you are brutally deprived of the freedom of choice there, no? Where you live you simply connect to water, to electricity. But most of you would have said, "Okay, if they rip you off too much I will protest," but you don't want to say, "Oh, I want a choice here." My life—your life would become a nightmare. Certain things should simply function in the background so that where it really matters, you have choices. Of course water and electricity really matter. But you prefer not having them back there—not to deal with them. I claim it would immensely raise the level of actual choices, freedoms and so on if at least a basic healthcare acquires a little bit of this status: that you know what I mean, you don't have to worry about it, it's in the background. This doesn't mean in any way in what way should be done and so on and so on. So now really to conclude—I know once you started a talk with "let me conclude," it's a long story. The—what happens when this invisible background disintegrates—of institutional guarantees, of customs and so on and so on? Well, something very sad happens. Something, the first preview of what we can get, in a movie which some people whom I know recently made—there is not yet a premiere even—so I'm not even supposed to talk about this movie because some of the people who helped—who helped make this movie are threatened, you will see immediately why. It's a Danish documentary, Free Men, When Killers Make Movies, made by a small Copenhagen in Denmark house. It's about a group of ex-killers in—from Medan, Indonesia. It was shot in In this film—it shows a group led by a guy called Anwar Congo. They were—maybe you don't know but in '66 Communists tried a coup d'état there and then the right-wing generals counteracted and then in the aftermath there was—people estimated it's around two and a half million of suspected Communists, most of them of Chinese origins, were killed. Now this movie tells the story of one of the group of these murderers. What is so shocking about the movie is that it tells the story in an open way. You know what I mean? Like the murderers don't take it secretly and so on, they publicly boast about it. Like with pride they—they—and it's shattering like you see them who are now rich businessmen, senators, journalists and so on, they answer all the questions. For example, they are asked "how did you usually rape women?" and they describe it, it took them some time to discover the most pleasurable way, that usually the girl should be on a table back and then you ask a friend with a wire around—around her neck to hold her down and strangle her slowly and so on. Then they ask how did they torture men, they describe what's the most practical way, cut off their balls, maybe the guy swallow his own balls—all this nice stuff. And—and they do this publicly and openly. There is even at the end a TV show, really took place in Indonesia on one of the biggest state TV channels, which is the ultimate of obscenity that I've seen. In this TV show, the—these criminals are in front of a large audience, ask—answer questions and so on, and then the moderator celebrates them. Like they ask a guy "how did you torture blah blah," and the guy says "Oh in this way, it's most practical way to torture women," and the moderator says "A big applause for the gentleman here for this nice insight" and so on and so on. Such a caricature, you know usually this happens in these bad taste leftist dystopias where they imagine some future totalitarian society. It happens there. And the question is again, how is something like this possible? Because the movie up to a point answers. Because all these guys loved Hollywood when they were young, but I'm not blaming Hollywood for that. And the way they were able to do it, imagine themselves, as they said, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were their two heroes. They imagine themselves as imitating Hollywood heroes, tough guys, gangsters and so on. Again, I'm not blaming here Hollywood, but I'm also not blaming here the primitive Indonesian culture like you know those idiots there and so on. No, I'm saying that it has more something to do with how the ongoing capitalist globalization undermines our standard traditional ethics—ethical attitudes and creates a certain moral vacuum. And my point is that this is the first battle to be fought, as it were. Don't think that ideology doesn't matter today. Precisely today in our at-most cynical era and so on, we are more deep in ideology than we ever were. Ideology again, as I pointed out, is not only the explicit rules, it's all beliefs that we obey without believing in them, all the obscene implicit rules and so on and so on, and it is very difficult to withdraw from it because you pay the price for it, it hurts, as it were. Which is why what if you really want to do something today, you should not succumb too quickly to this idea "Oh children are starving, let's do something." Yeah, of course we should, but first we should change ourselves. First we should put in order our dreams. We should start here. Otherwise this is for me, to put it in very naive terms, the reason of the failure of the 20th century revolutions. I have no mercy for Soviet Union and so on. They won, but they didn't win in the dreams they were dreaming. And then you end up with what you end up with what you end up with here. Because do not—just a concluding variation—do not forget how important dreams are. Let's take the ultimate ideological dream, anti-Semitism. Of course we all know—and today I claim we live in a way where it's no—so that let me make it clear where I stand here. I still think that anti-Semitism is ideology par excellence and cannot—cannot ever be justified. But I nonetheless, not in spite of this but because of this, I think one should absolutely also be critical of what goes on in today's Israel too. For example, my thesis is a crazy one here but I presented it in Israel there. Zionism is the ultimate today's Zionism is the ultimate stage of anti-Semitism. In what sense do I mean? This idea came to me when there was a big public debate in I think Jerusalem where I was defending a friend of mine, anti-Zionist Jewish filmmaker Woody Allen, and then people in the public attacked me claiming "But listen, you're a famous philosopher, this guy is nobody. Are you aware that this guy just wants to exploit you for money? That this guy really doesn't care?" Then others accused this guy of not being really one of them, Jews, that he's just floating around with [unintelligible]. Then I told them, "Are you aware that you are describing this guy in exactly the same terms the late 19th century anti-Semitic nation-state partisans were describing the Jew? They are only for money, they don't really have roots in their community and so on and so on." But—okay, nonetheless back to this anti-Semitic feelings. You know, it's not enough to say but Jews are not like that. You should fight anti-Semitism not only at the level of facts, as every racism, but also at the level of dreams, fantasies and so on. You know because if you accept the debate at the level of facts—are Jews really like that and so on—it's over, I claim. You will achieve nothing. Imagine debating with somebody in Germany in '36 if there the anti-Semitic Nazi image of Jews is true or not. The result will be somewhere in the middle. Like the anti-Semites abuse Jews what of? Exploiting the Germans. Well, my God, some Jews were big, so in a certain sense they were exploiting Germans. So all you can say at this level is "It's not as bad as the Nazis claim, but there is some truth in it." Okay, they claim Jews corrupt, seduce sexually our German girls. Well, I claim probably it was totally true, I mean why not? Of course, everyone. So you see my point. The true question is not are Jews really like that? The true question is why does the anti-Semitic subject need the figure of the Jew? And here I am tempted to repeat Jacques Lacan's wonderful ironic statement when he says that when a husband is jealous of his wife that she sits around with other men, that his jealousy is pathological even if it's true that his wife is doing this. Because what makes it pathological, it's not is it true or not, but why does he in order to maintain, as it were, the consistency of his subjectivity, why does he need that—that—husband a wife who is cheating him, or an anti-Semitic German why does he need in order to maintain the consistency of his subjectivity why does he need such a figure of the Jew? So to conclude with this wonderful formula of Jacques Lacan in Seminar XI where he says the picture that I see is in my eye, it's my fantasy, but I—I am also in the picture. So of course the anti—the—the racist anti-Semitic picture of the Jew is a fantasy in the eye of the anti-Semitic subject. But anti-Semitic subject is also in his own picture in the sense of his very identity is constructed by this relies on this fantasy. You take his fantasy, his dream away, he in a way loses everything, and has to—and this is a difficult universe—has totally to reconstruct himself. Which is why I think all good radical movements start with this first act of violence, which is a spiritual violence aimed at yourself. This is how at least I read the scene in one of my favorite Hollywood movies—and I don't think it's proto-fascist propaganda—Fight Club. You remember when Edward Norton in that wonderful scene confronting his boss beats himself? That's how you should begin: change your dreams. I'm sorry if I was too long. On the other hand, I'm not sorry. What can you do? Thanks.
movies there. That's how you gain time to do your work. As you know, for me to be frank, university is a nice place without students, sorry to be so surprised that show. Okay, let's nonetheless serious talk. What I want to provide today is simply a couple of examples of practicing the old, half-forgotten art of the critique of ideology. The shortest definition of what critique of ideology is, was I think perhaps provided by Paul, the one from the Bible, who in Ephesians wrote, listen to this—I'll try to read this text. This is Paul speaking: "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against leaders, against authorities, against the world rulers (kosmokratoras in Greek) of this darkness, against the," wonderful expression, "the spiritual wickedness in the heavens." End of quote. Or to translate it into today's language, our struggle is not primarily against concrete corrupt individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification which sustains it. What then is ideology? When are we in ideology? Let me give you an example from my own public life. During a debate with Bernard-Henri Lévy at New York Public Library a year or so ago, Henri Lévy made a pathetic case for liberal tolerance. Something like: would you not like to live in a society where you can make fun of the predominant religion without the fear of being killed for it, where women are free to dress the way they like and choose a man they like—they love and so on and so on—while I made a similarly pathetic case for Communism. With the growing food crisis, ecological crisis, and so on and so on, is there not a need to find a new way of collective action which radically differs from market as well as from state administration? So what happened? The irony of the situation was that when we both stated our case in such abstract terms, we both couldn't but agree with each other. What should I say? "No, I want women to be oppressed, not to marry the man they love"? And even Bernard-Henri Lévy, a hard-line liberal anti-Communist, ironically remarked that if this is Communism, what I said, even he is a Communist. Now, this mutual understanding was the proof that we were both knee-deep in ideology. Ideology is precisely such a reduction to the simplified essence which conveniently forgets what comes up with it as the price to be paid, the let's call it background noise which provides the density of the actual meaning of a statement. This is why, for example, I claim you get now in our media, newspapers, TV, all those charity ads, you remember? Some, usually a black child or a native child from Guatemala, from Africa, with I don't know, crippled, distorted and so on, and then comes the message: something like, "you can make difference for the price of a couple of cappuccinos" or whatever to make this child's life for the better. Why is this ideology? Because again, in abstract, of course, my God, we should all be doing it, what's wrong with it? What's wrong with it, I claim, is the concrete message in it, which is, if we read it a little bit cynically: you who are lucky to live relatively safe lives and so on and so on, I know you feel bad because of the hunger horrors and so on in which you even in a not direct way but indirectly participate, we offer you a simple way out. For the price of a couple of cappuccinos, you can even feel well for it and you can forget about it. Like, the message is that you—I claim we pay charity, charities, not so much to help those out there, but to make sure that they remain there, that they don't come. Or another example of ideology. Most of us probably are buying organic food. Now in itself, this is of course okay. But ask yourself deeply: why are you really buying it? I don't think you really believe that all those half-rotten apples which cost twice the normal that we all love, normally genetically manipulated apples and so on, that they are really any less poisonous. Maybe they are. But I don't think this is why we buy it. There's a certain reflexivity in it. We buy organic apples because it makes you feel good. "I'm—our Mother Earth is in danger, I'm part of a wonderful movement to do something." It's this sense of fake profit. I did my thought—doing something without paying any serious price and so on and so on. So the first conclusion here is: you know, every, not only ideological, every field of meaning, or more specifically, every space of rules which regulate interaction within a certain community—from large national communities up to families and so on—I claim that the rules in such a space are always, let's call them, two-level rules. You have the explicit rules: do this, don't do that, you may do this and so on. And, this is for me crucial, you always get rules which are a kind of a second-level rules, rules which tell you how to deal with the explicit rules. This is why, give you a popular example—okay, today is no longer popular—when ordinary people still thought that those from the upper classes have true manners and they tried to learn these manners, you had you know all those courses: we can teach you how to behave among the elite and so on. Why you always fail? Because you simply don't fit in in learning those rules. Because you do learn the rules, but you do not learn the unwritten rules which tell you how to violate the explicit rules. If you are a member of any community regulated with such rules, you know that to truly be in, you must not only follow the rules, but there is a very codified way, nothing contingent about it, of how you softly here and there violate the explicit rules. In both directions: A, there are rules, prohibitions, which are literally meant not to be respected, like you are simply an idiot if you follow the rules. Now this differs from different cultures. In some cultures like pay the taxes and so on, if you don't try to avoid paying taxes you are considered an idiot and so on. Or especially in sexuality, for example, most of the prohibitions, the standard prohibitions, at least the conservative patriarchal ones, are basically half-hidden injunctions to do it but do it discreetly. And it would be wonderful and of course but you don't have time to do it to show you how ideology functions at this level. How official ideology are not only the explicit rules which you then you are allowed a space for for playing a little bit with them, the resistance undermining it. Official ideology is the entire space of what is explicitly said and the implicit. So, before I give you a couple of examples, just also the opposite case, which I find even more interesting. Especially at universities—I don't know your experience, maybe you are a big exception—but everywhere where I was, I encounter much more interesting the opposite example: things that you are not only allowed to do, but even solicited to do on condition that you don't really do them. You know, to cut a long story short, you are given a certain freedom, but God help you if you take that too literally and you actually do it. The mystery is here—we don't have time to go into it—the mystery of appearance. Why don't those in power simply directly tell you "you should do it"? Why do they play this game of maintaining the appearances? For example, let's take a harsh totalitarian regime, Soviet Union in the 1930s. I don't know if you know that in the Soviet Constitution of '34 or '35 when Stalin won, not only was there guaranteed, it says bombastically, Soviet Union guarantees its citizenship the right to organize a political party, it even says that the state has the duty to provide any group of citizens who want a political party with means to do it, with offices, with newspaper and so on and so on. Of course if you just tried to do it, you were arrested. Why, why this rule of appearances? And are we aware to what extent even our daily lives are penetrated with this paradoxical condition? What is politeness? Politeness is precisely a complex network of making offers that you know they will be rejected. The example I use all the time: let's say an older guy who has money—I don't mean a pedophile, just—invites you to dinner. It's clear absolutely to both of you that he will pay, for she, I should say. But it's the usual ritual, at least in my country, I don't know how it's here, that you know when the bill check arrives, for a little bit you have to resist. Now, yes, I know what you will say, and yes, it did happen to me. Once you resist a little bit too long—"Okay, if you insist," and so on. But you know what's the mystery? You see the mystery. The mystery is that you both know that he will pay, but you both know that your offer or my in this case to pay is in a way hypocritical. But we must go through this ritual. Or, I mean, there are—one cannot even cover all the examples. And then we come to more mysterious examples of this soliciting pleasure—prohibitions which solicit. For example, let me just take an obvious example, one of the great masterpieces of Western civilization, I hope you saw the movie, The Sound of Music. I hope I don't have to engage in the boring exercise of telling, okay, if you know the movie, you know probably which scene, at least I even now shock at what kind of obscenity this scene really is. You remember a little bit less than half into the movie, Sister Maria, who gets a crush with the Baron von Trapp, escapes back to the monastery? She's in love with the Baron and cannot stand it and so on. There she still desires the Baron whose children she was serving and goes to the Mother Superior and tells her like, "What should I do? I still have sinful desires," like she goes there with a plea to be properly punished so that she will control her desires, like I don't know, put me on fasting, whatever. And then comes the obscene moment. I hope you remember it when instead of admonishing her—I really couldn't believe it—the Mother Superior starts to sing a song. You remember which one? "Climb Ev'ry Mountain" and so on. Which means almost literally: go back, seduce and screw the guy. And I think this is how, if you really read a certain type of church ideology between the lines, they are not telling you "no sex," they are telling you effectively: accept our superficial rules, pay lip service to them, and your sex life done discreetly will be even better. I think they know how they are doing it. It's entire culture constructed in this way. Maybe this is, but I doubt more typical, I doubt appealing for Catholics than for Protestants. You know, this idea of do it discreetly and everything is pardoned and so on and so on. So another example, I repeat it, but it's from a rather unknown book of mine, so I hope you don't know it, which I find perfect for this. I go again, another movie which I more sincerely like, I hope you saw it, Casablanca, of course. You remember two-thirds into the movie, just a small scene, Ingrid Bergman in the middle of the night comes to Humphrey Bogart to Rick's Cafe and, of course, to get—to ask for those famous visas for Portugal and so on. Then something happens. They start to talk remembering their love affair in Paris a year or two ago, then they embrace, then a fade-out. We see for two or three seconds the tower of the Casablanca airport, just the light turning around, then we jump back into the room where they are no longer embraced, but it's just continue the same conversation. What's important here? Well, the important thing is, of course, the stupid vulgar question: did they do it or not? That is to say, those two seconds and a half, are they only—are they only here to mark the passage of real time, or are they here to signal the whole, I don't know, half an hour? However, what's so interesting in the movie—if you look it—is that it's not so much that it's not clear what happens. The movie rather gives you signals, a whole series of signals which point first in the direction they did do it, then in the direction they didn't do it. It's consciously contradictory. First, notice that—that—notice that afterwards they are smoking. I hope you know this, that Hays Code, Hollywood rules in the '30s and '40s, because explicit sex was prohibited, after a coupling scene, if you have a fade-out and afterwards if you return to smoking, it was quite—quite unambiguous signal that there was sex. And a whole series of other obvious, like even that phallic primitive statue of the tower of the airport, whatever. But then you have the whole series of signs that they didn't do it. Like, the same conversation seems to go on, there is no bed, no ruffled surface, everything clean and so on and so on. So I think the movie consciously plays a double game. The message is: I know you have dirty desires, but I will allow you, as if the movie talks to you, addresses you, I will allow you this—to play this hypocritical game. On the one hand, I will make you safe from any reproaches from the moral ideological agency. If, imagine, ideology as an agent asking you, "How—how do you dare to watch such a dirty movie?" You say, "But nothing happened, they just talked and so on." But at the same time, I will give you very specifically all the series of signals so that you can do all your dirty imagination and so on and so on. I don't know if you know, but there is a short story by an author I forgot who he was, who wrote a short story again called As Time Goes By, which focuses precisely on the paradox of this scene. It's a 20-page short story where first it's the beginning of that scene, Ingrid Bergman arrives. The last half a page is the conversation we hear. And in between, pages of extremely open hardcore of what they were doing. But what is nice is that the short story does even something really nasty. It reinterprets in the terms of hardcore pornography some of the sayings, you know, these legendary sayings from the movie. You know we all know—we all know this famous Humphrey Bogart phrase to his lady, "Here's to you, kid." You know how it then happens? In the middle of lovemaking, he gives her her his—his penis to her mouth and says, "Here's to you, kid." But now, you know what I am saying. Now I am doing a dirty trick. Your laughter now—and okay, my dirty trick to you—this is what makes us subjects of power. There's absolutely nothing sub—no, we didn't screw, we didn't squeeze their balls, so to speak. We played their games. Ideology is not just the explicit story. It's not just "nothing happens" and then you think you play some subversive games whatever by imagining. Ideology includes both levels: the explicit and the unspoken obscenity. This is how—this is how I read—not in any America-bashing way, in a way I claim in Europe we are even worse—what happened in Abu Ghraib. I claim that what those guys in prison there by annoying, torturing and so on prisoners, they were effectively staging there this obscene underground other side of not only military—I will even—I even claim maybe cultural life. Namely, look, if you remember some of the first photos from Abu Ghraib came out, you remember the famous one: one of the prisoners like in women's plain dresses attached to some cords and so on. I did an experiment: I showed that photo to a friend of mine who was at some holiday, didn't see this photo, and I asked him, "What is this?" He told me, "Well, in New York, this sounds like some Off-Off-Broadway avant-garde theater performance." You know, again our army, Yugoslav Army was bad, Russian Army, Yugoslav Army was even worse. But for you, you know all these military rituals, fragging, the obscenity of songs. This for me always fascinated me. For example, this so-called, I think maybe I'm wrong, they are called marching chants. You know these songs that Marines or other soldiers sing while marching on training and which are very interesting. They combine open vulgarities—brutal obscenities with nonsense rhymes. Like, okay, an innocent one, I think it's from that movie An Officer and a Gentleman, something like: "I don't know but I've been told that Eskimo pussy is rather cold." Total nonsense. But again, my point is this is not just something which happens by in a closed military community. That's the—the point of true identification. When you want to learn to analyze how a certain closed community functions, don't look at the explicit rules. Look at this as it were secret rituals and so on and so on. And again, please don't accuse me of America-bashing. If anything, what happened to me, or what I was witnessing in ex-Yugoslav Army, it's too much to say here, much more further. Okay, so let me go on. The next point I want to make here is that this is why, you know, when you analyze a community, when you witness something that we may call spontaneous transgressive outburst so to say, or transgressive behavior—when you break off and you explode in whatever way—I think we should not take this as a spontaneous outburst in contrast to rules. No, these so-called spontaneous outbursts are absolutely even more maybe also regulated by rules. They are not a matter of spontaneous enjoyment. No, they have to be learned. The more transgressive hedonistic they appear, they have to be learned. Let me just take two, three supreme cases. Smoking. How, maybe you do remember, I don't because I'm a madman, not because—I didn't—I never smoked in my life, but don't take me for a crazy guy, not because I wanted to remain pure, because I just don't like it. I don't know, but all my friends told me and I am in the same thing. You know how it usually happened when you were first seduced, if you were into smoking? Usually as a kind of a small transgressive initiatory experience. You know, like you are small on elementary school, some friend tells you, "Yeah, this is what adults do, try it," and so on. And admit it is always the same story. First, you start coughing, you didn't like it—"Bah, it's disgusting." Then you literally have to learn to enjoy as part of the initiatory ritual. I claim it's the same with drinking. Everyone who tries whiskey for the first time, the first reaction is always "It's bitter, it's disgusting." Then you learn you have to enjoy it. I think it's clear that to enjoy, if—if you drink for pleasure, you—you don't drink whiskey, my God, you drink some stupid fruit juice or whatever. And I claim the same happens—it's the same even for sex. At the deepest level, it's not pleasure, it's some kind of a more—some kind of a transgressive-enforced duty. I mean, if you want pure pleasure, masturbation is much better. So all I am trying to say is that—is that—this makes the whole of culture. How you obey the rules through all those transgressive carnival, adults—adults whatever and so on and so on. Incidentally as an amusing remark, I think the same even goes for music club. For example, I love classical music and I have many friends who love it. But how do you signal that you are really in part of an elite circle? It's not by if you follow the commonly accepted judgments, you appear an idiot. The way to do is to take a great—I'm not giving you instructions—take a great composer but ignore his masterpieces. Like, you will say Beethoven, "I like the Ninth Symphony, I like the late string quartets," you are barbarian. You must say, "Yeah, but there is one piano piece nobody knows from the middle age and this is the masterwork." Or for example, with my good friend Fred Jameson and some others, we even wanted to do a book—we just didn't get enough collaborators—of playing this game with Alfred Hitchcock's films. The idea was each of us should select—each of us should select an—a—a Hitchcock thriller which is obviously a failure and play the game "Ah, but this is the true masterpiece." Fred's, I'm sure you don't know it, Fred's selection was Stage Fright, that failure from '48, '49 with Marlene Dietrich. Mine was even the lowest you can go—Topaz, that anti-Communist drama whatever from—from the '60s. So this is that complication. So if we return from this short detour to my basic point. So we take into account these complications. How does ideology function today, especially with regard to the claim that we live in a post-ideological era? I claim that—I will try to explain why—ideology today appears as its own opposite, as non-ideology, as the reference to the core of our human identity beneath all ideological labels. This is how it works in art, in politics. You can be sure you are in ideology when somebody says, "Listen, let's forget about all the stupid political, religious labels. Ultimately, are we not ordinary human beings? We all share the same fears, the same passions," and so on and so on. To give you an example of this fall—the best example I can think of is a book recently translated into English, which was a tremendous bestseller first in France, then in Germany, now here also—Jonathan Littell, Les Bienveillantes. I think the translation is The Kindly Ones. It's a slightly too long, almost pages, first-person narrative of a Holocaust executioner, a mid-level SS officer who did it all. But of course in a consciously provocative way, the book presents him as a normal, warm human being like all of us. He has his fears, his sometimes disgusted, you see all his doubts, fears and so on and so on. And of course the book does not justify him, but the—the—the insight of the book is a deeper one, I think. It is that, you know, Hannah Arendt already made a similar point as was right. When you are witnessing terrifying acts, don't fall into the trap of thinking that behind the acts you will encounter some kind of a demonic entity, a superman of evil. No, you encounter just ordinary beings with all their fears and so on. You know, everybody as we put it has a human side. Stalin loved her daughter, Hitler liked to talk to children giving them chocolate, whatever and so on and so on. We are all humans. And here comes my next conclusion, which I think, I will try to show immediately why, has even political implications. If there is the a most basic lesson of psychoanalysis, it is that what we usually refer to as the wealth of our inner lives, there is nothing authentic about it. This is constitutively a priori almost a lie. You know this famous postmodern, deconstructionist, whatever definition, anti-substantialist definition of human identity in the sense of we are nothing but stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves. I think it's not quite true, because we are telling these stories, but these stories are fundamentally lies to obfuscate the reality—the reality of what we are doing. What do I mean by it? You remember the—a—a saying, an allegedly deep thought which I think was pronounced in a dialogue by a partisan of the Middle East dialogue. It sounds so deep, listen: "An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard." It sounds very deep, no? Like, I stigmatize you as an enemy because I wasn't able to listen to you. I just reify you as some monster. Then if I listen to your side of the story, I see you are human like me, you have your dreams, your fears and so on, and I see you as a human being. This is all very nice. It has a limit. The limit is what? Well, we reach this limit when we simply replace the general term "enemy" with a concrete name. Would you also say: Adolf Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his story? No, the answer is his story was just a lie which he made to justify and at the same time avoid the horror of what he was doing. And this is incidentally almost the most difficult thing to do, and the most tragic even, when you analyze a certain ideological constellation. You know, for example, I recently read the book—I forgot who wrote it, I bought it at some book face—The Nazi Ethic. No, it wasn't Men's Obscenity. The book did something which is absolutely crucial to do. It looked at how did the Nazis justify to themselves what they were doing. And of course you find a very beautiful, sometimes very beautiful narrative full of almost, I tend to say, authentic insights and so on and so on. But again, the truth is not there, that's on what I insist. It's not that when I want to judge you, the rule is I should look deep into you and try to understand what you thought you were doing. Of course I should, but I will not arrive at any fundamental truth in this way. I will rather arrive at something that I have tempted to call the fundamental lie, the script that you construct to yourself. This is why we have all these horrible examples. Take the architect of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich, before he was killed in Prague in '42. You know what's so shocking in even reading the biography of this guy? Do you know that in his spare time he was meeting with three other friend officers of SS, he was a very good violin player, and they were playing in a string quartet late Beethoven's string quartets, which are maybe one of the tops, tops in the classical music. Now, what I tragically claim is that you cannot say, "Oh, but it must have been non-authentic." No, that's very difficult to accept. Maybe he played them with a real authenticity, blah blah, and nonetheless he was able to do it. And okay, I will not repeat here my old examples, but I have many of them, even more tragic. For example, in the West, it's my old story, maybe you don't know it, did you read Aldous Huxley's Grey Eminence? It's a wonderful historical research into early 17th century French politician priest, Père Joseph, Father Joseph. He was a counselor to Cardinal Richelieu at the time of the Thirty Years' War in Europe, which devastated Europe terribly, to between Protestants and Catholics. If there is a guy who can be retroactively isolated as the origin of Nazism, it's this guy, believe it or not. Because what he did is that he concluded a pact between France and Protestant Sweden against Catholic Austrian Empire just to prevent the unification of Germany. He succeeded, which is why Germany delayed its constitution as a nation-state, which was the ultimate condition of First World War and then Second World War. So again, the meanest politician ordering tortures, poisons, reasons, whatever. But now comes the horrible thing which fascinated Aldous Huxley: in the evening, metaphorically, after doing this dirty work, he wrote the most beautiful mystical meditations, absolutely at the level of who are our biggest hits, Saint Theresa of Avila and so on and so on. And this is what bothered Aldous Huxley. Is it possible? How could a guy who was obviously an authentic mystic, how could he be doing that? Huxley thought it's not possible, there must have been something false not only in his Père Joseph mystic but also in Christianity itself for playing this so—so Huxley thought Zen Buddhism, Oriental mysticism is better. I'm not saying it's worse, but I'm saying it's not even better. It's not better. Again, read the book to which I refer always, it's a guy called Brian Victoria, who is himself a Zen Buddhist, Zen at War. He looks at how the Zen community in Japan around the—literally over million then I think related to Japanese war imperialism in the '30s and '40s, attack on China and so on. What he noticed was that they were all justifying it, large majority. Not only this, so not only supporting it but actively justifying it. For example, one, a guy whom many of you maybe know because he was popular when we were young in the hippie times, D.T. Isaacs—Teitaro Suzuki, the great popularizer of Zen in the West. Yes, in the late '30s, he was writing texts where he fully justified Japanese aggression on China. He even tried to provide through Zen Buddhism instructions into how to cope with the act of killing. His idea was that for us ordinary people with a minimum of decency, you know, it's not so easy to kill. Like, we can dream of killing, but to have a concrete person in front of you, it can be difficult to step on the person. So he mobilized the entire Zen machinery and he said: this happens only if you remain caught within the illusion of false reality where you know the story. You think you are the agent, you believe in substantial reality. But he says if you reach the level of story of Buddhist enlightenment, then things appear in a different way. If you are still caught into the limits of your false self, then you experience it like "you are there, I am here, I am now stabbing you," this is horrible. But then he says, "if I reach enlightenment and see the vanity of substantial reality, then I can experience the same scene in a totally different way." Something like: I'm for nothing in it, I'm a pure observer. I don't—not even I go—here is my hand moving around in the intersubjective interpersonal dance, and as a part—as a part of the same dance, your body gets stuck into it. I am for nothing in it. And again, don't misunderstand me. I am not blaming Suzuki. He was authentic. The lesson is just: I don't see any continuity, as it were, any necessary link between our inner experience, authentic as it may be, and let's call it maybe the social political consequences, the horror of what we are doing. I claim that fundamentally our innermost identity in the sense of the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves are not the truth. They are even as a rule a lie. In this sense, I claim this withdrawal from external reality in the sense of "let's look into the depth of your personality, you as a concrete human being" is false. And so let's go to give you another example, to the very opposite end of the Nazis—and I'm not claiming in any way that they are the same, quite on the contrary—but to see how, of course, at a much more modest level, but nonetheless we find something similar, for example, in today's Israel. Let's look at the movies. Did you see the last two Israeli films which were a big success, Ari Folman's animated documentary Waltz with Bashir and Samuel Maoz's Lebanon? Lebanon is especially typical here I think. You know it presents the experience of an ordinary Israeli soldier in the Lebanon war when he was in a tank penetrating deep into Lebanon. And almost the entire movie shot from the perspective within inside a tank—all the horrors, the claustrophobia and so on and so on. I think this is ideology at its purest because under the pretext of "forget about ideology, war is horrible, we need that horrible experience, nonsense." You know, all the historical background—what was he doing there, who was he killing, children and so on—it all disappears. All of a sudden it becomes the story of your inner suffering, fears, of your inner experience and so on and so on. So it's pretty sad to report how Israeli Army—I know because I was there, I have there many friends, I visit often there—how IDF, Israeli Defense Forces, play this game endlessly. For example, they don't present themselves as superheroes like, "Oh, one battalion of us can take Cairo in one afternoon if we want" and so on. No, they always emphasize: war is not in our genes, we are human like you, we are afraid, we urinate—I remember long interviews in the movie which I think is ideology at its purest, you know Claude Lanzmann Shoah, but you know he did later another movie called Tsahal, which is the name for Israeli Defense Forces, endless interview along the model of Shoah with Israeli soldiers, their memories about the '73 Yom Kippur War. And it's all about this concrete experience. They tell how they even urinated, they were totally scared—like an endless variation on "we are human." But I claim this precisely allows you to obliterate the political consequences of what you are doing and so on. Let me give you another example which I must say really shocked me. When I was in Israel, they reported of a strange incident. A group of anti-terrorist soldiers entered an apartment where they suspected—that—an alleged terrorist is hiding. They found only his family there, wife and children. Among the children a daughter, of course terrified that soldiers breaking in, started to cry and the mother, to calm her down, called her by her name, her name and bit what—and then one of the Israeli soldiers breaking in discovered that he has a daughter with the same name. And of course he pulled out his wallet and, "You see mother, I have the same—I have the same daughter—I have the same name." You see the message: "Oh, we are human," and so on and so on. But I claim in that situation this was an obscenity, in that situation to emphasize in that sense humanity. So again now so that you will not say that I am only taking as it were Nazis and God forbid to confuse them Israelis, I will also give you an interesting example from the opposite side politically. You know that in today's Cuba they have a certain even relatively at high-level quality detective novels, some—the biggest—their biggest export name is a writer called Leonardo Padura Fuentes, who writes police procedurals, four of them or even five are translated, you can get them in better bookstores. The hero is Mario Conde, a police officer in today's Havana. The books are so critical—I mean critical at least in the sense of presenting all the misery of today's Cuba, they are a lost generation, misery, hunger, prostitution, nepotism and so on—so that I thought, my God, it would be nice to visit this guy in a nice villa in the suburbs of Miami or what, no? I was surprised to learn that no, he is—he is—he is in Cuba and not even as a tough dissident. He is totally accepted, supported by state media and so on. So asked myself "what's going on?" And I think it is—from the standpoint of their interest, Cuban authorities are right in supporting him. Because first of all, in spite of all the criticism, the basic message at this human level of—of Leonardo Padura is what? It is: okay, we screwed it up, it's a misery, we are a lost generation and so on, but the true patriot hero stays here with bitterness but heroism. "Don't dream about Miami, we are from here, we should heroically go on here." You know this totally without—without any apparently in a totally non-ideological way like cut the bullshit about socialism and so on, but nonetheless you know, "be faithful to you, stay here, don't escape into dreams," and so on and so on. It's I claim a really, really very refined mode of ideology. Where do you find a similar ideology? Now we go to more crazy orders, a little bit on movies. Maybe you know this part then I will go to other examples. My first example would have been—did you see the movie, I did it six times because of my small son, Kung Fu Panda. That's ideology at its quite—I think it's a perfect, almost clinical example of how we function in our societies. If you saw the movie, you know, the big fat kung fu panda called Po, who wants to become a kung fu warrior and succeeds. But okay, the point is that the movie moves at two levels. First, you have all this orientalist Western Buddhist element, you know: fate, choice, fidelity, hero and so on, all this, how shall I put it, religious-military background. At the same time, you must have noticed how the movie is full of most commonsensical, brutal humor jokes at its own expense—at the expense of this ideology. It makes fun continuously of these Buddhist wisdoms and so on and so on. But then something extremely interesting, which is that in spite of all this, the ideology—this pseudo-Buddhism, mystique—survives. You can make fun of it, but nonetheless it functions. And this is the mystery. This is I think how beliefs function today. Nobody really believes. If you ask anyone, "Do you believe?" everyone would tell you, "Are you insane? Are you crazy? Why should I believe?" But beliefs, how shall I put it, they socially function. We have the paradox of beliefs which as it were circulate, nobody believes in them, but they function. The one who first provided this formula was—and I appreciate her for that—was the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. You know, when she was asked "Do you believe in God?" You know what she said? It's a nice formula. She said, "Jewish people believe in God, and I believe in Jewish people." You know what this means? This is not the usual Stalinist logic where your reasoning is "ordinary people need to believe." No, I claim nobody has to believe and belief functions. How does this function? Imagine, let's take the most simple example. Imagine Christmas. Of course you don't believe in Santa Claus, my God, you have to provide yourself the presents, but when somebody asks you "Do you believe in Santa Claus?" you will probably say "No, I just pretend because of my children, not to disappoint them." Now, if I ask alone, not with you there in front of you, your children, I'm sure they will say "Of course I don't believe, I just pretend not to disappoint my parents and get the presents." And it goes on endlessly, I claim. So you can see a belief functions as element of a social network. It functions except although even if nobody effectively in the first person believes. And this message is wonderfully formulated at the end of Kung Fu Panda, where Kung Fu the Po the panda looks for the secret ingredient that would make him a hero. In his ordinary life, he just helps his father who runs a restaurant where they make a special soup, a noodle soup, and father claims that he—there is a special ingredient to that soup. And at the end, the father tells him the secret: there is no special ingredient. It's only you. To make something special, you just have to believe it's special. And then he discovers it's the same for becoming a warrior. This means precisely what I was saying: there is no special belief, no special quality. It functions even if you know that there is nothing. It functions if you, as it were, follow it as if it functions. This is how our beliefs function today. At the cynical level, you can laugh at everything, but I claim that nonetheless beliefs function. Like—I'm again sorry if I repeat a story which I'm repeating all around for years—Niels Bohr, quantum physics, probably you know it, made a wonderful comment. He had a country—a house in the countryside of Denmark, an old wooden farmer's house with above the entrance door a horseshoe. I don't know how it is here, in Europe a horseshoe above the entrance doors is a superstitious sign preventing evil spirits to enter the house. So a friend, another scientist visited him and said, "But wait a minute, are you stupid? I mean, why do you have this? Do you believe in it?" Niels Bohr said, "Of course not." Then the friend asked him, "But why do you have it here?" You know what Niels Bohr answered? "Of course I don't believe in it, that this really prevents evil spirits to enter, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." This is how beliefs—nobody believes in democracy, blah blah, but we somehow accept it at the social level that it works. So again, before we dismiss fundamentalism and all that as crazy people who believe, let's first set the things straight. I claim that we believe in a way more than ever, just in this more impersonal—in this more impersonal way. From here, one could have go on in analyzing Hollywood as a part towards our ideological constellation. Like there is another feature which I think pretty crucial in Kung Fu Panda: no lady, no girl, no love interest. All you have in the universe of Panda is this mystical wisdom and then a kind of a—how shall I call it—oral-anal pre-pre-sexual primitivity. The drive of the hero, the—the panda, is not sex, power, it's eating. He eats like a pig. He's kind of an oral-anal economy. It's so typical, I don't know, probably the authors—they are not idiots—were aware of it that you know he is called Po, P-O. I mean in German *Po* is a common term for ass, no? P-O. I mean—so what I am saying is that sexuality is excluded. And I don't know what this means, but did you notice how in many recent films—and I'm not saying this simply means less sexuality, I don't know what it—what—sexuality—Hollywood starts to violate its own old rule of how shall I call it of creating the couple? For example, this was what was so mysterious in The Da Vinci Code. You know already years ago a friend of mine, French—sorry, British Lacanian psychoanalyst Darian Leader told me something wonderful. He told me, you remember X-Files, if you watch some of them. He provided a wonderful formula for X-Files. He said, why do all these things happen out there, you know the formula, the truth is out there, here an alien, there an alien. He says: to cover up the fact that nothing goes on here between the two of them. You know, no sex, because all this has to happen because—and I claim it's exactly the same formula for The Da Vinci Code. At least the movie: poor Jesus Christ has to screw Mary or what to cover up the fact that they don't do it. If you notice, okay, it's between Tom Hanks and who is that French girl that I don't like, whatever, Audrey Tautou, no sex here. And then it goes further in movies even more than in the novels. Take the earlier novel, Angels Demons. The way it was made into a movie, if you saw it, again no sex, although the girl is quite attractive if you allow me a sexist remark, quite die—nice, but nothing happens, no sex. And then if you read—I did, I almost killed myself, it's—all those novels, and I measure him, Dan Brown, by his own standards, it's so bad, this Lost Symbol—but remember there is just another older lady, there is not even a minimal—a minimal sexual tension. I find this very strange what is happening in—in Hollywood that they are—that they are moving in this direction. Because I even found the same—did you notice that the same happens for the first time in entire James Bond, in the last James Bond, Quantum of Solace? No sex. Just at the end they discover they are both too shattered or whatever. So—why am I saying this? Because one of the standard formulas of Hollywood which I developed in my book on Titanic and elsewhere is that whenever you have a big dramatic story, it can be about the end of the world or whatever, it's always enframed by the logic of creating a couple. Like it goes up to The subtitle of could have been how a young what is he, failed writer, John Cusack, lost and regained his wife and so on. To—to—to make him to go further, even two couples are created: the daughter Tandie Newton also gets a good colored guy so that—but so—this formula how it gradually disappears. And it plays a—a crucial role this formula. What I'm saying is not that simply we should obliterate all the historical background, fighting the Nazis and so on, but it's that what makes the film as it were attractive, the cause of our desire, is this apparently marginal feature that all the official topic of the movie which is in the foreground, you know how to break the Nazi code, is—generated our interest because it's always in this kind of a dialogue, constant dialogue with its frame, which is the enigma of sexual relationship, the enigma of a woman and so on and so on. Okay, let me now go on to my final, or slowly approaching the end element which is, what if we live in this so-called post-ideological era where they say forget about big ideological phrases, be authentic who you are, enjoy life and so on, or as they put it today? Because I think our predominant ideology today is more some kind of an enlightened hedonism, which is decaffeinated Dalai Lama, how shall I put it, Dalai Lama popularized. You know, be truly yourself, realize your potentials and so on. I think what is—the reason for it is that we find ourselves in a stage which can be called cultural capitalism. I think something did change with capitalism after '68. Capitalism somehow integrated all the critique—critique of consumerism, alienation and so on—and functioned in a new—functioned in a new way now. The two dimensions which were until now opposed, on the one hand the dimension of your consumerism—"I want this product to enjoy" and so on—and the dimension of caring for society, let's call it the—the—altruistic humanitarian ideological dimension, they are more and more combined. How? Well, if you visit Starbucks you will immediately notice it, because Starbucks is maybe the company which most directly exploits this. They are masters in it. You know what they are doing. All the time they are bombarding you by something like: when you buy a cappuccino with us, you don't buy just a cappuccino, you buy much more. And they enumerate it: A, you buy an authentic community. They know—they openly manipulate Starbucks this ideological cliché that in our societies we no longer town councils or public places, they are no longer here, we are just isolated individuals. The idea is: we will provide an ersatz community for you. Then they go on: we only grow our coffee beans from organic—we only buy it from organic farms, we give money there to educate, to bring water to them and so on and so on. So you know the idea being all this—I cannot but call it—semantic density. Like you don't just buy a coffee, you are made aware that you buy a whole ideological experience of caring for others and so on and so on. I claim that this is absolutely crucial for today's capitalism, that as it were consumerism tries to recuperate its own opposite. You know, it's no longer "I do this, I consume, but I have to do something else to do something good." No, they offer you a much better choice: "consume and you will at the same time act as a humanitarian caring for Mother Nature, caring for others," and so on and so on. This formula reached recently almost its climax with two cases. First, maybe you've heard about Toms shoes, a company founded in for shoes. Their formula is "one for one," as they call it. They claim for every pair of shoes you buy with them, another pair of shoes will be given to again some starving children, I don't know where and so on and so on. It's a wonderful formula. It gives you at its best: you may engage in consumerism because the more you do it, the more also those who are excluded profit by it. Or another absurd: Coca-Cola—sorry, Pepsi—recently started a publicity—with the formula, I quote it: "Pepsi was always about refreshment, but what if instead of just refreshing people, Pepsi helps to refresh the world?" So the idea is that when you buy a Coke, you get the right to vote to send your ideas about what to do to help people. And then when these ideas will be gathered, they will be again put to vote and you will be able to choose which idea, "helping starving people here, preserving nature there," will be—will be put—will be put to use. So even have—even you even have the as it were the element of democracy here. What are the further consequences of it? Here with Pepsi, of course, Pepsi plays to the end the logic of—what—what one cannot call but—the logic of freedom of choice. And with this I would like to conclude, because I think that the fight that we have now in United States, this ideological fight about healthcare reform, is an important fight because what it focuses on is precisely the freedom of choice. And things are complex here. Okay, do not misunderstand me. I'm totally on the side of those who are for the reform. What I just wanted to say is that in a what sense things are getting complex today. In the good old days, the main argument against the ideology of free choice was this vulgarized Marxist one: "Yes, we are given choices but only the unimportant choices, Pepsi or Coke or whatever, we are not given the real choices." This is up to a point true. But I think, then some sociologists like the German one, Ulrich Beck in his well-known book on the risk society, they—I don't agree wholly with them, but they nonetheless point that out something at how the status of choice, risk, catastrophes changed today. It changed in what way? In the sense that today we perceive as—risks in our era of new uncertainties, not only—not simply something which will hit us from outside, like a gigantic asteroid or whatever. We are more and more aware that there may be risks which we are generated or threats by our own activity. So you see the problem is not so much that we don't have a choice, but that we have a choice but—and I don't think here, I am critical of the big companies, but that we can simply put all the blame on the big companies. But the situation is simply not transparent. Okay, basically of course I accept the—the global warming argument, but things are so complicated. We are—it's not that we have too much—too much power, okay humanity as such. We the consequences of our own activity are impenetrable to ourselves. We are effectively—we are so strong that we can even change nature, but we are not aware of how are we doing it. For example, I read—I got a message recently from a friend from China who told me that even these big earthquakes, you remember a year and a half ago or when they had in the Sichuan province inside the big earthquake? And then now more and more—they don't make it public—but nonetheless more and more admit that these earthquakes were probably the product of human activity. You know how? You remember China is building those gigantic Three Gorges Dams or what. The idea is that the gigantic lakes they created have changed so much with high pressure—pressure on different strata there—that they if not caused the earthquake at least contributed to it. So again that's the first element of radical insecurity today. And—the second point I want to emphasize here is how—and this is again ideology at its purest—how the very uncertainties caused by the gradual dismantling of welfare state are then sold to us as new freedoms. For example, we all know that more and more we are forced to make just one, two, three years' contracts. It's more and more difficult to get a long-term job. But instead of—this—then we are told, "Why don't instead of being afraid of it, why don't you take this as a new opportunity to reinvent yourself every two, three years, to make a choice," and so on and so on. Or with healthcare. At least in Europe where they are also slowly, we already had it, dismantling—well—healthcare, the reasoning is again: this gives you new choices. This give you a choice to choose, you know, do you want to spend more and take a risk or you want to be absolutely sure spend less whatever and so on and so on. This I think is ideology at its purest. Why? Because—two, three points only almost old-fashioned Marxist points I want to make here. As it is clear not only to Marxists but even to old-fashioned communitarians and so on, you know freedom—actual freedom of choice, personal freedoms that we all cherish—is something which works only, more and more in our complex society, only against the background of the very complex network of state guarantees, rules, customs, civility and so on and so on. Do you know how many things has to function in the background so that you have your freedom? And I think that if you approach it in this way, then universal healthcare if anything provides for people much more freedom. In what sense? The comparison I'm tempted to make is with water and electricity. I mean, you probably notice that all of us, maybe in some states or cities it's different, but I think practically everywhere—everywhere you are brutally deprived of the freedom of choice there, no? Where you live you simply connect to water, to electricity. But most of you would have said, "Okay, if they rip you off too much I will protest," but you don't want to say, "Oh, I want a choice here." My life—your life would become a nightmare. Certain things should simply function in the background so that where it really matters, you have choices. Of course water and electricity really matter. But you prefer not having them back there—not to deal with them. I claim it would immensely raise the level of actual choices, freedoms and so on if at least a basic healthcare acquires a little bit of this status: that you know what I mean, you don't have to worry about it, it's in the background. This doesn't mean in any way in what way should be done and so on and so on. So now really to conclude—I know once you started a talk with "let me conclude," it's a long story. The—what happens when this invisible background disintegrates—of institutional guarantees, of customs and so on and so on? Well, something very sad happens. Something, the first preview of what we can get, in a movie which some people whom I know recently made—there is not yet a premiere even—so I'm not even supposed to talk about this movie because some of the people who helped—who helped make this movie are threatened, you will see immediately why. It's a Danish documentary, Free Men, When Killers Make Movies, made by a small Copenhagen in Denmark house. It's about a group of ex-killers in—from Medan, Indonesia. It was shot in In this film—it shows a group led by a guy called Anwar Congo. They were—maybe you don't know but in '66 Communists tried a coup d'état there and then the right-wing generals counteracted and then in the aftermath there was—people estimated it's around two and a half million of suspected Communists, most of them of Chinese origins, were killed. Now this movie tells the story of one of the group of these murderers. What is so shocking about the movie is that it tells the story in an open way. You know what I mean? Like the murderers don't take it secretly and so on, they publicly boast about it. Like with pride they—they—and it's shattering like you see them who are now rich businessmen, senators, journalists and so on, they answer all the questions. For example, they are asked "how did you usually rape women?" and they describe it, it took them some time to discover the most pleasurable way, that usually the girl should be on a table back and then you ask a friend with a wire around—around her neck to hold her down and strangle her slowly and so on. Then they ask how did they torture men, they describe what's the most practical way, cut off their balls, maybe the guy swallow his own balls—all this nice stuff. And—and they do this publicly and openly. There is even at the end a TV show, really took place in Indonesia on one of the biggest state TV channels, which is the ultimate of obscenity that I've seen. In this TV show, the—these criminals are in front of a large audience, ask—answer questions and so on, and then the moderator celebrates them. Like they ask a guy "how did you torture blah blah," and the guy says "Oh in this way, it's most practical way to torture women," and the moderator says "A big applause for the gentleman here for this nice insight" and so on and so on. Such a caricature, you know usually this happens in these bad taste leftist dystopias where they imagine some future totalitarian society. It happens there. And the question is again, how is something like this possible? Because the movie up to a point answers. Because all these guys loved Hollywood when they were young, but I'm not blaming Hollywood for that. And the way they were able to do it, imagine themselves, as they said, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were their two heroes. They imagine themselves as imitating Hollywood heroes, tough guys, gangsters and so on. Again, I'm not blaming here Hollywood, but I'm also not blaming here the primitive Indonesian culture like you know those idiots there and so on. No, I'm saying that it has more something to do with how the ongoing capitalist globalization undermines our standard traditional ethics—ethical attitudes and creates a certain moral vacuum. And my point is that this is the first battle to be fought, as it were. Don't think that ideology doesn't matter today. Precisely today in our at-most cynical era and so on, we are more deep in ideology than we ever were. Ideology again, as I pointed out, is not only the explicit rules, it's all beliefs that we obey without believing in them, all the obscene implicit rules and so on and so on, and it is very difficult to withdraw from it because you pay the price for it, it hurts, as it were. Which is why what if you really want to do something today, you should not succumb too quickly to this idea "Oh children are starving, let's do something." Yeah, of course we should, but first we should change ourselves. First we should put in order our dreams. We should start here. Otherwise this is for me, to put it in very naive terms, the reason of the failure of the 20th century revolutions. I have no mercy for Soviet Union and so on. They won, but they didn't win in the dreams they were dreaming. And then you end up with what you end up with what you end up with here. Because do not—just a concluding variation—do not forget how important dreams are. Let's take the ultimate ideological dream, anti-Semitism. Of course we all know—and today I claim we live in a way where it's no—so that let me make it clear where I stand here. I still think that anti-Semitism is ideology par excellence and cannot—cannot ever be justified. But I nonetheless, not in spite of this but because of this, I think one should absolutely also be critical of what goes on in today's Israel too. For example, my thesis is a crazy one here but I presented it in Israel there. Zionism is the ultimate today's Zionism is the ultimate stage of anti-Semitism. In what sense do I mean? This idea came to me when there was a big public debate in I think Jerusalem where I was defending a friend of mine, anti-Zionist Jewish filmmaker Woody Allen, and then people in the public attacked me claiming "But listen, you're a famous philosopher, this guy is nobody. Are you aware that this guy just wants to exploit you for money? That this guy really doesn't care?" Then others accused this guy of not being really one of them, Jews, that he's just floating around with [unintelligible]. Then I told them, "Are you aware that you are describing this guy in exactly the same terms the late 19th century anti-Semitic nation-state partisans were describing the Jew? They are only for money, they don't really have roots in their community and so on and so on." But—okay, nonetheless back to this anti-Semitic feelings. You know, it's not enough to say but Jews are not like that. You should fight anti-Semitism not only at the level of facts, as every racism, but also at the level of dreams, fantasies and so on. You know because if you accept the debate at the level of facts—are Jews really like that and so on—it's over, I claim. You will achieve nothing. Imagine debating with somebody in Germany in '36 if there the anti-Semitic Nazi image of Jews is true or not. The result will be somewhere in the middle. Like the anti-Semites abuse Jews what of? Exploiting the Germans. Well, my God, some Jews were big, so in a certain sense they were exploiting Germans. So all you can say at this level is "It's not as bad as the Nazis claim, but there is some truth in it." Okay, they claim Jews corrupt, seduce sexually our German girls. Well, I claim probably it was totally true, I mean why not? Of course, everyone. So you see my point. The true question is not are Jews really like that? The true question is why does the anti-Semitic subject need the figure of the Jew? And here I am tempted to repeat Jacques Lacan's wonderful ironic statement when he says that when a husband is jealous of his wife that she sits around with other men, that his jealousy is pathological even if it's true that his wife is doing this. Because what makes it pathological, it's not is it true or not, but why does he in order to maintain, as it were, the consistency of his subjectivity, why does he need that—that—husband a wife who is cheating him, or an anti-Semitic German why does he need in order to maintain the consistency of his subjectivity why does he need such a figure of the Jew? So to conclude with this wonderful formula of Jacques Lacan in Seminar XI where he says the picture that I see is in my eye, it's my fantasy, but I—I am also in the picture. So of course the anti—the—the racist anti-Semitic picture of the Jew is a fantasy in the eye of the anti-Semitic subject. But anti-Semitic subject is also in his own picture in the sense of his very identity is constructed by this relies on this fantasy. You take his fantasy, his dream away, he in a way loses everything, and has to—and this is a difficult universe—has totally to reconstruct himself. Which is why I think all good radical movements start with this first act of violence, which is a spiritual violence aimed at yourself. This is how at least I read the scene in one of my favorite Hollywood movies—and I don't think it's proto-fascist propaganda—Fight Club. You remember when Edward Norton in that wonderful scene confronting his boss beats himself? That's how you should begin: change your dreams. I'm sorry if I was too long. On the other hand, I'm not sorry. What can you do? Thanks.