What happened in the first decade of the XXI Century
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2009-05 · 1:31:02 · 13,228 words
ideologyliberalism-political-correctnesscapitalismcommunism-socialismpsychoanalysisgeopolitics-warhegel-dialecticsreligion-theologytechnology-ai-cyberspaceeconomicsdemocracyrace-antisemitismfascism-populismecology-climatehistory
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture in Kosovo/Albania addressing multiculturalism, liberal tolerance, and the obscene underside of ideology, using examples from Nazi perpetrators, Zen Buddhist militarism, and Yugoslav army life. He argues that liberal multiculturalism offers a 'decaffeinated other' and that mutual understanding through storytelling is ideologically false. The talk pivots to political economy, diagnosing the twin crises of September 11 and the 2008 financial collapse as the death of the Fukuyama liberal-democratic utopia, and argues that contemporary capitalism, particularly in its Chinese and Berlusconi-style variants, is decoupling from democracy and moving from profit to rent. He concludes with a defense of communism as a future horizon, grounded in antagonisms (ecology, intellectual property, biogenetics, hunger) that the market cannot solve.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The gap between what one is in immediate reality and the truth about oneself articulated in an inaccessible symbolic place (the Other's discourse), illustrated here by the secret police dossier.
Žižek's coinage for the Yugoslav variant of the military-industrial complex: the devil's pact between communist nomenklatura and nationalist intelligentsia/poets that legitimized ethnic violence.
Historical concept used by Žižek to trace Germany's late unification, engineered by Père Joseph/Richelieu, as the root cause of its subsequent catastrophic political trajectory toward Hitler.
Hindu/Buddhist concept of the veil of false appearances, which Žižek shows was weaponized by both Himmler's reading of the Bhagavad Gita and Suzuki's Zen militarism to justify killing by denying the reality of death.
Zen Buddhist enlightenment, invoked here critically: Suzuki describes Satori as dissolving the subject's agency so thoroughly that killing becomes merely 'a dance of shadows,' a technique of moral anesthesia.
Rorty's postmodern-constructivist formula that identity is narrative; Žižek invokes it only to reject it, arguing these self-narratives are ideological screens that enable rather than prevent atrocity.
Žižek's conclusion from the Heydrich/Père Joseph/Suzuki examples: one's inner spiritual life or personal authenticity does not determine or constrain what one does externally; the two are radically severed.
Higher-order rules that tell you how and when to violate the explicit rules of a community; true belonging requires mastering these violations, not just following the surface norms.
The unofficial, transgressive, obscene rituals and jokes that do not subvert power but are its necessary supplement, what actually holds a community together beneath explicit rules.
Shared transgressive humor and dirty jokes exchanged on equal footing between members of different ethnic groups, which Žižek argues actually produced more genuine solidarity (bratstvo i jedinstvo) than liberal multicultural dialogue.
as “decaffeinated other”
The liberal-multicultural version of the foreign neighbor stripped of all threatening or 'poisonous' substance, open to difference in appearance while aggressively censoring its dark aspects.
A category proliferating in US social sciences that collapses wildly different threats (terrorists, abusive parents, fundamentalists) under a single rubric, symptomatically expressing anxiety about the dark underside beneath liberal narratives.
as “postmodern permissive authority”
Contemporary form of power that presents itself as free choice and permissivity while issuing a stronger injunction than old authoritarian command: not only must you do X, you must want to do X.
as “shock therapy”
Naomi Klein's concept of capitalism using major crises to impose structural transformations; Žižek invokes it to argue the 2008 crisis will likely be absorbed by capitalism rather than overcome it.
Authoritarian capitalism, first perfected in Singapore by Lee Kuan Yew and adopted by China, that is dynamic and productive while dispensing with the need for liberal democracy.
as “economic state of emergency”
The de facto suspension of democratic deliberation during the 2008 bailout, when political elites across party lines overrode the congressional vote, a sign of capitalism's growing incompatibility with democracy.
Labor whose product is immaterial (knowledge, code, affect); Žižek follows Negri in noting its rise but argues, against Negri, that it requires an ever-stronger state rather than making the state obsolete.
Marx's term from the Grundrisse for collective practical and theoretical knowledge that becomes the primary source of wealth in advanced capitalism, which Žižek argues capitalism has succeeded in reprivatizing.
as “from profit to rent”
Žižek's characterization of the new dominant logic of capitalist accumulation: instead of extracting surplus value from labor, capital privatizes parts of the common symbolic/intellectual space and charges rent for access.
as “intellectual property as rent”
Žižek's argument that privatizing parts of the general intellect (as Microsoft does with Windows) functions not as profit but as rent extracted for dwelling in a common symbolic space.
Stories he reaches for 15
D.T. Suzuki argued that on reaching Satori the killer ceases to be an agent: the sword dances, the body is just appearances, the enlightened mind merely observes, killing becomes easy once selfhood dissolves. Later a colleague argued military discipline is itself the fastest path to Zen enlightenment.
“I no longer am part of reality. I am not even I. Just my mind is a passive point of observation…where I see just as a dance of shadows of appearances my sword dancing in reality and somehow your body dances and it gets stuck on it.”
Microsoft's pricing cannot be explained by labor exploitation or profit mark-up on production costs; Windows functions as part of our general intellect, and Bill Gates privatized a portion of the common symbolic space, charging rent to dwell in it.
“Windows functions as part of our general intellect. It's the very symbolic space where we communicate and so on. So Bill Gates privatized part of our common space and so in order to dwell in common…we have to pay him rent.”
Himmler carried a leather-bound Bhagavad Gita in his pocket as ethical inspiration: Krishna's teaching that killing in Maya doesn't count (only appearances die, not true reality) served as his moral framework for genocide.
“he always carried in his pocket a Bhagavad Gita in special leather edition…to remind him of true ethics and so on.”
Old authoritarian father: 'I don't care how you feel, go to grandmother, it's your duty.' Postmodern permissive father: 'I want you to visit her only if you really want to.' The second is a stronger command: you must not only go but desire to go.
“The order is not only you must visit her, but you must like to visit her. You see this is how authority functions.”
A cap with brain sensors allows a paralyzed person to move a wheelchair by thought alone; the military has isolated the neural signature of total panic and built a suitcase device that induces it across four football fields. If thoughts can control reality, reality can also write thoughts.
“what goes out also goes in, no? If it goes in this direction, it also goes in the opposite direction…They already know how to produce them artificially. And then they bombard you and you are automatically in panic.”
Reinhard Heydrich, organizer of the Holocaust, spent evenings playing late Beethoven string quartets with fellow SS officers in a genuine string quartet, not as a performance but as authentic high culture; the monstrosity coexists with aesthetic refinement.
“the same Heydrich in the evenings…very often met with his other SS officers friends and they formed a string quartet and they played music which is…top of the top of Western music, late Beethoven string quartets.”
Physicist Steven Weinberg said that without religion good people do good things and bad people do bad things, but you need religion to make good people do bad things. Žižek applies the formula to communism: its tragedy was not evil people but good people made to do evil thinking it was good.
“without religion good people do good things, bad people did bad things like usual. But that you need religion to make good people do bad things…it's the same in East Germany.”
Cardinal Richelieu's brutal executive secretary Père Joseph, who through realpolitik prolonged the Thirty Years' War and triggered Germany's delayed unification, each evening wrote breathtakingly refined mystical letters to nuns, at the level of Saint Teresa and John of the Cross.
“This same guy about whom we know that was unimaginable cruel realpolitiker, wrote the most beautiful mystical reflections absolutely at the level of…the top, the biggest hits, Saint Teresa, John of the Cross.”
How does a Montenegro man masturbate? He digs a hole in the earth, puts his penis in, and waits for the earthquake, illustrating the cliché of Montenegrin laziness.
“How does a Montenegro guy masturbate, no? He digs a hole in the earth, puts the penis in and waits for the earthquake, no?”
At an airport, Sloterdijk told Žižek he was puzzling over who future generations would erect statues to; his answer: Lee Kuan Yew, the inventor of Singapore's 'capitalism with Asian values,' the model Deng Xiaoping took to China.
“his answer was Lee Kuan Yew…Lee Kuan Yew invented and perfectly practiced the first what poetically we call capitalism with Asian values. Less poetically it means authoritarian capitalism.”
At a talk, Žižek had lent his phone to Badiou; the phone rang mid-lecture, Badiou answered and even asked Žižek to speak more quietly. Žižek's comment: 'You can do this only to someone who is a real friend.'
“he even asked me could I talk a little bit less loudly so that he can. I told him immediately: 'You can do this only to someone who is a real friend.'”
In the Yugoslav army, Žižek and an Albanian intellectual soldier became true friends only when the soldier said 'I fuck your mother,' which Žižek reciprocated; thereafter they greeted each other only with 'Mother' / 'Sister', a shorthand reminder of genuine friendship enacted through mutual obscenity.
“Every morning that we met instead of saying 'Hello, good morning,' we just…he told me 'Mother,' I told him 'Sister.' You know? It was just a reminder we are still friends.”
Clinton admitted in a UN Food Day text that US pressure to open Third World agriculture to the market caused mass hunger: best land was taken for export crops, and when global prices spiked in 2008, countries could no longer feed themselves. Žižek uses this to extend the logic: if food cannot be left to the market, neither can education, health, or arms.
“Clinton says this: 'The result is mass hunger now.'…'The lesson is food is too important to be simply left to the market.'”
Anthropologists sought out a tribe rumored to have terrifying death dances; the tribe, wanting to be good hosts, invented exactly such a dance for them. Later anthropologists learned the truth: the 'authentic primitive ritual' was staged hospitality.
“This so-called primitive tribe just wanted to be good hosts to their guests. And they somehow guessed that these idiots want to see some terrible dance. And as good hosts, they in a panic invented this dance.”
A fairy offers a Slovene farmer any wish, but will give his neighbor twice as much. The farmer asks the fairy to take one of his eyes, so the neighbor loses both.
“Take one of my eyes. Because then…it's better if I lose a little bit just that the neighbor loses more.”
Works invoked 8
Grundrisse book
Marx's manuscripts; Žižek cites the concept of 'general intellect' as Marx's most important (and underread) contribution to understanding contemporary capitalism.
Bhagavad Gita book
Used by Himmler as ethical justification for genocide; Žižek analyzes Krishna's teaching as a moral anesthetic that empties killing of moral weight via ontological idealism.
Underground film
Kusturica's film; Žižek argues it stages the Balkan spectacle the Western gaze wants, a world of perpetual orgy outside history, rather than providing critical representation.
Žižek argues the film is 'way too soft': it attributes surveillance to an evil minister's private desire rather than the structural logic of communist totalitarianism where surveillance was automatic and universal.
Jonathan Littell's novel narrated by a mid-level Nazi executioner; Žižek praises it for showing the monstrosity was precisely that perpetrators remained fully human, supporting his thesis against liberal othering.
Žižek's own book (English only at time of talk); he directs readers there for the detailed Suzuki quotes and argument about Zen Buddhism and militarism.
Aldous Huxley's biography of Père Joseph; Žižek appreciates the diagnosis of the paradox but rejects Huxley's solution (blame Christianity, turn to Eastern spirituality).
Doors of Perception book
Huxley's drug/Eastern-spirituality book; mentioned only as what made Huxley popular with hippies, contrasted with L'Éminence grise.
People invoked 29
Bill Clinton positive
Žižek expresses personal liking for Clinton and endorses his October 2008 UN Food Day admission that US agricultural market liberalization caused mass hunger; uses it as a springboard to argue for re-politicizing food, education, health.
Cardinal Richelieu's executive secretary: brutal realpolitiker responsible for preventing German unification (triggering the eventual path to Hitler) and simultaneously a breathtaking Christian mystic, Žižek's other central example for inner authenticity as a lie.
Described as the last authentic tragic president, genuinely corrupt but with something authentically tragic in his fall, before the postmodern register of Reagan and Berlusconi.
Identified as the first and most radical practitioner of the devil's pact between communist nomenklatura and nationalist intelligentsia in Yugoslavia, the origin of the poetic-military complex.
Used as the paradigm case of postmodern power: systematic undermining of presidential dignity via pornographic reality-show self-presentation, which does not diminish but concentrates power beneath the spectacle.
Žižek insists Karadžić was not a bad poet, dismissing him as such is too easy; he was a criminal who should be shot, but the key point is that high-quality culture coexists with and legitimizes atrocity.
Singapore's long-time president cited via Sloterdijk as the inventor of 'capitalism with Asian values', authoritarian capitalism, who Sloterdijk predicts will be the figure future generations erect statues to.
Cited for having visited Singapore before his reforms and declaring it the model for all of China, confirming Žižek's thesis that China adopted capitalism with Asian values as its template.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek mentions the concept of symbolic castration as psychoanalytic framing of the opening anecdote; also cites Lacan's aphorism about a fiancée who is late ('my fiancée is never late because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancée') to illustrate his own neofascist love of order.
Steven Weinberg positive
Physicist cited approvingly for the formula: without religion good people do good things, bad people do bad things; religion makes good people do bad things, Žižek applies this to communism.
Francis Fukuyama negative
His end-of-history / liberal democratic utopia thesis is declared dead by the twin crises of 9/11 and 2008; noted with some credit for renouncing it himself due to biogenetics.
Cited for using near-identical September 11 emergency rhetoric to announce the 2008 financial crisis response, illustrating the slide toward economic emergency-state governance.
Richard Rorty negative
His formula 'we are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves' is cited as the theoretical basis for multicultural empathy; Žižek rejects it as false, these narratives are ideological screens enabling atrocity.
Naomi Klein positive
Her shock doctrine thesis, that capitalism uses crises to extract structural gains, is cited approvingly to argue the 2008 crisis will be integrated rather than overcome.
Antonio Negri negative
Žižek agrees that immaterial labor has risen but rejects Negri's conclusion that the state is withering; today's capitalism needs a stronger state than ever.
Alain Badiou positive
Described warmly as a 'good friend'; the anecdote of Badiou taking a phone call during Žižek's lecture is told to illustrate genuine friendship expressed through transgression of norms.
Jonathan Littell positive
Author of Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones); Žižek cites the novel approvingly as showing that Nazi executioners remained human in their monstrosity, supporting his thesis against liberal othering of perpetrators.
Philosopher and mayor of Venice; mentioned only as the rumored lover of Berlusconi's wife, used in the Berlusconi-reception anecdote.
Robert Conquest positive
His chronicles of communist crimes are recommended as essential reading, though Žižek criticizes the theoretical framework for reducing the tragedy to bad individuals.
Described as the most disgusting Nazi criminal precisely because he was a perfect bureaucrat with genuine ethical anxieties who used the Bhagavad Gita to solve his problem of how to kill without guilt.
Described as a good friend personally despite philosophical enmity ('we hate each other philosophically'); mutual joke that each would send the other to the gulag when in power. His observation about Lee Kuan Yew and future statues is cited approvingly.
D. T. Suzuki negative
Great Zen popularizer who in the 1930s–40s justified Japanese militarism and developed a Zen framework for killing without guilt; Žižek insists he was a genuine Zen master, the point is precisely that authentic spirituality enabled atrocity.
Used as the paradigm case of authentic high culture (late Beethoven string quartets) coexisting with organizing the Holocaust, key example for the thesis that inner authenticity is a lie.
Mentioned as part of the bipartisan coalition that overrode the congressional bailout vote, and as the target of right-wing accusations of socialism, Žižek dismisses both the socialist label and naive Obama-optimism.
Aldous Huxley negative
Author of L'Éminence grise on Père Joseph; Žižek rejects Huxley's solution (blame Christianity, turn to the East) as false, since Eastern spirituality (Himmler's Gita, Suzuki's Zen) has the same problem.
Plato positive
Žižek invokes Plato's expulsion of poets from the polis approvingly, saying the Yugoslav wars made him a Platonist: poets providing nationalist legitimacy for violence confirm Plato's worry.
Karl Marx positive
Invoked for the Grundrisse concept of general intellect and the diagnosis of capitalism; Žižek criticizes only Marx's conclusion that the rise of general intellect would automatically end capitalism.
Emir Kusturica negative
Žižek calls him explicitly 'not my greatest friend'; accuses him of staging the Balkan spectacle the Western gaze wants rather than providing authentic representation, too Westernized, not too primitive.
Identified as the first US president (alongside Argentina's Menem) to perform his own stupidity, a precursor of the Berlusconi mode of postmodern self-undermining authority.
What it argues
liberal multiculturalism as decaffeinated tolerancethe obscene underside of ideology and powercapitalism's decoupling from democracythe movement from profit to rent in immaterial capitalisminner authenticity as ideological liethe poetic-military complex and high culture enabling atrocitycommunism as necessary response to unsolvable antagonisms
Dialectical moves 12
“The true multiculturalist tolerance is not to try to understand the other but to accept that most people are stupid and boring and learn to live side-by-side without understanding.”
Inverts the liberal formula: genuine coexistence requires abandoning the drive to comprehend, not deepening it.
“It is not that Karadžić was a bad poet — the problem is that he was not a bad poet; horrible things are legitimized by high culture, not despite it.”
Reverses the reassuring liberal move of attributing atrocity to cultural inferiority; culture and crime coexist without contradiction.
“Inner authenticity is not what you truly are about — inner authenticity is a lie.”
Inverts the romantic-humanist premise: one's authentic inner life (mysticism, poetry) has no determining relation to one's external actions (mass murder).
“An enemy is not someone whose story we were not ready to hear — we did hear Karadžić's story, written in poems, and that is exactly the problem.”
Turns the multicultural empathy formula against itself: narrative understanding does not dissolve enmity but may legitimate it.
“The obscene underside does not subvert power — it is the deepest aspect of the community's identity and the very mechanism through which power functions.”
Apparent transgression is not resistance but constitutive of the order it seems to violate.
“Far from being permissive, the postmodern non-authoritarian father issues a stronger order than the old patriarch: you must not only visit grandmother but want to visit her.”
Liberal permissivity conceals a deeper injunction that forecloses even internal rebellion.
“The real utopia was not communism — the real utopia was the 1990s, Clinton prosperity and liberal-democratic capitalism as the end of history.”
Inverts the standard narrative: communism was a failed experiment, but the true fantasy was Western liberal capitalism's self-understanding as the final form of society.
“Capitalism no longer needs democracy — the historical alliance between liberal democracy and capitalism is over.”
Reverses the standard developmental teleology that capitalism naturally generates democracy; now capitalism generates authoritarian forms.
“What went from rent to profit is now going back from profit to rent — we are not at the end of capitalism but at a new archaic form of extraction.”
The supposedly superseded feudal/pre-capitalist form of rent returns as the dominant logic of immaterial capitalism.
“Anti-communists were not strong enough in seeing what a terrifying experience communism was — the tragedy was not bad people doing bad things but good people doing bad things thinking they were doing good.”
Paradox: defenders of communism understate the horror, but so do standard anti-communists who moralize about evil individuals rather than the structural production of good intentions turned monstrous.
“Berlusconi makes jokes and plays the clown, but the power is stronger for it — the more obscene the head of state, the more depoliticized and real the economic power beneath.”
Political spectacle and self-mockery do not dissolve power but reinforce it by displacing attention from structural to personal.
“Kusturica is not too primitive Balkan — he is too Westernized; he stages for the West the spectacle of what they want to see.”
The accusation of primitivism reverses: what looks most authentically Balkan is in fact the most complicit with the Western gaze.
Claims 22
asserts
Liberal multiculturalism's demand that we understand and empathize with the Other is a form of racist arrogance that delivers only a 'decaffeinated other,' stripping the neighbor of all threatening substance.liberal multiculturalism
asserts
True tolerance does not mean understanding the other but learning to live side-by-side with people we do not and cannot fully understand.tolerance and coexistence
asserts
The ideological narratives people construct about themselves—the stories they tell—are fundamentally lies that function as screens enabling atrocity rather than preventing it.ideology and self-narrative
rejects
The formula 'an enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to hear' is false: hearing Hitler's or Karadžić's story does not dissolve enmity and may even legitimate it.multicultural empathy as political solution
asserts
Inner authenticity is a lie: the same person can be a monstrous realpolitiker and a breathtakingly refined mystic, showing that inner life does not constrain external action.inner authenticity and ethics
asserts
Eastern spirituality (Bhagavad Gita, Zen Buddhism) has historically served as a moral anesthetic enabling killing, not a holistic antidote to Western violence.Eastern spirituality as ethical alternative
asserts
The obscene underside of transgressive jokes and rituals is not subversion of power but its necessary supplement; it holds communities together more effectively than official norms.power and obscenity
asserts
Postmodern permissive authority is stronger than old repression: it does not merely command you to act but commands you to desire to act, eliminating the space for internal rebellion.contemporary forms of authority
asserts
September 11 and the 2008 financial crisis are twin deaths of the Fukuyama liberal-democratic utopia; the 1990s Clinton prosperity was the real utopia, not communism.Fukuyama's end-of-history thesis
asserts
Contemporary capitalism—exemplified by China and Berlusconi's Italy—is decoupling from liberal democracy; the historical alliance between capitalism and democratization is over.capitalism and democracy
asserts
Today's capitalism has shifted from profit to rent by reprivatizing the general intellect: Bill Gates does not exploit workers but charges rent for access to a common symbolic space.capitalism and intellectual property
rejects
Marx was wrong that the rise of general intellect would automatically end capitalism; capitalism succeeded in reprivatizing collective knowledge, a possibility Marx was theoretically blind to.Marx's prediction about general intellect and capitalism's end
rejects
A strong and growing state is required for contemporary capitalism to function, particularly to define and enforce intellectual property; Negri's thesis that the state is withering is wrong.Negri's thesis on the state and immaterial capitalism
rejects
Communism was a tragedy of good people doing bad things while believing they were doing good, not simply bad people doing bad things—anti-communists underestimate its horror.liberal anti-communist narrative
asserts
A series of antagonisms—ecology, intellectual property, biogenetics, global hunger—cannot be resolved by market mechanisms and will make communism necessary again.communism's continued relevance
asserts
The 2008 crisis will be absorbed by capitalism as another shock therapy rather than overcoming it, used for instance to break the last strong trade unions.the 2008 financial crisis
asserts
Berlusconi's obscene populist spectacle is not an aberration but the European version of authoritarian capitalism—the model of depoliticized economy combined with cheap political theater.Berlusconi and postmodern power
asserts
Food, education, health, and arms cannot be left to the market; following Clinton's admission about food policy to its logical conclusion means accepting a communist-style re-politicization of these domains.market limits and the commons
asserts
Emir Kusturica, in Underground, is not too primitive but too Westernized: he stages for the Western gaze the Balkan spectacle it wants to see, reproducing orientalist fantasy.Kusturica and Western gaze
asserts
Shared racist jokes and mutual obscenity between ethnic groups in Yugoslavia functioned as genuine emancipatory solidarity, doing more for brotherhood and unity than liberal dialogue.obscenity and ethnic solidarity
asserts
The poetic-military complex—the pact between nationalist intelligentsia and communist nomenklatura—was the root cause of Yugoslav wars, and Karadžić's criminality has nothing to do with being a bad poet.Yugoslav wars and cultural-political legitimization
asserts
Brain-computer interface technology (thought-controlled wheelchairs, panic-wave weapons) fundamentally undermines the inside/outside boundary that defines human subjectivity.technology and subjectivity
Quotes 16
“A true multicultural tolerance today, I think, should start from the premise: no, most people, most other nations are stupid and boring. Why should I try to understand them?”Slavoj Žižek · critique of liberal multicultural tolerance
“An enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to hear. This sounds so deep, you know…Would you say that Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his story?”Slavoj Žižek · refutation of multicultural empathy formula
“The monstrosity is not they were inhuman. The monstrosity is how human they remained.”Slavoj Žižek · the human face of atrocity
“Inner authenticity is not what you truly are about. Inner authenticity is a lie.”Slavoj Žižek · inner authenticity as ideological illusion
“The function of the poets is to provide the screen which makes you possible to do it. So now let go let me go a step further.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as enabling screen for atrocity
“The order is not only you must visit her, but you must like to visit her. You see this is how authority functions.”Slavoj Žižek · postmodern permissive authority commands desire not just action
“The true utopia were not communism, social democracy, which died, the true utopia were the 90s, the happy era of this Clinton prosperity.”Slavoj Žižek · the 1990s as the real utopia
“It's quite shocking…he is systematically undermining even the minimal dignity of being a president of the state.”Slavoj Žižek · Berlusconi as postmodern spectacle of power
“Windows functions as part of our general intellect. It's the very symbolic space where we communicate and so on. So Bill Gates privatized part of our common space.”Slavoj Žižek · intellectual property as rent on the commons
“The horror of communism was not that bad people did bad things, but that it made people who thought they were good do bad things thinking that they were doing good.”Slavoj Žižek · communism as structural tragedy of good intentions
“The lesson is food is too important to be simply left to the market. But now I just would push our friend Clinton a little bit further…At the end, maybe some Chinese plastic toys can be left to the market. And communism will be back, believe me.”Slavoj Žižek · communism as logical endpoint of market-limit reasoning
“any idiot can sacrifice himself for his country. It takes a true hero to sacrifice his soul for his country.”Slavoj Žižek · Himmler's formula for the ethics of atrocity
“We are stories that we are telling ourselves about ourselves.”Slavoj Žižek · Rorty's postmodern constructivist identity thesis (cited to refute)
“It's over this, how should I put it, natural alliance between liberal democracy and capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism's decoupling from democracy
“when Bush announced the crisis…he used almost the same terms as he used when he reacted to September 11th: 'Our way of life is in danger, emergency state'”Slavoj Žižek · financial crisis framed as security emergency
“To be called an Indian is at least a monument to white man's stupidity, no? Because you know Colombo they thought they are in India.”Slavoj Žižek · Native American / Indian naming debate
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I’m very sorry for having to talk in to speak in English. But since English also is not my maternal tongue, since as some of my aggressive friends in United States like sometimes to refer to my English as Arafat English, you know, the way the Yasser Arafat mumbled to Western reporters, so I hope you will be able to follow me. First, let me really thank you because why? Because, you know, although many Western people liberalize sorry, sympathize with you in the difficult years of the previous decade, nonetheless, they, as I precisely written in many of my books, precisely propos Kosovo, they liked you as long as you were a victim, no? The moment you no longer want to be a victim, you yourself become ethnic cleanser, potentially terrorist, fundamentalist, whatever. That's the problem with liberalism, no? They like you as a victim so that they can bring you food, they worry if your children gets enough medicine and so on and so on, no? That's another story, I will tell it later. So, again, I am glad to be here because it was easy to sympathize with you, with all of you here, Serbs, Albanians, all who are here. But now that you are half forgotten, no? Like I think now it’s the time and place. Now you are now it's the time to come here and you are the right place to come. So, again, thank you for your introduction which immediately brings us to the topic of psychoanalysis. How? You may imagine how. You know, as you said, first in English, then in your language. And of course, my fantasy immediately exploded, what you really said in that Albanian language part like what I... it was probably about me, but you know why I was in anxiety? Because you know, it's the same dream as if under communism we all wanted to see—I know I heroically resisted it—your secret police dossier when at the end the archives were opened. Of course, it was worthless that we discovered; all the truly sensitive dossiers or even part of dossiers were burnt, cleansed, no? But that's a nice example of ambiguity how, even if we all dismissed the secret police dossiers as just lies of those in power, somehow I noticed, at least in my country Slovenia, with many of my dissident half dissident friends, somehow they did trust the dossiers as if, you know, there is some truth about them written in the dossiers. They will learn some deep thing about them. So that's how I relate to that to that Albanian part of your language, no? It it was on me, the truth of me, but like you know my genome, genome, you know like what I really am, what I never can say, I am forever separated from it. And this separation between what I am in my stupid reality, the way I experience myself, and the truth about me articulated in a different place, inaccessible to me, in psychoanalysis we call this symbolic castration, this gap. So, thank you for my castrating experience. That’s what you expect from a good friend, from a good friend, no? Okay. So let me go on. I sincerely mean it, I'm glad to be here, because you are now a place of—I wouldn't say experiment, this has a too light flavor—but of of a situation which is in a way, although basically maybe resolved, still totally open. Economically, it’s not clear what will happen, socially, inter-ethnic relations, all the challenges and so on and so on. And the problem—you should always while being grateful to foreigners if they really helped you and are helping you—you should always be aware of the price you are paying for this. And I don’t think this obvious leftist approach to you: "Oh, you betrayed your leftist soul and as the price for independence you became an American military colony" or whatever. No, I mean another thing. It's much more dangerous and ambiguous. I mean how Western liberals, humanitarians, bombarded you with their notion of multiculturalism, human rights and so on and so on, which I think often displays an extremely vulgar racism and arrogance masked as its opposite, you know, as attempts to try to understand and so on and so on. Even I claim even when foreigners come to your country or to mine and claim, "We try to understand you." My god, this means they treat you basically, there is always at least an element of treating you like some primitive aborigines, no, who do some crazy dances and then you try to understand them and so on, no? I mean this is how I like to shock my friends. A true multicultural tolerance today, I think, should start from the premise: no, most people, most other nations are stupid and boring. Why should I try to understand them? The we will never understand each other to the end. What we need is to learn to live side-by-side with people who—they don’t understand us, we don’t understand them—we just, you know, that's the true art of tolerance. To to live side-by-side by people who are foreigners to us, not this eternal liberal blackmail: "Oh, I want to know your folkloric dances, all your myths" and so on. You know like this the worst racist cliché from the 90s early of the West: "To understand what goes on in Balkan you must know the entire thousand years at least of history," no? No, I claim it's exactly the opposite. You must know what goes on now. And thousands of years of history were evoked to legitimize what goes on now. For example, it’s very simplified, but if you ask me for the basic element of what went on in ex-Yugoslavia already from the mid-80s, the problem for me if you ask me was a very brutally simple one. Starting from I would say maybe even early 70s, but it's more complex, at least from early 80s, the old Yugoslav communist regime faced a crisis of legitimization. In the 70s they could have said, you know, remember '73, Yom Kippur War, lack of I mean the problems with oil supply, so it was a general crisis. The problem is that all Europe, even the world starts to function, entered a new era of relative welfare, while we in ex-Yugoslavia remained even more down. So it was the problem of legitimacy. And I think this is basically what Milosevic did. He was the first, not the only, but the first and the one who most radically realized this scheme of providing legitimacy for the local, in this sense I mean Serb of the Serb Republic, communist nomenklatura by making this devil's pact with nationalist intelligentsia. As I wrote in one of the essays whom you were kind enough to include in the book, no, this is the source of what I call, in contrast to Western so-called industrial-military complex, the poetic-military complex that we had here, no? When you get warriors together with poets, this is bad. So again this made me in my old age a Platonist, you know, when Plato said let's throw out poets of the polis. You know we learn, I mean like you know people for example people say Karadžić, ha ha ha, it's a bad poet. First, I don't think he's a bad poet. I think he's a criminal. I think he should be shot. But I'm sorry to tell you from my moderate knowledge and the second point is that I always find it suspicious when people mock too much Karadžić as a poet. No, he you remember I quote a poem by him. Sorry, I've written by I read by by celebrated Slovene poets a much worse poem poems than that one. You know that's this brings me to one of the things that I would like to develop later. It’s one of the crucial points which can orient us in this ethical confusion today. The problem is not that Karadžić was a bad poet. The problem is that he wasn't a bad poet. In what sense? In the sense that what is so difficult for us to accept is that horrible things can happen and are legitimized even by high culture. Let’s go with the Karadžić logic to the end. You know when I was reading history of SS in Germany, figures like Reinhard Heydrich, you know, who basically organized the Holocaust, fascinated me. Why? An evil guy if there ever was. Organized Holocaust, my god. But then did you know that the same Heydrich in the evenings—okay evenings metaphorically—when he was free, very often met with his other SS officers friends and they formed a string quartet and they played music which is I'm sorry to tell you top of the top of Western music, late Beethoven string quartets. Now it’s too easy to say, "Oh, it must be a fake." No, from what we know it's not a fake. And in my earlier books I developed this motive to the end. Namely taking even more radical examples. Okay can it be more radical than this one? Maybe it can. You know if you read European history and ask a naive stupid question, which is: when did things go wrong so that Hitler emerged? I think we can—it's a little bit suspicious logic—but basically we can precisely define the moment when European history took the wrong turn. And retroactively at least we can say there the first step towards Hitler was opened. The guy who is most responsible for it is Père Joseph, Father Joseph, a French priest who was kind of a executive secretary of Cardinal Richelieu, the de facto leader, executive leader of France in the time of Thirty Years' War, you know, I think, between Protestants and Catholics. What was the genius of Père Joseph? He proposed to Richelieu and then enacted it a simple brutal formula. He told him: "Listen, forget about this Catholicism blah blah or religion. It's not about that. The problem is to prevent the reunification of Germany so that France will remain the only superpower in Europe." And he succeeded. If you know history, you know what happened. In a totally opportunistic way, the Catholic France made a pact with Protestant Sweden against the Catholic Austrian Empire. Just to prevent the unification of Germany. And it worked. The Germany, as you all know, was late for to even more years in unification. This was the moment which caused at the beginning the so-called German delay, which is the main reason because Germany was, as we all know, too late for colonization, for the First World War, the defeat in the First World War, Second World War, Hitler. Okay, it’s a little bit simple explanation but you got the logic. So, Aldous Huxley wrote a wonderful book about this guy Père Joseph called *L’Éminence grise*, the Grey Eminence. What fascinated Huxley is the following. On the one hand, as you already see from what I told you, Père Joseph was a brutal nightmare, like you know he did all possible. Ordered torturing, poisoning, plots, just imagine it. Realpolitiker at its most terrifying. But then he was shocked to discover something, Huxley, that again, something even much more crazy than Heydrich playing string quartets. Do you know that this same Father Joseph every evening—okay metaphorically again, every evening—after the work done, wrote letters to a certain convent, nuns who were there in France, because he was in correspondence with them about mystical topics? And that was the shock. This same guy about whom we know that was unimaginable cruel realpolitiker, wrote the most beautiful mystical reflections absolutely at the level of who are the top, how should I put it, the top, the biggest hits, Saint Teresa, John of the Cross, you know the big mystics. He is at that level. No way to escape it. So this is what intrigued what intrigued Aldous Huxley. How it is possible that the same person who was a monster in what he did was in his inner life an a breathtakingly refined mystic? Huxley’s solution was a false one. He said—please feel free to answer the phone. I I would have done the same. And do what as I did it in I thanked to my good friend Alain Badiou for a one this is how we became friends. You know what Alain Badiou did to me once? He told me somebody will call me so I borrowed so I lent him a cell phone. Then I was giving like here a talk. In the middle of the talk he was sitting in front, the phone rang. He not only started to talk in the middle of the I mean me giving a talk, he even asked me could I talk a little bit less loudly so that he can. I told him immediately: "You can do this only to someone who is a real friend." This you know I mean okay. Sorry. Let's go on. So Huxley's solution was too easy. To avoid the problem by blaming a particular culture. Huxley's solution was: this must have something to do with what is wrong in Christianity, with its obsession with Christ on the cross, this suffering and so on. So Huxley's solution, as maybe some of you know from if you are old enough—unfortunately some of you do seem to be like me to remember hippie times when Huxley was popular, not for this, but for his *Doors of Perception* and so on books celebrating drugs and Eastern experience—for Huxley the solution was the East, no? The solution was let’s go to Eastern spirituality, which is more holistic, passive, doesn’t have this how should I put it potentially aggressive fixation on suffering and so on. I claim it brutally doesn’t work. Another example here, I like these impossible crazy examples. Let's jump from Heydrich to his boss, Heinrich Himmler. Himmler had a problem, an genuinely—I don’t laugh at his—ethical problem, which he tried to solve. You know he was maybe the most disgusting of all Nazi criminals because he much more than Eichmann was this perfect bureaucrat, personally relatively honest, seriously bothered with ethical problems. Like in some of his letters he asks that he was the first to admit that what Germans are doing to the Jews and to Slavs and others is horrible, no? It’s terrible, killing children even, women and so on. And he as he put it, "how can we justify this?" He was the first to develop this wonderful, wonderful in a terrifying sense, formula that the true heroic greatness is to not only sacrifice yourself for a higher ethical cause but to sacrifice your ethics itself. Like as he put it, any idiot can sacrifice himself for his country. It takes a true hero to sacrifice his soul for his country. Like you know the very how should I put it, let’s say you fight in a war and an order is given to you: rape those women, kill those children. Of course, most of us are unfortunately, unfortunately for these warriors, are whatever, whatever, however evil humans are—and they are—nonetheless most of us unfortunately find it a little bit difficult. I don’t know how it is with you, at least I would find it. If somebody would would tell me rape that women, kill that child, I would have small nonetheless problem. So how to come over it? The trick is again to change the topic, the perspective, so that this very temptation of "My god, I cannot do it," the ethical temptation is presented to you as your weakness, no? If you cannot kill, you are weak. A true hero does it. But I want to mention Himmler for another reason. He nonetheless admitted: "My god, you are literally sometimes covered with blood. You gas, you poison people with poisonous gases, whatever. How can you remain human in all of this?" Do you know what was Himmler's solution? *Bhagavad Gita*. You know that Indian epic? You know what happened in the central part of *Bhagavad Gita*? Arjuna, the Indian warrior king, addresses appeals to god, asking him, "My god, now I lead the army, I have to order attack, but thousands will die, families will suffer. How can I do it?" And the god Krishna, I think, appears and gives to Arjuna a brief lesson in let’s call it Hindu militarism, no? I know I had great debates with this and I am not satisfied with how some of my Hindu friends try to squeeze out of this by claiming, "No, you must read this metaphorically" and so on and so on, no? Namely, the answer of Krishna is basically this quick recourse to this ontology of appearances, which we also find in Buddhism, no? Like reality, substantial reality doesn't exist. What we perceive as reality is Maya, the veil of false appearances and so on. So if you arrive at spiritual enlightenment, that is to say, this Atman and so on, unity of you with the god, which is this kind of a abyss of abstract spirituality, then you see that that's the only reality. So the logical conclusion: you can kill whatever how as much as you want in this reality, literally the god says—I can quote it to you—"Kill, do it, it doesn't count because nothing really is killed, just appearances" and so on and so on. Now, I will go a step which is why incidentally, as I read in a biography of Himmler, he always carried in his pocket a *Bhagavad Gita* in special leather edition and so on, no, to remind him of true ethics and so on. Now let me return to Oriental true more authentic Oriental thought, Zen Buddhism. Maybe some of you, if you are old enough to remember from the hippie times what we were reading, it was one of the most famous popularizers of Zen Buddhism which was very popular in already in the hippie movement was D.T. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, a great popularizer. But what is a little bit less known is that in the 30s and 40s he was a great propagator of Japanese attack on China and generally of Japanese militarism. And incidentally he openly admits it. That's these are not those hippie texts: "Make love not war" and "Peace" and "Holistic relationship to women and to nature" or whatever. But this is the true Suzuki, and it’s wonderful to read him. Wonderful in a terrifying sense because he not only justifies the Japanese aggression on China, claiming that basically it’s this disgusting pseudo-theology of stain and picture. You know this idea of when you perceive evil, it’s as like when you look at a picture and you are too close and you just see and you just see a stain. But when you pull far away enough, you see that what you thought was a stain is really just an element which contributes to the harmony of the whole. So the idea is: we humans caught in our terrestrial limited reality perceive killing as a stain. But from a proper divine perspective, it contributes to global harmony, no? And so on and so on. Okay, that's the standard theology. You also find it in the West in Christianity and so on. He went a step further, Suzuki. He tries to also resolve this Himmler problem, no: how to kill without feeling guilty? And he goes in a terrifying way pretty far there. If you want to learn more about it, read my book—only in English, I think till now, okay German whatever—*The Puppet and the Dwarf*, where I where I quote the stuff. Namely, the first solution of Suzuki is to he said: "I know how difficult it is to kill. Like you suffer"—sorry you will be the victim here—"somebody must be like, I want I have to I must I have to kill you, no? With knife. Okay, now it’s difficult, no? I do this to you." But Suzuki—it's almost like kind of a bad joke—he says: "No, when I describe the situation like this, you look at me like a frightened rabbit, I kill you and so on." He says: "No, this is when I'm still caught in the false illusion of substantial reality, when I still perceive myself as subject agent, author of my own acts." But Suzuki says that I must once I reach the Buddhist enlightenment—this famous called Satori in Zen Buddhism—the same scene would have been described in a totally different way. I no longer am part of reality. I am not even I. Just my mind is a passive point of—not even point, medium of—observation. I'm in it for nothing, where I see just as a dance of shadows of appearances my sword dancing in reality and somehow your body dances and it gets stuck on it. And I just observe it and I'm in it for nothing. And in this way if you look at it, it’s not so difficult to kill." Then he goes on and even—that's the nicest point—says sorry this is not Suzuki, I will not cheat, this is another Zen Buddhist theorist from the same age, late 30s, who I have exact references in my book, who said that for ordinary people who don't have the time to reflect on and to meditate too much, the best path to the goal of Zen Buddhist meditation—which is the liberation from this being caught into false reality—is military discipline. Let's say imagine a soldier who learns to suspend all reflection. A command comes: shoot, you shoot. Without even a minimum of reflection. At that point you broke out of the your the the prison of your false ego. You no longer perceive yourself as agent and so on and so on. Now let me make it clear here again. Even in stronger terms one should insist on what I already said propos Karadžić. I’m not making fun of Suzuki as a bad Zen Buddhist and so on. This would make it all too simple. The point is that he undoubtedly was a great authentic Zen meditator and writer and so on and so on. But nonetheless he could. I will approach this if there will be time later. Yeah, yeah, but you you are victim of the linear metaphysical Western notion of time, how should I put it. Okay, sorry no let's go on. These are serious things. You know the ethical conclusion of this is a very hard one. It is that inner authenticity is not what you truly are about. Inner authenticity is a lie. In the sense of, you know, one of the fashionable post so-called postmodern deconstructionist dogmas is, it was put very nicely by Richard Rorty: "We are stories that we are telling ourselves about ourselves." So we don’t have any substantial identity. You know, the way you structure your universe, this is what you are. So from this, immediately a whole ethical program emerges, which is the main mode to fight to fight racism would have been that we listen to each other's stories, no? Like the idea would have been that, let’s say, we come from different groups, no? And the way to bring peace is: "Why don't you tell me your boring—I say them because I also have mine—stories about, you know, your poems, your tradition, your food, your folkloric dances, all that stuff which makes me immediately" you know what I mean. And of course, I allow you the same to to me. This attitude was best expressed in a motto of some, I don't know, multicultural movement where they said something and they intended to be as something very deep: "An enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to hear." This sounds so deep, you know. Like you again sorry I have problems with you today. Like if I am not ready to listen to you, then I just fetishize you into my enemy. But I should try to understand your side of the story, no? And I should then I will see that you also like me you have your fears, your dreams, your anxieties and all of a sudden I will see you are not simply an enemy, you know, but a tragic person caught in its finitude, its dreams and so on. You no longer can can be my enemy. My answer to this is ha ha. I mean ha ha like, okay, it sounds deep but replace the general term "enemy" with a concrete name. Would you say that Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his story and so on, no? I mean or take take for example Karadžić. No, we did hear his story, no? And you know what I mean. It's even written in poems in and so on. This is why—okay it probably will not be translated into Albanian for simple reasons because it's too big—in Slovene it will not only be... you know this novel which is now in the last two years big hit, first in France then in Germany, England: Jonathan Littell... no, it's not Little it's Littell, it's a French word... *Les Bienveillantes*, *The Kindly Ones*. It's a clumsy translation into English. Ah it got the Prix—I don’t know which one—Goncourt or whatever in France. It's an incredible novel, pages, a memoirs, of course faked, written as a novel of a mid-level Nazi executioner, the one who participated in Holocaust. And it does precisely this. It tells you his side of the story. You see an ordinary guy with his dreams, all the shit, his dreams, his whatever you want and that's the monstrosity. The monstrosity is not they were inhuman. The monstrosity is how human they remained. And the only conclusion I see from this is to abandon this topic of, let’s understand each other and so on, no? And to admit that, of course we should, but in a more radical sense, namely in the sense that narratives we are telling about ourselves, in other words the ideological myths, narratives we are constructing to provide a meaningful framework for our experience of our lives, they are fundamentally lies. They are the screen we construct to to allow us to do the horrors we are doing in reality without having to confront them. Like you do horrible things, you kill blah blah. The function of the poets is to provide the screen which makes you possible to do to do it. So now let go let me go a step further. Here I think I'm getting... this does not mean that I am against mutual understanding, but many people thought I was crazy, but I'm more and more convinced that I am right. In what? It whenever some multiculturalist comes to you and with this you know racist arrogance: "Oh how interesting your culture, tell me about your stories blah blah," this doesn't work. This is a mutual lie. Usually even what I will do then is to tell you a story which more than my story will be just something like I will try to guess what you want to hear in me and I will stage for you that. Maybe you know this story but it's a true anecdote from the history of of anthropology which I think is the best formula of how the West ideologically exploited us during the war in the 90s. For them how did we function for them? It's a maybe you know it, I'm sorry if I repeat myself, it's a wonderful story about—again I read it in some book on the history of anthropology, so it’s if the book didn’t lie reality. Somewhere I think it's New Guinea, Guinea, that happened about even more years ago. There was a rumor that some tribe in the middle, out of touch with civilization, that they have some terrible horrifying dances of death. They paint themselves like death figure with dark masks and dance. So an anthropological expedition went there, finally arrived at that tribe and explained to them through some confused language sign but somehow they got it that they want to see this dance, no? And okay, they went to sleep, next day the people, the tribe members, did perform exactly the dance they wanted, no? They went home satisfied, they wrote a report, "Oh the wild nature, primitives blah blah." Everything okay except for one small detail. A couple of years later, another group, more reasonable anthropologists, visited the same tribe, really learned their language and got the true story what happened from the other side. This so-called primitive tribe just wanted to be good good hosts to their guests. And they somehow guessed that these idiots want to see some terrible dance. And as good hosts, they in a panic invented this dance, masks, to be you know what they thought is the original abyss was staged for them as a sign of hospitality. Now, that's my problem and I'm not in any way anti-Serb. If anything now you remember the majority here you are now you should not do to them what they were doing to you. But this is the reason Emir Kusturica is not my greatest friend, to put it as the understatement of the century. Because I claim that, for example, in his *Underground* he is doing exactly this for the Western gaze. He stages for them—if you saw *Underground*, what image of our Balkan do you get there?—a crazy piece of the world outside history where people frankly eat, drink, kill and fuck all the time. A perpetual spiritual orgy. This is what the West wants to see in us. And he is delivering it to them. I'm I’m against him not because he is too primitive Balkan but because he is too Westernized. He is like that tribe. He is staging for the West the spectacle what they want to see. So what is nonetheless a road? But I would have to go deeper into psychoanalytic theory why here but just let me give you an anecdote. Nonetheless, I'm not saying that we should be cold to each other and so on. I am tempted to say something totally crazy. I don't know how it functioned here, maybe I'm going too fast, but in my youth experience, you know how we had the formula under Tito—and I have no nostalgia for Tito, but that’s another story—this *Bratstvo i jedinstvo*, brotherhood and unity. I claim up to a point it functioned in so far as it was based in dirty jokes, racist jokes. I think racist jokes played a great... you can imagine how I was almost lynched in an American campus when I told this... but they played a great progressive role. In what sense? Because the way I remember from my youth, for example when I was serving the Yugoslav army, precisely because they were not racist jokes the way I remember them from my youth youth, in the sense of attacking each other. It was more a kind of a friendly sharing of obscenities. I remember, for example, I remember in the army I met a Montenegro guy, I met a Bosnian and the story was like: I tell you a joke about my about me, you tell me a joke about yours. You know you know how in ex-Yugoslavia each of us nations, ethnic groups, was identified by a certain racial cliché. And I think the correct heroic thing to do was not to say: "Oh, racist cliché," but to ironically fully assume it and play with it. For example, we Slovenes were and are—it always surprises me, you know, politically incorrect observation, to what extent clichés are usually true, no? But that's another story—we Slovenes are supposed to be misers, you know, people who don't like to spend money. So you know what's the yeah, it's true, yeah. You know, of course it’s true. And I used it when I was in the Yugoslav army. You know what I did? Once only I invited my fellow soldiers to beer and bought them beer. And because they perceived me as a Slovene, I became a legend. A Slovene who is not a miser. It was the best investment I did. For the whole year, "Oh he is a good Slovene," they were inviting me and so on. Our standard joke is what—and we are really like that—you know, a fairy, fairy, you know, the stupid magic entity who fulfills your wishes, comes to a Slovene farmer and asks him, "I will do whatever you want to you, just remember I will do to your neighbor twice as much," no? You know what is Slovene farmer's answer? "Take one of my eyes." Because then... and this is the basic Slovene principle. If I get a little bit but the neighbor gets more, no, it's better if I lose a little bit just that the neighbor loses more. So okay these are we Slovenes, no? Then the Montenegro friend I remember immediately jumped in and said, you know Montenegro, they have earthquakes and they are their cliché is lazy, no? You can imagine what was his story. You know, how does a Montenegro guy masturbate, no? He digs a hole in the earth, puts the penis in and waits for the earthquake, no? He’s too late but you see how it works even now. I claim this, now we are enacting the true brotherhood and unity. This is how it worked. And now I come to the climactic point, the best experience of this at its clinical purest. I report about it in one of my early books, so I'm sure you don't know it, which is not translated, is was with an Albanian friend of mine, soldier in Yugoslav army. Namely, we were almost friends, becoming friends. But then something was missing, we were still this official cold friends, respect, no? And then the guy made the first move. Okay I don't know if this is a racist cliché, no? I love clichés, but I was told that with you, you can joke about everything but not about your mother and sister, that it’s not good to tell you "I will fuck your mother" or what, no? Okay, so he approached me one morning and I was very shocked because he was an intellectual and he told me, "I fuck your mother." And I noticed what was the message. The message was: let’s become truly friends. And I accepted the logic. Believe me I never had problems with replying dirty to dirty. You know how what was my immediate answer? "Go ahead after I finish with your sister," no? Okay, so you know what then happened? Now comes the ethical miracle. Then we embraced, we became friends and it's not what you think now. Then we were spending hours telling dirty stories or what? No. We were both intellectuals—he was more than me—we were very cold, just to remind ourselves that we are really friends, a wonderful small ritual developed. Every morning that we met instead of saying "Hello, good morning," we just—we didn't even say the whole story—he told me "Mother," I told him "Sister." You know? It was just a reminder we are still friends. So don't you know I was always fascinated about this ambiguity of obscenity. On the other... yes to go so that you will see that I'm nonetheless a good feminist boy, no? I’m not saying these jokes solve everything because I mean my god the first feminist reaction—and this should be a test for you if you pretend to be a feminist—ask yourself: did you immediately feel what is wrong with this joke? That it's nonetheless it's the typical male pact about the exchange of women, no? No? Yeah? It not? Okay. But then I would like to have the opposite. Here I'm a feminist. I would like to see two women say "Fuck your father after I finish with your husband," you know? That would be feminism for me. Then you are a good feminist, okay? Okay, sorry. Okay no sorry let's go on so that you know what I mean like... how should how should I put it, this is unfortunately one side of the story. I think ah yeah another problem here is the problem of hierarchy of course, unfortunately no? Hierarchy in the sense that this also worked because both of us were at the same level ordinary soldiers. Like it wouldn’t work I think at least, maybe I'm wrong, as well if I were to approach my battalion commander major and tell him "fuck your mother," no? I it wouldn't be so good how should I put it, no? So first there is the problem of hierarchy. The second—and yeah that’s the the other problem—the second problem is that now I'm not saying, you know, things are much more refined here. I'm not telling you, "Oh, so let's start telling dirty jokes about each other," no? Although I don't see anything bad in it. I remember when I—ten years ago when the war was finishing, but when I was telling in United States this story—a woman from Sarajevo who escaped from there attacked me: "Like what are you saying this? We are in a tragic situation and you are just telling us we should just across the lines—I mean front lines—tell each other a dirty joke." But then I told her: "Sorry but what’s so bad about it? If you if you do this instead of shooting at each other, what’s bad about it?" How should I put it, no? I mean I don’t underestimate this this ironic populist low humor. The problem is somewhere else. I don't know how it is with you because in each culture this works in a specific way. But it is I claim a general feature of cultures. What fascinates me more and more in as an ideological phenomenon and I return to this in all my books is how when you look at a culture or how a certain community is hold together—and it can be large community, it can be even a university department small one—you can see that you have for example you have explicit rules which define how this community functions. But this is never all. You have explicit rules but then you have, how should I call them, meta-rules, higher level rules which tell you how to relate to these elementary rules. Let me put it in this way. You want to become a member of a certain upper class community, group. It can be you want to be integrated for example the most brutal disappointment will be for you if you try to become, if you get scholarship part of some snobbish Oxford, British or American Harvard, whatever community. You try to learn their rules. You follow them, then you discover they laugh at you. Why? Because you know true identity, true belonging to a community is not only rules, but it’s to learn meta-rules which tell you how and when to violate the explicit rules. It’s through this violation that you really become a member. You must learn how to violate the rules. For example, in you have British patriotism and you learn this from all those British novels about Oxford secrets and so on. But this is not enough. You have to learn how to make fun of your patriotism. It is only through this gentle undermining that you are really one of them. If you just follow the rules you are an idiot. And now I come to the more obscene aspect. We should never underestimate to what extent what may appear to us as subverting undermining a community is really the deepest part, aspect of the identity, as it were, of this of this community. Here we enter the other much more ominous level of obscenity. This is what fascinated me so much in the ex—I hated it—Yugoslav army. Why? Privately I admit it, as a private person I'm a kind of a neofascist. I like order, discipline in all, at all levels, even in love life. Like my favorite saying by Lacan is "my fiancé is never late for an appointment because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancé," you know like there must be order. So I went with great hope into Yugoslav army because I thought at least there will be order. Well if some of you are old enough to serve it, you knew beneath the surface of order it was one big chaos of obscenities, obscene jokes, whatever. And it took me a long time—now I will tell you another thing which I only mention once in my English book which is the worst selling so I'm sure you don't know it, but I love it—the story of a doctor's exam, you know the story which I witnessed. It’s the best story. I can yeah yeah because there you have ideology at its purest. It is at that point that almost as in a kind of a epiphany I understood what is power. It happened in Karlovac, you know, Croatia close to Slovene border. I was there—well we had this we didn’t have there a proper how do you call it? We didn’t have a proper doctor's office. We just had a student who was medical student, so he was there if some of us got slightly wounded. He slept in a room which to which—and you will see why this is important—in that room there was a washbasin for wash and above on the mirror there were stuck these, you know from pre-pornographic times, these photos of girls just half-naked, not even really pornography. You will see why this is important. Okay. So once a week a doctor came from military hospital and we had a collective examination. We were there waiting in line and each of us had to stand up and in front of others and say what it's wrong. Okay. I was there quite by chance then something very mystical happened. One guy stood up and said—as you say in the vulgar Serbo-Croat—that he have pains in his penis, no? But he said in Serbo-Croat "boli me kurac", which you know means something slightly different like "fuck off" and so on. This already started laughter. But then the doctor ask him, "What do you say?" and he said "No, no, no, it’s quite serious." So the doctor told him "Okay, undress yourself." He did it and he said, "The problem is I have great pains with my skin around the head, I cannot pull it down." Then the doctor said, "Okay, show it to me, pull it down. Then it doesn't hurt, you can do it." Then the the soldier said, "No, it's only when I am have an erection." Then—now comes, yeah yeah it's even worse than you think—then then the doctor told him "Okay, drkaj, drkaj, the jerk off, do it." And then something absolutely obscene happened. The guy masturbated tried to get an erection, of course it didn't work. Then the doctor went to that mirror, took the photos and showed them said "Look, gledaj kakva pička gledaj, look at this, look what, drkaj, drkaj, look at it, what man are you?" And then I got it. At the same time the doctor was looking at us and started to laugh. It was the most oppressive obscene solidarity. But this is not the same as the joke with my Albanian colleague. I claim this is totally this is how power functions. There was no subverting undermining of power here. For power in order to function—this for this was for me the the basic lesson of the army life—you need, and this is why for example in United States Army they have all the time these scandals, you know, they discover they call it fragging or whatever, you know these rituals of soldiers torturing... You for the army collective you need this obscene underside. You need it to function. So again the point is how to manage with all of it. Sorry? more, yes, because of course I promise you if you want to publish it anywhere to give you the text, because it looks very bad now. It looks bad in the sense that that I will begin it when I will end it, it will be the time that I will be at the beginning. No, okay. So what I wanted to tell you after all this... okay, let me do it a little bit more systematically. So we have three elements, as it were, two are oppressed with political correctness. We have on the one hand this simple cold distance dignity which I like. We can undermine it through shared emancipatory obscenity which is good. What but all this dimension what is the problem for me with today’s liberal ideology? It is that it... okay I will try to develop it a little bit with another improvisation. Did you notice how more and more, and I repeat this often in my books, more and more today we have products deprived of their substance, you know, like you have—my god, I usually drink it—Coke but without caffeine or without sugar. We have we have I don’t know a cake without sugar. You have beer without alcohol, coffee, like as if you get the product but deprived of its poisonous substance. I claim that this is what is basically false with liberal multiculturalism. In all their praising the neighbor, the other, it’s a decaffeinated other, how should I put it, no? They they appear to be open to you but they terribly censor you. I noticed this in the United States when I witnessed some conversations of liberal multiculturalist with American Indians—even the name is prohibited now, you are forced to call them Native Americans. And I had a good friends among them who is furious about it, who told me, "Now these liberals even don't allow us tell us how we should name ourselves." And he gave me a wonderful argument for Indians. He told me, "Native Americans sounds like we are part of nature, you know like only you are culture, we are nature." While he said, "To be called an Indian is at least a monument to white man's stupidity, no? Because you know Colombo they thought they are in India, at least no? Much better." But what I'm saying is that how if you listen to this politically correct description, all the dark aspect—drinking, despair—disappears and American Indians appear to be some kind of a, you know, holistic spiritualized guys who told us how against Western technological imperialism we should have a holistic relationship with mother nature and so on, all that all that stuff. So erase that that. So the problem of tolerance is something which I think it's a crucial phenomenon which tells us a lot in today's ideology. It is about as I noticed how in United States more and more now one topic predominates. In social sciences it's getting popular—I know of more than books dealing with it—the topic of toxic subjects. They're obsessed with the idea that your neighbor, people, can be toxic in somehow. Toxic as excessive harassment and it's interesting how this term "toxic" covers everything. It can be a terrorist who is toxic, dangerous, bringing arms. It can be a priest who is sexually molesting you, I mean you or children. It can be it can be fundamentalist preacher. It can be a mother who doesn't allow his child to go free. It can be father with excessive authority. Anything goes. All this is covered by the same category toxic subject. Because this is difficult to accept, that beneath all these appearances stories we are telling ourselves, this toxic this toxic dimension. How do we fight... this is why I think also incidentally we are so obsessed with the topic of immigrants. Because in the Western Europe today—and you must know it, okay now it's better but not so much you as Albanian Albanians—you know for Italians you were very toxic. Now I think it shifted from Albanians first to North Africans. Now for some strange reasons Romanians are the ultra toxic in Italy. All the rapes are usually attributed—don't ask me why, it’s very mysterious—the logic of it. So what I want to say is that Italy is for me—watch it—the country of the future, the most progressive country in the world now. Why? Because it’s where we are all unfortunately, unfortunately heading, I claim now. It’s still a democracy formally, but a democracy which is becoming openly more and more insubstantial. Look, now after the last elections even whatever remained of the center-left—Oliva, Olive Party, Prodi, Veltroni—it’s falling apart. They resigned to it. Berlusconi is the boss. But not so mysterious about Berlusconi. This should give you to think about what is changing in our societies about how power functions. Are we aware that Berlusconi—I mean he is stupid but not so stupid that he doesn't know what he is doing—that he is it’s quite shocking, it’s did you notice if you just follow the media? He is systematically undermining even the minimal dignity of being a president of the state. I mean how he deals with his wife, you know all this which it’s literally a pornographic reality show. That girl, his wife, he explains his life. And I think that Berlusconi is not the beginning. It started already in the 80s with in Argentina Carlos Menem and Ronald Reagan. Yes, although he kept some dignity, but Reagan was the first first which played upon presenting himself as an idiot. I remember I read an—not read, I listened to it—an interview with him when a journalist asked him a difficult question and Ronald Reagan's answer was: "Why are you asking me this? You know that I'm too stupid to answer." You know like mocking his own stupidity and so on. I think that—but this is maybe too much history for you and for us, I mean not moment—that Richard Nixon was the last authentic tragic president. He he fell, he was corrupted, but there is something almost authentically tragic in his corruption. With Reagan we are entering the different register. So again why is this important? Because de facto, let’s be clear here, de facto democracy it is still formally a democracy, Italy, but it’s becoming totally non-substantial. You have an obscene head of state and all people talk about him: next love affair, what with his wife do... he even incidentally mocks totally without dignity the love affairs of his wife. You know who is Massimo Cacciari, the philosopher who is the mayor or was of Venezia, of Venice. The rumor is that how is she called, Veronica or what, Berlusconi's wife and Cacciari had an affair. And at at one reception—I couldn't believe it when I was in Italy, I saw it on TV—a a foreign young diplomat was presented to Berlusconi, and who was a young nice guy, and in front of cameras Berlusconi told him, "Oh I must present you to my wife so that I get rid of Cacciari, you know, you are more..." it but this shouldn't deceive you. This shouldn't deceive you. You know? It’s like that doctor in the army. You know, he makes jokes ha ha masturbate, but the power remains there. And if anything, the power is stronger. This is typically postmodern. The power which masks itself—now it’s no longer joke, it’s a little bit more serious—you know this is typically postmodern power. It’s mask as permissivity, the right to choice and so on, but beneath it it's an even stronger injunction. Like another story I use in my book which is not translated here, it’s my favorite example of today how authority functions. Let’s say, maybe you even know, I'm sorry if I repeat myself. Let's say it's Saturday or Sunday afternoon, you are a small boy or girl and you have to visit your grandmother. You hate it, it’s boring and so on. Okay, let’s say you have an old type patriarchal father. What will he tell you? He will tell you: "Listen I don't," to you small boy or girl, "Listen I don't care how you feel, behave properly, it's your duty to go to the grandmother." That’s okay I claim. It’s a little bit of repression, but you retain all your freedom to secretly rebel against it or whatever. Now let's take the postmodern permissive non-authoritarian father. What would he tell you? He would tell you something like: "You know how much your grandmother loves you, but nonetheless I want you to visit her only if you really want to." Now, you got it that beneath the surface of free choice there is an order which is much stronger. The order is not only you must visit her, but you must like to visit her. You see this is how authority functions. Okay, now let go a step further how even... don't be nervous. I mean I am I am, my god, are you I'm supposed to be here racist cliché in crazy Albanian part where you are lazy, nobody works, and I come from almost Protestant Slovenia, and you act now as the stupid Slovene, be be be member of your nation how should I put it. Okay so let's go on. You know the problem of... okay okay no listen there must be a point where to stop, no? So no no how sorry more minutes okay if yeah let me conclude nonetheless go. Now I will jump nonetheless a little bit to what was the title of this talk, no? You know what is the link with economy here nonetheless? Okay my thesis is a very simple one. What the title like what happened in the first century? Two things happened: A, September 11th at the beginning of the first decade; B, the ongoing financial crisis. And my idea is these are two twice the same thing repeated itself, the death of the liberal Fukuyama utopia. First, the Fukuyama utopia died with September 11th, in the sense that it's obvious that the Western liberal democracy is not the formula for the entire world. Then, in the ongoing financial crisis, the properly economic aspect of liberal capitalism was dealt a blow. It is clear today that the true utopia were not communism, social democracy, which died, the true utopia were the 90s, the happy era of this Clinton prosperity and I like Clinton, I agree with your I will explain at the end why, the poster you have here of of Clinton, but that's another story. What I'm saying is that why is this moment dangerous, the moment in which we are today? And I will come back to Berlusconi. It is because... no, I'm not naive, I'm not saying "Oh this crisis is the beginning of the end of capitalism, we just have to organize the left." No, if you ask me at this level, I'm even a little bit of a pessimist. I think that the, you know Naomi Klein's theory of the shock therapy, how capitalism uses no matter how strong shocks to get a new boost. So I think this will be just perfectly integrated as another shock therapy for capitalism. It is already done in the United States where okay, on the one hand I know all the investments of Obama helping economy, but those are right, the guys who claim "No no, this has nothing to do with Obama socialist" or what. It’s rather that for example how the big thing one of the big things going on now explicitly in United States is how to use this crisis to break the last the last still relatively powerful trade unions, syndicates, trade unions, no? It's explicitly that's the whole point about the debate: should they allow the Great Three automakers, General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, to fold? The idea is: let's use this to get rid of the trade unions because the auto car trade union it's one of the last strong. But I want to focus on another thing here. Now you will say, "Okay if everything will be okay, just use for capitalism, why then aren't we just glad and accept it?" If there will be no revolution, in other words, I'm now asking myself the big question that maybe some of you would like to ask me like: am I totally stupid or what? Like why don't I simply honestly accept capitalism with all its problems which is still liberal capitalism, liberal-democratic capitalism is still the best game in town, how should I put it, no? In other words, in the same way that when I was young we were dreaming—some of them, I wasn't so stupid—about socialism with a human face, why don't we just fight for global capitalism with a stupid sorry with a human face once you... You know like a little bit bad okay. Now I come to the problem. Because I think that—and with this I will conclude now really minutes—there was one good argument for capitalism, let's admit it, till now. That whenever, wherever there was and from time to time capitalism did need a dictatorship, no, to survive like Chile, South Korea, but after years when things developed, it always generated a strong push towards democracy. So it was true that sooner or later it did bring democracy. I claim this game is over. How where do I see it? First, first there is the mega—I cannot emphasize how much historical importance of what goes on in China today. My good friend, yes my good friend although we hate each other philosophically, but personally we go along quite well, Peter Sloterdijk, the German. You know, when we meet, he tells me: "I know when you get over, I go to gulag, but when I get to power I will shoot you," and then we say, "but till that moment we can be friends, what's the problem," no? So he told me when I met him, typically at an airport waiting for light, a very interesting thought. He told me that he is thinking a lot about a very naive question: can we imagine to which person from our time will they be raising monuments, statues, years from now in future? And his answer was Lee Kuan Yew. You know who he was? I think he is now over, the long-time president of Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew invented and perfectly practiced the first what poetically we call capitalism with Asian values. Less poetically it means authoritarian capitalism. Capital and do you know that Deng Xiaoping, just before when he was starting his reforms, he visited Singapore and said—I remember as a child, my god I wasn't even a child so he said to the cameras—"This Singapore is the model all of China should follow." And that’s what's going on as you probably know. China is basically today an ideal capitalist country. It’s a country where if you don’t mess with politics, it’s probably the most free more or less for capitalists. Like in the sense of the party takes over of keeps the workers in check, you know? And it’s literally true. You know what is one of the most tragic things? I have some friends in China and they told me that in the latest reprint of their, you know, the official guide, like history of the Chinese Communist Party for the cadre printed every year in millions of copies, they censored their own past now. The previous editions have one chapter about how the Communist Party in the 1920s and 30s organized in Shanghai and big industrial centers working class workers to strike. They censored them because they're so much afraid that somebody will apply this today, no, workers organized in China and so on. So they re okay, but what now I’m coming to. Reading many books, I was in China debating with them and so on. Unfortunately, I don't believe liberals who claim, "Oh give them another years, there will be a democratic explosion." I think genuinely that something is emerging in China and some other countries there with so-called capitalism with Asian values, which is a capitalism maybe even more dynamic, productive than our Western capitalism, but which no longer needs democracy. Function even this is fatal. It's over this, how should I put it, natural alliance between liberal democracy and capitalism. And I think and as a right-winger, to be quite clear, Peter Sloterdijk is a enlightened conservative, he says, told me, he is worried like hell here. He sees phenomena like Berlusconi as European version of it. Because vaguely the same thing is happening in Russia and again no wonder Putin and Berlusconi are great pals, friends, no? You know this kind of a of course it’s not the same as in China. Berlusconi plays a clown. But what is important is that on the one hand you have the political spectacle, cheap populism, jokes, but the what should have been the true politics, social politics, economy is simply totally depoliticized, where economy is starting to function in a, how should I put it, implicitly authoritarian way. And I think this expresses—I cannot go enough deep, don't have enough time because you brutally repress me into into a—why, what is happening in today's capitalism? That contrary to what some of the poets like Negri think, you know Toni Negri, that today's capitalism is dynamic, autopoietic, the state is out, no, it needs more than ever a strong state. Let’s make it clear: the state is getting stronger and stronger. And and the state which I think, in order to regulate properly the way capitalism is functioning today, will less and less be able to do it in a in a even formally democratic way. We got the first taste of it even in the United States. I wonder if you noticed something. When Bush announced the crisis confronted the crisis in October, addressed the American people, did you notice, many commentators did, how he used almost the same terms as he used when he reacted to September 11th: "Our way of life is in danger, emergency state, all to" and then you had something which shocked me. You remember how the Bush presented this first so-called bailout money, billions of dollars plan? Today we are used to higher sums. You don't even pick them up if you see them down, no? But the important thing is that, you remember, there was the first vote, the Congress voted against it, two-thirds of the members. Then it was something strange that happened. All the political elite, irrespective of color—Bush, McCain, Obama, Democrats—came together and put the Congress under an incredible pressure. The notice was basically: "Listen, fuck off, now is no time for democracy. We need these measures, stop it." And basically they de facto introduced an economic state of emergency. Now don't don’t misunderstand me, I would have done the same. I'm not playing this boring leftist game "Oh fascism in America" or whatever, no? It was the economic necessity. It's one of the signs of how I claim today's capitalism is less and less able to act in a is less and less able to function within a democratic state. So the way it is doing is that simply, of course we will be... I'm not saying that there will be an emergency state in the sense of, you know, like in Poland Jaruzelski, one morning we will awaken state of emergency. Although incidentally it's fuck off let's go with you with the public don't bother me. Although it's interesting to know, this is again where Italy is future. Do you know that in Italy is formally from September or October of in a state of emergency? Formally. With very precise point that this enables the government to use military in the countries. And they are doing it. First against the immigrants in the south, then against mafia in Napoli. Now they have serious plans, it's not a joke, to deploy soldiers in big city parks to prevent women being raped and so on. Now you will tell me but I’m exaggerating, but people still live normally. Yeah but that’s how it will come, I think. It will not be this classical emergency state, you know, you awaken one morning, police curfew. Life will go on, you will have all your stupid private pleasures, you can have sex with dogs, with cows, with whatever, it’s your problem and they will even say, "We need emergency state precisely to save and guard all these freedoms of yours and so on and so on." And okay, allow me three minutes now to conclude really conclude with what in capitalism, which tendency I see. I agree but not quite with Negri and some other Italian economists who claim who try to draw consequences from what is called the so-called rise of immaterial labor. You know that when Marx spoke about it in his *Grundrisse* manuscripts, he introduced the term "general intellect," which means the collective practical knowledge which is today much more important than work time. Like one has to admit this: that today the source of capitalist wealth, it's no longer predominantly classical workers' exploitation. This is nothing anti-Marxist. Marx says this in *Grundrisse* where he says that once the once the labor once the general what Marx calls in a general intellect this collective knowledge becomes the main factor in wealth, simply labor measured by time and so on becomes meaningless as the source. But Marx draw a totally wrong conclusion: that this will mean the end of capitalism. It will simply collapse because exploitation will no longer work. What Marx didn’t see is the possibility for theoretical reasons that can be explained, I don't have time now of course, that that capitalism succeeded in something else, in reprivatizing this general intellect itself. This was the possibility for which Marx was totally blind. What do I mean by this? Take an example like Bill Gates. How did he become as rich as he is? You cannot say he is exploiting his workers. No, he is even paying them relatively well. You also cannot play the game of he is getting extra profit from others. No, I think the only explanation is the one offered by some good economists which claim: for Marx the development of capitalism was from rent—you know rent like you pay rent for—to profit. Now we are moving back from profit to rent. What Bill Gates does is this: why do you have to pay euros or I don't know how much when you if you do it legally ha ha when you when you when you download a new Microsoft Windows Word, whatever? It’s not profit. You know this price is basically totally independent of the production costs. The way Bill Gates function, he doesn't say, "Okay this costed me so much, let’s put a high profit and then." It’s rent. De facto, Windows functions as part of our general intellect. It’s the very symbolic space where we communicate and so on. So Bill Gates privatized part of our common space and so in order to dwell in common, to communicate and so on, we have to pay him rent. And I think this logic of rent is exploding more and more. And the problem with rent is that it's not as natural as it was. The moment you deal with immaterial property, with intellectual property, knowledge and so on, it’s not as clear. Like if I produce a watch and sell it, it's clear, I sell this, the price is determined more or less on the market. But with so-called immaterial property, intellectual property sorry, the problem is even how to define what can be privatized or not. The state has to intervene there already. You know what I mean like it’s not Bill Gates cannot say, "this is mine." I can say with production "this is mine" if I produced it somehow. But with intellectual property it gets much more complex. You know all the problems when some companies already tried to privatize some genetic structure, some genes and so on, and then the state says, "No." So you need an incredibly strong state to set the parameters, to define: this can be privatized, which is usually reduced to, but it's not only today, you know, even in popular culture, iPod and so on, all the problem of popular sorry of copyright and so on and so on. The stronger and stronger state is needed here. I think again it cannot function in the in the long term in a in a democratic way. This and now if you allow me really one minute to come back to Clinton. This is why I'm still a communist. I'm the first to admit that 20th-century communism was a nightmare. My only very critical reproach to anti-communists—and this may surprise you—is that they were not strong enough in seeing what a terrifying experience communism was. What do I mean by this? To amuse okay the last story I admit it. Did you see that big German film which got the Oscar I think, *Das Leben der Anderen*, *The Lives of Others*? My problem with that film is that it's way too soft. Why? This is typical how liberals who think they are anti-communist don't get it what was the communist tragedy. You know basically the story: a corrupted minister wants to fuck this famous writer's wife and to make the wife more accessible he orders secret police to get the writer under total observation. And the writer is the presented as an East German celebrity, faithful to the party but at the same time famous in the West and so on and so on. If you are if you know anything about how socialism functioned, you start to laugh here. Because you know what happened in this film could have happened even in the West. If you have a corrupted secret police guy who wants to fuck your wife, of course, let’s say sorry I want to you okay I tell secret police there is a suspicion that you have I don't know links with Milosevic police I don't know what, no, and let's watch you a little bit, no? But the where the film goes wrong is that in a country like East Germany the writer like that would have been under total observation even if there is no minister who wants to fuck your wife, my god. You got it? It's still in a typically liberal way, they think there must be an evil guy who wants something evil. But you know in—although I hate these parallels between religion and communism but in this sense they were similar—you know Steven Weinberg, the physicist, says something—and this doesn't cover all the religion, I wrote a lot about respect for Christian heritage and so on—but at least referring to religious fundamentalism, there is something nice in what Steven Weinberg said. What did he say? He said that without religion good people do good things, bad people did bad things like usual. But that you need religion to make good people do bad things, you know, for that additional push. I'm saying it's the same in East the horror of communism was not that bad people did bad things, but that it made people who thought they were good do bad things thinking that they were doing good. You know the tragedy was deeper. That's why, for example, you should read it, you learn a lot, Robert Conquest, the big chronicles of communist crimes. But the background theoretically is not strong enough. The story is always this one: "Oh what a bad guy Stalin was doing all these horrible." No, communism is not a problem of bad people doing bad things. It's a authentic tragedy of good people pursuing good starting to do bad things. So what I'm saying is that no illusion here. I am not I mean if there was a catastrophe it was the 20th-century communism. What I'm nonetheless saying is that we have a whole series of antagonisms today. One is this toxic immigrants, new walls. You know we were happy you know that if the metaphor of of the end of communism is the walls are falling down, now as we all know the walls are again going up all around. West Bank, European Union, sometimes metaphorical walls often real walls, Mexico, United States and so on and so on. The other problem ecology, I think. I cannot now go into it, but I think ecology is in the long term a problem which you cannot solve with market measures. You can do a lot of good things with market like include the price sorry ecological damage as an externality, but simply the stakes are too high. Because market in order to work needs time. You know what I mean? Like you try this, you try that, the best wins, if I’m not so sure. But the problem is that with Chernobyl you cannot say one Chernobyl the other Chernobyl okay before we find the solution through market we will be all that. Then intellectual property, as I already said. Then even biogenetics, I think. You know Fukuyama of all people, Fukuyama who was this big utopian, the end of history, now thinks now renounces his thesis. He thinks that that biogenetics is a strong argument enough. He sees very clearly that biogenetics brought us something which is a totally new situation where all the coordinates are mixed. And I agree, let me conclude with the last even story detail. I read two weeks ago that in England they already constructed a first wheelchair for crippled people which is run totally by thoughts. Yeah you know what they did? They your you have some kind of a cap with I don't know what brain detectors on your head. And it's still very primitive, like it cannot really read your mind but it can do something primitive. It can be done. It can read if you think strongly about forward, backward, left, right. It somehow detect so you know you sit and you just think strongly forward, your wheelchair moves forward. I mean now you'll say what's so horrible about this? It is because in a way the very fundamental what is our being human? Our being human is experience says I have my free thought, I'm here, you know, my thought is here, reality is out. Now you will say but this is wonderful, we are becoming like god. Like you know I think my thinking immediately has effects on reality. You know the problem is to put it in vulgar pornographic terms that what goes out also goes in, no? If it goes in this direction, it also goes in the opposite direction. For example I was told—this is a great hushed up debate in the United States now—that militaries are doing already like like crazy this kind of a experiments, no? That is to say they already isolated the waves which your brain radiates when you are in a total panic. And they already know how to produce them artificially. And then they bombard you and you are automatically in panic. They already have a simple machine, it can be carried in a suitcase I was told, where it covers about three-four football fields. I press a button, all people are there in panic. I mean no no I’m not here apocalyptic, it’s not the end of the world, I'm just saying things are happening which affect deeply the most elementary sense of what does it mean to be human. You know our understanding of being human till now is I have a this basic distance between inside, outside. I fantasize my free thoughts, reality is out. It’s getting undermined. And here I didn't forget really to conclude, Clinton was right. Clinton wrote along these lines a wonderful text without any irony a couple of months ago, I think again October-November where there was United Nations Food Day. He openly admitted, "We blew it," that's the title of the text. "With you know how United States and developed countries were putting immense pressure on the third world to open their agriculture to the market" and so on and so on. Clinton says this: "The result is mass hunger now." Why? Because how did it work? Many countries like Indonesia and so on followed it, Haiti, crucial case. What did this mean? The best land was privatized, bought by foreign companies who use it to export not even food, many industrial plants. Local people—it wasn't immediately a catastrophe for them—they work there, they get paid. But once you have a crisis like now, there are two things: first, all of a sudden this export industrial agricultural products plants, you cannot sell it, lower demand, and point two, because of global warming, because of new economic power of China and so on, as we all know, the price of food went double, triple. And because the countries cannot sustain themselves, you have hunger. Hunger is a new phenomenon. An incredible amount of people are already in hunger. I’m repeating Clinton and I know from my friends in Haiti. Do you know—I mean this is for me the tragic, all all people think "Oh now things are moving China, economy"—yeah yeah yeah but China and Haiti and many countries where... do you know that in Haiti I saw a TV report, they are now selling on the market how do you call it water mixed with earth mud when it rains—mud cakes, literally cakes made of mud. Because they discovered they have some minimal minerals and they somehow fill your stomach and so what I'm and then Clinton finishes in a very nice way. He said, "The lesson is food is too important to be simply left to the market." But now I just would push our friend Clinton—I saw the poster of that big image—a little bit further. Let's follow Clinton to the end. Food, yes. Then wouldn't you agree that education also, it's not simply it cannot be left to the market? Wouldn't you agree that arms industry couldn't be left to the market? Wouldn't you agree that that that that that health cannot be simply left to the market because then rich people will live and so on? So and so on and so on. At the end, maybe some Chinese plastic toy toys can be left to the market, no? And communism will be back, believe me. Thank you very much.
I’m very sorry for having to talk in to speak in English. But since English also is not my maternal tongue, since as some of my aggressive friends in United States like sometimes to refer to my English as Arafat English, you know, the way the Yasser Arafat mumbled to Western reporters, so I hope you will be able to follow me. First, let me really thank you because why? Because, you know, although many Western people liberalize sorry, sympathize with you in the difficult years of the previous decade, nonetheless, they, as I precisely written in many of my books, precisely propos Kosovo, they liked you as long as you were a victim, no? The moment you no longer want to be a victim, you yourself become ethnic cleanser, potentially terrorist, fundamentalist, whatever. That's the problem with liberalism, no? They like you as a victim so that they can bring you food, they worry if your children gets enough medicine and so on and so on, no? That's another story, I will tell it later. So, again, I am glad to be here because it was easy to sympathize with you, with all of you here, Serbs, Albanians, all who are here. But now that you are half forgotten, no? Like I think now it’s the time and place. Now you are now it's the time to come here and you are the right place to come. So, again, thank you for your introduction which immediately brings us to the topic of psychoanalysis. How? You may imagine how. You know, as you said, first in English, then in your language. And of course, my fantasy immediately exploded, what you really said in that Albanian language part like what I... it was probably about me, but you know why I was in anxiety? Because you know, it's the same dream as if under communism we all wanted to see—I know I heroically resisted it—your secret police dossier when at the end the archives were opened. Of course, it was worthless that we discovered; all the truly sensitive dossiers or even part of dossiers were burnt, cleansed, no? But that's a nice example of ambiguity how, even if we all dismissed the secret police dossiers as just lies of those in power, somehow I noticed, at least in my country Slovenia, with many of my dissident half dissident friends, somehow they did trust the dossiers as if, you know, there is some truth about them written in the dossiers. They will learn some deep thing about them. So that's how I relate to that to that Albanian part of your language, no? It it was on me, the truth of me, but like you know my genome, genome, you know like what I really am, what I never can say, I am forever separated from it. And this separation between what I am in my stupid reality, the way I experience myself, and the truth about me articulated in a different place, inaccessible to me, in psychoanalysis we call this symbolic castration, this gap. So, thank you for my castrating experience. That’s what you expect from a good friend, from a good friend, no? Okay. So let me go on. I sincerely mean it, I'm glad to be here, because you are now a place of—I wouldn't say experiment, this has a too light flavor—but of of a situation which is in a way, although basically maybe resolved, still totally open. Economically, it’s not clear what will happen, socially, inter-ethnic relations, all the challenges and so on and so on. And the problem—you should always while being grateful to foreigners if they really helped you and are helping you—you should always be aware of the price you are paying for this. And I don’t think this obvious leftist approach to you: "Oh, you betrayed your leftist soul and as the price for independence you became an American military colony" or whatever. No, I mean another thing. It's much more dangerous and ambiguous. I mean how Western liberals, humanitarians, bombarded you with their notion of multiculturalism, human rights and so on and so on, which I think often displays an extremely vulgar racism and arrogance masked as its opposite, you know, as attempts to try to understand and so on and so on. Even I claim even when foreigners come to your country or to mine and claim, "We try to understand you." My god, this means they treat you basically, there is always at least an element of treating you like some primitive aborigines, no, who do some crazy dances and then you try to understand them and so on, no? I mean this is how I like to shock my friends. A true multicultural tolerance today, I think, should start from the premise: no, most people, most other nations are stupid and boring. Why should I try to understand them? The we will never understand each other to the end. What we need is to learn to live side-by-side with people who—they don’t understand us, we don’t understand them—we just, you know, that's the true art of tolerance. To to live side-by-side by people who are foreigners to us, not this eternal liberal blackmail: "Oh, I want to know your folkloric dances, all your myths" and so on. You know like this the worst racist cliché from the 90s early of the West: "To understand what goes on in Balkan you must know the entire thousand years at least of history," no? No, I claim it's exactly the opposite. You must know what goes on now. And thousands of years of history were evoked to legitimize what goes on now. For example, it’s very simplified, but if you ask me for the basic element of what went on in ex-Yugoslavia already from the mid-80s, the problem for me if you ask me was a very brutally simple one. Starting from I would say maybe even early 70s, but it's more complex, at least from early 80s, the old Yugoslav communist regime faced a crisis of legitimization. In the 70s they could have said, you know, remember '73, Yom Kippur War, lack of I mean the problems with oil supply, so it was a general crisis. The problem is that all Europe, even the world starts to function, entered a new era of relative welfare, while we in ex-Yugoslavia remained even more down. So it was the problem of legitimacy. And I think this is basically what Milosevic did. He was the first, not the only, but the first and the one who most radically realized this scheme of providing legitimacy for the local, in this sense I mean Serb of the Serb Republic, communist nomenklatura by making this devil's pact with nationalist intelligentsia. As I wrote in one of the essays whom you were kind enough to include in the book, no, this is the source of what I call, in contrast to Western so-called industrial-military complex, the poetic-military complex that we had here, no? When you get warriors together with poets, this is bad. So again this made me in my old age a Platonist, you know, when Plato said let's throw out poets of the polis. You know we learn, I mean like you know people for example people say Karadžić, ha ha ha, it's a bad poet. First, I don't think he's a bad poet. I think he's a criminal. I think he should be shot. But I'm sorry to tell you from my moderate knowledge and the second point is that I always find it suspicious when people mock too much Karadžić as a poet. No, he you remember I quote a poem by him. Sorry, I've written by I read by by celebrated Slovene poets a much worse poem poems than that one. You know that's this brings me to one of the things that I would like to develop later. It’s one of the crucial points which can orient us in this ethical confusion today. The problem is not that Karadžić was a bad poet. The problem is that he wasn't a bad poet. In what sense? In the sense that what is so difficult for us to accept is that horrible things can happen and are legitimized even by high culture. Let’s go with the Karadžić logic to the end. You know when I was reading history of SS in Germany, figures like Reinhard Heydrich, you know, who basically organized the Holocaust, fascinated me. Why? An evil guy if there ever was. Organized Holocaust, my god. But then did you know that the same Heydrich in the evenings—okay evenings metaphorically—when he was free, very often met with his other SS officers friends and they formed a string quartet and they played music which is I'm sorry to tell you top of the top of Western music, late Beethoven string quartets. Now it’s too easy to say, "Oh, it must be a fake." No, from what we know it's not a fake. And in my earlier books I developed this motive to the end. Namely taking even more radical examples. Okay can it be more radical than this one? Maybe it can. You know if you read European history and ask a naive stupid question, which is: when did things go wrong so that Hitler emerged? I think we can—it's a little bit suspicious logic—but basically we can precisely define the moment when European history took the wrong turn. And retroactively at least we can say there the first step towards Hitler was opened. The guy who is most responsible for it is Père Joseph, Father Joseph, a French priest who was kind of a executive secretary of Cardinal Richelieu, the de facto leader, executive leader of France in the time of Thirty Years' War, you know, I think, between Protestants and Catholics. What was the genius of Père Joseph? He proposed to Richelieu and then enacted it a simple brutal formula. He told him: "Listen, forget about this Catholicism blah blah or religion. It's not about that. The problem is to prevent the reunification of Germany so that France will remain the only superpower in Europe." And he succeeded. If you know history, you know what happened. In a totally opportunistic way, the Catholic France made a pact with Protestant Sweden against the Catholic Austrian Empire. Just to prevent the unification of Germany. And it worked. The Germany, as you all know, was late for to even more years in unification. This was the moment which caused at the beginning the so-called German delay, which is the main reason because Germany was, as we all know, too late for colonization, for the First World War, the defeat in the First World War, Second World War, Hitler. Okay, it’s a little bit simple explanation but you got the logic. So, Aldous Huxley wrote a wonderful book about this guy Père Joseph called *L’Éminence grise*, the Grey Eminence. What fascinated Huxley is the following. On the one hand, as you already see from what I told you, Père Joseph was a brutal nightmare, like you know he did all possible. Ordered torturing, poisoning, plots, just imagine it. Realpolitiker at its most terrifying. But then he was shocked to discover something, Huxley, that again, something even much more crazy than Heydrich playing string quartets. Do you know that this same Father Joseph every evening—okay metaphorically again, every evening—after the work done, wrote letters to a certain convent, nuns who were there in France, because he was in correspondence with them about mystical topics? And that was the shock. This same guy about whom we know that was unimaginable cruel realpolitiker, wrote the most beautiful mystical reflections absolutely at the level of who are the top, how should I put it, the top, the biggest hits, Saint Teresa, John of the Cross, you know the big mystics. He is at that level. No way to escape it. So this is what intrigued what intrigued Aldous Huxley. How it is possible that the same person who was a monster in what he did was in his inner life an a breathtakingly refined mystic? Huxley’s solution was a false one. He said—please feel free to answer the phone. I I would have done the same. And do what as I did it in I thanked to my good friend Alain Badiou for a one this is how we became friends. You know what Alain Badiou did to me once? He told me somebody will call me so I borrowed so I lent him a cell phone. Then I was giving like here a talk. In the middle of the talk he was sitting in front, the phone rang. He not only started to talk in the middle of the I mean me giving a talk, he even asked me could I talk a little bit less loudly so that he can. I told him immediately: "You can do this only to someone who is a real friend." This you know I mean okay. Sorry. Let's go on. So Huxley's solution was too easy. To avoid the problem by blaming a particular culture. Huxley's solution was: this must have something to do with what is wrong in Christianity, with its obsession with Christ on the cross, this suffering and so on. So Huxley's solution, as maybe some of you know from if you are old enough—unfortunately some of you do seem to be like me to remember hippie times when Huxley was popular, not for this, but for his *Doors of Perception* and so on books celebrating drugs and Eastern experience—for Huxley the solution was the East, no? The solution was let’s go to Eastern spirituality, which is more holistic, passive, doesn’t have this how should I put it potentially aggressive fixation on suffering and so on. I claim it brutally doesn’t work. Another example here, I like these impossible crazy examples. Let's jump from Heydrich to his boss, Heinrich Himmler. Himmler had a problem, an genuinely—I don’t laugh at his—ethical problem, which he tried to solve. You know he was maybe the most disgusting of all Nazi criminals because he much more than Eichmann was this perfect bureaucrat, personally relatively honest, seriously bothered with ethical problems. Like in some of his letters he asks that he was the first to admit that what Germans are doing to the Jews and to Slavs and others is horrible, no? It’s terrible, killing children even, women and so on. And he as he put it, "how can we justify this?" He was the first to develop this wonderful, wonderful in a terrifying sense, formula that the true heroic greatness is to not only sacrifice yourself for a higher ethical cause but to sacrifice your ethics itself. Like as he put it, any idiot can sacrifice himself for his country. It takes a true hero to sacrifice his soul for his country. Like you know the very how should I put it, let’s say you fight in a war and an order is given to you: rape those women, kill those children. Of course, most of us are unfortunately, unfortunately for these warriors, are whatever, whatever, however evil humans are—and they are—nonetheless most of us unfortunately find it a little bit difficult. I don’t know how it is with you, at least I would find it. If somebody would would tell me rape that women, kill that child, I would have small nonetheless problem. So how to come over it? The trick is again to change the topic, the perspective, so that this very temptation of "My god, I cannot do it," the ethical temptation is presented to you as your weakness, no? If you cannot kill, you are weak. A true hero does it. But I want to mention Himmler for another reason. He nonetheless admitted: "My god, you are literally sometimes covered with blood. You gas, you poison people with poisonous gases, whatever. How can you remain human in all of this?" Do you know what was Himmler's solution? *Bhagavad Gita*. You know that Indian epic? You know what happened in the central part of *Bhagavad Gita*? Arjuna, the Indian warrior king, addresses appeals to god, asking him, "My god, now I lead the army, I have to order attack, but thousands will die, families will suffer. How can I do it?" And the god Krishna, I think, appears and gives to Arjuna a brief lesson in let’s call it Hindu militarism, no? I know I had great debates with this and I am not satisfied with how some of my Hindu friends try to squeeze out of this by claiming, "No, you must read this metaphorically" and so on and so on, no? Namely, the answer of Krishna is basically this quick recourse to this ontology of appearances, which we also find in Buddhism, no? Like reality, substantial reality doesn't exist. What we perceive as reality is Maya, the veil of false appearances and so on. So if you arrive at spiritual enlightenment, that is to say, this Atman and so on, unity of you with the god, which is this kind of a abyss of abstract spirituality, then you see that that's the only reality. So the logical conclusion: you can kill whatever how as much as you want in this reality, literally the god says—I can quote it to you—"Kill, do it, it doesn't count because nothing really is killed, just appearances" and so on and so on. Now, I will go a step which is why incidentally, as I read in a biography of Himmler, he always carried in his pocket a *Bhagavad Gita* in special leather edition and so on, no, to remind him of true ethics and so on. Now let me return to Oriental true more authentic Oriental thought, Zen Buddhism. Maybe some of you, if you are old enough to remember from the hippie times what we were reading, it was one of the most famous popularizers of Zen Buddhism which was very popular in already in the hippie movement was D.T. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, a great popularizer. But what is a little bit less known is that in the 30s and 40s he was a great propagator of Japanese attack on China and generally of Japanese militarism. And incidentally he openly admits it. That's these are not those hippie texts: "Make love not war" and "Peace" and "Holistic relationship to women and to nature" or whatever. But this is the true Suzuki, and it’s wonderful to read him. Wonderful in a terrifying sense because he not only justifies the Japanese aggression on China, claiming that basically it’s this disgusting pseudo-theology of stain and picture. You know this idea of when you perceive evil, it’s as like when you look at a picture and you are too close and you just see and you just see a stain. But when you pull far away enough, you see that what you thought was a stain is really just an element which contributes to the harmony of the whole. So the idea is: we humans caught in our terrestrial limited reality perceive killing as a stain. But from a proper divine perspective, it contributes to global harmony, no? And so on and so on. Okay, that's the standard theology. You also find it in the West in Christianity and so on. He went a step further, Suzuki. He tries to also resolve this Himmler problem, no: how to kill without feeling guilty? And he goes in a terrifying way pretty far there. If you want to learn more about it, read my book—only in English, I think till now, okay German whatever—*The Puppet and the Dwarf*, where I where I quote the stuff. Namely, the first solution of Suzuki is to he said: "I know how difficult it is to kill. Like you suffer"—sorry you will be the victim here—"somebody must be like, I want I have to I must I have to kill you, no? With knife. Okay, now it’s difficult, no? I do this to you." But Suzuki—it's almost like kind of a bad joke—he says: "No, when I describe the situation like this, you look at me like a frightened rabbit, I kill you and so on." He says: "No, this is when I'm still caught in the false illusion of substantial reality, when I still perceive myself as subject agent, author of my own acts." But Suzuki says that I must once I reach the Buddhist enlightenment—this famous called Satori in Zen Buddhism—the same scene would have been described in a totally different way. I no longer am part of reality. I am not even I. Just my mind is a passive point of—not even point, medium of—observation. I'm in it for nothing, where I see just as a dance of shadows of appearances my sword dancing in reality and somehow your body dances and it gets stuck on it. And I just observe it and I'm in it for nothing. And in this way if you look at it, it’s not so difficult to kill." Then he goes on and even—that's the nicest point—says sorry this is not Suzuki, I will not cheat, this is another Zen Buddhist theorist from the same age, late 30s, who I have exact references in my book, who said that for ordinary people who don't have the time to reflect on and to meditate too much, the best path to the goal of Zen Buddhist meditation—which is the liberation from this being caught into false reality—is military discipline. Let's say imagine a soldier who learns to suspend all reflection. A command comes: shoot, you shoot. Without even a minimum of reflection. At that point you broke out of the your the the prison of your false ego. You no longer perceive yourself as agent and so on and so on. Now let me make it clear here again. Even in stronger terms one should insist on what I already said propos Karadžić. I’m not making fun of Suzuki as a bad Zen Buddhist and so on. This would make it all too simple. The point is that he undoubtedly was a great authentic Zen meditator and writer and so on and so on. But nonetheless he could. I will approach this if there will be time later. Yeah, yeah, but you you are victim of the linear metaphysical Western notion of time, how should I put it. Okay, sorry no let's go on. These are serious things. You know the ethical conclusion of this is a very hard one. It is that inner authenticity is not what you truly are about. Inner authenticity is a lie. In the sense of, you know, one of the fashionable post so-called postmodern deconstructionist dogmas is, it was put very nicely by Richard Rorty: "We are stories that we are telling ourselves about ourselves." So we don’t have any substantial identity. You know, the way you structure your universe, this is what you are. So from this, immediately a whole ethical program emerges, which is the main mode to fight to fight racism would have been that we listen to each other's stories, no? Like the idea would have been that, let’s say, we come from different groups, no? And the way to bring peace is: "Why don't you tell me your boring—I say them because I also have mine—stories about, you know, your poems, your tradition, your food, your folkloric dances, all that stuff which makes me immediately" you know what I mean. And of course, I allow you the same to to me. This attitude was best expressed in a motto of some, I don't know, multicultural movement where they said something and they intended to be as something very deep: "An enemy is someone whose story we were not ready to hear." This sounds so deep, you know. Like you again sorry I have problems with you today. Like if I am not ready to listen to you, then I just fetishize you into my enemy. But I should try to understand your side of the story, no? And I should then I will see that you also like me you have your fears, your dreams, your anxieties and all of a sudden I will see you are not simply an enemy, you know, but a tragic person caught in its finitude, its dreams and so on. You no longer can can be my enemy. My answer to this is ha ha. I mean ha ha like, okay, it sounds deep but replace the general term "enemy" with a concrete name. Would you say that Hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to hear his story and so on, no? I mean or take take for example Karadžić. No, we did hear his story, no? And you know what I mean. It's even written in poems in and so on. This is why—okay it probably will not be translated into Albanian for simple reasons because it's too big—in Slovene it will not only be... you know this novel which is now in the last two years big hit, first in France then in Germany, England: Jonathan Littell... no, it's not Little it's Littell, it's a French word... *Les Bienveillantes*, *The Kindly Ones*. It's a clumsy translation into English. Ah it got the Prix—I don’t know which one—Goncourt or whatever in France. It's an incredible novel, pages, a memoirs, of course faked, written as a novel of a mid-level Nazi executioner, the one who participated in Holocaust. And it does precisely this. It tells you his side of the story. You see an ordinary guy with his dreams, all the shit, his dreams, his whatever you want and that's the monstrosity. The monstrosity is not they were inhuman. The monstrosity is how human they remained. And the only conclusion I see from this is to abandon this topic of, let’s understand each other and so on, no? And to admit that, of course we should, but in a more radical sense, namely in the sense that narratives we are telling about ourselves, in other words the ideological myths, narratives we are constructing to provide a meaningful framework for our experience of our lives, they are fundamentally lies. They are the screen we construct to to allow us to do the horrors we are doing in reality without having to confront them. Like you do horrible things, you kill blah blah. The function of the poets is to provide the screen which makes you possible to do to do it. So now let go let me go a step further. Here I think I'm getting... this does not mean that I am against mutual understanding, but many people thought I was crazy, but I'm more and more convinced that I am right. In what? It whenever some multiculturalist comes to you and with this you know racist arrogance: "Oh how interesting your culture, tell me about your stories blah blah," this doesn't work. This is a mutual lie. Usually even what I will do then is to tell you a story which more than my story will be just something like I will try to guess what you want to hear in me and I will stage for you that. Maybe you know this story but it's a true anecdote from the history of of anthropology which I think is the best formula of how the West ideologically exploited us during the war in the 90s. For them how did we function for them? It's a maybe you know it, I'm sorry if I repeat myself, it's a wonderful story about—again I read it in some book on the history of anthropology, so it’s if the book didn’t lie reality. Somewhere I think it's New Guinea, Guinea, that happened about even more years ago. There was a rumor that some tribe in the middle, out of touch with civilization, that they have some terrible horrifying dances of death. They paint themselves like death figure with dark masks and dance. So an anthropological expedition went there, finally arrived at that tribe and explained to them through some confused language sign but somehow they got it that they want to see this dance, no? And okay, they went to sleep, next day the people, the tribe members, did perform exactly the dance they wanted, no? They went home satisfied, they wrote a report, "Oh the wild nature, primitives blah blah." Everything okay except for one small detail. A couple of years later, another group, more reasonable anthropologists, visited the same tribe, really learned their language and got the true story what happened from the other side. This so-called primitive tribe just wanted to be good good hosts to their guests. And they somehow guessed that these idiots want to see some terrible dance. And as good hosts, they in a panic invented this dance, masks, to be you know what they thought is the original abyss was staged for them as a sign of hospitality. Now, that's my problem and I'm not in any way anti-Serb. If anything now you remember the majority here you are now you should not do to them what they were doing to you. But this is the reason Emir Kusturica is not my greatest friend, to put it as the understatement of the century. Because I claim that, for example, in his *Underground* he is doing exactly this for the Western gaze. He stages for them—if you saw *Underground*, what image of our Balkan do you get there?—a crazy piece of the world outside history where people frankly eat, drink, kill and fuck all the time. A perpetual spiritual orgy. This is what the West wants to see in us. And he is delivering it to them. I'm I’m against him not because he is too primitive Balkan but because he is too Westernized. He is like that tribe. He is staging for the West the spectacle what they want to see. So what is nonetheless a road? But I would have to go deeper into psychoanalytic theory why here but just let me give you an anecdote. Nonetheless, I'm not saying that we should be cold to each other and so on. I am tempted to say something totally crazy. I don't know how it functioned here, maybe I'm going too fast, but in my youth experience, you know how we had the formula under Tito—and I have no nostalgia for Tito, but that’s another story—this *Bratstvo i jedinstvo*, brotherhood and unity. I claim up to a point it functioned in so far as it was based in dirty jokes, racist jokes. I think racist jokes played a great... you can imagine how I was almost lynched in an American campus when I told this... but they played a great progressive role. In what sense? Because the way I remember from my youth, for example when I was serving the Yugoslav army, precisely because they were not racist jokes the way I remember them from my youth youth, in the sense of attacking each other. It was more a kind of a friendly sharing of obscenities. I remember, for example, I remember in the army I met a Montenegro guy, I met a Bosnian and the story was like: I tell you a joke about my about me, you tell me a joke about yours. You know you know how in ex-Yugoslavia each of us nations, ethnic groups, was identified by a certain racial cliché. And I think the correct heroic thing to do was not to say: "Oh, racist cliché," but to ironically fully assume it and play with it. For example, we Slovenes were and are—it always surprises me, you know, politically incorrect observation, to what extent clichés are usually true, no? But that's another story—we Slovenes are supposed to be misers, you know, people who don't like to spend money. So you know what's the yeah, it's true, yeah. You know, of course it’s true. And I used it when I was in the Yugoslav army. You know what I did? Once only I invited my fellow soldiers to beer and bought them beer. And because they perceived me as a Slovene, I became a legend. A Slovene who is not a miser. It was the best investment I did. For the whole year, "Oh he is a good Slovene," they were inviting me and so on. Our standard joke is what—and we are really like that—you know, a fairy, fairy, you know, the stupid magic entity who fulfills your wishes, comes to a Slovene farmer and asks him, "I will do whatever you want to you, just remember I will do to your neighbor twice as much," no? You know what is Slovene farmer's answer? "Take one of my eyes." Because then... and this is the basic Slovene principle. If I get a little bit but the neighbor gets more, no, it's better if I lose a little bit just that the neighbor loses more. So okay these are we Slovenes, no? Then the Montenegro friend I remember immediately jumped in and said, you know Montenegro, they have earthquakes and they are their cliché is lazy, no? You can imagine what was his story. You know, how does a Montenegro guy masturbate, no? He digs a hole in the earth, puts the penis in and waits for the earthquake, no? He’s too late but you see how it works even now. I claim this, now we are enacting the true brotherhood and unity. This is how it worked. And now I come to the climactic point, the best experience of this at its clinical purest. I report about it in one of my early books, so I'm sure you don't know it, which is not translated, is was with an Albanian friend of mine, soldier in Yugoslav army. Namely, we were almost friends, becoming friends. But then something was missing, we were still this official cold friends, respect, no? And then the guy made the first move. Okay I don't know if this is a racist cliché, no? I love clichés, but I was told that with you, you can joke about everything but not about your mother and sister, that it’s not good to tell you "I will fuck your mother" or what, no? Okay, so he approached me one morning and I was very shocked because he was an intellectual and he told me, "I fuck your mother." And I noticed what was the message. The message was: let’s become truly friends. And I accepted the logic. Believe me I never had problems with replying dirty to dirty. You know how what was my immediate answer? "Go ahead after I finish with your sister," no? Okay, so you know what then happened? Now comes the ethical miracle. Then we embraced, we became friends and it's not what you think now. Then we were spending hours telling dirty stories or what? No. We were both intellectuals—he was more than me—we were very cold, just to remind ourselves that we are really friends, a wonderful small ritual developed. Every morning that we met instead of saying "Hello, good morning," we just—we didn't even say the whole story—he told me "Mother," I told him "Sister." You know? It was just a reminder we are still friends. So don't you know I was always fascinated about this ambiguity of obscenity. On the other... yes to go so that you will see that I'm nonetheless a good feminist boy, no? I’m not saying these jokes solve everything because I mean my god the first feminist reaction—and this should be a test for you if you pretend to be a feminist—ask yourself: did you immediately feel what is wrong with this joke? That it's nonetheless it's the typical male pact about the exchange of women, no? No? Yeah? It not? Okay. But then I would like to have the opposite. Here I'm a feminist. I would like to see two women say "Fuck your father after I finish with your husband," you know? That would be feminism for me. Then you are a good feminist, okay? Okay, sorry. Okay no sorry let's go on so that you know what I mean like... how should how should I put it, this is unfortunately one side of the story. I think ah yeah another problem here is the problem of hierarchy of course, unfortunately no? Hierarchy in the sense that this also worked because both of us were at the same level ordinary soldiers. Like it wouldn’t work I think at least, maybe I'm wrong, as well if I were to approach my battalion commander major and tell him "fuck your mother," no? I it wouldn't be so good how should I put it, no? So first there is the problem of hierarchy. The second—and yeah that’s the the other problem—the second problem is that now I'm not saying, you know, things are much more refined here. I'm not telling you, "Oh, so let's start telling dirty jokes about each other," no? Although I don't see anything bad in it. I remember when I—ten years ago when the war was finishing, but when I was telling in United States this story—a woman from Sarajevo who escaped from there attacked me: "Like what are you saying this? We are in a tragic situation and you are just telling us we should just across the lines—I mean front lines—tell each other a dirty joke." But then I told her: "Sorry but what’s so bad about it? If you if you do this instead of shooting at each other, what’s bad about it?" How should I put it, no? I mean I don’t underestimate this this ironic populist low humor. The problem is somewhere else. I don't know how it is with you because in each culture this works in a specific way. But it is I claim a general feature of cultures. What fascinates me more and more in as an ideological phenomenon and I return to this in all my books is how when you look at a culture or how a certain community is hold together—and it can be large community, it can be even a university department small one—you can see that you have for example you have explicit rules which define how this community functions. But this is never all. You have explicit rules but then you have, how should I call them, meta-rules, higher level rules which tell you how to relate to these elementary rules. Let me put it in this way. You want to become a member of a certain upper class community, group. It can be you want to be integrated for example the most brutal disappointment will be for you if you try to become, if you get scholarship part of some snobbish Oxford, British or American Harvard, whatever community. You try to learn their rules. You follow them, then you discover they laugh at you. Why? Because you know true identity, true belonging to a community is not only rules, but it’s to learn meta-rules which tell you how and when to violate the explicit rules. It’s through this violation that you really become a member. You must learn how to violate the rules. For example, in you have British patriotism and you learn this from all those British novels about Oxford secrets and so on. But this is not enough. You have to learn how to make fun of your patriotism. It is only through this gentle undermining that you are really one of them. If you just follow the rules you are an idiot. And now I come to the more obscene aspect. We should never underestimate to what extent what may appear to us as subverting undermining a community is really the deepest part, aspect of the identity, as it were, of this of this community. Here we enter the other much more ominous level of obscenity. This is what fascinated me so much in the ex—I hated it—Yugoslav army. Why? Privately I admit it, as a private person I'm a kind of a neofascist. I like order, discipline in all, at all levels, even in love life. Like my favorite saying by Lacan is "my fiancé is never late for an appointment because the moment she is late she is no longer my fiancé," you know like there must be order. So I went with great hope into Yugoslav army because I thought at least there will be order. Well if some of you are old enough to serve it, you knew beneath the surface of order it was one big chaos of obscenities, obscene jokes, whatever. And it took me a long time—now I will tell you another thing which I only mention once in my English book which is the worst selling so I'm sure you don't know it, but I love it—the story of a doctor's exam, you know the story which I witnessed. It’s the best story. I can yeah yeah because there you have ideology at its purest. It is at that point that almost as in a kind of a epiphany I understood what is power. It happened in Karlovac, you know, Croatia close to Slovene border. I was there—well we had this we didn’t have there a proper how do you call it? We didn’t have a proper doctor's office. We just had a student who was medical student, so he was there if some of us got slightly wounded. He slept in a room which to which—and you will see why this is important—in that room there was a washbasin for wash and above on the mirror there were stuck these, you know from pre-pornographic times, these photos of girls just half-naked, not even really pornography. You will see why this is important. Okay. So once a week a doctor came from military hospital and we had a collective examination. We were there waiting in line and each of us had to stand up and in front of others and say what it's wrong. Okay. I was there quite by chance then something very mystical happened. One guy stood up and said—as you say in the vulgar Serbo-Croat—that he have pains in his penis, no? But he said in Serbo-Croat "boli me kurac", which you know means something slightly different like "fuck off" and so on. This already started laughter. But then the doctor ask him, "What do you say?" and he said "No, no, no, it’s quite serious." So the doctor told him "Okay, undress yourself." He did it and he said, "The problem is I have great pains with my skin around the head, I cannot pull it down." Then the doctor said, "Okay, show it to me, pull it down. Then it doesn't hurt, you can do it." Then the the soldier said, "No, it's only when I am have an erection." Then—now comes, yeah yeah it's even worse than you think—then then the doctor told him "Okay, drkaj, drkaj, the jerk off, do it." And then something absolutely obscene happened. The guy masturbated tried to get an erection, of course it didn't work. Then the doctor went to that mirror, took the photos and showed them said "Look, gledaj kakva pička gledaj, look at this, look what, drkaj, drkaj, look at it, what man are you?" And then I got it. At the same time the doctor was looking at us and started to laugh. It was the most oppressive obscene solidarity. But this is not the same as the joke with my Albanian colleague. I claim this is totally this is how power functions. There was no subverting undermining of power here. For power in order to function—this for this was for me the the basic lesson of the army life—you need, and this is why for example in United States Army they have all the time these scandals, you know, they discover they call it fragging or whatever, you know these rituals of soldiers torturing... You for the army collective you need this obscene underside. You need it to function. So again the point is how to manage with all of it. Sorry? more, yes, because of course I promise you if you want to publish it anywhere to give you the text, because it looks very bad now. It looks bad in the sense that that I will begin it when I will end it, it will be the time that I will be at the beginning. No, okay. So what I wanted to tell you after all this... okay, let me do it a little bit more systematically. So we have three elements, as it were, two are oppressed with political correctness. We have on the one hand this simple cold distance dignity which I like. We can undermine it through shared emancipatory obscenity which is good. What but all this dimension what is the problem for me with today’s liberal ideology? It is that it... okay I will try to develop it a little bit with another improvisation. Did you notice how more and more, and I repeat this often in my books, more and more today we have products deprived of their substance, you know, like you have—my god, I usually drink it—Coke but without caffeine or without sugar. We have we have I don’t know a cake without sugar. You have beer without alcohol, coffee, like as if you get the product but deprived of its poisonous substance. I claim that this is what is basically false with liberal multiculturalism. In all their praising the neighbor, the other, it’s a decaffeinated other, how should I put it, no? They they appear to be open to you but they terribly censor you. I noticed this in the United States when I witnessed some conversations of liberal multiculturalist with American Indians—even the name is prohibited now, you are forced to call them Native Americans. And I had a good friends among them who is furious about it, who told me, "Now these liberals even don't allow us tell us how we should name ourselves." And he gave me a wonderful argument for Indians. He told me, "Native Americans sounds like we are part of nature, you know like only you are culture, we are nature." While he said, "To be called an Indian is at least a monument to white man's stupidity, no? Because you know Colombo they thought they are in India, at least no? Much better." But what I'm saying is that how if you listen to this politically correct description, all the dark aspect—drinking, despair—disappears and American Indians appear to be some kind of a, you know, holistic spiritualized guys who told us how against Western technological imperialism we should have a holistic relationship with mother nature and so on, all that all that stuff. So erase that that. So the problem of tolerance is something which I think it's a crucial phenomenon which tells us a lot in today's ideology. It is about as I noticed how in United States more and more now one topic predominates. In social sciences it's getting popular—I know of more than books dealing with it—the topic of toxic subjects. They're obsessed with the idea that your neighbor, people, can be toxic in somehow. Toxic as excessive harassment and it's interesting how this term "toxic" covers everything. It can be a terrorist who is toxic, dangerous, bringing arms. It can be a priest who is sexually molesting you, I mean you or children. It can be it can be fundamentalist preacher. It can be a mother who doesn't allow his child to go free. It can be father with excessive authority. Anything goes. All this is covered by the same category toxic subject. Because this is difficult to accept, that beneath all these appearances stories we are telling ourselves, this toxic this toxic dimension. How do we fight... this is why I think also incidentally we are so obsessed with the topic of immigrants. Because in the Western Europe today—and you must know it, okay now it's better but not so much you as Albanian Albanians—you know for Italians you were very toxic. Now I think it shifted from Albanians first to North Africans. Now for some strange reasons Romanians are the ultra toxic in Italy. All the rapes are usually attributed—don't ask me why, it’s very mysterious—the logic of it. So what I want to say is that Italy is for me—watch it—the country of the future, the most progressive country in the world now. Why? Because it’s where we are all unfortunately, unfortunately heading, I claim now. It’s still a democracy formally, but a democracy which is becoming openly more and more insubstantial. Look, now after the last elections even whatever remained of the center-left—Oliva, Olive Party, Prodi, Veltroni—it’s falling apart. They resigned to it. Berlusconi is the boss. But not so mysterious about Berlusconi. This should give you to think about what is changing in our societies about how power functions. Are we aware that Berlusconi—I mean he is stupid but not so stupid that he doesn't know what he is doing—that he is it’s quite shocking, it’s did you notice if you just follow the media? He is systematically undermining even the minimal dignity of being a president of the state. I mean how he deals with his wife, you know all this which it’s literally a pornographic reality show. That girl, his wife, he explains his life. And I think that Berlusconi is not the beginning. It started already in the 80s with in Argentina Carlos Menem and Ronald Reagan. Yes, although he kept some dignity, but Reagan was the first first which played upon presenting himself as an idiot. I remember I read an—not read, I listened to it—an interview with him when a journalist asked him a difficult question and Ronald Reagan's answer was: "Why are you asking me this? You know that I'm too stupid to answer." You know like mocking his own stupidity and so on. I think that—but this is maybe too much history for you and for us, I mean not moment—that Richard Nixon was the last authentic tragic president. He he fell, he was corrupted, but there is something almost authentically tragic in his corruption. With Reagan we are entering the different register. So again why is this important? Because de facto, let’s be clear here, de facto democracy it is still formally a democracy, Italy, but it’s becoming totally non-substantial. You have an obscene head of state and all people talk about him: next love affair, what with his wife do... he even incidentally mocks totally without dignity the love affairs of his wife. You know who is Massimo Cacciari, the philosopher who is the mayor or was of Venezia, of Venice. The rumor is that how is she called, Veronica or what, Berlusconi's wife and Cacciari had an affair. And at at one reception—I couldn't believe it when I was in Italy, I saw it on TV—a a foreign young diplomat was presented to Berlusconi, and who was a young nice guy, and in front of cameras Berlusconi told him, "Oh I must present you to my wife so that I get rid of Cacciari, you know, you are more..." it but this shouldn't deceive you. This shouldn't deceive you. You know? It’s like that doctor in the army. You know, he makes jokes ha ha masturbate, but the power remains there. And if anything, the power is stronger. This is typically postmodern. The power which masks itself—now it’s no longer joke, it’s a little bit more serious—you know this is typically postmodern power. It’s mask as permissivity, the right to choice and so on, but beneath it it's an even stronger injunction. Like another story I use in my book which is not translated here, it’s my favorite example of today how authority functions. Let’s say, maybe you even know, I'm sorry if I repeat myself. Let's say it's Saturday or Sunday afternoon, you are a small boy or girl and you have to visit your grandmother. You hate it, it’s boring and so on. Okay, let’s say you have an old type patriarchal father. What will he tell you? He will tell you: "Listen I don't," to you small boy or girl, "Listen I don't care how you feel, behave properly, it's your duty to go to the grandmother." That’s okay I claim. It’s a little bit of repression, but you retain all your freedom to secretly rebel against it or whatever. Now let's take the postmodern permissive non-authoritarian father. What would he tell you? He would tell you something like: "You know how much your grandmother loves you, but nonetheless I want you to visit her only if you really want to." Now, you got it that beneath the surface of free choice there is an order which is much stronger. The order is not only you must visit her, but you must like to visit her. You see this is how authority functions. Okay, now let go a step further how even... don't be nervous. I mean I am I am, my god, are you I'm supposed to be here racist cliché in crazy Albanian part where you are lazy, nobody works, and I come from almost Protestant Slovenia, and you act now as the stupid Slovene, be be be member of your nation how should I put it. Okay so let's go on. You know the problem of... okay okay no listen there must be a point where to stop, no? So no no how sorry more minutes okay if yeah let me conclude nonetheless go. Now I will jump nonetheless a little bit to what was the title of this talk, no? You know what is the link with economy here nonetheless? Okay my thesis is a very simple one. What the title like what happened in the first century? Two things happened: A, September 11th at the beginning of the first decade; B, the ongoing financial crisis. And my idea is these are two twice the same thing repeated itself, the death of the liberal Fukuyama utopia. First, the Fukuyama utopia died with September 11th, in the sense that it's obvious that the Western liberal democracy is not the formula for the entire world. Then, in the ongoing financial crisis, the properly economic aspect of liberal capitalism was dealt a blow. It is clear today that the true utopia were not communism, social democracy, which died, the true utopia were the 90s, the happy era of this Clinton prosperity and I like Clinton, I agree with your I will explain at the end why, the poster you have here of of Clinton, but that's another story. What I'm saying is that why is this moment dangerous, the moment in which we are today? And I will come back to Berlusconi. It is because... no, I'm not naive, I'm not saying "Oh this crisis is the beginning of the end of capitalism, we just have to organize the left." No, if you ask me at this level, I'm even a little bit of a pessimist. I think that the, you know Naomi Klein's theory of the shock therapy, how capitalism uses no matter how strong shocks to get a new boost. So I think this will be just perfectly integrated as another shock therapy for capitalism. It is already done in the United States where okay, on the one hand I know all the investments of Obama helping economy, but those are right, the guys who claim "No no, this has nothing to do with Obama socialist" or what. It’s rather that for example how the big thing one of the big things going on now explicitly in United States is how to use this crisis to break the last the last still relatively powerful trade unions, syndicates, trade unions, no? It's explicitly that's the whole point about the debate: should they allow the Great Three automakers, General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, to fold? The idea is: let's use this to get rid of the trade unions because the auto car trade union it's one of the last strong. But I want to focus on another thing here. Now you will say, "Okay if everything will be okay, just use for capitalism, why then aren't we just glad and accept it?" If there will be no revolution, in other words, I'm now asking myself the big question that maybe some of you would like to ask me like: am I totally stupid or what? Like why don't I simply honestly accept capitalism with all its problems which is still liberal capitalism, liberal-democratic capitalism is still the best game in town, how should I put it, no? In other words, in the same way that when I was young we were dreaming—some of them, I wasn't so stupid—about socialism with a human face, why don't we just fight for global capitalism with a stupid sorry with a human face once you... You know like a little bit bad okay. Now I come to the problem. Because I think that—and with this I will conclude now really minutes—there was one good argument for capitalism, let's admit it, till now. That whenever, wherever there was and from time to time capitalism did need a dictatorship, no, to survive like Chile, South Korea, but after years when things developed, it always generated a strong push towards democracy. So it was true that sooner or later it did bring democracy. I claim this game is over. How where do I see it? First, first there is the mega—I cannot emphasize how much historical importance of what goes on in China today. My good friend, yes my good friend although we hate each other philosophically, but personally we go along quite well, Peter Sloterdijk, the German. You know, when we meet, he tells me: "I know when you get over, I go to gulag, but when I get to power I will shoot you," and then we say, "but till that moment we can be friends, what's the problem," no? So he told me when I met him, typically at an airport waiting for light, a very interesting thought. He told me that he is thinking a lot about a very naive question: can we imagine to which person from our time will they be raising monuments, statues, years from now in future? And his answer was Lee Kuan Yew. You know who he was? I think he is now over, the long-time president of Singapore. Lee Kuan Yew invented and perfectly practiced the first what poetically we call capitalism with Asian values. Less poetically it means authoritarian capitalism. Capital and do you know that Deng Xiaoping, just before when he was starting his reforms, he visited Singapore and said—I remember as a child, my god I wasn't even a child so he said to the cameras—"This Singapore is the model all of China should follow." And that’s what's going on as you probably know. China is basically today an ideal capitalist country. It’s a country where if you don’t mess with politics, it’s probably the most free more or less for capitalists. Like in the sense of the party takes over of keeps the workers in check, you know? And it’s literally true. You know what is one of the most tragic things? I have some friends in China and they told me that in the latest reprint of their, you know, the official guide, like history of the Chinese Communist Party for the cadre printed every year in millions of copies, they censored their own past now. The previous editions have one chapter about how the Communist Party in the 1920s and 30s organized in Shanghai and big industrial centers working class workers to strike. They censored them because they're so much afraid that somebody will apply this today, no, workers organized in China and so on. So they re okay, but what now I’m coming to. Reading many books, I was in China debating with them and so on. Unfortunately, I don't believe liberals who claim, "Oh give them another years, there will be a democratic explosion." I think genuinely that something is emerging in China and some other countries there with so-called capitalism with Asian values, which is a capitalism maybe even more dynamic, productive than our Western capitalism, but which no longer needs democracy. Function even this is fatal. It's over this, how should I put it, natural alliance between liberal democracy and capitalism. And I think and as a right-winger, to be quite clear, Peter Sloterdijk is a enlightened conservative, he says, told me, he is worried like hell here. He sees phenomena like Berlusconi as European version of it. Because vaguely the same thing is happening in Russia and again no wonder Putin and Berlusconi are great pals, friends, no? You know this kind of a of course it’s not the same as in China. Berlusconi plays a clown. But what is important is that on the one hand you have the political spectacle, cheap populism, jokes, but the what should have been the true politics, social politics, economy is simply totally depoliticized, where economy is starting to function in a, how should I put it, implicitly authoritarian way. And I think this expresses—I cannot go enough deep, don't have enough time because you brutally repress me into into a—why, what is happening in today's capitalism? That contrary to what some of the poets like Negri think, you know Toni Negri, that today's capitalism is dynamic, autopoietic, the state is out, no, it needs more than ever a strong state. Let’s make it clear: the state is getting stronger and stronger. And and the state which I think, in order to regulate properly the way capitalism is functioning today, will less and less be able to do it in a in a even formally democratic way. We got the first taste of it even in the United States. I wonder if you noticed something. When Bush announced the crisis confronted the crisis in October, addressed the American people, did you notice, many commentators did, how he used almost the same terms as he used when he reacted to September 11th: "Our way of life is in danger, emergency state, all to" and then you had something which shocked me. You remember how the Bush presented this first so-called bailout money, billions of dollars plan? Today we are used to higher sums. You don't even pick them up if you see them down, no? But the important thing is that, you remember, there was the first vote, the Congress voted against it, two-thirds of the members. Then it was something strange that happened. All the political elite, irrespective of color—Bush, McCain, Obama, Democrats—came together and put the Congress under an incredible pressure. The notice was basically: "Listen, fuck off, now is no time for democracy. We need these measures, stop it." And basically they de facto introduced an economic state of emergency. Now don't don’t misunderstand me, I would have done the same. I'm not playing this boring leftist game "Oh fascism in America" or whatever, no? It was the economic necessity. It's one of the signs of how I claim today's capitalism is less and less able to act in a is less and less able to function within a democratic state. So the way it is doing is that simply, of course we will be... I'm not saying that there will be an emergency state in the sense of, you know, like in Poland Jaruzelski, one morning we will awaken state of emergency. Although incidentally it's fuck off let's go with you with the public don't bother me. Although it's interesting to know, this is again where Italy is future. Do you know that in Italy is formally from September or October of in a state of emergency? Formally. With very precise point that this enables the government to use military in the countries. And they are doing it. First against the immigrants in the south, then against mafia in Napoli. Now they have serious plans, it's not a joke, to deploy soldiers in big city parks to prevent women being raped and so on. Now you will tell me but I’m exaggerating, but people still live normally. Yeah but that’s how it will come, I think. It will not be this classical emergency state, you know, you awaken one morning, police curfew. Life will go on, you will have all your stupid private pleasures, you can have sex with dogs, with cows, with whatever, it’s your problem and they will even say, "We need emergency state precisely to save and guard all these freedoms of yours and so on and so on." And okay, allow me three minutes now to conclude really conclude with what in capitalism, which tendency I see. I agree but not quite with Negri and some other Italian economists who claim who try to draw consequences from what is called the so-called rise of immaterial labor. You know that when Marx spoke about it in his *Grundrisse* manuscripts, he introduced the term "general intellect," which means the collective practical knowledge which is today much more important than work time. Like one has to admit this: that today the source of capitalist wealth, it's no longer predominantly classical workers' exploitation. This is nothing anti-Marxist. Marx says this in *Grundrisse* where he says that once the once the labor once the general what Marx calls in a general intellect this collective knowledge becomes the main factor in wealth, simply labor measured by time and so on becomes meaningless as the source. But Marx draw a totally wrong conclusion: that this will mean the end of capitalism. It will simply collapse because exploitation will no longer work. What Marx didn’t see is the possibility for theoretical reasons that can be explained, I don't have time now of course, that that capitalism succeeded in something else, in reprivatizing this general intellect itself. This was the possibility for which Marx was totally blind. What do I mean by this? Take an example like Bill Gates. How did he become as rich as he is? You cannot say he is exploiting his workers. No, he is even paying them relatively well. You also cannot play the game of he is getting extra profit from others. No, I think the only explanation is the one offered by some good economists which claim: for Marx the development of capitalism was from rent—you know rent like you pay rent for—to profit. Now we are moving back from profit to rent. What Bill Gates does is this: why do you have to pay euros or I don't know how much when you if you do it legally ha ha when you when you when you download a new Microsoft Windows Word, whatever? It’s not profit. You know this price is basically totally independent of the production costs. The way Bill Gates function, he doesn't say, "Okay this costed me so much, let’s put a high profit and then." It’s rent. De facto, Windows functions as part of our general intellect. It’s the very symbolic space where we communicate and so on. So Bill Gates privatized part of our common space and so in order to dwell in common, to communicate and so on, we have to pay him rent. And I think this logic of rent is exploding more and more. And the problem with rent is that it's not as natural as it was. The moment you deal with immaterial property, with intellectual property, knowledge and so on, it’s not as clear. Like if I produce a watch and sell it, it's clear, I sell this, the price is determined more or less on the market. But with so-called immaterial property, intellectual property sorry, the problem is even how to define what can be privatized or not. The state has to intervene there already. You know what I mean like it’s not Bill Gates cannot say, "this is mine." I can say with production "this is mine" if I produced it somehow. But with intellectual property it gets much more complex. You know all the problems when some companies already tried to privatize some genetic structure, some genes and so on, and then the state says, "No." So you need an incredibly strong state to set the parameters, to define: this can be privatized, which is usually reduced to, but it's not only today, you know, even in popular culture, iPod and so on, all the problem of popular sorry of copyright and so on and so on. The stronger and stronger state is needed here. I think again it cannot function in the in the long term in a in a democratic way. This and now if you allow me really one minute to come back to Clinton. This is why I'm still a communist. I'm the first to admit that 20th-century communism was a nightmare. My only very critical reproach to anti-communists—and this may surprise you—is that they were not strong enough in seeing what a terrifying experience communism was. What do I mean by this? To amuse okay the last story I admit it. Did you see that big German film which got the Oscar I think, *Das Leben der Anderen*, *The Lives of Others*? My problem with that film is that it's way too soft. Why? This is typical how liberals who think they are anti-communist don't get it what was the communist tragedy. You know basically the story: a corrupted minister wants to fuck this famous writer's wife and to make the wife more accessible he orders secret police to get the writer under total observation. And the writer is the presented as an East German celebrity, faithful to the party but at the same time famous in the West and so on and so on. If you are if you know anything about how socialism functioned, you start to laugh here. Because you know what happened in this film could have happened even in the West. If you have a corrupted secret police guy who wants to fuck your wife, of course, let’s say sorry I want to you okay I tell secret police there is a suspicion that you have I don't know links with Milosevic police I don't know what, no, and let's watch you a little bit, no? But the where the film goes wrong is that in a country like East Germany the writer like that would have been under total observation even if there is no minister who wants to fuck your wife, my god. You got it? It's still in a typically liberal way, they think there must be an evil guy who wants something evil. But you know in—although I hate these parallels between religion and communism but in this sense they were similar—you know Steven Weinberg, the physicist, says something—and this doesn't cover all the religion, I wrote a lot about respect for Christian heritage and so on—but at least referring to religious fundamentalism, there is something nice in what Steven Weinberg said. What did he say? He said that without religion good people do good things, bad people did bad things like usual. But that you need religion to make good people do bad things, you know, for that additional push. I'm saying it's the same in East the horror of communism was not that bad people did bad things, but that it made people who thought they were good do bad things thinking that they were doing good. You know the tragedy was deeper. That's why, for example, you should read it, you learn a lot, Robert Conquest, the big chronicles of communist crimes. But the background theoretically is not strong enough. The story is always this one: "Oh what a bad guy Stalin was doing all these horrible." No, communism is not a problem of bad people doing bad things. It's a authentic tragedy of good people pursuing good starting to do bad things. So what I'm saying is that no illusion here. I am not I mean if there was a catastrophe it was the 20th-century communism. What I'm nonetheless saying is that we have a whole series of antagonisms today. One is this toxic immigrants, new walls. You know we were happy you know that if the metaphor of of the end of communism is the walls are falling down, now as we all know the walls are again going up all around. West Bank, European Union, sometimes metaphorical walls often real walls, Mexico, United States and so on and so on. The other problem ecology, I think. I cannot now go into it, but I think ecology is in the long term a problem which you cannot solve with market measures. You can do a lot of good things with market like include the price sorry ecological damage as an externality, but simply the stakes are too high. Because market in order to work needs time. You know what I mean? Like you try this, you try that, the best wins, if I’m not so sure. But the problem is that with Chernobyl you cannot say one Chernobyl the other Chernobyl okay before we find the solution through market we will be all that. Then intellectual property, as I already said. Then even biogenetics, I think. You know Fukuyama of all people, Fukuyama who was this big utopian, the end of history, now thinks now renounces his thesis. He thinks that that biogenetics is a strong argument enough. He sees very clearly that biogenetics brought us something which is a totally new situation where all the coordinates are mixed. And I agree, let me conclude with the last even story detail. I read two weeks ago that in England they already constructed a first wheelchair for crippled people which is run totally by thoughts. Yeah you know what they did? They your you have some kind of a cap with I don't know what brain detectors on your head. And it's still very primitive, like it cannot really read your mind but it can do something primitive. It can be done. It can read if you think strongly about forward, backward, left, right. It somehow detect so you know you sit and you just think strongly forward, your wheelchair moves forward. I mean now you'll say what's so horrible about this? It is because in a way the very fundamental what is our being human? Our being human is experience says I have my free thought, I'm here, you know, my thought is here, reality is out. Now you will say but this is wonderful, we are becoming like god. Like you know I think my thinking immediately has effects on reality. You know the problem is to put it in vulgar pornographic terms that what goes out also goes in, no? If it goes in this direction, it also goes in the opposite direction. For example I was told—this is a great hushed up debate in the United States now—that militaries are doing already like like crazy this kind of a experiments, no? That is to say they already isolated the waves which your brain radiates when you are in a total panic. And they already know how to produce them artificially. And then they bombard you and you are automatically in panic. They already have a simple machine, it can be carried in a suitcase I was told, where it covers about three-four football fields. I press a button, all people are there in panic. I mean no no I’m not here apocalyptic, it’s not the end of the world, I'm just saying things are happening which affect deeply the most elementary sense of what does it mean to be human. You know our understanding of being human till now is I have a this basic distance between inside, outside. I fantasize my free thoughts, reality is out. It’s getting undermined. And here I didn't forget really to conclude, Clinton was right. Clinton wrote along these lines a wonderful text without any irony a couple of months ago, I think again October-November where there was United Nations Food Day. He openly admitted, "We blew it," that's the title of the text. "With you know how United States and developed countries were putting immense pressure on the third world to open their agriculture to the market" and so on and so on. Clinton says this: "The result is mass hunger now." Why? Because how did it work? Many countries like Indonesia and so on followed it, Haiti, crucial case. What did this mean? The best land was privatized, bought by foreign companies who use it to export not even food, many industrial plants. Local people—it wasn't immediately a catastrophe for them—they work there, they get paid. But once you have a crisis like now, there are two things: first, all of a sudden this export industrial agricultural products plants, you cannot sell it, lower demand, and point two, because of global warming, because of new economic power of China and so on, as we all know, the price of food went double, triple. And because the countries cannot sustain themselves, you have hunger. Hunger is a new phenomenon. An incredible amount of people are already in hunger. I’m repeating Clinton and I know from my friends in Haiti. Do you know—I mean this is for me the tragic, all all people think "Oh now things are moving China, economy"—yeah yeah yeah but China and Haiti and many countries where... do you know that in Haiti I saw a TV report, they are now selling on the market how do you call it water mixed with earth mud when it rains—mud cakes, literally cakes made of mud. Because they discovered they have some minimal minerals and they somehow fill your stomach and so what I'm and then Clinton finishes in a very nice way. He said, "The lesson is food is too important to be simply left to the market." But now I just would push our friend Clinton—I saw the poster of that big image—a little bit further. Let's follow Clinton to the end. Food, yes. Then wouldn't you agree that education also, it's not simply it cannot be left to the market? Wouldn't you agree that arms industry couldn't be left to the market? Wouldn't you agree that that that that that health cannot be simply left to the market because then rich people will live and so on? So and so on and so on. At the end, maybe some Chinese plastic toy toys can be left to the market, no? And communism will be back, believe me. Thank you very much.