What is freedom today?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2022-05-27 · 1:39:42 · 11,335 words
democracygeopolitics-warideologyhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisliberalism-political-correctnessfascism-populismtechnology-ai-cyberspacerevolution-violencecommunism-socialismphilosophy-generaleveryday-life
Žižek delivers a lecture in Kyiv (or to a Kyiv-connected audience) on the nature of freedom, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Europe's crisis of political will. He argues that genuine freedom is not abstract individual choice but concrete freedom sustained by social rules, including their unwritten transgressions, and that Ukraine's armed resistance exemplifies a higher form of freedom in which necessity and free choice coincide. The talk moves through the Four Riders of the Apocalypse (pandemic, war, hunger, digital death of the human), the disintegration of the big Other, the problem of Western leftist pacifism and cynical ideology, and closes by framing Ukraine's struggle as a lesson for a Europe sunk in melancholic apathy.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 16
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The ability to act independently of social rules, exemplified in revolt or revolution, Hegel's term for freedom as pure negation of constraint.
Freedom that is only actual within a regulated social space, the ability to walk down a street safely because others are bound by shared norms and prohibitions.
as “prohibited prohibition”
A prohibition whose very existence must remain secret, you must obey it but are forbidden to publicly state that it exists, as with the Stalinist rule against criticizing Stalin.
The repressed, publicly excluded behavior that is nonetheless necessary for a social space to reproduce itself, e.g., the disavowed homosexual undercurrent that holds the homophobic army together.
as “Nachholende Revolution (catch-up revolution)”
Habermas's term for post-communist Eastern Europe's task of catching up with Western liberal democracy, Žižek invokes it only to reject it as insufficient.
as “retroactive rewriting of the past”
The idea that the symbolic meaning of past events changes with present developments, not the brute facts but their historical sense, which ideology constantly refashions.
The paradox (illustrated by the Appointment in Samarra) in which knowing and trying to escape a predicted catastrophe is precisely the mechanism that brings it about.
as “cynical ideology”
The mode of ideology where subjects know perfectly well what they are doing but do it anyway, following Sloterdijk's formula 'I know, but nonetheless…'
Byung-Chul Han's observation (endorsed by Žižek) that contemporary societies have lost the capacity for shared mourning and collective ritual, replacing them with neurotic private ceremonials.
The phenomenon (elaborated by Robert Pfaller) where the Other performs a passive experience, crying, laughing, praying, on your behalf, so you are relieved of actually having the experience.
The social substance / symbolic order that Žižek, following Lacan, identifies as the agency that holds collective ritual and objective feeling together, and which he argues is now disintegrating.
as “melancholic apathy”
Žižek's diagnosis of Western Europe's political condition: a paralysis in which awareness of crises produces hyperactivity (conferences, biennales) that ensures nothing actually changes.
Žižek's call for a collective response to contemporary crises that goes beyond military mobilization to include ecological, social, and political action.
as “freedom as the coincidence of free choice and necessity”
Žižek's definition of the highest freedom: doing freely what you cannot not do, exemplified by love and by the Ukrainian fighters' decision to resist.
The term raised by the interlocutor (and engaged by Žižek) for Russia's specific contemporary ideology, which Žižek treats as a variant of fascism grounded in explicitly published ideologues like Ivan Ilyin.
as “harmonious society”
Chinese Communist Party's official slogan for a society where each member occupies their proper place, which Žižek identifies as corporate fascism in a new idiom.
Stories he reaches for 9
In the Soviet Union it was forbidden to criticize Stalin, but it was equally forbidden to publicly state that this prohibition existed. Announcing the rule was more dangerous than breaking it.
“It was prohibited to criticize Stalin, but this prohibition itself had to remain secret. You will disappear even faster, I claim.”
At the Glasgow COP conference all the right statements were made about global warming, but no adequate action followed, the paradigm of knowing + not acting that actualizes catastrophe.
“They were saying all the right things, but nothing followed.”
When the DDR collapsed, Stasi chief Erich Mielke addressed parliament saying 'Aber ich liebe euch alle' (I love you all), Žižek uses this as the paradigm of totalitarian love that secretly excludes the traitors to be liquidated.
“Erich Mielke came to the parliament and said: Aber ich liebe euch alle. When they say I love you all, it always means except the traitors who have to be liquidated.”
When asked at the Geneva Korean War negotiations what he thought of the French Revolution, Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai replied: 'It is still too early to tell', illustrating how the meaning of historical events remains open.
“A French journalist asked Zhou Enlai: What does he think about the French Revolution? Zhou Enlai replied: It is still too early to tell.”
In Mozart's Don Giovanni, all characters enthusiastically unite in singing 'long live freedom,' but each faction projects its own entirely different meaning into the word.
“Although the entire group is enthusiastically unified around the call to freedom, each subgroup probably projects into libertà, freedom, its own dreams and hopes.”
Žižek cites his favorite Polish graffiti: 'Life is a disease transmitted by sex which always ends with death', deployed as an ironic definition of biological life before pivoting to a more radical sense of 'death.'
“Life is a disease transmitted by sex which always ends with death.”
On a visit to China ten years prior, Žižek asked what 'harmonious society' means; he was told it means every individual is at their proper place doing their specific role, which he instantly identifies as corporate fascism.
“It means a society where every part, individual, is at its own place and does his/her specific work. I said: Now I understand, in Europe we call this corporate fascism.”
Trump supporters invading the Capitol claimed to be acting freely to protect their liberty, the paradigm case of abstract freedom deployed to destroy concrete freedom.
“When a crowd of populist partisans of Donald Trump invaded the Capitol. They did a revolution.”
Oedipus's parents, trying to avert the oracle, send him away, which sets in motion the very events predicted. Had they ignored the prophecy, there would have been no Oedipus complex.
“If the parents of Oedipus were to say: Okay, if it happens, it happens, who cares about the prophecy, nothing would happen. There would have been no Oedipus complex.”
Works invoked 4
Don Giovanni opera
Žižek describes himself as an 'opera lover' and uses the Act One finale's 'Viva la libertà' chorus to illustrate the emptiness of political universals.
Don't Look Up film
Described as 'not a great movie, but somehow interesting'; used to illustrate the figure of the Other who 'doesn't know for me', collective disavowal of known catastrophe.
Book of Revelation book
The Four Riders of the Apocalypse serve as the organizing frame for Žižek's survey of contemporary crises (plague, war, hunger, death).
Source of the Sartre quote on freedom under German occupation; used to ground the freedom/liberty distinction.
People invoked 30
Paul Mason positive
Cited as an example of a genuine leftist who is absolutely pro-Ukraine, in contrast to the 'fake leftists.'
Philip Gosse positive
The creationist 'priest' (actually naturalist) who claimed God created fossils directly, used as an adequate model of ideological retroaction even though his theory is false as science.
Zhou Enlai positive
Cited for his famous remark that it is 'still too early to tell' about the French Revolution, used to illustrate how historical meaning remains open and retroactively alterable.
Ivan Ilyin negative
Described as a 1920s thinker who criticized Western fascism for being 'not authentic enough'; identified as Putin's semi-official ideological figure whose books are given to military conscripts.
William Somerset Maugham positive
Mentioned as one of the retellers of the Appointment in Samarra story, used to illustrate self-fulfilling fate.
Steve Bannon negative
Noted as sharing with Dugin/Putin the same message to Europe: celebrating individual nations but opposing United Europe.
Jacques Lacan positive
Cited for the concept of the big Other as the social substance / symbolic agency underlying collective feeling and ritual.
Robert Pfaller positive
Described as 'my good friend Austrian philosopher'; credited with elaborating the concept of interpassivity.
Donald Trump negative
Cited as the paradigm of violating unwritten political norms without technically breaking the law; noted for sharing with Putin a hostility to United Europe.
Dmitry Medvedev negative
Cited for proposing a formula of 'egalitarian globalization' that would 'respect' other values, which Žižek reads as a cover for authoritarian solidarity among rulers.
Étienne Balibar positive
Cited for the 'honestly brutal' formulation that 'pacifism is not an option' apropos Ukraine, used to support Žižek's anti-pacifist position.
Alain Badiou positive
Referred to as 'my French friend' and credited with pointing out the significance of the English/French locution 'to fall in love', the 'fall' being philosophically important.
Elon Musk negative
Mentioned briefly, Žižek acknowledges Musk did good things for Ukraine (Starlink implied) but says his plan to privatize Twitter is 'very dangerous.'
Adrian Johnston positive
Described as 'my good friend'; quoted at length on the global condition of being stuck, knowing what needs fixing but being unable to act.
T. S. Eliot positive
Quoted on the retroactive alteration of past works by new creations, used to support Žižek's thesis of retroactive historical meaning.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy positive
Praised as an example of genuine heroism, fully identifying with an externally adopted role ('playing it for the real') rather than performing authentic self-discovery; also endorsed for saying Ukraine is fighting for Europe.
Yanis Varoufakis negative
Listed among 'fake leftists' who apply an automatic sympathy toward any obstacle to American imperialism, thereby failing to properly assess Russia's fascist ideology.
Alexander Dugin negative
Dismissed as 'a clown'; mentioned alongside Ivan Ilyin as representative of Russia's openly proto-fascist ideological foundations.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Cited for his formula of cynicism, 'I know what I am doing, but I'm nonetheless doing it', which Žižek uses to characterize contemporary ideological functioning.
John Mearsheimer negative
Grouped with Chomsky as underestimating Putin's geopolitical ambitions and the growth of Russian military hysteria prior to the invasion.
Byung-Chul Han positive
Called a 'South Korean social theorist now popular in the West'; endorsed for his observation about the pathological disintegration of collective rituals in contemporary society.
Erich Mielke negative
DDR Stasi chief used as example of totalitarian love ('I love you all') that secretly excludes the enemies to be liquidated.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited as a 'great Marxist, a good one' for the idea that in every revolution the past itself must be redeemed, used to frame Ukraine's fight as redemption of its historical past.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Called 'my favorite theologian' and cited on the impossibility of choosing a religion from outside, only once you believe do you understand the reasons, paralleling the structure of love.
Timothy Snyder positive
When asked about Snyder's characterization of Russia as a fascist regime, Žižek says he agrees with that claim.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Žižek rejects both Habermas's 'catch-up revolution' formula for Eastern Europe and his later warning against Ukraine 'morally blackmailing' Europe and against a return to heroic military spirit.
Vladimir Putin negative
Identified as pursuing a project to destroy United Europe and Western liberal democracy; said to share with Trump a hatred of United Europe; described as governing through openly proto-fascist and theological ideology (Ilyin).
Noam Chomsky negative
Grouped with Mearsheimer as misreading the Ukraine war by ignoring Russia's own ideological trajectory and missing the build-up of Russian military hysteria.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited as the source of the abstract/concrete freedom distinction; Žižek refers to 'Hegel the philosopher' and builds his entire opening framework around Hegelian categories.
Jean-Paul Sartre positive
Quoted from his December 1944 Atlantic essay on French freedom under Nazi occupation to illustrate the freedom/liberty distinction in conditions of resistance.
What it argues
abstract vs. concrete freedominherent transgression and unwritten social rulesUkraine's resistance as exemplary ethical-political actthe Four Riders of the Apocalypse as contemporary crisesWestern leftist pacifism and melancholic apathythe disintegration of the big Other and collapse of collective ritualfreedom as the coincidence of free choice and necessity
Dialectical moves 10
“The army violently rejects homosexuality precisely because it relies on disavowed homosexuality as the key component of male bonding.”
Homophobia is not the opposite of homosexual desire in military culture but its protective cover, the prohibition sustains what it ostensibly excludes.
“For nothing, you get three years — not ten. Everything has a price, including nothing.”
There is no neutral zero in social space; even 'nothing' is tariffed by power, meaning subjects are always already guilty.
“It was prohibited to criticize Stalin — but this prohibition itself had to remain secret. Stating the prohibition was more dangerous than breaking it.”
The meta-prohibition (the prohibition on acknowledging the prohibition) is the real mechanism of totalitarian control.
“In Ukraine today, you who fight the Russian invasion are free — and you fight for liberty. The problem in the West is that people think they must act freely, violate the rules, in order to protect their liberty.”
Freedom (existential, engaged) and liberty (regulated legal order) are inverted: fighters in a war have freedom while those in peace mistake rule-breaking for it.
“The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past — so we are free to change not only the future but even our past.”
Agency is retroactive: meaningful historical change rewrites the symbolic significance of prior events, not just the trajectory ahead.
“If you know your fate and try to avoid it, that is precisely how fate realizes itself; if you ignore the prophecy, nothing would have happened.”
Self-fulfilling prophecy inverts the commonsense view: knowing + fleeing enacts the doom; indifference would have dissolved it.
“True heroism is not looking deep into yourself and becoming what you are — true heroism is adopting a mask and playing it to the end, to death.”
Authenticity is not self-discovery but identification with an externally assumed role; depth is found in fidelity to a persona, not in interiority.
“Love is a free choice — but a free choice that you experience as your deepest necessity. You never fall in love in the present; you discover you already are in love.”
Love is the paradigm case of the coincidence of freedom and necessity: the freest act is the one you could not have done otherwise.
“Our real fear in Europe is not that Ukraine will be crushed — it is exactly the opposite: that Ukraine will not be crushed, that the war will just go on.”
Europe's stated solidarity conceals an unconscious wish for Ukrainian defeat, which would allow a comfortable return to normality and profitable mourning.
“The TV screen laughed for me and I felt relaxed as if I had laughed — the Other takes over not just action but the passive experience itself.”
Interpassivity exceeds mere delegation of labor; it is the outsourcing of inner subjective states to the Other.
Claims 19
asserts
In every social community there is no neutral 'nothing' — everything has a price set by those in power, making all subjects a priori guilty.freedom, guilt, social power
asserts
Concrete freedom — the only real freedom — is not absence of rules but is sustained by a complex web of rules, prohibitions, and their constitutive transgressions.concrete vs. abstract freedom
asserts
The army's homophobia presupposes a disavowed homosexual male bonding that is the libidinal glue of military community — the transgression sustains itself only by censoring its own foundation.inherent transgression, sexuality, military
asserts
Political slogans like 'freedom' achieve unity precisely by being empty — each faction projects its own meaning into the same signifier, as in the Don Giovanni finale.political universality, ideology, freedom
asserts
Pacifism is not a viable option in the Ukraine war; abstract calls for peace serve the occupier, who always 'sincerely' wants peace in the territory it holds.pacifism, Ukraine-Russia war
rejects
Ukraine catching up with Western liberal democracy is insufficient as a goal because Western liberal democracy is itself in deep crisis.Habermas's catch-up revolution, Western liberalism
asserts
Ideology today functions in a thoroughly cynical mode: subjects know what they are doing is destructive or false, but continue doing it anyway.cynical ideology, late capitalism
asserts
The big Other — the symbolic social substance that makes collective ritual possible — is slowly disintegrating in contemporary society.the big Other, collective ritual
asserts
We are caught in a self-fulfilling catastrophe: knowing about ecological and geopolitical threats but not reacting seriously is precisely how the fate actualizes itself.ecological crisis, political paralysis, self-fulfilling prophecy
asserts
Putin's project is not merely about Ukraine but about destroying the United Europe project and the European way of life.Russian imperialism, European project
asserts
Russia's ideology (Dugin, Ilyin) is openly proto-fascist and theological, not leftist; Western leftists who sympathize with Russia as anti-imperialist are making a category error.Russian ideology, fascism, Western left
asserts
Zelensky's greatness lies not in authentic self-discovery but in fully identifying with a role adopted from outside — true heroism is playing a mask to the end.authenticity, heroism, Zelensky
asserts
The highest freedom is when free choice and necessity coincide — you do what you cannot not do — as exemplified by love and Ukraine's fighters.freedom, necessity, love, resistance
asserts
Ukraine's struggle is not only for its future but for the retroactive redemption of its past; defeat would allow winners to rewrite Ukrainian history out of existence.historical memory, Ukraine, ideological retroaction
rejects
The Western left's pseudo-Marxist reductionism (war as military-industrial profiteering) is a new form of conspiracy theory that erases the actual ideological stakes.Western left, conspiracy theory, Ukraine war
asserts
The left must not be written off because Ukraine, if it survives free, will need leftist allies to avoid being merely exploited by Western capitalism.left politics, Ukraine's post-war future
asserts
Russia's 'tolerant multipolarity' (Medvedev's formula) is in practice solidarity among authoritarians in power against any popular revolt.Russian multipolar ideology, authoritarianism
asserts
China's 'harmonious society' is corporate fascism under another name — a society where each individual is fixed in their proper place.Chinese political ideology, fascism
asserts
The Neuralink/wired-brain prospect threatens to destroy the last private space of human freedom — the gap between inner thought and outward behavior.digital technology, human freedom, Neuralink
Quotes 18
“In every social community, there is no neutral nothing. Everything has a price determined by those in power. Which means that we are all, in some sense, a priori guilty.”Slavoj Žižek · social guilt and the tariff on innocence
“My freedom is only actual as freedom within certain social spaces regulated by rules and prohibitions.”Slavoj Žižek · concrete freedom requires rules
“A social space is not just the space of what is permitted, but also the space of what is repressed, excluded from the public space, but simultaneously necessary for this public space to reproduce itself.”Slavoj Žižek · inherent transgression as social necessity
“Transgression works only by censoring its own libidinal foundation. Censoring, not eliminating it.”Slavoj Žižek · inherent transgression — censoring not eliminating
“I know what I am doing, but I'm nonetheless doing it.”Slavoj Žižek · Sloterdijk's formula for cynical ideology
“In Ukraine today, you who fight the Russian invasion are free and you fight for liberty.”Slavoj Žižek · freedom/liberty distinction applied to Ukraine
“Every ideology in some sense creates fossils. It doesn't create just the present, it creates an imagined past which fits the present.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology creates retroactive pasts
“You are not only trying to sustain the space for your future. You are trying to redeem your past.”Slavoj Žižek · Ukraine's fight as redemption of the past (Benjamin)
“What if you knowing about your fate and trying to avoid it is how what you think is your fate realizes itself?”Slavoj Žižek · self-fulfilling prophecy and fate
“True heroism is you adopt a certain mask, role, and you play it to the end, to death.”Slavoj Žižek · heroism as fidelity to an adopted role, not authentic depth
“You never fall in love in the present. All of a sudden you discover you already are in love.”Slavoj Žižek · love as retroactive discovery of necessity
“The deepest choices are doing freely what you have to do.”Slavoj Žižek · freedom as coincidence of choice and necessity
“You screwed it up for us. You simply resisted where secretly you were not expected to resist. That was the hypocrisy of the West.”Slavoj Žižek · West's unconscious wish for Ukrainian defeat
“Occupiers always sincerely want peace in the territory they hold.”Slavoj Žižek · pacifism serves the occupier
“Freedom, real freedom hurts. Real freedom is not I go to a candy store, strawberry cake or other.”Slavoj Žižek · authentic freedom as painful necessity, not consumer choice
“Love is a catastrophe. Imagine you are a free man and woman... and then you fall passionately in love. All your life is ruined.”Slavoj Žižek · love as catastrophic freedom
“Life is a disease transmitted by sex which always ends with death.”Slavoj Žižek · darkly comic definition of biological life
“Don't write off the left. Remember that there is a guy here, our common enemy, Putin, who is whatever he is, my God, he is not a leftist in any sense.”Slavoj Žižek · Putin is not leftist; don't conflate fake left with the left
Transcript 34 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I will begin with what will sound as the usual rhetoric, but this time I mean it seriously. It's an honor for me to be here. Because I think that places like Kyiv shouldn't be treated just in this patronizing way from my comfortable home. I say, oh, you are suffering, I should help you and so on. I have a mistrust of these big universities where they think they are the center of the world, big American, European universities, but you meet very stupid people today. My worst experiences are at Princeton, Yale and so on. So, let me begin. In an old Soviet joke, a new arrival to Gulag condemned to ten years is asked by other prisoners: What were you given ten years for? The new arrival answers: For nothing! I'm guilty of nothing. Others shout back at him: Don't lie to us! Everybody knows here that for nothing, you get three years, not ten. There is, I think, a profound wisdom in this joke. In every social community, there is no neutral nothing. Everything has a price determined by those in power. Which means that we are all, in some sense, a priori guilty and that you have to work hard to get rid of this guilt and being given nothing. Why? Because we are free, but this freedom is necessarily ambiguous. I want to develop this ambiguity, which is not just linked to totalitarian regimes or whatever, but it's general, I think. With, I don't know how it works in your language, in Slovene we also can do it, namely, what in English they have is two terms for freedom: freedom and liberty. I think they can be interpreted as the distinction between what Hegel, the philosopher, called abstract freedom and concrete freedom. Abstract freedom is the ability to do what you want independently of social rules and customs. You can even violate these rules and so on. Of course, exemplarily in a revolt, war, revolutionary situation. Concrete freedom is the freedom sustained by a set of rules and customs. My freedom is only actual as freedom within certain social spaces regulated by rules and prohibitions. I can walk freely along a busy street because I can be reasonably sure that others on the street will behave in a civilized way towards me. That if they attack me or if they insult me, they will be punished. So, let me take the case of freedom to speak and communicate with others. I can only exert this freedom if I obey the commonly established rules of language, with all their ambiguities and inclusive of the unwritten rules, messages between the lines. And to this, this may be a particular, unimportant point, but I think it is crucial even to understand this politics, how Putin is acting, how Russians are acting. Namely, I want now to refer to your everyday experience even. We all know that if you live in a community where you speak certain language, which is regulated by certain explicit rules, what you can do, what you cannot do, it's never as simple as that. Every community doesn't simply obey rules. You have deeper rules which tells you which rules not only you can violate a little bit, but which rules you are even expected to violate. Especially since you are in war now, in the army life, many things are prohibited, but de facto you are expected to violate these rules. On the other hand, even more interesting for me, there are things that you are allowed to do, even solicited, but you are not expected to do them. For example, I don't know if in your country you have the same custom. Let's say that I go with Timothy to a restaurant. Let's say that maybe, I'm not even sure, I have more money than you, I invite you, so it's clear that I will pay. But in my country, when the bill arrives, you have to pretend for some time: No, no, I will contribute, let's share the money and so on. It's a pure formality because you are expected to say okay then you pay after, I don't know, seconds. But this rule has to be obeyed. So, what interests me immensely are, along these lines, are prohibitions which are themselves prohibited, in the sense that you must obey them, but you are prohibited to state even the prohibition publicly. My popular example from Stalinism: in Soviet Union, there was not only prohibited to criticize publicly Stalin, of course. It was also prohibited to publicly say that it is prohibited to criticize Stalin. Imagine we are in a Central Committee session, I'm Stalin, somebody raises his hand and criticizes me. Okay, next day the question will be who was that guy, to see him alive? But let's imagine then, then somebody else, like you Timothy, you stand up and say to this guy who attacked me, Stalin: Are you stupid? Don't you know in our country it is prohibited to criticize Stalin? You will disappear even faster, I claim. You see the paradox? It was prohibited to criticize Stalin, but this prohibition itself had to remain secret. And I think that all our diplomacy today, even war moves, when Putin says something and so on, it's always done in this way that you always have to raise the question: What are the unwritten rules? Is it meant literally what he says? The problem today is that politicians often violate the unwritten rules. You know, that's the horror in United States, Donald Trump was doing this. He usually didn't break the law, but it's part of a communal consensus that you do things in a certain way, manners. This is the substance of our lives. Now, let me go a step further concerning the army in this line of. We encounter here what I call inherent transgression. A social space is not just the space of what is permitted, but also the space of what is repressed, excluded from the public space, but simultaneously necessary for this public space to reproduce itself. Let me ask, give you an example, a naive question: why does the army (military, right) so strongly resist publicly accepting homosexuals into its ranks? There is only one consistent answer, I think: not because homosexuality poses a threat to the alleged patriarchal phallic or what, libidinal economy of the army. Just the contrary, because the army community itself relies on a disavowed repressed homosexuality as the key component of the soldiers' male bonding. I experienced this when, years ago, I was serving in the infamous Yugoslav People's Army. Two things strike me immediately. On the one hand, the army life was homophobic to the extreme. If somebody was discovered to be gay, he was beaten, humiliated by other soldiers before, after a week or so, being dismissed from the army. But at the same time, everyday army life was full of atmosphere of homosexual innuendos. Like I remember in my unit, when in the morning you met your another soldier, your friend, you never simply said hello, good morning. In my unit, the expression to be used was in Serbo-Croat: puši kurac, which means smoke my prick. And this formula was so standardized that we even didn't pronounce it with a small obscene smile. It was just a pure act of politeness. So, the key point not to be missed here is that this fragile coexistence of extreme violent homophobia with publicly disavowed homosexuality bears witness to the fact that in a military community, transgression works only by censoring its own libidinal foundation. Censoring, not eliminating it. So, again, our space of concrete freedom is sustained by such ambiguous rules. That's my first point. My second point: the contours of freedom are, of course, historically variable. The predominant notion of freedom is always historically specific. To simplify to the utmost: in traditional societies, freedom does not refer to equality. Freedom means that each person should be free to play its specific role in the hierarchic order. In modern societies, freedom is linked to abstract legal equality and personal liberty. A poor worker and a rich employer of him are equally free. In 20th century, freedom was more and more linked to social circumstances which enable you to actualize it, freedom. Minimal welfare, free education and so on. Today, the accent is on the freedom of choice, which I think imply that we ignore how the very frame of choices is imposed on individuals. There are always some choices which are de facto privilege. And I think true freedom begins when you are allowed to question what is meant by freedom, not just fitting into freedom which is given to you. What this means is that at this very moment when we are supporting Ukraine in its struggle for freedom, we should be attentive to what this freedom is or will be. As an opera lover, I remember the finale of the Act One of Mozart's Don Giovanni, which begins with Don Giovanni's powerful appeal to all present: Viva la libertà!, long live freedom. This is repeated forcefully by all. The music gets stuck at this point of full engagement. But the catch is, of course, that although the entire group is enthusiastically unified around the call to freedom, each subgroup probably projects into libertà, freedom, its own dreams and hopes. And that's for me the problem. Imagine a situation of political unity where all sides are united under the sign of freedom, but every particular group projects a different meaning into this universality. Freedom for some means anarchic freedom outside the state law, for others freedom of property, for others yet social conditions which allow individuals to realize your potentials and so on, and so on. So this is my question: now in Ukraine, you are in that Don Giovanni stage. You have an extraordinary unity. You are all crying like Don Giovanni: Viva la libertà!. But if or, more hopefully, when you will succeed in your struggle, you will face the true test: which freedom should you finally enjoy? Should you just try to catch up with Western liberal democracy? I'm not sure. Western liberal democracy is now in a deep crisis. I don't think you should follow the formula proposed by Jürgen Habermas, who used this term in German it's Nachholende, catch-up revolution, that all you can do in post-communist East is to catch up with Western Europe. It's not bad to do this, but again, Western Europe is in a deep crisis now. And you know where I see the crisis? Think of movements like Podemos in Spain, Yellow Vests in France. They formulate a certain discontent of population, but this discontent cannot be translated into the existing political system. This situation is very dangerous. So this, I am afraid, will not be enough for you, just let's became like Western Europe. Should you join the conservative populist axis of Poland and Hungary? I'm skeptical towards this. So what, what what, sorry... What then should you do? Well, first, you are doing the right thing now. Back to Hegel. Hegel knew very well that this concrete freedom is fragile. There are moments when abstract freedom has to intervene. What do I mean by this? Sorry, I have here I got an opinion poll... Okay, whatever, sorry, something appeared. Okay, let's go on. In the December '44 issue of The Atlantic, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote immediately after France was liberated, I quote Sartre: Never were we freer than under the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, and first of all our right to speak. They, the Germans, insulted us to our faces. And that is why the Resistance was a true democracy. For the soldier, for his superior, the same danger, the same loneliness, the same responsibility, the same absolute freedom within the discipline. This situation, full of anxiety and danger, was freedom, not liberty. Liberty was established when post-war normality returned. So in Ukraine today, you who fight the Russian invasion are free and you fight for liberty. The problem I see here, not with you, but in the West, is that we are more and more approaching a situation in which millions of people think that they have to act freely, violate the rules, in order to protect their liberty, their social order. Remember on January 6th, when a crowd of populist partisans of Donald Trump invaded the Capital, sorry, the Capitol. They did a revolution. So we are in a mess. What is this mess about? The multiple crises and even apocalyptic projects, prospects, that we are facing today seem to evoke more and more ominously the Four Riders of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation: plague, war, hunger, death. Although global awareness of the threat is growing, it is not allowed followed by adequate activity. So the Four Riders, Raiders, are galloping faster and faster. First: plague. At the end of COVID exploded and changed our lives forever. And it is still here and I think it will remain. We can expect other new waves or other pandemics. War. With the Russian attack on Ukraine, we have a hot war in Europe. Even if some kind of truce will be enforced, war forcefully asserted itself as a general condition of our lives, so that peace is just a temporary exception. We all want peace, but I'm here totally on your side against some of my pseudo-leftist Western friends. Abstract calls for peace are not enough. Peace alone is not a term which allows us to draw the key political difference. Occupiers always sincerely want peace in the territory they hold. Germany definitely wanted peace in the occupied France from till '44. Israel wants peace on the occupied West Bank. And Russia is, as they say, and in some stupid sense it's true, in a mission for peace in Ukraine. But peace means we totally control the situation. That's why, as Étienne Balibar put it in an honestly brutal way, today a propos Ukraine, pacifism is not an option. Yes, we should prevent a new great war, but the only way to do it is to engage in a total mobilization against the situation in which we are. The third Rider of the Apocalypse: hunger. It's also on the horizon. I think the greatest scandal today, one of the is what Russia is doing in Odessa now. You have millions of tons of grain in the third world, third world people begin to starve and it's it means hunger. Even more, because of global warming, warming, are we ready for mass migrations? There will be, I think, riots and so on. We are approaching very dangerous stage. My last, fourth Rider of the Apocalypse: death. I don't mean here death in general. What has to say about death is was said in my my my favorite Polish graffiti from years ago: It's the best definition of life that I know. Life is a disease transmitted by sex which always ends with death. But what I mean with death as a fourth rider is something much more radical. I've written about it. I mean the end of humanity as we know it, which is threatening us through the latest modes of digital control of our daily lives. Especially the prospect of our of what some people call wired brain, Neuralink, the direct link between our thinking processes and digital machines. This is not a utopia, it is already up to some level happening. And can you even imagine how this will change our lives? Even my thoughts will no longer be mine. And friends from China, who are now even afraid to email me, censored, are giving to me so many data about this, how in some Chinese elementary schools pupils already have to wear just a tiny ring around their head which measures their brain activity, not thoughts, but the idea is that it shows on the teacher's computer if you are not actively following the class. That's the future. So, what will happen? Will we still be human? In what sense will we be free? Isn't our basic freedom the freedom of thought in the simple sense that I may appear, I don't mean you personally, Timothy, but I appear to be friendly to you, but who knows what do I think in my head, you know? That's if I am deprived of this, in a way I'm deprived of a very distance between what goes in myself and outside world. In a way I'm no longer human. So, are we doomed? Do I have only bad news? No, because at the same time we are free. Free in a radical sense of being able to change not only the future but even our past. What do I mean by this? Let me begin with a quote from the great conservative poet T.S. Eliot, quote: What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. End of quote. What do we mean by this? Let's take the example of Shakespeare. A great staging of Hamlet today is not just a new interpretation of the play. It in a way fills the empty spaces, the gaps in Shakespeare's play itself. Shakespeare didn't know fully what he is saying. The play is full of inconsistencies. So that's my idea, I don't have time to go into it now, I like a kind of the idea of a kind of unfinished ontology. The world is not fully here. So with every progress forwards, the meaning, not the facts (when you kill millions people it's a fact, but the meaning of the past changes). This is where ideology enters and this is of course where you Ukraine enter. I will tell you how. I remember how many of you know this, I know a wonderful detail from the history of Darwinism. Darwin had a friend, a deep, a priest, who believed literally in the Bible but at the same time saw the truth of Darwin's theory. So he had a problem, how to reconcile the proofs of the evolutionary theory, fossils and so on which show how life on Earth slowly developed in millions of years, and the Bible which, taken literally, tells that the world was created about years B.C., before Christ. So if the world was created years ago, how can we explain the fossils? Ah, the guy, the priest, I forgot his name, gave a wonderful answer: When God created the world, he directly created fossils as such. So that, you know, the way you create a movie set, a false background. He gave us a false opening. God created traces of an imagined past. This Christian solution, of course, is not true as a scientific theory, but it provides an adequate theory of ideology. Every ideology in some sense creates fossils. It doesn't create just the present, it creates an imagined past which fits the present. And are we aware, these are details, how many of the things we identify today as our past were created in this retroactive way? For example, my Scottish friend told me that these, what do you call them, kilt, the skirts worn by men, they were invented in Scottish national revival early 19th century. Or, you know, the Vikings wearing horns or how do you put it in their, on their heads, this was invented, this was even invented through opera stagings around We are always reinventing our past. Why am I losing time by this? Because politics works in the same time. With all the criticism of Chinese communism, I like how in in Geneva, during the negotiations to end Korean War, a French journalist asked Zhou Enlai, Chinese Prime Minister who was there: What does he think about the French Revolution? Zhou Enlai replied: It is still too early to tell. In a way he was right. When in Eastern Europe in 1990s so-called people's democracies, communism, disintegrated, the struggle for the historical place of the French Revolution exploded again. Conservatives claimed that with the fall of communism, the entire era which began exactly years ago in came at the end. The epoch of revolutions is over. Is it true or not? It depends on what will happen. So again, in every historical conjuncture, present is not only present, it also encompasses a perspective on the past, permanent to this present. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the October Revolution is no longer, is no longer perceived as the beginning of a new progressive epoch, but the beginning of a catastrophic misdirection of history which reached its end in So why am I telling you this? Because I think, please be aware, you are... but I repeat it... in your struggle against Russian invasion now, you are not only trying to sustain the space for your future. You are trying to... what is at stake is also your past. You know Walter Benjamin, the great Marxist, a good one, said that in every revolution what is to be redeemed is also the past itself. All past progressive attempts. In the same sense, you are now trying to redeem your past. If you lose, your past will be rewritten by the winners and you will even be evoked with some sympathy maybe, but: Ah, you know, that half-disappeared nation which tried to..., you are fighting for your past. Of course, now let's go on, more and more complex. Don't be too bored, things will get more different, more interesting now. But this change of the past, of course, happens only at the level of symbolic space. Brutal reality cannot be changed. But this opens another paradoxical position. What about necessity or fate, which can realize itself only through being known? That's our danger today. What do I mean is... I'm sorry, this is known to some of you... my favorite, this paradoxical story, it's an ancient Arab story about the appointment in Samarra. It was retold by William Somerset Maugham and many other writers. Here is the story, I'm sorry if you know it: a servant on an errand in the busy market of Baghdad meets Death there. Terrified by seeing Death, he runs home to his master and asks him to give him a horse so that he can ride all the day and reach quickly Samarra, another city in the north of Iraq where Death will not find him. The good master not only gives the servant a horse, but goes himself to the market after to look for Death. Finds Death and shouts at Death: Why did you scare my faithful servant? Death replies: But I didn't want to scare your servant. I was just surprised about what was he doing here in Baghdad when I have an appointment in Samarra with him tomorrow. So the message of this story is a beautiful one. It's not that man's demise is impossible to avoid, that trying to twist free of it will only tighten the grip of Death. But rather the exact opposite: what if you knowing about your fate and trying to avoid it is how what you think is your fate realizes itself? Should I even quote the best known example, Oedipus? You know how it all begins: parents of Oedipus are told your son will marry his mother, kill his father, so to get rid of this they send him away. And then, then this is how it happens. Oedipus wanders around, kills a man not knowing it's his father and so on and so on. The paradox is that if the parents of Oedipus were to say: Okay, if it happens, it happens, who cares about the prophecy, nothing would happen. There would be no, there would have been no Oedipus, no Oedipus complex and so on and so on. Here again, you in Ukraine were doing the right thing. Now I will say what has this to do with Ukraine. I don't know how it is with you, but even among leftist liberals in the West, it was popular to say: Yes, it's nice, you try to resist, but basically, looked all of it, you don't have a chance, you are lost. And no, you said: Okay, maybe this is our fate, but we behave as if we don't know our fate, we fight. I will return to this later. But I think that we are caught in this paradox today. We think that how we know what is awaiting us, media are telling us all the time: ecological crisis, global warming, viruses. But precisely through knowing it and not reacting seriously to it, the fate actualizes itself. This is why, permit me to quote my good friend Adrian Johnston and how he characterized today's geopolitical situation (a long quote): He wrote: Today we are in a situation in which the world's societies and humanity as a whole are facing multiple acute crises: global pandemic, environmental disasters, massive inequality, poverty, wars and so on; yet seem unable to take measures necessary to resolve the crisis. We know things are broken. We know what needs fixing. We even sometimes have ideas about how to fix things. But nevertheless, we keep doing nothing either to mend damage already done or to prevent further damage. So we are in some sense stuck. Why? The model of this stuckness was, remember half a year ago or when, the Glasgow conference on global warming. Yeah, they were saying all the right things, but nothing followed. There is a lesson I will later return of this. I think the paradox is that in Western capitalism, we are hyper-active and we are in an apathy precisely because things are happening so fast that we cannot make a step back and reflect on things. We are a little bit like compulsive neurotics. Believe me or not, I know what this means because I am one of them. Compulsive neurotics talk all the time, not because they want to say something, but, yes Jennifer, I'm afraid of you, but that if they stop talking for a second, others will see that all I'm saying is bullshit and ask me the serious question, you know? This hyper-activity where you are active not to achieve something, but precisely to make it sure that nothing has changed. And in Western Europe, what this means is that ideology functions more and more in a cynical way, which means to quote Peter Sloterdijk's formula of cynicism: I know what I am doing, but I'm nonetheless doing it. Knowing what we are doing doesn't prevent us from going on doing it. I don't know how much you were in earlier happier times part of it, but the true horror for me was are, I hate them, you know all these big art biennales, Venice, Venezia, Kassel. I know that's a paradox, their program is always the most radical critique of capitalism. Today's societies are commodified, we have to fight it and so on. But it doesn't matter, this same biennales perfectly fit capitalist self-reproduction. In socialism it can be the same. With you guys who are old enough to remember the horror of Soviet Union, probably was not like this, but in ex-Yugoslavia, when I was young, we had the ideology of self-management socialism. But the condition for this ideology to function was not to take it seriously. I had a guy who was a naive communist, he thinks self-management good idea, workers should really take over. He lost his job at Central Committee. Because he was considered dangerous. My God, he take things seriously then he will become a dissident if you take things seriously and so on and so on. Now the last metaphysical point, and then slowly I'm coming to the end. This totally cynical functioning is a moment, I think, of what the Korean, South Korean of course, social theorist who is now popular in the West, Byung-Chul Han, observed, observed very well as the, he calls it getting pathological of our collective rituals. We no longer know how to mourn properly. We just have neurotic private ceremonials, confessional experiences and so on. We no longer are able to do ritual acts which include feelings, but not feelings of isolated individuals. It's kind of objective collective feeling. This agency is what Lacan calls big Other, the social substance. And it's extremely important. What do I mean by this? One more example to understand this. I would like to remind you, maybe some of you know, the notion elaborated by my good friend Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller, the notion of interpassivity. What is interpassivity? Something beautiful, I think. Remember so-called weepers. You still find them in South of Greece, these were in traditional societies women you paid to cry for you, to do the mourning for you. It's beautiful, you can stay at home, watch pornography whatever, if your father dies, no, you are doing the mourning through others. Even to go more into the past, I always admired in Tibet, they have these praying wheels, you know. You write a prayer, you put it into a small wheel, you turn it around mechanically, and it counts as if you are praying. It doesn't matter what you are doing, thinking about sex or what, you are praying. Now I come to the crucial point. You will say: But okay, this goes only in primitive societies. No! My, I think the biggest contribution of United States of America to 20th century culture is something it's that's called, I think, canned laughter. You know, you watch a TV series, comic, and laughter is part of the soundtrack. You know what's the mystery of this? I remember when I was doing this, I returned to home that tired, I look at the TV screen, and I was too tired to laugh, but the TV screen laughed for me and I felt relaxed as if I have laughed. This is something wonderful. The other is not acting for you, the other is even taking over the passive experience for you. And I think that we are again less and less able to have this proper rituals where the big Other is involved. And, and that's I think a very dangerous thing. Did you see, it was well before the war, I hope it was shown there, the movie, it's not a great movie, but somehow it was interesting: Don't Look Up, where Meryl Streep plays the president. There you have the strange figure of the other who doesn't know for me. They all know catastrophe is real, some comet is approaching Earth, end of life, but they go on as if they don't know it, although they personally know it. This is more and more our, our situation. So now, really to conclude very fast. This big Other is slowly disintegrating. Let me give you another tragic example of big Other, it happened to a girlfriend of a friend of a friend of mine. She, no it was the other way around, sorry, boyfriend of her. She wanted to become a woman and she went through all the painful surgical procedures. And all her friends, friends supported her, everything seemed okay. Then on a certain day, she got from municipal city authorities a note saying: You are now officially a man. She killed herself instantly. You know, like it was as long as it was her private thing, it was okay. The moment it became registered by social authority, it was over. Okay, I don't want to go overtime because I wanted here to speak briefly about Elon Musk, who to you did good things, but a what... But the way he wants to privatize Twitter is very dangerous. I just want to end up with just end up nicely with a little bit in a little bit more optimistic way. I think that all is not so dark precisely because in situations that you are now, when in a way freedom, free choice and necessity overlap. This is the true freedom, much more than the freedom of choice. Let me mention the biggest mention the biggest example: love. If there is a free choice, it is that of a love object. You cannot order somebody to fall in love. But once you are in love, you experience love as your fate. You don't have a choice. And I wonder if you would agree. My idea is that you never fall in love in the present. All of a sudden you discover you already are in love. That's why you also never know the reason why you fall in why you fall in love. The moment you can say: Okay, this lady or man has nice legs, nice legs, nice eyes, another talks nicely and so on, and you make a choice, it's not love. So love is a wonderful example of how it's a free choice, but free choice which is at the same time a deep, the deepest necessity. And my point: your struggle is now the same one. Of course, in some formal sense, you have the choice: I will fight or not. But admit something, it's not the same choice as when you go to a sweet store: should I get a I shall get a strawberry cake or a chocolate cake? It's a choice where if you choose to fight, you choose it because you know that you cannot do it otherwise. You know, it's this radical choice where you realize: but I wouldn't be able to live with myself with not doing it. I think that today, just the conclusion now, this is what all we in Europe should learn from you. It's not just this superficial freedom of choices. Choice is not just that you click like it, not like it. The deepest choices are doing freely what you have to do. So what can we in Europe learn from you? During the first weeks of the war, we in Europe feared that Ukraine will be quickly crushed. But now we have to admit that our real fear is exactly the opposite one: that Ukraine will not be crushed, that the war will just go on and on. And I'm here very critical. I spoke with many people who said: oh the tragic fate, Ukraine will not be able to resist and so on. But secretly, this was I wouldn't say directly their desire, but that expectation. Wouldn't it be nice? You are crushed, you are no longer there, and then we can of course go through all the hypocrisy of mourning. You know, we would write wonderful books: what, how tragic was your fate and so on. But it will be over, after a couple of years we would make new peace with Russia or whatever. And you, I mean this as extreme love although I... it will sound vulgar... you screwed it up for us. You simply resisted where secretly you were not expected to resist. That was the hypocrisy of the West. What should have been good news: a smaller nation unexpectedly resisting brutal invasion is now something that we don't know what to do with it. And here I'm ashamed of some leftist colleagues of mine who play pacifism and warn against, like Jürgen Habermas did, about Ukraine morally blackmailing Europe, about the danger of returning to heroic military spirit. I think that the lesson of the war is that this golden era of Europe, where we could afford pacifism because we were under nuclear umbrella by the United States, it's over. And pacifism means just more and more compromises. I'm especially horrified by the insight proposed by some of my leftists ex-friends when they say that they oppose the war, they symp- everybody sympathize with Ukrainians, but they say they oppose the war because NATO is in the war just for economic capitalist reasons to further develop and strengthen the base of its military-industrial complex. And basically, what NATO is saying, what these leftists are saying to you is: Okay, resist somehow Russian aggression, but not with arms, because if you use Western arms, you support American military-industrial complex. It's a model of hypocrisy. So I think this melancholic apathy of Europe is running out of its time. Heroic acts will be needed again, not just what you taught us: military mobilization, but also mobilization to cope with ecological catastrophes, hunger and so on and so on. I agree that we should resist the temptation of glorifying war as an authentic experience and so on. But I think what we need today is not just military mobilization but a general mobilization. There are serious dangers. So now I come back to my beginning: the price of nothing. We should be aware that we will have to pay a heavy price for nothing, which means our liberty. And we will have to pay it by accepting that there is no return to old normality. We are entering new era. And here I see what you Ukrainians are doing for Europe. You will, I hope, push us to awaken from the melancholic apathy and makes us accept the necessity of a new mobilization. Not just or even primarily military military mobilization, but again, old normalization is over. We have again to fight for our liberty, to redefine our liberty. So we should totally drop this idea that you are some kind of unfortunate exception. Let's just impose some peace, not pushing Putin too far. No, I think in a way, although I don't always agree with him but, here your Zelensky, sorry... yes, Zelensky, was right when he said that you are fighting for Europe. Not in this cheap sense, just defending Europe. But in your fate, the fate of Europe will be decided. And I don't mean just this cheap beating Russia and so on. It's that Europe has to be awakened from its melancholic apathy where we are not really to act. And we should be grateful to you to remind us us of this, that freedom, real freedom hurts. Real freedom is not I go to a again, a candy store, strawberry cake or other. Freedom means accept the necessity to do something to maintain your freedom. That's the lesson you are giving to Europe and that's what I'm afraid many in Europe don't want to hear. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you so much. A lot of questions. Before we get to all of the questions, there's so many of them from our colleagues in Ukraine, I wanted to ask you about this point you made about love. And if you could relate this, at the end you related this concept, this idea you have of love and this idea of love as freedom, if I understood this correctly, to Ukraine. Because you are, I think, in the same situation I defined love very formally as freedom in necessity. You are not free in love. Love, can I be vulgar but in a loving way, love is a catastrophe. Imagine you are a free man and woman. You have every evening you drink with friends, you go to a movie, maybe a one-night stand here and there, and then you fall passionately in love. All your life is ruined, you know? It's that's why I like Western love, not Oriental love. Oriental love is this stupid Buddha's smile, you know: Oh, I love all of you. No, love is exclusive. I love you and I don't care if what happens to the world. So in some sense, love is characterized by this that you experience as the highest freedom doing what you cannot not do. And isn't this what your fight is about? It's not a simple choice. Like let's say I'm a vulgar the raw many an example, Ukrainian who says: Okay, I had relatively good life here, let's see, it is worth it or not, should I rather go out, let's measure the profit, the loss. No, you fight because... it's not simply because you have to do it, I would rather say because you cannot not do it. That's the ethical stance. In this sense, only, it has immense... This is why incidentally I'm almost, although I'm still radical leftist, a conservative today in the sense that... a conservative in the sense that I think that, I think that how... there is something very beautiful my French friend Alain Badiou invented in the expression, do you have it in your language? We don't have it, but in French they have it, in English they have it: we use the verb to fall in love. To fall. It's very important, which means you don't plan it. You fall into it and you don't know even why. All of and in this sense love is like authentic religion. In authentic religion, Kierkegaard, my favorite theologian, said in a beautiful way that it's an obscenity to say: I compare different religions, oh, arguments for Christianity sounded best to me so I decided to be Christian. No! You can understand reasons for being a Christian only when you already believe in it. And with love it's the same. You see why you fell in love, but once you are already in love. I say: her smile is wonderful. Yeah, but it appears wonderful to me when I'm already in love, you know? So I think that I like in love precisely its non-human universal scope. No, you don't love all the world. This is what totalitarian societies are saying. You know like, you are too young to remember when the DDR communist regime fell apart, Erich Mielke, the horrible minister, chief of secret police, came to the parliament and said: Aber ich liebe euch alle, you know? When they say I love you all, it always means except the traitors who have to liquid- to be liquidated so that we are really all. Okay, so now, so I'm going to have to interrupt you because we have many questions and that was my prerogative to ask you... Okay, so but now the interrogation begins. Now we are at the end of humanism, we are at the KGB. Okay, we did love, now we're on to the fun stuff, right? Love is a catastrophe, this is the this is the part you came for. So this is from Babel, a Ukrainian media outlet, and they asked this following question: They want to know about your work with Russia Today. They said that you use the Russian media to interrogate the West with critical questions, but don't you think that RT is a bad company not because they're Russians, but because they're propagandists? Who is performing specific information tasks of the Russian authorities? And they used your popularity, your reputation and your words for their own benefit. So can you tell the truth and fight for the truth, but your words still be used to build lies? Okay, I see your point. Let me just point out a couple of things here. It was a very risky strategic, it goes without saying that from January on when I see where things are going, I stopped all collaboration with them. Not only this, already before, whenever there was a critical point, I took stance against Russia. Example: in my book, I forgot which one, is it The End of Time? Okay, in one of my many books, I have a whole chapter on Maidan Ukraine against Russia. And maybe this has be another provocation for for you Ukrainians, I point out already then Putin's nervousness with Lenin. Did you notice then on the 23rd of February, when Putin announced invasion of Ukraine, he mentioned critically only one name: Lenin. He said this utter stupidity: Lenin invented imagined Ukraine. First, I know it was not true, from till '21 or when, '22, there were attempts at independent Ukraine and so on and so on. And I'm not for Lenin, he did many horrible things. But one thing he was well aware: that great Russian nationalism is the main danger. So he took seriously Ukrainian cultural autonomy. That's why Putin displays on the... okay, but let's not get lost. To my point: so again, I was clear there. Then, whenever there was a problem with Russia, they had a, I forgot the name, one philosophical journal where the guys were arrested. I did a video for them. When Pussy Riot was there, I gave a talk in Moscow at that standard point supporting them and so on and so on. So I I'll put it like this: I knew the very risky thing that I was doing. But so I was very careful. Okay, I will ask my critics: I know the point, nonetheless allowed them to use you, but show me there is not one sentence which I would change today in in... like I agree with all. It was risky, but listen, let me tell you something. Now, now comes the bad part. Do you know, don't overestimate Western liberalism. You are it's much better of course than than authoritarian. But this is why the limits are all the more mysterious. There are more or less the limits in the style of what I mentioned in my talk as prohibited prohibitions. They say nothing is prohibited, just try... Yeah, it was Doxa! Yes! I made a video for them, I even allowed them to... I told them, they proposed me to go to Russia and have a public debate with a big prosecutor, he the one who was prosecuting them. It didn't come to... so no, things are here absolutely clear. My despair was this one. I myself was in the last, I would say ten years, gradually simply censored, excluded from the big Western media. I remember ten years ago, every two three months, New York Times invited me to do a co-ed for them, Guardian and so on. Now I was slowly pushed out. Why? Because of my critique of political correctness and so on, the whole series of things. I will not go through them. But now now, a two days ago, a text of course very pro-Ukraine appeared in Guardian, but Guardian US. Not Guardian UK, I'm still prohibited. And the it's a crazy paradox, the hypocrisy of the Western left, that you know which were the only media in the West that were ready to publish me? Die Welt in Germany, which is center-right, and Spectator in UK which is again center-right. And I'm more and more convinced that there are certain prohibited, certain topics which simply they don't pass in the West. You have for example, you know that for very moderate criticism of West Bank politics of Israel, I was proclaimed even at point the main anti-Semitic philosopher in Europe and so on. So again, don't underestimate a much more subtle censorship in the West. Yes, you can publish what you want in marginal media and so on. But I took great risks, I admit it, and now I promise you it's over.
I will begin with what will sound as the usual rhetoric, but this time I mean it seriously. It's an honor for me to be here. Because I think that places like Kyiv shouldn't be treated just in this patronizing way from my comfortable home. I say, oh, you are suffering, I should help you and so on. I have a mistrust of these big universities where they think they are the center of the world, big American, European universities, but you meet very stupid people today. My worst experiences are at Princeton, Yale and so on. So, let me begin. In an old Soviet joke, a new arrival to Gulag condemned to ten years is asked by other prisoners: What were you given ten years for? The new arrival answers: For nothing! I'm guilty of nothing. Others shout back at him: Don't lie to us! Everybody knows here that for nothing, you get three years, not ten. There is, I think, a profound wisdom in this joke. In every social community, there is no neutral nothing. Everything has a price determined by those in power. Which means that we are all, in some sense, a priori guilty and that you have to work hard to get rid of this guilt and being given nothing. Why? Because we are free, but this freedom is necessarily ambiguous. I want to develop this ambiguity, which is not just linked to totalitarian regimes or whatever, but it's general, I think. With, I don't know how it works in your language, in Slovene we also can do it, namely, what in English they have is two terms for freedom: freedom and liberty. I think they can be interpreted as the distinction between what Hegel, the philosopher, called abstract freedom and concrete freedom. Abstract freedom is the ability to do what you want independently of social rules and customs. You can even violate these rules and so on. Of course, exemplarily in a revolt, war, revolutionary situation. Concrete freedom is the freedom sustained by a set of rules and customs. My freedom is only actual as freedom within certain social spaces regulated by rules and prohibitions. I can walk freely along a busy street because I can be reasonably sure that others on the street will behave in a civilized way towards me. That if they attack me or if they insult me, they will be punished. So, let me take the case of freedom to speak and communicate with others. I can only exert this freedom if I obey the commonly established rules of language, with all their ambiguities and inclusive of the unwritten rules, messages between the lines. And to this, this may be a particular, unimportant point, but I think it is crucial even to understand this politics, how Putin is acting, how Russians are acting. Namely, I want now to refer to your everyday experience even. We all know that if you live in a community where you speak certain language, which is regulated by certain explicit rules, what you can do, what you cannot do, it's never as simple as that. Every community doesn't simply obey rules. You have deeper rules which tells you which rules not only you can violate a little bit, but which rules you are even expected to violate. Especially since you are in war now, in the army life, many things are prohibited, but de facto you are expected to violate these rules. On the other hand, even more interesting for me, there are things that you are allowed to do, even solicited, but you are not expected to do them. For example, I don't know if in your country you have the same custom. Let's say that I go with Timothy to a restaurant. Let's say that maybe, I'm not even sure, I have more money than you, I invite you, so it's clear that I will pay. But in my country, when the bill arrives, you have to pretend for some time: No, no, I will contribute, let's share the money and so on. It's a pure formality because you are expected to say okay then you pay after, I don't know, seconds. But this rule has to be obeyed. So, what interests me immensely are, along these lines, are prohibitions which are themselves prohibited, in the sense that you must obey them, but you are prohibited to state even the prohibition publicly. My popular example from Stalinism: in Soviet Union, there was not only prohibited to criticize publicly Stalin, of course. It was also prohibited to publicly say that it is prohibited to criticize Stalin. Imagine we are in a Central Committee session, I'm Stalin, somebody raises his hand and criticizes me. Okay, next day the question will be who was that guy, to see him alive? But let's imagine then, then somebody else, like you Timothy, you stand up and say to this guy who attacked me, Stalin: Are you stupid? Don't you know in our country it is prohibited to criticize Stalin? You will disappear even faster, I claim. You see the paradox? It was prohibited to criticize Stalin, but this prohibition itself had to remain secret. And I think that all our diplomacy today, even war moves, when Putin says something and so on, it's always done in this way that you always have to raise the question: What are the unwritten rules? Is it meant literally what he says? The problem today is that politicians often violate the unwritten rules. You know, that's the horror in United States, Donald Trump was doing this. He usually didn't break the law, but it's part of a communal consensus that you do things in a certain way, manners. This is the substance of our lives. Now, let me go a step further concerning the army in this line of. We encounter here what I call inherent transgression. A social space is not just the space of what is permitted, but also the space of what is repressed, excluded from the public space, but simultaneously necessary for this public space to reproduce itself. Let me ask, give you an example, a naive question: why does the army (military, right) so strongly resist publicly accepting homosexuals into its ranks? There is only one consistent answer, I think: not because homosexuality poses a threat to the alleged patriarchal phallic or what, libidinal economy of the army. Just the contrary, because the army community itself relies on a disavowed repressed homosexuality as the key component of the soldiers' male bonding. I experienced this when, years ago, I was serving in the infamous Yugoslav People's Army. Two things strike me immediately. On the one hand, the army life was homophobic to the extreme. If somebody was discovered to be gay, he was beaten, humiliated by other soldiers before, after a week or so, being dismissed from the army. But at the same time, everyday army life was full of atmosphere of homosexual innuendos. Like I remember in my unit, when in the morning you met your another soldier, your friend, you never simply said hello, good morning. In my unit, the expression to be used was in Serbo-Croat: puši kurac, which means smoke my prick. And this formula was so standardized that we even didn't pronounce it with a small obscene smile. It was just a pure act of politeness. So, the key point not to be missed here is that this fragile coexistence of extreme violent homophobia with publicly disavowed homosexuality bears witness to the fact that in a military community, transgression works only by censoring its own libidinal foundation. Censoring, not eliminating it. So, again, our space of concrete freedom is sustained by such ambiguous rules. That's my first point. My second point: the contours of freedom are, of course, historically variable. The predominant notion of freedom is always historically specific. To simplify to the utmost: in traditional societies, freedom does not refer to equality. Freedom means that each person should be free to play its specific role in the hierarchic order. In modern societies, freedom is linked to abstract legal equality and personal liberty. A poor worker and a rich employer of him are equally free. In 20th century, freedom was more and more linked to social circumstances which enable you to actualize it, freedom. Minimal welfare, free education and so on. Today, the accent is on the freedom of choice, which I think imply that we ignore how the very frame of choices is imposed on individuals. There are always some choices which are de facto privilege. And I think true freedom begins when you are allowed to question what is meant by freedom, not just fitting into freedom which is given to you. What this means is that at this very moment when we are supporting Ukraine in its struggle for freedom, we should be attentive to what this freedom is or will be. As an opera lover, I remember the finale of the Act One of Mozart's Don Giovanni, which begins with Don Giovanni's powerful appeal to all present: Viva la libertà!, long live freedom. This is repeated forcefully by all. The music gets stuck at this point of full engagement. But the catch is, of course, that although the entire group is enthusiastically unified around the call to freedom, each subgroup probably projects into libertà, freedom, its own dreams and hopes. And that's for me the problem. Imagine a situation of political unity where all sides are united under the sign of freedom, but every particular group projects a different meaning into this universality. Freedom for some means anarchic freedom outside the state law, for others freedom of property, for others yet social conditions which allow individuals to realize your potentials and so on, and so on. So this is my question: now in Ukraine, you are in that Don Giovanni stage. You have an extraordinary unity. You are all crying like Don Giovanni: Viva la libertà!. But if or, more hopefully, when you will succeed in your struggle, you will face the true test: which freedom should you finally enjoy? Should you just try to catch up with Western liberal democracy? I'm not sure. Western liberal democracy is now in a deep crisis. I don't think you should follow the formula proposed by Jürgen Habermas, who used this term in German it's Nachholende, catch-up revolution, that all you can do in post-communist East is to catch up with Western Europe. It's not bad to do this, but again, Western Europe is in a deep crisis now. And you know where I see the crisis? Think of movements like Podemos in Spain, Yellow Vests in France. They formulate a certain discontent of population, but this discontent cannot be translated into the existing political system. This situation is very dangerous. So this, I am afraid, will not be enough for you, just let's became like Western Europe. Should you join the conservative populist axis of Poland and Hungary? I'm skeptical towards this. So what, what what, sorry... What then should you do? Well, first, you are doing the right thing now. Back to Hegel. Hegel knew very well that this concrete freedom is fragile. There are moments when abstract freedom has to intervene. What do I mean by this? Sorry, I have here I got an opinion poll... Okay, whatever, sorry, something appeared. Okay, let's go on. In the December '44 issue of The Atlantic, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote immediately after France was liberated, I quote Sartre: Never were we freer than under the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, and first of all our right to speak. They, the Germans, insulted us to our faces. And that is why the Resistance was a true democracy. For the soldier, for his superior, the same danger, the same loneliness, the same responsibility, the same absolute freedom within the discipline. This situation, full of anxiety and danger, was freedom, not liberty. Liberty was established when post-war normality returned. So in Ukraine today, you who fight the Russian invasion are free and you fight for liberty. The problem I see here, not with you, but in the West, is that we are more and more approaching a situation in which millions of people think that they have to act freely, violate the rules, in order to protect their liberty, their social order. Remember on January 6th, when a crowd of populist partisans of Donald Trump invaded the Capital, sorry, the Capitol. They did a revolution. So we are in a mess. What is this mess about? The multiple crises and even apocalyptic projects, prospects, that we are facing today seem to evoke more and more ominously the Four Riders of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation: plague, war, hunger, death. Although global awareness of the threat is growing, it is not allowed followed by adequate activity. So the Four Riders, Raiders, are galloping faster and faster. First: plague. At the end of COVID exploded and changed our lives forever. And it is still here and I think it will remain. We can expect other new waves or other pandemics. War. With the Russian attack on Ukraine, we have a hot war in Europe. Even if some kind of truce will be enforced, war forcefully asserted itself as a general condition of our lives, so that peace is just a temporary exception. We all want peace, but I'm here totally on your side against some of my pseudo-leftist Western friends. Abstract calls for peace are not enough. Peace alone is not a term which allows us to draw the key political difference. Occupiers always sincerely want peace in the territory they hold. Germany definitely wanted peace in the occupied France from till '44. Israel wants peace on the occupied West Bank. And Russia is, as they say, and in some stupid sense it's true, in a mission for peace in Ukraine. But peace means we totally control the situation. That's why, as Étienne Balibar put it in an honestly brutal way, today a propos Ukraine, pacifism is not an option. Yes, we should prevent a new great war, but the only way to do it is to engage in a total mobilization against the situation in which we are. The third Rider of the Apocalypse: hunger. It's also on the horizon. I think the greatest scandal today, one of the is what Russia is doing in Odessa now. You have millions of tons of grain in the third world, third world people begin to starve and it's it means hunger. Even more, because of global warming, warming, are we ready for mass migrations? There will be, I think, riots and so on. We are approaching very dangerous stage. My last, fourth Rider of the Apocalypse: death. I don't mean here death in general. What has to say about death is was said in my my my favorite Polish graffiti from years ago: It's the best definition of life that I know. Life is a disease transmitted by sex which always ends with death. But what I mean with death as a fourth rider is something much more radical. I've written about it. I mean the end of humanity as we know it, which is threatening us through the latest modes of digital control of our daily lives. Especially the prospect of our of what some people call wired brain, Neuralink, the direct link between our thinking processes and digital machines. This is not a utopia, it is already up to some level happening. And can you even imagine how this will change our lives? Even my thoughts will no longer be mine. And friends from China, who are now even afraid to email me, censored, are giving to me so many data about this, how in some Chinese elementary schools pupils already have to wear just a tiny ring around their head which measures their brain activity, not thoughts, but the idea is that it shows on the teacher's computer if you are not actively following the class. That's the future. So, what will happen? Will we still be human? In what sense will we be free? Isn't our basic freedom the freedom of thought in the simple sense that I may appear, I don't mean you personally, Timothy, but I appear to be friendly to you, but who knows what do I think in my head, you know? That's if I am deprived of this, in a way I'm deprived of a very distance between what goes in myself and outside world. In a way I'm no longer human. So, are we doomed? Do I have only bad news? No, because at the same time we are free. Free in a radical sense of being able to change not only the future but even our past. What do I mean by this? Let me begin with a quote from the great conservative poet T.S. Eliot, quote: What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. End of quote. What do we mean by this? Let's take the example of Shakespeare. A great staging of Hamlet today is not just a new interpretation of the play. It in a way fills the empty spaces, the gaps in Shakespeare's play itself. Shakespeare didn't know fully what he is saying. The play is full of inconsistencies. So that's my idea, I don't have time to go into it now, I like a kind of the idea of a kind of unfinished ontology. The world is not fully here. So with every progress forwards, the meaning, not the facts (when you kill millions people it's a fact, but the meaning of the past changes). This is where ideology enters and this is of course where you Ukraine enter. I will tell you how. I remember how many of you know this, I know a wonderful detail from the history of Darwinism. Darwin had a friend, a deep, a priest, who believed literally in the Bible but at the same time saw the truth of Darwin's theory. So he had a problem, how to reconcile the proofs of the evolutionary theory, fossils and so on which show how life on Earth slowly developed in millions of years, and the Bible which, taken literally, tells that the world was created about years B.C., before Christ. So if the world was created years ago, how can we explain the fossils? Ah, the guy, the priest, I forgot his name, gave a wonderful answer: When God created the world, he directly created fossils as such. So that, you know, the way you create a movie set, a false background. He gave us a false opening. God created traces of an imagined past. This Christian solution, of course, is not true as a scientific theory, but it provides an adequate theory of ideology. Every ideology in some sense creates fossils. It doesn't create just the present, it creates an imagined past which fits the present. And are we aware, these are details, how many of the things we identify today as our past were created in this retroactive way? For example, my Scottish friend told me that these, what do you call them, kilt, the skirts worn by men, they were invented in Scottish national revival early 19th century. Or, you know, the Vikings wearing horns or how do you put it in their, on their heads, this was invented, this was even invented through opera stagings around We are always reinventing our past. Why am I losing time by this? Because politics works in the same time. With all the criticism of Chinese communism, I like how in in Geneva, during the negotiations to end Korean War, a French journalist asked Zhou Enlai, Chinese Prime Minister who was there: What does he think about the French Revolution? Zhou Enlai replied: It is still too early to tell. In a way he was right. When in Eastern Europe in 1990s so-called people's democracies, communism, disintegrated, the struggle for the historical place of the French Revolution exploded again. Conservatives claimed that with the fall of communism, the entire era which began exactly years ago in came at the end. The epoch of revolutions is over. Is it true or not? It depends on what will happen. So again, in every historical conjuncture, present is not only present, it also encompasses a perspective on the past, permanent to this present. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the October Revolution is no longer, is no longer perceived as the beginning of a new progressive epoch, but the beginning of a catastrophic misdirection of history which reached its end in So why am I telling you this? Because I think, please be aware, you are... but I repeat it... in your struggle against Russian invasion now, you are not only trying to sustain the space for your future. You are trying to... what is at stake is also your past. You know Walter Benjamin, the great Marxist, a good one, said that in every revolution what is to be redeemed is also the past itself. All past progressive attempts. In the same sense, you are now trying to redeem your past. If you lose, your past will be rewritten by the winners and you will even be evoked with some sympathy maybe, but: Ah, you know, that half-disappeared nation which tried to..., you are fighting for your past. Of course, now let's go on, more and more complex. Don't be too bored, things will get more different, more interesting now. But this change of the past, of course, happens only at the level of symbolic space. Brutal reality cannot be changed. But this opens another paradoxical position. What about necessity or fate, which can realize itself only through being known? That's our danger today. What do I mean is... I'm sorry, this is known to some of you... my favorite, this paradoxical story, it's an ancient Arab story about the appointment in Samarra. It was retold by William Somerset Maugham and many other writers. Here is the story, I'm sorry if you know it: a servant on an errand in the busy market of Baghdad meets Death there. Terrified by seeing Death, he runs home to his master and asks him to give him a horse so that he can ride all the day and reach quickly Samarra, another city in the north of Iraq where Death will not find him. The good master not only gives the servant a horse, but goes himself to the market after to look for Death. Finds Death and shouts at Death: Why did you scare my faithful servant? Death replies: But I didn't want to scare your servant. I was just surprised about what was he doing here in Baghdad when I have an appointment in Samarra with him tomorrow. So the message of this story is a beautiful one. It's not that man's demise is impossible to avoid, that trying to twist free of it will only tighten the grip of Death. But rather the exact opposite: what if you knowing about your fate and trying to avoid it is how what you think is your fate realizes itself? Should I even quote the best known example, Oedipus? You know how it all begins: parents of Oedipus are told your son will marry his mother, kill his father, so to get rid of this they send him away. And then, then this is how it happens. Oedipus wanders around, kills a man not knowing it's his father and so on and so on. The paradox is that if the parents of Oedipus were to say: Okay, if it happens, it happens, who cares about the prophecy, nothing would happen. There would be no, there would have been no Oedipus, no Oedipus complex and so on and so on. Here again, you in Ukraine were doing the right thing. Now I will say what has this to do with Ukraine. I don't know how it is with you, but even among leftist liberals in the West, it was popular to say: Yes, it's nice, you try to resist, but basically, looked all of it, you don't have a chance, you are lost. And no, you said: Okay, maybe this is our fate, but we behave as if we don't know our fate, we fight. I will return to this later. But I think that we are caught in this paradox today. We think that how we know what is awaiting us, media are telling us all the time: ecological crisis, global warming, viruses. But precisely through knowing it and not reacting seriously to it, the fate actualizes itself. This is why, permit me to quote my good friend Adrian Johnston and how he characterized today's geopolitical situation (a long quote): He wrote: Today we are in a situation in which the world's societies and humanity as a whole are facing multiple acute crises: global pandemic, environmental disasters, massive inequality, poverty, wars and so on; yet seem unable to take measures necessary to resolve the crisis. We know things are broken. We know what needs fixing. We even sometimes have ideas about how to fix things. But nevertheless, we keep doing nothing either to mend damage already done or to prevent further damage. So we are in some sense stuck. Why? The model of this stuckness was, remember half a year ago or when, the Glasgow conference on global warming. Yeah, they were saying all the right things, but nothing followed. There is a lesson I will later return of this. I think the paradox is that in Western capitalism, we are hyper-active and we are in an apathy precisely because things are happening so fast that we cannot make a step back and reflect on things. We are a little bit like compulsive neurotics. Believe me or not, I know what this means because I am one of them. Compulsive neurotics talk all the time, not because they want to say something, but, yes Jennifer, I'm afraid of you, but that if they stop talking for a second, others will see that all I'm saying is bullshit and ask me the serious question, you know? This hyper-activity where you are active not to achieve something, but precisely to make it sure that nothing has changed. And in Western Europe, what this means is that ideology functions more and more in a cynical way, which means to quote Peter Sloterdijk's formula of cynicism: I know what I am doing, but I'm nonetheless doing it. Knowing what we are doing doesn't prevent us from going on doing it. I don't know how much you were in earlier happier times part of it, but the true horror for me was are, I hate them, you know all these big art biennales, Venice, Venezia, Kassel. I know that's a paradox, their program is always the most radical critique of capitalism. Today's societies are commodified, we have to fight it and so on. But it doesn't matter, this same biennales perfectly fit capitalist self-reproduction. In socialism it can be the same. With you guys who are old enough to remember the horror of Soviet Union, probably was not like this, but in ex-Yugoslavia, when I was young, we had the ideology of self-management socialism. But the condition for this ideology to function was not to take it seriously. I had a guy who was a naive communist, he thinks self-management good idea, workers should really take over. He lost his job at Central Committee. Because he was considered dangerous. My God, he take things seriously then he will become a dissident if you take things seriously and so on and so on. Now the last metaphysical point, and then slowly I'm coming to the end. This totally cynical functioning is a moment, I think, of what the Korean, South Korean of course, social theorist who is now popular in the West, Byung-Chul Han, observed, observed very well as the, he calls it getting pathological of our collective rituals. We no longer know how to mourn properly. We just have neurotic private ceremonials, confessional experiences and so on. We no longer are able to do ritual acts which include feelings, but not feelings of isolated individuals. It's kind of objective collective feeling. This agency is what Lacan calls big Other, the social substance. And it's extremely important. What do I mean by this? One more example to understand this. I would like to remind you, maybe some of you know, the notion elaborated by my good friend Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller, the notion of interpassivity. What is interpassivity? Something beautiful, I think. Remember so-called weepers. You still find them in South of Greece, these were in traditional societies women you paid to cry for you, to do the mourning for you. It's beautiful, you can stay at home, watch pornography whatever, if your father dies, no, you are doing the mourning through others. Even to go more into the past, I always admired in Tibet, they have these praying wheels, you know. You write a prayer, you put it into a small wheel, you turn it around mechanically, and it counts as if you are praying. It doesn't matter what you are doing, thinking about sex or what, you are praying. Now I come to the crucial point. You will say: But okay, this goes only in primitive societies. No! My, I think the biggest contribution of United States of America to 20th century culture is something it's that's called, I think, canned laughter. You know, you watch a TV series, comic, and laughter is part of the soundtrack. You know what's the mystery of this? I remember when I was doing this, I returned to home that tired, I look at the TV screen, and I was too tired to laugh, but the TV screen laughed for me and I felt relaxed as if I have laughed. This is something wonderful. The other is not acting for you, the other is even taking over the passive experience for you. And I think that we are again less and less able to have this proper rituals where the big Other is involved. And, and that's I think a very dangerous thing. Did you see, it was well before the war, I hope it was shown there, the movie, it's not a great movie, but somehow it was interesting: Don't Look Up, where Meryl Streep plays the president. There you have the strange figure of the other who doesn't know for me. They all know catastrophe is real, some comet is approaching Earth, end of life, but they go on as if they don't know it, although they personally know it. This is more and more our, our situation. So now, really to conclude very fast. This big Other is slowly disintegrating. Let me give you another tragic example of big Other, it happened to a girlfriend of a friend of a friend of mine. She, no it was the other way around, sorry, boyfriend of her. She wanted to become a woman and she went through all the painful surgical procedures. And all her friends, friends supported her, everything seemed okay. Then on a certain day, she got from municipal city authorities a note saying: You are now officially a man. She killed herself instantly. You know, like it was as long as it was her private thing, it was okay. The moment it became registered by social authority, it was over. Okay, I don't want to go overtime because I wanted here to speak briefly about Elon Musk, who to you did good things, but a what... But the way he wants to privatize Twitter is very dangerous. I just want to end up with just end up nicely with a little bit in a little bit more optimistic way. I think that all is not so dark precisely because in situations that you are now, when in a way freedom, free choice and necessity overlap. This is the true freedom, much more than the freedom of choice. Let me mention the biggest mention the biggest example: love. If there is a free choice, it is that of a love object. You cannot order somebody to fall in love. But once you are in love, you experience love as your fate. You don't have a choice. And I wonder if you would agree. My idea is that you never fall in love in the present. All of a sudden you discover you already are in love. That's why you also never know the reason why you fall in why you fall in love. The moment you can say: Okay, this lady or man has nice legs, nice legs, nice eyes, another talks nicely and so on, and you make a choice, it's not love. So love is a wonderful example of how it's a free choice, but free choice which is at the same time a deep, the deepest necessity. And my point: your struggle is now the same one. Of course, in some formal sense, you have the choice: I will fight or not. But admit something, it's not the same choice as when you go to a sweet store: should I get a I shall get a strawberry cake or a chocolate cake? It's a choice where if you choose to fight, you choose it because you know that you cannot do it otherwise. You know, it's this radical choice where you realize: but I wouldn't be able to live with myself with not doing it. I think that today, just the conclusion now, this is what all we in Europe should learn from you. It's not just this superficial freedom of choices. Choice is not just that you click like it, not like it. The deepest choices are doing freely what you have to do. So what can we in Europe learn from you? During the first weeks of the war, we in Europe feared that Ukraine will be quickly crushed. But now we have to admit that our real fear is exactly the opposite one: that Ukraine will not be crushed, that the war will just go on and on. And I'm here very critical. I spoke with many people who said: oh the tragic fate, Ukraine will not be able to resist and so on. But secretly, this was I wouldn't say directly their desire, but that expectation. Wouldn't it be nice? You are crushed, you are no longer there, and then we can of course go through all the hypocrisy of mourning. You know, we would write wonderful books: what, how tragic was your fate and so on. But it will be over, after a couple of years we would make new peace with Russia or whatever. And you, I mean this as extreme love although I... it will sound vulgar... you screwed it up for us. You simply resisted where secretly you were not expected to resist. That was the hypocrisy of the West. What should have been good news: a smaller nation unexpectedly resisting brutal invasion is now something that we don't know what to do with it. And here I'm ashamed of some leftist colleagues of mine who play pacifism and warn against, like Jürgen Habermas did, about Ukraine morally blackmailing Europe, about the danger of returning to heroic military spirit. I think that the lesson of the war is that this golden era of Europe, where we could afford pacifism because we were under nuclear umbrella by the United States, it's over. And pacifism means just more and more compromises. I'm especially horrified by the insight proposed by some of my leftists ex-friends when they say that they oppose the war, they symp- everybody sympathize with Ukrainians, but they say they oppose the war because NATO is in the war just for economic capitalist reasons to further develop and strengthen the base of its military-industrial complex. And basically, what NATO is saying, what these leftists are saying to you is: Okay, resist somehow Russian aggression, but not with arms, because if you use Western arms, you support American military-industrial complex. It's a model of hypocrisy. So I think this melancholic apathy of Europe is running out of its time. Heroic acts will be needed again, not just what you taught us: military mobilization, but also mobilization to cope with ecological catastrophes, hunger and so on and so on. I agree that we should resist the temptation of glorifying war as an authentic experience and so on. But I think what we need today is not just military mobilization but a general mobilization. There are serious dangers. So now I come back to my beginning: the price of nothing. We should be aware that we will have to pay a heavy price for nothing, which means our liberty. And we will have to pay it by accepting that there is no return to old normality. We are entering new era. And here I see what you Ukrainians are doing for Europe. You will, I hope, push us to awaken from the melancholic apathy and makes us accept the necessity of a new mobilization. Not just or even primarily military military mobilization, but again, old normalization is over. We have again to fight for our liberty, to redefine our liberty. So we should totally drop this idea that you are some kind of unfortunate exception. Let's just impose some peace, not pushing Putin too far. No, I think in a way, although I don't always agree with him but, here your Zelensky, sorry... yes, Zelensky, was right when he said that you are fighting for Europe. Not in this cheap sense, just defending Europe. But in your fate, the fate of Europe will be decided. And I don't mean just this cheap beating Russia and so on. It's that Europe has to be awakened from its melancholic apathy where we are not really to act. And we should be grateful to you to remind us us of this, that freedom, real freedom hurts. Real freedom is not I go to a again, a candy store, strawberry cake or other. Freedom means accept the necessity to do something to maintain your freedom. That's the lesson you are giving to Europe and that's what I'm afraid many in Europe don't want to hear. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you so much. A lot of questions. Before we get to all of the questions, there's so many of them from our colleagues in Ukraine, I wanted to ask you about this point you made about love. And if you could relate this, at the end you related this concept, this idea you have of love and this idea of love as freedom, if I understood this correctly, to Ukraine. Because you are, I think, in the same situation I defined love very formally as freedom in necessity. You are not free in love. Love, can I be vulgar but in a loving way, love is a catastrophe. Imagine you are a free man and woman. You have every evening you drink with friends, you go to a movie, maybe a one-night stand here and there, and then you fall passionately in love. All your life is ruined, you know? It's that's why I like Western love, not Oriental love. Oriental love is this stupid Buddha's smile, you know: Oh, I love all of you. No, love is exclusive. I love you and I don't care if what happens to the world. So in some sense, love is characterized by this that you experience as the highest freedom doing what you cannot not do. And isn't this what your fight is about? It's not a simple choice. Like let's say I'm a vulgar the raw many an example, Ukrainian who says: Okay, I had relatively good life here, let's see, it is worth it or not, should I rather go out, let's measure the profit, the loss. No, you fight because... it's not simply because you have to do it, I would rather say because you cannot not do it. That's the ethical stance. In this sense, only, it has immense... This is why incidentally I'm almost, although I'm still radical leftist, a conservative today in the sense that... a conservative in the sense that I think that, I think that how... there is something very beautiful my French friend Alain Badiou invented in the expression, do you have it in your language? We don't have it, but in French they have it, in English they have it: we use the verb to fall in love. To fall. It's very important, which means you don't plan it. You fall into it and you don't know even why. All of and in this sense love is like authentic religion. In authentic religion, Kierkegaard, my favorite theologian, said in a beautiful way that it's an obscenity to say: I compare different religions, oh, arguments for Christianity sounded best to me so I decided to be Christian. No! You can understand reasons for being a Christian only when you already believe in it. And with love it's the same. You see why you fell in love, but once you are already in love. I say: her smile is wonderful. Yeah, but it appears wonderful to me when I'm already in love, you know? So I think that I like in love precisely its non-human universal scope. No, you don't love all the world. This is what totalitarian societies are saying. You know like, you are too young to remember when the DDR communist regime fell apart, Erich Mielke, the horrible minister, chief of secret police, came to the parliament and said: Aber ich liebe euch alle, you know? When they say I love you all, it always means except the traitors who have to liquid- to be liquidated so that we are really all. Okay, so now, so I'm going to have to interrupt you because we have many questions and that was my prerogative to ask you... Okay, so but now the interrogation begins. Now we are at the end of humanism, we are at the KGB. Okay, we did love, now we're on to the fun stuff, right? Love is a catastrophe, this is the this is the part you came for. So this is from Babel, a Ukrainian media outlet, and they asked this following question: They want to know about your work with Russia Today. They said that you use the Russian media to interrogate the West with critical questions, but don't you think that RT is a bad company not because they're Russians, but because they're propagandists? Who is performing specific information tasks of the Russian authorities? And they used your popularity, your reputation and your words for their own benefit. So can you tell the truth and fight for the truth, but your words still be used to build lies? Okay, I see your point. Let me just point out a couple of things here. It was a very risky strategic, it goes without saying that from January on when I see where things are going, I stopped all collaboration with them. Not only this, already before, whenever there was a critical point, I took stance against Russia. Example: in my book, I forgot which one, is it The End of Time? Okay, in one of my many books, I have a whole chapter on Maidan Ukraine against Russia. And maybe this has be another provocation for for you Ukrainians, I point out already then Putin's nervousness with Lenin. Did you notice then on the 23rd of February, when Putin announced invasion of Ukraine, he mentioned critically only one name: Lenin. He said this utter stupidity: Lenin invented imagined Ukraine. First, I know it was not true, from till '21 or when, '22, there were attempts at independent Ukraine and so on and so on. And I'm not for Lenin, he did many horrible things. But one thing he was well aware: that great Russian nationalism is the main danger. So he took seriously Ukrainian cultural autonomy. That's why Putin displays on the... okay, but let's not get lost. To my point: so again, I was clear there. Then, whenever there was a problem with Russia, they had a, I forgot the name, one philosophical journal where the guys were arrested. I did a video for them. When Pussy Riot was there, I gave a talk in Moscow at that standard point supporting them and so on and so on. So I I'll put it like this: I knew the very risky thing that I was doing. But so I was very careful. Okay, I will ask my critics: I know the point, nonetheless allowed them to use you, but show me there is not one sentence which I would change today in in... like I agree with all. It was risky, but listen, let me tell you something. Now, now comes the bad part. Do you know, don't overestimate Western liberalism. You are it's much better of course than than authoritarian. But this is why the limits are all the more mysterious. There are more or less the limits in the style of what I mentioned in my talk as prohibited prohibitions. They say nothing is prohibited, just try... Yeah, it was Doxa! Yes! I made a video for them, I even allowed them to... I told them, they proposed me to go to Russia and have a public debate with a big prosecutor, he the one who was prosecuting them. It didn't come to... so no, things are here absolutely clear. My despair was this one. I myself was in the last, I would say ten years, gradually simply censored, excluded from the big Western media. I remember ten years ago, every two three months, New York Times invited me to do a co-ed for them, Guardian and so on. Now I was slowly pushed out. Why? Because of my critique of political correctness and so on, the whole series of things. I will not go through them. But now now, a two days ago, a text of course very pro-Ukraine appeared in Guardian, but Guardian US. Not Guardian UK, I'm still prohibited. And the it's a crazy paradox, the hypocrisy of the Western left, that you know which were the only media in the West that were ready to publish me? Die Welt in Germany, which is center-right, and Spectator in UK which is again center-right. And I'm more and more convinced that there are certain prohibited, certain topics which simply they don't pass in the West. You have for example, you know that for very moderate criticism of West Bank politics of Israel, I was proclaimed even at point the main anti-Semitic philosopher in Europe and so on. So again, don't underestimate a much more subtle censorship in the West. Yes, you can publish what you want in marginal media and so on. But I took great risks, I admit it, and now I promise you it's over.
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I it's absolutely over. And I incidentally, if you on the other part side of the story, now many leftists attack me, attack me as proto-fascist, pro-US imperialist. Then how can you avoid this? Look who are in- sorry. Okay, sorry. Speaking of the attack, you spoke about... this is another question from Babel, the Ukrainian media... I know Chomsky
I it's absolutely over. And I incidentally, if you on the other part side of the story, now many leftists attack me, attack me as proto-fascist, pro-US imperialist. Then how can you avoid this? Look who are in- sorry. Okay, sorry. Speaking of the attack, you spoke about... this is another question from Babel, the Ukrainian media... I know Chomsky
Slavoj Žižek
and so on. Yes, Chomsky, Mearsheimer, how they've criticized the US so much and they've completely forgotten about what's happened in Russia even after And so partly because of this, the war was a surprise. The growth of military hysteria in Russia was simply missed by them. What do you think about them? How can we say that Russia's threat was underestimated? I think there are two. First, I totally disagree with them here. I don't think they see the global geopolitical meaning of what Putin wants now. It's not they say it more and more openly, it's not about Ukraine. They okay it is immediately, but what is really about this war? It's to to destroy Western European way of life. And they're even getting ready here for a pact with the United States. Remember that Putin and Trump, that's why they were doing so well, have the same hatred towards United Europe. I mean Trump ideologist Steve Bannon and Putin's Dugin, they always give the same message to Europe: Yes, long live France, long live Germany, just long live not United Europe. But I think as a radical leftist that the model of United Europe when different nations meet and coordinate their acts not because of some narrow ethnic ideology, but because of the common interest, global warming survival, is what we all need, it's what we all need. And Russia is now already offering this pact to United States. One of their minor philosophers even wrote in a very arrogant interview with some Italian medium that Europe it's over, the end goal of this operation is to split Europe: England, maybe France are American, all other especially Germany is ours. We take it. Then, you know what shocks me? What shocks me is this open openly proto-fascist and theological background. You know, people my x-leftist friends, it's not only Chomsky, I also have Yanis Varoufakis and so on, you know? They, I think, behind their mind is one syllogism, one reasoning, which is something like this: the main enemy today is American imperialism. So whoever is an obstacle to American imperialism, it cannot be all bad. You know like this automatic sympathy. Then I tell them, but look look their ideology, look not so much Dugin, he is a clown, look Ivan Ilyin, who in the '20s criticized a little bit Western fascism because he said it's not authentic enough. He said the greatest tragedy was the loss of the White counter-revolution, because they would have been authentic fascists. So Putin and you know that Ilyin is now half an official figure, his books are reprinted and given to all military conscripts and so on and so on. So I am not reading between the lines that Putin is a fascist, I very naively read his ideologies. They are openly this. And when people tell me: What about that Azov Group and so on, no?, I tell them: Okay, I don't know, but I know a lot through friends about the true horror which is Wagner Group in
and so on. Yes, Chomsky, Mearsheimer, how they've criticized the US so much and they've completely forgotten about what's happened in Russia even after And so partly because of this, the war was a surprise. The growth of military hysteria in Russia was simply missed by them. What do you think about them? How can we say that Russia's threat was underestimated? I think there are two. First, I totally disagree with them here. I don't think they see the global geopolitical meaning of what Putin wants now. It's not they say it more and more openly, it's not about Ukraine. They okay it is immediately, but what is really about this war? It's to to destroy Western European way of life. And they're even getting ready here for a pact with the United States. Remember that Putin and Trump, that's why they were doing so well, have the same hatred towards United Europe. I mean Trump ideologist Steve Bannon and Putin's Dugin, they always give the same message to Europe: Yes, long live France, long live Germany, just long live not United Europe. But I think as a radical leftist that the model of United Europe when different nations meet and coordinate their acts not because of some narrow ethnic ideology, but because of the common interest, global warming survival, is what we all need, it's what we all need. And Russia is now already offering this pact to United States. One of their minor philosophers even wrote in a very arrogant interview with some Italian medium that Europe it's over, the end goal of this operation is to split Europe: England, maybe France are American, all other especially Germany is ours. We take it. Then, you know what shocks me? What shocks me is this open openly proto-fascist and theological background. You know, people my x-leftist friends, it's not only Chomsky, I also have Yanis Varoufakis and so on, you know? They, I think, behind their mind is one syllogism, one reasoning, which is something like this: the main enemy today is American imperialism. So whoever is an obstacle to American imperialism, it cannot be all bad. You know like this automatic sympathy. Then I tell them, but look look their ideology, look not so much Dugin, he is a clown, look Ivan Ilyin, who in the '20s criticized a little bit Western fascism because he said it's not authentic enough. He said the greatest tragedy was the loss of the White counter-revolution, because they would have been authentic fascists. So Putin and you know that Ilyin is now half an official figure, his books are reprinted and given to all military conscripts and so on and so on. So I am not reading between the lines that Putin is a fascist, I very naively read his ideologies. They are openly this. And when people tell me: What about that Azov Group and so on, no?, I tell them: Okay, I don't know, but I know a lot through friends about the true horror which is Wagner Group in
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Russia. It's a whole private army which is already operating all around the world. That's what we know in ex-Yugoslavia. It's not just you Ukraine.
Russia. It's a whole private army which is already operating all around the world. That's what we know in ex-Yugoslavia. It's not just you Ukraine.
Slavoj Žižek
Wagner Group members are already in
Wagner Group members are already in
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Republika Srpska in that part of Bosnia. They are getting ready to trigger disorder to get Kosovo back to Serbia and so on. It's a plan and it's a plan for new globalization where I think Medvedev, yeah, Medvedev proposed a formula where he says: This will be an egalitarian globalization where we will not try to impose on others our values, but will be pragmatically respect- pragmatically respectful towards others. I say, yes, we have seen what this means. You remember when Taliban won in in Afghanistan? They immediately
Republika Srpska in that part of Bosnia. They are getting ready to trigger disorder to get Kosovo back to Serbia and so on. It's a plan and it's a plan for new globalization where I think Medvedev, yeah, Medvedev proposed a formula where he says: This will be an egalitarian globalization where we will not try to impose on others our values, but will be pragmatically respect- pragmatically respectful towards others. I say, yes, we have seen what this means. You remember when Taliban won in in Afghanistan? They immediately
Slavoj Žižek
made peace with China. This brutal pragmatic peace, the deal was: You China, tolerate us in Afghanistan, we don't care what you do with Uyghurs there. Sorry, I stop. Everybody made peace with the Taliban though, all of the neighbors made peace with the Taliban, including Russia... But on the other hand, you know the big question still is: what did they do wrong, do wrong Americans there that after years or how much of occupation they it all fell apart immediately? And we'll invite you for another talk on this topic. But before we we continue on the Taliban, I want to ask you about Timothy Snyder. I'm stupid, I don't even, don't kill me, I'm not bluffing. When he says Russia is a fascist regime, I agree with him, but what more did he say? I don't know. So we have a question about this term Rashism. Do you think this is a new ideology? You've talked about how Russia wants to destroy Europe, wants to destroy the United States, wants to destroy this European ideology or European way of life. What is the replacement for it? They offer as a replacement, it's clear, what they call international, they called respect and tolerance which basically means supporting local authoritarian regimes even with military help because never underestimate the fear. That's why Russians are especially mad at Ukrainians, no? Color revolution. That's why Putin, Russia reacted, you remember, in such a panic when demonstration in Belarus began and when was Azerbaijan or where and so on. No? And you know what is so interesting, this is the most obscene point: that Russia and especially especially China, this was for me the lowest point of China. You remember when there were demonstrations in Hong Kong? Chinese big ideologist wrote in their official newspaper a very interesting text where he said: What you are triggering now in Hong Kong, it will return to you, look what is happening with Podemos in Spain, in France. You know what was so crazy there? He did not talk about socialism versus capitalism. He directly referred to the solidarity of those in power. You know like: Don't play triggering disorder here, you will get it back. It's incredible this. And also, sorry, another point. If you have any doubts, look my God who are Putin's friends in the West? The only ones he systematically supports are extreme right: Alternative für Deutschland, Marine Le Pen and so on and so on. It's absolutely Salvini and those right-wingers in in in Italy and so on. Now there is we can go into theoretical debate, is this really fascism? Okay, it's a specific fascism because don't forget Nazism is not the only fascism. Even in Franco's Spain, with Mussolini, a certain minimal plurality was allowed, you know? Fascism is not this Nazi only that. So I think, yes, it's really... to give you a story which you will like. I was in China, now it's suspicious, ten years ago. And they no longer use the term communism now, they prefer the term harmonious society. And then I asked them: Listen, I'm an idiot Western naive, I don't get it. Could you simply explain to me what do you mean by harmonious society? And they told me: It means a society where every part, individual, is at its own place and does his/her specific work. Woman is a good mother, worker a good worker, teacher a good teacher, manager a good manager, no? And I said: Now I understand, there are no multicultural disagreements, in Europe we call this corporate fascism, you know? Ah, it's more perverted because I am for
made peace with China. This brutal pragmatic peace, the deal was: You China, tolerate us in Afghanistan, we don't care what you do with Uyghurs there. Sorry, I stop. Everybody made peace with the Taliban though, all of the neighbors made peace with the Taliban, including Russia... But on the other hand, you know the big question still is: what did they do wrong, do wrong Americans there that after years or how much of occupation they it all fell apart immediately? And we'll invite you for another talk on this topic. But before we we continue on the Taliban, I want to ask you about Timothy Snyder. I'm stupid, I don't even, don't kill me, I'm not bluffing. When he says Russia is a fascist regime, I agree with him, but what more did he say? I don't know. So we have a question about this term Rashism. Do you think this is a new ideology? You've talked about how Russia wants to destroy Europe, wants to destroy the United States, wants to destroy this European ideology or European way of life. What is the replacement for it? They offer as a replacement, it's clear, what they call international, they called respect and tolerance which basically means supporting local authoritarian regimes even with military help because never underestimate the fear. That's why Russians are especially mad at Ukrainians, no? Color revolution. That's why Putin, Russia reacted, you remember, in such a panic when demonstration in Belarus began and when was Azerbaijan or where and so on. No? And you know what is so interesting, this is the most obscene point: that Russia and especially especially China, this was for me the lowest point of China. You remember when there were demonstrations in Hong Kong? Chinese big ideologist wrote in their official newspaper a very interesting text where he said: What you are triggering now in Hong Kong, it will return to you, look what is happening with Podemos in Spain, in France. You know what was so crazy there? He did not talk about socialism versus capitalism. He directly referred to the solidarity of those in power. You know like: Don't play triggering disorder here, you will get it back. It's incredible this. And also, sorry, another point. If you have any doubts, look my God who are Putin's friends in the West? The only ones he systematically supports are extreme right: Alternative für Deutschland, Marine Le Pen and so on and so on. It's absolutely Salvini and those right-wingers in in in Italy and so on. Now there is we can go into theoretical debate, is this really fascism? Okay, it's a specific fascism because don't forget Nazism is not the only fascism. Even in Franco's Spain, with Mussolini, a certain minimal plurality was allowed, you know? Fascism is not this Nazi only that. So I think, yes, it's really... to give you a story which you will like. I was in China, now it's suspicious, ten years ago. And they no longer use the term communism now, they prefer the term harmonious society. And then I asked them: Listen, I'm an idiot Western naive, I don't get it. Could you simply explain to me what do you mean by harmonious society? And they told me: It means a society where every part, individual, is at its own place and does his/her specific work. Woman is a good mother, worker a good worker, teacher a good teacher, manager a good manager, no? And I said: Now I understand, there are no multicultural disagreements, in Europe we call this corporate fascism, you know? Ah, it's more perverted because I am for
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love in this crazy radical way. But precisely these countries affirm a certain perverted political love for the leader. So I claim where the basis of politics is love for the leader, like in North Korea today, beware, beware. That's why I don't like authenticity, that's why can I say a thing, it will maybe surprise you, about Zelensky. You hear a lot many of these stupid remarks, you know: he was an actor, he acted as president.
love in this crazy radical way. But precisely these countries affirm a certain perverted political love for the leader. So I claim where the basis of politics is love for the leader, like in North Korea today, beware, beware. That's why I don't like authenticity, that's why can I say a thing, it will maybe surprise you, about Zelensky. You hear a lot many of these stupid remarks, you know: he was an actor, he acted as president.
Slavoj Žižek
I love this idea! For me true ethical greatness is not you become, you look deep into yourself, you become what you are. No, true greatness is you adopt a certain mask, role, and you play it to the end, to death. I remember listening an interview with Zelensky where he said openly: even at the beginning of his presidency, he felt a little bit like I am acting, no? But when Russian threat began and war, he said, used a wonderful expression, something like: Now I have to play it for the real. Now I have to fully identify with it. That's heroism today. I don't believe in this look deep into yourself. If you look deep into yourself, only in myself, you discover a lot of shit usually. We all have our dirty secrets and so on. No, true heroism is I adopted a certain role authentically and I'm ready to play it to the end. Okay, so we have a really good question along these lines, about your expectations about what's going to happen in Europe after this war. That many people, this is from Oleksandr Kravchuk, many people suspect that many Western leftists are disappointed, and disappointed supporters are not being able to overcome the old confrontation lines between NATO and the USSR or Russia. Could this war be an impetus for the development of new universal alternatives for the world? Well, oh my god, this is a very difficult and serious question. Because what I am unfortunately also with regard to all the reactions of hatred against me, what I'm seeing is that on the opposite this war gave this, I call them fake leftists, fake left impetus, you know? Like: the main thing today is to fight our our military establishment. They really believe war exploded because American military establishment put pressure on American politics to to engage itself to support. But on the other hand, I think it's even the opposite. Do you remember when Putin announced the invasion? Do you remember first Biden's reaction, which was I think even too soft. He did something horrible. When they ask him: what about sanctions now, no? He said: well, let's see what kind of evasion will it be, limited or.... In other words, he offered Putin a way out: why don't you grab just Donbas down there and then we can make a deal? And Putin didn't accept that. So so I I don't believe these vulgar pseudo-Marxists who do this direct economic reductionism. It's really about profiteering and so on. You know, they are, I think they are a new stage of these conspiracy theories. You know, first it was COVID, it's a conspiracy by the big companies, you know the story, Bill Gates wants to put chips in all of us and so on. Then then then now it's ah then it's global warming. They claim it's a pseudo-problem, it's just another way for big capital to control us. Now it's the war. And do you know, it will interest you that, from my sources in these crazy circles, I was told they are already preparing a third fourth paranoia conspiracy theory, that those in power will invent contact with aliens as now it's an emergency state all around the world, we have to have global discipline and so on and so on. So again, that's another reason for me to support Ukraine. All these conspiracy theories, and you have different versions. One is American establishment, the other one is it's all a secret deal between Biden and Putin. It's not really
I love this idea! For me true ethical greatness is not you become, you look deep into yourself, you become what you are. No, true greatness is you adopt a certain mask, role, and you play it to the end, to death. I remember listening an interview with Zelensky where he said openly: even at the beginning of his presidency, he felt a little bit like I am acting, no? But when Russian threat began and war, he said, used a wonderful expression, something like: Now I have to play it for the real. Now I have to fully identify with it. That's heroism today. I don't believe in this look deep into yourself. If you look deep into yourself, only in myself, you discover a lot of shit usually. We all have our dirty secrets and so on. No, true heroism is I adopted a certain role authentically and I'm ready to play it to the end. Okay, so we have a really good question along these lines, about your expectations about what's going to happen in Europe after this war. That many people, this is from Oleksandr Kravchuk, many people suspect that many Western leftists are disappointed, and disappointed supporters are not being able to overcome the old confrontation lines between NATO and the USSR or Russia. Could this war be an impetus for the development of new universal alternatives for the world? Well, oh my god, this is a very difficult and serious question. Because what I am unfortunately also with regard to all the reactions of hatred against me, what I'm seeing is that on the opposite this war gave this, I call them fake leftists, fake left impetus, you know? Like: the main thing today is to fight our our military establishment. They really believe war exploded because American military establishment put pressure on American politics to to engage itself to support. But on the other hand, I think it's even the opposite. Do you remember when Putin announced the invasion? Do you remember first Biden's reaction, which was I think even too soft. He did something horrible. When they ask him: what about sanctions now, no? He said: well, let's see what kind of evasion will it be, limited or.... In other words, he offered Putin a way out: why don't you grab just Donbas down there and then we can make a deal? And Putin didn't accept that. So so I I don't believe these vulgar pseudo-Marxists who do this direct economic reductionism. It's really about profiteering and so on. You know, they are, I think they are a new stage of these conspiracy theories. You know, first it was COVID, it's a conspiracy by the big companies, you know the story, Bill Gates wants to put chips in all of us and so on. Then then then now it's ah then it's global warming. They claim it's a pseudo-problem, it's just another way for big capital to control us. Now it's the war. And do you know, it will interest you that, from my sources in these crazy circles, I was told they are already preparing a third fourth paranoia conspiracy theory, that those in power will invent contact with aliens as now it's an emergency state all around the world, we have to have global discipline and so on and so on. So again, that's another reason for me to support Ukraine. All these conspiracy theories, and you have different versions. One is American establishment, the other one is it's all a secret deal between Biden and Putin. It's not really
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even a serious war, it's a deal between Biden and Putin to to screw
even a serious war, it's a deal between Biden and Putin to to screw
Slavoj Žižek
Europe, to destroy Europe. Incidentally, here not that I believe in it, but there may be a tiny element of truth, in the sense that there are strong circles in the
Europe, to destroy Europe. Incidentally, here not that I believe in it, but there may be a tiny element of truth, in the sense that there are strong circles in the
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United States again, as I already said, who don't like United Europe. That's why as a leftist progressive,
United States again, as I already said, who don't like United Europe. That's why as a leftist progressive,
Slavoj Žižek
I think now it's the time to fully return to United Europe. But what will happen? Sorry, answering the question: I simply don't
I think now it's the time to fully return to United Europe. But what will happen? Sorry, answering the question: I simply don't
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know enough and I worry a lot. I think as I wrote in my last text, that the first thing that Western Europe should do is stop this obsession with Putin like: you know, did we go too far? Did we cross
know enough and I worry a lot. I think as I wrote in my last text, that the first thing that Western Europe should do is stop this obsession with Putin like: you know, did we go too far? Did we cross
Slavoj Žižek
the the red line? or what, you know like worrying all the time. No, first we should be aware that my God, Putin crossed the red line! I'm ready to buy everything even... I say to friends who tell me: but Ukraine did some not nice things in Donbas, prohibited Russian, I said: okay, I don't know, but wait a minute, we are talking now about a superpower attacking fully another country. If this is not crossing the red line, then I don't know what this means. So I think that precisely first the only way to stop Russia is to be, not in the sense of dropping bombs, but to prevent global war as the West also should should draw red lines. Like one I agree here with you guys: do all, even offer Russians: you control the ships, but that grain has to go out of Odessa. You know also why, I warn you, that's what really worries me: don't underestimate, a warning to Ukrainians, the success of Russian propaganda in Africa, Asian countries, Latin America and there, even Serbia and so on. And that's why this gesture would have been very wise, going to the end, red line: the grain must go through Odessa port, going out, because this would be a gesture which would also be had to be perceived as a gesture for the starving people in the third world, and depicting Russians as those who are really pre- because Russians are now playing this game, you know? They even proclaim, this is an obscenity, that they are decolonizing Ukraine. That after Maidan Maidan was Western colonial occupation of of Ukraine, you know? It's don't forget Asia, Africa... I think that this is absolutely clear that this is the Russian plan. It's simply new global order, new globalization. We will have a new European fortress, but we saw in Belarus what horrors they're able to do, like infiltrating refugees and so on there. They will be extremely brutal here in provoking crisis
the the red line? or what, you know like worrying all the time. No, first we should be aware that my God, Putin crossed the red line! I'm ready to buy everything even... I say to friends who tell me: but Ukraine did some not nice things in Donbas, prohibited Russian, I said: okay, I don't know, but wait a minute, we are talking now about a superpower attacking fully another country. If this is not crossing the red line, then I don't know what this means. So I think that precisely first the only way to stop Russia is to be, not in the sense of dropping bombs, but to prevent global war as the West also should should draw red lines. Like one I agree here with you guys: do all, even offer Russians: you control the ships, but that grain has to go out of Odessa. You know also why, I warn you, that's what really worries me: don't underestimate, a warning to Ukrainians, the success of Russian propaganda in Africa, Asian countries, Latin America and there, even Serbia and so on. And that's why this gesture would have been very wise, going to the end, red line: the grain must go through Odessa port, going out, because this would be a gesture which would also be had to be perceived as a gesture for the starving people in the third world, and depicting Russians as those who are really pre- because Russians are now playing this game, you know? They even proclaim, this is an obscenity, that they are decolonizing Ukraine. That after Maidan Maidan was Western colonial occupation of of Ukraine, you know? It's don't forget Asia, Africa... I think that this is absolutely clear that this is the Russian plan. It's simply new global order, new globalization. We will have a new European fortress, but we saw in Belarus what horrors they're able to do, like infiltrating refugees and so on there. They will be extremely brutal here in provoking crisis
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in Western Europe with
in Western Europe with
Slavoj Žižek
immigrants and so on and so on. Okay, I think Timothy Brik is our time up? He just can he just speak on this lecture or in in general... Jennifer, is he your your husband or are you are you really related? We are siblings. We are siblings, yes, somehow. Yes, spiritually. Exactly. We're soulmates, we're soulmates, we're soulmates. We will we will figure it out. I I have my theories, I have my theories we need to do some historical research. But anyway, thank you a lot, thanks a lot for your time, for your, you know, energy and for answering all of these questions. We will have some polls for the audience, so the audience please you can stay for a second or two and answer some of these questions if you want to be engaged. But, you know, I I think I think we had a very productive and fun conversation. Can I make just an- yeah. Yeah, a very brief final statement. You know what is my message? Yeah, don't fall into this trap of the left, parts of the left:
immigrants and so on and so on. Okay, I think Timothy Brik is our time up? He just can he just speak on this lecture or in in general... Jennifer, is he your your husband or are you are you really related? We are siblings. We are siblings, yes, somehow. Yes, spiritually. Exactly. We're soulmates, we're soulmates, we're soulmates. We will we will figure it out. I I have my theories, I have my theories we need to do some historical research. But anyway, thank you a lot, thanks a lot for your time, for your, you know, energy and for answering all of these questions. We will have some polls for the audience, so the audience please you can stay for a second or two and answer some of these questions if you want to be engaged. But, you know, I I think I think we had a very productive and fun conversation. Can I make just an- yeah. Yeah, a very brief final statement. You know what is my message? Yeah, don't fall into this trap of the left, parts of the left:
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the left are pro-Putin so the left is to be written off. There is still quite a lot of left, look at Paul Mason in the UK and others, who are real leftists and absolutely pro-Ukraine. So don't write off the left. Remember that there is a guy here, our common enemy, Putin, who is whatever he
the left are pro-Putin so the left is to be written off. There is still quite a lot of left, look at Paul Mason in the UK and others, who are real leftists and absolutely pro-Ukraine. So don't write off the left. Remember that there is a guy here, our common enemy, Putin, who is whatever he
Slavoj Žižek
is, my God, he is not a leftist in any sense. And doesn't also claim to be a leftist. Don't write left off too quickly because, especially if, pray to God, you will survive free, you will need not this humiliating support but my God, you know, you will need to be included quickly into developed world and let's hope that you will not get the worst of Europe, just exploitation and so on and so on. You will need leftist friends. But I agree with you when you say: now it's the time for the left to prove, you know, to prove that they are really for you. Because again, it's horrible how all these stories, you know, like I tell them for example: yes, that Azov, charismatic leader, but in the elections he got no? That guy of of your extreme right? and then I told them: okay, even if it's but in every Western European country left, sorry, the radical right is getting more. And they always mention Ukraine as some kind of horrible exception. So I'm going to have to interrupt you now because our friends in Kyiv have to go, but one final question and it's a very short question: are you going to visit Kyiv soon? As soon as possible. Okay, excellent. And then we'll and then we'll have you in Pittsburgh. I would love to, I would love to. I would even if I have to fly somewhere and then with a train... I'm an old lover of trains, I like trains so much, you know? You know why? Because I'm totally alienated. I like to see the countryside through the window of a train when you can then type your know. I'm not interested in nature, nature is for me something that you look through the through the window, you know? Yes, we have excellent trains. Yes, we will get you on a train, it's so... it's done, it's written. We will put you on a train and you're coming to Kyiv soon. So thank you, Professor. It was a very it was a true honor. I'm very grateful to you. I hope I wasn't too confused and so on. You know, because sorry, just one thing which is important, really the last one. You know what's so important when people say: now it's war, what philosophy can do? Now, but are we aware that now a propos Ukraine, we all have to do with questions, my God, which are really philosophical questions: what is freedom today? How can we organize our freedom? Are we free? And so on. It's a unique situation where even common people need philosophers to at least clarify things and so on. It's for me as a philosopher the best time to live in. I just see you know what's my fear, half a sentence. My fear is I worry about this... now they have this brutal butcher from Syria general, the Russians no? That they will just slowly slowly burn villages, go up, you know? I hope they will be somehow stopped or let's hope the optimistic reading is
is, my God, he is not a leftist in any sense. And doesn't also claim to be a leftist. Don't write left off too quickly because, especially if, pray to God, you will survive free, you will need not this humiliating support but my God, you know, you will need to be included quickly into developed world and let's hope that you will not get the worst of Europe, just exploitation and so on and so on. You will need leftist friends. But I agree with you when you say: now it's the time for the left to prove, you know, to prove that they are really for you. Because again, it's horrible how all these stories, you know, like I tell them for example: yes, that Azov, charismatic leader, but in the elections he got no? That guy of of your extreme right? and then I told them: okay, even if it's but in every Western European country left, sorry, the radical right is getting more. And they always mention Ukraine as some kind of horrible exception. So I'm going to have to interrupt you now because our friends in Kyiv have to go, but one final question and it's a very short question: are you going to visit Kyiv soon? As soon as possible. Okay, excellent. And then we'll and then we'll have you in Pittsburgh. I would love to, I would love to. I would even if I have to fly somewhere and then with a train... I'm an old lover of trains, I like trains so much, you know? You know why? Because I'm totally alienated. I like to see the countryside through the window of a train when you can then type your know. I'm not interested in nature, nature is for me something that you look through the through the window, you know? Yes, we have excellent trains. Yes, we will get you on a train, it's so... it's done, it's written. We will put you on a train and you're coming to Kyiv soon. So thank you, Professor. It was a very it was a true honor. I'm very grateful to you. I hope I wasn't too confused and so on. You know, because sorry, just one thing which is important, really the last one. You know what's so important when people say: now it's war, what philosophy can do? Now, but are we aware that now a propos Ukraine, we all have to do with questions, my God, which are really philosophical questions: what is freedom today? How can we organize our freedom? Are we free? And so on. It's a unique situation where even common people need philosophers to at least clarify things and so on. It's for me as a philosopher the best time to live in. I just see you know what's my fear, half a sentence. My fear is I worry about this... now they have this brutal butcher from Syria general, the Russians no? That they will just slowly slowly burn villages, go up, you know? I hope they will be somehow stopped or let's hope the optimistic reading is
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that they
that they
Slavoj Žižek
want just to get some territory then to start some kind of negotiations or whatever you know. I still worry. Don't be too optimistic, I don't
want just to get some territory then to start some kind of negotiations or whatever you know. I still worry. Don't be too optimistic, I don't
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think
think
Slavoj Žižek
you have already
you have already
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won,
won,
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you know
you know
unknown
what I mean. The danger is still there. But I love your cities, I love Lviv, I like Kharkiv, Kyiv, I I love the country, I love the country. And not that there is one very sad racist prejudice: that you Ukrainian having beautiful girls, this is very very sad.
what I mean. The danger is still there. But I love your cities, I love Lviv, I like Kharkiv, Kyiv, I I love the country, I love the country. And not that there is one very sad racist prejudice: that you Ukrainian having beautiful girls, this is very very sad.
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And
And
Slavoj Žižek
then many people even in Slovenia, we have some refugees, automatically assume that they are potentially prostitutes, you know? Many of them were offered jobs in night clubs and so on and so on.
then many people even in Slovenia, we have some refugees, automatically assume that they are potentially prostitutes, you know? Many of them were offered jobs in night clubs and so on and so on.
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This is
This is
Slavoj Žižek
not your problem, this is our problem, you know? Remember
not your problem, this is our problem, you know? Remember
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that in Western Europe,
that in Western Europe,
Slavoj Žižek
it's a more refined racism but it's also racism, you know? It was nice and we have emails and so on
it's a more refined racism but it's also racism, you know? It was nice and we have emails and so on
unknown
to be in contact. Thank you a lot.
to be in contact. Thank you a lot.
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you so much. We will stay in touch with you. Bye bye. Thank you, thank you. Bye bye. Thank you, Professor Žižek. Thank you, Jen. Thank you, everyone. Bye bye.
Thank you so much. We will stay in touch with you. Bye bye. Thank you, thank you. Bye bye. Thank you, Professor Žižek. Thank you, Jen. Thank you, everyone. Bye bye.