What is to be done for politics?
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2012-06-27 · 1:24:25 · 10,271 words
ideologycapitalismcommunism-socialismpsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsecology-climatesexuality-genderphilosophy-generaleveryday-lifetechnology-ai-cyberspace
Žižek delivers a wide-ranging lecture in South Korea arguing that global capitalism must be understood as a totality that includes its necessary failures and exclusions, Congo, Foxconn, structural unemployment, not just its successful poles. He analyses how contemporary ideology operates through implicit meanings, superstitious belief-structures, and commodity fetishism rather than direct lies, illustrating this with the Niels Bohr horseshoe anecdote, canned laughter, and Starbucks's built-in charity pricing. The talk closes by defending a redefined communism as the name for the problem of the commons, ecology, biogenetics, intellectual property, and calling on universities to think rather than merely serve expert functions.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 23
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
True universality is not spiritual commonality but shared participation in struggles for emancipation; people can understand each other across cultures because they fight the same battles.
The socially-assigned role or title that confers authority independently of the person's actual qualities, as with a father who is respected for the position rather than the man.
The gap between one's immediate empirical person and one's symbolic identity, introduced here through the experience of hearing oneself described without understanding the description.
as “negation / negativity”
What something is not is constitutive of what it is, illustrated by 'coffee without cream' vs. 'coffee without milk', which differ only in their respective absences.
Today's ideology does not operate through direct lies but through what is said without being said, the implicit presuppositions generated by a statement that contradict its explicit content.
In the Hegelian dialectical sense, not a harmonious whole but a sum that includes a concept's negations, failures, and necessary exclusions, e.g. Apple cannot be understood without Foxconn.
Žižek expands the category beyond the reserve army to include permanently unemployable individuals, unemployable regions (Congo, Somalia), and graduates with no prospect of work in their field, all necessary products of capitalism.
The dominant form of capitalism-critique that targets greedy individuals rather than the system, thereby preventing structural analysis and leaving the system intact.
Today's horizon of political imagination, accepting global capitalism as the only game in town and at best seeking minority rights and moderate solidarity within it, analogous to the old demand for 'socialism with a human face'.
Referenced obliquely through the structure of ideology that provides a cheap way out (organic food, charity) that allows one to enjoy consumption while feeling morally redeemed.
A Lacanian variant Žižek coins here: we outsource our belief to an imagined other (children, patriots, primitives) so that belief continues to function as a social bond without anyone holding it in the first person.
The anonymous symbolic structure whose existence we presuppose so that our acts have meaning, invoked in the toilet-paper rumour story where people act as if others believe even when no individual actually does.
The second-order structure sustaining social reality, on financial markets, investors do not guess future reality but guess what most people believe others will believe; the fragility of capitalism rests on this recursive trust.
Marx's concept that capitalists practice material beliefs embedded in market behaviour even while consciously holding cynical-realist views, not a cognitive illusion but a belief enacted in practice.
as “mini ecology / lifestyle ecology”
The individualised, consumer-level ecological behaviour (recycling cans, organic food) that functions as superstitious guilt-relief and avoids confronting the systemic causes of environmental destruction.
as “super-ego ecological pressure”
The constant ethical demand to micro-manage one's consumption habits (recycle, buy organic) that functions as a punishing superego agency distracting from macro-level systemic critique.
The left's passive waiting for a grand revolutionary Event that will never come, which has paralysed it in the current crisis and left it without any concrete alternative proposal.
Žižek's formulation for the contemporary structure of sexual encounters, using the other purely as an instrument for private gratification without genuine openness or passionate attachment.
Invoked through the 'partial object' logic, Žižek argues men increasingly want only the partial object (plastic vagina device, beer bottle) rather than a full human partner.
as “pure contractual sex”
The hidden ideal behind anti-harassment ideology: pre-negotiated, legally sanitised sex that eliminates the traumatic, open-ended dimension of genuine erotic encounter.
Žižek redefines communism not as a historical programme but as the conceptual acknowledgment that capitalism is approaching a deadlock and that the commons problem requires thinking beyond the present system.
as “commons”
The three shared resources whose privatisation defines today's antagonism: the earth (ecology), biogenetic legacy, and intellectual property, 'communism' is the name for the problem of the commons.
as “experts vs. true intellectuals”
Experts solve problems defined by others; true intellectuals redefine the problem itself, since the way we perceive a problem is typically part of the problem.
Stories he reaches for 13
The physicist Niels Bohr kept a horseshoe above his door; when a friend objected that he was a scientist, Bohr replied: 'I was told it works even if you don't believe in it.' This perfectly captures how ideology functions today, through the materiality of practice independent of belief.
“I'm not stupid, of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”
In Lubitsch's Ninotchka a waiter cannot give coffee without cream so offers coffee without milk instead. The joke shows that what you lack, the specific negation, is constitutive of identity, not just a missing positive property.
“sorry, but we have run out of cream. We only have milk. So I cannot give you coffee without cream, can I give you coffee without milk?”
Starbucks advertises that two cents from each cup go to Somali children or the rainforest, allowing consumers to pay a premium that purchases moral relief alongside their coffee, ideology incorporates the cost of consumerism into the price of the commodity.
“they include the price for consumerism like into the price of commodity. Do you feel bad by being a consumerist? No problem. Pay a little bit more.”
In the British film Brassed Off a woman invites a man up for coffee; he says he doesn't drink coffee; she replies she has no coffee, through double negation they communicate a direct erotic invitation without stating anything.
“why don't you come up to my flat for a coffee? — I would like to, but I don't drink coffee. — No problem, I don't have any coffee.”
Alain Badiou and Žižek observe French dating-agency publicity promising 'love without the fall', safe, healthy love without the traumatic, fate-like dimension of falling in love, as the ultimate example of risk-managed erotic ideology.
“we will enable you to be in love without the fall, without falling in love. Do it safely in a healthy way, don't risk the encounter.”
American TV sitcoms include a laugh track so that the TV laughs for you when you are too tired; after watching, you feel relieved as if you had laughed yourself. This illustrates how emotional functions, and beliefs, can be outsourced to an external mechanism.
“you come home tired as a dog, you open TV, and the TV even laughs for you. After it I feel relieved as if I have laughed.”
In The Da Vinci Code, hero and heroine (Robert Langdon and the great-granddaughter of Jesus) do not have sex, Žižek argues sex is displaced into the theological backstory (Jesus and Mary Magdalene) precisely to cover its absence in the earthly narrative.
“there has to be sex in heaven you know... to cover up the fact that there is no sex here as it were on earth.”
China's authorities banned time-travel and alternate-history themes in narrative media because they feared people would start imagining political alternatives, Žižek reads this as a good sign: at least the Chinese state fears alternative thinking, unlike Western democracies where no one even dares to imagine it.
“at least those in power are afraid that people will imagine alternatives. In our more democratic countries, nobody even dares to imagine this type of different, different new world.”
Parents say they don't believe in Santa Claus but maintain the fiction for children; children say they don't believe but pretend for their parents. The result is a belief that functions as a social bond without anyone actually holding it.
“a belief which functions as a social link without anyone really believing.”
Žižek notes that Quantum of Solace is the first Bond film with no sex at the end, reflecting a broader cultural prohibition on excessive erotic openness and passionate attachment.
“this is a tendency now... every as it were excessive engagement opening to the other is considered as dangerous.”
Žižek arrives at his Korean hotel and is disappointed to find it skips the 13th floor, the same superstition as in the United States, illustrating how ideology functions even when one consciously knows the act is irrational: you play the game anyway.
“if you are really consciously afraid of the number then you must know that you are doing something stupid... but nonetheless you play the game.”
Fans shout and cheer for their team while watching at home, knowing the players cannot hear them, pure magical thinking analogous to recycling Coca-Cola cans as a response to ecological catastrophe.
“you shout and cry as if in this way you can help your team there. It's pure everyday magical thinking. I claim recycling Coca-Cola cans is a little bit similar.”
In communist Yugoslavia a rumour spread that toilet paper was scarce; everyone knew it was false but reasoned that others might hoard, so they hoarded pre-emptively, producing a real shortage. No individual believed the rumour yet the collective effect was as if they all did.
“no one really believed there is a shortage of toilet paper. We just believed that there is another one that there are some others who are stupid enough to believe.”
Works invoked 7
Ninotchka film
The coffee-without-cream/milk scene is described as 'a very nice joke' and provides the foundational example for the entire talk's argument about negation, identity, and implicit meaning.
The Da Vinci Code film
Part of 'the most disgusting novels and films' by Dan Brown; used to illustrate how erotic energy is displaced from the real protagonists onto a theological backstory.
Brassed Off film
The 'no coffee' seduction scene is called 'a wonderful short scene' and used to show how erotic meaning is produced through double negation and that human sexuality is inherently linguistic.
Quantum of Solace film
Noted as 'even pretty interesting politically' (leftist plot saving Bolivia's Morales regime) but primarily cited as the first Bond film without sex at the end, evidence for the contemporary prohibition on passionate erotic openness.
Melancholia film
The final scene (inescapable planetary destruction) is cited to support the claim that ecological catastrophe at a certain scale is simply beyond individual agency, there is nothing to do.
Angels and Demons film
The film removes sex that exists in the novel, Žižek cites this as part of the same tendency toward erotic avoidance.
The Inuit film's changed ending is used to argue that genuine cultural authenticity lies in adaptive transformation, not in fidelity to original versions.
People invoked 12
Lars von Trier positive
His film Melancholia (the final scene of inescapable planetary destruction) is cited to support the argument that some ecological catastrophes are beyond individual agency.
Jacques Lacan positive
Called 'one of my great teachers'; his concept of symbolic castration is introduced early to frame the gap between empirical person and symbolic identity; also invoked for the subject supposed to believe and for Lacan's observations on technology and post-sexual sexuality.
Mentioned as an example of minimal physical interface with technology (moving a finger) as a point of comparison to the direct brain-computer interface that supersedes even that limit.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Žižek coins 'Fukuyamaist' as a term for those who accept liberal democratic capitalism as the only game in town, including most leftist critics; the 'Fukuyama dream' is declared over.
Alain Badiou positive
Called 'my good friend Alain Badiou'; cited for observing the French dating-agency publicity offering 'love without falling in love', supporting Žižek's argument about risk-managed erotic ideology.
Fredric Jameson positive
Called 'my good friend American Marxist Fredric Jameson'; cited for the observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a small social change that limits capitalism.
Ernst Lubitsch positive
Director of Ninotchka; the coffee-without-cream scene from his film is the first and central illustrative example in the talk.
Named as the star of Ninotchka when introducing the coffee-without-cream joke.
Niels Bohr positive
The horseshoe anecdote about Bohr is deployed as 'the perfect example of today's ideology', one acts as if one believes even without believing.
Dan Brown positive
Called 'the most disgusting novels and films'; yet The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons are used to illustrate the contemporary ideology of avoiding erotic commitment.
Karl Marx positive
Marx's concept of commodity fetishism is deployed as 'totally useful today'; the talk also reworks the Marxist category of exploitation by expanding the proletariat to include the structurally unemployed.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
The Hegelian dialectical tradition, negativity, totality, Aufhebung, is the central methodological framework throughout the talk; Žižek presents his argument as applying Hegelian dialectics to contemporary capitalism.
What it argues
capitalism as totality including its necessary failures and dark sideideology as implicit meaning and materialised belief rather than direct liestructural unemployment and the expansion of the proletariat beyond the employedsuperstitious belief-structures and the subject supposed to believecommodity fetishism and consumerist pseudo-critiquecommunism redefined as the problem of the commonsuniversities as sites of free thinking against expert-knowledge pressure
Dialectical moves 10
“coffee without milk is the same as coffee without cream in its immediate materiality — it's just coffee — but it's not really the same, because what you don't have, negativity, is part of your identity”
Absence is not nothing, the specific negation attached to a thing constitutes its meaning, so two materially identical objects differ as identities.
“the true utopia is not the radical left's vision of change but the belief that things can simply go on the way they are now”
The standard charge of utopianism is reversed: it is the defenders of the status quo who are utopian, not the critics demanding systemic change.
“this apparently corrupted attitude [reinventing tradition for the market] is much more authentic in its way than sticking to some original authenticity”
Genuine cultural authenticity consists in adaptive transformation, not in frozen fidelity to an original, the 'corrupted' version is the truly authentic one.
“the most popular spiritual orientation among top bank managers is some kind of vaguely orientalist Buddhist spirituality — ideology functioning by taking an old concept and discovering how it fits perfectly the most modern postmodern global capitalist experience”
An ostensibly anti-capitalist spiritual ontology (Buddhist void) turns out to perfectly naturalise the fragility and groundlessness of speculative finance capitalism.
“precisely as such — as the horror of this land without rule of law — Congo is part of today's global capitalism; global capitalism needs it”
Congo's hellish dysfunction is not a failure to integrate into global capitalism but an internal necessity of how that capitalism functions, the excluded is included as excluded.
“far from entering a hedonist era, we believe more than ever — but just in this objectified, alienated way”
Conservative complaints about declining belief are wrong in their diagnosis: belief has not disappeared but has been displaced into anonymous objective structures.
“no one really believed there is a shortage of toilet paper — we just believed that there are some others who are stupid enough to believe — and yet there really was a shortage”
Social reality (the actual shortage) is produced entirely through second-order belief without any first-person belief being present, belief in belief is materially efficacious.
“tolerance can also mean something quite the opposite — don't come too close to me, I don't tolerate your proximity”
The liberal virtue of tolerance contains within it the logic of exclusion and distance, the concept is already its own negation.
“there is a light at the end of the tunnel — of course there is, because it's another train approaching us”
The left's traditional optimism about historical progress is reversed: the promised light signals catastrophe, not salvation.
“the way we perceive a problem is part of the problem — the task is not to solve problems defined by others but to define the problem itself”
Problem-framing is not neutral pre-work but is already ideologically determined; true intellectual work begins by questioning the problem's formulation.
Claims 22
asserts
Universality is not spiritual but the universality of shared emancipatory struggle across cultural differences.universality and cross-cultural understanding
asserts
What something is not — its constitutive absence — is part of its identity, and this is the basic message of Hegelian dialectics.negation and identity in Hegelian dialectics
asserts
Today's ideology operates not through direct lies but through implicit meanings — what is said without being said.the mechanism of contemporary ideology
asserts
A proper dialectical analysis of capitalism must include its necessary failures and dark byproducts (Congo, Foxconn) as internal to the concept, not external accidents.dialectical totality and capitalism
asserts
Structural unemployment — including permanently unemployable individuals and whole excluded regions — is a necessary product of capitalism and must be included in the expanded concept of the proletariat.exploitation, unemployment, and capitalism
rejects
Moralistic anticapitalism, which blames greedy individuals, prevents the structural systemic analysis that is the only truly critical approach.moralistic anticapitalism
reframes
The real utopia today is to believe that things can simply continue as they are; the radical left is not utopian but the Fukuyamaist centre is.the charge of utopianism against the left
asserts
Liberal democratic capitalism will not be able to properly confront problems of ecology, biogenetics, and intellectual property in the long term.the limits of liberal democratic capitalism
asserts
Consumer lifestyle practices (organic food, charity donations, recycling) are ideological substitutes that relieve guilt and block confrontation with the systemic causes of the problems they purport to address.consumer ideology and charity
asserts
Nobody in contemporary society really believes in the first person; belief is always outsourced to an imagined other — the subject supposed to believe.structure of belief in contemporary society
asserts
Commodity fetishism (Marx) is fully operative today: the capitalist practices beliefs embedded in market behaviour that contradict his conscious cynical realism.commodity fetishism and contemporary capitalism
asserts
Buddhist spirituality's popularity among financial elites is ideologically functional because its ontology of fragile appearances maps onto the speculative fragility of contemporary capitalism.ideology and pseudo-oriental spiritualism
asserts
The radical left has failed in the current crisis because it has no realistic alternative proposal and is still trapped in a messianic waiting for the great revolutionary Event.the radical left's failure
asserts
In contemporary ideology, unlimited possibility is attributed to technology and private pleasures while even modest social change is dismissed as utopian — this asymmetry is ideology at its clearest.ideology and the horizon of the possible
asserts
Biogenetic intervention in beliefs (DARPA programme) threatens the foundational human self/world border — the freedom of inner thought — and cannot be properly confronted by global capitalism.biogenetics, technology, and human identity
reframes
Tolerance as a social norm can mean its opposite — don't come too close, I don't tolerate your proximity — and this ambiguity must be confronted.the concept of tolerance
asserts
We do not live in a hedonist society but in a society of moderate, regulated pleasures — the smoking hysteria is an example of false hedonism that prohibits real excess.contemporary hedonism and ideology of moderation
asserts
Contemporary sexual ideology prohibits passionate love and traumatic erotic attachment in favour of safe contractual experimentation without genuine commitment.sexual ideology and love
reframes
Communism today means not a party or revolution but the acknowledgment that capitalism is approaching a deadlock and that the problem of the commons (ecology, biogenetics, intellectual property) must be thought radically.the meaning of communism today
asserts
Universities are crucial precisely for their apparently useless free thinking — the task of the intellectual is not to solve problems defined by others but to redefine the problem itself.the role of universities and intellectuals
reframes
So-called 'primitive' societies never naively believed in their totems literally; the same structure of outsourced belief applies there as in modern societies, and cultural racism begins with attributing naive belief to others.primitive belief and cultural racism
asserts
Authentic cultural tradition is not fidelity to an original version but the capacity to change stories according to new situations — as illustrated by the Inuit film The Fast Runner.cultural authenticity
Quotes 15
“The universality is the universality of struggle.”Slavoj Žižek · universality grounded in shared emancipatory struggle, not spiritual essence
“What you don't have, negativity, is part of your identity. This is the basic message of basic Hegelian dialectics.”Slavoj Žižek · constitutive negation in Hegelian dialectics
“Ideology is more lying in the sense of implicit implications. It lies not in what it says, but it lies so that it says what it says by generating in us one implicit meaning while it's really relying on the opposite meaning.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as implicit meaning rather than direct lie
“No Apple without Foxconn. Foxconn is the other side.”Slavoj Žižek · dialectical totality: capitalism's success requires its dark necessary underside
“I'm not stupid, of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.”Slavoj Žižek · materiality of belief — ideology functions through practice independent of conviction
“I'm not aware of any not even minimally realistic proposals. The left is still caught into this messianic expectation.”Slavoj Žižek · left's failure in the crisis — messianic waiting for the Event
“The true utopia is to think that things can simply go on the way they are now.”Slavoj Žižek · reversal of the utopianism charge against the left
“When somebody tells me there is a light at the end of the tunnel, my reaction is of course it is because it's another train approaching us.”Slavoj Žižek · Eastern European cynical reversal of left optimism
“Communism is for me the name of a problem. Our problem today is the problem of commons.”Slavoj Žižek · communism redefined as problem of the commons
“Experts are people who solve problems defined by others. To be a true intellectual is not just to solve problems defined by others, it's to define the problem itself.”Slavoj Žižek · distinction between expert knowledge and true intellectual work
“The message is do something, don't think. No, we should have the courage to say yes the situation can be desperate but precisely in such situations we should withdraw and think.”Slavoj Žižek · defence of theoretical distance and university thinking
“We don't really believe, nobody believes today. People pretend to be cynics... but they usually need another one to believe for them. The psychoanalytic term for this would be subject supposed to believe.”Slavoj Žižek · subject supposed to believe as structure of contemporary ideology
“Isn't passionate sexual love an example of this metaphysics. It's the catastrophe in the sense that I live my happy life... then I fall in love. My happiness is over, everything is subordinated to that.”Slavoj Žižek · love as secular metaphysics and traumatic encounter
“The structure of sexual encounters is becoming that of masturbation with a real partner.”Slavoj Žižek · contemporary sexuality as use of the other as partial object
“All great inventions were never planned. They come as collateral damage and we should do a lot of collateral damage to the system by simply thinking freely.”Slavoj Žižek · free thinking as productive collateral damage to the system
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I hope all the technique works, you that you hear me, and to begin, I really would like to emphasize how proud I am to be here. Why? Because I was told that my books are relatively successful here, which gives me a hope. A hope in what sense? You know, I never really trusted this multiculturalist ideology of how we never can fully communicate, how do you know what I mean, how do I know what you mean, and so on and so on. I always think that a universality is possible. Not a kind of a high spiritual universality, but a universality of struggle. We cannot understand each other because in spite of our struggles, we share the same spiritual substance, but because we participate in the same struggles for emancipation, freedom, and so on and so on. The universality is the universality of struggle. Then I would like to say my thanks to of course first all of you who were kind enough to come here, but especially to the organizers and to the kind words of introduction, and I cannot resist the temptation to use this kind introduction for the first theoretical clarification. Namely, what was my situation during the introduction? I knew something is spoken there about me. I recognized my name, the name of my country, and some more, but you know, so I knew it's about me. I knew as it were that my fate is written there, but it wasn't clear at all to me what this is. This is a little bit like you know when somebody describes you and you don't know how are you described so you cannot identify with it. Like, like, my God, am I really all that? And in psychoanalytic theory developed by Jacques Lacan, one of my great teachers, this gap, the distance that separates my stupid empirical person from my symbolic identity is called symbolic castration. So this is for me the true hospitality that you allowed me to experience again my castration. Thank you very much. No, mean it seriously, you know, castration is precisely this gap that you experience and this is the basic of all our paradoxes in especially between your immediate identity and your symbolic identity. Just think about traditional authority, like a father. A father for most of us, if you look at him as a person, is a confused, impotent idiot, whatever. But nonetheless, it's a father, so in his symbolic identity you respect him. These are the basic of our life. Okay. The third point, I want to emphasize how deeply affected I am by Korean culture. I follow it quite closely, although maybe not in the way you expect. Like, I like Korean films, but not so much those big spiritual films like the one Spring, Summer, or whatever, you know, this is too spiritual for me. I like, I remember one about a North Korean spy who comes here, meets a girl who is also a North Korean spy and then they try to defect, or a film called Warriors, a big spectacle about Korean, these are the films that I like. Not too much art, not good. Okay. I'm okay. So in order to stop losing time, let me please begin. Let me begin with a joke that I consider a very nice one from a classical Hollywood comedy from late 1930s with Greta Garbo playing the main role, Ninotchka, directed by the German emigrant Ernst Lubitsch. It's just a short scene. The hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. He said just coffee, without cream. The waiter replies, sorry, but we have run out of cream. We only have milk. So I cannot give you coffee without cream, can I give you coffee without milk? Because we only have, we only have milk. What's so nice in this idea? It's that what you don't have, negativity, is part of your identity. This is the basic message of our, of basic Hegelian dialectics. What you are not, what is missing, is part of your identity. Which means that although in its immediate materiality coffee without milk is the same as coffee without cream, it's just coffee. But it's not really the same. It matters as to its meaning, coffee without what it is. Now we can even develop further this paradox, quoting another film where you can see also immediately the erotic dimension of this playing with absence, and you can see in what sense properly human eroticism is part of language. We are really sexual in human sense only because we speak. It's a British film from I think late 1990s, a working-class comedy-drama, Brassed Off, about miners losing their job and so on. There is a wonderful again short scene in that film where a young girl flirts with her future boyfriend and after having dinner together, he accompanies her to her home and there she tells him, again it's about coffee. Uh, why don't you come up to my flat for a coffee? He answers, oh, I would like to, but there is only one problem, I don't drink coffee. And she answers, no problem, I don't have any coffee. You see how nothing happens, but through this double negation, I don't drink coffee, no problem, I don't have coffee, can you imagine a more direct erotic invitation? I mean, it means directly asserting what we already suspected, that coffee was a pretext for some other things. Now why lose time with such jokes? And now I'm very serious. Because I think that today the way ideology works today, and at the end if I will have time I will go more in detail with regard to this, the way ideology works today is not as a direct lie in the sense of it's directly telling something that it's not true or whatsoever. Ideology is more lying in the sense of implicit implications. It lies not in what it says, but it lies so that it says what it says by generating in us one implicit meaning while it's really generating or relying on the opposite meaning. Or to use again the example of coffee, it is giving, it is giving us coffee without milk but it claims that it giving us coffee without cream and so on. So again what you really have to be attentive to today are these implicit meanings, what is said without being said. For example in Europe much more than in your country we have today hard problems with economic crisis, austerity. And when those in power want to impose on people austerity measures, lower salaries, no healthcare and so on, of course they pretend they're offering let's say coffee without milk. You just have to suffer a little bit for your own good and so on and so on. They're really offering coffee without cream. So again to fight this type of ideology you have to look at, you have to look at its implications. Why again is this so important? Now I come to my first point. What in Hegelian dialectical tradition we call totality is precisely such a totality, a totality of what there is and of what there is not, of what it is only absent, excluded and so on. And in a true dialectical analysis, the point is not to include particular events into a larger harmonious totality. Dialectics is not holistic. The point is not don't look at phenomena as they are isolated, look at them holistically. That's not enough. What you should do is to include into a certain concept also all its negations, falsifications, failures and so on and so on. For example, let's take today's capitalism. To observe today's capitalism as a totality, it's not enough to say as a system it is good, ideally like Fukuyama described it, it is liberal democracy with successful market economy and so on and so on. No, we should look at all those points where capitalism fails, within a country or outside a country. For example, people celebrate today Apple, the company, as a model of postmodern, digital, technologically most advanced successful capitalism. But the first thing to say here is no Apple without Foxconn. Foxconn is the other side. You know what they're doing in their factories in China, even in an openly obscene way. Like, I was shocked when I read a couple of months ago that the boss, top manager of Foxconn, visited the zoo in Taipei and said I have a big problem, there is one million animals, he meant his workers, that I have to direct, regulate, so I went to the zoo to how to deal with workers and how to deal with thousands of animals at the same time and so on and so on. Or let's take another example, Congo. If you look at the state today which is horror embodied, it's the Republic of Congo. It's simply a state which is immensely rich, wealthy, minerals and so on, but a state which doesn't function, doesn't exist as an operative state. You have simply local warriors, warlords who control parts of it and directly deal with foreign companies because the minerals for Congo are crucial. They are in all your computers, iPads, notebooks and so on. So it is wrong to say unfortunately Congo is not yet developed enough to be part of global capitalism. No, precisely as such, as the horror of this land without rule of law. For example, there are in Congo people think at least one or two thousand, sorry, hundred or two hundred thousand child warriors, you know children you start to give them hard drugs when they are seven, eight, and at eleven, twelve you have perfect killers without conscience. As such as this hell on earth, Congo is part of today's global capitalism. Global capitalism needs it. Global capitalism are not just successful countries like more and more you, up to a point China, Singapore or Northern Europe or whatever. Global capitalism is all this, also the dark side, which has to be excluded. For example, your own country among others. Okay, you are doing nice, but what about, I don't know if this came true, if it was realized, but I know a couple of years ago some one of your big companies had plans basically to buy all the best land, arable land in Madagascar. And it's not just you. Many developed countries today are simply buying the best land in especially African countries and throwing out local farmers and so on and so on, causing new hunger and so on and so on. This is global capitalism. Again, you know where a proper dialectical analysis begins? When you have a certain ideal universal notion, capitalism, communism whatsoever. Then look at the failures or non-intended byproducts of this notion and the basic gesture of dialectics is to see how these failures are necessary failures. How it's not just a misfortune, it's not that oh, because there were bad capitalists there in Congo and so on. No, all these mistakes, antagonism, horrible byproducts are part of the precisely part of the universal notion. I think the category which is more and more becoming crucial today along these lines is the category of unemployment. In the standard Marxist tradition capitalism was defined by exploitation. But I think that today those who are not even in a position to be properly exploited, those who are unemployed are becoming more and more crucial. It's not only the reserve army, those who are temporarily unemployed will be maybe employed later. It's more and more first, people who with new technological development are unemployable, forever unemployed if they don't find job in a totally different sphere. Then we have even whole countries, Somalia, Congo up to a point and many others, or at least whole regions in countries which are as it were in some sense unemployed, excluded from world traffic, from world market. Then you have people who are already in advance unemployable. This is I think one of the main causes of great unrest in Europe. You have thousands, millions of students who study, but they all of a sudden they become aware that there is no chance for them that they will forever get a job in the domain of their studies. So I think that we have somehow to expand the domain of let's call them proletarians, the exploited. It's not only those who work and are exploited. We should include also those who are not even able to work because this exclusion is precisely part of how capitalism is functioning. It is more and more generating necessary unemployment. Why? Now let me go a step further. Why don't we see this more clearly although it's pretty obvious? I think that this shows the strength of the ruling hegemonic ideology. You know where you can see its strength? Precisely in the omnipresence of anticapitalism. What do I mean by this? It's very easy today to be anticapitalist. Just look at any popular media. You have all the time reports on how these companies exploiting children, that company's polluting the environment, that bank is speculating and so on and so on. But all this critique of capitalism remains a moralistic critique. They accuse, I don't know, greedy bankers, greedy capitalists and so on and so on. And I think we shouldn't just blame people here. I'm tired of these stories how oh, that capitalist is an evil guy, greedy. Well, bankers were always like this. The problem is what changed in recent capitalism that this greed can be realized with such catastrophic consequences? That is to say, the limit of this, let's call it moralistic anticapitalism is that it by blaming people and their bad character, their greed, their corruption and so on, it prevents us from doing the crucial analysis which is the analysis, which is the analysis of the system. What is wrong with the system as such. This is for me the only big question today. Everyone today is a almost everyone is a Fukuyamaist. I'm referring to Francis Fukuyama. Even most of the critics of capitalism are, because large majority today accepts as a matter of fact that liberal democratic capitalism is the only game in town, as the Americans put it. The only system that really works and all we can do is to make it a little bit better, more efficient. When I was young, we were all, some people, fighting for socialism with a human face. Today it is as if the limit of our horizon is capitalism, global capitalism with a human face. More rights for minorities, more solidarity and so on, but we accept the system as such. It is as if effectively seeing the limit of capitalist system is almost unimaginable, if I may put it like this. It's like my good friend American Marxist Fredric Jameson, he noticed this, namely how in today's science fiction even, we can easily imagine the end of the earth, an asteroid hitting the earth, end of life whatever, easy to imagine, but a little bit of a social change that would limit capitalism, we cannot imagine that. The end of the world okay, but capitalism has to stay. Now I'm not blaming here some evil ideologists and so on and so on. It's a much more complex situation. I read recently, it's a wonderful detail of ideological struggles, not recently, a year ago I think, a little bit less, in the fall of I read that in People's Republic of China, they, I don't know who this they is, some ministry for information of culture, they prohibited the topic of time travel and alternate history in all narrative media, narrative films, TV series, novels and so on. Why? Okay, it's obvious. They were afraid that people will start to think about alternatives. But I think this is a good sign for China. At least those in power are afraid that people will imagine alternatives. In our more democratic countries, nobody even dares to imagine, even dares to imagine this type of different, different new world. Why am I emphasizing this? Because your obvious counter-argument would have been probably so what's the problem? We know that communism miserably failed, and I agree with this, 20th century communism was over all a catastrophe, it failed, so why not simply stay with what we have? Well, I will not repeat the analysis from my books which are already translated here, just briefly I would say, and this is for me the crucial problem, I would say that there are enough signs that we are approaching problems from ecology to biogenetics, and so on and so on, even to the problem of so-called intellectual property, which I think that in the long term global capitalism together with its political expression liberal democracy will not be able to confront properly. Here I am a moderate pessimist. I think when people accuse us radical leftists for utopia, I claim no, the true utopia is to think that things can simply go on the way they are now. I'm not saying there will be a catastrophe tomorrow and so on. I'm just saying that we are approaching a certain limit. For example we know that the environment cannot sustain rapid development in countries like China and so on, simply the world, the world environment cannot sustain this. And we also know I think that local ways to resist this are not enough. We try to escape it, to avoid this confrontation and here I would like to improvise with you some wonderful way ideology ways ideology penetrates our daily lives. Maybe you know some of them, I always found them amusing. For example, I claim that most of our charitable activities or most of our care for organic food and so on, that they are pure ideology. You know for example, now I will be very cynical. Imagine yourself, you go to a store, I don't know how popular here in your country this is, but in all Western Europe and United States the big trend among among snobbish upper-middle-class people or intellectuals is for example to buy organic food. I will be very cynical. I claim that okay imagine yourself in a store, you see an organic apple. It's usually rotten much uglier than the good biogenetically modified apple and it costs more, but you buy that one. Why? I don't think you really believe that it really does something to environment or whatever. I think you basically do it because it makes you feel good. That is to say, you feel a little bit guilty, oh my God, it's not good what we are doing to environment, and then you are looking for a cheap way out and you tell say to yourself isn't this nice, I bought this apple, I'm doing something for the Mother Earth, I'm part of a big movement of millions of people who are with me together to help the Mother Earth. It's this sublime feeling which is again ideology at its purest. Let's go on with charity, I think it's the same. You know you for example, I don't know, you buy coffee, you buy a for example you buy coffee or sorry, for example when you it's very popular in the West, you contribute some money, it can be even pseudo-personalized. You establish contact through some agency with an African orphan and you send, I don't know, dollars, even less every month and once a year you get a letter back with a photo and so on and so on. It makes you feel good. You are doing something, isn't it wonderful, I even know the face there and so on and so on. I think that it this is what is offering you as it were an easy way out. Like because you don't really have to change your life. You as it were, it's I think even an example of superstitious thinking. Don't underestimate this superstitious thinking today. Its power. I saw it today when I came here, I descended from my hotel in the elevator and I saw that you are here, here you disappointed me a little bit because you display the same stupidity as in the United States, you at least this hotel, but maybe it's because it's more for foreigners, Hyatt, I don't know I hope this is true, you don't have the 13th floor. It's and Now if you are really consciously afraid of the number then you must know that you are doing something stupid. Because whom are you cheating? God knows very well that is really if you skip. You know what I mean. But nonetheless you play the game. This is I think how ideology functions today. You don't have to believe in it, but you still act as if you believe. And I'm sorry if I now will use an example which I used in many of my books, but I think it's the perfect example of today's ideology. It's the anecdote about Niels Bohr, you know the quantum physicist, who had a country house outside Copenhagen, a friend scientist visited him there and saw a horseshoe above the entrance. I don't know how is it here with you but in Europe a horseshoe above the entrance is a sign of superstition. Like allegedly it keeps the evil spirits outside. Okay so the friend asked Niels Bohr, but you are a scientist, are you crazy? Why do you have this there? Do you believe in it? And you know what was Niels Bohr's answer, a perfect one. He said I'm not stupid, of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it. That's ideology today. You don't have to believe in justice, in democracy, but you do, you think that somehow, how should I put it, it works even if you don't believe in it. I mean in our system maybe in our everyday ideology this type of superstition, but maybe superstition is not a good word, it's more something like the materiality of belief, like you can believe literally without believing. I'm sorry if I use another example from my early books which maybe some of you know. But I think it's perfect, for me at least, the greatest contribution of America, United States to world culture. So-called canned laughter, you know, the TV set, those stupid American series like Cheers, Friends, where the TV laughs for you. Laughter is included into the soundtrack. I think this is a wonderful invention. Imagine yourself, you Koreans I know are hardworking people, that's what some scientists claim. So imagine you come home at tired as a dog, you want to relax. You open TV, you just of course you are tired, you just look at it like an idiot, tired, and the TV even laughs for you. And I don't know if it works for you, but it works for me, after it I feel relieved as if I have laughed. It can laugh for you. These mechanisms are not just to make us to make just to make good jokes. This is I think for example how our beliefs function today. We don't really believe, nobody believes today. People pretend to be cynics, you know, oh I don't care, I know life is cruel, it's just sex, money, power whatever. People don't believe but you know how you can detect their beliefs? They usually need another one to believe for them. The psychoanalytic term for this would have been subject supposed to believe. And it's again absolutely crucial this category today. Like most people at least in my country, they are not patriots. They say oh who cares about my blah blah blah. But nonetheless they don't like you to make or me to make fun of our own country and then when you ask them but why not? They say oh listen, but it's my son he will not understand it I have to pretend to, you know, it's like do you have here something that in Europe corresponds something here that corresponds to what in Europe we call Santa Claus, that stupid guy you know it, red dress who brings presents to children. It's a wonderful structure, you know, where you ask parents do you believe in Santa Claus? They would have said I'm not idiot of course not. I buy the presents. Okay then you ask children they would say of course not, I'm not an idiot, I pretend not to disappoint my parents and to get, you know here you have a nice example of a belief which functions as a social link without anyone really believing. And this subject supposed to believe can also be a totally imagined entity. An old story from my past from communist Yugoslavia. There was a situation at some point it really happened and a sociological research established this. All of a sudden there was a rumor that there is not enough toilet paper in the stores. Now most of the people knew that this is a false rumor. That with normal consumption of toilet paper there is more than enough of it. But each of us reasoned like this. I know this is just a rumor. But what if there are some idiots who will take this rumor seriously and will start to buy excessive amounts of toilet paper? So and then there will be really a shortage of toilet paper. So to to prevent this that I will be out of toilet paper better to go and buy it now. And when enough people did this there really was a shortage of toilet paper. But you see the paradox, no one really believed there is a shortage of toilet paper. We just believed that there is another one that there are some others who are stupid enough to believe as it were. This again this is I think absolutely crucial for our situation today. That and I think here conservatives who claim you know we are entering a hedonist era, an era where people think just of about their pleasures they no longer believe are no longer ready to sacrifice their lives and so on. I think they are totally wrong. We believe more than ever but just in this objectified alienated way. Of course we don't believe in the first person. But we believe by way of as it were attributing our belief onto another but again the belief still maintains its function. And incidentally here also European scientists were totally wrong when they met so-called entered so-called primitive societies and you know when that society thought that when they claimed our totem is I don't know a fish or an eagle a bird and Europeans thought they really believed that these people are so stupid as to believe that they developed out of a bird. But then I read a good analysis when someone who entered this tribe asked them but do you really believe that people from your tribe descend from that bird. It's interesting what type of answer they got. It was something like no we don't really believe but we were told that there was everyone says but there was I heard a grand uncle of mine who believed it and so on you know like once they believed it or whatever. I think that the first step outside of cultural racism is to admit that nobody believes that if there is an idiot who believes it's ourselves not the others. Let me tell you before I get lost then I will return to my main line another function which is this cultural miscommunication at its purest. Maybe you know it but it's so wonderful that I like to repeat it. In the middle of 19th century some I think it was German anthropologists visited a tribe in the middle of North Guinea Guinea. They heard that this tribe knows how to dance some terrible dance of death. Okay so they visited the tribe, they arrived there in the evening and they somehow through their gestures explained to them that they want to see their famous terrifying dance of death. They went to sleep next day they awakened and members of the tribe effectively performed for them this terrible dance. So satisfied they wrote their anthropological report about the primitive dance fascination of primitives with death and so on and left the tribe. Unfortunately years later another expedition visited the same tribe and asked them what really happened with the first expedition. And since this second group learned properly the language understood better the local people they got the true story which is a wonderful one. When the tribe was visited by the first expedition they terribly tried to guess what do these foreigners want from them. And somehow they guessed that they want some stupid terrible dance of death. So the whole night they worked constructing this mask just out of politeness politeness and hospitality they organized this dance to be to be nice towards them. So you see what the stupid white people thought oh the authentic primitive horror was just the others being polite and trying to guess their here also we should be very very precise and careful about so-called primitive authenticity. I wonder if it was shown in your country a wonderful Eskimo Inuit film The Fast Runner which retells an old Eskimo myth about a conflict and in the original myth from 17th century it's total catastrophe at the end. The two tribes kill each other, everyone is dead. In this new version it just they throw out two bad guys and there is a big reconciliation. So then a white journalist asked the authors why did you commercialize your myth. Why didn't you stick to the original story. Why didn't you remain authentic to your culture. And he got a wonderful answer. The answer is that no it's precisely part of our original authentic culture not to repeat the same story but to change it accordingly to new situations. They said this is our tradition. It's you stupid Europeans who are obsessed with authenticity you know the original version and so on and so on. And this is what I always like when I see here on the way here on a taxi or everywhere you know these stores selling authentic Korean medicine and so on and so on. I think they are intelligent enough to I was told this in in New Zealand they have Maoris the natives there who have their representatives in New York who look at new fashions what now the market wants and then he tells this to these local authentic painters tribal who quickly change they their style to fit better the you know they reinvent and I think that like the paradox is that this apparently corrupted attitude it's much more authentic in its way than sticking to some original original authenticity or whatever. Okay let's not get lost. I just wanted to convince you to these couple of examples of why is this structure of belief, belief to belief and so on so crucial. If you know even a little bit about capitalism today speculations with futures and so on and so on. You know that it's all sustained by trust and belief or belief in belief. When you play with futures on the stock market you don't just invest, you don't just try to guess with your investment what people will believe two years from now. You try to guess what most of the people believe that people will believe two years from now. And I think there is something almost horrifying in this let's call it fragility of the social edifice of today's global capitalism. How much it is based on this how should I call it belief or belief in belief. But again I am not a psychological idealist here. I am not saying there is no objective reality there are just beliefs or whatever. No the problem is that these beliefs are material beliefs. They are materialized in our acts and so on and so on. Which is why as I always insist we should return to Marx his notion of commodity fetishism. Which is precisely a wonderful notion totally useful today. Why? Because Marx does not claim that we in fetish in market fetishism that we believe something which doesn't fit reality. No. Marx claims that we practice beliefs of which we are not aware. Marx is saying that if you take a typical capitalist, he is totally cynical realist but when he deals on the market he practices a belief. His belief is in what he does not in what he thinks. It's a wonderful dialectical notion of a belief which is a material belief. Belief embodied in your practice, not in what you are doing. Which is why incidentally do you know which I think this explains why a certain type of pseudo-oriental spiritualism, Zen Buddhism or whatever kind of Buddhism is so popular among top top bank managers, investors, digital capitalists and so on. Did you know did you know this? It's very interesting that the most popular spiritual orientation among them is some kind of a vaguely orientalist Buddhist spirituality. Why? Because they are fully aware of this fragility of our social reality. You know you have a certain economic orientation successful. People start to believe, not even start to believe what is reality. People start to believe that other people believe something and everything can collapse. And of course the idea is that this is something close to the ontological fragility. The world is just the game of appearances and so on. which we find again in Buddhist teachings. I think this is a nice example of how of ideological how should I call it trans-functioning, re-functioning where an old concept can acquire new actuality. You take something like the Buddhist ontology you know of Sunyata, void, nothingness, our reality is just a game of appearances and so on. And you you can discover how it fits perfectly the most modern even postmodern global capitalist global capitalist experience. Okay so back to that idea of superstition and so on. I claim that what is so difficult to admit apropos ecology today, it's not so much that is difficult to recognize our responsibility, like we are destroying nature and so on. Maybe it's even more difficult to recognize that up to a point it doesn't even depend on us. You know like the final scene pretty horrifying from that Lars von Trier new movie Melancholia where you just know it's the end of the world you can't do anything. And I think that much of this small level ecology this style style of life mini ecology you know this constant super-ego in the psychoanalytic sense of ethical agency. Super-ego pressure like did you throw a can of Coke away or did you recycle it? Do you recycle all your newspapers and so on? I think it's this type of superstitious activity. I'm not saying it's not good and important doing it. I'm doing it. I claim it's avoiding the true problem which is a much larger one. We will not save the earth by by recycling Coca-Cola cans. We will maybe maybe save the world by totally changing our mode of production and so on and so on. So what I'm saying is that are you aware that are you aware of this strange phenomenon which is another example of everyday superstition? When you watch at home some sport soccer, football, basketball whatever match even if you are just at home in front of TV with your friends. You shout and cry as if in this way you can help your team there. It's pure everyday magical thinking. Although you rationally know they don't hear you it's nothing but you do it. I claim recycling Coca-Cola cans is a little bit similar. It's a little bit similar to this. So you see here again and yes okay I will repeat my old example that you all know unfortunately I noticed that even here you have Starbucks. Starbucks are the greatest here for me. You know why? The starting point of Starbucks is that we feel bad as consumers you know. But you know when I don't know if it's true here in Europe and United States it is that Starbucks make publicity of how conscious they are socially. You know they say for each cup of cappuccino that you buy with us, two cents go to some Somali starving children, two cents go to save the rainforest whatever. And this is a wonderful capitalist solution that they include the price for consumerism like into the price of commodity. Like they tell you do you feel bad by being a consumerist, spending too much? No problem. Pay a little bit more and you pay a price for consumerism you know. It's it's so again what I'm saying is that with all these phenomena of beliefs magical thinking and so on and so on we are not dreaming here to understand today's capitalism, its crisis, the way capitalism works at the level of ideology and so on and so on. All this is absolutely all this is I think so absolutely crucial. Now let's go a step further. What happens when this system threatens to collapse? There are signs in the last two three years that the system is at least becoming aware of its limitations like this is what the great movement Occupy Wall Street was about I think so. About the first awareness of a limitation. Because this was not just a protest movement against war, racism whatever. It was a movement based on the insight that there is some structural fault, problem with capitalist system as such. But here if you permit me one last circle here as leftists we should be brutally honest. Brutally honest in what sense? Listen. Now maybe this will not be popular with some of you if you are traditional leftists. But till like five years ago at least in the developed West the left when capitalism thrived in relative prosperity for most of the people at least for most in the West the usual critical Marxist intellectuals' attitude was yeah yeah this is a false prosperity just wait for the crisis you will see things will collapse and so on and so on. They were as it were waiting for their great moment you know playing this what we call in Europe Cassandra from Homer's Iliad you know the the the the one who always predicted the catastrophe. Now the crisis is here not with you you are the lucky ones, you Brazil, Singapore whatever but at least in Western Europe in United States and so on there is at least a feeling of gloom crisis large demonstrations Greece and so on. And where is the left? Nowhere. Nowhere in what sense? Even in this time of massive protests and so on and so on where the left was expected to bring together, unify all these movements into one great proposal like that's what we should do. I think the left failed here. I'm not aware of any and I'm not of any alternative proposal what to do. And I'm not talking about detailed plans of course we cannot do this. I'm talking about very general orientation. What do we want? Like what should we do now? Is this a crisis of capitalism as such or it's just a limited crisis of a certain type of capitalism where we need more public spending, healthcare whatever to make it more efficient. If we have to move outside of capitalism how? through return to state-centralized property, some more dispersed local democracy or whatever. We get it's incredible how I am not aware of any not even minimally realistic proposals. I think that the left whatever remains of radical left is still caught into this into this let's call it messianic expectation. You know that we just patiently wait there will be a moment when the authentic working class, not social democracy, not Stalinist Communist, will finally realize their destiny, come together and do the real revolution whatever. It they are all as it were waiting for the event with capital the great event to happen and patiently waiting. I think we have finally to accept that there will not be such an event. This doesn't mean things will just continue to go on the way they do. No no, there will be ecological catastrophes, starvation, mass chaos, war and so on and so on. But what I doubt is that there will be this one great event of massive global redemption whatever. So now there will be again your skeptical attitude. In the sense of why not nonetheless accept where we are. Isn't the dream of a radical change an impossible dream? Ah here again we should be very careful today I claim. Did you notice how in our I hope with you it's the same as in Western Europe in United States in Japan how when people talk about what is possible and what is impossible and by people here I mean simply the big media. It's a very strange duality that we get. When you talk about technology and private pleasures almost nothing is impossible. They are promising us that things that we cannot even imagine today are more and more becoming possible. Like I don't know, the ultimate dream is this dream of Gnostic digital technology that we will turn into software programs and just embody ourselves from one to another hardware becoming immortal. Or there are these crazy dreams of multiple sexuality. Like my bad taste example and it's not a dream I spoke with a doctor who is doing this today in New York. They a doctor can split your penis into two so that you can do it to two with two women at the same time whatever you want. All this can be possible or you know growing organs through cloning and so on whatever. Here things are or soon we will as tourists be able to fly to other planets. Again in private pleasures, in technology no problem things are possible, possible. But isn't this a strange world where immortality may be possible, changing all your organs blah blah maybe possible but to give more money for healthcare ah impossible, we lose competitiveness and so on and so on. Did you notice how this growing possibility of the impossible in the sphere of technology and private life is one side the other side is as if any even moderate social change is immediately dismissed as utopian impossible, it will cause a catastrophe, it will cause a it will cause a war or police terror whatever. Maybe this is the clearest example of ideology today. Ideology is not primarily the big lessons you know belief in this and so on. Ideology is precisely this automatic structure of our as it were mental space which makes something possible other things unthinkable for us. And and again this is for me the the the problem today. Namely the reason I don't want to accept this easy solution which would have been okay let's drop it I mean let's stay with what we are and just fight moderately and so on and so on is that I am too much of a pessimist here. I again as I already said I think that the Fukuyama dream is over. I think that we are approaching times where just imagine for example a nuclear catastrophe or ecological catastrophe just two three times stronger than the Fukushima catastrophe. The solution would have been to move tens of millions of people to change whole social body and so on and so on. Who will do this? How how will it be done and so on and so on. Just think about biogenetics. I find it fascinating but are we aware what is going on that already and it's not some utopian future at the very elementary level they can do it more and more now. Namely what? Not only through biogenetic and other way to affect our psychological properties, sense of pride and so on. What do I mean by this? If you don't believe me go to Google after this talk and just put into Google DARPA, D-A-R-P-A. It's not a joke, it's a program financed by CIA. It's pretty terrifying. It's explicitly I'm not now caricaturizing it the program with the goal how to change narrative structures and beliefs through direct brain biogenetic interventions. So the idea is and that's their example you have somebody who started to believe in Islam fundamentalism and became a terrorist. Let's observe what happens in his brain when he accepted those beliefs and let's try to change his beliefs not by any ideological work even brainwashing. Brainwashing you still wash the brain by automatic repetitive arguing. No by simply with chemical means or operations directly intervening into it. No now I'm not blaming this I'm just saying that this is not just a crazy idea because probably it was also in your media how for example a computer can already read the fundamental orders in your brain so that for example if you are totally crippled you no longer need even what Stephen Hawking needs you remember like moving his finger a little bit. They just attach your brain to computer you think strongly forward it goes forward. You think left it goes left. Now this sounds nice. You are like God. You can make things move by your thought alone. The problem is that it also goes outside inside like they can also affect you and so on and so on. I mean now I'm not painting you a dark prospect. I'm just saying something here tremendously important is happening which will probably affect the very definition of what it means to be human. Because our basic human identity presupposes this limit. I'm here with my thoughts reality is out there. You can torture me whatever you want my thought remains free. What if this this this border falls down. Who will control this? How and so on and so on. These are immense challenges which again I think cannot be properly confronted dealt with in with today's global capitalism. Because you know ideology is not simply a lie. Ideology is ideology deals with real problems but in a false way. For example for me at least ecology becomes ideology when you translate it into some cheap New Age spiritualism. And you say oh because we abandoned Mother Earth whatever and you this is clearly or in a more refined way. I wonder if you will agree this and with this I will so that the kind organizers will not will not will not the time yes will be to finish slowly. I'm sorry if I'm too long. Just one example again of this everyday of this functioning of ideology. Take the notion of tolerance. We talk a lot about tolerance today. But did you notice how ambiguous this category is? Tolerance yes but I mean I'm all for tolerance when it means tolerate diversity and so on and so on. But tolerance can also meet mean something quite the opposite. It means don't come too close to me I don't tolerate your proximity and so on. You know this is why for example now I will go to the end with an extreme proposition. I will defend I don't smoke and I hate tobacco companies. But do you also have this obsession with smoking should be prohibited and so on and so on? I think it's ideology. I'm not saying people are not dying of smoking. But you know people are also dying from alcohol from drugs and so on and I notice in the West how the same left-liberals who oppose smoking then they offer you drugs the same evening and so on. So why was smoking elevated into this ultimate as it were image of horror. You know like it's incredible at least in the West how far this goes. Even when you buy a cigarette it started with the inscription obligatory smoking may hurt your health. Then it became more brutal, smoking kills. Now the next step was to be even more specific smoking will render you impotent and so on. Then the last fashion in Europe is you have big photos of like your lungs operation and so on and ah this is what you smoke. No I'm not for smoking but I think that this example is a good example of how false our hedonism is I claim. We don't really live in a hedonist society. We live in a society of moderate regulated pleasures. Beer yes but beer without alcohol. Coffee yes but decaffeinated coffee. Like do it properly do it moderately. Hedonism for me real hedonism means I don't care I go to the end I smoke I have sex till I drop dead which is not a bad idea but not what is advised today. When I flew here from Europe three days ago I read the most horrible text I can imagine on that journal of the you know inflight journal of the company. It was a text praising sex. But in the most depressing way you can imagine. The thesis was sex is good for health. And then they described how if you change position like this this it's even better than jogging then they claim that even deep kissing is good because deep kissing strengthens your muscles here so that when you are old the saliva will not I mean it's absolutely depressing and to conclude with an example of everyday ideology. Did I claim that excessive sex or even more love, love as passionate love is becoming prohibited. Today's ideology is not monogamy. I don't know how it's here but in United States and Europe I can guarantee you today's ideology is kind of a moderate experimenting. Be who you truly are, make experiments, try it with a woman with a man with two women with a man and a dog whatever you want, but don't identify yourself so much too much you know. And in this sense let me give you an example which may surprise you if you noticed it. Did you see the last James Bond film Quantum of Solace? Politically it's even pretty interesting because it's very leftist basically James Bond saves Morales regime in Bolivia from a bad international company. But did you notice something strange is the first James Bond film where at the end there is no sex between Bond and Bond girl? And this is a tendency now. Did you see the most disgusting novels and films Dan Brown. Did you notice how in The Da Vinci Code you have hero and heroine, Robert Langdon the symbologist and his the grand-granddaughter of Jesus Christ okay. There is no sex between two of them. And I claim that the there has to be sex in heaven you know the thesis is that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and so on to cover up the fact that there is no sex here as it were on earth. Even worse did you see the last Dan Brown film Angels and Demons. There there is sex in the novel but no sex in the film. I think the tendency is clear and a terrifying one is that every as it were excessive engagement opening to the other is considered as dangerous. This is why at least the Western Europe through this marriage or dating agencies is I think returning to pre-modern practices of arranged marriages. What do I mean by this? What do I mean by this? I don't know your language how you put it but in French and in English when you fall in love we use the word fall to designate this and that's the most beautiful thing about love no I see you and then oh my God it's my fate I cannot help and so on. Do you know that now I noticed it and my good friend Alain Badiou noticed it in France how more and more dating agencies directly refer to this phrase and for example one big publicity that I saw is we will enable you to be in love without the fall, without falling in love. You know the idea is do it safely in a healthy way don't risk the encounter none of that traumatic fall and so on. And I think again that this is something which is for me pretty terrifying. This means that sex is more and more becoming no longer this deadly passionate attachment which is I think even the first form of metaphysics. If metaphysics means that you are in your vulgar daily life but then you encounter another dimension something which totally changes opens another dimension isn't this passionate sexual love isn't passionate sexual love an example of this metaphysics. It's the catastrophe in the sense that I live my happy life, happy maybe a one-night stand here there short sex drinks then I fall in love. My happiness is over everything is subordinated to that it's a traumatic encounter. Which is why now really to conclude I think that what is more and more happening is that the structure of sexual encounters is becoming that of let's call it masturbation with a real partner. You just want to play games and it's at least till now more satisfying to do it with another person than with some plastic objects or whatever and it's pretty terrifying to what extent our industries already provide more and more plastic objects. For example I saw recently a publicity among those horrible sexual free ads that you get on your email for something like vaginal trainer for men sounds horribly. It looks like a lamp. You open the top and it's the entry to vagina, plastic. So the idea and it's electrically regulated. You can regulate the form so that it looks like no you put different plastic top in it. It can be vagina, anus or mouth and then you can regulate how thick it it and so on and so on and you just do it alone and so on. So you know in my first book I think or second I quoted a publicity from Australia years ago. I think it's now becoming a reality. In Europe we have this well-known fairy tale story of a girl who sees a frog and the girl kisses the frog and the frog turns into a young prince. This is the first part of the publicity because it's the publicity for beer. Girl sees a frog, kisses the frog, the frog turns into a beautiful young man. But you know what then happens. The boy kisses the prince kisses the girl and she turns into the bottle of beer like this is what I really want. I think we are passing from this woman who still wants at least a human partner to a man who wants just a partial object. And Jacques Lacan in his psychoanalytic theory was deeply impressed by this movement of our technology towards this let's call it post-sexual sexuality. And I claim that even our obsession with so-called sexual harassment. First I'm aware there is real harassment and I am totally opposed to it. What I'm only saying is that quite often when at least in the United States I notice this people are obsessed with harassment but the basic message is that almost anything you did is you know when you are in the process of seduction someone has to make the move which if the other says no becomes harassment. Harassment is the what I'm saying is this, the hidden ideal of this attack against harassment is pure contractual sex. We make a plan in advance, I agree you agree this, we just make a plan, a kind of a legal pact about how we will use each other for our pleasures. I think so again I didn't lose my thread here. I'm still talking about today's capitalism. What I'm saying is that all these changes that I was indicating this how even intense sexual commitment becomes something dangerous this preaching of moderation and so on or the structure of beliefs that I described how even if we don't believe we believe to believe and so on and so on. This is not just ideology in the sense of something up there. This is ideology in the very heart of our economic process of consumption, production exchange and so on and so on. And so again things are happening today and for me to be still a communist. Okay I will not lose time now if you want you can ask me afterwards why I still prefer to use this horrible word but to be a communist does not mean oh we need a big communist revolution, communist party, especially not the one across the border here no. To be a communist means for me just this to admit that we are approaching a certain deadlock. That things cannot go on indefinitely the way they do and that also we cannot find the solution by returning to any tradition you know what people say like oh capitalism is disintegrating social texture so we need capitalism but with some ancient Buddhist whatever Confucian tradition this is basically today's China, Chinese solution. which is why Confucianism and so on are fully supported by the state in China today. I think communism just means this opening. It's no longer the 20th century communism where you know the laws of history what will happen. No, we have no guarantee that we will save ourselves. It's up to us, the situation is open. We just know that we are approaching difficult times. That it cannot go on the way it did and it's up to us to act or not. There is no higher necessity directing us you know that old-style communists liked to say how oh the situation may seem dark but there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm coming from Eastern Europe, our humor was always very cynical so when somebody tells me there is a light at the end of the tunnel, my reaction is of course it is because it's another train approaching us you know. So that's all I try to tell you. I don't have clear solutions. Communism is for me the name of a problem. Our problem today is the problem of commons. Commons of our earth, commons of our of our biogenetic legacy, commons of our intellectual substance so-called intellectual property which shouldn't be privatized and so on and so on. That's our problem and the situation is open and we have to start thinking radically. Which is why also places like here universities are I claim extremely important today. The establishment literally doesn't want us to think. I don't know how maybe you are lucky here but in Europe and United States there is now a wide movement saying who needs this ivory tower of universities. Universities should serve concrete needs of people and so on. No, I think that what they want us, universities, is to produce experts. But we if we are true intellectuals we are not experts. Experts are people who do what? Experts are people who solve problems defined by others. For example there are riots in Paris and police calls experts. How will be psychologically how will we manipulate the demonstrators what force should we use and so on. To be a true intellectual is something much more. It's not just to solve problems defined by others, it's to define the problem itself. As a rule the way we perceive a problem is part of the problem. We perceive the problem in a wrong way. The task of us intellectuals is to not to offer solutions who knows today but to make people really aware of the problems that we are in. And for this again we need apparently useless institutions like universities. My God all great inventions were never planned. They come as a as they say in Iraq collateral damage and we should do a lot of collateral damage to the system by simply thinking freely. That's why you have all this pressure on like like my God how can you spend time and money here just doing your theories while people are starving in Africa or whatever. This is brutal manipulation because the message is do something don't think. No, we should have the courage to say yes the situation can be desperate but precisely in such situations we should withdraw out of being fully part of life and think. We need the distance of universities today more than ever. I am sorry if I was too long and I am infinitely grateful for your patience. Thank you very much.
I hope all the technique works, you that you hear me, and to begin, I really would like to emphasize how proud I am to be here. Why? Because I was told that my books are relatively successful here, which gives me a hope. A hope in what sense? You know, I never really trusted this multiculturalist ideology of how we never can fully communicate, how do you know what I mean, how do I know what you mean, and so on and so on. I always think that a universality is possible. Not a kind of a high spiritual universality, but a universality of struggle. We cannot understand each other because in spite of our struggles, we share the same spiritual substance, but because we participate in the same struggles for emancipation, freedom, and so on and so on. The universality is the universality of struggle. Then I would like to say my thanks to of course first all of you who were kind enough to come here, but especially to the organizers and to the kind words of introduction, and I cannot resist the temptation to use this kind introduction for the first theoretical clarification. Namely, what was my situation during the introduction? I knew something is spoken there about me. I recognized my name, the name of my country, and some more, but you know, so I knew it's about me. I knew as it were that my fate is written there, but it wasn't clear at all to me what this is. This is a little bit like you know when somebody describes you and you don't know how are you described so you cannot identify with it. Like, like, my God, am I really all that? And in psychoanalytic theory developed by Jacques Lacan, one of my great teachers, this gap, the distance that separates my stupid empirical person from my symbolic identity is called symbolic castration. So this is for me the true hospitality that you allowed me to experience again my castration. Thank you very much. No, mean it seriously, you know, castration is precisely this gap that you experience and this is the basic of all our paradoxes in especially between your immediate identity and your symbolic identity. Just think about traditional authority, like a father. A father for most of us, if you look at him as a person, is a confused, impotent idiot, whatever. But nonetheless, it's a father, so in his symbolic identity you respect him. These are the basic of our life. Okay. The third point, I want to emphasize how deeply affected I am by Korean culture. I follow it quite closely, although maybe not in the way you expect. Like, I like Korean films, but not so much those big spiritual films like the one Spring, Summer, or whatever, you know, this is too spiritual for me. I like, I remember one about a North Korean spy who comes here, meets a girl who is also a North Korean spy and then they try to defect, or a film called Warriors, a big spectacle about Korean, these are the films that I like. Not too much art, not good. Okay. I'm okay. So in order to stop losing time, let me please begin. Let me begin with a joke that I consider a very nice one from a classical Hollywood comedy from late 1930s with Greta Garbo playing the main role, Ninotchka, directed by the German emigrant Ernst Lubitsch. It's just a short scene. The hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. He said just coffee, without cream. The waiter replies, sorry, but we have run out of cream. We only have milk. So I cannot give you coffee without cream, can I give you coffee without milk? Because we only have, we only have milk. What's so nice in this idea? It's that what you don't have, negativity, is part of your identity. This is the basic message of our, of basic Hegelian dialectics. What you are not, what is missing, is part of your identity. Which means that although in its immediate materiality coffee without milk is the same as coffee without cream, it's just coffee. But it's not really the same. It matters as to its meaning, coffee without what it is. Now we can even develop further this paradox, quoting another film where you can see also immediately the erotic dimension of this playing with absence, and you can see in what sense properly human eroticism is part of language. We are really sexual in human sense only because we speak. It's a British film from I think late 1990s, a working-class comedy-drama, Brassed Off, about miners losing their job and so on. There is a wonderful again short scene in that film where a young girl flirts with her future boyfriend and after having dinner together, he accompanies her to her home and there she tells him, again it's about coffee. Uh, why don't you come up to my flat for a coffee? He answers, oh, I would like to, but there is only one problem, I don't drink coffee. And she answers, no problem, I don't have any coffee. You see how nothing happens, but through this double negation, I don't drink coffee, no problem, I don't have coffee, can you imagine a more direct erotic invitation? I mean, it means directly asserting what we already suspected, that coffee was a pretext for some other things. Now why lose time with such jokes? And now I'm very serious. Because I think that today the way ideology works today, and at the end if I will have time I will go more in detail with regard to this, the way ideology works today is not as a direct lie in the sense of it's directly telling something that it's not true or whatsoever. Ideology is more lying in the sense of implicit implications. It lies not in what it says, but it lies so that it says what it says by generating in us one implicit meaning while it's really generating or relying on the opposite meaning. Or to use again the example of coffee, it is giving, it is giving us coffee without milk but it claims that it giving us coffee without cream and so on. So again what you really have to be attentive to today are these implicit meanings, what is said without being said. For example in Europe much more than in your country we have today hard problems with economic crisis, austerity. And when those in power want to impose on people austerity measures, lower salaries, no healthcare and so on, of course they pretend they're offering let's say coffee without milk. You just have to suffer a little bit for your own good and so on and so on. They're really offering coffee without cream. So again to fight this type of ideology you have to look at, you have to look at its implications. Why again is this so important? Now I come to my first point. What in Hegelian dialectical tradition we call totality is precisely such a totality, a totality of what there is and of what there is not, of what it is only absent, excluded and so on. And in a true dialectical analysis, the point is not to include particular events into a larger harmonious totality. Dialectics is not holistic. The point is not don't look at phenomena as they are isolated, look at them holistically. That's not enough. What you should do is to include into a certain concept also all its negations, falsifications, failures and so on and so on. For example, let's take today's capitalism. To observe today's capitalism as a totality, it's not enough to say as a system it is good, ideally like Fukuyama described it, it is liberal democracy with successful market economy and so on and so on. No, we should look at all those points where capitalism fails, within a country or outside a country. For example, people celebrate today Apple, the company, as a model of postmodern, digital, technologically most advanced successful capitalism. But the first thing to say here is no Apple without Foxconn. Foxconn is the other side. You know what they're doing in their factories in China, even in an openly obscene way. Like, I was shocked when I read a couple of months ago that the boss, top manager of Foxconn, visited the zoo in Taipei and said I have a big problem, there is one million animals, he meant his workers, that I have to direct, regulate, so I went to the zoo to how to deal with workers and how to deal with thousands of animals at the same time and so on and so on. Or let's take another example, Congo. If you look at the state today which is horror embodied, it's the Republic of Congo. It's simply a state which is immensely rich, wealthy, minerals and so on, but a state which doesn't function, doesn't exist as an operative state. You have simply local warriors, warlords who control parts of it and directly deal with foreign companies because the minerals for Congo are crucial. They are in all your computers, iPads, notebooks and so on. So it is wrong to say unfortunately Congo is not yet developed enough to be part of global capitalism. No, precisely as such, as the horror of this land without rule of law. For example, there are in Congo people think at least one or two thousand, sorry, hundred or two hundred thousand child warriors, you know children you start to give them hard drugs when they are seven, eight, and at eleven, twelve you have perfect killers without conscience. As such as this hell on earth, Congo is part of today's global capitalism. Global capitalism needs it. Global capitalism are not just successful countries like more and more you, up to a point China, Singapore or Northern Europe or whatever. Global capitalism is all this, also the dark side, which has to be excluded. For example, your own country among others. Okay, you are doing nice, but what about, I don't know if this came true, if it was realized, but I know a couple of years ago some one of your big companies had plans basically to buy all the best land, arable land in Madagascar. And it's not just you. Many developed countries today are simply buying the best land in especially African countries and throwing out local farmers and so on and so on, causing new hunger and so on and so on. This is global capitalism. Again, you know where a proper dialectical analysis begins? When you have a certain ideal universal notion, capitalism, communism whatsoever. Then look at the failures or non-intended byproducts of this notion and the basic gesture of dialectics is to see how these failures are necessary failures. How it's not just a misfortune, it's not that oh, because there were bad capitalists there in Congo and so on. No, all these mistakes, antagonism, horrible byproducts are part of the precisely part of the universal notion. I think the category which is more and more becoming crucial today along these lines is the category of unemployment. In the standard Marxist tradition capitalism was defined by exploitation. But I think that today those who are not even in a position to be properly exploited, those who are unemployed are becoming more and more crucial. It's not only the reserve army, those who are temporarily unemployed will be maybe employed later. It's more and more first, people who with new technological development are unemployable, forever unemployed if they don't find job in a totally different sphere. Then we have even whole countries, Somalia, Congo up to a point and many others, or at least whole regions in countries which are as it were in some sense unemployed, excluded from world traffic, from world market. Then you have people who are already in advance unemployable. This is I think one of the main causes of great unrest in Europe. You have thousands, millions of students who study, but they all of a sudden they become aware that there is no chance for them that they will forever get a job in the domain of their studies. So I think that we have somehow to expand the domain of let's call them proletarians, the exploited. It's not only those who work and are exploited. We should include also those who are not even able to work because this exclusion is precisely part of how capitalism is functioning. It is more and more generating necessary unemployment. Why? Now let me go a step further. Why don't we see this more clearly although it's pretty obvious? I think that this shows the strength of the ruling hegemonic ideology. You know where you can see its strength? Precisely in the omnipresence of anticapitalism. What do I mean by this? It's very easy today to be anticapitalist. Just look at any popular media. You have all the time reports on how these companies exploiting children, that company's polluting the environment, that bank is speculating and so on and so on. But all this critique of capitalism remains a moralistic critique. They accuse, I don't know, greedy bankers, greedy capitalists and so on and so on. And I think we shouldn't just blame people here. I'm tired of these stories how oh, that capitalist is an evil guy, greedy. Well, bankers were always like this. The problem is what changed in recent capitalism that this greed can be realized with such catastrophic consequences? That is to say, the limit of this, let's call it moralistic anticapitalism is that it by blaming people and their bad character, their greed, their corruption and so on, it prevents us from doing the crucial analysis which is the analysis, which is the analysis of the system. What is wrong with the system as such. This is for me the only big question today. Everyone today is a almost everyone is a Fukuyamaist. I'm referring to Francis Fukuyama. Even most of the critics of capitalism are, because large majority today accepts as a matter of fact that liberal democratic capitalism is the only game in town, as the Americans put it. The only system that really works and all we can do is to make it a little bit better, more efficient. When I was young, we were all, some people, fighting for socialism with a human face. Today it is as if the limit of our horizon is capitalism, global capitalism with a human face. More rights for minorities, more solidarity and so on, but we accept the system as such. It is as if effectively seeing the limit of capitalist system is almost unimaginable, if I may put it like this. It's like my good friend American Marxist Fredric Jameson, he noticed this, namely how in today's science fiction even, we can easily imagine the end of the earth, an asteroid hitting the earth, end of life whatever, easy to imagine, but a little bit of a social change that would limit capitalism, we cannot imagine that. The end of the world okay, but capitalism has to stay. Now I'm not blaming here some evil ideologists and so on and so on. It's a much more complex situation. I read recently, it's a wonderful detail of ideological struggles, not recently, a year ago I think, a little bit less, in the fall of I read that in People's Republic of China, they, I don't know who this they is, some ministry for information of culture, they prohibited the topic of time travel and alternate history in all narrative media, narrative films, TV series, novels and so on. Why? Okay, it's obvious. They were afraid that people will start to think about alternatives. But I think this is a good sign for China. At least those in power are afraid that people will imagine alternatives. In our more democratic countries, nobody even dares to imagine, even dares to imagine this type of different, different new world. Why am I emphasizing this? Because your obvious counter-argument would have been probably so what's the problem? We know that communism miserably failed, and I agree with this, 20th century communism was over all a catastrophe, it failed, so why not simply stay with what we have? Well, I will not repeat the analysis from my books which are already translated here, just briefly I would say, and this is for me the crucial problem, I would say that there are enough signs that we are approaching problems from ecology to biogenetics, and so on and so on, even to the problem of so-called intellectual property, which I think that in the long term global capitalism together with its political expression liberal democracy will not be able to confront properly. Here I am a moderate pessimist. I think when people accuse us radical leftists for utopia, I claim no, the true utopia is to think that things can simply go on the way they are now. I'm not saying there will be a catastrophe tomorrow and so on. I'm just saying that we are approaching a certain limit. For example we know that the environment cannot sustain rapid development in countries like China and so on, simply the world, the world environment cannot sustain this. And we also know I think that local ways to resist this are not enough. We try to escape it, to avoid this confrontation and here I would like to improvise with you some wonderful way ideology ways ideology penetrates our daily lives. Maybe you know some of them, I always found them amusing. For example, I claim that most of our charitable activities or most of our care for organic food and so on, that they are pure ideology. You know for example, now I will be very cynical. Imagine yourself, you go to a store, I don't know how popular here in your country this is, but in all Western Europe and United States the big trend among among snobbish upper-middle-class people or intellectuals is for example to buy organic food. I will be very cynical. I claim that okay imagine yourself in a store, you see an organic apple. It's usually rotten much uglier than the good biogenetically modified apple and it costs more, but you buy that one. Why? I don't think you really believe that it really does something to environment or whatever. I think you basically do it because it makes you feel good. That is to say, you feel a little bit guilty, oh my God, it's not good what we are doing to environment, and then you are looking for a cheap way out and you tell say to yourself isn't this nice, I bought this apple, I'm doing something for the Mother Earth, I'm part of a big movement of millions of people who are with me together to help the Mother Earth. It's this sublime feeling which is again ideology at its purest. Let's go on with charity, I think it's the same. You know you for example, I don't know, you buy coffee, you buy a for example you buy coffee or sorry, for example when you it's very popular in the West, you contribute some money, it can be even pseudo-personalized. You establish contact through some agency with an African orphan and you send, I don't know, dollars, even less every month and once a year you get a letter back with a photo and so on and so on. It makes you feel good. You are doing something, isn't it wonderful, I even know the face there and so on and so on. I think that it this is what is offering you as it were an easy way out. Like because you don't really have to change your life. You as it were, it's I think even an example of superstitious thinking. Don't underestimate this superstitious thinking today. Its power. I saw it today when I came here, I descended from my hotel in the elevator and I saw that you are here, here you disappointed me a little bit because you display the same stupidity as in the United States, you at least this hotel, but maybe it's because it's more for foreigners, Hyatt, I don't know I hope this is true, you don't have the 13th floor. It's and Now if you are really consciously afraid of the number then you must know that you are doing something stupid. Because whom are you cheating? God knows very well that is really if you skip. You know what I mean. But nonetheless you play the game. This is I think how ideology functions today. You don't have to believe in it, but you still act as if you believe. And I'm sorry if I now will use an example which I used in many of my books, but I think it's the perfect example of today's ideology. It's the anecdote about Niels Bohr, you know the quantum physicist, who had a country house outside Copenhagen, a friend scientist visited him there and saw a horseshoe above the entrance. I don't know how is it here with you but in Europe a horseshoe above the entrance is a sign of superstition. Like allegedly it keeps the evil spirits outside. Okay so the friend asked Niels Bohr, but you are a scientist, are you crazy? Why do you have this there? Do you believe in it? And you know what was Niels Bohr's answer, a perfect one. He said I'm not stupid, of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it. That's ideology today. You don't have to believe in justice, in democracy, but you do, you think that somehow, how should I put it, it works even if you don't believe in it. I mean in our system maybe in our everyday ideology this type of superstition, but maybe superstition is not a good word, it's more something like the materiality of belief, like you can believe literally without believing. I'm sorry if I use another example from my early books which maybe some of you know. But I think it's perfect, for me at least, the greatest contribution of America, United States to world culture. So-called canned laughter, you know, the TV set, those stupid American series like Cheers, Friends, where the TV laughs for you. Laughter is included into the soundtrack. I think this is a wonderful invention. Imagine yourself, you Koreans I know are hardworking people, that's what some scientists claim. So imagine you come home at tired as a dog, you want to relax. You open TV, you just of course you are tired, you just look at it like an idiot, tired, and the TV even laughs for you. And I don't know if it works for you, but it works for me, after it I feel relieved as if I have laughed. It can laugh for you. These mechanisms are not just to make us to make just to make good jokes. This is I think for example how our beliefs function today. We don't really believe, nobody believes today. People pretend to be cynics, you know, oh I don't care, I know life is cruel, it's just sex, money, power whatever. People don't believe but you know how you can detect their beliefs? They usually need another one to believe for them. The psychoanalytic term for this would have been subject supposed to believe. And it's again absolutely crucial this category today. Like most people at least in my country, they are not patriots. They say oh who cares about my blah blah blah. But nonetheless they don't like you to make or me to make fun of our own country and then when you ask them but why not? They say oh listen, but it's my son he will not understand it I have to pretend to, you know, it's like do you have here something that in Europe corresponds something here that corresponds to what in Europe we call Santa Claus, that stupid guy you know it, red dress who brings presents to children. It's a wonderful structure, you know, where you ask parents do you believe in Santa Claus? They would have said I'm not idiot of course not. I buy the presents. Okay then you ask children they would say of course not, I'm not an idiot, I pretend not to disappoint my parents and to get, you know here you have a nice example of a belief which functions as a social link without anyone really believing. And this subject supposed to believe can also be a totally imagined entity. An old story from my past from communist Yugoslavia. There was a situation at some point it really happened and a sociological research established this. All of a sudden there was a rumor that there is not enough toilet paper in the stores. Now most of the people knew that this is a false rumor. That with normal consumption of toilet paper there is more than enough of it. But each of us reasoned like this. I know this is just a rumor. But what if there are some idiots who will take this rumor seriously and will start to buy excessive amounts of toilet paper? So and then there will be really a shortage of toilet paper. So to to prevent this that I will be out of toilet paper better to go and buy it now. And when enough people did this there really was a shortage of toilet paper. But you see the paradox, no one really believed there is a shortage of toilet paper. We just believed that there is another one that there are some others who are stupid enough to believe as it were. This again this is I think absolutely crucial for our situation today. That and I think here conservatives who claim you know we are entering a hedonist era, an era where people think just of about their pleasures they no longer believe are no longer ready to sacrifice their lives and so on. I think they are totally wrong. We believe more than ever but just in this objectified alienated way. Of course we don't believe in the first person. But we believe by way of as it were attributing our belief onto another but again the belief still maintains its function. And incidentally here also European scientists were totally wrong when they met so-called entered so-called primitive societies and you know when that society thought that when they claimed our totem is I don't know a fish or an eagle a bird and Europeans thought they really believed that these people are so stupid as to believe that they developed out of a bird. But then I read a good analysis when someone who entered this tribe asked them but do you really believe that people from your tribe descend from that bird. It's interesting what type of answer they got. It was something like no we don't really believe but we were told that there was everyone says but there was I heard a grand uncle of mine who believed it and so on you know like once they believed it or whatever. I think that the first step outside of cultural racism is to admit that nobody believes that if there is an idiot who believes it's ourselves not the others. Let me tell you before I get lost then I will return to my main line another function which is this cultural miscommunication at its purest. Maybe you know it but it's so wonderful that I like to repeat it. In the middle of 19th century some I think it was German anthropologists visited a tribe in the middle of North Guinea Guinea. They heard that this tribe knows how to dance some terrible dance of death. Okay so they visited the tribe, they arrived there in the evening and they somehow through their gestures explained to them that they want to see their famous terrifying dance of death. They went to sleep next day they awakened and members of the tribe effectively performed for them this terrible dance. So satisfied they wrote their anthropological report about the primitive dance fascination of primitives with death and so on and left the tribe. Unfortunately years later another expedition visited the same tribe and asked them what really happened with the first expedition. And since this second group learned properly the language understood better the local people they got the true story which is a wonderful one. When the tribe was visited by the first expedition they terribly tried to guess what do these foreigners want from them. And somehow they guessed that they want some stupid terrible dance of death. So the whole night they worked constructing this mask just out of politeness politeness and hospitality they organized this dance to be to be nice towards them. So you see what the stupid white people thought oh the authentic primitive horror was just the others being polite and trying to guess their here also we should be very very precise and careful about so-called primitive authenticity. I wonder if it was shown in your country a wonderful Eskimo Inuit film The Fast Runner which retells an old Eskimo myth about a conflict and in the original myth from 17th century it's total catastrophe at the end. The two tribes kill each other, everyone is dead. In this new version it just they throw out two bad guys and there is a big reconciliation. So then a white journalist asked the authors why did you commercialize your myth. Why didn't you stick to the original story. Why didn't you remain authentic to your culture. And he got a wonderful answer. The answer is that no it's precisely part of our original authentic culture not to repeat the same story but to change it accordingly to new situations. They said this is our tradition. It's you stupid Europeans who are obsessed with authenticity you know the original version and so on and so on. And this is what I always like when I see here on the way here on a taxi or everywhere you know these stores selling authentic Korean medicine and so on and so on. I think they are intelligent enough to I was told this in in New Zealand they have Maoris the natives there who have their representatives in New York who look at new fashions what now the market wants and then he tells this to these local authentic painters tribal who quickly change they their style to fit better the you know they reinvent and I think that like the paradox is that this apparently corrupted attitude it's much more authentic in its way than sticking to some original original authenticity or whatever. Okay let's not get lost. I just wanted to convince you to these couple of examples of why is this structure of belief, belief to belief and so on so crucial. If you know even a little bit about capitalism today speculations with futures and so on and so on. You know that it's all sustained by trust and belief or belief in belief. When you play with futures on the stock market you don't just invest, you don't just try to guess with your investment what people will believe two years from now. You try to guess what most of the people believe that people will believe two years from now. And I think there is something almost horrifying in this let's call it fragility of the social edifice of today's global capitalism. How much it is based on this how should I call it belief or belief in belief. But again I am not a psychological idealist here. I am not saying there is no objective reality there are just beliefs or whatever. No the problem is that these beliefs are material beliefs. They are materialized in our acts and so on and so on. Which is why as I always insist we should return to Marx his notion of commodity fetishism. Which is precisely a wonderful notion totally useful today. Why? Because Marx does not claim that we in fetish in market fetishism that we believe something which doesn't fit reality. No. Marx claims that we practice beliefs of which we are not aware. Marx is saying that if you take a typical capitalist, he is totally cynical realist but when he deals on the market he practices a belief. His belief is in what he does not in what he thinks. It's a wonderful dialectical notion of a belief which is a material belief. Belief embodied in your practice, not in what you are doing. Which is why incidentally do you know which I think this explains why a certain type of pseudo-oriental spiritualism, Zen Buddhism or whatever kind of Buddhism is so popular among top top bank managers, investors, digital capitalists and so on. Did you know did you know this? It's very interesting that the most popular spiritual orientation among them is some kind of a vaguely orientalist Buddhist spirituality. Why? Because they are fully aware of this fragility of our social reality. You know you have a certain economic orientation successful. People start to believe, not even start to believe what is reality. People start to believe that other people believe something and everything can collapse. And of course the idea is that this is something close to the ontological fragility. The world is just the game of appearances and so on. which we find again in Buddhist teachings. I think this is a nice example of how of ideological how should I call it trans-functioning, re-functioning where an old concept can acquire new actuality. You take something like the Buddhist ontology you know of Sunyata, void, nothingness, our reality is just a game of appearances and so on. And you you can discover how it fits perfectly the most modern even postmodern global capitalist global capitalist experience. Okay so back to that idea of superstition and so on. I claim that what is so difficult to admit apropos ecology today, it's not so much that is difficult to recognize our responsibility, like we are destroying nature and so on. Maybe it's even more difficult to recognize that up to a point it doesn't even depend on us. You know like the final scene pretty horrifying from that Lars von Trier new movie Melancholia where you just know it's the end of the world you can't do anything. And I think that much of this small level ecology this style style of life mini ecology you know this constant super-ego in the psychoanalytic sense of ethical agency. Super-ego pressure like did you throw a can of Coke away or did you recycle it? Do you recycle all your newspapers and so on? I think it's this type of superstitious activity. I'm not saying it's not good and important doing it. I'm doing it. I claim it's avoiding the true problem which is a much larger one. We will not save the earth by by recycling Coca-Cola cans. We will maybe maybe save the world by totally changing our mode of production and so on and so on. So what I'm saying is that are you aware that are you aware of this strange phenomenon which is another example of everyday superstition? When you watch at home some sport soccer, football, basketball whatever match even if you are just at home in front of TV with your friends. You shout and cry as if in this way you can help your team there. It's pure everyday magical thinking. Although you rationally know they don't hear you it's nothing but you do it. I claim recycling Coca-Cola cans is a little bit similar. It's a little bit similar to this. So you see here again and yes okay I will repeat my old example that you all know unfortunately I noticed that even here you have Starbucks. Starbucks are the greatest here for me. You know why? The starting point of Starbucks is that we feel bad as consumers you know. But you know when I don't know if it's true here in Europe and United States it is that Starbucks make publicity of how conscious they are socially. You know they say for each cup of cappuccino that you buy with us, two cents go to some Somali starving children, two cents go to save the rainforest whatever. And this is a wonderful capitalist solution that they include the price for consumerism like into the price of commodity. Like they tell you do you feel bad by being a consumerist, spending too much? No problem. Pay a little bit more and you pay a price for consumerism you know. It's it's so again what I'm saying is that with all these phenomena of beliefs magical thinking and so on and so on we are not dreaming here to understand today's capitalism, its crisis, the way capitalism works at the level of ideology and so on and so on. All this is absolutely all this is I think so absolutely crucial. Now let's go a step further. What happens when this system threatens to collapse? There are signs in the last two three years that the system is at least becoming aware of its limitations like this is what the great movement Occupy Wall Street was about I think so. About the first awareness of a limitation. Because this was not just a protest movement against war, racism whatever. It was a movement based on the insight that there is some structural fault, problem with capitalist system as such. But here if you permit me one last circle here as leftists we should be brutally honest. Brutally honest in what sense? Listen. Now maybe this will not be popular with some of you if you are traditional leftists. But till like five years ago at least in the developed West the left when capitalism thrived in relative prosperity for most of the people at least for most in the West the usual critical Marxist intellectuals' attitude was yeah yeah this is a false prosperity just wait for the crisis you will see things will collapse and so on and so on. They were as it were waiting for their great moment you know playing this what we call in Europe Cassandra from Homer's Iliad you know the the the the one who always predicted the catastrophe. Now the crisis is here not with you you are the lucky ones, you Brazil, Singapore whatever but at least in Western Europe in United States and so on there is at least a feeling of gloom crisis large demonstrations Greece and so on. And where is the left? Nowhere. Nowhere in what sense? Even in this time of massive protests and so on and so on where the left was expected to bring together, unify all these movements into one great proposal like that's what we should do. I think the left failed here. I'm not aware of any and I'm not of any alternative proposal what to do. And I'm not talking about detailed plans of course we cannot do this. I'm talking about very general orientation. What do we want? Like what should we do now? Is this a crisis of capitalism as such or it's just a limited crisis of a certain type of capitalism where we need more public spending, healthcare whatever to make it more efficient. If we have to move outside of capitalism how? through return to state-centralized property, some more dispersed local democracy or whatever. We get it's incredible how I am not aware of any not even minimally realistic proposals. I think that the left whatever remains of radical left is still caught into this into this let's call it messianic expectation. You know that we just patiently wait there will be a moment when the authentic working class, not social democracy, not Stalinist Communist, will finally realize their destiny, come together and do the real revolution whatever. It they are all as it were waiting for the event with capital the great event to happen and patiently waiting. I think we have finally to accept that there will not be such an event. This doesn't mean things will just continue to go on the way they do. No no, there will be ecological catastrophes, starvation, mass chaos, war and so on and so on. But what I doubt is that there will be this one great event of massive global redemption whatever. So now there will be again your skeptical attitude. In the sense of why not nonetheless accept where we are. Isn't the dream of a radical change an impossible dream? Ah here again we should be very careful today I claim. Did you notice how in our I hope with you it's the same as in Western Europe in United States in Japan how when people talk about what is possible and what is impossible and by people here I mean simply the big media. It's a very strange duality that we get. When you talk about technology and private pleasures almost nothing is impossible. They are promising us that things that we cannot even imagine today are more and more becoming possible. Like I don't know, the ultimate dream is this dream of Gnostic digital technology that we will turn into software programs and just embody ourselves from one to another hardware becoming immortal. Or there are these crazy dreams of multiple sexuality. Like my bad taste example and it's not a dream I spoke with a doctor who is doing this today in New York. They a doctor can split your penis into two so that you can do it to two with two women at the same time whatever you want. All this can be possible or you know growing organs through cloning and so on whatever. Here things are or soon we will as tourists be able to fly to other planets. Again in private pleasures, in technology no problem things are possible, possible. But isn't this a strange world where immortality may be possible, changing all your organs blah blah maybe possible but to give more money for healthcare ah impossible, we lose competitiveness and so on and so on. Did you notice how this growing possibility of the impossible in the sphere of technology and private life is one side the other side is as if any even moderate social change is immediately dismissed as utopian impossible, it will cause a catastrophe, it will cause a it will cause a war or police terror whatever. Maybe this is the clearest example of ideology today. Ideology is not primarily the big lessons you know belief in this and so on. Ideology is precisely this automatic structure of our as it were mental space which makes something possible other things unthinkable for us. And and again this is for me the the the problem today. Namely the reason I don't want to accept this easy solution which would have been okay let's drop it I mean let's stay with what we are and just fight moderately and so on and so on is that I am too much of a pessimist here. I again as I already said I think that the Fukuyama dream is over. I think that we are approaching times where just imagine for example a nuclear catastrophe or ecological catastrophe just two three times stronger than the Fukushima catastrophe. The solution would have been to move tens of millions of people to change whole social body and so on and so on. Who will do this? How how will it be done and so on and so on. Just think about biogenetics. I find it fascinating but are we aware what is going on that already and it's not some utopian future at the very elementary level they can do it more and more now. Namely what? Not only through biogenetic and other way to affect our psychological properties, sense of pride and so on. What do I mean by this? If you don't believe me go to Google after this talk and just put into Google DARPA, D-A-R-P-A. It's not a joke, it's a program financed by CIA. It's pretty terrifying. It's explicitly I'm not now caricaturizing it the program with the goal how to change narrative structures and beliefs through direct brain biogenetic interventions. So the idea is and that's their example you have somebody who started to believe in Islam fundamentalism and became a terrorist. Let's observe what happens in his brain when he accepted those beliefs and let's try to change his beliefs not by any ideological work even brainwashing. Brainwashing you still wash the brain by automatic repetitive arguing. No by simply with chemical means or operations directly intervening into it. No now I'm not blaming this I'm just saying that this is not just a crazy idea because probably it was also in your media how for example a computer can already read the fundamental orders in your brain so that for example if you are totally crippled you no longer need even what Stephen Hawking needs you remember like moving his finger a little bit. They just attach your brain to computer you think strongly forward it goes forward. You think left it goes left. Now this sounds nice. You are like God. You can make things move by your thought alone. The problem is that it also goes outside inside like they can also affect you and so on and so on. I mean now I'm not painting you a dark prospect. I'm just saying something here tremendously important is happening which will probably affect the very definition of what it means to be human. Because our basic human identity presupposes this limit. I'm here with my thoughts reality is out there. You can torture me whatever you want my thought remains free. What if this this this border falls down. Who will control this? How and so on and so on. These are immense challenges which again I think cannot be properly confronted dealt with in with today's global capitalism. Because you know ideology is not simply a lie. Ideology is ideology deals with real problems but in a false way. For example for me at least ecology becomes ideology when you translate it into some cheap New Age spiritualism. And you say oh because we abandoned Mother Earth whatever and you this is clearly or in a more refined way. I wonder if you will agree this and with this I will so that the kind organizers will not will not will not the time yes will be to finish slowly. I'm sorry if I'm too long. Just one example again of this everyday of this functioning of ideology. Take the notion of tolerance. We talk a lot about tolerance today. But did you notice how ambiguous this category is? Tolerance yes but I mean I'm all for tolerance when it means tolerate diversity and so on and so on. But tolerance can also meet mean something quite the opposite. It means don't come too close to me I don't tolerate your proximity and so on. You know this is why for example now I will go to the end with an extreme proposition. I will defend I don't smoke and I hate tobacco companies. But do you also have this obsession with smoking should be prohibited and so on and so on? I think it's ideology. I'm not saying people are not dying of smoking. But you know people are also dying from alcohol from drugs and so on and I notice in the West how the same left-liberals who oppose smoking then they offer you drugs the same evening and so on. So why was smoking elevated into this ultimate as it were image of horror. You know like it's incredible at least in the West how far this goes. Even when you buy a cigarette it started with the inscription obligatory smoking may hurt your health. Then it became more brutal, smoking kills. Now the next step was to be even more specific smoking will render you impotent and so on. Then the last fashion in Europe is you have big photos of like your lungs operation and so on and ah this is what you smoke. No I'm not for smoking but I think that this example is a good example of how false our hedonism is I claim. We don't really live in a hedonist society. We live in a society of moderate regulated pleasures. Beer yes but beer without alcohol. Coffee yes but decaffeinated coffee. Like do it properly do it moderately. Hedonism for me real hedonism means I don't care I go to the end I smoke I have sex till I drop dead which is not a bad idea but not what is advised today. When I flew here from Europe three days ago I read the most horrible text I can imagine on that journal of the you know inflight journal of the company. It was a text praising sex. But in the most depressing way you can imagine. The thesis was sex is good for health. And then they described how if you change position like this this it's even better than jogging then they claim that even deep kissing is good because deep kissing strengthens your muscles here so that when you are old the saliva will not I mean it's absolutely depressing and to conclude with an example of everyday ideology. Did I claim that excessive sex or even more love, love as passionate love is becoming prohibited. Today's ideology is not monogamy. I don't know how it's here but in United States and Europe I can guarantee you today's ideology is kind of a moderate experimenting. Be who you truly are, make experiments, try it with a woman with a man with two women with a man and a dog whatever you want, but don't identify yourself so much too much you know. And in this sense let me give you an example which may surprise you if you noticed it. Did you see the last James Bond film Quantum of Solace? Politically it's even pretty interesting because it's very leftist basically James Bond saves Morales regime in Bolivia from a bad international company. But did you notice something strange is the first James Bond film where at the end there is no sex between Bond and Bond girl? And this is a tendency now. Did you see the most disgusting novels and films Dan Brown. Did you notice how in The Da Vinci Code you have hero and heroine, Robert Langdon the symbologist and his the grand-granddaughter of Jesus Christ okay. There is no sex between two of them. And I claim that the there has to be sex in heaven you know the thesis is that Jesus Christ married Mary Magdalene and so on to cover up the fact that there is no sex here as it were on earth. Even worse did you see the last Dan Brown film Angels and Demons. There there is sex in the novel but no sex in the film. I think the tendency is clear and a terrifying one is that every as it were excessive engagement opening to the other is considered as dangerous. This is why at least the Western Europe through this marriage or dating agencies is I think returning to pre-modern practices of arranged marriages. What do I mean by this? What do I mean by this? I don't know your language how you put it but in French and in English when you fall in love we use the word fall to designate this and that's the most beautiful thing about love no I see you and then oh my God it's my fate I cannot help and so on. Do you know that now I noticed it and my good friend Alain Badiou noticed it in France how more and more dating agencies directly refer to this phrase and for example one big publicity that I saw is we will enable you to be in love without the fall, without falling in love. You know the idea is do it safely in a healthy way don't risk the encounter none of that traumatic fall and so on. And I think again that this is something which is for me pretty terrifying. This means that sex is more and more becoming no longer this deadly passionate attachment which is I think even the first form of metaphysics. If metaphysics means that you are in your vulgar daily life but then you encounter another dimension something which totally changes opens another dimension isn't this passionate sexual love isn't passionate sexual love an example of this metaphysics. It's the catastrophe in the sense that I live my happy life, happy maybe a one-night stand here there short sex drinks then I fall in love. My happiness is over everything is subordinated to that it's a traumatic encounter. Which is why now really to conclude I think that what is more and more happening is that the structure of sexual encounters is becoming that of let's call it masturbation with a real partner. You just want to play games and it's at least till now more satisfying to do it with another person than with some plastic objects or whatever and it's pretty terrifying to what extent our industries already provide more and more plastic objects. For example I saw recently a publicity among those horrible sexual free ads that you get on your email for something like vaginal trainer for men sounds horribly. It looks like a lamp. You open the top and it's the entry to vagina, plastic. So the idea and it's electrically regulated. You can regulate the form so that it looks like no you put different plastic top in it. It can be vagina, anus or mouth and then you can regulate how thick it it and so on and so on and you just do it alone and so on. So you know in my first book I think or second I quoted a publicity from Australia years ago. I think it's now becoming a reality. In Europe we have this well-known fairy tale story of a girl who sees a frog and the girl kisses the frog and the frog turns into a young prince. This is the first part of the publicity because it's the publicity for beer. Girl sees a frog, kisses the frog, the frog turns into a beautiful young man. But you know what then happens. The boy kisses the prince kisses the girl and she turns into the bottle of beer like this is what I really want. I think we are passing from this woman who still wants at least a human partner to a man who wants just a partial object. And Jacques Lacan in his psychoanalytic theory was deeply impressed by this movement of our technology towards this let's call it post-sexual sexuality. And I claim that even our obsession with so-called sexual harassment. First I'm aware there is real harassment and I am totally opposed to it. What I'm only saying is that quite often when at least in the United States I notice this people are obsessed with harassment but the basic message is that almost anything you did is you know when you are in the process of seduction someone has to make the move which if the other says no becomes harassment. Harassment is the what I'm saying is this, the hidden ideal of this attack against harassment is pure contractual sex. We make a plan in advance, I agree you agree this, we just make a plan, a kind of a legal pact about how we will use each other for our pleasures. I think so again I didn't lose my thread here. I'm still talking about today's capitalism. What I'm saying is that all these changes that I was indicating this how even intense sexual commitment becomes something dangerous this preaching of moderation and so on or the structure of beliefs that I described how even if we don't believe we believe to believe and so on and so on. This is not just ideology in the sense of something up there. This is ideology in the very heart of our economic process of consumption, production exchange and so on and so on. And so again things are happening today and for me to be still a communist. Okay I will not lose time now if you want you can ask me afterwards why I still prefer to use this horrible word but to be a communist does not mean oh we need a big communist revolution, communist party, especially not the one across the border here no. To be a communist means for me just this to admit that we are approaching a certain deadlock. That things cannot go on indefinitely the way they do and that also we cannot find the solution by returning to any tradition you know what people say like oh capitalism is disintegrating social texture so we need capitalism but with some ancient Buddhist whatever Confucian tradition this is basically today's China, Chinese solution. which is why Confucianism and so on are fully supported by the state in China today. I think communism just means this opening. It's no longer the 20th century communism where you know the laws of history what will happen. No, we have no guarantee that we will save ourselves. It's up to us, the situation is open. We just know that we are approaching difficult times. That it cannot go on the way it did and it's up to us to act or not. There is no higher necessity directing us you know that old-style communists liked to say how oh the situation may seem dark but there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. I'm coming from Eastern Europe, our humor was always very cynical so when somebody tells me there is a light at the end of the tunnel, my reaction is of course it is because it's another train approaching us you know. So that's all I try to tell you. I don't have clear solutions. Communism is for me the name of a problem. Our problem today is the problem of commons. Commons of our earth, commons of our of our biogenetic legacy, commons of our intellectual substance so-called intellectual property which shouldn't be privatized and so on and so on. That's our problem and the situation is open and we have to start thinking radically. Which is why also places like here universities are I claim extremely important today. The establishment literally doesn't want us to think. I don't know how maybe you are lucky here but in Europe and United States there is now a wide movement saying who needs this ivory tower of universities. Universities should serve concrete needs of people and so on. No, I think that what they want us, universities, is to produce experts. But we if we are true intellectuals we are not experts. Experts are people who do what? Experts are people who solve problems defined by others. For example there are riots in Paris and police calls experts. How will be psychologically how will we manipulate the demonstrators what force should we use and so on. To be a true intellectual is something much more. It's not just to solve problems defined by others, it's to define the problem itself. As a rule the way we perceive a problem is part of the problem. We perceive the problem in a wrong way. The task of us intellectuals is to not to offer solutions who knows today but to make people really aware of the problems that we are in. And for this again we need apparently useless institutions like universities. My God all great inventions were never planned. They come as a as they say in Iraq collateral damage and we should do a lot of collateral damage to the system by simply thinking freely. That's why you have all this pressure on like like my God how can you spend time and money here just doing your theories while people are starving in Africa or whatever. This is brutal manipulation because the message is do something don't think. No, we should have the courage to say yes the situation can be desperate but precisely in such situations we should withdraw out of being fully part of life and think. We need the distance of universities today more than ever. I am sorry if I was too long and I am infinitely grateful for your patience. Thank you very much.