Why Only an Atheist Can Believe
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2006-11-10 · 1:59:32 · 17,119 words
with Jennifer Williams
ideologyreligion-theologycinema-art-culturepsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsecology-climateliberalism-political-correctnesshistoryconsciousness-mindeveryday-lifegeopolitics-warphilosophy-general
Delivered at Calvin College, this lecture uses the two 9/11 Hollywood films (United 93 and World Trade Center) to argue that their apparent realism is ideologically abstract in the Hegelian sense, they suppress cognitive mapping of historical context while projecting a secret theological teleology onto catastrophe. Žižek then develops a Rumsfeldian epistemology of 'unknown knowns', unconscious, disavowed beliefs, to explain why we know but do not act on ecological crisis, and how ideology operates at the level of embodied practice rather than explicit belief. The talk turns to the radical Judeo-Christian legacy: Job's refusal of false meaning, the death of God as guarantee on the cross, and the Holy Ghost as the gift of communal freedom, contrasted with fundamentalism (which Žižek reads as the true end of belief), the traumatic figure of the neighbor, and the culturalization of politics as tolerance replacing justice.
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
The gap between one's immediate self-experience and the symbolic public identity ascribed by others; invoked ironically when Žižek thanks his introducer for 'castrating' him with too-flattering a description.
Fredric Jameson's term for a subject's ability to locate itself within a social totality; invoked to diagnose how both 9/11 films deliberately withhold any larger political picture.
as “abstract vs. concrete (Hegelian)”
For Hegel, the immediate particular is abstract while true concreteness means articulating the full social-historical mediation; Žižek uses this to show that the down-to-earth realism of the 9/11 films is actually the most abstract because it strips away context.
as “dialectical mediation”
The Hegelian operation of rendering an immediate datum concrete by deploying the complex universal context that gives it meaning; illustrated with the example of a cigarette and colonial history.
as “false teleology / secret teleology”
The ideological reading of catastrophe as a blessing in disguise or divine awakening that secretly gives events a deeper meaning; the target of Žižek's critique via the Book of Job.
The pre-Christian (and re-paganized Christian) attitude of universal hermeneutics, every object is a sign, every event has cosmic significance, which the Judeo-Christian tradition rejects in favor of accepting meaninglessness.
Things we know but don't know that we know, the disavowed ideological presuppositions that regulate our practice without rising to explicit belief; Žižek adds this fourth term to Rumsfeld's epistemological grid to name ideology itself.
as “belief without belief”
The paradox in which one practices or enacts a belief at the level of the big Other while consciously disavowing it, illustrated by the horseshoe story and the Niels Bohr anecdote: 'it works even if you don't believe in it.'
as “ideology as embodied practice”
Ideology operates not at the level of explicit belief but in the material habits and objects of daily life (toilet designs, rituals, canned laughter); 'you go to the toilet and you shit on ideology.'
as “big Other”
The symbolic order / anonymous social substance that holds beliefs and practices 'for us' even when we personally disavow them; Žižek invokes it via the Tibetan prayer-wheel and canned laughter as machines that believe or laugh on our behalf.
as “sincere hypocrisy”
Not cynical performance but the genuine structure of transposing one's own belief onto another (the innocent child, the last good person in the camp) so that the Other believes or is good on one's behalf.
The camp prisoners (described by Agamben after Levi) who had surrendered all will to survive and became a kind of living dead; invoked to show that even consistent evil requires a presupposed goodness elsewhere.
The split between what one explicitly professes and what one's practices embody or enact; canned TV laughter laughs for you even when you don't, just as Tibetan prayer-mills pray for you.
An offer or act that is structurally required to be made but refused; its value is real (it saves friendship, repairs dignity) precisely because it is declared superfluous, 'you do something, the result is nothing.'
as “ethical substance”
Following Hegel, the unspoken meta-rules and background customs that give explicit norms their texture and that are today silently disintegrating under the pressure of explicit utilitarian rationalism.
as “moon illusion (Harris)”
Sam Harris's analogy: just as we know the moon is large despite perceiving it as small, we should rationally override our visceral reluctance to torture by utilitarian calculation; Žižek uses this to expose Harris's reductive neurological ethics.
as “decaf products / X without X”
The contemporary logic of getting the product without its noxious substance, decaf coffee, alcohol-free beer, fat-free cake, extended to war (no casualties), the Other (cleaned up multiculturalism), and Sam Harris's torture pill: evil without discomfort.
In the Judeo-Christian and Freudian tradition, the neighbor is not a benign similar but a traumatic, abyssal Other whose radical freedom is irreducible and potentially monstrous; all racism plays on fear of the neighbor.
The postmodern reduction of political-economic conflicts (exploitation, inequality) to cultural conflicts (tolerance of difference), effacing structural critique in favor of liberal pluralism.
as “death of God as guarantee”
What dies on the cross is not merely a man but God as the substantial master who teleologically controls history and redeems all stains into higher harmony; after the crucifixion, God entrusts creation to human freedom.
as “Holy Ghost as community”
The Holy Ghost is literally the spirit of the community of believers ('whenever two of you are there, I will be there'), not a supernatural entity; resurrection equals the founding of this communal freedom.
as “predestination as retroactive necessity”
Predestination does not mean a fixed script but the retroactive constitution of necessity: what happens appears, once it has happened, as if it had always had to happen; freedom is choosing (constituting) one's own necessity.
as “death drive as immortality”
Freud's death drive is not a desire to die or a nirvana-pull but a name for what insists beyond life and death, an undead persistence, illustrated by Stephen King's horror figures.
Stories he reaches for 10
A friend visits Bohr and sees a horseshoe over the door. Bohr says he doesn't believe in superstition, but when asked why it's there he replies: 'I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.' This illustrates that ideology functions at the level of practice, not explicit conviction.
“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.”
Rumsfeld's March 2003 interview distinguished known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. Žižek adds the missing fourth term, unknown knowns, and uses it to define ideology as what we practice without knowing we know it.
“the fourth term... unknown knowns, things we know, but we don't even know that we know them. that is to say, this is ideology.”
You return home tired, switch on Friends, you don't actually laugh but the laugh track laughs for you and you feel relieved as if you had. Even the most intimate expression (laughter) can be transposed onto an external machine.
“you hear the laughter and you just look at it and... as an idiot and when it ends, you feel relieved. it is as if you have laughed.”
French toilets flush immediately (radical-revolutionary politics), Anglo-Saxon float in water (pragmatic liberalism), German toilets have a shelf for inspection and contemplation (poetry and conservative contemplation). Even the toilet embodies deep ideological attitudes toward the embarrassing remainder.
“even such as the lowest of the lowest vulgar everyday object cannot be accounted for in direct utilitarian terms... you go to the toilet and you shit on ideology.”
Žižek behaved badly at dinner with Judith Butler, later apologized; she replied 'you owe me no apology, I wasn't offended.' But this absolution was only possible after the apology was made, the apparently superfluous gesture was structurally necessary to produce its own superfluity.
“it was possible for her to say, you owe me no apology, only after i did apologize. and this is not hypocrisy. that's the mystery of communication.”
Cardinal Richelieu's eminence grise ordered tortures and concluded cynical great-power pacts by day, then wrote sublime mystical meditations by night, the same person. Huxley was troubled by this gap; Žižek uses it to argue that inner truth (mystical depth) is precisely where we lie.
“this same person ordering tortures, poisoning... was writing the most precious of incredible depth mystical meditations.”
In Auschwitz, every two months prisoners had to run naked before an SS doctor for 'Selektion'; in two to three seconds of inspection they would be assigned to life or death. Levi describes prisoners pinching their cheeks to look healthier, a mad comedy with no tragic dignity, which Žižek says captures the true horror.
“the prisoners were trying to pinch their lips to appear more healthy... it's kind of a totally crazy comedy, no dignity in it. and that's the true horror of it.”
Write a prayer, put it in a mill, let it spin, the mill prays for you while you think about anything. Illustrates how belief can be entirely outsourced to a mechanical Other, anticipating canned TV laughter.
“you can think about sex, whatever you want, but objectively you pray. it prays for you.”
Hungarian philosopher Agnes Heller (an Auschwitz survivor) describes how every barracks had a myth: somewhere in the next barracks was someone who still behaved like a full human being. The most dangerous moment was discovering this was a myth, people then lost the will to survive. Even to be consistently evil, you need a presupposed goodness somewhere.
“even to be consistently evil, you need a presupposed goodness. somewhere up there.”
Martin plays a con-artist faith healer; when a genuine miracle occurs, he totally breaks down. This illustrates that believers often believe 'with a distance', the direct confirmation of belief is more terrifying than the absence of the miracle.
“once but he does something which he thinks is treating, but it's a true miracle. he totally breaks down. it's a shock.”
Works invoked 16
The Parallax View book
Žižek's own book, referenced as the place where the Bohr horseshoe / belief-without-belief example is developed in detail.
The Da Vinci Code book
Used as the reductio ad absurdum of universal hermeneutics: a little ecological meaning-seeking ends in the DVC and 'Jesus copulating.'
The Book of Job other
Called 'absolutely unsurpassable ethical revolution', Job's refusal of false meaning is the Judeo-Christian break from pagan universal hermeneutics, and God's siding with Job against the theologians is the key moment.
If This Is a Man book
Primo Levi's memoir cited for the Selektion scene as proof that authentic Holocaust testimony takes a comical form, not a tragic one.
Zen at War book
Brian Victoria's study of Zen monks' support of Japanese militarism cited to show that authentic spiritual experience coexists with political evil, inner depth is the site of deception.
Mein Kampf book
Cited only to show that hearing Hitler's story does not make him cease to be an enemy; inner self-narration is always coherent regardless of the horror of the politics.
Schindler's List film
Called 'a failure' aesthetically but praised for the correct structural choice of focusing on the exception (a German who helped) to indict those who claimed action was impossible.
T.S. Eliot's essay on how great art retroactively changes the past is used to illustrate retroactive constitution of necessity / predestination.
Grey Eminence book
Aldous Huxley's biography of Père Joseph used to illustrate the gap between inner mystical truth and evil political acts; Huxley's conclusion called wrong but the problem right.
The Age of Innocence film
Edith Wharton's novel via Scorsese's film: the wife's knowing-unknowing used to illustrate sincere hypocrisy and the structure of transgression conditioned on the Other's innocence.
The End of Faith book
Described as 'a horrible book'; Harris's argument for torture via the moon illusion is refuted as erasing the abyssal neighbor and exemplifying the decaf-logic of X without X.
Leap of Faith film
Steve Martin's con-artist-faith-healer film: the miracle breakdown illustrates that direct confirmation of belief is more terrifying than its absence.
Regulating Aversion book
Wendy Brown's book described as 'wonderful' for showing how tolerance has displaced justice; Žižek engages with it critically but approvingly.
United 93 film
Analyzed as ideologically abstract in the Hegelian sense: its anti-Hollywood realism suppresses cognitive mapping and projects a secret teleological meaning onto 9/11.
World Trade Center film
Like United 93, its realism conceals the same ideological gesture; its final off-screen narrator makes the 'blessing in disguise' logic explicit.
Borges on Kafka essay
Borges's essay on how Kafka created his own precursors illustrates the same retroactive logic as Eliot.
People invoked 27
Primo Levi positive
If This Is a Man is cited for the Selektion scene as an example of how authentic Holocaust testimony is comical rather than tragic.
Blaise Pascal positive
Pascal's advice (act as if you believe and belief will come) is invoked but partially inverted: Žižek suggests the opposite, if you believe too intensely, externalizing it in ritual provides relief.
Emmanuel Levinas positive
Partially agreed with on iconoclasm: the prohibition on images of God means God is alive in how we act toward others, not in transcendent images.
Jacques Lacan positive
Psychoanalytic theory (symbolic castration, the big Other) is invoked through brief references without detailed exposition.
Brian Victoria positive
Zen at War cited as the source for the Zen-monk-as-militarist paradox.
Wendy Brown positive
Regulating Aversion described as 'wonderful' for asking the right questions about how tolerance has replaced justice; Žižek says he has critical disagreements but praises the analysis.
Donald Rumsfeld positive
Žižek finds genuine dialectical strength in Rumsfeld's known/unknown matrix, then adds the fourth term (unknown knowns) to expose its limit and name ideology.
Described as a friend despite theoretical fighting; the apology anecdote illustrates empty gesture and symbolic exchange.
Ágnes Heller positive
Hungarian philosopher and Auschwitz survivor whose account of the 'myth of the last good person in the barracks' Žižek cites as a profound illustration of structural dependency on projected goodness.
Sam Harris negative
The End of Faith is called 'a horrible book'; Harris's moon-illusion argument for torture is refuted as erasing the neighbor's abyssal Other and exemplifying the decaf-product logic.
Giorgio Agamben positive
Remnants of Auschwitz cited for the figure of the Muselmänner as a limit of tragic representation.
Jerry Falwell negative
His reading of 9/11 as divine punishment for American sin is cited as exemplifying the false teleology Žižek criticizes.
Fredric Jameson positive
The term 'cognitive mapping' is attributed to Jameson and used approvingly to diagnose what the 9/11 films suppress.
Pat Robertson negative
Co-cited with Falwell for the providential interpretation of 9/11.
T. S. Eliot positive
'Tradition and the Individual Talent' cited for the idea that every great artwork retroactively changes its entire past, illustrating retroactive necessity and predestination.
The Posen speech is called 'one of the most disgusting ethical documents' but nonetheless analyzed as a genuine (perverse) attempt to articulate a coherent ethics for perpetrators.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Praised for knowing Christianity as comedy rather than tragedy, and for understanding that the solution to 'christendom' is not liberal inner faith but the concrete community (Gemeinde); Žižek calls himself 'a strict Kierkegaardian' here.
Niels Bohr positive
Used twice: for the correct reply to Einstein ('don't tell God what to do') and the horseshoe anecdote illustrating belief without belief.
Ludwig Feuerbach negative
Secular humanist reading of Christianity (religion as projection of highest human ideals) is rejected as not radical enough, man alone is insufficient, something more is required.
Meister Eckhart negative
Called 'great' but criticized for evading the Incarnation and Logos through wordplay (mundus as 'world' vs. 'purity'), losing what is essential to Christianity.
Martin Luther King Jr. positive
King's speeches are cited as evidence that the civil rights movement fought for equality and justice, not tolerance; used to contrast with liberal culturalization of politics.
Aldous Huxley positive
Grey Eminence used as a source for the Père Joseph story; Huxley's conclusion is called 'wrong' but the problem he identifies is acknowledged.
Jorge Luis Borges positive
Essay on Kafka cited for the notion that a great writer creates their own precursors, illustrating retroactive constitution of necessity.
Sigmund Freud positive
Freudian notions (death drive, the neighbor in relation to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the paradox of desire) are invoked throughout.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Central philosophical resource throughout: the abstract/concrete inversion, dialectical mediation, the reading of Christianity, Aufhebung, and the logic of retroactive necessity are all drawn from Hegel.
His phrase 'God doesn't play dice' is cited only as the foil for Bohr's correct retort.
Max Weber positive
The Protestant ethic thesis is referenced as the famous puzzle of how predestination generates ceaseless capitalist activity.
What it argues
Hegelian abstract vs. concrete: ideology in the guise of realismUnknown knowns: disavowed unconscious beliefs as ideologyTheological teleology and the obscenity of meaning-in-catastropheThe Book of Job as ethical revolution: refusing false meaningThe death of God as guarantee and Christianity as comedyThe neighbor as traumatic abyss and fear as the motor of contemporary politicsTolerance replacing justice: the culturalization of politics
Dialectical moves 10
“the ideological message resides in the very abstention from delivering a message”
Silence and 'apolitical' realism are not neutral but embody an implicit political stance, trust in government in the face of catastrophe.
“for Hegel, it is precisely such immediate reality which is abstract, and to render it concrete means to deploy the complex universal context”
The common-sense opposition of abstract (general) vs. concrete (particular) is inverted: the singular sensuous individual is the most abstract; concrete = mediated totality.
“the fourth term missing from Rumsfeld: unknown knowns—things we know but don't know that we know”
Adding the repressed fourth cell of the epistemological table names ideology itself as that which operates below the threshold of acknowledged knowledge.
“the true danger of fundamentalism is not that it endangers secular science but that it is the true end of belief”
Far from being hyper-believers, fundamentalists destroy authentic faith by collapsing its internal distance and treating it as empirical knowledge.
“what really dies on the cross is God as substantial master—not Christ, but the very figure of a god who teleologically controls everything”
The Crucifixion is not a redemption-payment but the death of the theological guarantee; what survives is freedom given over to the community.
“only with Protestantism did Christianity become what it always truly was”
A Hegelian retroactive move: Protestantism does not add something new but actualizes what was implicit in Christianity all along, the community as locus of the divine.
“the death drive is Freud's name for immortality”
Inverting the obvious reading, the death drive is not a wish to die but the undead insistence of something that persists beyond the life/death opposition.
“the other is my enemy not because I haven't heard their story, but precisely because I have—and found it coherent”
The liberal platitude ('an enemy is someone whose story you haven't heard') is refuted: Hitler's story is available and explicable, yet he remains our enemy; inner truth is the site of self-deception.
“predestination doesn't mean we are not free; it means we are free at a more radical level—free to constitute our own predestination”
Freedom and necessity are not opposed; the highest freedom is retroactively assuming what became necessary through one's own act.
“god didn't just send a messenger; Christ is God—and the message is that God trusted us”
The Incarnation is not a communication from a distant God but God's own self-entrusting to human history; the direction of faith is reversed.
Claims 18
asserts
The terse realism of United 93 and World Trade Center is ideologically abstract in the Hegelian sense: it suppresses historical-political context and prevents cognitive mapping of September 11.9/11 Hollywood films and ideology
asserts
Both 9/11 films secretly read the catastrophe as a theological blessing in disguise—a divine awakening—which is the same ideological frame as Falwell/Robertson, only inverted.theological ideology in post-9/11 cinema
asserts
The ideological message of the two films resides precisely in their abstention from delivering a political message, which embodies implicit trust in government.ideology as absence of explicit message
asserts
Ideology today operates primarily at the level of unknown knowns—things we practice and enact without knowing we believe them—not at the level of explicit conviction.the nature of contemporary ideology
asserts
The Book of Job represents an absolute ethical revolution in its refusal to accept any meaning for suffering; Job's greatness is not patient submission but bitter insistence that there is no deeper meaning.the Book of Job and the ethics of meaninglessness
rejects
The teleological reading of catastrophe as a painting whose 'stains' contribute to a higher harmony is an obscenity—especially applied to the Holocaust—and must be unconditionally rejected.providential/teleological theodicy
asserts
We know about ecological catastrophe but do not believe it, because our direct embeddedness in the life-world produces background beliefs that override abstract scientific knowledge.ecological inaction and the gap between knowing and believing
rejects
The ecological-return-to-nature argument is wrong: we cannot solve the ecological crisis by returning to primordial life-world experience, because that very embeddedness is the problem.eco-phenomenological critique of science
rejects
Sam Harris's argument for torture is wrong not merely because it is utilitarian but because it effaces the radical Judeo-Christian notion of the neighbor as an abyssal, irreducible Other.Sam Harris's torture advocacy
asserts
Fundamentalists do not genuinely believe: by treating religious propositions as empirical claims verifiable by science, they obliterate the gap between faith and knowledge and thus enact the true end of belief.religious fundamentalism as the end of authentic belief
asserts
What dies on the cross is God as substantial master who benevolently controls history; the crucifixion is the death of the guarantee, after which God entrusts creation to human freedom.the theological meaning of the Crucifixion
asserts
The Holy Ghost is literally the spirit of the communal gathering ('when two of you are together, I am there'), and resurrection is this gift of freedom to the community.the Holy Ghost and resurrection
asserts
Christianity is properly a comedy, not a tragedy; to stage the Crucifixion as tragedy is an obscenity because the horror was total enough to preclude the dignity tragic form requires.Christianity as comedy vs. tragedy
rejects
The replacement of justice/equality demands with tolerance discourse—the culturalization of politics—represents a depoliticization that erases structural critique.liberal tolerance as substitute for justice
reframes
Predestination does not negate freedom but names the retroactive constitution of necessity: one is free to constitute one's own predestination, and true freedom is assuming inner necessity.predestination and freedom in Protestant theology
rejects
The claim that political correctness and multicultural celebration of the Other is anti-racist is wrong; abstracting the Other from their actual complexity (sanitizing native Americans) is the most racist gesture.multicultural tolerance and racism
asserts
The catastrophe films' solidarity-in-crisis motif contains a utopian-socialist element, but it is a sad one: solidarity can only be imagined against the background of catastrophe.utopian socialism and catastrophe cinema
rejects
The soul/inner truth reading of Christian redemption is a lie; the inner self is precisely where we deceive ourselves, not the site of ultimate truth.gnostic/humanist inwardness
Quotes 18
“the ideological message resides in their very abstention from delivering a message”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as non-message
“for hegel, it is such immediate reality which is abstract, and to render it concrete means to deploy the complex universal context that gives meaning to it”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian inversion of abstract and concrete
“unknown knowns, things we know, but we don't even know that we know them. that is to say, this is ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · unknown knowns as ideology
“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.”Slavoj Žižek · belief without believing as ideology
“you go to the toilet and you shit on ideology”Slavoj Žižek · ideology in the most banal everyday objects
“even to be consistently evil, you need a presupposed goodness. somewhere up there.”Slavoj Žižek · structural necessity of projected goodness even for evil
“it was possible for her to say, you owe me no apology, only after i did apologize. and this is not hypocrisy. that's the mystery of communication.”Slavoj Žižek · the empty gesture and the structure of symbolic exchange
“the only way in our societies to imagine this kind of solidary activity is against the background of a catastrophe”Slavoj Žižek · utopian solidarity only thinkable through catastrophe
“beware of succumbing to this pressure. i mean it seriously. this is where the devil waits upon you. this is... paganism.”Slavoj Žižek · the hermeneutic temptation of universal meaning as paganism
“we know, but we don't believe. that is to say... imagine yourself reading a report on global warming, horrible this that. but then you go out, you see sun, trees, grass, my god, you say, but this cannot really disappear.”Slavoj Žižek · knowing vs. believing and ecological inaction
“an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard... would you also be ready to say hitler was our enemy because we didn't hear his story?”Slavoj Žižek · refutation of liberal empathy as political solution
“martin luther didn't fight for tolerance. he fought for end of exploitation, end of injustice, inequality.”Slavoj Žižek · justice vs. tolerance: the culturalization of politics
“god is no longer the substantial master up there... to put it in this way, the spirit of our community it's the gift of freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · the Holy Ghost as communal freedom after death of God
“don't tell god what to do.”Slavoj Žižek · Bohr's reply to Einstein on quantum indeterminacy
“predestination doesn't mean we are not free. predestination means that we are at a much more radical level free to constitute our very predestination.”Slavoj Žižek · freedom and necessity in Protestant predestination
“the worst thing that can happen to you is that your dreams come true”Slavoj Žižek · the Freudian paradox of desire: fantasy must not be realized
“the true every idiot can be good. the greatest heroism is to do the necessary. tough cruel thing to protect the innocence of the others.”Slavoj Žižek · the perverse logic of Stalinist/Nazi heroism through evil
“death drive paradoxically i claim is freud's name for immortality”Slavoj Žižek · death drive as undead insistence beyond life and death
Transcript 28 turns
Slavoj Žižek
one joke is the guy had to deliver speeches, they don't move off. so you know they use this water and they drink more, they go on drinking. so to do. okay. all right.
one joke is the guy had to deliver speeches, they don't move off. so you know they use this water and they drink more, they go on drinking. so to do. okay. all right.
Jennifer Williams
well, welcome. i'm jennifer williams from the department of english here at calvin. and on behalf of the center for christian scholarship, the office of multicultural affairs,
well, welcome. i'm jennifer williams from the department of english here at calvin. and on behalf of the center for christian scholarship, the office of multicultural affairs,
Slavoj Žižek
the office of the provost, the department of communication arts and
the office of the provost, the department of communication arts and
Jennifer Williams
sciences, the department of english, the department of philosophy, the department of art history, and the metanex institute's local societies initiative. welcome to calvich college and the lecture by sloj jacques. a couple of brief announcements first. there is an overflow room if you don't want to sit on the floor. it's over in the seminary chapel and there's some kind of closed circuit. so that you can still hear and experience the whole lecture, but you're welcome to continue to be a fire hazard if you like. it is a full room, so if there are any empty seats in the middle, if you could consolidate so that those empty seats are now on the outside, that would be nice. um... tonight's lecture is being recorded. if you're interested in finding out how to get a copy of that, please make sure you put your name down on we have a pad of paper that says recording signs up. there's one on both these main doors, so please make sure you put your name and information down. and then finally, we were just curious to know who you all are. so rather than have us all go around the room and introduce ourselves, there are sort of sign-up books at both sides. and again, we would just love to have your signature just as a record of you being here. my first encounter with gex's work occurred back in grad school, where i suppose all these things begin. i was trying to use kierkegaard as a theoretical model for an argument about modernism that i was trying to make in my dissertation. and one of my advisors was just absolutely adamant that such a thing could not be done. and she said that to have a dissertation with kierkegaard, gertrude stein, and konrad would just be weird. and as you can tell, i'm scarred for life. so i spent many days poring over books and articles and all kinds of things to see if i could find that perfect quote that would allow me to link all these things together. and one night, a friend of mine from grad school, jim, emailed me. he had found a page from the ticklish subject and had typed it out in its entirety in the email. to my delight, there enough, on page 211, gques makes the connection between kierkegaard and manardini that i was seeking. so i wrote back to jim, this is great. this is great, but what does it mean? what does it jacques mean? to which jim replied, and you'll excuse me, who the hell knows? but if jjak is writing about kierkegaard, then you know it's important and you can do it too. and this is the same friend, i should say, who was given a t-shirt by his then girlfriend, now wife, and the t-shirt had the initials wzs. what would g jacques say? and jim told me later he almost proposed to her like right on the spot right there. much has been said, of course, about gek's use of pop cultural references alongside these sort of major philosophical works. but i find that that's something that really is delightful about his work. and one of my favorite features of the fragile absolute is that i can think of no other work in which keu reeves and hegel share the same page in an index. but most importantly for me and my work is uac's engagement with christianity and the christian tradition. gek's claim about the radical ethical and political capabilities of what some have declared to be the most foundational and universalist of all foundational and universalist traditions, christianity. are very invigorating. in grad school, it was my experience that nobody talked about christianity unless of course you wanted to critique it. even when philosophers like jacques derrida or léain bedieu would talk about christianity, it was because they were making religious turns in their old age as opposed to seriously interrogating the work. but not jijac. and all of this from an avowed atheist to boot. and to conclude, stanley fish recently reviewed wendy brown's book, regulating aversion, tolerance in the age of identity and empire for the chronicle of ir education. and in that review, fish concludes by stating, brown's account of how liberal tolerance and therefore liberalism works is nuanced embracing the fact that her analysis does not, and in my view, could not, deliver a program for improving the world. or even a set of reasons for rejecting liberal tolerance makes it no different from any other effort, always doomed, to derive a politics from the discourses of postmodernism, anti-essentialism, and anti-foundationalism. the title of tonight's lecture, why only an atheist can believe, politics between fear and trembling, leads me to think jean-jacques may have something to say about such claims. so without further delay, please join me in welcoming slavo-jacques.
sciences, the department of english, the department of philosophy, the department of art history, and the metanex institute's local societies initiative. welcome to calvich college and the lecture by sloj jacques. a couple of brief announcements first. there is an overflow room if you don't want to sit on the floor. it's over in the seminary chapel and there's some kind of closed circuit. so that you can still hear and experience the whole lecture, but you're welcome to continue to be a fire hazard if you like. it is a full room, so if there are any empty seats in the middle, if you could consolidate so that those empty seats are now on the outside, that would be nice. um... tonight's lecture is being recorded. if you're interested in finding out how to get a copy of that, please make sure you put your name down on we have a pad of paper that says recording signs up. there's one on both these main doors, so please make sure you put your name and information down. and then finally, we were just curious to know who you all are. so rather than have us all go around the room and introduce ourselves, there are sort of sign-up books at both sides. and again, we would just love to have your signature just as a record of you being here. my first encounter with gex's work occurred back in grad school, where i suppose all these things begin. i was trying to use kierkegaard as a theoretical model for an argument about modernism that i was trying to make in my dissertation. and one of my advisors was just absolutely adamant that such a thing could not be done. and she said that to have a dissertation with kierkegaard, gertrude stein, and konrad would just be weird. and as you can tell, i'm scarred for life. so i spent many days poring over books and articles and all kinds of things to see if i could find that perfect quote that would allow me to link all these things together. and one night, a friend of mine from grad school, jim, emailed me. he had found a page from the ticklish subject and had typed it out in its entirety in the email. to my delight, there enough, on page 211, gques makes the connection between kierkegaard and manardini that i was seeking. so i wrote back to jim, this is great. this is great, but what does it mean? what does it jacques mean? to which jim replied, and you'll excuse me, who the hell knows? but if jjak is writing about kierkegaard, then you know it's important and you can do it too. and this is the same friend, i should say, who was given a t-shirt by his then girlfriend, now wife, and the t-shirt had the initials wzs. what would g jacques say? and jim told me later he almost proposed to her like right on the spot right there. much has been said, of course, about gek's use of pop cultural references alongside these sort of major philosophical works. but i find that that's something that really is delightful about his work. and one of my favorite features of the fragile absolute is that i can think of no other work in which keu reeves and hegel share the same page in an index. but most importantly for me and my work is uac's engagement with christianity and the christian tradition. gek's claim about the radical ethical and political capabilities of what some have declared to be the most foundational and universalist of all foundational and universalist traditions, christianity. are very invigorating. in grad school, it was my experience that nobody talked about christianity unless of course you wanted to critique it. even when philosophers like jacques derrida or léain bedieu would talk about christianity, it was because they were making religious turns in their old age as opposed to seriously interrogating the work. but not jijac. and all of this from an avowed atheist to boot. and to conclude, stanley fish recently reviewed wendy brown's book, regulating aversion, tolerance in the age of identity and empire for the chronicle of ir education. and in that review, fish concludes by stating, brown's account of how liberal tolerance and therefore liberalism works is nuanced embracing the fact that her analysis does not, and in my view, could not, deliver a program for improving the world. or even a set of reasons for rejecting liberal tolerance makes it no different from any other effort, always doomed, to derive a politics from the discourses of postmodernism, anti-essentialism, and anti-foundationalism. the title of tonight's lecture, why only an atheist can believe, politics between fear and trembling, leads me to think jean-jacques may have something to say about such claims. so without further delay, please join me in welcoming slavo-jacques.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah. thank you very much. i'm really glad to be here. thank you very much for this nice, maybe too nice introduction. what i mean is the following. when i hear such gentle and nice words, i always start to look behind my back, like, who is that real me you were addressing? it's too much for me to recognize myself in it. and now comes the evil point that the name of this gap. between what i experience as my immediate self-identity and the symbolic identity. de. constitutes my public image. that you were describing. the name of this gap in psychoanalytic theory is symbolic castration. so thanks very much for. castrating experience, good beginning okay but let's go on in a little bit more serious way. i hope you will not be bored. the beginning is a little bit more difficult than maybe things happen. okay, i would like to begin with something probably known to most of you, maybe all of you, two hollywood productions released to mark the5th anniversary of the september 11th. paul greengr's united 93 and oliver stone's world trade center. the first thing that strikes the eye is that both films try to be as anti-hollywood as possible. they both focus on the courage of ordinary people with no glamorous stars, no special effects, no grandiloquent heroic gestures. just a terse realistic depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. it is however this very touch of authenticity which raises, i think, some disturbing questions. the first thing one cannot but note is how both films tell the story of an exception. united 93 is about the only one of the four kidnapped planes in which the terrorists failed, which did not hit its destination. world trade center tells the story of the two of those 20 or so policemen, firemen who were saved from the rabble from the ruins of world center. the disaster is thus turned into a kind of triumph, most notably in united 93. hereier a comparisonaison with spielberg's schindlers list is instructive. although. i think schindler's list is... a failure the idea to choose schindler as a hero was a correct one. it is precisely by focusing on a german who did something to help the jews the demonstrates how it was possible to do something and thus to condemn those who did nothing, claiming that the regime was so totalitarian it was not possible to do anything and so on. in united 93, on the contrary, the focus on the rebellion serves the purpose of preventing us to ask the truly pertinent questions. that is to say, let us indulge in a simple mental experiment. let us imagine both films. united 93 world trade center with the same change. let us say that instead of united 93, we would get a film called american 11, you know, the name of another flight which did hit its target. or let us imagine world trade center remade as the story of two of the firefighters or policemen who did die in the r of the twin towers after postponed prolonged suffering. without in any way justifying. the terrible crime or showing an understanding for it. such a version would confront us with the true horror of the situation. it would thus compel us to think, to start asking serious questions about how such a thing could have happened and what does it mean. the second feature. both films restrain not only from taking political stance about the events but even from depicting their larger political context. that is to say, neither the passengers on united 93 flight nor the policemen in world trade center have a grasp on the full picture. all of a sudden, they find themselves thrown into a terrifying situation and they have to make the best out of it. this lack of what frederick json would have called cognitive mapping is crucial. both films depict ordinary people affected by the sudden, brutal intrusion of history with a capital h. the invisible real that curse. all we see are the disastrous effects. so that in the case of world trade center, one can easily imagine exactly the same feeling. in which the twin towers would have collapsed not because of the terrorist attack, but due, let us say, to a strong earthquake. or even more problematically. we can imagine the same film. the same narrative at least taking place, for example, to be really evil, in a big german city in the winter of 1944 after a devastating allied bombing. or... even more evil. surmise, what about the same film taking place in a bombed high-rise building in southern beirut during the last lebanon-israel conflict? and that's the point. it cannot take place there. such a film taking place in southern beirut would have been immediately dismissed as a subtle pro-hezbollah terrorist propaganda or something similar. what this means is that the two films message! ideological political message resides in their very abstention from delivering a message. this abstention is sustained by an implicit trust into one's government. when the enemy attacks, one just don't think, do your duty. this is what i call britney spears. theory of... because because effectively, i remember two years ago seeing a britney spears interview on mtv, she was asked what does she think about iraq and so on and she said, i don't quite understand it. all i know is that at a certain point we ordinary people should simply trust our president. this brings us back to our starting point, to the concrete character of the two films, depicting ordinary people in a terse realistic mode. nope. we philosophers know hegel's counterintuitive use of the opposition of abstract and concrete, as you all know in our ordinary language, abstract are general notions, as opposed to concrete, really existing singular objects and events. talking does not exist. i, maybe, i'm not so sure, exist here now talking to you. for hegel, on the contrary, it is such immediate reality which is abstract, and to render it concrete means to deploy the complex universal context that gives meaning to it. let me give you an example which is fictional because i don't smoke. if i were to smoke here, for hegel, the abstract, the most abstract approach would have been simply to present me here as this really existing individual smoking. a concrete approach would have been to render visible, to articulate the complex historical, social, economic, ideological context which has to be here so that i can smoke here. european colonization of latin america where, if i'm correctly informed. smoke, i mean smoking comes from then the development of industry, plantations, or in a more delicate way, why do we have to smoke, stress of work, relaxation and so on. all this this context has to be here so that this pseudoconcrete reality can happen in that wider context. this is what we call dialectical mediation. is. what for hegel is concrete. and back to the two films, here is the problem. both are abstract in the hegelian sense. the function of their down-to-earth depiction of concrete individuals struggling for life is not just to avoid cheap commercial spectacle, but to obliterate the historical context here then is where we are five years later still unable to locate. september eleventh into a large narrative to provide some kind of generally acceptable cognitive mapping. the third feature. in both films. there is a key moment which violates the terse realistic style. united 93 starts with kidnappers in a motel room, praying, getting ready. they look austere. like some kind of angels of death. and the first shot after the title credits confirms this impression. it is a panoramic shot from high above. manhattan in the night, camera moving above the streets, accompanied by the sound of the kidnappers' prayers, as if the kidnappers stroll above the city getting ready to descend on earth to rape their deadly harvest. similarly, there are no direct shots of the planes hitting the twin towers in world trade center. all that we see second. before the catastrophe. is when one of the policemen is on a busy street, an ominous shadow quickly passing over the crowd there. of course, we know retrospectively the shadow of the first plane, seconds before it will hit its target. these shots confer on both films a strange theological reverberation, as if the attacks were a kind of divine intervention. what do i mean by this? recall the first reaction of jerry folwell and pat robertson to the september 11th bombings. you remember the scandal caused because they perceived the bombings as a sign that god lifted up its protection of the united states because of the sinful way of life of contemporary americans. they put the blame on hedonist materialism, liberalism, rampant sexuality, basically claiming exactly the same thing as muslim fundamentalists, that america got what it deserved. now in a hidden way, i think, united 93 and world trade center tend to do the opposite, but within the same frame. to read the september 11th catastrophe as a blessing in disguise, as a divine intervention from above destined to awaken us from moral slumber and to bring out the best in us. world trade center ends with the off-screen words of an anonymous narrator which spells out this message. terrible events like the twin towers destruction bring out in people the worst and the best. people are shown to be able to do things they would never imagine of being able. so it is as if our societies need a major catastrophe. in order to resuscitate the spirit of communal solidarity. no. here. things get really interesting. they bring us to our topic. i don't think this is anything bad because i think that if you look much in a more refined, delicate way, these big science fiction catastrophe movies, i think that they are... one of the last places where we can still discern some kind of utopian socialist element in hollywood. i always think that this big catastrophe, spectacular destruction that we see is basically a lure. it's here to deceive us. what the truly fascinating thing is what happens as a byproduct, the sudden upsurge of solidarity, dedication, communal love and so on and so on. and the message is basically again a sad one. it is that the only way in our societies to imagine this kind of solidary activity is against the background of a catastrophe. but now let me move to what really disturbs me in these two films? implicitly, i claim. they. not justify but how to put it, contextualize or provide the interpretation of the events as part of some deeper. deeper. deeper meaning how put, in the sense of these events really happened in order to awaken us. a secret teleology built in them. like they are terrible but a blessing in disguise. hey. of course this brings us to certain teleological and theological reading of history which i think precisely if we want to remain faithful to. judeo-christian legacy we should unconditionally. reject. this i claim. falch. teleology of philology becht exemplified by that well-known metaphor. of a painting. you know, when something appears discordant, terrifying, horrible to us, it is as if we are looking at a painting, the painting being the universe, from we are too close to it and it appears as a stain. like if you look even at the most beautiful painting, whatever you want, rembrandt, da vinci, too close, you see a stain. you withdraw. it you see how what appeared as a stain contributes to global harmony. but i think that precisely with catastrophes, maybe even much larger, of course, than september 11th, like holocaust, the stalinist gulag, and why not, we live in the middle of such a catastrophe. it makes you think why we don't talk more about it. you remember this summer there was a cover story on the time magazine. so it's publicly known that in the last 10 years at least 4 million people died of unnatural causes in congo. okay, we ignore it. so, you know, this should at least make you suspicious of whenever a humanitarian crisis is discovered, the sad lesson is that there is always some political strategic calculation behind it. but what i want to say, when we witness such a tragedy, let's say auschwitz holocaust you can feel that it's in a way obscene to say, ah, auschwitz appears such a tragedy because we are too close to it, we see it as a stain. but from a proper distance available only to god, it would be clear how this contributes to global harmony of the universe or whatever. it's an obscenity. what does this mean? this means, for example, that we should finally take the lesson of what for me as an atheist is absolutely unsurpassable. ethical revolution, one of them, there may be two, three. path-breaking texts, entire human history, the book of job in the bible. remember what happens there. forget the very beginning. i think this is just probably taken over from some previous tradition, which is why enemies of judeo-christian tradition like to upon, you know that obscene conversation like, you know, god and devil sitting at the table, desserts, serves, drinks, and then they, oh, what about that guy, blah, blah. that's an obscenity. forget that. think about focus on what happens. job is hit by calamities. and... what does job do? it's incredible how spontaneously we try to falsify his image. once i asked my friends, atheists or religious, and most of them had this totally fake memory that job is a guy who, and thereim should recite the lesson of the story, who silently suffers. humbly submits to divine will not at all he is angry, he protests all the time but here also we should be very precise what happens there he doesn't protest in this vulgar economic sense i didn't deserve it blah blah. there are three bad guys, three theologists there, who are precisely providers of meaning. the point of daring, you know, three friends, four. i three. the point is not that they put the blame on job. that's secondary, like the first one who provides this simple pseudo-hermeneutics. god is just so if you suffer, even if you are not aware now of what, you must have done something. no, it's more precise. they just desperately try to provide a meaning there. underlying. hypothesis or axiom is it must have some meaning if we know it or not and the absolute greatness that's undesescribable ethical revolution i think of job is to reject this meaning i see in this the sense of his like bitter insistence not i'm good i'm extra good i served god but this i didn't deserve it again not in the sense i was good but in the sense of no there is no deeper meaning here. and remember what happens then when got finally intervenes. he gives full right to job. he says to the three, quick ideology, quickly to the three like maybe the name of one of them was, i don't know, one was pat, the other was gary, who knows who was the third one no and he says no, they against that. so i think again that today this pressure of meaning is strong and now my god, i will speak like a kind of a biblical preacher but i mean it seriously now in the sense of beware of succumbing to this pressure. i mean it seriously. this is where the devil waits upon you. this is... paganism. pagan universe is all intelligent. not only protestants, but catholic also, like chesterton pointed out. you know, this universal hermeneutic attitude, this metaphoric reading of the universe, this rose, that rose, cat is not a cat, it's devil, the dog is, you know, like this fullness of meaning, no, this is not. judeo-christian legacy. judeo-christian legacy is much more bitter. you accept. the meaninglessness of the universe. and today again. it's a danger to succumb to this pseudo-hermeneutics. when we witness things like aids, the prospect of ideological catastrophe and so on, it's so simple to succumb to this temptation. aids, oh, it must have some meaning, punishment for this ecology, yes, because we disturbed the balance of yin yang and so on or whatever. and no, you start with a little bit of hermeneutic of ecology. i warn you, you end up in the vinci code, and then you end up with jesus christ copulating. small step from one to the other, no? so again, one has to resist this temptation, which is a terrible temptation. let me give you a brutal extreme example which i... not like, but it's at least convincing. when i was in israel, i was told that there is a minor sect, but nonetheless, not negligible. quite strong. sect of people, and there is a rabbi who leads them, who believe that, among other things, that holocaust was justified, that the jewish people, european jews did something very sinful, okay, he tries to specify it as integrating themselves too much into european societies and that this was divine punishment. it's terrible, but i understand it in the sense that, you know, even if the message is a bad one. we deserved it. often, it's better. eh. bad message than no message. because even if the message is bad, what you nonetheless gain is a dialogue with the meaningful universe. it still means things have a global meaning and so on and so on. so that's my first theoretical point. let's go now on. undoubtedly, at least some of you. what if you. where if we were to be immediately in a dialogue, would have reacted to what i've said, saying, but this is not what i directly or how i directly experienced the film. it's not open. yes, and now i come to my second crucial point. the level at which this logic operates this obscene, i claim. beliefs, it must have had a meaning, is not the level of our explicit beliefs. it's the level of what? i will describe this level now. briefly referring to what i developed in some of my books, namely, i would like, in kind case of professional solidarity, referring to a theosopher who three days ago lost his job referred to a well-known contemporary american philosopher who elaborated the relationship between what we know and what we don't know. you got the point. sorry, old joke. donald ramsfeld. no, i'm referring to, you remember in march 2003, donald ramsfeld gave the famous interview where he developed his thoughts on the relationship between known and unknown. here it is, the quote. there are known knowns. there are things we know that we know. that's clear. like, i don't know. i'm here. calvin college and i no. that i'm here. i know that i know that. then he goes on. there are known unknowns. that is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. this is also clear. like i know there are some cars outside this building, but i don't know how many cars are parked there. and i know that i don't know this. that is to say, this is something that i don't know, but it's still, how should they put it, with regard to the horizon of understanding or of meaning it's still within the field of my knowledge. i clearly don't know that i know that. then ramsfeld goes on, this was of course destined at that point to warn us of unpredictable horrors hidden in iraq, but there are also unknown unknowns. there are things we don't know that we don't know. it's also clear, let us say if saddam were to have some ultra-secret weapon or whatever, not the ordinary weapons of mass destruction that we suspected that he had, this would be unknown unknown. it's not simply that we didn't know. we even wouldn't have known that we don't know no because it's totally outside our horizon. but here unfortunately the. dialectical strength of rumsfeld thinking finds its limit. because did you notice that the fourth term is missing? we have known knowns. we have known unknowns, we know that we don't know, and we have unknown unknowns. it's so much outside our horizon that we don't know that we don't know. what about the fourth term, which i claim is the most interesting one? not the known unknowns, but the unknown knowns, things we know, but we don't even know that we know them. that is to say, this is ideology. ideology is not so much our explicit today today, of course, we live, as everybody says in hedonist cynical era, nobody is ready to fight for big causes. what i claim is that nonetheless there are more than ever maybe beliefs here, beliefs which although we would never publicly admit that they are our beliefs. we, as it were, practice these beliefs. they are embodied in our knowledge, in the materials we use, and so on and so on. to end up, to just make the last mention of poor ramsfeld, i think that that's why he lost his job. because he didn't know what he knows. okay, to put it in a more consistent way, knowing quite serious, why did things in iraq go wrong? precisely because american politics was not aware of its unknown norms, of the implicit ideological prejudices, presuppositions which they were simply here, not even you are aware of them, but they regulate your activity, you know, like presuppositions about how everybody in the world likes american type of democracy, presuppositions about how the people will react in iraq and so on, and so on and so on. so this level is, i think, crucial for the functioning of ideology. all these things that and this is the crucial problem of belief, i claim. all these things that we in a way believe without believing. in my book, the parallax view, i developed more in detail, i will just mention it here, the wonderful example which i found in a biography of niels bohr, you know, of copenhagen quantum physics. niels bohr incidentally, was also the guy who, i think, provided a wonderful right answer to einstein. you know that einstein's well-known phrase which reflects his distrust in quantum physics, god doesn't play dice. everybody knows this. but you know what was niels bohr's answer? don't tell god what to do. i i mean, it's the correct. okay. this is even a more beautiful story. a friend visited nils bhr in a countryside house. and notice above the entrance door a horseshoe. in europe, i don't know how it is here, a horseshoe is a kind of a... superstitious item. if you put it above the entrance, it is supposed to keep out the evil spirits and so on keep the house safe, whatever. now the friend was shocked and addressed nis bhr, my god, i thought you were a scientist. do you believe in this kind of superstitious crap? niels bhr answered, no, of course not. i'm not crazy. then the other guy says, but why is it there then? ah here, nils borg gave the correct answer. not the usual boring, fake, multiculturalist, tolerant one that we like today. it's just our way of life. it is out of respect for and so on. i know this story. all my jewish friends, they don't believe in kosher food, but they don't eat pork out of respect for and so on. and you get here wonderful paradoxes. i mean, i'm not focusing on jews, but arabs. it's the same with as. christians i'm saying because i know the situation there. now like a typical jew of course doesn't believe in god but nonetheless he believes that god gave them the land of israel that they can have it. that's another story but what i want to say is so what is then the answer? not this politically correct of nils br why do you have it? it's a wonderful one. he answered, 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 democracy. you practice it. like and your beliefs are out there in practice. let me give you, let's go to the end here. it will be, as it's usual with me, i'm sorry if i offend some of you, an absolutely scatological, obscene end endpoint, but i cannot resist repeating an old story. that i often use if you had the fortune or misfortune to travel around europe. maybe you noticed how in what different way, now comes the dangerous point, toilets are structured in europe. you have the french toilets where the hole where excrement disappears is in the back. so the idea is it drops. falls directly into it, it goes away as soon as possible. then you have english or yours anglo-saxon where it floats in water. then you have the german one, which is the most obscene, of course, which is that the hole is in front and you have just a little bit of water in the hole so that most of the bowl is a kind of a plateau. the idea is your excrement falls there to enable, it's an old disgusting german tradition that every morning you should inspect your bowl, sniff it and so on to see, look for any traces of illness if you don't believe me, go and look. it's quite a cultural shock. now i ask myself, why this? what's the point? i asked, i read books, there are two books on the market if you so you can check it on architects, very obscene books. you have scientific studies in what angle sheet falls down. and they don't give an account of this. they simply every book that i know or text plays this simple utilitarian card. oh, how is that the other guys don't see that ours is the most utilitarian, the most practical. but then it strike me. of course, things are more... complex in reality but basically i claim this is the only account that i can imagine. do you know that? if you know a little bit of the history of european thought around the time of hegel. it was. popular to claim that. to assert the notion of so-called european trinity, the idea being that. europe as a spiritual entity is structured around three poles each of them stands for a certain nation for a certain political attitude. and or attitude towards life. life and for. a certain level of social life. germans are politically conservative. the level of life is poetry, thinking, contemplation. french. politics, level of life, domain of life. politically leftist revolutionary, english, economy as a sphere of life and moderate liberalism as then it did strike me, but that's it. the french approach is radical politics. it falls in liquidated, disappear. it's like guillotine, like it should disappear. anglo-saxon. pragmatic. let it flow there. we will solve the problem. germans, of course, poetry and contemplation. you contemplate, you look at it. now, crazy, this may sound, but believe me or not, in a way it is true. that i say, that's my point, serious point that i want to make. are you er how? it's easy to say, oh, no ideology and so on. my god, you go to the toilet and you shit on ideology, how should i put it? that is to say, even such as the lowest of the lowest vulgar everyday object cannot be accounted for in direct. utilitarian terms, it is structured like this because it's the most appropriate, but embodies certain very fundamental attitudes towards what is one of the big problems of life. what to do with this embarrassing excrement that comes out of our body. and this is not a secondary point. every good anthropologist will tell you that one of the signs that you are dealing with humans, no longer with apes or animals is that you have this embarrassment what to do with shit basically how to it must disappear. uh. it's it's... the whole problem of i mean, we are immediately in the deepest metaphysics. i'm quite serious, which is... uh what we as humans i claim that disgust is the deeply human. emotion and what is disgust disgust is not necessarily, immediately. characterized by its object. it has to do something with the disturbed frontier between inside and outside. disgust is with something inside from your inside you confront it from the outside. okay, now you can tell me that shit is disgusting. no but let's take a more neutral example which i hope will convince you. you have saliva all the time in your mouth. you swallow it now all the time. no problem, nothing disgusting. do or rather don't do it. i can't do it, but try to do a certain extremely elementary example. take a glass. spit in it, kind of a certain strata, half an inch of your saliva, look and then try to drink it. you cannot. because it's outside. it's disgusting. it's disgusting. so what i want to say is that you cannot imagine how much this tells us about human identity. the point being that at a certain level, precisely at the level of ramsfeldian unknown knowns, we do not perceive ourselves. in this most elementary phenomenological self-experience, we do not perceive ourselves as beings with depth. the depth is spiritual, not bodily. i claim that when i look at you, i somehow abstract. the fact that beneath your skin there are pretty horrible things, all the blood, bones, whatever. when i look you into your eyes, head, i behave as if... there is some kind of a soul spiritual presence inside, not the stupidity of biological machine or whatever. so this tells us a lot about this most immediate phenomenology of our experience. again, the way it is embodied in this unknown unknown. gnes. now let me... make a step. fder. uh. the central mystery here. it's dead. dich belie ich. even if we are aware of them, another way that we deal with them is that we transpose them onto others there is nothing. hypocritical in it or rather it's a kind of a sincere hypocrisy. what do you mean by this? uh. my favorite example here is another one which i repeatedly use in my books. do you know the tibetan praying mills? like you write a prayer, you put it into a mill, you turn it around, or even better, you put it on a windmill and it turns around itself. and to put it in a slightly cynical way, it's wonderful. like you can think about sex, whatever you want, but objectively you pray. it prays for you. now you will say, haha, this goes for primitive cultures. no, we have exactly the same phenomena all around. think about what, if you ask me, is one of the great contributions of american civilization to world culture, can laughter on tv. you know, laughter being part of the soundtrack. it's a very mysterious phenomenon. why does it work? namely, how does it work? it's not as many people think. that it's a kind of a pavlovian reflex machine to signal you when to laugh. no, as a rule, you don't laugh. you return home in the evening tired as a dog, you put it on, cheers, friends, whatever. you hear the laughter and you just look at it and... as an idiot and when it ends, you feel relieved. it is as if you have laughed. i mean, it's a paradox, how, how to put it, even. the most intimate. spontaneous. expression of yourself, like laughter, can be transposed onto others. the same ghost. also especially i claim for example for. belie. what do i mean by this? did you notice how often in families where parents have belief or stop believing. what happens is that date desperately cling to. another one, it can be their parents, old mother. children who should believe. what really breaks them down is that much more than their disbelief is to discover that this other whose innocence should be protected. doesn't believe even for many, i'm sorry. for many people who participate in sexual orgies and so on. i spoke recently with the sociologist who investigated this and told me how, as a rule, they can be ruthless group orgies, whatever you want, but they always have somebody who should remain innocent who shouldn't know about it the moment that happens. der life. literally, force. false. literally falls apart. this structure, i think, is extremely interesting. let me give you another example from literature. okay, literature, i only saw the film. edith wharton's age of innocence. this is the beauty of the story that you remember the affair between newland and that count olenska or who? no? but the wife, to put it in human terms, vinona, right don't know. the young wife is supposed to be naive. not to know. and then you know what happens at the end. the wife, young wife of the hero d, he thinks he is free now legally to rejoin his long. love of long years mistress, okay, michelle pfeiffer in the film, then at this very point his son tells him that the wife knew it all the time. just pretended not to know and it's ruined. he cannot do it. you see, he was engaged in this transgressive behavior, whatever, but on condition that another one. of this innocence of another one. so this is. the great mystery of how even if we don't believe we claim to be cynical and so on we have this need for another one to remain pure, to believe. i know now enough of jokes. i know a much more serious and tragic version of this. agnes heller, probably unknown to almost all of you, is a hungarian philosopher. who was during, now she's a very old lady, during world war ii in, i think it was even auschwitz. i mean, she has all these numbers, the real one, how should i put it. and she told me a very interesting story, how in every... barrack in the camp. there were two types of people, basically. there were survivalists, those who were totally bitter but still struggled for survival. and this was some kind of a codified egotism. you were allowed, if the other guy was stupid and left some food there and walked away, you were allowed to steal it. there were some minimal rules, but very hard rules. then there were so-called muslims, muslimmen, the living dead. the ones who simply no longer cared, just as living dead walked around. and then, now comes the tragic point. story she told me. then there was in every barack a myth that somewhere out there usually in a next barrack next, there is somebody who is still fully human. that is to say somebody who didn't regress to this level of survivalism still you do that, you just cruelly try to survive but who behaves even in those terrifying circumstances as if are in normal life, he helped others, shared food and so on. and she told me something very interesting that the most dangerous moment for your psychic integrity was when, as unfortunately it was the case, you sooner or later discovered that this is a myth. that this other is like most of us at that point usually people lose even the will. to survive even this will to struggle and regressed to what was called muslim musulmanen that is to say. turned into living dead. so you see the nicety here even to put it in more almost theological terms, even to be consistently evil, you need a presupposed goodness. somewhere up there and i claim. now we shouldn't underestimate this. now don't go into this orgy o divine spark, we are all deeply good. no, the problem is that the same holds for hitler, for stalin, for from whoever you want. i have no doubt that they were doing with this innocence in view. that is to say, you can also give to this a very nasty term, unethical term. you have, for example, with stalinist communists, even more in this case with nazis, this especially perverse logic, which is that the great theism when tough things have to be done, you kill, you torture and so on, that the true every idiot can be good. the greatest heroism is to do the necessary. tough cruel thing to protect the innocence of the others if you look. at one of the most disgusting ethical documents, but it's still an ethical document in the sense that crazy as it sounds, it tries to articulate the ethics of 20th century, the famous speech in 33 october 43 i think, of heinrich himmler ss. head to officers for the preparation of holocaust in posen uh. polish city. he there uttered these famous phrases. claiming that holocaust will be the most glorious chapter of german history but the chapter which unfortunately will never be written that is to say the message is we are the true heroes it's a terrible message. the message is you are in front of i mean, in a way, himmler, that's the horror of it, was bothered by a true ethical problem, which is, how could ss officers and soldiers do their dirty job? slaughtering killing children women without becoming beasts themselves his solution was this kind of a heroism that you. perceive your very evil acts as the supreme act of heroism, ready to descend into this hell for the good of the people. it's a terrifying logic. so... since unfortunately time is running. let me go on. uh. d eh this delicate relationship between what we believe and what we know. or rather what we explicitly know and these disavowed beliefs, they are at work in a very refined way in our daily experience often you believe in something, you can even believe sincerely. but nonetheless it's a great shock and surprise if you see your belief confirmed directly in a too brutal way. did you see the film? isn't there? i was told that tomorrow there will be here a play by steve martin. somewhere. okay, doesn't matter. perform. the point is that he acts in a film, leap of faith from 92, maybe you saw it. which is one film about a con artist, this preacher who treats he heals cripples, but it's all a stage. then once but he does something which he thinks is treating, but it's a true miracle. he totally breaks down. it's a shock. so things are here much more refined in the sense that... what does it mean to believe? often people who believe, believe with a distance. i often notice how religious people often pray and obey the ritual. not as pascal thought in order to really believe. you know that. advice of blaise pascal to unbelievers who want to believe. you don't believe? here it is what you should do. act simply, act as if you believe. obey the ritual, kneel down, pray, do good work and belief will come by itself. i claim unfortunately that often it's the exact opposite. it's that. what if you really believe, but in a too intense way, it's horrible directly to believe. then maybe the solution is... do as if you believe and your belief will be externalized in the ritual out there. you no longer will directly have to believe. now let's move to more. problematic topic. this gap between what we rationally know and what we unconsciously believe. tells us i claim a lot about our... predicament. namely how we relate usually to the prospect of ecological catastrophe. ich this is a paradox, basically we know. catastrophe is coming, there will be global warming, whatever, but why don't we act? why don't we do something? i don't think it's enough, this simple leftist explanation, yes, big companies, manipulation, whatever. i claim we know, but we don't believe. that is to say... imagine yourself reading a report on global warming, horrible this that. but then you go out, you see sun, trees, grass, my god, you say, but this cannot really disappear. that's the tragedy that what prevents us from taking seriously the prospect of ecological catastrophe. it's precisely this our direct immersion into our life world. these are beliefs which are part of the way we act in reality and it's extremely difficult to renounce them. there is a very important theoretical consequence to be drawn from this paradoxical one. you know the usual criticism of ecological i mean of why we are in ecological deadlock. the idea is the following one. we trust too much science, abstract scientific reasoning. we should not forget that science is secondary. it's alienated secondary product of our primordial attitude which is our being embedded in a concrete life world. you see, you feel, you sense with the earth where you live and so on. i claim that that's not enough. we cannot return to this immediate life-world experience because this exactly is the problem. if we are to confront properly i claim ecological catastrophe we have to confront we have to outgrow precisely this direct embeddedness. now, let's go on. i hope it will be a little bit more amusing what i say now. namely, how then do we relate towards this? uh how where do we detect this? gap in our beliefs or knowledge, this inconsistency. i know it's true, but nonetheless i don't believe it. let me make a simple observation. did you notice how every normative order, in the sense of rules that we obey, to be in order to be members of certain collective, from family to whenever you want, it's never a simple set of rules then you learn them, you are in. what's so interesting is that there are never simply only rules. there are always rules and then metaules. that is to say, rules which tell you how to relate to these rules, to take them seriously or not, how seriously. for example. it's often that there is a prohibition. you shouldn't do it. but we all know that. it means usually means in many cases, do it discreetly or sometimes it's even, especially with some kind of sexual prohibitions, it's even a direct solicitation, do it or whatever. so then can be prohibitions which are not meant to be taken seriously. if you take them seriously, you appear an idiot, how shouldda put it. like you are here a little bit different, you take your state seriously. for example, this is my legacy from the socialist regime in my country. like if i... try not to pay taxes to find a loophole. and if somebody tells me, how can you? we have to pay taxes all, i mean, the guy is an idiot you know what i mean?'s okay. but there is something much more interesting here, the opposite paradox. the paradox of not of prohibition which between the lines tells you, do it, do it discreetly, whatever, but do it. but an offer of freedom. you are. permitted something. but on condition that you don't. use this option. as, you can do it. you are given the freedom to do it on condition that you will not do it. i mean, again, there are especially, for example, in different political regimes, you have freedom to choose on condition that you make the right choice. or even in our daily lives. for example, recently a friend from japan told me, do you know that in japan, workers have the right to 40 days holiday every year. but you are expected not to. use this right in its full extent. the implicit rule is not more than 20 days. then i asked them, okay, but then don't you simply write 20 days? he told me, you're an idiot, you don't get it. and he was right. i didn't get it. why not? it's the same as. do you know, this is always what fascinated me because i think this is communication between people at its most mysterious. and elementary these empty gestures you are offered something but you shouldn't. use it. for example, all of you probably were already in this situation. you were invited by somebody older, richer to dinner. now, you knew it was absolutely clear in advance that he will pay. but isn't it kind of a ritual of politeness that you have to insist for some time, no, no, let me pay. just don't do, by the way, what i did. once i insisted too long and then... the guy said, if you want, do it. then i have to stage all this comedy of, oh my god, i forgot my credit card or whatever. no. there are other beautiful examples. for example, she is my friend, although we fight all the time theoretically. personally, she is my friend. judith butler. recently i met her in switzerland and i was not too rude to her, but i used some degenerate creep, whatever. i mean, i'm horrible when i eat. so i saw that i did hurt her. so i felt bad. afterwards, i found her, i called her, i told sorry, blah, blah, and then she told me. thanks, i appreciate it. but really, i wasn't offended. i knew you didn't mean it. you owe me no apology. she was absolutely sincere and i was. really grateful. but you see the paradox is that. it was possible for her to say, you owe me no apology, only after i did apologize. and this is not hypocrisy. that's the mystery of communication. you do something, the result is nothing. you do something which is declared. superfluous. but... in order to be declared superfluous, you have to do it. this is how, now you will say, what's the profit? the profit is respect, friendship, love, communication,, true communication between us. i don't know. my favorite example even here is we have this ritual in my country. let us say that i and a friend of mine compete for the same job. let us say he wins, i lose. it's a ritual in my country that then the winner. should say to the loser, listen, i know that you deserved it more. why don't i step down and you will get the job. but of course, you have to say, no, no, no, you can have it. what's the profit? usually the friendship is saved in this way, frankly, not what i'm saying here is that the most delicate texture of our human relations. moves operates at this level at the level not of explicit rules but of this. between the lines rules, you know. like i give you an offer, but... these meta rules tell me it's an offer to be rejected or whatever. now i come to the concluding point, if you allow me a little bit of time just more. it is that. i claim that what is going on today, what worries me, is that. these unspoken rules, what i would call following hegel, the ethical substance of our being. this, i claim, is slowly slowly, but... uhly but surely, if you want ich... disintegrating. today. something are some profound changes operating at that level. what do you mean by this? let me take a book which i as an atheist should like, but i not. i think it's a horrible book. it was a big new york times bestseller around a year ago, sam harris, the end of belief. it tells all the title. the thesis of the book is our, and he means specifically our religions of the book, jewish, christian, muslim and so on, beliefs are ridiculously out of date. they belong to a totally different. ep, today they only cause ethnic slaughter and so on. so we have to outgrow them and all he allows is some kind of a vague buddhist. whatever oriental meditation with no epistemological commitment. but i think there is something significant here, that precisely the guy who claims this, the end of belief, is also the guy who supports, advocates the use of torture. in this book. and it's interesting too. look. to take a look at... how does he justify? torture. it's uh... because, you know, the point is to find exactly what is wrong in his reasoning. his reasoning is very simple, basically. he starts with this problem why is it that most of us find it more problematic much more problematic to. torture somebody in front of us, then to push a button which will kill hundreds of thousands people out there out of our sight. he calls this the moon illusion. in parallel with this old perceptual illusion, if you don't know how it is, you think the moon is just a small object out there in the sky. but he says in the same way that we note now rationally that moon is a quite large object, that we should do the same restructuring of our ethical experience. so for him, it's a pretty horrifying conclusion, the fact that we cannot torture, most of us at least, somebody face to face is simply, i quote him, the reason for this inability to torture another person is every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion. so simply, let's grow up. let's learn to put things in proper proportion and. following a ruthless utilitarian calculation, let's. become aware that it's even your duty, as he puts it, to torture somebody in front of you if in this way you can prevent larger, much larger suffering. now, harris concedes that nonetheless, we cannot simply outgrow our deeply ingrained habits, so he proposed something which i think is even more tasteless, a kind of a truth pill. here is how he says, a drug that would deliver both the instrument of torture and the instrument of its utter concealment. the action of the pill, okay. i will cut it short. the idea is a pill which causes undesescribable suffering, but not visible from the outside. you have a terrorist. instead instead of torturing him there, which would make you feel bad, you give him the pill and the terrorist, expected terrorist, just seems to take a half an hour nap, but then he awakens and i confess everything you want, the first thing that bothers me here is that how this fits perfectly our postmodern logic of, which i developed in many of the books of decaf coffee. we like today's projects, sorry,. products without paying the price for them. coffee but decaf coffee. beer but beer without alcohol. a cake but fat-free cake. and don't you think that this is only for products? i claim it's exactly the same in our intersubjective relations. colin powell's theory of war was precisely decaffeinated war, but no victims on our side. and to be a little bit more nasty, i would say that at least the way it is in its predominant form, multiculturalist tolerance is the tolerance of to be nasty the decaffeinated other. the other is abstracted. for example, i think this is the filthiest form of racism to celebrate. native americans, if you call them that, i find this disgusting, even more racist than indians. because i spoke with one of them and he told me, native americans, what is this? are we part of nature? what are you? cultural americans? and he said, to be called an indian, at least then my name is a monument to white men's stupidity. no, like they thought... better they start there in india no but did you notice how these politically correct guys, if you hear them talk about native americans, it's, you know, people who live in a holistic way, harmony with nature, have their dances spiritually connected to earth, nothing about torture, family rapes, whatever. and i don't say this in, i think, so what i want to say is that this is for me, this cleansing of the other is the most racist thing. so back to this, this is the first problem. have with sam harris. the second problem, but that's just a minor remark, is that fine, so we are following kgb, namely, i learned in a book about the misuses of psychiatry in soviet union that they already had it. the standard way to torture dissidents there was... under the mask of, because there in soviet union in the last decades, dissidents being critical of the system was defined as a special form of social schizophrenia or whatever, no megalomania that you can was they injected something here in the region of your heart. and it was a terrifying experience. it slowed down your heartbeat. you thought like, you know, you are slowly dying. so from the outside, you just took a nap. it's exactly what sam harris described. from the inside, it was a nightmare. but, but, now i come to the truly central point. nonetheless, you will say, but what's the point? what is fundamentally wrong with harris? here we come to the topic of what in judeo-christian tradition, and freud also refers to this tradition in his theory of how we relate to others, we call the neighbor. the neighbor is something very radical in judeo-christian tradition. the neighbor is not the other who is like us. the neighbor is some kind of a traumatic presence is the other person. if you want in the abyss of its infinity. and there is always something monstrous about it. but the name of that monstrosity is freedom. no you cannot ever be sure you promised me this, but how do i know? how do i know that i can trust you and so on, which is why we need promises with people which are not neighbors. if i were to know you totally in a kind of a cognitivist or brain scientist dream that i know the mechanisms how you decide, i wouldn't need promises. promises are here because precisely i don't know. what an abyss you are! and i think we should be very careful here not to h put it. not to idealize the notion of the neighbor. there is something irreducibly traumatic in the notion of the neighbor, which is why a little lesson in theology. if you look already at the old testament, i claim that the true function of the ten commandments. is not so much to enable you to love your neighbor, but also to keep a neighbor at a proper distance. it can be very unpleasant, intrusive, to come too close to it. why? let me give you a simple example. i hope you were but it's not es. loving as it may appear you were, some of you at least, i hope most of you all, in a situation where somebody declared intense love to you. somebody approaches you and you see that it's sincere, it's not a joke. you are the center of my life. i totally love you. admit it, if you are honest, that. maybe you enjoyed it, but for a split of a second at least, you were horrified. i mean, it's something horrifying to be in such an intense way the focus of all desires of another person, which is why, do you know that william butler yeats' famous poem like you walk be careful how you walk because you are walking in my dreams. it's horrible to be somebody who as a real person. walk in dreams of another person. it's a very claustrophobic experience. so again, this topic of neighbor is crucial abyssal topic. i even claim that we are basically... our basic fear is fear of the neighbor and all racisms play upon this, this abyss of the other. and that's incidentally one of the sad things, for me at least, going on today, namely the fact of how... did you notice how in the last two, three decades, our politics is defined by two, three features? one is debt. uh uh the only way to mobilize people, not just to do this technocratic administration, but to mobilize people passionately, is to play on a fear. the only politics of passions today is a politics of fear. and unfortunately, not only for the right, also for the left. fear of immigrants, fear of, i don't know, fear of ecological catastrophe, fear of the state, high taxes, whatever you want, fear of sexual depravity and so on. i claim what is beneath this is effectively... is effectively fear of the neighbor. another thing. to be noted here is how sad thing about today is then how do we deal with the neighbor? you cannot simply swallow. him or her neighbor is out there in its abyss, which is why again i claim that this. notion of love thy neighbor. it's something very radical. it means love thy neighbor, love this radical otherness. not just love somebody who is like me. is dead. today, the way we deal with it is... tolance. and here, i'm sorry, i don't have time maybe tomorrow morning at the restraint seminar i want to go with it because i'm now in intense dialogue with that wonderful book, but i have my critical with wendy brown's book on regulating ad. she draws nonetheless, wonderful conclusions and asks the right questions. namely, the basic problem is the following one. why is the category of tolerance universalized to such an extent today. did you notice how problems which 20, 30, 40 years ago? were perceived not as problems of intolerance, but problems of injustice, inequality and so on are today rephrased as problems of tolerance. racism is today you don't tolerate my way of life, whatever, but make a stupid experiment, the moment of glory of united states, martin luther king, the fight for racial equality. i mean, i made a simple experiment. go to internet, put some of his speeches and put search tolerance, intolerance, practically absent. martin luther didn't fight for tolerance. he fought for end of exploitation, end of injustice, inequality. that was the problem for him. i mean, it would be even obscene and racist to say for him, oh, we blacks want whites to tolerate us. you know, it's the same ridicule as to say as if a feminist would have said, we want men to tolerate women. no. which is even a very obscene idea, like many of my male friends would have said, i can somehow grant equality to women, but tolerate them never so okay, well this this's another story. what's underlying this is something that should be called culturalization of politics in our postmodern era where economy is more and more reduced to something that experts do, just administration. the only conflicts that remain are perceived as conflicts of but but now really, sorry to conclude, this notion of neighbor is something terrifying. i claim in what sense in the sense that again neighbor is not. the wealth of another person, as we put it, his or her inner life, what i see in you. no, this level is usually a lie. there is a wonderful poetic, but i totally reject it. a multicultural phrase which says something like this. it's supposed to be a deep insight. i think it's precisely pseudo-depth. it's an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard. it sounds so noble, you know, like you are my enemy if i just objectivize you, you there. but oh if i take care or make the effort of understanding you from within, oh then i will see that you have your standpoint. okay. up to a certain level, this is undoubtedly true, but i claim only up to a certain level. and the limits are clear if i simply paraphrase this or apply to a very specific case. would you also be ready to say hitler was our enemy because we didn't hear his story? i did hear his story, i read mein kampf and so on. and what shocks me is how, no matter how horrible your politics is, you always can find a nice way, as we usually put it, to rationalize it, to tell yourself a story about it. so the radical conclusion here is that... and this is another deep deepest insight of judeo-christian tradition, it's that the ultimate truth the truth of you as an unique person, where you really stand, is not when you go deep into yourself and the deepest sincere self-identification or whatever. at that level, we usually lie. that's not the ultimate truth. which is why... if you want to get this point, i advise you to read two books. one is aldous huxley, the english guy. grey eminence. it's the story of father joseph, père joseph, the foreign minister of cardinal richelieu in the early 17th century, the 30 years war. what's so fascinating in this person? he was for that epoch, evil incarnated. the worst real politique. manipulator he concluded a pact between catholic france and protestant sweden against catholic austria. to prevent unification of germany. so we can even say he's guilty for hitler in a certain way because you know, it was because of his political plotting that german was not unified earlier as a nation state. we all know this is what caused first world war and so on. now what is the shock? the shock is that this same person ordering tortures, poisoning, blah, blah, was in the evening, after his work was done, was writing the most precious of incredible depth mystical meditations. absolutely, how should i put it in a vulgar way, top level, at the level of santa teresa, whoever you want. and this is what bothered huxley. i think his solution is wrong but this gap. the same, let's go to the east. a simple book by brian victoria, zen et war. the same problem. we have undoubtedly authentic zen buddhist monks. like the one who was very popular if some of you are old enough in the 60s era, hippish. theuki, but he was in the 30s, 40s, he was not only totally supporting japanese militarism, but even was writing like... justification of it, claiming that. for the majority of people this... unconditional obedience of military discipline you don't think there is order you do it it's the only way to satti, to enlightenment, to overcoming of your. so the same paradox. and i think the lesson of it is very clear. that when we who stand in a christian tradition, when we speak about redemption, blah blah, all this, it's something totally different than this gnostic or pagan perspective of going deep into yourself, finding this inner truth about yourself and so on and so on. precisely this level of inner truth. ich! a light. is the point of lying. so now, believe me or not, but i will really conclude now very short. so just two concluding points from all this. now you will tell me, okay, but this all my relativism and so on, we don't believe, you don't know where you believe, blah, blah, but there are people, so-called fundamentalists who really immediately believe. i don't give time. it will take another hour. two. develop the whole line of thought, my conclusion is they don't believe. not that they are not sincere, that they cheat. they know. that is to say, to be very precise. i claim that. believe what bothers me in at least some type of fundamentalist is precisely you, for example, what's for me problematic in creationism as opposed to evolutionism, it's not that it's wrong, blah, blah. i don't care. it is that the presupposition is that. you obliterate. the gap between. religious faith and scientific propositions and new treat. religious propositions at the same level like jesus has arise from the dead becomes statement a statement like this is the dna structure of that animal or whatsoever. which is why i think it's deeply significant that fundamentalists usually don't have any problem dealing with science. they love science. they all the time try to prove that there is no gap there. you have them in christianity, creationist. you have them in islam. you have them among the jews. for example, i learned theish... a group in israel which takes literally the prophecy that. messiah will come when a calf will be born with totally red hair. so they say, let's fasten the process and they are making these biogenetic experiments to make it happen. you know what's for me belief? belief is something different. belief is for me a kind of, there is always an element of a belief which is absurd. belief is not, you don't believe in fact. to say it's to say. i believe in christ, but fuck it, i prefer to sin or i don't take it. no, you cannot. it's a belief which is by definition and existentially. engaged belief. it's, for example, to give a pathetic example, it's ridiculous, but it's true. anna frank, if you read her memoirs, this is belief when she writes. in spite of all the horrors that germans are doing to us, the jews, i believe that there is a divine spark in every human being. this total counterfactual, crazy gesture. it's the same with human rights. believing in human rights doesn't mean i look around, scientifically, analyze people, i see at certain level they all have rights, then i say, oh, okay, i believe. no, it's... a leap of faith. it's kind of a crazy axiom. you can be white, black, yellow, high, low, stupid i! posit it as a practical axiom. that in this... this engagement is... crucial. so... the first paradoxical conclusion from this, i claim, is that the true danger of this kind of fundamentalism is not that it's a danger to secular knowledge, or if they take over no science. that doesn't bother me. they are the true end of belief. belief at its most authentic is endangered. so what is belief today? let me go briefly, now really three minutes. you are my supererego here briefly back to. holocaust to i claim that what the ultimate lesson of when i spoke you know about how we shouldn't play this game. gott is, the good father up there who somehow manipulates things and you can trust on him, everything will turn out well and so on. i think that with things like holocaust it's obscene to expect oh we don't know how, but... mysterious are the way of the lord it must have some deep meanings that it somehow justified i claim here i follow hegel's reading of christianity. i claim that it is what really dies on the cross. it not precisely this got. as hegel would have put it, god as substance. god as this secret mind which benevolently controls everything. god as whatever we here do in a kind of higher unity, everything has a secret meaning and so on and so on. because i mean, here we should be, if you want to be christian, be really a christian, that is to say it's not that we are here. god is there and then god from time to time, why not, he sends a messenger, okay, things turn back, come back next time and so on. the ultimate lesson of christianity, of embodiment, incarnation, for me is death. god is engaged in our history. what happens here on earth, it's not something that god observes from above. the way i read it is that the death of christ on the cross, which means it's not just the death of a representative of god. and i think even we should forget all that legalistic topic. god paid the price for our redemption. oh my god. paid to whom? to devil, to what it. that the death on the cross is precisely the death of death. christ of god as an absolute master which controls everything in a kind of teleological unity so that all our stains are somehow redeemed as contributing to some higher harmony even if it's unknown to us. gott! christ coming here, suffering with us, means precisely our suffering is for the real. you cannot redeem it in this stupid way. show uh... what i claim is that something absolutely unheard of happens with christianity, which is the death of christ. minch! something very radical it means in all other religions we. trust god. we believe in god. the death of christ means god trusted us. it means like i give you your freedom. it's up to you. holy ghost for me is literal. i take it literally when it says in the bible, whenever the two of you are there, i will be there. i am there. it means the gift of freedom. it means god doesn't want to play that up there a guarantee. it means god entrusts the faith of creation, his own faith, into us. it means what happens here? ich. part, as it were, of the history of god. and although i don't agree with amalo and levinas, he made nicely this point, here i agree with him, apropos iconoclasm. don't misread it. the prohibition to make image of god. in judaism does not mean in this gnostic way oh it's too mysterious we cannot paint it it means exact opposite it means god is alive not in your stupid deep meditations of up there but how you act react with others that's why you shouldn't make images because it's not an image to be made up there and i think if anything even more this this holds for christianity that's for me what holy ghost is god is no longer the substantial master up there, gott is. to put it in this way, the spirit of our community it's the gift of freedom. i claim if you don't. draw this crazy conclusion, then whatever you claim to be, you repaganize christianity. you fall back at that level of god is up there sending messengers or whatever. sorry, but to inform you, although you know this, but christ is not a messenger of god. christ is god. i'm just trying to draw conclusions from what this means. i'm sorry if i was too long. on the other hand, i'm not sorry. you had to suffer it. that's life. thanks very much. thank. hope we can do some 20 minutes, we'll see but maybe we should be a little bit liberal and... ghosts want to leave let the mouth. um... we have some time for questions.
yeah. thank you very much. i'm really glad to be here. thank you very much for this nice, maybe too nice introduction. what i mean is the following. when i hear such gentle and nice words, i always start to look behind my back, like, who is that real me you were addressing? it's too much for me to recognize myself in it. and now comes the evil point that the name of this gap. between what i experience as my immediate self-identity and the symbolic identity. de. constitutes my public image. that you were describing. the name of this gap in psychoanalytic theory is symbolic castration. so thanks very much for. castrating experience, good beginning okay but let's go on in a little bit more serious way. i hope you will not be bored. the beginning is a little bit more difficult than maybe things happen. okay, i would like to begin with something probably known to most of you, maybe all of you, two hollywood productions released to mark the5th anniversary of the september 11th. paul greengr's united 93 and oliver stone's world trade center. the first thing that strikes the eye is that both films try to be as anti-hollywood as possible. they both focus on the courage of ordinary people with no glamorous stars, no special effects, no grandiloquent heroic gestures. just a terse realistic depiction of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. it is however this very touch of authenticity which raises, i think, some disturbing questions. the first thing one cannot but note is how both films tell the story of an exception. united 93 is about the only one of the four kidnapped planes in which the terrorists failed, which did not hit its destination. world trade center tells the story of the two of those 20 or so policemen, firemen who were saved from the rabble from the ruins of world center. the disaster is thus turned into a kind of triumph, most notably in united 93. hereier a comparisonaison with spielberg's schindlers list is instructive. although. i think schindler's list is... a failure the idea to choose schindler as a hero was a correct one. it is precisely by focusing on a german who did something to help the jews the demonstrates how it was possible to do something and thus to condemn those who did nothing, claiming that the regime was so totalitarian it was not possible to do anything and so on. in united 93, on the contrary, the focus on the rebellion serves the purpose of preventing us to ask the truly pertinent questions. that is to say, let us indulge in a simple mental experiment. let us imagine both films. united 93 world trade center with the same change. let us say that instead of united 93, we would get a film called american 11, you know, the name of another flight which did hit its target. or let us imagine world trade center remade as the story of two of the firefighters or policemen who did die in the r of the twin towers after postponed prolonged suffering. without in any way justifying. the terrible crime or showing an understanding for it. such a version would confront us with the true horror of the situation. it would thus compel us to think, to start asking serious questions about how such a thing could have happened and what does it mean. the second feature. both films restrain not only from taking political stance about the events but even from depicting their larger political context. that is to say, neither the passengers on united 93 flight nor the policemen in world trade center have a grasp on the full picture. all of a sudden, they find themselves thrown into a terrifying situation and they have to make the best out of it. this lack of what frederick json would have called cognitive mapping is crucial. both films depict ordinary people affected by the sudden, brutal intrusion of history with a capital h. the invisible real that curse. all we see are the disastrous effects. so that in the case of world trade center, one can easily imagine exactly the same feeling. in which the twin towers would have collapsed not because of the terrorist attack, but due, let us say, to a strong earthquake. or even more problematically. we can imagine the same film. the same narrative at least taking place, for example, to be really evil, in a big german city in the winter of 1944 after a devastating allied bombing. or... even more evil. surmise, what about the same film taking place in a bombed high-rise building in southern beirut during the last lebanon-israel conflict? and that's the point. it cannot take place there. such a film taking place in southern beirut would have been immediately dismissed as a subtle pro-hezbollah terrorist propaganda or something similar. what this means is that the two films message! ideological political message resides in their very abstention from delivering a message. this abstention is sustained by an implicit trust into one's government. when the enemy attacks, one just don't think, do your duty. this is what i call britney spears. theory of... because because effectively, i remember two years ago seeing a britney spears interview on mtv, she was asked what does she think about iraq and so on and she said, i don't quite understand it. all i know is that at a certain point we ordinary people should simply trust our president. this brings us back to our starting point, to the concrete character of the two films, depicting ordinary people in a terse realistic mode. nope. we philosophers know hegel's counterintuitive use of the opposition of abstract and concrete, as you all know in our ordinary language, abstract are general notions, as opposed to concrete, really existing singular objects and events. talking does not exist. i, maybe, i'm not so sure, exist here now talking to you. for hegel, on the contrary, it is such immediate reality which is abstract, and to render it concrete means to deploy the complex universal context that gives meaning to it. let me give you an example which is fictional because i don't smoke. if i were to smoke here, for hegel, the abstract, the most abstract approach would have been simply to present me here as this really existing individual smoking. a concrete approach would have been to render visible, to articulate the complex historical, social, economic, ideological context which has to be here so that i can smoke here. european colonization of latin america where, if i'm correctly informed. smoke, i mean smoking comes from then the development of industry, plantations, or in a more delicate way, why do we have to smoke, stress of work, relaxation and so on. all this this context has to be here so that this pseudoconcrete reality can happen in that wider context. this is what we call dialectical mediation. is. what for hegel is concrete. and back to the two films, here is the problem. both are abstract in the hegelian sense. the function of their down-to-earth depiction of concrete individuals struggling for life is not just to avoid cheap commercial spectacle, but to obliterate the historical context here then is where we are five years later still unable to locate. september eleventh into a large narrative to provide some kind of generally acceptable cognitive mapping. the third feature. in both films. there is a key moment which violates the terse realistic style. united 93 starts with kidnappers in a motel room, praying, getting ready. they look austere. like some kind of angels of death. and the first shot after the title credits confirms this impression. it is a panoramic shot from high above. manhattan in the night, camera moving above the streets, accompanied by the sound of the kidnappers' prayers, as if the kidnappers stroll above the city getting ready to descend on earth to rape their deadly harvest. similarly, there are no direct shots of the planes hitting the twin towers in world trade center. all that we see second. before the catastrophe. is when one of the policemen is on a busy street, an ominous shadow quickly passing over the crowd there. of course, we know retrospectively the shadow of the first plane, seconds before it will hit its target. these shots confer on both films a strange theological reverberation, as if the attacks were a kind of divine intervention. what do i mean by this? recall the first reaction of jerry folwell and pat robertson to the september 11th bombings. you remember the scandal caused because they perceived the bombings as a sign that god lifted up its protection of the united states because of the sinful way of life of contemporary americans. they put the blame on hedonist materialism, liberalism, rampant sexuality, basically claiming exactly the same thing as muslim fundamentalists, that america got what it deserved. now in a hidden way, i think, united 93 and world trade center tend to do the opposite, but within the same frame. to read the september 11th catastrophe as a blessing in disguise, as a divine intervention from above destined to awaken us from moral slumber and to bring out the best in us. world trade center ends with the off-screen words of an anonymous narrator which spells out this message. terrible events like the twin towers destruction bring out in people the worst and the best. people are shown to be able to do things they would never imagine of being able. so it is as if our societies need a major catastrophe. in order to resuscitate the spirit of communal solidarity. no. here. things get really interesting. they bring us to our topic. i don't think this is anything bad because i think that if you look much in a more refined, delicate way, these big science fiction catastrophe movies, i think that they are... one of the last places where we can still discern some kind of utopian socialist element in hollywood. i always think that this big catastrophe, spectacular destruction that we see is basically a lure. it's here to deceive us. what the truly fascinating thing is what happens as a byproduct, the sudden upsurge of solidarity, dedication, communal love and so on and so on. and the message is basically again a sad one. it is that the only way in our societies to imagine this kind of solidary activity is against the background of a catastrophe. but now let me move to what really disturbs me in these two films? implicitly, i claim. they. not justify but how to put it, contextualize or provide the interpretation of the events as part of some deeper. deeper. deeper meaning how put, in the sense of these events really happened in order to awaken us. a secret teleology built in them. like they are terrible but a blessing in disguise. hey. of course this brings us to certain teleological and theological reading of history which i think precisely if we want to remain faithful to. judeo-christian legacy we should unconditionally. reject. this i claim. falch. teleology of philology becht exemplified by that well-known metaphor. of a painting. you know, when something appears discordant, terrifying, horrible to us, it is as if we are looking at a painting, the painting being the universe, from we are too close to it and it appears as a stain. like if you look even at the most beautiful painting, whatever you want, rembrandt, da vinci, too close, you see a stain. you withdraw. it you see how what appeared as a stain contributes to global harmony. but i think that precisely with catastrophes, maybe even much larger, of course, than september 11th, like holocaust, the stalinist gulag, and why not, we live in the middle of such a catastrophe. it makes you think why we don't talk more about it. you remember this summer there was a cover story on the time magazine. so it's publicly known that in the last 10 years at least 4 million people died of unnatural causes in congo. okay, we ignore it. so, you know, this should at least make you suspicious of whenever a humanitarian crisis is discovered, the sad lesson is that there is always some political strategic calculation behind it. but what i want to say, when we witness such a tragedy, let's say auschwitz holocaust you can feel that it's in a way obscene to say, ah, auschwitz appears such a tragedy because we are too close to it, we see it as a stain. but from a proper distance available only to god, it would be clear how this contributes to global harmony of the universe or whatever. it's an obscenity. what does this mean? this means, for example, that we should finally take the lesson of what for me as an atheist is absolutely unsurpassable. ethical revolution, one of them, there may be two, three. path-breaking texts, entire human history, the book of job in the bible. remember what happens there. forget the very beginning. i think this is just probably taken over from some previous tradition, which is why enemies of judeo-christian tradition like to upon, you know that obscene conversation like, you know, god and devil sitting at the table, desserts, serves, drinks, and then they, oh, what about that guy, blah, blah. that's an obscenity. forget that. think about focus on what happens. job is hit by calamities. and... what does job do? it's incredible how spontaneously we try to falsify his image. once i asked my friends, atheists or religious, and most of them had this totally fake memory that job is a guy who, and thereim should recite the lesson of the story, who silently suffers. humbly submits to divine will not at all he is angry, he protests all the time but here also we should be very precise what happens there he doesn't protest in this vulgar economic sense i didn't deserve it blah blah. there are three bad guys, three theologists there, who are precisely providers of meaning. the point of daring, you know, three friends, four. i three. the point is not that they put the blame on job. that's secondary, like the first one who provides this simple pseudo-hermeneutics. god is just so if you suffer, even if you are not aware now of what, you must have done something. no, it's more precise. they just desperately try to provide a meaning there. underlying. hypothesis or axiom is it must have some meaning if we know it or not and the absolute greatness that's undesescribable ethical revolution i think of job is to reject this meaning i see in this the sense of his like bitter insistence not i'm good i'm extra good i served god but this i didn't deserve it again not in the sense i was good but in the sense of no there is no deeper meaning here. and remember what happens then when got finally intervenes. he gives full right to job. he says to the three, quick ideology, quickly to the three like maybe the name of one of them was, i don't know, one was pat, the other was gary, who knows who was the third one no and he says no, they against that. so i think again that today this pressure of meaning is strong and now my god, i will speak like a kind of a biblical preacher but i mean it seriously now in the sense of beware of succumbing to this pressure. i mean it seriously. this is where the devil waits upon you. this is... paganism. pagan universe is all intelligent. not only protestants, but catholic also, like chesterton pointed out. you know, this universal hermeneutic attitude, this metaphoric reading of the universe, this rose, that rose, cat is not a cat, it's devil, the dog is, you know, like this fullness of meaning, no, this is not. judeo-christian legacy. judeo-christian legacy is much more bitter. you accept. the meaninglessness of the universe. and today again. it's a danger to succumb to this pseudo-hermeneutics. when we witness things like aids, the prospect of ideological catastrophe and so on, it's so simple to succumb to this temptation. aids, oh, it must have some meaning, punishment for this ecology, yes, because we disturbed the balance of yin yang and so on or whatever. and no, you start with a little bit of hermeneutic of ecology. i warn you, you end up in the vinci code, and then you end up with jesus christ copulating. small step from one to the other, no? so again, one has to resist this temptation, which is a terrible temptation. let me give you a brutal extreme example which i... not like, but it's at least convincing. when i was in israel, i was told that there is a minor sect, but nonetheless, not negligible. quite strong. sect of people, and there is a rabbi who leads them, who believe that, among other things, that holocaust was justified, that the jewish people, european jews did something very sinful, okay, he tries to specify it as integrating themselves too much into european societies and that this was divine punishment. it's terrible, but i understand it in the sense that, you know, even if the message is a bad one. we deserved it. often, it's better. eh. bad message than no message. because even if the message is bad, what you nonetheless gain is a dialogue with the meaningful universe. it still means things have a global meaning and so on and so on. so that's my first theoretical point. let's go now on. undoubtedly, at least some of you. what if you. where if we were to be immediately in a dialogue, would have reacted to what i've said, saying, but this is not what i directly or how i directly experienced the film. it's not open. yes, and now i come to my second crucial point. the level at which this logic operates this obscene, i claim. beliefs, it must have had a meaning, is not the level of our explicit beliefs. it's the level of what? i will describe this level now. briefly referring to what i developed in some of my books, namely, i would like, in kind case of professional solidarity, referring to a theosopher who three days ago lost his job referred to a well-known contemporary american philosopher who elaborated the relationship between what we know and what we don't know. you got the point. sorry, old joke. donald ramsfeld. no, i'm referring to, you remember in march 2003, donald ramsfeld gave the famous interview where he developed his thoughts on the relationship between known and unknown. here it is, the quote. there are known knowns. there are things we know that we know. that's clear. like, i don't know. i'm here. calvin college and i no. that i'm here. i know that i know that. then he goes on. there are known unknowns. that is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. this is also clear. like i know there are some cars outside this building, but i don't know how many cars are parked there. and i know that i don't know this. that is to say, this is something that i don't know, but it's still, how should they put it, with regard to the horizon of understanding or of meaning it's still within the field of my knowledge. i clearly don't know that i know that. then ramsfeld goes on, this was of course destined at that point to warn us of unpredictable horrors hidden in iraq, but there are also unknown unknowns. there are things we don't know that we don't know. it's also clear, let us say if saddam were to have some ultra-secret weapon or whatever, not the ordinary weapons of mass destruction that we suspected that he had, this would be unknown unknown. it's not simply that we didn't know. we even wouldn't have known that we don't know no because it's totally outside our horizon. but here unfortunately the. dialectical strength of rumsfeld thinking finds its limit. because did you notice that the fourth term is missing? we have known knowns. we have known unknowns, we know that we don't know, and we have unknown unknowns. it's so much outside our horizon that we don't know that we don't know. what about the fourth term, which i claim is the most interesting one? not the known unknowns, but the unknown knowns, things we know, but we don't even know that we know them. that is to say, this is ideology. ideology is not so much our explicit today today, of course, we live, as everybody says in hedonist cynical era, nobody is ready to fight for big causes. what i claim is that nonetheless there are more than ever maybe beliefs here, beliefs which although we would never publicly admit that they are our beliefs. we, as it were, practice these beliefs. they are embodied in our knowledge, in the materials we use, and so on and so on. to end up, to just make the last mention of poor ramsfeld, i think that that's why he lost his job. because he didn't know what he knows. okay, to put it in a more consistent way, knowing quite serious, why did things in iraq go wrong? precisely because american politics was not aware of its unknown norms, of the implicit ideological prejudices, presuppositions which they were simply here, not even you are aware of them, but they regulate your activity, you know, like presuppositions about how everybody in the world likes american type of democracy, presuppositions about how the people will react in iraq and so on, and so on and so on. so this level is, i think, crucial for the functioning of ideology. all these things that and this is the crucial problem of belief, i claim. all these things that we in a way believe without believing. in my book, the parallax view, i developed more in detail, i will just mention it here, the wonderful example which i found in a biography of niels bohr, you know, of copenhagen quantum physics. niels bohr incidentally, was also the guy who, i think, provided a wonderful right answer to einstein. you know that einstein's well-known phrase which reflects his distrust in quantum physics, god doesn't play dice. everybody knows this. but you know what was niels bohr's answer? don't tell god what to do. i i mean, it's the correct. okay. this is even a more beautiful story. a friend visited nils bhr in a countryside house. and notice above the entrance door a horseshoe. in europe, i don't know how it is here, a horseshoe is a kind of a... superstitious item. if you put it above the entrance, it is supposed to keep out the evil spirits and so on keep the house safe, whatever. now the friend was shocked and addressed nis bhr, my god, i thought you were a scientist. do you believe in this kind of superstitious crap? niels bhr answered, no, of course not. i'm not crazy. then the other guy says, but why is it there then? ah here, nils borg gave the correct answer. not the usual boring, fake, multiculturalist, tolerant one that we like today. it's just our way of life. it is out of respect for and so on. i know this story. all my jewish friends, they don't believe in kosher food, but they don't eat pork out of respect for and so on. and you get here wonderful paradoxes. i mean, i'm not focusing on jews, but arabs. it's the same with as. christians i'm saying because i know the situation there. now like a typical jew of course doesn't believe in god but nonetheless he believes that god gave them the land of israel that they can have it. that's another story but what i want to say is so what is then the answer? not this politically correct of nils br why do you have it? it's a wonderful one. he answered, 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 democracy. you practice it. like and your beliefs are out there in practice. let me give you, let's go to the end here. it will be, as it's usual with me, i'm sorry if i offend some of you, an absolutely scatological, obscene end endpoint, but i cannot resist repeating an old story. that i often use if you had the fortune or misfortune to travel around europe. maybe you noticed how in what different way, now comes the dangerous point, toilets are structured in europe. you have the french toilets where the hole where excrement disappears is in the back. so the idea is it drops. falls directly into it, it goes away as soon as possible. then you have english or yours anglo-saxon where it floats in water. then you have the german one, which is the most obscene, of course, which is that the hole is in front and you have just a little bit of water in the hole so that most of the bowl is a kind of a plateau. the idea is your excrement falls there to enable, it's an old disgusting german tradition that every morning you should inspect your bowl, sniff it and so on to see, look for any traces of illness if you don't believe me, go and look. it's quite a cultural shock. now i ask myself, why this? what's the point? i asked, i read books, there are two books on the market if you so you can check it on architects, very obscene books. you have scientific studies in what angle sheet falls down. and they don't give an account of this. they simply every book that i know or text plays this simple utilitarian card. oh, how is that the other guys don't see that ours is the most utilitarian, the most practical. but then it strike me. of course, things are more... complex in reality but basically i claim this is the only account that i can imagine. do you know that? if you know a little bit of the history of european thought around the time of hegel. it was. popular to claim that. to assert the notion of so-called european trinity, the idea being that. europe as a spiritual entity is structured around three poles each of them stands for a certain nation for a certain political attitude. and or attitude towards life. life and for. a certain level of social life. germans are politically conservative. the level of life is poetry, thinking, contemplation. french. politics, level of life, domain of life. politically leftist revolutionary, english, economy as a sphere of life and moderate liberalism as then it did strike me, but that's it. the french approach is radical politics. it falls in liquidated, disappear. it's like guillotine, like it should disappear. anglo-saxon. pragmatic. let it flow there. we will solve the problem. germans, of course, poetry and contemplation. you contemplate, you look at it. now, crazy, this may sound, but believe me or not, in a way it is true. that i say, that's my point, serious point that i want to make. are you er how? it's easy to say, oh, no ideology and so on. my god, you go to the toilet and you shit on ideology, how should i put it? that is to say, even such as the lowest of the lowest vulgar everyday object cannot be accounted for in direct. utilitarian terms, it is structured like this because it's the most appropriate, but embodies certain very fundamental attitudes towards what is one of the big problems of life. what to do with this embarrassing excrement that comes out of our body. and this is not a secondary point. every good anthropologist will tell you that one of the signs that you are dealing with humans, no longer with apes or animals is that you have this embarrassment what to do with shit basically how to it must disappear. uh. it's it's... the whole problem of i mean, we are immediately in the deepest metaphysics. i'm quite serious, which is... uh what we as humans i claim that disgust is the deeply human. emotion and what is disgust disgust is not necessarily, immediately. characterized by its object. it has to do something with the disturbed frontier between inside and outside. disgust is with something inside from your inside you confront it from the outside. okay, now you can tell me that shit is disgusting. no but let's take a more neutral example which i hope will convince you. you have saliva all the time in your mouth. you swallow it now all the time. no problem, nothing disgusting. do or rather don't do it. i can't do it, but try to do a certain extremely elementary example. take a glass. spit in it, kind of a certain strata, half an inch of your saliva, look and then try to drink it. you cannot. because it's outside. it's disgusting. it's disgusting. so what i want to say is that you cannot imagine how much this tells us about human identity. the point being that at a certain level, precisely at the level of ramsfeldian unknown knowns, we do not perceive ourselves. in this most elementary phenomenological self-experience, we do not perceive ourselves as beings with depth. the depth is spiritual, not bodily. i claim that when i look at you, i somehow abstract. the fact that beneath your skin there are pretty horrible things, all the blood, bones, whatever. when i look you into your eyes, head, i behave as if... there is some kind of a soul spiritual presence inside, not the stupidity of biological machine or whatever. so this tells us a lot about this most immediate phenomenology of our experience. again, the way it is embodied in this unknown unknown. gnes. now let me... make a step. fder. uh. the central mystery here. it's dead. dich belie ich. even if we are aware of them, another way that we deal with them is that we transpose them onto others there is nothing. hypocritical in it or rather it's a kind of a sincere hypocrisy. what do you mean by this? uh. my favorite example here is another one which i repeatedly use in my books. do you know the tibetan praying mills? like you write a prayer, you put it into a mill, you turn it around, or even better, you put it on a windmill and it turns around itself. and to put it in a slightly cynical way, it's wonderful. like you can think about sex, whatever you want, but objectively you pray. it prays for you. now you will say, haha, this goes for primitive cultures. no, we have exactly the same phenomena all around. think about what, if you ask me, is one of the great contributions of american civilization to world culture, can laughter on tv. you know, laughter being part of the soundtrack. it's a very mysterious phenomenon. why does it work? namely, how does it work? it's not as many people think. that it's a kind of a pavlovian reflex machine to signal you when to laugh. no, as a rule, you don't laugh. you return home in the evening tired as a dog, you put it on, cheers, friends, whatever. you hear the laughter and you just look at it and... as an idiot and when it ends, you feel relieved. it is as if you have laughed. i mean, it's a paradox, how, how to put it, even. the most intimate. spontaneous. expression of yourself, like laughter, can be transposed onto others. the same ghost. also especially i claim for example for. belie. what do i mean by this? did you notice how often in families where parents have belief or stop believing. what happens is that date desperately cling to. another one, it can be their parents, old mother. children who should believe. what really breaks them down is that much more than their disbelief is to discover that this other whose innocence should be protected. doesn't believe even for many, i'm sorry. for many people who participate in sexual orgies and so on. i spoke recently with the sociologist who investigated this and told me how, as a rule, they can be ruthless group orgies, whatever you want, but they always have somebody who should remain innocent who shouldn't know about it the moment that happens. der life. literally, force. false. literally falls apart. this structure, i think, is extremely interesting. let me give you another example from literature. okay, literature, i only saw the film. edith wharton's age of innocence. this is the beauty of the story that you remember the affair between newland and that count olenska or who? no? but the wife, to put it in human terms, vinona, right don't know. the young wife is supposed to be naive. not to know. and then you know what happens at the end. the wife, young wife of the hero d, he thinks he is free now legally to rejoin his long. love of long years mistress, okay, michelle pfeiffer in the film, then at this very point his son tells him that the wife knew it all the time. just pretended not to know and it's ruined. he cannot do it. you see, he was engaged in this transgressive behavior, whatever, but on condition that another one. of this innocence of another one. so this is. the great mystery of how even if we don't believe we claim to be cynical and so on we have this need for another one to remain pure, to believe. i know now enough of jokes. i know a much more serious and tragic version of this. agnes heller, probably unknown to almost all of you, is a hungarian philosopher. who was during, now she's a very old lady, during world war ii in, i think it was even auschwitz. i mean, she has all these numbers, the real one, how should i put it. and she told me a very interesting story, how in every... barrack in the camp. there were two types of people, basically. there were survivalists, those who were totally bitter but still struggled for survival. and this was some kind of a codified egotism. you were allowed, if the other guy was stupid and left some food there and walked away, you were allowed to steal it. there were some minimal rules, but very hard rules. then there were so-called muslims, muslimmen, the living dead. the ones who simply no longer cared, just as living dead walked around. and then, now comes the tragic point. story she told me. then there was in every barack a myth that somewhere out there usually in a next barrack next, there is somebody who is still fully human. that is to say somebody who didn't regress to this level of survivalism still you do that, you just cruelly try to survive but who behaves even in those terrifying circumstances as if are in normal life, he helped others, shared food and so on. and she told me something very interesting that the most dangerous moment for your psychic integrity was when, as unfortunately it was the case, you sooner or later discovered that this is a myth. that this other is like most of us at that point usually people lose even the will. to survive even this will to struggle and regressed to what was called muslim musulmanen that is to say. turned into living dead. so you see the nicety here even to put it in more almost theological terms, even to be consistently evil, you need a presupposed goodness. somewhere up there and i claim. now we shouldn't underestimate this. now don't go into this orgy o divine spark, we are all deeply good. no, the problem is that the same holds for hitler, for stalin, for from whoever you want. i have no doubt that they were doing with this innocence in view. that is to say, you can also give to this a very nasty term, unethical term. you have, for example, with stalinist communists, even more in this case with nazis, this especially perverse logic, which is that the great theism when tough things have to be done, you kill, you torture and so on, that the true every idiot can be good. the greatest heroism is to do the necessary. tough cruel thing to protect the innocence of the others if you look. at one of the most disgusting ethical documents, but it's still an ethical document in the sense that crazy as it sounds, it tries to articulate the ethics of 20th century, the famous speech in 33 october 43 i think, of heinrich himmler ss. head to officers for the preparation of holocaust in posen uh. polish city. he there uttered these famous phrases. claiming that holocaust will be the most glorious chapter of german history but the chapter which unfortunately will never be written that is to say the message is we are the true heroes it's a terrible message. the message is you are in front of i mean, in a way, himmler, that's the horror of it, was bothered by a true ethical problem, which is, how could ss officers and soldiers do their dirty job? slaughtering killing children women without becoming beasts themselves his solution was this kind of a heroism that you. perceive your very evil acts as the supreme act of heroism, ready to descend into this hell for the good of the people. it's a terrifying logic. so... since unfortunately time is running. let me go on. uh. d eh this delicate relationship between what we believe and what we know. or rather what we explicitly know and these disavowed beliefs, they are at work in a very refined way in our daily experience often you believe in something, you can even believe sincerely. but nonetheless it's a great shock and surprise if you see your belief confirmed directly in a too brutal way. did you see the film? isn't there? i was told that tomorrow there will be here a play by steve martin. somewhere. okay, doesn't matter. perform. the point is that he acts in a film, leap of faith from 92, maybe you saw it. which is one film about a con artist, this preacher who treats he heals cripples, but it's all a stage. then once but he does something which he thinks is treating, but it's a true miracle. he totally breaks down. it's a shock. so things are here much more refined in the sense that... what does it mean to believe? often people who believe, believe with a distance. i often notice how religious people often pray and obey the ritual. not as pascal thought in order to really believe. you know that. advice of blaise pascal to unbelievers who want to believe. you don't believe? here it is what you should do. act simply, act as if you believe. obey the ritual, kneel down, pray, do good work and belief will come by itself. i claim unfortunately that often it's the exact opposite. it's that. what if you really believe, but in a too intense way, it's horrible directly to believe. then maybe the solution is... do as if you believe and your belief will be externalized in the ritual out there. you no longer will directly have to believe. now let's move to more. problematic topic. this gap between what we rationally know and what we unconsciously believe. tells us i claim a lot about our... predicament. namely how we relate usually to the prospect of ecological catastrophe. ich this is a paradox, basically we know. catastrophe is coming, there will be global warming, whatever, but why don't we act? why don't we do something? i don't think it's enough, this simple leftist explanation, yes, big companies, manipulation, whatever. i claim we know, but we don't believe. that is to say... imagine yourself reading a report on global warming, horrible this that. but then you go out, you see sun, trees, grass, my god, you say, but this cannot really disappear. that's the tragedy that what prevents us from taking seriously the prospect of ecological catastrophe. it's precisely this our direct immersion into our life world. these are beliefs which are part of the way we act in reality and it's extremely difficult to renounce them. there is a very important theoretical consequence to be drawn from this paradoxical one. you know the usual criticism of ecological i mean of why we are in ecological deadlock. the idea is the following one. we trust too much science, abstract scientific reasoning. we should not forget that science is secondary. it's alienated secondary product of our primordial attitude which is our being embedded in a concrete life world. you see, you feel, you sense with the earth where you live and so on. i claim that that's not enough. we cannot return to this immediate life-world experience because this exactly is the problem. if we are to confront properly i claim ecological catastrophe we have to confront we have to outgrow precisely this direct embeddedness. now, let's go on. i hope it will be a little bit more amusing what i say now. namely, how then do we relate towards this? uh how where do we detect this? gap in our beliefs or knowledge, this inconsistency. i know it's true, but nonetheless i don't believe it. let me make a simple observation. did you notice how every normative order, in the sense of rules that we obey, to be in order to be members of certain collective, from family to whenever you want, it's never a simple set of rules then you learn them, you are in. what's so interesting is that there are never simply only rules. there are always rules and then metaules. that is to say, rules which tell you how to relate to these rules, to take them seriously or not, how seriously. for example. it's often that there is a prohibition. you shouldn't do it. but we all know that. it means usually means in many cases, do it discreetly or sometimes it's even, especially with some kind of sexual prohibitions, it's even a direct solicitation, do it or whatever. so then can be prohibitions which are not meant to be taken seriously. if you take them seriously, you appear an idiot, how shouldda put it. like you are here a little bit different, you take your state seriously. for example, this is my legacy from the socialist regime in my country. like if i... try not to pay taxes to find a loophole. and if somebody tells me, how can you? we have to pay taxes all, i mean, the guy is an idiot you know what i mean?'s okay. but there is something much more interesting here, the opposite paradox. the paradox of not of prohibition which between the lines tells you, do it, do it discreetly, whatever, but do it. but an offer of freedom. you are. permitted something. but on condition that you don't. use this option. as, you can do it. you are given the freedom to do it on condition that you will not do it. i mean, again, there are especially, for example, in different political regimes, you have freedom to choose on condition that you make the right choice. or even in our daily lives. for example, recently a friend from japan told me, do you know that in japan, workers have the right to 40 days holiday every year. but you are expected not to. use this right in its full extent. the implicit rule is not more than 20 days. then i asked them, okay, but then don't you simply write 20 days? he told me, you're an idiot, you don't get it. and he was right. i didn't get it. why not? it's the same as. do you know, this is always what fascinated me because i think this is communication between people at its most mysterious. and elementary these empty gestures you are offered something but you shouldn't. use it. for example, all of you probably were already in this situation. you were invited by somebody older, richer to dinner. now, you knew it was absolutely clear in advance that he will pay. but isn't it kind of a ritual of politeness that you have to insist for some time, no, no, let me pay. just don't do, by the way, what i did. once i insisted too long and then... the guy said, if you want, do it. then i have to stage all this comedy of, oh my god, i forgot my credit card or whatever. no. there are other beautiful examples. for example, she is my friend, although we fight all the time theoretically. personally, she is my friend. judith butler. recently i met her in switzerland and i was not too rude to her, but i used some degenerate creep, whatever. i mean, i'm horrible when i eat. so i saw that i did hurt her. so i felt bad. afterwards, i found her, i called her, i told sorry, blah, blah, and then she told me. thanks, i appreciate it. but really, i wasn't offended. i knew you didn't mean it. you owe me no apology. she was absolutely sincere and i was. really grateful. but you see the paradox is that. it was possible for her to say, you owe me no apology, only after i did apologize. and this is not hypocrisy. that's the mystery of communication. you do something, the result is nothing. you do something which is declared. superfluous. but... in order to be declared superfluous, you have to do it. this is how, now you will say, what's the profit? the profit is respect, friendship, love, communication,, true communication between us. i don't know. my favorite example even here is we have this ritual in my country. let us say that i and a friend of mine compete for the same job. let us say he wins, i lose. it's a ritual in my country that then the winner. should say to the loser, listen, i know that you deserved it more. why don't i step down and you will get the job. but of course, you have to say, no, no, no, you can have it. what's the profit? usually the friendship is saved in this way, frankly, not what i'm saying here is that the most delicate texture of our human relations. moves operates at this level at the level not of explicit rules but of this. between the lines rules, you know. like i give you an offer, but... these meta rules tell me it's an offer to be rejected or whatever. now i come to the concluding point, if you allow me a little bit of time just more. it is that. i claim that what is going on today, what worries me, is that. these unspoken rules, what i would call following hegel, the ethical substance of our being. this, i claim, is slowly slowly, but... uhly but surely, if you want ich... disintegrating. today. something are some profound changes operating at that level. what do you mean by this? let me take a book which i as an atheist should like, but i not. i think it's a horrible book. it was a big new york times bestseller around a year ago, sam harris, the end of belief. it tells all the title. the thesis of the book is our, and he means specifically our religions of the book, jewish, christian, muslim and so on, beliefs are ridiculously out of date. they belong to a totally different. ep, today they only cause ethnic slaughter and so on. so we have to outgrow them and all he allows is some kind of a vague buddhist. whatever oriental meditation with no epistemological commitment. but i think there is something significant here, that precisely the guy who claims this, the end of belief, is also the guy who supports, advocates the use of torture. in this book. and it's interesting too. look. to take a look at... how does he justify? torture. it's uh... because, you know, the point is to find exactly what is wrong in his reasoning. his reasoning is very simple, basically. he starts with this problem why is it that most of us find it more problematic much more problematic to. torture somebody in front of us, then to push a button which will kill hundreds of thousands people out there out of our sight. he calls this the moon illusion. in parallel with this old perceptual illusion, if you don't know how it is, you think the moon is just a small object out there in the sky. but he says in the same way that we note now rationally that moon is a quite large object, that we should do the same restructuring of our ethical experience. so for him, it's a pretty horrifying conclusion, the fact that we cannot torture, most of us at least, somebody face to face is simply, i quote him, the reason for this inability to torture another person is every bit as neurological as those that give rise to the moon illusion. so simply, let's grow up. let's learn to put things in proper proportion and. following a ruthless utilitarian calculation, let's. become aware that it's even your duty, as he puts it, to torture somebody in front of you if in this way you can prevent larger, much larger suffering. now, harris concedes that nonetheless, we cannot simply outgrow our deeply ingrained habits, so he proposed something which i think is even more tasteless, a kind of a truth pill. here is how he says, a drug that would deliver both the instrument of torture and the instrument of its utter concealment. the action of the pill, okay. i will cut it short. the idea is a pill which causes undesescribable suffering, but not visible from the outside. you have a terrorist. instead instead of torturing him there, which would make you feel bad, you give him the pill and the terrorist, expected terrorist, just seems to take a half an hour nap, but then he awakens and i confess everything you want, the first thing that bothers me here is that how this fits perfectly our postmodern logic of, which i developed in many of the books of decaf coffee. we like today's projects, sorry,. products without paying the price for them. coffee but decaf coffee. beer but beer without alcohol. a cake but fat-free cake. and don't you think that this is only for products? i claim it's exactly the same in our intersubjective relations. colin powell's theory of war was precisely decaffeinated war, but no victims on our side. and to be a little bit more nasty, i would say that at least the way it is in its predominant form, multiculturalist tolerance is the tolerance of to be nasty the decaffeinated other. the other is abstracted. for example, i think this is the filthiest form of racism to celebrate. native americans, if you call them that, i find this disgusting, even more racist than indians. because i spoke with one of them and he told me, native americans, what is this? are we part of nature? what are you? cultural americans? and he said, to be called an indian, at least then my name is a monument to white men's stupidity. no, like they thought... better they start there in india no but did you notice how these politically correct guys, if you hear them talk about native americans, it's, you know, people who live in a holistic way, harmony with nature, have their dances spiritually connected to earth, nothing about torture, family rapes, whatever. and i don't say this in, i think, so what i want to say is that this is for me, this cleansing of the other is the most racist thing. so back to this, this is the first problem. have with sam harris. the second problem, but that's just a minor remark, is that fine, so we are following kgb, namely, i learned in a book about the misuses of psychiatry in soviet union that they already had it. the standard way to torture dissidents there was... under the mask of, because there in soviet union in the last decades, dissidents being critical of the system was defined as a special form of social schizophrenia or whatever, no megalomania that you can was they injected something here in the region of your heart. and it was a terrifying experience. it slowed down your heartbeat. you thought like, you know, you are slowly dying. so from the outside, you just took a nap. it's exactly what sam harris described. from the inside, it was a nightmare. but, but, now i come to the truly central point. nonetheless, you will say, but what's the point? what is fundamentally wrong with harris? here we come to the topic of what in judeo-christian tradition, and freud also refers to this tradition in his theory of how we relate to others, we call the neighbor. the neighbor is something very radical in judeo-christian tradition. the neighbor is not the other who is like us. the neighbor is some kind of a traumatic presence is the other person. if you want in the abyss of its infinity. and there is always something monstrous about it. but the name of that monstrosity is freedom. no you cannot ever be sure you promised me this, but how do i know? how do i know that i can trust you and so on, which is why we need promises with people which are not neighbors. if i were to know you totally in a kind of a cognitivist or brain scientist dream that i know the mechanisms how you decide, i wouldn't need promises. promises are here because precisely i don't know. what an abyss you are! and i think we should be very careful here not to h put it. not to idealize the notion of the neighbor. there is something irreducibly traumatic in the notion of the neighbor, which is why a little lesson in theology. if you look already at the old testament, i claim that the true function of the ten commandments. is not so much to enable you to love your neighbor, but also to keep a neighbor at a proper distance. it can be very unpleasant, intrusive, to come too close to it. why? let me give you a simple example. i hope you were but it's not es. loving as it may appear you were, some of you at least, i hope most of you all, in a situation where somebody declared intense love to you. somebody approaches you and you see that it's sincere, it's not a joke. you are the center of my life. i totally love you. admit it, if you are honest, that. maybe you enjoyed it, but for a split of a second at least, you were horrified. i mean, it's something horrifying to be in such an intense way the focus of all desires of another person, which is why, do you know that william butler yeats' famous poem like you walk be careful how you walk because you are walking in my dreams. it's horrible to be somebody who as a real person. walk in dreams of another person. it's a very claustrophobic experience. so again, this topic of neighbor is crucial abyssal topic. i even claim that we are basically... our basic fear is fear of the neighbor and all racisms play upon this, this abyss of the other. and that's incidentally one of the sad things, for me at least, going on today, namely the fact of how... did you notice how in the last two, three decades, our politics is defined by two, three features? one is debt. uh uh the only way to mobilize people, not just to do this technocratic administration, but to mobilize people passionately, is to play on a fear. the only politics of passions today is a politics of fear. and unfortunately, not only for the right, also for the left. fear of immigrants, fear of, i don't know, fear of ecological catastrophe, fear of the state, high taxes, whatever you want, fear of sexual depravity and so on. i claim what is beneath this is effectively... is effectively fear of the neighbor. another thing. to be noted here is how sad thing about today is then how do we deal with the neighbor? you cannot simply swallow. him or her neighbor is out there in its abyss, which is why again i claim that this. notion of love thy neighbor. it's something very radical. it means love thy neighbor, love this radical otherness. not just love somebody who is like me. is dead. today, the way we deal with it is... tolance. and here, i'm sorry, i don't have time maybe tomorrow morning at the restraint seminar i want to go with it because i'm now in intense dialogue with that wonderful book, but i have my critical with wendy brown's book on regulating ad. she draws nonetheless, wonderful conclusions and asks the right questions. namely, the basic problem is the following one. why is the category of tolerance universalized to such an extent today. did you notice how problems which 20, 30, 40 years ago? were perceived not as problems of intolerance, but problems of injustice, inequality and so on are today rephrased as problems of tolerance. racism is today you don't tolerate my way of life, whatever, but make a stupid experiment, the moment of glory of united states, martin luther king, the fight for racial equality. i mean, i made a simple experiment. go to internet, put some of his speeches and put search tolerance, intolerance, practically absent. martin luther didn't fight for tolerance. he fought for end of exploitation, end of injustice, inequality. that was the problem for him. i mean, it would be even obscene and racist to say for him, oh, we blacks want whites to tolerate us. you know, it's the same ridicule as to say as if a feminist would have said, we want men to tolerate women. no. which is even a very obscene idea, like many of my male friends would have said, i can somehow grant equality to women, but tolerate them never so okay, well this this's another story. what's underlying this is something that should be called culturalization of politics in our postmodern era where economy is more and more reduced to something that experts do, just administration. the only conflicts that remain are perceived as conflicts of but but now really, sorry to conclude, this notion of neighbor is something terrifying. i claim in what sense in the sense that again neighbor is not. the wealth of another person, as we put it, his or her inner life, what i see in you. no, this level is usually a lie. there is a wonderful poetic, but i totally reject it. a multicultural phrase which says something like this. it's supposed to be a deep insight. i think it's precisely pseudo-depth. it's an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard. it sounds so noble, you know, like you are my enemy if i just objectivize you, you there. but oh if i take care or make the effort of understanding you from within, oh then i will see that you have your standpoint. okay. up to a certain level, this is undoubtedly true, but i claim only up to a certain level. and the limits are clear if i simply paraphrase this or apply to a very specific case. would you also be ready to say hitler was our enemy because we didn't hear his story? i did hear his story, i read mein kampf and so on. and what shocks me is how, no matter how horrible your politics is, you always can find a nice way, as we usually put it, to rationalize it, to tell yourself a story about it. so the radical conclusion here is that... and this is another deep deepest insight of judeo-christian tradition, it's that the ultimate truth the truth of you as an unique person, where you really stand, is not when you go deep into yourself and the deepest sincere self-identification or whatever. at that level, we usually lie. that's not the ultimate truth. which is why... if you want to get this point, i advise you to read two books. one is aldous huxley, the english guy. grey eminence. it's the story of father joseph, père joseph, the foreign minister of cardinal richelieu in the early 17th century, the 30 years war. what's so fascinating in this person? he was for that epoch, evil incarnated. the worst real politique. manipulator he concluded a pact between catholic france and protestant sweden against catholic austria. to prevent unification of germany. so we can even say he's guilty for hitler in a certain way because you know, it was because of his political plotting that german was not unified earlier as a nation state. we all know this is what caused first world war and so on. now what is the shock? the shock is that this same person ordering tortures, poisoning, blah, blah, was in the evening, after his work was done, was writing the most precious of incredible depth mystical meditations. absolutely, how should i put it in a vulgar way, top level, at the level of santa teresa, whoever you want. and this is what bothered huxley. i think his solution is wrong but this gap. the same, let's go to the east. a simple book by brian victoria, zen et war. the same problem. we have undoubtedly authentic zen buddhist monks. like the one who was very popular if some of you are old enough in the 60s era, hippish. theuki, but he was in the 30s, 40s, he was not only totally supporting japanese militarism, but even was writing like... justification of it, claiming that. for the majority of people this... unconditional obedience of military discipline you don't think there is order you do it it's the only way to satti, to enlightenment, to overcoming of your. so the same paradox. and i think the lesson of it is very clear. that when we who stand in a christian tradition, when we speak about redemption, blah blah, all this, it's something totally different than this gnostic or pagan perspective of going deep into yourself, finding this inner truth about yourself and so on and so on. precisely this level of inner truth. ich! a light. is the point of lying. so now, believe me or not, but i will really conclude now very short. so just two concluding points from all this. now you will tell me, okay, but this all my relativism and so on, we don't believe, you don't know where you believe, blah, blah, but there are people, so-called fundamentalists who really immediately believe. i don't give time. it will take another hour. two. develop the whole line of thought, my conclusion is they don't believe. not that they are not sincere, that they cheat. they know. that is to say, to be very precise. i claim that. believe what bothers me in at least some type of fundamentalist is precisely you, for example, what's for me problematic in creationism as opposed to evolutionism, it's not that it's wrong, blah, blah. i don't care. it is that the presupposition is that. you obliterate. the gap between. religious faith and scientific propositions and new treat. religious propositions at the same level like jesus has arise from the dead becomes statement a statement like this is the dna structure of that animal or whatsoever. which is why i think it's deeply significant that fundamentalists usually don't have any problem dealing with science. they love science. they all the time try to prove that there is no gap there. you have them in christianity, creationist. you have them in islam. you have them among the jews. for example, i learned theish... a group in israel which takes literally the prophecy that. messiah will come when a calf will be born with totally red hair. so they say, let's fasten the process and they are making these biogenetic experiments to make it happen. you know what's for me belief? belief is something different. belief is for me a kind of, there is always an element of a belief which is absurd. belief is not, you don't believe in fact. to say it's to say. i believe in christ, but fuck it, i prefer to sin or i don't take it. no, you cannot. it's a belief which is by definition and existentially. engaged belief. it's, for example, to give a pathetic example, it's ridiculous, but it's true. anna frank, if you read her memoirs, this is belief when she writes. in spite of all the horrors that germans are doing to us, the jews, i believe that there is a divine spark in every human being. this total counterfactual, crazy gesture. it's the same with human rights. believing in human rights doesn't mean i look around, scientifically, analyze people, i see at certain level they all have rights, then i say, oh, okay, i believe. no, it's... a leap of faith. it's kind of a crazy axiom. you can be white, black, yellow, high, low, stupid i! posit it as a practical axiom. that in this... this engagement is... crucial. so... the first paradoxical conclusion from this, i claim, is that the true danger of this kind of fundamentalism is not that it's a danger to secular knowledge, or if they take over no science. that doesn't bother me. they are the true end of belief. belief at its most authentic is endangered. so what is belief today? let me go briefly, now really three minutes. you are my supererego here briefly back to. holocaust to i claim that what the ultimate lesson of when i spoke you know about how we shouldn't play this game. gott is, the good father up there who somehow manipulates things and you can trust on him, everything will turn out well and so on. i think that with things like holocaust it's obscene to expect oh we don't know how, but... mysterious are the way of the lord it must have some deep meanings that it somehow justified i claim here i follow hegel's reading of christianity. i claim that it is what really dies on the cross. it not precisely this got. as hegel would have put it, god as substance. god as this secret mind which benevolently controls everything. god as whatever we here do in a kind of higher unity, everything has a secret meaning and so on and so on. because i mean, here we should be, if you want to be christian, be really a christian, that is to say it's not that we are here. god is there and then god from time to time, why not, he sends a messenger, okay, things turn back, come back next time and so on. the ultimate lesson of christianity, of embodiment, incarnation, for me is death. god is engaged in our history. what happens here on earth, it's not something that god observes from above. the way i read it is that the death of christ on the cross, which means it's not just the death of a representative of god. and i think even we should forget all that legalistic topic. god paid the price for our redemption. oh my god. paid to whom? to devil, to what it. that the death on the cross is precisely the death of death. christ of god as an absolute master which controls everything in a kind of teleological unity so that all our stains are somehow redeemed as contributing to some higher harmony even if it's unknown to us. gott! christ coming here, suffering with us, means precisely our suffering is for the real. you cannot redeem it in this stupid way. show uh... what i claim is that something absolutely unheard of happens with christianity, which is the death of christ. minch! something very radical it means in all other religions we. trust god. we believe in god. the death of christ means god trusted us. it means like i give you your freedom. it's up to you. holy ghost for me is literal. i take it literally when it says in the bible, whenever the two of you are there, i will be there. i am there. it means the gift of freedom. it means god doesn't want to play that up there a guarantee. it means god entrusts the faith of creation, his own faith, into us. it means what happens here? ich. part, as it were, of the history of god. and although i don't agree with amalo and levinas, he made nicely this point, here i agree with him, apropos iconoclasm. don't misread it. the prohibition to make image of god. in judaism does not mean in this gnostic way oh it's too mysterious we cannot paint it it means exact opposite it means god is alive not in your stupid deep meditations of up there but how you act react with others that's why you shouldn't make images because it's not an image to be made up there and i think if anything even more this this holds for christianity that's for me what holy ghost is god is no longer the substantial master up there, gott is. to put it in this way, the spirit of our community it's the gift of freedom. i claim if you don't. draw this crazy conclusion, then whatever you claim to be, you repaganize christianity. you fall back at that level of god is up there sending messengers or whatever. sorry, but to inform you, although you know this, but christ is not a messenger of god. christ is god. i'm just trying to draw conclusions from what this means. i'm sorry if i was too long. on the other hand, i'm not sorry. you had to suffer it. that's life. thanks very much. thank. hope we can do some 20 minutes, we'll see but maybe we should be a little bit liberal and... ghosts want to leave let the mouth. um... we have some time for questions.
Jennifer Williams
and what we thought we'd do so that everyone can hear is we have a couple of microphones here and here. and so if you have a question pertaining to what was discussed and presented, you can queue up to the mic. if you jacques said we should be a little bit liberal and allow those who would like to end their suffering to leave now.
and what we thought we'd do so that everyone can hear is we have a couple of microphones here and here. and so if you have a question pertaining to what was discussed and presented, you can queue up to the mic. if you jacques said we should be a little bit liberal and allow those who would like to end their suffering to leave now.
Slavoj Žižek
yeah, liberal, but did you see goldfinger?? you remember that car where you press the button? my dream is to have here this kind of a plan. you asked me a nasty question, i press the button, you jump up and nonetheless. that.
yeah, liberal, but did you see goldfinger?? you remember that car where you press the button? my dream is to have here this kind of a plan. you asked me a nasty question, i press the button, you jump up and nonetheless. that.
Jennifer Williams
well, since we don't have that button... or maybe we do. i don't know. so if you feel like you'd like to leave, feel free. otherwise, go ahead and we'll try to negotiate back and forth between the two.
well, since we don't have that button... or maybe we do. i don't know. so if you feel like you'd like to leave, feel free. otherwise, go ahead and we'll try to negotiate back and forth between the two.
Audience Member 2
do you want to do or should i?
do you want to do or should i?
Slavoj Žižek
there is a guy there already.
there is a guy there already.
Audience Member 2
are we ready? oh, okay. soak, if you will comment briefly maybe on the connection between what you were talking about earlier. and some of your other work and your writings. um. maybe something about how in films like independence day where we saw the events that would later happen. and then we look at movies like the two you mentioned today where we didn't see what we knew happened.
are we ready? oh, okay. soak, if you will comment briefly maybe on the connection between what you were talking about earlier. and some of your other work and your writings. um. maybe something about how in films like independence day where we saw the events that would later happen. and then we look at movies like the two you mentioned today where we didn't see what we knew happened.
Slavoj Žižek
sorry, which is the second film i didn't get it.
sorry, which is the second film i didn't get it.
Audience Member 2
the two you discussed earlier, the the flight.
the two you discussed earlier, the the flight.
Slavoj Žižek
i, yeah, yeah.
i, yeah, yeah.
Audience Member 2
and um... and the relationship between the... desert storm conflict where we watched the film the war on television as if it were a film or we were experiencing it, and the current conflict where we dismiss it with media and just kind of talk about it from the point of view of dc.
and um... and the relationship between the... desert storm conflict where we watched the film the war on television as if it were a film or we were experiencing it, and the current conflict where we dismiss it with media and just kind of talk about it from the point of view of dc.
Slavoj Žižek
there are so many. again, i will be short because it's... i hate you because it's too good question in the sense i you know what i mean, to answer it properly it's again half an hour and so on. what i want to say is that first when you said like independence day, we saw what happens later, no? my god, many people accused me when i wrote about this in my welcome, as if i'm some kind of a mean, evil anti-american and wants to say, you see, you were dreaming about it, so you basically got what you. not only deserved, but desired, no? ah, here things are much more complex because, you know, the first lesson of psychoanalysis is that, it's also, i think, the title of that last novel of truman kapot, unfinished, something along these lines, namely that, you, the worst thing that can happen to you is that your dreams come true, herirsch it, no the freudian notion of desire is much more complex. if you fantasize about something, it it is often that the worst thing that can happen is if this fantasy is brutally from outside imposed onto you. in one of my books, i even make a very unpleasant. i take a brutal example. but talking with many feminists who first were shocked, but then half accepted it, i'm convinced in the truth, namely, you know, now this will be problematic for some of you, but at least listen to the end. do you remember? this usual phrase of a rapist, no? oh, but she secretly deserved it. i only gave the bitch what she really was asking for. now the standard defense is, oh, male fantasy, they dream about it and so on. but when they speak frankly many women will tell you i read many minutes of reports on rape that it is true that there was some kind of desire. now comes my conclusion. does this justify it? not. it's even more horrible. what do i mean by this? i read in my country some reports on rape and one thing is clear. i do it in one of my early books. imagine this situation, just to get the point. of course, it's not as simple as that, but the basic point is like this. imagine two women, to simplify to the utmost. one is... self-assertive. autonomous. the other is more passive, dreams about being beaten, raped and so on. imagine both of them raped. i claim for the second one. it would have been much more terrifying. the first one will get over, maybe i hope so, take even some revenge afterwards. for the second one, who, at a certain level you can say, oh, she just got what she was dreaming about for that one, i fear she may kill herself and so on. i claim afterwards. deris who said, there is nothing more humiliating than to get from the outside like stuck into your face the fact of your dreams. because you know, fantasies are a very fragile thing. so... back to that point, i think this is a different question, but very interesting one. why this eternal fascination of the united states with the victory of the enemy from all those fantasies, and i like them, you know, all those stories where there was, i think, with, i don't know who played in it, a big minieries some 10, 20 years ago where soviet union occupied the united states and then daily life. and even the last one, i bought it, my god, at the airport now four days ago. i forgot some italian sounding author, prayers for the assassins. the idea is atomic bombs, blah, blah, blah, war, the result, united states states falls apart, southeast, bible belt republic, new york, that area, atomic waste, and la, northwest in seattle, islamic republic of the united states no and it's a very nice novel because it doesn't paint islamists simply as bad. it tries to imagine how it would have but again, the point is what ideological pleasure what ideological pleasure do you get from it? so... okay, i would have to go on too much, but to go your other point about... where we get we didn't see and so on and so on uh. i now i will make another point here and that's all i can say now. i am not saying, maybe i gave a wrong impression, that the true film would have been the one which would have provided a total picture with all historical causes of the events. no, i already hinted that a couple of versions of what would have been a more truthful film. for example, as i said, american 11 instead of united 93. that is to say, not some kind of marxist optimistic total knowledge, but at least the true despair, hus put it, no? at least the true despair. and again, this doesn't... involve any kind of secret pseudo-leftist justification, ha you got what you want or whatever. no, it's it's just, how should to put it? the problem is simply... precisely to confront things in all their horror. what bothers me in this aggressive either here republican attitude, it's a feature which somehow strangely, this idea that you can only tell the story when people fight back and know you know that? d was the same in... communist countries it's a strange think why when they were dealing with those who survived the concentration camps. the communist regimes always found it a kind of an irrational hatred and guilt. usually all those russian soldiers who were freed from nazi camps. most of them were sent to siberia, killed or even worse in my country. slovenia, part of ex-yugoslavia, we avoided stalinist show trials, but there was one show trial monstrous in 1951. it was called dachau trial. the survivors of dachau were put to trial, accused of surviving dachau because they collaborated with the germans and then they are now english spies, the usual story. but what fasc i think what is beneath is that. the communists couldn't imagine this true despair that there are situations where you can be so humiliated that it's no longer possible this heroic stance shoot but i fight back and so on no they still it's somehow too embarrassing, unimaginable to them this utter despair embodied in the figure of this. nicely described in agamben's book about auschwitz, these muslims, muslimmen and this living death totally broken. or to put it in another way, it's a very sensitive topic, but i insist on it. uh. did you notice a strange fact that most of the really good films about holocaust and so on are comedies? i think there is a deeper necessity in it. what kind of necessity? tragedy can only be written, something can be staged, presented as tragedy when things are not really truly desperate to the end. because in tragedy you retain a minimum of dignity. two play your tragic role with this heroic dignity. so to a film which would have taken place for example in auschwitz as a tragedy would have been an obscenity i claim it would have given too much credit to the nazis. the whole point is that the terror was so total that it was not possible to do a conflict at the level of tragedy, which is why ein wirklich bei. uh. some of the scenes, if you read primo levi, the way he describes the you cannot but describe them as comical. for example, one of the most horrible scenes read it in, if this is a man, when when you know every two months you had in auschwitz camp a process called seleia, selection. all prisoners have to run naked in front of an ss doctor and the doctor was tired, didn't care. literally, you had two, three seconds to impress the doctor that you are healthy enough to survive. and he simply can categorize you to be burned or to allowed to live. but there is something obscenely, madly comical in this. how primo levi describes this, you know, like the prisoners were trying to pinch their lips to appear more healthy, more eat their stomach straight to it's kind of a totally crazy comedy, no dignity in it. and that's the true horror of it, i claim. so and the same goes for stalinist show trials and so on and so on. in this sense, i claim, and kierkegaard knew this, christianity is a comedy. christianity to reach. crucifixion as a tragedy is an obscenity. tragedy is for ancient greeks, for the christian it's comedy, but of course, the whole point being comedy which is much more nightmarish than... more. so again, i didn't answer your question, i know, but... there was too much in it. i'm sorry, i cannot go in that direction. sorry sorry please.
there are so many. again, i will be short because it's... i hate you because it's too good question in the sense i you know what i mean, to answer it properly it's again half an hour and so on. what i want to say is that first when you said like independence day, we saw what happens later, no? my god, many people accused me when i wrote about this in my welcome, as if i'm some kind of a mean, evil anti-american and wants to say, you see, you were dreaming about it, so you basically got what you. not only deserved, but desired, no? ah, here things are much more complex because, you know, the first lesson of psychoanalysis is that, it's also, i think, the title of that last novel of truman kapot, unfinished, something along these lines, namely that, you, the worst thing that can happen to you is that your dreams come true, herirsch it, no the freudian notion of desire is much more complex. if you fantasize about something, it it is often that the worst thing that can happen is if this fantasy is brutally from outside imposed onto you. in one of my books, i even make a very unpleasant. i take a brutal example. but talking with many feminists who first were shocked, but then half accepted it, i'm convinced in the truth, namely, you know, now this will be problematic for some of you, but at least listen to the end. do you remember? this usual phrase of a rapist, no? oh, but she secretly deserved it. i only gave the bitch what she really was asking for. now the standard defense is, oh, male fantasy, they dream about it and so on. but when they speak frankly many women will tell you i read many minutes of reports on rape that it is true that there was some kind of desire. now comes my conclusion. does this justify it? not. it's even more horrible. what do i mean by this? i read in my country some reports on rape and one thing is clear. i do it in one of my early books. imagine this situation, just to get the point. of course, it's not as simple as that, but the basic point is like this. imagine two women, to simplify to the utmost. one is... self-assertive. autonomous. the other is more passive, dreams about being beaten, raped and so on. imagine both of them raped. i claim for the second one. it would have been much more terrifying. the first one will get over, maybe i hope so, take even some revenge afterwards. for the second one, who, at a certain level you can say, oh, she just got what she was dreaming about for that one, i fear she may kill herself and so on. i claim afterwards. deris who said, there is nothing more humiliating than to get from the outside like stuck into your face the fact of your dreams. because you know, fantasies are a very fragile thing. so... back to that point, i think this is a different question, but very interesting one. why this eternal fascination of the united states with the victory of the enemy from all those fantasies, and i like them, you know, all those stories where there was, i think, with, i don't know who played in it, a big minieries some 10, 20 years ago where soviet union occupied the united states and then daily life. and even the last one, i bought it, my god, at the airport now four days ago. i forgot some italian sounding author, prayers for the assassins. the idea is atomic bombs, blah, blah, blah, war, the result, united states states falls apart, southeast, bible belt republic, new york, that area, atomic waste, and la, northwest in seattle, islamic republic of the united states no and it's a very nice novel because it doesn't paint islamists simply as bad. it tries to imagine how it would have but again, the point is what ideological pleasure what ideological pleasure do you get from it? so... okay, i would have to go on too much, but to go your other point about... where we get we didn't see and so on and so on uh. i now i will make another point here and that's all i can say now. i am not saying, maybe i gave a wrong impression, that the true film would have been the one which would have provided a total picture with all historical causes of the events. no, i already hinted that a couple of versions of what would have been a more truthful film. for example, as i said, american 11 instead of united 93. that is to say, not some kind of marxist optimistic total knowledge, but at least the true despair, hus put it, no? at least the true despair. and again, this doesn't... involve any kind of secret pseudo-leftist justification, ha you got what you want or whatever. no, it's it's just, how should to put it? the problem is simply... precisely to confront things in all their horror. what bothers me in this aggressive either here republican attitude, it's a feature which somehow strangely, this idea that you can only tell the story when people fight back and know you know that? d was the same in... communist countries it's a strange think why when they were dealing with those who survived the concentration camps. the communist regimes always found it a kind of an irrational hatred and guilt. usually all those russian soldiers who were freed from nazi camps. most of them were sent to siberia, killed or even worse in my country. slovenia, part of ex-yugoslavia, we avoided stalinist show trials, but there was one show trial monstrous in 1951. it was called dachau trial. the survivors of dachau were put to trial, accused of surviving dachau because they collaborated with the germans and then they are now english spies, the usual story. but what fasc i think what is beneath is that. the communists couldn't imagine this true despair that there are situations where you can be so humiliated that it's no longer possible this heroic stance shoot but i fight back and so on no they still it's somehow too embarrassing, unimaginable to them this utter despair embodied in the figure of this. nicely described in agamben's book about auschwitz, these muslims, muslimmen and this living death totally broken. or to put it in another way, it's a very sensitive topic, but i insist on it. uh. did you notice a strange fact that most of the really good films about holocaust and so on are comedies? i think there is a deeper necessity in it. what kind of necessity? tragedy can only be written, something can be staged, presented as tragedy when things are not really truly desperate to the end. because in tragedy you retain a minimum of dignity. two play your tragic role with this heroic dignity. so to a film which would have taken place for example in auschwitz as a tragedy would have been an obscenity i claim it would have given too much credit to the nazis. the whole point is that the terror was so total that it was not possible to do a conflict at the level of tragedy, which is why ein wirklich bei. uh. some of the scenes, if you read primo levi, the way he describes the you cannot but describe them as comical. for example, one of the most horrible scenes read it in, if this is a man, when when you know every two months you had in auschwitz camp a process called seleia, selection. all prisoners have to run naked in front of an ss doctor and the doctor was tired, didn't care. literally, you had two, three seconds to impress the doctor that you are healthy enough to survive. and he simply can categorize you to be burned or to allowed to live. but there is something obscenely, madly comical in this. how primo levi describes this, you know, like the prisoners were trying to pinch their lips to appear more healthy, more eat their stomach straight to it's kind of a totally crazy comedy, no dignity in it. and that's the true horror of it, i claim. so and the same goes for stalinist show trials and so on and so on. in this sense, i claim, and kierkegaard knew this, christianity is a comedy. christianity to reach. crucifixion as a tragedy is an obscenity. tragedy is for ancient greeks, for the christian it's comedy, but of course, the whole point being comedy which is much more nightmarish than... more. so again, i didn't answer your question, i know, but... there was too much in it. i'm sorry, i cannot go in that direction. sorry sorry please.
Audience Member 1
thank you. at the end of your talk, you said that jesus, by god through jesus, gives us the gift of freedom. and that is... christianity as you read it. that really made me think about an earlier statement you made about the idea of, for example, the paradoxical statements you were making about we have freedom to choose as long as we don't choose.
thank you. at the end of your talk, you said that jesus, by god through jesus, gives us the gift of freedom. and that is... christianity as you read it. that really made me think about an earlier statement you made about the idea of, for example, the paradoxical statements you were making about we have freedom to choose as long as we don't choose.
Slavoj Žižek
you.
you.
Audience Member 1
so... on some level, can you reconcile that with calvinism? uh we're here at calvin college for me. what are you an atheistic calvinist? on some level. paradoxically.
so... on some level, can you reconcile that with calvinism? uh we're here at calvin college for me. what are you an atheistic calvinist? on some level. paradoxically.
Slavoj Žižek
almost. if you ask me which... religious orientation would be of christianity would be closest to my spontaneous sensitivity. generally protestantism but maybe those who are closer to protestants among catholics pascal port royal. why? because we can debate about everything. one thing i don't conceit, this obscenity that our salvation depends on our good acts. i think this is an obscenity for me an obscenity in the sense that this then introduces an irreducible. aspect of, you know, as if. oh god, okay, if i make this, will it be okay that of kind of economic exchange or whatever? it has to be predestination. that's what i totally. agree with it. and now comes the point. oh my god, i hate you. why are you asking me two good questions? have you thought about this paradox? i've written about it, which is a crazy paradox, namely how we all know max weber, capitalismism, protestantism. but if we approach it... with a common sense it would have been that. capitalism, as we know, the most dynamic, competitive system in the history of humanity. you are up to you, your act autonomous, you work like crazy. how is it that this attitude is justified by the notion of predestination, which, if you approach it in a... common sense way would have should have justified precisely the opposite attitude. to be vulgar, if everything is decided in advance, why don't i sit down, read pornography and drink lemonade? you know why where everything is already decided? so it's mysterious. why how is it that precisely the awareness that everything is decided in advance processes as to incessant activity. my answer would be here problematic for some theologologists maybe, but i'm convinced by it. that predestination is an extremely refined dialectical notion. it's not simply it's written up there. it it's written up there, but you don't know what is written no and i think that we should make clear here a step further that even say it is written up there, but it is backwards written. what do you mean by this? there you there is a very refined paradox which theorists of even some theorists of rational action articulated of how something may happen or not, but if it happens retroactively, it appears that it had to happen from the beginning. for example, all good histories of roman civil war, julius caesar and so on, will tell you how once cesar won, everybody saw it as a destiny. no? but, you know, like it is as if things are not necessary from the beginning. so the paradox is that if a thing happens, you have to say retroactively that it had to happen. retroactively. and this brings me to another i love. as a marxist, i love religious conservatives. you find intelligent conservatives. like t. eliot, you know that, my god, if you study english, the most traditional and individual talent, that famous phrase, the proposition, how every great work of art retroactively changes its entire past. or it's the same, borges said something similar in his wonderful text on kafka, that a modest writer, you can say, by whom he or she was influenced, a truly great writer. create! its own his or her own precursors no he idea is that of course we can say kafka was influenced by by dostoevsky, edgar allan poe, william blake, whatever but it's not as simple as that because but to perceive that dimension in dostoevsky, blah blah blah, kafka already had to be here. now, this doesn't mean we simply retroactively project it. i think that there is this... i think that this retroactive constitution of necessity is the key to the key to predestination. predestination doesn't mean we are not free. predestination means that we are at a much more radical level free to. to constitute our very predestination, how should i put it? because that's the paradox of freedom. freedom, here i agree with deepest insights of protestants, you know, true freedom is not, oh, do i want a strawberry cake or a chocolate cake or whatever, this and that. true freedom is in a way, to choose your necessity herr putin true freedom is something much more. difficult. for example, let's take the ultimate free act, love. of course, love has to be free. if somebody tells me, you have to love this that, it doesn't work. but it's a strange kind of freedom because at the same time, let me be extremely vulgar. you notice that i like to i use the... it's nice to be hypocritical and put the blame, you know, i really don't want to be vulgar, but for the of of. okay. let's say if i were to say, here are some nice girls. let me fall in love and i look around. ah, you have nice hair, nice legs, like that. okay. the most percentage it's you. no, i will not point at anyone, not to be accused of harassment. and it doesn't work. isn't it the whole point of love is that it is free. the freest may act of all. but... what kind of, how do you experience it? all of a sudden you experience it as i cannot do otherwise but that. that's my necessity. i have to do it. and it's the same with all great acts of freedom. not choose chocolate cake or strawberry cake, but for example, you're in a difficult predicament. there is war or let's say in europe, nazi occupation, whatever. to decide to fight it, to engage in fight. it's probably the utmost free decision. but it's not that you... when you decide for it in a way, or for example, for a white man here in the 50s to really do it, not as a white liberal signing protests up there in new york, but like those white men who were killed here, to come really, not here, we are up down there in the south. sorry, i still think thought that i was where i was two days ago, in the south too. to go really down there and risk to be killed supporting the blacks and so on. obscene to say oh i was free to decide i decided you decided because in some way you sense that you would be ashamed of yourself you cannot do otherwise. you know this is the deepest sense not this neurological sense what when you think you are free you are controlled by your neurons this is the deepest sense in which freedom is assuming the. the highest freedom is assuming inner necessity. so i know again, that i didn't answer you, but here you see how i relate very intensely to all this topic of predestination and so on. and definitely, definitely, i think that all... how should to put it? i even now i am writing a book on hegelen christianity where i try to develop this, my god, i will be hated for that again, all these political how. in very eurocentric, unashamed and protestant how. first, we have eastern orthodoxy. which for me is i mean christianity, i mean russian church, that orthodoxy, not john milbank, not here, radical orthodoxy, neither east buddhism, but that one. i... i am very uneasy with that one because first this whole, i think they secretly changed christ into kind of an idol, a mere ideal to be imitated and then in the long term we all can become christ. you know, this idea of man becoming god. gradually we will all becoming god. connected with another problem which i find very problematic in uh... orthodox christian church. the notion of this distinction between what they call economy and god in itself, no? as if. you can distinguish in gut. the inner mystery, trinity of god himself and economy, which is basically to be cynical public relations, know how god deals with humanity. but i think that what gets lost here is simply the deepest christian insight which you find in it is pureist only in protestantism and some maybe of those mystics like meister eckhart who got it that. what is the deepest inside of them? it's death. we are part of god's history it's not god up there and. so i claim that catholicism you have more this symbolic exchange you deal with god institution and so on that i quite naively believe so here i'm totally for that only with. protestantism dit. christianity, again to use this nice hegelian dialectical formulation, only with protestantism did christianity become what it always truly was. here again you have this nice paradox which is. properly christian hegelian dialectical paradox that there is eternity, but eternity is something which can becomes through time. not simply that it wasn't there, it becomes what it always already was. okay, i'm sorry if i.
almost. if you ask me which... religious orientation would be of christianity would be closest to my spontaneous sensitivity. generally protestantism but maybe those who are closer to protestants among catholics pascal port royal. why? because we can debate about everything. one thing i don't conceit, this obscenity that our salvation depends on our good acts. i think this is an obscenity for me an obscenity in the sense that this then introduces an irreducible. aspect of, you know, as if. oh god, okay, if i make this, will it be okay that of kind of economic exchange or whatever? it has to be predestination. that's what i totally. agree with it. and now comes the point. oh my god, i hate you. why are you asking me two good questions? have you thought about this paradox? i've written about it, which is a crazy paradox, namely how we all know max weber, capitalismism, protestantism. but if we approach it... with a common sense it would have been that. capitalism, as we know, the most dynamic, competitive system in the history of humanity. you are up to you, your act autonomous, you work like crazy. how is it that this attitude is justified by the notion of predestination, which, if you approach it in a... common sense way would have should have justified precisely the opposite attitude. to be vulgar, if everything is decided in advance, why don't i sit down, read pornography and drink lemonade? you know why where everything is already decided? so it's mysterious. why how is it that precisely the awareness that everything is decided in advance processes as to incessant activity. my answer would be here problematic for some theologologists maybe, but i'm convinced by it. that predestination is an extremely refined dialectical notion. it's not simply it's written up there. it it's written up there, but you don't know what is written no and i think that we should make clear here a step further that even say it is written up there, but it is backwards written. what do you mean by this? there you there is a very refined paradox which theorists of even some theorists of rational action articulated of how something may happen or not, but if it happens retroactively, it appears that it had to happen from the beginning. for example, all good histories of roman civil war, julius caesar and so on, will tell you how once cesar won, everybody saw it as a destiny. no? but, you know, like it is as if things are not necessary from the beginning. so the paradox is that if a thing happens, you have to say retroactively that it had to happen. retroactively. and this brings me to another i love. as a marxist, i love religious conservatives. you find intelligent conservatives. like t. eliot, you know that, my god, if you study english, the most traditional and individual talent, that famous phrase, the proposition, how every great work of art retroactively changes its entire past. or it's the same, borges said something similar in his wonderful text on kafka, that a modest writer, you can say, by whom he or she was influenced, a truly great writer. create! its own his or her own precursors no he idea is that of course we can say kafka was influenced by by dostoevsky, edgar allan poe, william blake, whatever but it's not as simple as that because but to perceive that dimension in dostoevsky, blah blah blah, kafka already had to be here. now, this doesn't mean we simply retroactively project it. i think that there is this... i think that this retroactive constitution of necessity is the key to the key to predestination. predestination doesn't mean we are not free. predestination means that we are at a much more radical level free to. to constitute our very predestination, how should i put it? because that's the paradox of freedom. freedom, here i agree with deepest insights of protestants, you know, true freedom is not, oh, do i want a strawberry cake or a chocolate cake or whatever, this and that. true freedom is in a way, to choose your necessity herr putin true freedom is something much more. difficult. for example, let's take the ultimate free act, love. of course, love has to be free. if somebody tells me, you have to love this that, it doesn't work. but it's a strange kind of freedom because at the same time, let me be extremely vulgar. you notice that i like to i use the... it's nice to be hypocritical and put the blame, you know, i really don't want to be vulgar, but for the of of. okay. let's say if i were to say, here are some nice girls. let me fall in love and i look around. ah, you have nice hair, nice legs, like that. okay. the most percentage it's you. no, i will not point at anyone, not to be accused of harassment. and it doesn't work. isn't it the whole point of love is that it is free. the freest may act of all. but... what kind of, how do you experience it? all of a sudden you experience it as i cannot do otherwise but that. that's my necessity. i have to do it. and it's the same with all great acts of freedom. not choose chocolate cake or strawberry cake, but for example, you're in a difficult predicament. there is war or let's say in europe, nazi occupation, whatever. to decide to fight it, to engage in fight. it's probably the utmost free decision. but it's not that you... when you decide for it in a way, or for example, for a white man here in the 50s to really do it, not as a white liberal signing protests up there in new york, but like those white men who were killed here, to come really, not here, we are up down there in the south. sorry, i still think thought that i was where i was two days ago, in the south too. to go really down there and risk to be killed supporting the blacks and so on. obscene to say oh i was free to decide i decided you decided because in some way you sense that you would be ashamed of yourself you cannot do otherwise. you know this is the deepest sense not this neurological sense what when you think you are free you are controlled by your neurons this is the deepest sense in which freedom is assuming the. the highest freedom is assuming inner necessity. so i know again, that i didn't answer you, but here you see how i relate very intensely to all this topic of predestination and so on. and definitely, definitely, i think that all... how should to put it? i even now i am writing a book on hegelen christianity where i try to develop this, my god, i will be hated for that again, all these political how. in very eurocentric, unashamed and protestant how. first, we have eastern orthodoxy. which for me is i mean christianity, i mean russian church, that orthodoxy, not john milbank, not here, radical orthodoxy, neither east buddhism, but that one. i... i am very uneasy with that one because first this whole, i think they secretly changed christ into kind of an idol, a mere ideal to be imitated and then in the long term we all can become christ. you know, this idea of man becoming god. gradually we will all becoming god. connected with another problem which i find very problematic in uh... orthodox christian church. the notion of this distinction between what they call economy and god in itself, no? as if. you can distinguish in gut. the inner mystery, trinity of god himself and economy, which is basically to be cynical public relations, know how god deals with humanity. but i think that what gets lost here is simply the deepest christian insight which you find in it is pureist only in protestantism and some maybe of those mystics like meister eckhart who got it that. what is the deepest inside of them? it's death. we are part of god's history it's not god up there and. so i claim that catholicism you have more this symbolic exchange you deal with god institution and so on that i quite naively believe so here i'm totally for that only with. protestantism dit. christianity, again to use this nice hegelian dialectical formulation, only with protestantism did christianity become what it always truly was. here again you have this nice paradox which is. properly christian hegelian dialectical paradox that there is eternity, but eternity is something which can becomes through time. not simply that it wasn't there, it becomes what it always already was. okay, i'm sorry if i.
Audience Member 1
again if you come again, you can tell us what toilets are like in slovenia.
again if you come again, you can tell us what toilets are like in slovenia.
Slavoj Žižek
germans, we are disgusting germans. sorry to inform you.
germans, we are disgusting germans. sorry to inform you.
Audience Member 2
i've got a very simple question for you. god, this will be the really.
i've got a very simple question for you. god, this will be the really.
Slavoj Žižek
actually one.
actually one.
Audience Member 2
you already got... you already got asked the question about calvinism, but going back to your presentation and the scope of human suffering and how that all kind of fits or doesn't fit with christianity. to me, kind of you stop that crucifixion. and i find it kind of narrowing to talk about christian tradition at large without the resurrection. how resurrection fits into what you just said. or how it doesn't fit.
you already got... you already got asked the question about calvinism, but going back to your presentation and the scope of human suffering and how that all kind of fits or doesn't fit with christianity. to me, kind of you stop that crucifixion. and i find it kind of narrowing to talk about christian tradition at large without the resurrection. how resurrection fits into what you just said. or how it doesn't fit.
Slavoj Žižek
it does, but here maybe i'm a little bit too much. in favor of some kind of materialist rereading? i mean, resurrection is for me what i quoted, that when... the two of you will be there and laugh between you, i will be there. resurrection for me is... the holy ghost. you don't need any. christ to meddle things up there.
it does, but here maybe i'm a little bit too much. in favor of some kind of materialist rereading? i mean, resurrection is for me what i quoted, that when... the two of you will be there and laugh between you, i will be there. resurrection for me is... the holy ghost. you don't need any. christ to meddle things up there.
Audience Member 2
okay, so your definition of christian protestantism will be more of the 19th century liberal tradition.
okay, so your definition of christian protestantism will be more of the 19th century liberal tradition.
Slavoj Žižek
oh my god, no. if we were to be, sorry to tell you this, but if we were to be in soviet union in the 30s. even before you would reach home, you would disappear for in a camp of re-education, five years minimum. now seriously, because... no, my god, i'm kierkegaardian here and the greatness of kierkegaard is that people usually misread kierkegaard because they mistread him as if his point was, no, not institution, but inner faith. absolutely not. kierkegaard, this is for me the miracle of kierkegaard, that he knew very well in his critique of what he called christendom, the christianity as institution, that the solution is not this. liberal attitude of what it only truly matters is your inner faith. if okay, let me give you a radical answer. if i were to choose, okay, i'll put it this way. i have many friends who are this kind of half closet materialist closet believers and they even don't know in which closet they really are or whatever. i asked them, i like this brutal. do you believe or not? the usual answer i get is. really not. i don't like institutions, but there is something deep in me, maybe some force, blah blah blah. no? uh. to have no mercy for this. to me what is much more sympathetic, what interests me is precisely church as an institution. church as an institution, which is why what interests me is protestantism. it's not this, me and god. no, it's gemeinde. the community that's absolutely crucial for me which is why for example i. totally. agree with that basic protestant insight, what does it mean? read bible alone. it doesn't mean a kind of inner orgasm of meditation, blah blah. it means god's word for me. read bible means precisely. you cannot bypass logos. no. this is even the limitation for me of all those mystics, like great as he is, but meister eckhart cannot really deal with incarnation, with christ. did you notice how the whole operation of meister eckhart, his mystical rereading of christianity, is based on... this basically cheating with words. i think you have in latin this ambiguity mundus, now it can means pure and world. so he reads, god sent his son into mundus, not as into the world, but into the purity of our virgin soul. i think you lose everything in this way. but going back so that i don't get lost, to your point. what i'm especially opposed to is this secular humanist notion of this feuerbach version of you. it doesn't matter what you believe. christianity is more a kind of an ideal, you know, it's really we just project into it our highest human desires, what is most noble in us and so on and so on. no, i think it's absolutely crucial to insist. i cannot develop it now that man is not enough. two. you must have a dimension which is more radical than only a man in man and i cannot go now into it theoretically but. even in psychoanalysis, i claim. this is the function of... concept which is deeply misunderstood, the concept of death drive. death drive is not this oh i want to die, disappear or some kind of crazy destructive drive. death drive paradoxically i claim is freud's name for immortality. if you really want to understand what is death drive, forget about all this nirvana stuff and think about stephen king. you know what i mean? this and death in the sense of death but leaving death. something which insists beyond life and death. so again, in this sense, sorry for my taste but you got my point in this sense, no i'm definitely opposed to this has put, this soft religious humanism. who cares institutionally just that you are sincere and that whatever notes? no, no, no, here i'm a strict kierkegaardian who again, what kierkegaard got? and this was a great, almost i would say marxist insight by him, is that wasn't, you know, better this than me, wasn't a big target of kierkegaard? skating ironic criticism was some big state theologist i forgot the name who was precisely this kind of a liberal and what kierkegaard got is that there is no opposition between this kind of flat. trip. bleeding heart humanism being the worst conformist state philosopher.
oh my god, no. if we were to be, sorry to tell you this, but if we were to be in soviet union in the 30s. even before you would reach home, you would disappear for in a camp of re-education, five years minimum. now seriously, because... no, my god, i'm kierkegaardian here and the greatness of kierkegaard is that people usually misread kierkegaard because they mistread him as if his point was, no, not institution, but inner faith. absolutely not. kierkegaard, this is for me the miracle of kierkegaard, that he knew very well in his critique of what he called christendom, the christianity as institution, that the solution is not this. liberal attitude of what it only truly matters is your inner faith. if okay, let me give you a radical answer. if i were to choose, okay, i'll put it this way. i have many friends who are this kind of half closet materialist closet believers and they even don't know in which closet they really are or whatever. i asked them, i like this brutal. do you believe or not? the usual answer i get is. really not. i don't like institutions, but there is something deep in me, maybe some force, blah blah blah. no? uh. to have no mercy for this. to me what is much more sympathetic, what interests me is precisely church as an institution. church as an institution, which is why what interests me is protestantism. it's not this, me and god. no, it's gemeinde. the community that's absolutely crucial for me which is why for example i. totally. agree with that basic protestant insight, what does it mean? read bible alone. it doesn't mean a kind of inner orgasm of meditation, blah blah. it means god's word for me. read bible means precisely. you cannot bypass logos. no. this is even the limitation for me of all those mystics, like great as he is, but meister eckhart cannot really deal with incarnation, with christ. did you notice how the whole operation of meister eckhart, his mystical rereading of christianity, is based on... this basically cheating with words. i think you have in latin this ambiguity mundus, now it can means pure and world. so he reads, god sent his son into mundus, not as into the world, but into the purity of our virgin soul. i think you lose everything in this way. but going back so that i don't get lost, to your point. what i'm especially opposed to is this secular humanist notion of this feuerbach version of you. it doesn't matter what you believe. christianity is more a kind of an ideal, you know, it's really we just project into it our highest human desires, what is most noble in us and so on and so on. no, i think it's absolutely crucial to insist. i cannot develop it now that man is not enough. two. you must have a dimension which is more radical than only a man in man and i cannot go now into it theoretically but. even in psychoanalysis, i claim. this is the function of... concept which is deeply misunderstood, the concept of death drive. death drive is not this oh i want to die, disappear or some kind of crazy destructive drive. death drive paradoxically i claim is freud's name for immortality. if you really want to understand what is death drive, forget about all this nirvana stuff and think about stephen king. you know what i mean? this and death in the sense of death but leaving death. something which insists beyond life and death. so again, in this sense, sorry for my taste but you got my point in this sense, no i'm definitely opposed to this has put, this soft religious humanism. who cares institutionally just that you are sincere and that whatever notes? no, no, no, here i'm a strict kierkegaardian who again, what kierkegaard got? and this was a great, almost i would say marxist insight by him, is that wasn't, you know, better this than me, wasn't a big target of kierkegaard? skating ironic criticism was some big state theologist i forgot the name who was precisely this kind of a liberal and what kierkegaard got is that there is no opposition between this kind of flat. trip. bleeding heart humanism being the worst conformist state philosopher.