Why We Should Not Go To The End of the Revolutionary Road
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2022-08-31 · 1:28:28 · 10,923 words
hegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisrace-antisemitismideologygeopolitics-warsexuality-gendercommunism-socialismrevolution-violencesubjectivityphilosophy-general
Žižek opens by defending his pro-Ukrainian stance against abstract left pacifism, then delivers a main philosophical argument on Hegel's negation of negation and the productive failure of suicide, illustrated through Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome. He moves to a controversial provocation on race and collective symbolic suicide, arguing that both white South Africans and (more radically) Black South Africans need to shed their identity through a Lacanian subjective destitution, linking this to Malcolm X's adoption of the name 'X' as an instance of universal reinvention. The talk then broadens into a wide-ranging Q&A covering sexuality and trans identity (Lacanian sexual difference), the Ukraine-Russia war and European geopolitics, Russian fascist ideology (Ilyin, Dugin), and the paralysis of the contemporary left.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's dismissive label for a peace position that fails to identify the aggressor and inadvertently serves the occupying power's interests.
Žižek distinguishes the death drive from simple suicide: it marks the excess negativity within existence rather than a wish to cease existing.
as “mutual recognition”
The liberal-Hegelian concept (Pippin et al.) that Žižek argues has been purified of its darker dimension, illustrated by the fact that Hegel's concept of recognition applies even to the death penalty.
as “negation of negation as failure of negation”
Žižek reinterprets Hegel's negation of negation not as a return to higher positivity but as the productive failure when a negation does not fully succeed, illustrated by the master-slave dialectic's constitutive compromise.
Mladen Dolar's formula adopted by Žižek to describe the condition of surviving one's own attempt at self-annihilation, as exemplified by Ethan and Mattie in Ethan Frome.
Freud's term invoked by Žižek to describe the standard human condition as survivors of our failure to go to the end, epitomized by Ethan and Mattie's botched suicide.
Donald Moss's concept that racist whiteness is a parasitic formation that distorts its hosts, Žižek cites it only to reject it as too optimistic for distinguishing a clean substantial identity beneath racism.
as “zone of non-being”
Fanon's term for the radical exclusion of Blackness from the human symbolic order, which Žižek links to afropessimism as a structural condition that can paradoxically be seized as an opening for new universal identity.
The collective shedding of a socially constituted identity, white or Black, as a prerequisite for genuine emancipatory reinvention rather than literal self-killing.
as “passage through zero point”
The symbolic self-erasure of identity that Žižek sees Malcolm X enacting with the name 'X', creating the opening for a genuinely universal new identification.
For Žižek following Lacan, jouissance is not a lack one never reaches but an excess, a stain that persists and displaces itself onto the very rituals by which one tries to escape it.
A shift in subjectivity, not suicide but a shedding of narcissistic and symbolic identity, that enables sustained political engagement rather than a momentary brush with the abyss.
Žižek reads afropessimism not merely as a recognition of Black subordination's radical depth but as an unconscious processing of a new, more universal identity that can emerge through symbolic deracination.
Hegel's notion invoked by Žižek to describe how a particular identity transposed into another culture reveals something invisible in the original, contrasted with abstract universalism of 'we are all humans'.
Žižek's critical label for a leftism defined by brief moments of street mobilization that leave structures unchanged, followed by academic retreat into explaining the revolution's inevitable betrayal.
For Žižek following Lacan, sexual difference is not a binary of male and female identities but the deadlock of sexuality itself, most purely embodied in trans people who stand for difference as such.
Lacan's formula cited by Žižek to argue that femininity, unlike masculinity, is not self-identical, it already contains a trans element, an internal non-coincidence with itself.
Žižek's signature formula for the four interlocking global crises, hunger, pandemic, war, and digital control, that together constitute evidence that only a new communism/socialism can provide adequate solutions.
Alenka Zupančič's formulation adopted by Žižek: today's ideological structure uses acknowledged knowledge of catastrophe (climate, pandemics) as an excuse for inaction rather than a spur to change.
Stories he reaches for 6
Akira Kurosawa's 1960 film set in modern Japan shows how transposing Hamlet into another culture reveals something invisible in the original, exemplifying concrete universality.
“The best version of Hamlet is for me Akira Kurosawa from '62 set in modern Japan with a wonderful title The Bad Sleep Well.”
At a round table, Rushdie was accused of betraying his Indian roots; he replied that his biggest inspirations are two great Indian writers, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, illustrating how particular traditions are most alive when transposed.
“Not true, my biggest inspiration are two great Indian writers. Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.”
Through legal execution the guilty subject's debt is paid and the wound healed; refusing to hold them fully accountable by citing social circumstances denies their status as a free agent.
“death penalty for Hegel is the subject's right. The criminal's right. Through it the subject is recognized as a free autonomous person when he or she is sentenced to death.”
A Danish comic writer cited by Kierkegaard classifies all people into officers, housemaids, and chimney sweepers, illustrating Žižek's Lacanian point that antagonism always involves three positions, not two, with a privileged third term.
“all people can be classified into officers housemaids and chimney sweepers…antagonism always involves three points never two.”
G.K. Chesterton's example of a soldier who fights without fearing death but is not therefore reckless, fearlessness is compatible with strategic cunning, illustrating subjective destitution as a sustained political stance.
“a soldier who fights, doesn't care if he dies. But at the same time it doesn't mean I want to be killed. He is very fearless not afraid to die but this doesn't mean you are an idiot who just runs into the guns.”
By choosing X as a family name, Malcolm X did not call for return to African roots but seized the void created by slavery to forge a new, more universal identity; he was killed for this by the Nation of Islam.
“the point of choosing X…was not to mobilize the Blacks to fight for the return to some primordial African roots, but precisely to seize the opening provided by X.”
Works invoked 9
Žižek draws directly on its master-slave dialectic and the negation of negation, reinterpreting the famous passage as a constitutive failure rather than synthesis.
The Bad Sleep Well film
Kurosawa's 1960 Japanese Hamlet adaptation; Žižek calls it the best version of Hamlet and uses it to illustrate concrete universality.
Žižek says it misses its final point 'precisely because it becomes a', implying it retreats into false consolation rather than sustaining the comic-horrible register.
Žižek engages with Lacan's reading of Antigone as approaching the zero point of the death drive, but argues the subsequent Transference seminar constitutes a self-critique of the Ethics.
Oedipus at Colonus play
Briefly invoked as an example of subjective destitution, Žižek's reading is that the character has traversed the death drive and acts from reconstructed desire.
Žižek calls it the ultimate film on Auschwitz, exemplifying his thesis that Holocaust horror demands comedy rather than tragedy.
Lacan's reading of Claudel's trilogy; Žižek reads it as an absolute self-critique of the one-sided tragic reading of the Ethics seminar.
Ethan Frome book
Žižek explicitly loves it; calls it the 'masterpiece of the failed suicidal negation' and uses it as the central literary illustration of failed non-being and ordinary unhappiness.
Dialogues between Huey Newton and Erik Erikson; Žižek says he will find this book and (jokingly) plans to cite it with a footnote claiming it was a coincidental discovery.
People invoked 39
Frantz Fanon positive
Fanon's concept of 'zone of non-being' is deployed to ground afropessimism and the possibility of Black symbolic suicide opening onto universal identity.
Terblanche Delport positive
South African academic whose call for white collective suicide Žižek takes seriously as a philosophical provocation, though he redirects it toward Black symbolic suicide.
Mahatma Gandhi negative
Žižek notes that Gandhi's anti-colonial struggle in South Africa explicitly excluded Black rights, seeking only to elevate Indians to white status.
Jane Bennett positive
Žižek can't quite recall her name but credits her 'wonderful' ontological position on decay and new forms of life emerging from the mix of technology and nature, while disagreeing that this position requires no subject.
Alenka Zupančič positive
Member of Žižek's 'Lacanian gang'; credited with the idea of negation of negation as failure and the concept of knowledge as fetish.
Robert Pippin negative
Representative of liberal Hegelianism that focuses on mutual recognition and purifies Hegel of darker aspects like the death penalty.
Ivan Ilyin negative
Identified by Žižek as the founding figure of Russian fascism, more influential than Dugin; his books are now reprinted and distributed to Russian military conscripts and state bureaucrats.
Donald Moss negative
Žižek rejects Moss's concept of parasitic whiteness as too optimistic for presupposing a clean substantial white identity beneath its racist distortion.
Mentioned as the only person Putin criticized by name when announcing the invasion, claiming Ukraine is Lenin's invention.
Steve Bannon negative
Cited as the American right's operative whose goal is to break up the European Union, potentially aligning with Putin against Europe.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek follows Lacan on sexual difference, jouissance as excess rather than lack, subjective destitution, and the non-existence of Woman; he also argues that the Transference seminar is a self-critique of the Ethics seminar's tragic reading of Antigone.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Žižek's 'preferred theologian'; cited for the example of a fearless soldier who doesn't care if he dies but acts rationally, the model for subjective destitution as a sustained political stance.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Žižek treats him as following Kojève's error of end-of-history thinking, but notes with approval that Fukuyama eventually admitted he was wrong and supported Bernie Sanders.
Mike Davis positive
Žižek loves Davis and endorses his point that the contemporary left has been so disempowered it has nothing to say on international affairs.
Judith Butler positive
Žižek agrees with Butler's point (from what he calls her best book) that the repression of desire always turns into a desire of repression.
Edith Wharton positive
Žižek explicitly loves her; Ethan Frome is the 'masterpiece' of failed suicidal negation used to illustrate ordinary unhappiness and failed non-being.
Paul Claudel positive
Author of the Coûfontaine trilogy which Lacan reads in the Transference seminar as a self-critique of his Ethics reading of Antigone.
Mentioned in the context of an article Žižek published, contrasting Gorbachev with Putin; Žižek says Gorbachev eventually drifted toward being half pro-Putin.
Homi Jehangir Bhabha negative
Žižek 'respectfully disagrees' with Bhabha's concept of mimicry, arguing that colonizers actually preserved native identity rather than encouraging imitation.
Alexandre Kojève negative
Described as a pseudo-Hegelian who misread Hegel by thinking history had reached its end and spending his career looking for different figurations of that end, Stalinism, American technocracy, Japan.
Huey P. Newton positive
Žižek admires Newton as one of the few genuinely non-idiotic people; praises his dialogues with Erik Erikson (In Search of Common Ground); his book Revolutionary Suicide is noted as resonating with the talk's themes.
Adrian Johnston positive
Friend whose work on the contemporary paradox, we know what is wrong but do nothing, Žižek endorses.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy positive
Žižek defends Zelenskyy as basically aware of the oligarchy danger and genuine in his reform intentions despite Vogue portraits and difficulties changing the state apparatus.
Mladen Dolar positive
Member of Žižek's 'Lacanian gang'; credited with the formula 'failed non-being' and the Kierkegaard example of officers/housemaids/chimney sweepers.
Evo Morales positive
Cited as 'a little bit of a jerk' but backed by excellent socialist technocrats Linera and Arce who managed capitalism reasonably in Bolivia.
Malcolm X positive
Presented as the exemplar of symbolic suicide, the adoption of X as a passage through zero point toward a more universal Black identity; Žižek reads his assassination as evidence of the threat he posed.
Alexander Dugin negative
Žižek warns against overestimating Dugin's influence on Putin; calls his ideology 'stupid almost theology nationalist' but takes the broader ideological field it represents seriously.
Salman Rushdie positive
Žižek recalls Rushdie defending himself against accusations of betraying Indian roots by claiming Jane Austen and Dickens as his greatest Indian influences, an example of concrete universality.
Louis Farrakhan negative
Žižek quotes Farrakhan's call for Malcolm X's death as a horrifying example of ethnic particularism masquerading as Islamic universalism.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Žižek opposes Miller's Lacanian orthodoxy, which holds that we can only momentarily touch the Real and must return to daily life with cynical distance; Žižek wants subjective destitution to be a sustained stance.
Erik Erikson positive
Famous psychoanalyst who sided with Huey Newton in dialogues; Žižek mentions this approvingly.
Jordan Peterson negative
Described sarcastically as Žižek's 'best friend'; after initially opposing the invasion, Peterson gave a speech that accepted Russian designations of Western degeneration and praised Putin's religiosity, which Žižek finds 'horrible'.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Cited via Mladen Dolar for the example of officers/housemaids/chimney sweepers illustrating that antagonism always has three positions.
Vladimir Putin negative
Žižek analyzes Putin's invasion as a well-thought geopolitical plan targeting European unity; notes that Putin cited Lenin critically at the start of the invasion and employs both nationalist and leftist ideological framing.
Akira Kurosawa positive
Žižek considers The Bad Sleep Well the best version of Hamlet, exemplifying concrete universality through cultural transposition.
René Descartes positive
Žižek claims Descartes is 'at the origin of all good' because Cogito has no sex, which is why aristocratic women admirers grasped the liberating potential of his philosophy.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for 'ordinary unhappiness' as the standard human condition, the state of those who have survived their failure to go to the end.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek draws on the master-slave dialectic, negation of negation, death penalty as recognition, and concrete universality; argues liberal readings (Pippin) purify Hegel of his darker aspects.
Derek Hook positive
Žižek prefers Hook's Lacanian reading of Delport to Moss's, reading symbolic suicide as shedding narcissistic-phantasmatic identity as a necessary step toward new identification.
What it argues
symbolic suicide and subjective destitution as emancipatory political actnegation of negation as failure rather than synthesiscollective racial identity and its sheddingMalcolm X and Black universalism through deracinationUkraine-Russia war and the bankruptcy of left pacifismtrans identity, sexual difference, and Lacanian ontologythe paralysis of the contemporary left facing catastrophe
Dialectical moves 10
“Pacifism is not a notion of truth: peace can equally mean the occupier can 'in peace run the show there' — the demand for peace is already its own opposite.”
The peace position is not neutral; it structurally benefits whoever currently holds dominance, inverting its apparent moral neutrality.
“Death penalty is the criminal's right: through execution the murderer is recognized as a free autonomous agent — victimizing someone as a product of circumstances deprives them of freedom precisely.”
The liberal impulse to exculpate by social circumstances is the true denial of freedom; Hegel's harsher recognition is the more emancipatory move.
“The negation of negation is not a triumphant sublation but a failure of negation — the very origin of human culture lies in one side blinking and not going to the end.”
What looks like dialectical progress (master-slave) is actually the constitutive refusal of absolute negation, making compromise rather than extremity the motor of history.
“The attempt at suicide fails and the outcome is worse than before: Ethan and Mattie got exactly what they wished for — to stay together — but in mutual unhappiness, with Zeena permanently between them.”
The full realization of the wish reveals itself as its own punishment, the failed negation produces a more suffocating positive.
“The disappearance of whites would not solve the problem — just as the disappearance of Jews as the disturbing element never restored social harmony.”
Structural antagonism cannot be resolved by eliminating one of its terms; the system reproduces its contradiction through a different element.
“Far from being a lack you never reach, jouissance is an excess — a stain you can never get rid of, because it displaces itself onto the very rituals of escaping it.”
The Lacanian point is the inverse of the standard reading: it is not that enjoyment is perpetually deferred but that it is inescapably excessive.
“Lacan's reading of Antigone, which seems to push to the zero point, is actually a self-critique in the Transference seminar — the Ethics seminar is already its own negation.”
The moment in Lacan most identified with tragic confrontation with the Real is precisely where Lacan begins to revise that very position.
“What Malcolm X proposed was for Blacks to bring their deracination to the end — making white domination simply pointless, a solipsist dream missing a partner.”
Rather than resisting from a position of oppressed identity, the more radical act is to complete the identity-destruction the oppressor initiated, rendering the oppressor's game unplayable.
“To limit the war you have to show the will to defend yourself — by just conceding peace, the other side is emboldened, as the appeasement of Hitler demonstrated.”
The paradox of peace negotiations is that the credible threat of continued resistance is the condition for actually ending the war.
“The nation of Islam, which used Islam for limited ethnic identity, killed Malcolm X precisely because he had found a genuinely universal identity in Islam — the universal destroys what uses it as a cover for the particular.”
The organization that claims a universal religion kills the member who actually enacts its universalism, revealing the organization's particularity as its true essence.
Claims 22
rejects
Abstract pacifism is not a useful political concept because it cannot identify who is the aggressor; peace can serve the occupier just as well as the occupied.left pacifism on Ukraine
asserts
Lacan's political stance was at best a slightly cynical moderate conservative, not a hidden revolutionary, and his followers should be honest about this.Lacan's personal politics
asserts
Hegel's death penalty is a right of the criminal: through legal execution the guilty subject is recognized as a free autonomous agent and reconciled with the ethical order.Hegel's concept of recognition and death penalty
reframes
Negation of negation is best understood not as a return to higher positivity but as the productive failure of negation — the master-slave dialectic shows that civilization itself originates in a constitutive compromise rather than a push to the end.Hegel's negation of negation
asserts
The condition of survivors of a failed suicide — illustrated by Ethan Frome — is the standard human condition Freud called ordinary unhappiness.failure, survival, and ordinary unhappiness
asserts
The more politically productive response to white racism in South Africa is not to ask whites to shed their parasitic whiteness but to propose that Black South Africans perform a collective symbolic suicide — shedding an identity profoundly marked by white domination and resistance to it.afropessimism, race, and symbolic identity in South Africa
rejects
Donald Moss's notion of parasitic whiteness is too optimistic because it presupposes one can cleanly distinguish a good substantial white identity beneath its racist distortion.Donald Moss's theory of whiteness
asserts
Malcolm X's adoption of 'X' was a gesture of symbolic suicide that seized the opening created by slavery's destruction of African roots to reinvent a more universal Black identity.Malcolm X and Black universalism
asserts
Malcolm X was killed precisely because he blurred the line between 'ours' and 'yours', threatening the ethnic particularity of the Nation of Islam.Malcolm X's assassination and Black nationalism
reframes
Afropessimism should be read not only as a description of Black subordination's radical depth but as an unconscious processing of a new, more universal form of identification.afropessimism
rejects
Jouissance is not a lack one never reaches but an excess — a stain that always persists by displacing itself onto the rituals of its own suppression.the standard reading of Lacanian jouissance as lack
asserts
Repression of desire always turns into desire of repression — the obsessional neurotic's basic mechanism.obsessional neurosis and repression
asserts
Sexual difference in the Lacanian sense is not a binary of identities but a deadlock most purely embodied in trans people, who stand for difference as such.trans identity and sexual difference
asserts
Femininity is not self-identical in the way masculinity is; it already contains a trans element, which is what Lacan means by 'la femme n'existe pas'.feminine identity and Lacanian non-existence of Woman
asserts
Cogito has no sex, which is why Descartes was admired by aristocratic women of his time and why he is at the origin of all good.Descartes and the sexlessness of the subject
asserts
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a well-thought geopolitical plan whose primary target is Europe and the European Union, not merely territorial expansion.Russia's geopolitical strategy
asserts
Ivan Ilyin, not Dugin, is the foundational figure of Russian fascism, and his influence on Putin is more significant than is often acknowledged.Russian fascist ideology and Ilyin
reframes
Victimizing Black people by attributing their crimes to social circumstances deprives them of their freedom and dignity just as surely as ignoring white privilege does.victimization, freedom, and racial politics
asserts
British colonizers in India deliberately preserved traditional Indian identity precisely because it was easier to dominate people who retained their own particular identity.colonialism and the management of native identity
asserts
Today we know what is wrong and what roughly needs to be done about it, yet we do nothing — knowledge itself has become a fetish that functions as an excuse for inaction.ideology, knowledge, and political paralysis
asserts
The true horror of events like the Holocaust is missed if they are conceived as tragedy rather than comedy; the best Holocaust films are comedies.Holocaust representation, tragedy versus comedy
rejects
What I oppose is the idea of an original gender fluidity that bad patriarchy then fixes into binary oppositions — rather, sexual difference as deadlock is primary.the liberal-progressive narrative on gender fluidity
Quotes 17
“Pacifism I think is not a notion of truth. In the sense that it allows you to draw the proper line of division.”Slavoj Žižek · abstract pacifism fails to identify the aggressor
“death penalty for Hegel is the subject's right. The criminal's right. Through it the subject is recognized as a free autonomous person when he or she is sentenced to death.”Slavoj Žižek · recognition and the death penalty as emancipation
“the negation of negation as a failure of negation. Failed negation is by no means strange to Hegel.”Slavoj Žižek · negation of negation reinterpreted as productive failure
“In an agonizing irony, the love couple of Ethan and Mattie have gotten what their wish had they to stay together, but in mutual unhappiness and discontent. With Zeena as a constant presence between the two of them.”Slavoj Žižek · the wish fulfilled as its own punishment — failed non-being
“We are survivors of our failure to go to the end.”Slavoj Žižek · ordinary unhappiness as failed suicide
“To revolutionize a system is never equal to just eliminating one of its parts. In the same way that the disappearance of Jews as the disturbing element never restored social harmony.”Slavoj Žižek · structural antagonism cannot be resolved by removing one term
“This X which deprives the Blacks of their particular tradition offers a unique chance to reinvent themselves to form a new identity much more universal than white people's professed universality.”Slavoj Žižek · Malcolm X's X as passage to universal identity
“Malcolm was killed precisely because he blurred the clear line that separated ours from yours.”Slavoj Žižek · universalism as threat to ethnic particularity
“no matter how much you try to get rid of enjoyment, enjoyment will persist because it's simply displaced onto the very rituals act of getting rid of enjoyment.”Slavoj Žižek · jouissance as inescapable excess, not lack
“The repression of desire always turns into desire of repression.”Slavoj Žižek · obsessional neurosis and the libidinal logic of repression
“Tragedy works when the victim maintains a minimum of dignity. If you conceive Auschwitz as a tragedy, you miss the true horror of the situation.”Slavoj Žižek · comedy as the only honest form for extreme horror
“I want to be offensive because context itself can be wrong. In the sense of what is the context today? The context is the predominant ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · offensiveness as resistance to ideological reappropriation
“For me as a Lacanian Hegelian antagonism always involves three points never two.”Slavoj Žižek · triplicity over binary in dialectical structure
“Cogito doesn't have a sex — which meant is not masculine.”Slavoj Žižek · Cartesian subject as sexless and potentially emancipatory for women
“We know what is wrong…and we do nothing. This is the mystery today.”Slavoj Žižek · knowledge as fetish — knowing without acting
“The paradox is that at some point to limit the war you have to show will to defend yourself.”Slavoj Žižek · the paradox of peace through credible resistance
“I am afraid that maybe we need even more of a catastrophe. That maybe even Ukraine we will get tired of it and it's not enough to awaken us.”Slavoj Žižek · pessimism about the West's political will
Transcript 61 turns
Slavoj Žižek
First concerning politics, it's not only Ukraine and I am even more firmly now uh attached to what I declared as my position. My God, I'm what is the left thinking? Don't I'm not referring to some secret knowledge, inner information, just look what people are saying. Didn't people notice that when Putin announced, you remember on 23rd of February, when Putin announced the invasion, he mentioned critically only one name. Which name? Lenin. He said Ukraine is Lenin's invention. It's not true and so on. But Putin declares himself neo-conservative, supports all the extreme right-wing party in Slovenia and I simply don't get this abstract pacifism. You know also why not? Now comes my next provocation. Pacifism I think is not a notion of truth. In the sense that it allows you to draw the proper line of division. The point that I often make, think about Germany-occupied France in Isn't it absolutely true that they wanted peace? Of course because peace meant they can in peace run the show there. Israel sincerely wants peace on the West Bank. It's absolutely clear. This means they can go on with their job. And today, it's not an irony, Russia absolutely wants peace on the in Ukraine, in their own sense. Okay, just briefly then I will go to my main point. Second about Lacan politics and so on and so on. You know I'm I'm well aware neither me nor Alenka Zupančič nor Mladen Dolar try to make out of Lacan some hidden revolutionary or what. Let's be frank. Lacan from what we can reconstruct as his political stance was not even a left liberal. I would say he was some kind of a slightly cynical moderate conservative. From what we know he voted for De Gaulle, when his daughter supported against France the Algerian uprising late 50s in late 50s early 60s, Lacan was and wanted to join the Communist Party. Lacan was shocked at it and so on and so on. But so that I don't lose time here, more important the beginning of my answer to you if I were to have more time would have been to distinguish between suicide and subjective destitution. Subjective destitution for me is not is not suicide. Subjective destitution is a certain shift in subjectivity and Alenka and Mladen know more about this, have written about this. For example, you know which is I think really happy person when she is dying? There is no death drive. She went through subjective destitution. Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus. She reconstructed his desire, she knows what he wants to screw up as much as possible, to have his city-tab and so on and so on. So here things are much more complex. But let's not lose time. As far as I'm concerned, we can go on after with the debate. I would like just to do something which will appear maybe even more problematic to you because the key is that this big metaphysical topic, you know, I'm opposed to it like crazy. I agree this, you know, some fatal negativity, want to die, to erase yourself, all that, all that. For me, in every strong emancipatory movement, when you are precisely politically most engaged, something like this happens. And it's not only Ukraine now. My God, I'm proud to say if you are looking for my political engagements, I was actively involved in the I'm not saying I was crucial there, in the the miracle, the axis of good, not evil, I call them. Chile, Bolivia, Colombia. Where a radically leftist president was elected. With I was totally engaged in my broken Spanish, I even recorded uh some podcasts to support. But let's skip this. Let's go into what I want to say because as you will see, it's not that I celebrate suicide. My idea is precisely let's not go to the end. What do I mean by this? This now comes some kind of philosophy a little bit of patience. Hegel's basic concepts are as a rule misunderstood in order to fit the predominant interpretation of his work. Since today's Hegelian liberalism, from Robert Pippin uh to others, focuses on mutual recognition, this notion is I think in all liberal readings purified of its darker aspect. Who of the poets of reconciliation mentions Hegel's advocacy of death penalty? What's Hegel's point? Through the act of legal execution, the guilty subject is reconciled with the substantial ethical order and in this sense forgiven. His debt is paid, the wound of his crime is healed. Which is why I like this Hegel's formulation. Let's see if you swallow this. Which is why death penalty for Hegel is the subject's right. The criminal's right. Through it the subject is recognized as a free agent. Hegel uses the term recognition here and all those who see in recognition Hegel's key concept should gather the the strength to accept it here also. The murderer is recognized as a free autonomous person when he or she is sentenced to death. And for Hegel, taking into account all the social circumstances which made him a murderer deprives him of his freedom precisely. So I think this victimization in the sense of proclaiming somebody the victim of circumstances is very ambiguous. Many Black friends of mine are very sensitive to this, when they say when we commit a crime, oh we are victims of circumstances, when a white wealthy guy commits a crime, he should be punished. What does it mean? That we are just manipulated by social circumstances? Let me go on. Another concept which is as a rule misunderstood is the negation of negation. This concept is usually conceived as some kind of a self-sublating negation, return to a new higher positivity and so on. Like we go to the anti-negativity and then things magically turn around. What disappears in this reading is, as it was pointed out by the other two members of my Lacanian gang, Alenka and Mladen Dolar, the negation of negation as a failure of negation. Failed negation is by no means strange to Hegel. Let me just give you one example. In one of the most famous passages in his Phenomenology, dialectic of master and servant, Hegel imagines, as we all know, the confrontation of two self-consciousnesses engaged in the struggle for life and death. Each side is ready to go to the end in risking its life. But if they both persist to the end, there is no winner. One dies, the other survives but without another to recognize it. So the whole history of freedom and recognition, in short, the whole history as such, the whole of human culture, can take place only with an original compromise. In the eye-to-eye confrontation, one side, the future servant, blinks, averts its gaze, is not ready to go to the end. Here we can again see how Hegel is not a thinker pushing things to the end, to their most radical potential. Sometimes compromise, not going to the end, is crucial. But, ah here I take over again an idea developed elsewhere by Alenka and Mladen, but I find much more interesting than this idea of, you know, the end suicide as a vortex of some final negativity, we shouldn't go so far. The opposite case, when a subject goes to the end, tries to commit suicide and it fails. This is what interests me. The masterpiece of the failed suicidal negation is of course, I love her, Edith Wharton. Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome. You all know it I hope. A short novel which takes place against a backdrop of the cold grey bleakness of a New England winter. The narrator gradually learns the whole story reaching decades into the past. Ethan Frome, an isolated farmer, is trying to escape to scrap out a meager living while also attending to his frigid demanding wife Zeena. A ray of hope enters Ethan's life of despair when, years ago, his wife's cousin Mattie arrives to help them. His life is transformed as he falls in love with Mattie who returns love. Zeena suspects this and orders Mattie to leave. Since Ethan lacks money to escape with Mattie, he takes her to the train station. They stop up at a hill upon which they had once planned to go sledding and decide to sled together as a way of delaying their sad parting. After the first run, Mattie suggests a suicide pact. They go down again and steer the sled directly into a tree. So they will never be parted, so they will spend their last moments together. Ethan agrees. They get on the sled clutching each other. They crash headlong, headlong and at high speed into the elm tree. Ethan regains regains consciousness after the accident and but Mattie lies beside him piping in pain like a small wounded animal while Ethan is left with a permanent limp. The epilogue returns to the present while visiting Frome in his house the narrator hears a complaining female voice. And it is easy to assume that belongs this voice to the never-happy Zeena. But it emerges that it is Mattie who now lives with the Fromes due to having been paralyzed in the accident. Her misery over her plight and dependence has embittered her and the roles are now reversed. Zeena is forced to care for her as well as for Ethan. She has now found the strength to be the caregiver rather than being the invalid. So in an agonizing irony, the love couple of Ethan and Mattie have gotten what their wish had they to stay together, but in mutual unhappiness and discontent. With Zeena as a constant presence between the two of them. It's the ultimate case of what Mladen Dolar proposed as a formula of being as a failed non as a failed non-being. And I don't have time to develop this now because let's with time. I just want to say that this is for me rather the standard situation of our what Freud called ordinary unhappiness. We are survivors of our failure to go to the end. But now my final point. What if a suicide does not fail? Can we imagine suicide as an emancipatory political act? The first association are here of course public suicide as a protest against foreign occupation. I remember from my youth, Vietnam, Poland in 1980s and so on. In the last years however, and this is my final example, a suicide proposal aroused a wide debate in South Africa. Derek Hook reports how in March Terblanche Delport, a young white academic, sparked outrage at a Johannesburg conference when he called on white people in South Africa to commit suicide as an ethical act. Here are Delport's own words. Sorry for this longer quote. The reality in South Africa is that most of white people spend their whole lives only engaging Black people in subservient positions. Cleaners, gardeners and so on. My question is then how can a person not be a racist if that's the way they live their lives. The only way then for white people to become part of Africa is not to exist as white people anymore. If the goal is to dismantle white supremacy and white supremacy is white culture and vice-versa, then the goal has to be to dismantle white culture and ultimately white people themselves. The total integration into Africa by white people will also automatically mean the death of white people as white as a con white as a concept would not exist anymore. end of quote. How more concretely are we to imagine this suicide of South African whites? Donald Moss proposed a simple but for me problematic solution. The racist whiteness is a parasitic formation which parasitizes on whites themselves. Again a quote. Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has. A malignant parasite-like condition to which white people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one's body, in one's mind and in one's world. Parasitic whiteness renders its hosts' appetite voracious, insatiable and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target non-white people. Once established these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. end of quote. So, to get rid of their racist stance, the whites have to get rid of their parasitic whiteness which is not part of their substantial nature but just parasitizes on them. Which means that in getting rid of their racism, they do not lose the substance of their being. They even regain it, obliterating its distortion. I reject this. It's way too optimistic. As if we can simply distinguish in white people their true substantial whiteness which is not in itself racist and this parasitic uh disfiguration. I prefer to this easy way out Hook, Derek Hook's comment, directly inspired by Lacanian theory. Another quote, don't be afraid the last one. Delport's rhetorical and deliberately provocative suggestion is perhaps not as counter-intuitive or crazy as it at first sounds. Arguably it is the gesture of giving up what one is. The shedding of narcissistic investments and symbolic and phantasmatic identities. That proves a necessary first step to becoming what one is not but might become. This is the transformative potential of anxiety that clinicians work so hard to facilitate and that I think can also be discerned, however fleetingly, in the instances of white anxiety. The potential potentially the potentiality that a new and hitherto unthinkable form of identification is being unconsciously processed. end of quote. Now what I nonetheless find problematic in these lines is the optimistic term. Suicide does not mean the actual collective self-killing of the South African whites, it means a symbolic erasure of their identity which already points towards new forms of identity. I find it now comes my provocation. Trigger warning as they say. I find it much more productive to establish a link between the idea of the whites' collective suicide and the idea of so-called afropessimism. Recall Fanon's claim that quote the Negro is a zone of non-being, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly declining declivity. Is the experience that grounds today's afro today's afropessimism not a similar one? Does the insistence of afropessimists that Black subordination is much more radical than that of other underprivileged groups, Asians, LGBT+ and so on. That is to say that Blacks should not be put into the series with other forms of colonization, not grounded in the act of assuming that one belongs to such a zone of non-being. That's why do you remember I like to make a step at great authorities. We take as a symbol of struggle against colonialism Gandhi. Aha, I went to check it up. You know that when Gandhi was fighting uh white supremacy in South Africa, my friends in India gave me all the quotes. He was explicitly not fighting for Black rights. He just in early apartheid there were three groups: white on the top, Indians in the middle and Blacks on the bottom. And he explicitly just wanted Indians Indians in India, not Native Americans, to join to be recognized as the same as the whites. So what if we turned Delport's suggestion, now comes my real provocation, radical as it may appear, around and propose that it is the Blacks in the South Africa who should commit a collective symbolic suicide. To shed their social-symbolic identity which is profoundly marked by white domination and resistance to it and which contains its own fantasies and even narcissistic investments of victimization. I was told by my Black friends that in the United States Blacks are right in using the term victim to insult their their Black opponents. One can thus repeat exactly the same words. The Blacks need to perform the gesture of giving up what one is, shedding narcissistic investments, symbolic phantasmatic identities that proves a necessary first step towards becoming what one is not but might become. Consequently I see afropessimism not just as a recognition of dismal social reality but also and above all as something that announces the potentiality that a new form of identification is being unconsciously processed. To put it brutally. Let's imagine that in one way or another all the whites would disappear from South Africa. The ANC, African National Congress, inefficiency and corruption would remain and the poor Black majority would find itself even more strongly dislocated, lacking the designated cause of its poverty. To revolutionize a system is never equal to just eliminating one of its parts. In the same way that the disappearance of Jews as the disturbing element never restored social harmony. Now you will say I'm dreaming. Ah, I'm not. Was Malcolm X not following exactly this insight when he adopted X as his family name? The point of choosing X and thereby signaling that the slave traders who brought the enslaved Africans from their homeland brutally deprived them of their family and ethnic roots, of their entire cultural life world, was not to mobilize the Blacks to fight for the return to some primordial African roots, but precisely to seize the opening provided by X, an unknown new lack of identity engendered by the very process of slavery which made the African roots forever lost. The idea is that this X which deprives the Blacks of their particular tradition offers a unique chance to reinvent themselves to form a new identity much more universal than white people's professed universality. So Malcolm X proposed for Blacks themselves to bring to the end their deracination with a gesture of symbolic suicide. The passage through zero point in order to free the space for a new identity. Such a gesture would render the white domination simply pointless. A solipsist dream, a game missing a partner with whom it can only be played. Was this not the reason why Malcolm X was treated as an enemy by Muslim Nation, by Black nationalists. Farrakhan declared him worthy of death. A week before his assassination his home in Queens was firebombed and so on and so on. So one cannot but note the cruel irony of the fact that although as is well known Malcolm X found this new identity in the universalism of Islam, he was in all probability killed on the order of the organization called The Nation of Islam, an organization which used Islam to serve its limited ethnic identity. Here is a typical horrifying for me quote from Farrakhan attacking Malcolm X. Was Malcolm your traitor or ours? And if we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours? You just shut your mouth and stay out of it because in the future we gonna become a nation and the nation got to be able to deal with traitors and cutthroats and turncoats. The white man deals with his traitor blah blah the Jews deal with theirs. end of quote. In short, Malcolm was killed precisely because he blurred the clear line that separated ours from yours. He was killed to prevent the Blacks to commit the symbolic suicide that would open up the path to not only their emancipation. And even today we continue to live in the shadow of this failed suicide which keeps the Blacks in their subordinate position. That's it. Thanks very much. I hope I was not too long. Thank you very much Slavoj for this intervention. I personally you surprised us. And I'm going to invite Todd, Duane, Mari to think of a response to this very interesting question because I think Mari perhaps it would be interesting for you if you wanted to jump in because the direction of Slavoj's intervention in a way flipped your assumption of this tragic Marquis de Sade Lacan of the ethics version of the suicide. That's not what I just heard which was an interesting kind of reversal. go ahead. Oh sorry can I add one thing? it's important. Just to clarify this. I was always truly opposed to this poetry of the tragedy. My old motif, known probably some to some of you, is that to simplify to the utmost, when things get really horrible, tragedy no longer works. It has to be comedy. Tragedy works when the victim maintains a minimum of dignity. That and you if you conceive Auschwitz, Holocaust, even Soviet Gulag as a tragedy, you miss the true horror of the situation there. That's why all the best movies, a couple of them, on Holocaust, did you notice, are comedies? Are comedies? Okay I will not go into it how where La Vita Bella misses its final point precisely because it becomes a Yes, Seven Beauties, thanks very much, Pasqualino Settebellezze. This is the ultimate movie, I think, on on Auschwitz. You know what comedy is not this stupid comedy that you laugh. Comedy means things are so horrible that it's a fake to adopt the position of the the position of tragedy. So this is why, just another Lacanian dogmatic explanation, I also opposed this focus of Lacan as a thinker of tragic lack. Whatever we have in our hands we always miss the ultimate object of desire. No, as I insist again and again for Lacan the other aspect of this lack is always an excess. You encounter sexuality not as a lack but as an excess. The other wants something for you, it's impenetrable, what does the other want? it's an obscene excess. The point of jouissance is not what people usually claim. Oh you can do this, that, but no matter how perverse you are in your sex life you never reach that, the full incestuous enjoyment. Lacan's point is more the opposite one. No matter how much you try to get rid of enjoyment, enjoyment will persist because it's simply displaced onto the very rituals act of getting rid of enjoyment. Here I agree with Judith Butler who in her I think best book something about culture I forgot wrote that the repression of desire always turns into desire of repression. and believe for repression. And believe me I know this because this is the basic obsessional neurotic mechanism and if anything I am that, obsessional neurotic. Namely how you want to escape some too traumatic idea of jouissance but then you elevate into object of enjoyment these very rituals of how to escape it. No enjoyment is not a lack, enjoyment is kind of a stain, an excess that you never can get rid of. Sorry for interrupting you. so wait oh okay ah it's nice that I get you again yeah. Wait sorry can I reformulate now my question for you, you know what is to cut it short so that you don't drop tired drop dead of tiredness there. I what I'm trying to do is simply to show also with my practice that this dimension, this oscillation between and I agree with you I hate them you know this fatal fascination, no whatever we do in this world is limited just pragmatic, empirical, suicidal disappearance is the only true act. I will go to the end here. I think Lacan himself, now I'm addressing to the few among you who are a little bit more dogmatically educated in Lacan. That's how I read Lacan's seminar which comes after the Ethics, where Lacan gives his wonderful reading of Claudel's Coûfontaine trilogy. I think that Lacan's reading of Antigone is still marked by this it's a certain Lacanian ontology which is now propagated by Jacques-Alain Miller which is this one. We can be truly authentic, encounter the zero point of death drive, the abyss of the thing only in momentary elements of contacting the real. But we cannot persist in this state
First concerning politics, it's not only Ukraine and I am even more firmly now uh attached to what I declared as my position. My God, I'm what is the left thinking? Don't I'm not referring to some secret knowledge, inner information, just look what people are saying. Didn't people notice that when Putin announced, you remember on 23rd of February, when Putin announced the invasion, he mentioned critically only one name. Which name? Lenin. He said Ukraine is Lenin's invention. It's not true and so on. But Putin declares himself neo-conservative, supports all the extreme right-wing party in Slovenia and I simply don't get this abstract pacifism. You know also why not? Now comes my next provocation. Pacifism I think is not a notion of truth. In the sense that it allows you to draw the proper line of division. The point that I often make, think about Germany-occupied France in Isn't it absolutely true that they wanted peace? Of course because peace meant they can in peace run the show there. Israel sincerely wants peace on the West Bank. It's absolutely clear. This means they can go on with their job. And today, it's not an irony, Russia absolutely wants peace on the in Ukraine, in their own sense. Okay, just briefly then I will go to my main point. Second about Lacan politics and so on and so on. You know I'm I'm well aware neither me nor Alenka Zupančič nor Mladen Dolar try to make out of Lacan some hidden revolutionary or what. Let's be frank. Lacan from what we can reconstruct as his political stance was not even a left liberal. I would say he was some kind of a slightly cynical moderate conservative. From what we know he voted for De Gaulle, when his daughter supported against France the Algerian uprising late 50s in late 50s early 60s, Lacan was and wanted to join the Communist Party. Lacan was shocked at it and so on and so on. But so that I don't lose time here, more important the beginning of my answer to you if I were to have more time would have been to distinguish between suicide and subjective destitution. Subjective destitution for me is not is not suicide. Subjective destitution is a certain shift in subjectivity and Alenka and Mladen know more about this, have written about this. For example, you know which is I think really happy person when she is dying? There is no death drive. She went through subjective destitution. Oedipus in Oedipus at Colonus. She reconstructed his desire, she knows what he wants to screw up as much as possible, to have his city-tab and so on and so on. So here things are much more complex. But let's not lose time. As far as I'm concerned, we can go on after with the debate. I would like just to do something which will appear maybe even more problematic to you because the key is that this big metaphysical topic, you know, I'm opposed to it like crazy. I agree this, you know, some fatal negativity, want to die, to erase yourself, all that, all that. For me, in every strong emancipatory movement, when you are precisely politically most engaged, something like this happens. And it's not only Ukraine now. My God, I'm proud to say if you are looking for my political engagements, I was actively involved in the I'm not saying I was crucial there, in the the miracle, the axis of good, not evil, I call them. Chile, Bolivia, Colombia. Where a radically leftist president was elected. With I was totally engaged in my broken Spanish, I even recorded uh some podcasts to support. But let's skip this. Let's go into what I want to say because as you will see, it's not that I celebrate suicide. My idea is precisely let's not go to the end. What do I mean by this? This now comes some kind of philosophy a little bit of patience. Hegel's basic concepts are as a rule misunderstood in order to fit the predominant interpretation of his work. Since today's Hegelian liberalism, from Robert Pippin uh to others, focuses on mutual recognition, this notion is I think in all liberal readings purified of its darker aspect. Who of the poets of reconciliation mentions Hegel's advocacy of death penalty? What's Hegel's point? Through the act of legal execution, the guilty subject is reconciled with the substantial ethical order and in this sense forgiven. His debt is paid, the wound of his crime is healed. Which is why I like this Hegel's formulation. Let's see if you swallow this. Which is why death penalty for Hegel is the subject's right. The criminal's right. Through it the subject is recognized as a free agent. Hegel uses the term recognition here and all those who see in recognition Hegel's key concept should gather the the strength to accept it here also. The murderer is recognized as a free autonomous person when he or she is sentenced to death. And for Hegel, taking into account all the social circumstances which made him a murderer deprives him of his freedom precisely. So I think this victimization in the sense of proclaiming somebody the victim of circumstances is very ambiguous. Many Black friends of mine are very sensitive to this, when they say when we commit a crime, oh we are victims of circumstances, when a white wealthy guy commits a crime, he should be punished. What does it mean? That we are just manipulated by social circumstances? Let me go on. Another concept which is as a rule misunderstood is the negation of negation. This concept is usually conceived as some kind of a self-sublating negation, return to a new higher positivity and so on. Like we go to the anti-negativity and then things magically turn around. What disappears in this reading is, as it was pointed out by the other two members of my Lacanian gang, Alenka and Mladen Dolar, the negation of negation as a failure of negation. Failed negation is by no means strange to Hegel. Let me just give you one example. In one of the most famous passages in his Phenomenology, dialectic of master and servant, Hegel imagines, as we all know, the confrontation of two self-consciousnesses engaged in the struggle for life and death. Each side is ready to go to the end in risking its life. But if they both persist to the end, there is no winner. One dies, the other survives but without another to recognize it. So the whole history of freedom and recognition, in short, the whole history as such, the whole of human culture, can take place only with an original compromise. In the eye-to-eye confrontation, one side, the future servant, blinks, averts its gaze, is not ready to go to the end. Here we can again see how Hegel is not a thinker pushing things to the end, to their most radical potential. Sometimes compromise, not going to the end, is crucial. But, ah here I take over again an idea developed elsewhere by Alenka and Mladen, but I find much more interesting than this idea of, you know, the end suicide as a vortex of some final negativity, we shouldn't go so far. The opposite case, when a subject goes to the end, tries to commit suicide and it fails. This is what interests me. The masterpiece of the failed suicidal negation is of course, I love her, Edith Wharton. Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome. You all know it I hope. A short novel which takes place against a backdrop of the cold grey bleakness of a New England winter. The narrator gradually learns the whole story reaching decades into the past. Ethan Frome, an isolated farmer, is trying to escape to scrap out a meager living while also attending to his frigid demanding wife Zeena. A ray of hope enters Ethan's life of despair when, years ago, his wife's cousin Mattie arrives to help them. His life is transformed as he falls in love with Mattie who returns love. Zeena suspects this and orders Mattie to leave. Since Ethan lacks money to escape with Mattie, he takes her to the train station. They stop up at a hill upon which they had once planned to go sledding and decide to sled together as a way of delaying their sad parting. After the first run, Mattie suggests a suicide pact. They go down again and steer the sled directly into a tree. So they will never be parted, so they will spend their last moments together. Ethan agrees. They get on the sled clutching each other. They crash headlong, headlong and at high speed into the elm tree. Ethan regains regains consciousness after the accident and but Mattie lies beside him piping in pain like a small wounded animal while Ethan is left with a permanent limp. The epilogue returns to the present while visiting Frome in his house the narrator hears a complaining female voice. And it is easy to assume that belongs this voice to the never-happy Zeena. But it emerges that it is Mattie who now lives with the Fromes due to having been paralyzed in the accident. Her misery over her plight and dependence has embittered her and the roles are now reversed. Zeena is forced to care for her as well as for Ethan. She has now found the strength to be the caregiver rather than being the invalid. So in an agonizing irony, the love couple of Ethan and Mattie have gotten what their wish had they to stay together, but in mutual unhappiness and discontent. With Zeena as a constant presence between the two of them. It's the ultimate case of what Mladen Dolar proposed as a formula of being as a failed non as a failed non-being. And I don't have time to develop this now because let's with time. I just want to say that this is for me rather the standard situation of our what Freud called ordinary unhappiness. We are survivors of our failure to go to the end. But now my final point. What if a suicide does not fail? Can we imagine suicide as an emancipatory political act? The first association are here of course public suicide as a protest against foreign occupation. I remember from my youth, Vietnam, Poland in 1980s and so on. In the last years however, and this is my final example, a suicide proposal aroused a wide debate in South Africa. Derek Hook reports how in March Terblanche Delport, a young white academic, sparked outrage at a Johannesburg conference when he called on white people in South Africa to commit suicide as an ethical act. Here are Delport's own words. Sorry for this longer quote. The reality in South Africa is that most of white people spend their whole lives only engaging Black people in subservient positions. Cleaners, gardeners and so on. My question is then how can a person not be a racist if that's the way they live their lives. The only way then for white people to become part of Africa is not to exist as white people anymore. If the goal is to dismantle white supremacy and white supremacy is white culture and vice-versa, then the goal has to be to dismantle white culture and ultimately white people themselves. The total integration into Africa by white people will also automatically mean the death of white people as white as a con white as a concept would not exist anymore. end of quote. How more concretely are we to imagine this suicide of South African whites? Donald Moss proposed a simple but for me problematic solution. The racist whiteness is a parasitic formation which parasitizes on whites themselves. Again a quote. Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has. A malignant parasite-like condition to which white people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one's body, in one's mind and in one's world. Parasitic whiteness renders its hosts' appetite voracious, insatiable and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target non-white people. Once established these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. end of quote. So, to get rid of their racist stance, the whites have to get rid of their parasitic whiteness which is not part of their substantial nature but just parasitizes on them. Which means that in getting rid of their racism, they do not lose the substance of their being. They even regain it, obliterating its distortion. I reject this. It's way too optimistic. As if we can simply distinguish in white people their true substantial whiteness which is not in itself racist and this parasitic uh disfiguration. I prefer to this easy way out Hook, Derek Hook's comment, directly inspired by Lacanian theory. Another quote, don't be afraid the last one. Delport's rhetorical and deliberately provocative suggestion is perhaps not as counter-intuitive or crazy as it at first sounds. Arguably it is the gesture of giving up what one is. The shedding of narcissistic investments and symbolic and phantasmatic identities. That proves a necessary first step to becoming what one is not but might become. This is the transformative potential of anxiety that clinicians work so hard to facilitate and that I think can also be discerned, however fleetingly, in the instances of white anxiety. The potential potentially the potentiality that a new and hitherto unthinkable form of identification is being unconsciously processed. end of quote. Now what I nonetheless find problematic in these lines is the optimistic term. Suicide does not mean the actual collective self-killing of the South African whites, it means a symbolic erasure of their identity which already points towards new forms of identity. I find it now comes my provocation. Trigger warning as they say. I find it much more productive to establish a link between the idea of the whites' collective suicide and the idea of so-called afropessimism. Recall Fanon's claim that quote the Negro is a zone of non-being, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly declining declivity. Is the experience that grounds today's afro today's afropessimism not a similar one? Does the insistence of afropessimists that Black subordination is much more radical than that of other underprivileged groups, Asians, LGBT+ and so on. That is to say that Blacks should not be put into the series with other forms of colonization, not grounded in the act of assuming that one belongs to such a zone of non-being. That's why do you remember I like to make a step at great authorities. We take as a symbol of struggle against colonialism Gandhi. Aha, I went to check it up. You know that when Gandhi was fighting uh white supremacy in South Africa, my friends in India gave me all the quotes. He was explicitly not fighting for Black rights. He just in early apartheid there were three groups: white on the top, Indians in the middle and Blacks on the bottom. And he explicitly just wanted Indians Indians in India, not Native Americans, to join to be recognized as the same as the whites. So what if we turned Delport's suggestion, now comes my real provocation, radical as it may appear, around and propose that it is the Blacks in the South Africa who should commit a collective symbolic suicide. To shed their social-symbolic identity which is profoundly marked by white domination and resistance to it and which contains its own fantasies and even narcissistic investments of victimization. I was told by my Black friends that in the United States Blacks are right in using the term victim to insult their their Black opponents. One can thus repeat exactly the same words. The Blacks need to perform the gesture of giving up what one is, shedding narcissistic investments, symbolic phantasmatic identities that proves a necessary first step towards becoming what one is not but might become. Consequently I see afropessimism not just as a recognition of dismal social reality but also and above all as something that announces the potentiality that a new form of identification is being unconsciously processed. To put it brutally. Let's imagine that in one way or another all the whites would disappear from South Africa. The ANC, African National Congress, inefficiency and corruption would remain and the poor Black majority would find itself even more strongly dislocated, lacking the designated cause of its poverty. To revolutionize a system is never equal to just eliminating one of its parts. In the same way that the disappearance of Jews as the disturbing element never restored social harmony. Now you will say I'm dreaming. Ah, I'm not. Was Malcolm X not following exactly this insight when he adopted X as his family name? The point of choosing X and thereby signaling that the slave traders who brought the enslaved Africans from their homeland brutally deprived them of their family and ethnic roots, of their entire cultural life world, was not to mobilize the Blacks to fight for the return to some primordial African roots, but precisely to seize the opening provided by X, an unknown new lack of identity engendered by the very process of slavery which made the African roots forever lost. The idea is that this X which deprives the Blacks of their particular tradition offers a unique chance to reinvent themselves to form a new identity much more universal than white people's professed universality. So Malcolm X proposed for Blacks themselves to bring to the end their deracination with a gesture of symbolic suicide. The passage through zero point in order to free the space for a new identity. Such a gesture would render the white domination simply pointless. A solipsist dream, a game missing a partner with whom it can only be played. Was this not the reason why Malcolm X was treated as an enemy by Muslim Nation, by Black nationalists. Farrakhan declared him worthy of death. A week before his assassination his home in Queens was firebombed and so on and so on. So one cannot but note the cruel irony of the fact that although as is well known Malcolm X found this new identity in the universalism of Islam, he was in all probability killed on the order of the organization called The Nation of Islam, an organization which used Islam to serve its limited ethnic identity. Here is a typical horrifying for me quote from Farrakhan attacking Malcolm X. Was Malcolm your traitor or ours? And if we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours? You just shut your mouth and stay out of it because in the future we gonna become a nation and the nation got to be able to deal with traitors and cutthroats and turncoats. The white man deals with his traitor blah blah the Jews deal with theirs. end of quote. In short, Malcolm was killed precisely because he blurred the clear line that separated ours from yours. He was killed to prevent the Blacks to commit the symbolic suicide that would open up the path to not only their emancipation. And even today we continue to live in the shadow of this failed suicide which keeps the Blacks in their subordinate position. That's it. Thanks very much. I hope I was not too long. Thank you very much Slavoj for this intervention. I personally you surprised us. And I'm going to invite Todd, Duane, Mari to think of a response to this very interesting question because I think Mari perhaps it would be interesting for you if you wanted to jump in because the direction of Slavoj's intervention in a way flipped your assumption of this tragic Marquis de Sade Lacan of the ethics version of the suicide. That's not what I just heard which was an interesting kind of reversal. go ahead. Oh sorry can I add one thing? it's important. Just to clarify this. I was always truly opposed to this poetry of the tragedy. My old motif, known probably some to some of you, is that to simplify to the utmost, when things get really horrible, tragedy no longer works. It has to be comedy. Tragedy works when the victim maintains a minimum of dignity. That and you if you conceive Auschwitz, Holocaust, even Soviet Gulag as a tragedy, you miss the true horror of the situation there. That's why all the best movies, a couple of them, on Holocaust, did you notice, are comedies? Are comedies? Okay I will not go into it how where La Vita Bella misses its final point precisely because it becomes a Yes, Seven Beauties, thanks very much, Pasqualino Settebellezze. This is the ultimate movie, I think, on on Auschwitz. You know what comedy is not this stupid comedy that you laugh. Comedy means things are so horrible that it's a fake to adopt the position of the the position of tragedy. So this is why, just another Lacanian dogmatic explanation, I also opposed this focus of Lacan as a thinker of tragic lack. Whatever we have in our hands we always miss the ultimate object of desire. No, as I insist again and again for Lacan the other aspect of this lack is always an excess. You encounter sexuality not as a lack but as an excess. The other wants something for you, it's impenetrable, what does the other want? it's an obscene excess. The point of jouissance is not what people usually claim. Oh you can do this, that, but no matter how perverse you are in your sex life you never reach that, the full incestuous enjoyment. Lacan's point is more the opposite one. No matter how much you try to get rid of enjoyment, enjoyment will persist because it's simply displaced onto the very rituals act of getting rid of enjoyment. Here I agree with Judith Butler who in her I think best book something about culture I forgot wrote that the repression of desire always turns into desire of repression. and believe for repression. And believe me I know this because this is the basic obsessional neurotic mechanism and if anything I am that, obsessional neurotic. Namely how you want to escape some too traumatic idea of jouissance but then you elevate into object of enjoyment these very rituals of how to escape it. No enjoyment is not a lack, enjoyment is kind of a stain, an excess that you never can get rid of. Sorry for interrupting you. so wait oh okay ah it's nice that I get you again yeah. Wait sorry can I reformulate now my question for you, you know what is to cut it short so that you don't drop tired drop dead of tiredness there. I what I'm trying to do is simply to show also with my practice that this dimension, this oscillation between and I agree with you I hate them you know this fatal fascination, no whatever we do in this world is limited just pragmatic, empirical, suicidal disappearance is the only true act. I will go to the end here. I think Lacan himself, now I'm addressing to the few among you who are a little bit more dogmatically educated in Lacan. That's how I read Lacan's seminar which comes after the Ethics, where Lacan gives his wonderful reading of Claudel's Coûfontaine trilogy. I think that Lacan's reading of Antigone is still marked by this it's a certain Lacanian ontology which is now propagated by Jacques-Alain Miller which is this one. We can be truly authentic, encounter the zero point of death drive, the abyss of the thing only in momentary elements of contacting the real. But we cannot persist in this state
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so we have to return to normality but, and Miller
so we have to return to normality but, and Miller
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uses this term, with a cynical distance. Like play the game but be aware that don't take the game too seriously. That it's not the
uses this term, with a cynical distance. Like play the game but be aware that don't take the game too seriously. That it's not the
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truth. I'm totally opposed to it and I think here Lacan's Alenka do you know is it desire, desire and its interpretation wait which is the seminar that comes after Ethics? Transference. Transference. Stupid of me, I deserve Gulag for this deviation, sorry. That there it's absolutely a self-critique of Lacan. Of his one-sided reading of Ethics. Because his reading of Antigone there again can still be read in this way. We confront some ultimate zero point but it's too traumatic to persist
truth. I'm totally opposed to it and I think here Lacan's Alenka do you know is it desire, desire and its interpretation wait which is the seminar that comes after Ethics? Transference. Transference. Stupid of me, I deserve Gulag for this deviation, sorry. That there it's absolutely a self-critique of Lacan. Of his one-sided reading of Ethics. Because his reading of Antigone there again can still be read in this way. We confront some ultimate zero point but it's too traumatic to persist
Slavoj Žižek
there so let's return cynically to our daily life. I'm sorry for having interrupted you Mari, go on. No thank you so much, yeah. My point is sorry I break my point is precisely that that what I call subjective destitution or giving suicide is something not kind of a mystical I I awoke sweating in the middle of the night and blah blah and then oh let's go back to daily life. No, it's a stance which should permit sustain precisely our daily political struggle. Here I will quote my preferred theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton who uses this wonderful example. That's for me subjective destitution, of a soldier who fights, doesn't care if he dies. But at the same time it doesn't mean I want to be killed. He is very you know you are fearless not afraid to die but this doesn't mean you are an idiot who just runs into the guns. You are still very cunning, act rationally. That's what interests me. I'm very sorry now even if I have to kill myself I will shut up please. Thank you so much. Uh actually I have I have to say that I was not surprised to hear this talk and I think it's because I heard a talk a few years ago by you in which you kind of indicated that the LGBTQ+ would be the site of a some sort of a privileged site for political universalism or something like that. And so I don't want to contest anything that you said, I really just have a question. Why not contest it? F points you contest it. No now I because I want to ask a question so that I can be sure that I understood you correctly. which is, are you saying that afropessimism in your view, in your current view, is a privileged site of a more genuine universalism than what has been okay? as naive as that yeah. Okay and then how do you link that to your other point about the collective Black suicide in South Africa? That link got lost for me. I'm just asking for clarification. But collective suicide means just what again I can only give you the example of Malcolm X. The don't this is okay I will just give you the political background. I'm terrified of those Black politicians, theorists who think the situation in terms of resisting white universalism. No we have our own authentic tradition, let's return to it and so on and so on. My God my point is that white colonization never wanted to make the colonized other the same as us. Here I respectfully disagree with Homi Bhabha who spoke about mimicry and so on and so on. My big lesson here is India. You know that the first thing that the British did in the mid of 19th century was to printing old old old Veda books and so on. They noticed that if Indians keep their own traditional identity it will be much easier to keep them in subordinate position and and exploit them. And this came with a wonderful hypocrisy that every Indian colonizer, sorry British colonizer of India, they were
there so let's return cynically to our daily life. I'm sorry for having interrupted you Mari, go on. No thank you so much, yeah. My point is sorry I break my point is precisely that that what I call subjective destitution or giving suicide is something not kind of a mystical I I awoke sweating in the middle of the night and blah blah and then oh let's go back to daily life. No, it's a stance which should permit sustain precisely our daily political struggle. Here I will quote my preferred theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton who uses this wonderful example. That's for me subjective destitution, of a soldier who fights, doesn't care if he dies. But at the same time it doesn't mean I want to be killed. He is very you know you are fearless not afraid to die but this doesn't mean you are an idiot who just runs into the guns. You are still very cunning, act rationally. That's what interests me. I'm very sorry now even if I have to kill myself I will shut up please. Thank you so much. Uh actually I have I have to say that I was not surprised to hear this talk and I think it's because I heard a talk a few years ago by you in which you kind of indicated that the LGBTQ+ would be the site of a some sort of a privileged site for political universalism or something like that. And so I don't want to contest anything that you said, I really just have a question. Why not contest it? F points you contest it. No now I because I want to ask a question so that I can be sure that I understood you correctly. which is, are you saying that afropessimism in your view, in your current view, is a privileged site of a more genuine universalism than what has been okay? as naive as that yeah. Okay and then how do you link that to your other point about the collective Black suicide in South Africa? That link got lost for me. I'm just asking for clarification. But collective suicide means just what again I can only give you the example of Malcolm X. The don't this is okay I will just give you the political background. I'm terrified of those Black politicians, theorists who think the situation in terms of resisting white universalism. No we have our own authentic tradition, let's return to it and so on and so on. My God my point is that white colonization never wanted to make the colonized other the same as us. Here I respectfully disagree with Homi Bhabha who spoke about mimicry and so on and so on. My big lesson here is India. You know that the first thing that the British did in the mid of 19th century was to printing old old old Veda books and so on. They noticed that if Indians keep their own traditional identity it will be much easier to keep them in subordinate position and and exploit them. And this came with a wonderful hypocrisy that every Indian colonizer, sorry British colonizer of India, they were
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always ready to
always ready to
Slavoj Žižek
to accept my God I read some brutal colonizer's memoirs where he says My God I've never seen such a spiritual depth as in an ordinary half-illiterate Indian farmer. Who are we? Nothing, pure Western manipulators technologists and so on and so on. This is how racism works today. This is why the friends that I have among Native Americans, the friends who hate these terms by the way is precisely one told me a wonderful story, I will not report my own stories, when he was visited in some reservation by a Black guy living in a nice villa in LA of course who said My God you live such an authentic life I would like and then my Native American friend told him Wonderful let's exchange our places. You come to live in my dirty hut, allow me to go and you can have all the authenticity here. So I you see my point. I believe in universality. Not abstract universality of we are simply all the same but I believe in this, how should I put it, multiculturalism of mixing identities. In what sense? It always, sorry my old story, it always fascinated me to see how a certain work of art when it's transposed into another culture you preserve you observe you become aware in this work of art of something that was not there in the original. I think foreigners can understand us as a rule better than we understand here. My usual example. You can download it on Pirate Bay. The best version of Hamlet is for me Akira Kurosawa from '62 set in modern Japan with a wonderful title The Bad Sleep Well you know which is totally true. They don't have conscience and so on. You see this is why, my last story sorry if you know it since Salman Rushdie was in the news recently. I remember being at a round table with him where somebody criticized him for for betraying his Indian roots and so on. And he gave a wonderful answer. He said Not true, my biggest inspiration are two great Indian writers. Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. And he went on how all this topic, Austen's topic of impoverished upper class trying to marry their daughters he said This is Bombay today, the upper middle class. and so on and so on. You see this is for me what Hegel would have called concrete universality. Not this abstract we are all humans and so on, but this unique mixture of particular identities where something new emerges. Sorry again. Thank you so much. I interrupted you four five times. It's obviously true what people say that no matter how I try to flatter feminists I'm really a male chauvinist pig and I don't know what to do. Thank you. I think I can forgive you for that. thank you. So nice, thanks very much yeah. But sorry Mari, my last question to you but admit something else that this I hate it I'm for death penalty. You know this type of apparently anti-male chauvinist men who celebrate women
to accept my God I read some brutal colonizer's memoirs where he says My God I've never seen such a spiritual depth as in an ordinary half-illiterate Indian farmer. Who are we? Nothing, pure Western manipulators technologists and so on and so on. This is how racism works today. This is why the friends that I have among Native Americans, the friends who hate these terms by the way is precisely one told me a wonderful story, I will not report my own stories, when he was visited in some reservation by a Black guy living in a nice villa in LA of course who said My God you live such an authentic life I would like and then my Native American friend told him Wonderful let's exchange our places. You come to live in my dirty hut, allow me to go and you can have all the authenticity here. So I you see my point. I believe in universality. Not abstract universality of we are simply all the same but I believe in this, how should I put it, multiculturalism of mixing identities. In what sense? It always, sorry my old story, it always fascinated me to see how a certain work of art when it's transposed into another culture you preserve you observe you become aware in this work of art of something that was not there in the original. I think foreigners can understand us as a rule better than we understand here. My usual example. You can download it on Pirate Bay. The best version of Hamlet is for me Akira Kurosawa from '62 set in modern Japan with a wonderful title The Bad Sleep Well you know which is totally true. They don't have conscience and so on. You see this is why, my last story sorry if you know it since Salman Rushdie was in the news recently. I remember being at a round table with him where somebody criticized him for for betraying his Indian roots and so on. And he gave a wonderful answer. He said Not true, my biggest inspiration are two great Indian writers. Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. And he went on how all this topic, Austen's topic of impoverished upper class trying to marry their daughters he said This is Bombay today, the upper middle class. and so on and so on. You see this is for me what Hegel would have called concrete universality. Not this abstract we are all humans and so on, but this unique mixture of particular identities where something new emerges. Sorry again. Thank you so much. I interrupted you four five times. It's obviously true what people say that no matter how I try to flatter feminists I'm really a male chauvinist pig and I don't know what to do. Thank you. I think I can forgive you for that. thank you. So nice, thanks very much yeah. But sorry Mari, my last question to you but admit something else that this I hate it I'm for death penalty. You know this type of apparently anti-male chauvinist men who celebrate women
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but in this fake patronizing way. You know like We men are too much caught into manipulating nature domination. You women are much more into organic collaboration with nature. I this is death penalty for me. You know? Would you agree with my For me too, for me too. I'm going to interrupt you now okay because that's death penalty for me too. I hate that kind of of thinking. The whole men are different
but in this fake patronizing way. You know like We men are too much caught into manipulating nature domination. You women are much more into organic collaboration with nature. I this is death penalty for me. You know? Would you agree with my For me too, for me too. I'm going to interrupt you now okay because that's death penalty for me too. I hate that kind of of thinking. The whole men are different
Slavoj Žižek
than women I I can't stand it. So no. Good. Sorry now I will be silent. Thanks. Hey Slavoj.
than women I I can't stand it. So no. Good. Sorry now I will be silent. Thanks. Hey Slavoj.
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Yes, Carol yeah. You fuck you. I don't want to talk with you you are sorry. He is my best friend so I want to begin with an insult. You know you sent me your last book. Did I send it to you? A year ago, yeah. Yeah yeah. And you know what? The paper was so rough that I couldn't even use it as a toilet paper. Okay now ask your stupid question. Okay. I just it's really short. it's just what is the what is the collective subjective destitution look like the day after? So I just want to like bring
Yes, Carol yeah. You fuck you. I don't want to talk with you you are sorry. He is my best friend so I want to begin with an insult. You know you sent me your last book. Did I send it to you? A year ago, yeah. Yeah yeah. And you know what? The paper was so rough that I couldn't even use it as a toilet paper. Okay now ask your stupid question. Okay. I just it's really short. it's just what is the what is the collective subjective destitution look like the day after? So I just want to like bring
Slavoj Žižek
together a couple of your ideas and I wonder if you could talk about that. A very good question. Because here also as people who know my work know, I am tired of this let's call it ecstatic leftism. You know. we have a month or two of state of emergency millions on the street and so on. But then things return to normal and they may be even worse than the day before. But then this upper class leftists withdraw to their academic work and write very complex books why? because of the betrayal and counter-revolution. the revolution had to go wrong and so on and so on. No I I think when I speak about subjective destitution, first I don't mean a kind of a general obliteration of subjectivity. What I call sub Okay now Graham you are there. You know when you attack attack okay it's stupid term I know. When you when you in your wonderful descriptions, and I quote them in my new book, when you describe this how should I call it, I don't know the proper term, this this equalization of what are in traditional ontology different level. humans interacting with ani no different levels: minerals, nature, they all interact, you know. I think maybe here is the disagreement. I find this stance wonderful but I think it involves a subject. Not an active subject in the sense of false Kantian sense of dominating it all constituting it, but the subject as the very space of universality, the position from which maybe here Graham we disagree, the position from which you can adopt this wonderful stance. I remember here how was she called my God, the one I'm sorry this is my senility not anti-feminism. A lady who wrote a wonderful book on this ontology and proposed this metaphor of a place where where things rot and how you know in all this decay where technology in decay mix with nature new forms of interactive life emerge and so on and so on. Jane Bennett? Jane Bennett? Yeah yeah. I'm not saying I agree totally with her but this position I only claim maybe we disagree here that this position still implies what I would have called subject. Not as an active agent but as a very space from which you can perceive all this. I doubt that an animal or another being caught into its particular environment can can perceive this. But back to your point I agree with your point Todd, absolutely. I am for revolution the day after. when the when like what interests me more and more is and here so that you will not say again that I am dreaming would you agree Todd? If you agree I will read your next books I will not use it in the above mentioned way. Like here that's why I not as an opportunism but with full conviction supported this Latino guys. first Morales. Morales was a little bit of a jerk but behind him there were there were Linera and Lucho Arce. They were excellent socialist technocrats. They they didn't screw up capitalism. They controlled it in a very reasonable way. Capital didn't run away. They they were not Chavez and Cuba. who I think genuinely screwed it up. No absolutely I think that's right. And again I the same looks in Chile I hope in Colombia. Here we have the left which is not the left of oh we had one million people on the street and then misery returns and then you blame capitalism or whatever
together a couple of your ideas and I wonder if you could talk about that. A very good question. Because here also as people who know my work know, I am tired of this let's call it ecstatic leftism. You know. we have a month or two of state of emergency millions on the street and so on. But then things return to normal and they may be even worse than the day before. But then this upper class leftists withdraw to their academic work and write very complex books why? because of the betrayal and counter-revolution. the revolution had to go wrong and so on and so on. No I I think when I speak about subjective destitution, first I don't mean a kind of a general obliteration of subjectivity. What I call sub Okay now Graham you are there. You know when you attack attack okay it's stupid term I know. When you when you in your wonderful descriptions, and I quote them in my new book, when you describe this how should I call it, I don't know the proper term, this this equalization of what are in traditional ontology different level. humans interacting with ani no different levels: minerals, nature, they all interact, you know. I think maybe here is the disagreement. I find this stance wonderful but I think it involves a subject. Not an active subject in the sense of false Kantian sense of dominating it all constituting it, but the subject as the very space of universality, the position from which maybe here Graham we disagree, the position from which you can adopt this wonderful stance. I remember here how was she called my God, the one I'm sorry this is my senility not anti-feminism. A lady who wrote a wonderful book on this ontology and proposed this metaphor of a place where where things rot and how you know in all this decay where technology in decay mix with nature new forms of interactive life emerge and so on and so on. Jane Bennett? Jane Bennett? Yeah yeah. I'm not saying I agree totally with her but this position I only claim maybe we disagree here that this position still implies what I would have called subject. Not as an active agent but as a very space from which you can perceive all this. I doubt that an animal or another being caught into its particular environment can can perceive this. But back to your point I agree with your point Todd, absolutely. I am for revolution the day after. when the when like what interests me more and more is and here so that you will not say again that I am dreaming would you agree Todd? If you agree I will read your next books I will not use it in the above mentioned way. Like here that's why I not as an opportunism but with full conviction supported this Latino guys. first Morales. Morales was a little bit of a jerk but behind him there were there were Linera and Lucho Arce. They were excellent socialist technocrats. They they didn't screw up capitalism. They controlled it in a very reasonable way. Capital didn't run away. They they were not Chavez and Cuba. who I think genuinely screwed it up. No absolutely I think that's right. And again I the same looks in Chile I hope in Colombia. Here we have the left which is not the left of oh we had one million people on the street and then misery returns and then you blame capitalism or whatever
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you know.
you know.
Slavoj Žižek
A left which is aware of the is not simply a pragmatic left. They are aware of how the predicament we are in global warming war and so on will
A left which is aware of the is not simply a pragmatic left. They are aware of how the predicament we are in global warming war and so on will
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can be met
can be met
Slavoj Žižek
only through more radical changes but at the same time they are aware that if you proceed too fast in the wrong way with this changes you screw it up even more. That they would be if you ask me a model for me. I agree with that. I think you're I agree yeah. Let's go to Kiara quickly. We have how are you doing on time I think five ten minutes it's okay? Yeah yeah yeah I owe you this. All right. So this is a bit of a life situation but I'm sorry Slavoj you're the idiot. Either you're the idiot or
only through more radical changes but at the same time they are aware that if you proceed too fast in the wrong way with this changes you screw it up even more. That they would be if you ask me a model for me. I agree with that. I think you're I agree yeah. Let's go to Kiara quickly. We have how are you doing on time I think five ten minutes it's okay? Yeah yeah yeah I owe you this. All right. So this is a bit of a life situation but I'm sorry Slavoj you're the idiot. Either you're the idiot or
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or the transphobe because you keep blurting this stuff out that's so hard to justify. And it's like Where am I a transphobe? can you
or the transphobe because you keep blurting this stuff out that's so hard to justify. And it's like Where am I a transphobe? can you
Slavoj Žižek
explain? I have to I have to keep quiet about sort of being into your work it's like a guilty pleasure these days. Because you say so much that I just don't think it takes into account the field in which you're you're engaging and and how people are going to respond to it because they're going to read
explain? I have to I have to keep quiet about sort of being into your work it's like a guilty pleasure these days. Because you say so much that I just don't think it takes into account the field in which you're you're engaging and and how people are going to respond to it because they're going to read
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it as transphobic and and maybe you're not maybe you're just an idiot. But I I do think there is But can you explain to
it as transphobic and and maybe you're not maybe you're just an idiot. But I I do think there is But can you explain to
Slavoj Žižek
me this transphobic element? where do you see it? Well you have to watch my talk yesterday. There's this I mean like they're comparing cross-dressing with blacking up your face. You know that's that's uh got to be offensive to a lot of people including me. I just think I just think it's clumsy at best but there's also plenty of repetition. There's lots of examples where you you seem to single out trans people uh but not for instance cis women or for example just keep coming back to trans women to make your points where it's completely unnecessary as it was with the comment about sort of blacking up your face in your latest book. But yeah I mean I think you need to take take into account the context in which you're saying these things and and you shoot yourself in the foot and it makes it very difficult then to say I'm a Žižekian or I love Žižek and they say How can you love Žižek? You're a trans woman. You know I think the Okay no I appreciate your point but let me make first let me clarify something. Nobody will like it. I find very problematic this idea of context not being offensive. I want to be offensive because context itself can be wrong. In the sense of what is the context today? The context is the predominant ideology. And we have to be offensive here otherwise we are immediately re immediately reappropriated. Second thing uh what you said about this transphobia. Listen my position is very clear and as you pointed out and I agree here, even repeated repeatedly. Why? Because I follow Lacan here. No no no not that this justifies me. What I like in Lacan is that he has a couple of examples stories literary motifs and he returns to them again and again. But you follow him closely he changes uh the reading. But one point is basic. So here I would like to see where you have transphobia. My basic point is that sexual difference is not as you know is not binary in the sense of male identity opposed to female identity. And there I go into this Lacanian Hegelian paradox that uh that trans people stand for difference as such in opposition to to masculine feminine and so on. That trans is precisely not I what I oppose is this simplified idea that there is an original fluidity of trans and then bad uh patriarchy imposes binary opposition. I I think that sexual difference not in the sense of established identities but in the sense of the deadlock that marks sexuality is at its purest embodied in trans people. They and that's why para you know for me as a Lacanian Hegelian antagonism always involves three points never two. That's why as Mladen Dolar used this example a go years ago from Kierkegaard where Kierkegaard quotes a wonderful uh some some Danish comic writer who said all people can be classified into officers housemaids and chimney sweepers, you know. Like where is the chimney sweeper if the first two stand And so again my idea is that we don't have just identities and their opposition. We have also a privileged element which gives body to identity itself. And here I read you I want to ask you Kiara a question. Uh you on the one hand you go into this trans blah blah I agree but then somehow you claim that feminine identity is negativity as such and so on. But you know many some trans feminists that I know would say No no no trans means also you renounce feminine identity. What where do you stand here? why do you still privilege privilege feminine? I do but why you? I mean I think I mean it's complex uh answer that I would give in the presence of time but I mean you can just take the example of you know the diversity of clothes that a woman can wear against the very limited range of options of a man and that's and or we have notions such as gender neutral clothing it's never dresses it's always I agree
me this transphobic element? where do you see it? Well you have to watch my talk yesterday. There's this I mean like they're comparing cross-dressing with blacking up your face. You know that's that's uh got to be offensive to a lot of people including me. I just think I just think it's clumsy at best but there's also plenty of repetition. There's lots of examples where you you seem to single out trans people uh but not for instance cis women or for example just keep coming back to trans women to make your points where it's completely unnecessary as it was with the comment about sort of blacking up your face in your latest book. But yeah I mean I think you need to take take into account the context in which you're saying these things and and you shoot yourself in the foot and it makes it very difficult then to say I'm a Žižekian or I love Žižek and they say How can you love Žižek? You're a trans woman. You know I think the Okay no I appreciate your point but let me make first let me clarify something. Nobody will like it. I find very problematic this idea of context not being offensive. I want to be offensive because context itself can be wrong. In the sense of what is the context today? The context is the predominant ideology. And we have to be offensive here otherwise we are immediately re immediately reappropriated. Second thing uh what you said about this transphobia. Listen my position is very clear and as you pointed out and I agree here, even repeated repeatedly. Why? Because I follow Lacan here. No no no not that this justifies me. What I like in Lacan is that he has a couple of examples stories literary motifs and he returns to them again and again. But you follow him closely he changes uh the reading. But one point is basic. So here I would like to see where you have transphobia. My basic point is that sexual difference is not as you know is not binary in the sense of male identity opposed to female identity. And there I go into this Lacanian Hegelian paradox that uh that trans people stand for difference as such in opposition to to masculine feminine and so on. That trans is precisely not I what I oppose is this simplified idea that there is an original fluidity of trans and then bad uh patriarchy imposes binary opposition. I I think that sexual difference not in the sense of established identities but in the sense of the deadlock that marks sexuality is at its purest embodied in trans people. They and that's why para you know for me as a Lacanian Hegelian antagonism always involves three points never two. That's why as Mladen Dolar used this example a go years ago from Kierkegaard where Kierkegaard quotes a wonderful uh some some Danish comic writer who said all people can be classified into officers housemaids and chimney sweepers, you know. Like where is the chimney sweeper if the first two stand And so again my idea is that we don't have just identities and their opposition. We have also a privileged element which gives body to identity itself. And here I read you I want to ask you Kiara a question. Uh you on the one hand you go into this trans blah blah I agree but then somehow you claim that feminine identity is negativity as such and so on. But you know many some trans feminists that I know would say No no no trans means also you renounce feminine identity. What where do you stand here? why do you still privilege privilege feminine? I do but why you? I mean I think I mean it's complex uh answer that I would give in the presence of time but I mean you can just take the example of you know the diversity of clothes that a woman can wear against the very limited range of options of a man and that's and or we have notions such as gender neutral clothing it's never dresses it's always I agree
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I agree yeah.
I agree yeah.
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And so and so there is trousers clothing where do trans stand here? I think this is just symptomatic of of a
And so and so there is trousers clothing where do trans stand here? I think this is just symptomatic of of a
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deeper problem that people have with femininity. feminine expressions, things that we associate I know sort of in gendered respects to femininity such as caring for others, tenderness, kindness. All these issues that men have with their masculinity the pressures to man up. It comes back to if you like the feminist hysteric who says uh you know You're not man enough. you know women can be just as bad as men in goading men into uh being the the better patriarch and and but then there's also the feminine sexuality dimension which I I don't
deeper problem that people have with femininity. feminine expressions, things that we associate I know sort of in gendered respects to femininity such as caring for others, tenderness, kindness. All these issues that men have with their masculinity the pressures to man up. It comes back to if you like the feminist hysteric who says uh you know You're not man enough. you know women can be just as bad as men in goading men into uh being the the better patriarch and and but then there's also the feminine sexuality dimension which I I don't
Slavoj Žižek
want to spend up spend too much time I know there isn't much
want to spend up spend too much time I know there isn't much
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time. Maybe watch my talk yesterday but it's going to be deeply offensive or maybe not maybe you'll appreciate the intervention uh but yeah I mean plenty to talk about. Maybe No but but still the problem I found again again is sometimes maybe it's my superficial reading, sometimes you want to be radically trans but sometimes you speak about femininity undermining patriarchy. So are you claiming and I at a certain level I would be able to accept this that there is a trans element in okay we should demystify this notion but in femininity as such? That femininity is not self-identical in the same way that masculinity is. It's not masculine identity and feminine identity. Yeah. And this is I think exactly you may disagree what Lacan means by la femme n'existe pas. Exactly that with man you
time. Maybe watch my talk yesterday but it's going to be deeply offensive or maybe not maybe you'll appreciate the intervention uh but yeah I mean plenty to talk about. Maybe No but but still the problem I found again again is sometimes maybe it's my superficial reading, sometimes you want to be radically trans but sometimes you speak about femininity undermining patriarchy. So are you claiming and I at a certain level I would be able to accept this that there is a trans element in okay we should demystify this notion but in femininity as such? That femininity is not self-identical in the same way that masculinity is. It's not masculine identity and feminine identity. Yeah. And this is I think exactly you may disagree what Lacan means by la femme n'existe pas. Exactly that with man you
Slavoj Žižek
have a That's why I claimed now that may be a problematic point for you that Descartes is at the origin of all good. Because do you know his immense influence among women of his time, Descartes? They liked him because they got it. As one of his okay rich noblewoman admirers put it Cogito doesn't have a sex which meant is not masculine. And I I I love this idea. But okay sorry we cannot go on yes I will definitely look. I think we probably in a lot of agreement but there's this minor of course disagreement that can raise many issues. So I agree and I love how you say this. This is how we civilized people and I am not ironic. How we politely say that we don't agree with each other. Like we practically agree there is just maybe some minor point nowhere where I sent you to Gulag or you sent me to Gulag and I love this. Right. Thank you another time. Thanks. Very very interesting. I wanted to reference at least one comment from the audience which is Andrew Andrew said something very interesting which is are you aware that the title of Huey Newton's autobiography was called Revolutionary Suicide. He's one of the founders of the Black Panthers. No but you know I admire oh my God I forgot this. You know why I especially admire Huey Newton? Hmm? You know about his link with uh who was that famous leftist American Erikson or one of the great psychoanalysts? Erik Erikson. Yeah and you know that Huey Newton has a book of dialogues with him? Erikson was totally on his side. Huey Newton is an in- incredibly important figure. He is and I say this only about a few people. You know there are geniuses this that but they are idiots and there are only a few people who are not complete idiots. And one of them is Huey Newton. My God oh oh you know what I will do now? my usual cheating. I will find this book. no? Yeah yeah thanks yeah In Search of Common Ground yes thanks. I will find this book and then you know how we academics cheat? I will quote it and then I will add a small footnote claiming After I finished this text I noticed that my friend Daniel Todd also knew this. You know like when you cheat from when you steal from the other you admit it but as a contingent afterwards coincidence. No that's basic academic cheating no? Okay okay let's do our final question with Matthew Flisfeder. My friend please go. Sure. Hi Slavoj good to see you. My boy we are all the time in contact yeah. Okay um so I saw that you I haven't read it yet but I saw that you published today a piece on Mikhail Gorbachev
have a That's why I claimed now that may be a problematic point for you that Descartes is at the origin of all good. Because do you know his immense influence among women of his time, Descartes? They liked him because they got it. As one of his okay rich noblewoman admirers put it Cogito doesn't have a sex which meant is not masculine. And I I I love this idea. But okay sorry we cannot go on yes I will definitely look. I think we probably in a lot of agreement but there's this minor of course disagreement that can raise many issues. So I agree and I love how you say this. This is how we civilized people and I am not ironic. How we politely say that we don't agree with each other. Like we practically agree there is just maybe some minor point nowhere where I sent you to Gulag or you sent me to Gulag and I love this. Right. Thank you another time. Thanks. Very very interesting. I wanted to reference at least one comment from the audience which is Andrew Andrew said something very interesting which is are you aware that the title of Huey Newton's autobiography was called Revolutionary Suicide. He's one of the founders of the Black Panthers. No but you know I admire oh my God I forgot this. You know why I especially admire Huey Newton? Hmm? You know about his link with uh who was that famous leftist American Erikson or one of the great psychoanalysts? Erik Erikson. Yeah and you know that Huey Newton has a book of dialogues with him? Erikson was totally on his side. Huey Newton is an in- incredibly important figure. He is and I say this only about a few people. You know there are geniuses this that but they are idiots and there are only a few people who are not complete idiots. And one of them is Huey Newton. My God oh oh you know what I will do now? my usual cheating. I will find this book. no? Yeah yeah thanks yeah In Search of Common Ground yes thanks. I will find this book and then you know how we academics cheat? I will quote it and then I will add a small footnote claiming After I finished this text I noticed that my friend Daniel Todd also knew this. You know like when you cheat from when you steal from the other you admit it but as a contingent afterwards coincidence. No that's basic academic cheating no? Okay okay let's do our final question with Matthew Flisfeder. My friend please go. Sure. Hi Slavoj good to see you. My boy we are all the time in contact yeah. Okay um so I saw that you I haven't read it yet but I saw that you published today a piece on Mikhail Gorbachev
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and I'm wondering Sorry don't everything is read in my previous books journalist called me and I you know what I did? This very PC on which you see me now I put click to my texts find Gorbachev and I combined three four fragments. It took me minutes okay. But but here's my question. So in the context of the the current war how do
and I'm wondering Sorry don't everything is read in my previous books journalist called me and I you know what I did? This very PC on which you see me now I put click to my texts find Gorbachev and I combined three four fragments. It took me minutes okay. But but here's my question. So in the context of the the current war how do
Slavoj Žižek
you see the
you see the
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opposition Gorbachev Putin especially in light of the way that Gorbachev in
opposition Gorbachev Putin especially in light of the way that Gorbachev in
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particular portrayed Gorbachev got lost. He was half pro-Putin almost he tried to show understanding for Putin and so on. And wait a minute to avoid a misunderstanding. I'm not crazily just pro-Ukrainian. I know a lot about what they are doing wrong we can talk literally for over an hour about this. But all I'm saying this is my basic point. It's a well-thought geopolitical plan behind what Russia is doing and it's not it's not just this all this Alexander Dugin stupid almost theology nationalist is for me not just a bombastic excuse to grab a piece of land there. There is a precise sense in which the enemy is Europe much
particular portrayed Gorbachev got lost. He was half pro-Putin almost he tried to show understanding for Putin and so on. And wait a minute to avoid a misunderstanding. I'm not crazily just pro-Ukrainian. I know a lot about what they are doing wrong we can talk literally for over an hour about this. But all I'm saying this is my basic point. It's a well-thought geopolitical plan behind what Russia is doing and it's not it's not just this all this Alexander Dugin stupid almost theology nationalist is for me not just a bombastic excuse to grab a piece of land there. There is a precise sense in which the enemy is Europe much
Slavoj Žižek
more than United States. Which is why and this is what really scares me out of shit there are signs in the Republican Party where they because do you know that American old right always hated Europe? But Europe as United Europe. Steve Bannon has his goal is to break up European Union. So what I'm saying is that what really makes me afraid is that maybe if not Trump but some kind of Trumpian Republicans take over I can easily easily yes Putin's Russia infiltrate the NRA yes I'm easily convinced that they can make some peace new Republican United States and Putin's Russia against the the European Union. Also I warn you I wrote in another text of mine of something else. I know people who know people who at the end know people who claim to be close to Putin. I have my own KGB private KGB. And they told me something very interesting. That Putin I've written about it in my previous texts that Putin
more than United States. Which is why and this is what really scares me out of shit there are signs in the Republican Party where they because do you know that American old right always hated Europe? But Europe as United Europe. Steve Bannon has his goal is to break up European Union. So what I'm saying is that what really makes me afraid is that maybe if not Trump but some kind of Trumpian Republicans take over I can easily easily yes Putin's Russia infiltrate the NRA yes I'm easily convinced that they can make some peace new Republican United States and Putin's Russia against the the European Union. Also I warn you I wrote in another text of mine of something else. I know people who know people who at the end know people who claim to be close to Putin. I have my own KGB private KGB. And they told me something very interesting. That Putin I've written about it in my previous texts that Putin
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doesn't only have this religious orthodox Dugin and so on guys. He has also a small think tank of
doesn't only have this religious orthodox Dugin and so on guys. He has also a small think tank of
Slavoj Žižek
leftists who provide him with line with line of argumentation of how to present Russian case to the third world countries. Like all this you know We are now decolonizing Ukraine what we are doing now is
leftists who provide him with line with line of argumentation of how to present Russian case to the third world countries. Like all this you know We are now decolonizing Ukraine what we are doing now is
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the
the
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final defeat of the Western colonization and so on and so on. This is I think the the true tragedy and if you ask me I'm more of a pessimist here. I think if I were still to be young to have
final defeat of the Western colonization and so on and so on. This is I think the the true tragedy and if you ask me I'm more of a pessimist here. I think if I were still to be young to have
Slavoj Žižek
children I would be very skeptical about having children these days. Do you do you think that Dugin is at all a serious thinker or philosopher? No no but and he's also one should not exaggerate his influence. He is not really I know from my spies he is not really a secret mind no Putin calls him every evening blah blah no no no. There are others some of them are even worse than Dugin. But you know don't forget that there is a long tradition here. It began with I've written about it some know it Ivan Ilyin. He was uh he is the original figure of Russian fascism. In the or when when Lenin put a couple of philosophers who annoyed him on a so-called philosophers' boat, Ilyin was on that one and then he was in the 20s and 30s in Italy and Germany. He didn't quite like Nazism although he was impressed. He said that German Nazism was already too much infected by German technology by German Western technology individualism and so on. His idea was only Russia can produce an
children I would be very skeptical about having children these days. Do you do you think that Dugin is at all a serious thinker or philosopher? No no but and he's also one should not exaggerate his influence. He is not really I know from my spies he is not really a secret mind no Putin calls him every evening blah blah no no no. There are others some of them are even worse than Dugin. But you know don't forget that there is a long tradition here. It began with I've written about it some know it Ivan Ilyin. He was uh he is the original figure of Russian fascism. In the or when when Lenin put a couple of philosophers who annoyed him on a so-called philosophers' boat, Ilyin was on that one and then he was in the 20s and 30s in Italy and Germany. He didn't quite like Nazism although he was impressed. He said that German Nazism was already too much infected by German technology by German Western technology individualism and so on. His idea was only Russia can produce an
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authentic fascism. And this is he is taken so seriously now you will say no do you know that Putin has his body brought back to
authentic fascism. And this is he is taken so seriously now you will say no do you know that Putin has his body brought back to
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Russia and buried officially
Russia and buried officially
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a great ceremony and
a great ceremony and
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do you know that Ilyin's books are now reprinted and given to all military conscripts to all state bureaucrats and so on and so on. This idea that the West was too liberal to even construct a good proper organic fascism that only only the Russia can do it. This is not a joke. Don't overestimate Dugin but but this whole ideological field that he stands for it has to be taken seriously. And what do you make of the the the fascist because a lot of people on the left in the US they say the Ukraine is overriden with fascism themselves so it's a contradiction. No let's be serious here. First yeah yeah there are fascists. Their percentage is definitely lower than in France and in West Germany you know. This truly fascist group got percent and something votes in the last election
do you know that Ilyin's books are now reprinted and given to all military conscripts to all state bureaucrats and so on and so on. This idea that the West was too liberal to even construct a good proper organic fascism that only only the Russia can do it. This is not a joke. Don't overestimate Dugin but but this whole ideological field that he stands for it has to be taken seriously. And what do you make of the the the fascist because a lot of people on the left in the US they say the Ukraine is overriden with fascism themselves so it's a contradiction. No let's be serious here. First yeah yeah there are fascists. Their percentage is definitely lower than in France and in West Germany you know. This truly fascist group got percent and something votes in the last election
Slavoj Žižek
and so on. The tragedy as I've written I am afraid of is that although most of West European fascists they don't call themselves fascists like the new right like Salvini in Italy Le Pen in France have more sympathies for Russia but nonetheless this Visegrád group this new European East European post-communist right Poland and so on they try to inscribe as it were Ukraine into their field against liberal multicultural West. And this is what worries me. If Ukraine survive what kind of Ukraine will survive? And I think the left whatever remains of the left in Europe is here making a terrible mistake by this by this non-decisive stance Yes all sides are guilty maybe also Ukrainians fascism corruption. Of course there is corruption but you know this is the platform on which Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected. Now he is desperate not because only of Russia because he becomes aware of how difficult it is to change the actual state apparatus. But I still think although he may sound a little bit crazy and so on I still think that that Zelenskyy in spite of his Vogue portraits and so on all that stuff that basically he is aware also of this oligarchy danger and so on and so on. To some journalists he even confessed that the Maidan uprising was not it was a genuine popular movement. Friends send me clips from there. You know on that square there were theatrical performances theoretical debates it was authentic. But in the background it was the conflict between pro-Western and pro-Russian oligarchs. So never and I've written in a text against two colonizations don't forget another thing here the West will screw it up. Do you know how the West is grabbing land in Ukraine? Now it's the big fight for Ukrainian farming land which is maybe the most fertile in the world. Not only Russia wants it to blackmail us all with food but the do you know that the West mega companies already own over one third of the best Russian uh sorry Ukrainian land. They tried to that's the dirty game of the West. Ukrainians tried to stop this. years ago I don't know when they passed a law prohibiting foreigners to own the land. Under terrible pressure from the West
and so on. The tragedy as I've written I am afraid of is that although most of West European fascists they don't call themselves fascists like the new right like Salvini in Italy Le Pen in France have more sympathies for Russia but nonetheless this Visegrád group this new European East European post-communist right Poland and so on they try to inscribe as it were Ukraine into their field against liberal multicultural West. And this is what worries me. If Ukraine survive what kind of Ukraine will survive? And I think the left whatever remains of the left in Europe is here making a terrible mistake by this by this non-decisive stance Yes all sides are guilty maybe also Ukrainians fascism corruption. Of course there is corruption but you know this is the platform on which Volodymyr Zelenskyy was elected. Now he is desperate not because only of Russia because he becomes aware of how difficult it is to change the actual state apparatus. But I still think although he may sound a little bit crazy and so on I still think that that Zelenskyy in spite of his Vogue portraits and so on all that stuff that basically he is aware also of this oligarchy danger and so on and so on. To some journalists he even confessed that the Maidan uprising was not it was a genuine popular movement. Friends send me clips from there. You know on that square there were theatrical performances theoretical debates it was authentic. But in the background it was the conflict between pro-Western and pro-Russian oligarchs. So never and I've written in a text against two colonizations don't forget another thing here the West will screw it up. Do you know how the West is grabbing land in Ukraine? Now it's the big fight for Ukrainian farming land which is maybe the most fertile in the world. Not only Russia wants it to blackmail us all with food but the do you know that the West mega companies already own over one third of the best Russian uh sorry Ukrainian land. They tried to that's the dirty game of the West. Ukrainians tried to stop this. years ago I don't know when they passed a law prohibiting foreigners to own the land. Under terrible pressure from the West
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Zelenskyy had to repeal this. Because the West is here very brutal. They said Ah you want our help? Fuck it then
Zelenskyy had to repeal this. Because the West is here very brutal. They said Ah you want our help? Fuck it then
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repeal that Do you think do you think that Trump would have not allowed this to happen? This whole conflagration with
repeal that Do you think do you think that Trump would have not allowed this to happen? This whole conflagration with
Slavoj Žižek
Russia Ukraine. I think he would just have tried to mediate it but definitely in Putin's favor. Remember the first reaction of Trump
Russia Ukraine. I think he would just have tried to mediate it but definitely in Putin's favor. Remember the first reaction of Trump
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to Russian invasion It's ingenious it's incredible. Then he withdrew but you know who especially was a shock for me? I'm saying what I'm saying
to Russian invasion It's ingenious it's incredible. Then he withdrew but you know who especially was a shock for me? I'm saying what I'm saying
Slavoj Žižek
now with full irony. My best friend Jordan Peterson no? It was tragic to listen to him how he begins he it's not even a podcast he make really a made a one hour speech where he said Yeah yeah yeah it's sad this brutal attack but then he goes totally pro-Russian. He accepts the Russian designation of Western degeneration and he said I think Putin is sincerely religious. My God for me this is horrible but for him it's a good Putin is sincerely religious they are building many churches. Of course they are. They even build now a church of the a big cathedral dedicated to the army it's a wonderful paradox. Orthodox church with their frescoes of Red Army fighting and so on. So uh I definitely think that Trump maybe would have tried to make a compromise but Trump would not go in this direction of confrontation. And you know what I hate when people say Aren't you horrified by these pacifist stupidities? Like Why should we help Ukraine because bringing in more arms will not stop the war? Okay I say them Why not then to say the same to France in Why arms? there will be much less suffering if you simply surrender and so on and so on. You know what's the problem with Ukraine and all those countries Finland and so on. They really afraid, we underestimate this in the West. They are really afraid of Russia. You know? Because Russia is making clear moves. It was before in Georgia and so on. It's clear and they are simply it's not that Finland and Sweden Oh we want NATO. They were simply afraid because Putin made and you know in one text before the last one months I wrote about how this term denazification is already slowly expanding itself. Now some Serb representatives are telling from uh from uh from uh is telling that we need to denazify Kosovo and Bosnia you know
now with full irony. My best friend Jordan Peterson no? It was tragic to listen to him how he begins he it's not even a podcast he make really a made a one hour speech where he said Yeah yeah yeah it's sad this brutal attack but then he goes totally pro-Russian. He accepts the Russian designation of Western degeneration and he said I think Putin is sincerely religious. My God for me this is horrible but for him it's a good Putin is sincerely religious they are building many churches. Of course they are. They even build now a church of the a big cathedral dedicated to the army it's a wonderful paradox. Orthodox church with their frescoes of Red Army fighting and so on. So uh I definitely think that Trump maybe would have tried to make a compromise but Trump would not go in this direction of confrontation. And you know what I hate when people say Aren't you horrified by these pacifist stupidities? Like Why should we help Ukraine because bringing in more arms will not stop the war? Okay I say them Why not then to say the same to France in Why arms? there will be much less suffering if you simply surrender and so on and so on. You know what's the problem with Ukraine and all those countries Finland and so on. They really afraid, we underestimate this in the West. They are really afraid of Russia. You know? Because Russia is making clear moves. It was before in Georgia and so on. It's clear and they are simply it's not that Finland and Sweden Oh we want NATO. They were simply afraid because Putin made and you know in one text before the last one months I wrote about how this term denazification is already slowly expanding itself. Now some Serb representatives are telling from uh from uh from uh is telling that we need to denazify Kosovo and Bosnia you know
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it's uh it's So you you have no trust or or you're
it's uh it's So you you have no trust or or you're
Slavoj Žižek
not convinced of the classic leftist claim of NATO imperialism in this context. No, you know why? Let's be frank. Let's take World War II. Look at the data, don't idealize Roosevelt. The crisis went on through the 30s. It's only World War II with military investments which brought United States really out of crisis. So should we then say Don't fight the Germans it helps the American military establishment? I would worry much more as I said about that land grabbing and so on and so on. You know this agricultural if we call it colonization. No no I'm of that specifically I am not afraid and the I am of course for peace. But you know that's my paradox. I wonder if you agree. The paradox is that at some point to limit the war you have to show will to defend yourself. You know? That by just conceding peace the other side we learned this from Hitler my God. Yes peace Austria Czechoslovakia blah blah blah at the end we got what we got. And I read a wonderful science fiction novel I don't overestimate them but I loved it about alternate history a English guy who has a series of them about how the West and Russia decides to go to war after Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia. And it's a totally different picture. The war drags on but they somehow limit Hitler he doesn't succeed to get all of
not convinced of the classic leftist claim of NATO imperialism in this context. No, you know why? Let's be frank. Let's take World War II. Look at the data, don't idealize Roosevelt. The crisis went on through the 30s. It's only World War II with military investments which brought United States really out of crisis. So should we then say Don't fight the Germans it helps the American military establishment? I would worry much more as I said about that land grabbing and so on and so on. You know this agricultural if we call it colonization. No no I'm of that specifically I am not afraid and the I am of course for peace. But you know that's my paradox. I wonder if you agree. The paradox is that at some point to limit the war you have to show will to defend yourself. You know? That by just conceding peace the other side we learned this from Hitler my God. Yes peace Austria Czechoslovakia blah blah blah at the end we got what we got. And I read a wonderful science fiction novel I don't overestimate them but I loved it about alternate history a English guy who has a series of them about how the West and Russia decides to go to war after Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia. And it's a totally different picture. The war drags on but they somehow limit Hitler he doesn't succeed to get all of
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France and it's like it doesn't develop. So I think that crazy as it may sound, what is happening now is maybe the only way to prevent a more global conflict. But again
France and it's like it doesn't develop. So I think that crazy as it may sound, what is happening now is maybe the only way to prevent a more global conflict. But again
Slavoj Žižek
what I don't get it with with the I know I know yeah Kiara said cheap and false equivalence. Sorry I'm absolutely not putting on the same level like Putin is Hitler or whatever. I'm just saying it's a clear aggression and don't relativize it. And it's an aggression behind which uh sorry behind which there is geopolitical plan. What about Taiwan? is that next? Well I'm tired of my own bluffing. I don't know. I don't know. Because for a long time I thought wait a minute Taiwan is nonetheless part of China in some sense, you know. But some friends who are leftists not rightists even tried to convince me that it's not as ambiguous as that. That Taiwan has a long tradition of autonomy. It was never almost in the history an organic part of China or whatever. But I think that nonetheless it is a difference because Taiwan is Chinese you know that even Mao introduced this simplified language writing no? And Taiwan still has the old Mandarin whatever writing so in some sense Taiwan is more traditional China than than China itself no? So I I am not qualified enough to pass judgment on that. Yeah I mean this this really reminds me of the of Mike Davis the American Marxist. I love I love him yeah. Yeah yeah because his his point about the contemporary left is interesting because he basically says we've been so disempowered from being even commentators on international affairs because we have no power like we we have nothing to say often and I think That's so sad yes that's so true he's very right because again as I always repeat this haha four riders of the apocalypse: hunger pandemic war digital control and so on. For me it's an ABC evidence that something like a new communism socialism not 20th century but in the sense of more social control limiting the market. Look just imagine now a hunger food crisis. You cannot do it at the level of sovereign states. Millions of people will be displaced. How to organize
what I don't get it with with the I know I know yeah Kiara said cheap and false equivalence. Sorry I'm absolutely not putting on the same level like Putin is Hitler or whatever. I'm just saying it's a clear aggression and don't relativize it. And it's an aggression behind which uh sorry behind which there is geopolitical plan. What about Taiwan? is that next? Well I'm tired of my own bluffing. I don't know. I don't know. Because for a long time I thought wait a minute Taiwan is nonetheless part of China in some sense, you know. But some friends who are leftists not rightists even tried to convince me that it's not as ambiguous as that. That Taiwan has a long tradition of autonomy. It was never almost in the history an organic part of China or whatever. But I think that nonetheless it is a difference because Taiwan is Chinese you know that even Mao introduced this simplified language writing no? And Taiwan still has the old Mandarin whatever writing so in some sense Taiwan is more traditional China than than China itself no? So I I am not qualified enough to pass judgment on that. Yeah I mean this this really reminds me of the of Mike Davis the American Marxist. I love I love him yeah. Yeah yeah because his his point about the contemporary left is interesting because he basically says we've been so disempowered from being even commentators on international affairs because we have no power like we we have nothing to say often and I think That's so sad yes that's so true he's very right because again as I always repeat this haha four riders of the apocalypse: hunger pandemic war digital control and so on. For me it's an ABC evidence that something like a new communism socialism not 20th century but in the sense of more social control limiting the market. Look just imagine now a hunger food crisis. You cannot do it at the level of sovereign states. Millions of people will be displaced. How to organize
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this and so on you know. and that's why I am a pessimist in the very simple vulgar sense. I
this and so on you know. and that's why I am a pessimist in the very simple vulgar sense. I
Slavoj Žižek
wonder if you will agree. I am afraid that maybe we need even more of a catastrophe. That maybe even Ukraine we will get tired of it and it's not enough to awaken us. By us I mean here Western Europe and United and I'm actually worried about you know I may be leftist blah blah but I'm fully aware how the role of written unwritten rules of some basic public consent for state to function. You know and this is why it worries me you know what you have now in the United States. Not only breathtaking obscenities, you know that senator or what how is he called Akin, who made the tasteless comparison A woman really cannot be raped because if you penetrate her she had to get wet and so it's beyond my mind that something like this can be said publicly not male chauvinist talk in a pub afterwards. But what I want to say is also you remember how now what I really am afraid and many of my friends are. What the Republicans are now doing trying to pass the law in different states that if the election result is in any way unclear the local congress can directly nominate delegates. Sorry but this is not just the end of democracy but the end of stable social order. All this calls Biden is not legitimate president and so on and so on. I mean I wrote about the United States. Yeah. It's it's almost like that dystopian film on Netflix Up in the Air you know? It's gotten to a point now where that is our normal reality but it could be worse it could be worse than that. But that's why I agree with you and that's one of the strategies that Putin and others bad guys are playing. You know we strode Ukraine wait a minute it could be worse you know nuclear arms whatever and Would
wonder if you will agree. I am afraid that maybe we need even more of a catastrophe. That maybe even Ukraine we will get tired of it and it's not enough to awaken us. By us I mean here Western Europe and United and I'm actually worried about you know I may be leftist blah blah but I'm fully aware how the role of written unwritten rules of some basic public consent for state to function. You know and this is why it worries me you know what you have now in the United States. Not only breathtaking obscenities, you know that senator or what how is he called Akin, who made the tasteless comparison A woman really cannot be raped because if you penetrate her she had to get wet and so it's beyond my mind that something like this can be said publicly not male chauvinist talk in a pub afterwards. But what I want to say is also you remember how now what I really am afraid and many of my friends are. What the Republicans are now doing trying to pass the law in different states that if the election result is in any way unclear the local congress can directly nominate delegates. Sorry but this is not just the end of democracy but the end of stable social order. All this calls Biden is not legitimate president and so on and so on. I mean I wrote about the United States. Yeah. It's it's almost like that dystopian film on Netflix Up in the Air you know? It's gotten to a point now where that is our normal reality but it could be worse it could be worse than that. But that's why I agree with you and that's one of the strategies that Putin and others bad guys are playing. You know we strode Ukraine wait a minute it could be worse you know nuclear arms whatever and Would
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you would you call this a kind of new nihilism? is this a
you would you call this a kind of new nihilism? is this a
Slavoj Žižek
nihilistic I don't like this term because it means so many different things. If you by nihilism just means at the ground of it all it's a zero or what then okay every mystic is in this sense or Buddhism is nihilist. I would go even further here and say repeating the formulas of Alenka and Mladen, my nihilism is that even the zero phase you know we cannot even get at that zero point. But no I don't like the it's something much more horrible that my friend Adrian Johnston wrote about. We are in a strange situation. We know what is wrong. Vaguely, vaguely. Even the official media: global warming pandemics we need cooperation. You remember that disgusting scene a now it's only a year ago in Glasgow conference on against global warming. We know it we know vaguely what has to be done and we do nothing. This is the mystery today. It's Alenka developed this as the idea that today knowledge itself is a fetish. In the sense that we know how things are but we use this as an excuse not to confront things you know it it worries me okay. All right I'm slowly collapsing don't kill me. Okay okay I will make the cut I will make the scansion in a Lacanian sense and thank you No fuck this you make the Stalinist cut. Enough comrades. Stalinist cut of course. Stalin and Lacan are there well we that was actually a debate we had recently which was was Kojève a Stalinist and did Lacan read Kojève as a Stalinist? it's a very interesting You know I spoke with some people it was a friend friend of mine is a big student of Kojève knows everything. And he says it's not so much that he was a Stalinist but he
nihilistic I don't like this term because it means so many different things. If you by nihilism just means at the ground of it all it's a zero or what then okay every mystic is in this sense or Buddhism is nihilist. I would go even further here and say repeating the formulas of Alenka and Mladen, my nihilism is that even the zero phase you know we cannot even get at that zero point. But no I don't like the it's something much more horrible that my friend Adrian Johnston wrote about. We are in a strange situation. We know what is wrong. Vaguely, vaguely. Even the official media: global warming pandemics we need cooperation. You remember that disgusting scene a now it's only a year ago in Glasgow conference on against global warming. We know it we know vaguely what has to be done and we do nothing. This is the mystery today. It's Alenka developed this as the idea that today knowledge itself is a fetish. In the sense that we know how things are but we use this as an excuse not to confront things you know it it worries me okay. All right I'm slowly collapsing don't kill me. Okay okay I will make the cut I will make the scansion in a Lacanian sense and thank you No fuck this you make the Stalinist cut. Enough comrades. Stalinist cut of course. Stalin and Lacan are there well we that was actually a debate we had recently which was was Kojève a Stalinist and did Lacan read Kojève as a Stalinist? it's a very interesting You know I spoke with some people it was a friend friend of mine is a big student of Kojève knows everything. And he says it's not so much that he was a Stalinist but he
unknown
thought that Stalinism he oscillated what would be the model of this post-historical pseudo-Hegelian society. His first idea was like American technocracy then after World War
thought that Stalinism he oscillated what would be the model of this post-historical pseudo-Hegelian society. His first idea was like American technocracy then after World War
Slavoj Žižek
II everybody impressed with Russia he took very seriously Stalinism. And you know that Kojève in the early at least 50s worked for what was it then called European Union its previous European market and was obsessed with the idea of including Russia. But then his latest ideal was this a Japan. Post-modern melancholy irony and so on and so on. So it's not so much that he was a stupid Stalinist thinking that there is a democracy in Russia and so on. But he he was that is the mistake of all these pseudo-Hegelians you know. He didn't read properly Hegel when Hegel said about future we cannot say anything no he really thought we are at the end and he was looking for different figurations of this end. Yeah yeah that's why Francis Fukuyama incorporates Nietzsche last man all of that with
II everybody impressed with Russia he took very seriously Stalinism. And you know that Kojève in the early at least 50s worked for what was it then called European Union its previous European market and was obsessed with the idea of including Russia. But then his latest ideal was this a Japan. Post-modern melancholy irony and so on and so on. So it's not so much that he was a stupid Stalinist thinking that there is a democracy in Russia and so on. But he he was that is the mistake of all these pseudo-Hegelians you know. He didn't read properly Hegel when Hegel said about future we cannot say anything no he really thought we are at the end and he was looking for different figurations of this end. Yeah yeah that's why Francis Fukuyama incorporates Nietzsche last man all of that with
unknown
Kojève. But it's very interesting Fukuyama was a non-surprise for me. The last thing I heard about him two years
Kojève. But it's very interesting Fukuyama was a non-surprise for me. The last thing I heard about him two years
Slavoj Žižek
ago is that he got it that he got it wrong and that at the end two years
ago is that he got it that he got it wrong and that at the end two years
unknown
ago he supported Bernie Sanders. That's
ago he supported Bernie Sanders. That's
Slavoj Žižek
what I was told. Yep yep yep. You see we have to be open you know you never know. I'm not saying that when we will take power we should not shoot Fukuyama but he may be allowed to be a fellow traveler now. And then when his time come our secret police will knock on his door. Of course that's life what can we do. Thanks very much for your patience. And we can how do you say in California but you are not there we can repeat this shared experience once. No
what I was told. Yep yep yep. You see we have to be open you know you never know. I'm not saying that when we will take power we should not shoot Fukuyama but he may be allowed to be a fellow traveler now. And then when his time come our secret police will knock on his door. Of course that's life what can we do. Thanks very much for your patience. And we can how do you say in California but you are not there we can repeat this shared experience once. No
unknown
I mean Okay. Thanks very much. All right. Thank you everybody. Bye-bye. Till next time.
I mean Okay. Thanks very much. All right. Thank you everybody. Bye-bye. Till next time.
Slavoj Žižek
Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye. Bye-bye.