Year of Distraction
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
undated · 1:16:41 · 10,982 words
ideologypsychoanalysisethicsliberalism-political-correctnessreligion-theologyeveryday-liferace-antisemitismhegel-dialecticssubjectivity
Žižek delivers a lecture on the ideological function of contemporary liberal concepts, arguing that 'tolerance' is a pseudo-notion that displaces real political problems of inequality into cultural ones. He develops a sustained critique of the liberal presupposition that inner authenticity and subjective self-knowledge are moral guarantees, drawing on cases from Père Joseph to Zen Buddhism and Stalinist enthusiasts to show that inner sincerity is no bar to ethical monstrosity. The talk moves through an analysis of the 'neighbor' as an uncanny, abyss-like other (das Ding), the logic of habits and the 'big Other,' and concludes by championing an ethics without morality, ruthless, non-narcissistic, exemplified by the cold-blooded twins in Agota Kristof's trilogy.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 21
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
The liberal-multiculturalist operation whereby political and economic differences (inequality, exploitation) are neutralized into cultural differences to be 'tolerated' rather than overcome.
Tolerance as a substitute for direct political solutions (welfare state, socialist projects) after their retreat, ideology filling the vacuum of failed politics.
In practice, the injunction to 'tolerate' others operates as 'don't come too close to me,' i.e., as intolerance of the other's over-proximity.
as “the Real (intervention of the Real)”
Invoked when the microphone interruption occurs mid-talk; the Real is that which disrupts symbolic flow unexpectedly.
as “enthusiasm (Kant)”
Kant's notion that the French Revolution's true significance lay in the enthusiastic response of spectators across Europe, not in the violent empirical events themselves, which Žižek aligns with Lacanian reading of the Real.
The 'I know very well, but nonetheless I believe' structure whereby ethical enthusiasm requires excluding or refusing to see the miserable reality of one's ideals.
Freud's hermeneutic principle, cited here: to isolate one feature of a person and let it color the whole rather than integrating everything into a harmonious totality.
Implicit in the critique of 'know your neighbor from within', the liberal presupposition that authentic inner self-narration is the point of truth, which psychoanalysis radically denies.
as “the neighbor (das Ding)”
Following Lacan/Freud, the neighbor is not merely a like-minded semblant but an uncanny, impenetrable Thing whose radical otherness can provoke horror or aggression.
Referenced implicitly through the Lacanian framework of das Ding and surplus enjoyment as the irreducible kernel of the neighbor's otherness.
as “jouissance / way of enjoyment”
The neighbor's 'way of enjoyment' is experienced as a disturbing intrusion that throws our own enjoyment off balance, motivating aggression against the Other.
as “moral alienation”
Žižek's counter-proposal to liberal empathy: a new code of discretion, learning to ignore each other rather than demanding impossible total understanding.
The fourth term missing from Rumsfeld's epistemology: things we don't know that we know, the Freudian unconscious, ideological prejudices that shape behavior without awareness.
Habits are not simple behavioral routines but a complex meta-level set of unspoken rules about how to relate to explicit rules, including the prohibition on announcing certain prohibitions.
The symbolic order or virtual guarantor (God, collective belief, social consensus) onto which individuals displace and objectify their beliefs; Žižek argues it has no ontological substance but its appearances must be maintained.
An offer made to be refused or a symbolic act whose very superfluousness (e.g., an apology accepted as unnecessary) constitutes its social necessity.
as “implicit obscene underside”
The secret transgressive supplement that sustains institutions, e.g., the army's homoeroticism underlying its homophobia, or priestly pedophilia as an institution's disavowed constituent.
as “the death of God / no big Other”
Christ's death on the cross marks the end of the God who guarantees cosmic meaning; what remains is the Holy Spirit as community, and a radically materialist 'it is up to you.'
as “Zionist antisemitism”
A new mode of antisemitism in which hardline Zionists attack insufficiently solidary Jews using the exact same clichés (rootless, cosmopolitan, commercial) historically deployed by Western antisemites.
as “ethics without morality”
An ethics that is ruthless and non-narcissistic, acting because the other needs it, not for self-satisfaction, as opposed to sentimental morality that makes the agent feel good.
A figure (like Kristof's twins) who acts with blind duty to help others without empathy or narcissistic satisfaction, the paradoxical ideal of post-moral ethics.
Stories he reaches for 17
The celebrated Zen popularizer Suzuki argued in the 1930s-40s that killing in war is an act of love and that military obedience is the practical shortcut to Satori, showing Eastern spirituality is equally capable of ethical monstrosity.
“the sword which is killing them now is really a sword of love... absolute obedience to military discipline it's the only practical way to achieve Satori.”
God's answer to Job dismisses the theological friends' attempts to give suffering a meaning; God concedes that the universe is 'crazy like this,' effectively becoming an atheist and blasphemer, prefiguring Christ.
“God's defense is not 'No, it looks to you that it's meaningless catastrophe but it has a deeper meaning.' No, God... God there becomes for a moment a blasphemer and an atheist.”
Žižek reproduces Rumsfeld's known-knowns/known-unknowns/unknown-unknowns taxonomy then reveals the missing fourth category, unknown knowns (the Freudian unconscious), as the real reason for failure in Iraq.
“There are known knowns... known unknowns... unknown unknowns... But something is missing: the unknown knowns — things that we don't know that we know. And that's the Freudian unconscious.”
Žižek challenges audiences to search MLK's speeches and find 'tolerance' is practically absent; for King, the fight against racism was political and emancipatory struggle, not a matter of tolerance.
“Go and check on the web Martin Luther King's speeches... the word tolerance is practically absent there. For Martin Luther King, one doesn't fight racism with tolerance but with emancipatory political struggle.”
In 1936-37 Moscow, the second man who stands up to announce 'we don't criticize Stalin here' would disappear faster than the first man who actually criticized Stalin, illustrating the meta-level prohibition.
“It wasn't only prohibited to criticize Stalin; it was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition.”
The explicitly homophobic army culture was simultaneously saturated with homosexual jokes and greetings, the prohibition was sustained by constant implicit reference to what was prohibited.
“the explicit prohibition was sustained by a kind of a permanent reference to some kind of a thwarted implicit homosexuality.”
In Vertigo, what viewers automatically read as Madeleine's drying underwear is actually just abstract cloth, the Hays Code required this, yet viewers still see underwear, revealing the big Other as the virtual gaze that must be satisfied.
“It's not underwear. They are just abstract pieces of cloth... whom were they trying to protect? Because we viewers, we all automatically assume that we see underwear.”
Cardinal Richelieu's advisor was simultaneously the architect of destructive political intrigue and a genuine contemplative mystic; Huxley tries to explain this via Western Christianity's excess fixation on Christ's suffering.
“How is it possible that the same person who was ruthless lying, poisoning, brutality itself, at the same time demonstrates a breathtakingly deep spiritual strength?”
Gonzo porn, actors addressing the camera directly, dropping narrative pretense, is not sexual liberation but a new form of censorship against the too-direct proximity of the neighbor.
“I think that this precisely is censorship. They fear that the proximity of the neighbor would have been too direct.”
Žižek argues the Church's pedophilia scandal is not accidental but the institution's inherent transgressive supplement, citing Slovenian cases where straight men were made pedophiles by the institution itself.
“it was the institution itself which made them pedophiliacs... institutions have this kind of a secret collective unconscious... publicly disavowed but nonetheless constitutes a disavowed constituent of their identity.”
After insulting Judith Butler, Žižek calls to apologize; she accepts by saying 'you don't owe me an apology', which only works because the apology was first offered. Taking it back would have been equally rude.
“she was able to say 'you don't owe me an apology' only after I did offer an apology. And only in this way it worked.”
Marcel hears his grandmother's voice alone on the telephone and perceives a frail old woman; this colors his subsequent in-person perception, revealing how isolating one partial feature gives deeper truth than holistic empathy.
“He perceives her in a new way: as a strange mad old woman, drowsing over her book, overburdened with age, flushed, coarse, vulgar, no longer the charming caring grandmother he remembered.”
Žižek applies the liberal motto to Hitler to expose its bankruptcy: Hitler was probably kind to children (per his secretary), yet caused immense evil, humanizing the enemy is no ethical solution.
“Would you also say Hitler was our enemy because we did not really try to hear his story?”
Japanese workers legally have X holiday days but are expected to use only half, Žižek uses this to illustrate that explicit rules only function through implicit meta-rules about how not to use them.
“workers have the right to days holiday every year. However, you are expected to use maximum half of this amount.”
At least some Apartheid torturers came to the TRC, confessed everything with a cynical smile, claimed their pardon and walked away, showing the procedure only works when the perpetrator retains minimal ethical dignity.
“you got an Apartheid murderer, who torturer, who came there, confronted his black victims, and with a cynical smile said, 'Yes, don't you remember, I tortured you in this way... okay, haha, now I'm over.'”
The father who gradually becomes a murderous beast illustrates Žižek's Lacanian point that beneath every familiar human face lurks the Thing, the neighbor is always potentially a monster.
“The neighbor is the evil thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face.”
The Yugoslav nomenklatura knew in the 1970s the country was in deep economic trouble but accumulated enormous debt so Tito could die happy, a whole country collapsed to maintain the big Other's ignorance.
“They made a collective decision that Tito should die happy. So they prolonged the false welfare by collecting incredible debts.”
Works invoked 9
Vertigo film
Hitchcock's film analyzed for the underwear-that-is-not-underwear scene, illustrating the virtual big Other maintained by Hays Code censorship.
Zen at War book
Brian Victoria's book cited as evidence that Zen Buddhism overwhelmingly supported Japanese wartime aggression, countering the Eastern-spirituality solution.
Grey Eminence book
Aldous Huxley's book on Père Joseph cited as the source for the case of simultaneous mysticism and ruthless Realpolitik.
Frankenstein book
Mary Shelley's novel used to illustrate the liberal ideal of subjectivizing the Other and its limits, the monster as both ultimate criminal and ultimate victim.
Romance film
Catherine Breillat's film cited as an attempt to combine serious melodrama with hardcore pornography, but Žižek argues this just provoked a stronger censorship response (Gonzo).
Proust's novel cited for the grandmother's voice on the telephone episode, illustrating how isolating a partial feature gives deeper truth than holistic empathy.
Kant's late text cited for the concept of enthusiasm as the true moral index of the French Revolution, independent of its empirical violence.
Agota Kristof's trilogy called one of the defining novels; the twins' ruthless ethics is the lecture's central positive example of ethics without morality.
The Shining (novel) film
Stephen King's story cited to illustrate the neighbor as the evil Thing lurking beneath the homely face.
People invoked 31
Named as one of the scholars appearing on the masada2000.org list of 'self-hating Jews'.
Marcel Proust positive
In Search of Lost Time cited for the grandmother's telephone voice episode as illustration of how isolating a partial feature gives truth beyond empathic totalization.
Mary Shelley positive
Frankenstein cited to illustrate the liberal ideal of full subjectivization of the Other and its limits.
Used as a case study of the coexistence of authentic mysticism and political ruthlessness, illustrating the gap between inner authenticity and ethics.
Described as 'theoretical opponent, personal friend'; his experience of being attacked by hardline Zionists in Israel prompted Žižek's analysis of Zionist antisemitism.
Ágota Kristóf positive
Called author of 'one of the defining novels for me'; her trilogy (The Notebook/The Proof/The Third Lie) is the centerpiece of the lecture's conclusion on ethics without morality.
Lavrentiy Beria positive
The episode of his removal from the Soviet encyclopedia serves as the key illustration of the virtual big Other whose appearances must be maintained for no empirical person.
Emmanuel Levinas negative
Referenced as an alternative (just respect the neighbor, no universality) that Žižek explicitly rejects in favor of a positive universal ethics.
Jacques Lacan positive
Central theoretical authority: das Ding as neighbor, the big Other, the Real, intervention of the Real, and the ethics of psychoanalysis.
Brian Victoria positive
Zen at War cited as evidence for how Zen Buddhism supported Japanese war efforts; Victoria himself is a Zen Buddhist.
G. K. Chesterton positive
Called 'my favorite theologian'; cited for the observation that God becomes a blasphemer and atheist in the Book of Job.
Gilles Deleuze negative
The 'pseudo-Deleuzian' celebration of nomadic existence is criticized for blurring the distinction between leisure travelers and war refugees.
Donald Rumsfeld negative
His known/unknowns taxonomy is taken seriously but shown to be incomplete, missing the fourth term (unknown knowns = Freudian unconscious), used to explain the failure in Iraq.
Judith Butler negative
Described as 'good theoretical enemy, personal friend'; anecdote about Žižek insulting her and the subsequent apology used to illustrate the empty gesture.
Friedrich Schiller positive
The naive/sentimental distinction borrowed to differentiate ruthless ethics (naive) from sentimental morality.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak positive
Cited approvingly for the analogy of the dieting rich lady vs. the starving third-world woman to critique the false nomadic equivalence.
Paul Robeson positive
Cited as the great Black singer who defended the Soviet Union to the end, the sublime inner conviction amid miserable Stalinist reality as example of fetishist disavowal.
Julius Rosenberg positive
Cited as example of authentic-seeming inner purity coexisting with actual espionage, used to argue inner sincerity is no moral guarantee.
Wolf Biermann positive
German dissident poet cited for the poem asking 'is there life before death?', used to frame the final ethical call.
Ruhollah Khomeini positive
Cited for his claim that no one was killed in the Iranian revolution because those killed were 'criminal dogs', illustrates the logic of exclusion in ethical universalism.
Stephen King positive
The Shining cited to illustrate the neighbor as the Thing that lurks beneath the homely face.
Žižek disagrees with him politically but cites his observation that 'more communication means more conflict' approvingly; also credits him with the idea of a 'new code of discretion.'
D. T. Suzuki negative
Cited as example of Zen Buddhism justifying Japanese wartime atrocities, obedience as Satori, killing as love, the mirror of Père Joseph.
Hannah Arendt positive
Cited for the banality of evil, that perpetrators of great evil are often ordinary, kind people, with an immense gap between intimate experience and atrocity.
Alfred Hitchcock positive
Vertigo analyzed to illustrate the virtual big Other, the underwear-that-is-not-underwear scene and the Hays Code.
Martin Luther King Jr. positive
Cited as the exemplary antiracist fighter who fought with emancipatory political struggle, not tolerance, used to refute the culturalization of politics.
Aldous Huxley negative
His solution (turn to Eastern spirituality) is shown to be inadequate since Eastern spirituality has the same problem, as Zen at War demonstrates.
Josip Broz Tito positive
The nomenklatura's decision to protect Tito's final years with false prosperity (debt) illustrates the chicken-who-must-not-know logic of the big Other.
Paul the Apostle positive
The Pauline 'no Jew or Greek, no man or woman' is used to exemplify how universal inclusion entails brutal exclusion of non-members.
Sigmund Freud positive
Referenced for the hermeneutic principle of interpreting en détail, for the concept of das Ding (the Thing), and for the structural role of the unconscious.
Immanuel Kant positive
Conflict of the Faculties cited for the notion of enthusiasm generated by the French Revolution as the real moral event independent of empirical violence.
What it argues
culturalization of politics as ideological mystificationinner authenticity as no guarantee against ethical monstrositythe neighbor as uncanny abyssal Other (das Ding)habits, implicit rules, and the logic of the big Otherfetishist disavowal as condition of ethical universalismethics without morality versus sentimental moralityappearances and the big Other (the chicken who must not know)
Dialectical moves 10
“Tolerance means its exact opposite: 'don't harass me' means 'don't come too close to me' — tolerance is intolerance of the neighbor's over-proximity.”
What presents itself as openness to the other is actually a demand for distance, revealing ideology hiding within liberal virtue.
“The inner authentic story we tell ourselves about ourselves is fundamentally a lie — it is not the point of truth.”
Liberal empathy assumes inner self-narration is truth; psychoanalysis inverts this, making authenticity the site of mystification.
“Far from being a failure of ethics, fetishist disavowal ('I know it's terrible, but I nonetheless believe') may be the very positive condition of possibility of ethics.”
What looks like an inconsistency in ethical commitment is revealed as its innermost enabling condition.
“Christian all-inclusivity ('all men are brothers') means those who refuse inclusion are not men — universal love is the most exclusive stance.”
The more universal an ethics, the more brutal its underlying exclusion; universalism and radical exclusion are two sides of the same gesture.
“The missing fourth term is not the known unknowns but the unknown knowns — things we don't know that we know.”
Rumsfeld's schema is turned against itself: the problem in Iraq was not mysterious external unknowns but the ideological prejudices operative in American politics without self-awareness.
“What appears as an inconsistency — being allowed to do something but expected not to — is precisely how freedom functions in certain social regimes.”
Freedom is offered on condition it is not used; permission and prohibition are inverted in the implicit meta-rules of social life.
“It wasn't only prohibited to criticize Stalin; it was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition.”
The logic of the implicit obscene underside: the meta-prohibition is more tightly enforced than the object-level prohibition it conceals.
“The true question is not 'is there life after death' but 'is there life before death.'”
The religious preoccupation with afterlife displaces the actual challenge of living ethically and authentically in the present.
“What dies on the cross is not Christ but the God who is the guarantor of meaning — God becomes atheist for a moment.”
The death of God in Christianity is the death of cosmic meaningfulness itself, leaving only the community of believers and radical human freedom.
“The Zionist critique of self-hating Jews reproduces precisely the classical antisemitic clichés against Jews — Zionism turns into its opposite.”
The discourse used to defend Jewish identity against antisemitism replicates antisemitism's own stereotypes when directed inward.
Claims 20
asserts
The task of philosophy is not to provide answers but to show how the very perception of a problem can itself be ideological and mystifying.the role of philosophy
rejects
Tolerance is a pseudo-notion that displaces political and economic problems of inequality and exploitation into cultural differences that can only be tolerated, not overcome.liberal tolerance
reframes
In actual use, 'tolerance' means 'don't come too close to me' — i.e., it means its exact opposite, intolerance of the other's proximity.tolerance
rejects
The liberal motto 'an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard' is false: inner authentic self-narration is not the point of truth about a person.liberal empathy and subjectivization of the Other
asserts
Inner authenticity and spiritual sincerity provide no guarantee against ethical monstrosity — the same person can be a ruthless perpetrator of evil and a genuinely authentic mystic.the gap between inner life and ethical conduct
asserts
Every ethical universalism requires a founding gesture of exclusion: those who do not accept inclusion are simply declared non-human.ethical universalism and exclusion
reframes
Fetishist disavowal — 'I know things are horrible but I nonetheless believe' — is not a failure of ethics but a possible innermost constituent of every ethical stance.fetishist disavowal and ethics
asserts
The ethics of psychoanalysis is the sole exception to the rule that every ethics requires fetishist disavowal.psychoanalytic ethics
reframes
Rumsfeld's epistemology is missing the fourth term: 'unknown knowns' — things we don't know that we know — which is the Freudian unconscious and the real cause of the Iraq debacle.Rumsfeld's known/unknown matrix and the Iraq War
asserts
Habits are not simple behavioral rules but a dialectical meta-level structure, including prohibitions on announcing certain prohibitions.habits and the big Other
asserts
The big Other has no empirical referent — it is a purely virtual chicken for whom appearances must be maintained, as shown by the Beria encyclopedia episode and Hitchcock's Vertigo.the big Other / virtual symbolic order
asserts
What dies on the cross in Christianity is the God who guarantees cosmic meaning; the Holy Spirit is simply the community of believers left to their own freedom.Christian theology and the death of God
asserts
The Book of Job is the first ideology critique: God himself concedes that suffering has no deeper meaning, prefiguring the death of the guarantor-God in Christ.the Book of Job as ideology critique
asserts
Zionist attacks on 'self-hating Jews' reproduce the precise stereotypes of Western antisemitism (rootless, cosmopolitan, commercial), constituting a new form of Zionist antisemitism.Zionism and antisemitism
rejects
The South African Truth and Reconciliation motto 'we forgive but will not forget' is limited and ultimately fake; a more honest formula is 'I am ready to forget it, but I will never forgive you.'Truth and Reconciliation / forgiveness
asserts
We need moral alienation and a new code of discretion — learning to ignore each other — rather than impossible demands to empathize with everyone.social ethics and the neighbor
reframes
The stunts of Gonzo pornography — actors directly addressing the camera — represent a new form of censorship against over-proximity of the neighbor, not liberation.pornography, censorship, and the neighbor
asserts
Agota Kristof's twins embody a true ethics without morality: ruthless, non-narcissistic action that does what is needed without sentimentality.ethics without morality
asserts
Antisemitism is the zero-level ideology and admits of no compromise or partial tolerance, regardless of international political context.antisemitism as ideological zero-level
asserts
The French Revolution's true significance for Kant lies not in the empirical events in Paris but in the enthusiastic response of observers — the dimension of the Real.Kant's enthusiasm and the French Revolution
Quotes 20
“There are not only wrong answers; there are also wrong questions. These wrong questions are what we call ideology.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as wrong questions
“I claim the way we effectively use the word tolerance, I claim it de facto as a rule means its exact opposite. Tolerance means 'don't harass me'. 'Don't harass me' means 'don't come too close to me'.”Slavoj Žižek · tolerance as its own opposite
“Tolerance is their post-political ersatz.”Slavoj Žižek · tolerance as substitute for failed political solutions
“The experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie. That's not the point of truth.”Slavoj Žižek · inner authenticity as lie
“Inner authenticity is no guarantee against ethical monstrosity.”Slavoj Žižek · gap between inner life and ethical conduct
“The more universal our ethics is, the more brutal the underlying exclusion is.”Slavoj Žižek · universalism and exclusion
“The Christian motto 'all men are brothers' also means that those who do not accept to be my brothers are not men.”Slavoj Žižek · Christian universalism as exclusion
“The unknown knowns — not things that we know that we don't know, but things that we don't know that we know. And that's the Freudian unconscious.”Slavoj Žižek · unknown knowns as Freudian unconscious
“More communication means at first above all more conflict.”Slavoj Žižek · communication and conflict (Sloterdijk)
“I don't want to understand everybody. I don't care about majority of the people. I think what we need today... is a new code of discretion. We need moral alienation. We need to learn to ignore each other.”Slavoj Žižek · moral alienation over liberal empathy
“I am ready to forget it, but I will never forgive you.”Slavoj Žižek · forgetting without forgiving — alternative to TRC
“The neighbor is the evil thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face.”Slavoj Žižek · the neighbor as das Ding
“It wasn't only prohibited to criticize Stalin; it was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition.”Slavoj Žižek · meta-level prohibition as social rule
“As every deep theologian knows, the message of Christ is not 'Trust God,' but 'God trusts you. It's up to you. Up to your freedom.'”Slavoj Žižek · Christianity as radical materialism / no big Other
“The true question is not is there life after death, but is there life before death?”Slavoj Žižek · authentic existence before death
“Antisemitism is for me the zero-level ideology... It's always bad.”Slavoj Žižek · antisemitism as ideological zero-level
“An ethical monster without empathy, doing simply the duty to help others with blind spontaneity, but without any narcissistic self-satisfaction.”Slavoj Žižek · ethics without morality / the ethical monster
“What if on the contrary such a blindness, such a violent gesture of exclusion, of refusing to see, such a disavowal of reality... is an innermost constituent of every ethical stance?”Slavoj Žižek · fetishist disavowal as condition of ethics
“God there becomes for a moment a blasphemer and an atheist.”Slavoj Žižek · God as atheist in the Book of Job
“The sublime image that generated enthusiasm belongs to eternity.”Slavoj Žižek · enthusiasm and the eternal dimension of historical events
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. I'm very glad to be here. Thank you for Irena to inviting me, for Jeffrey for this wonderful introduction. I especially agree, without any irony, with that very precise point about dogmatics. I think that and especially, I would even go a step further and say dogmatics in the theological sense of the word. Why, maybe it will become clear from what I will be saying. So, let me go to the point and nonetheless, I hope you will not be too disappointed because there will it will not be only jokes in what I will be saying. Okay. Let me begin in a very traditional way with the big question: what can philosophy do today? What can it tell the general public haunted by the problems of ecology, racism, religious conflicts, and so on? I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem, mystifying it instead of enabling us to solve it. There are not only wrong answers; there are also wrong questions. These wrong questions are what we call ideology. When we are dealing with a problem which is undoubtedly a real problem, the ideological designation or perception introduces its inevitable mystification. So again, when people ask me, ecology or war, what can we do? Well, I don't know. What I can do as a philosopher is just to analyze how we perceive the problem. Let me take the example of tolerance. I'm opposed to this notion. I think it's a pseudo-notion. Now, of course, the immediate reaction of well-meaning liberals is: but how can you be for intolerance towards foreigners, how can you be for antifeminism, for homophobia, and so on and so on? But this is the catch. Of course I'm not for intolerance towards foreigners, for antifeminism, and so on. What I am against is the perception which is today more or less automatic of racism as a problem of tolerance. Make a simple experiment, I did make it. Go and check on the web Martin Luther King's speeches. If there is a great figure of antiracist fight, of course it's Martin Luther King. You will see that the word tolerance is practically absent there. For Martin Luther King, one doesn't fight racism with tolerance but with what? Emancipatory political struggle, even armed struggle. So, why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance rather than problems of inequality, exploitation, injustice, and so on? You see my point? That's for me the problem. Racism is a problem, but to perceive racism as problem of tolerance, it's not automatic. In this innocent shift of perspective, there is ideology. Why? I claim the reason is the liberal multiculturalist basic ideological operation, the—let's call it—culturalization of politics. Political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality or economic exploitation, are naturalized, neutralized into cultural differences. That is, into different ways of life which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, so they can only be tolerated. The cause of this culturalization is the retreat, the failure of direct political solutions such as welfare state or various socialist projects. Tolerance is their post-political ersatz. And I think the same goes for harassment, another heavily connotated ideological term. Again, of course I am very much against brutal harassments like rape, bigotry, and so on and so on. The problem is that in today's ideological space, real harassments, their perception, is irreducibly intertwined with the narcissistic notion of an individual who experiences all proximity of others as an intrusion into his or her private space. So I claim that the way we in the so-called highly developed Western countries, if you look closely how we effectively use the word tolerance, I claim it de facto as a rule means its exact opposite. Tolerance means 'don't harass me'. 'Don't harass me' means 'don't come too close to me'. You know, like are you washed, deodorants, don't smoke, and in other words, tolerance means 'I am intolerant towards your over-proximity to me'. Tolerance means 'don't come too close, stay at the proper distance'. So ideology is in this precise sense a notion which while designating a real problem blurs a crucial line of separation. Okay, another of such classical ideological notions today I think is this celebration, pseudo-Deleuzian, of nomadic existence and so on and so on. Why? Because instead of enabling us to draw the crucial distinction, it blurs it. It brings together under the same cover nomadic existence two totally different phenomena. One is the nomadic existence of—well, to be frank, somebody like me, an probably upper-middle-class intellectual traveling nicely, sometimes with upgrades and so on, even business class. But then you know, to put me together with let's say to be a little bit pathetic, a third world person refugee from a war-torn or starved country or starved population and claim we are both nomadic. It's a little bit like to quote Gayatri Spivak to take a rich fat lady who is dieting and a starving third world woman and say they are basically doing the same thing, eating less than. This ideology of tolerance can be reduced to the motto 'love your neighbor as yourself'. However, as we learned from Freud, neighbor is not simply another person with the rich inner life filled with stories she or he is telling himself, herself—this is the counter-revolution attacks or what? Enemy never... you see? I told... okay. This is what in Lacan we call intervention of the real and so on. Okay, let's go on. It's... so usually when we say neighbor, multiculturalist ideology tells us 'yes, we should know the other from within, we should not objectivize the other'. The premise of liberal tolerance is thus that such a person whom we know from within cannot ultimately be an enemy. Or to quote a well-known motto, which I totally oppose incidentally and but it sounds so sublime, so deep: 'an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard'. Okay, there is a nice literary example known to all of us: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It is true Mary Shelley does something that a conservative would never have done. In the central part of her novel, she allows the monster to speak for himself, to tell the story from his own perspective. Her choice expresses the liberal attitude towards the freedom of speech at its most radical. Everyone's point of view should be heard. In Frankenstein, the monster is not a thing, a horrible object no one dares to confront. He is fully subjectivized. Mary Shelley moves inside his mind and asks what is it like to be labeled, defined, oppressed, excommunicated, even physically distorted by society? The ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself as a deeply hurt, desperate individual yearning for company and love. Now along this line of practicing this noble motto of multicultural tolerance, the authorities in Iceland, Ísland, Reykjavík capital, but also now I heard in some other European countries, maybe even here in the United States, I don't know about it, they are recently imposing a unique form of enacting this subjectivization of the other. In order to fight the growing xenophobia, the result of the greater and greater number of immigrant workers in Western Europe, as well as sexual intolerance, they are organizing what is called Living Libraries. Members of ethnic or sexual minorities—gays, immigrant East Europeans, or blacks—are paid to visit an Icelandic or British or German family and just talk to them, acquainting them with their way of life, their everyday practices, their dreams, and so on. In this way, the exotic stranger who was perceived as a threat to our way of life appears as somebody we can empathize with, with the complex world of his or her own. So this sounds very nice. What's the problem? The problem is let's take this noble motto, 'an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard', and do something very vulgar in the sense of British empiricism. Let's just replace the general name with a concrete example. Would you also say Hitler was our enemy because we did not really try to hear his story? And the problem is deeper here than it may than it may appear. Namely, the automatic presupposition which we should abandon is that the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves, our inner authentic self-experience, is the point of truth. As if if you humanized the other, if you get him at his or her or their innermost, then you can say this is what they truly are. But I think that this precisely if there is a lesson of psychoanalysis is that this precisely is what we should radically abandon. If from what we know about Hitler, if we take again the worst example, one of the worst, Hitler, I think that even for him probably the same as Hannah Arendt claimed for Eichmann would have hold. Probably he was as we know from the memories of his secretary who died only two years ago or when, he was he could have been quite kind, compassionate, he liked to serve cakes to small children and so on, gentle vegetarian and so on. And I'm even quite sure that that he was absolutely sincere in this. This is the important lesson of Hannah Arendt, that people who cause great evil we should not elevate them into sublime Byron-esque demonic figures of evil. The gap between their intimate experience and the horror of their acts is always immense. So again, the experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie. That's not the point of truth. So let me give you two extreme examples which I already developed in some of my earlier books. One Western, one Eastern. The West: Père Joseph. You maybe know who he was, the grey eminence of Cardinal Richelieu. And you should maybe read the book Aldous Huxley, The Grey Eminence, about Père Joseph. What fascinated Aldous Huxley so much about Père Joseph? It's that he was—well, the most brutal Realpolitiker, real politician that you can imagine. Organizing kidnappings, torture, dark plotting. He is basically the guy, if we simplify history, who is responsible for Hitler, you know in one sense. In the Thirty Years' War, in Europe, he was the one who made a pact between Catholic France and Protestant Sweden against okay, Catholic Austria, in order to weaken Germany, to prevent the reunification of Germany. He succeeded. The result was the German delay, deferral of reunification, which was the structural condition for Hitler. Okay, the worst guy you can imagine. But there is something quite fascinating. After he did this dirty work every evening, metaphorically almost every evening, he was in permanent conversation, exchange of letters with some French convent with nuns and the exchange of letter demonstrates that he was a practicing mystic, this same Père Joseph, and you cannot escape the conclusion: his mystical meditations are how should I put it simply? Top of the top. Absolutely at the level of Saint Teresa of whatever you want. And this is what fascinated Huxley. How is it possible that the same person who was ruthless lying, poisoning, brutality itself, at the same time demonstrates a breathtakingly deep spiritual strength? Huxley's solution was a very simple one. Was that there must be something in Western Christianity which enables this, opens up the possibility of this deviation. He thinks is too much fixation on pain, fascination with the figure of Christ on the cross. So Huxley's solution: let's turn to Eastern spirituality. But there I think the story is the same. I read a book which I often quote, Brian Victoria—he himself is a Zen Buddhist—Zen at War. Where you learn again this is a book about how the Japanese Zen community related towards the Japanese war effort in the thirties and forties. And you learn in this book that with really a couple, like five, six minor exceptions, millions of them not only totally supported Japanese war effort but even provided the justification of it. Let me mention a figure which I'm sure is well known to many of you: Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. Popular in the sixties here in the States and in all Europe as the great popularizer of Zen Buddhism. Maybe we should also read his text from the thirties and forties, where for example in justifying Japanese invasion of China, he said that the Chinese should learn that from the cosmic perspective the sword which is killing them now is really a sword of love. Then he advises the attitude of a true warrior: that you should as it were overcome your ego and objectivize yourself, which makes killing much easier. He says like when you kill a man, you shouldn't think 'I'm pulling the trigger to hit him'. You should say 'I'm observing how my hand triggers a gun and when the bullet flies through the air, the enemy body stumbles upon it' so that instead of a substantial confrontation of me hurting another human being, you get some kind of a abstract abstract ballet. So even more, Suzuki and others—if you want detailed proofs, read the book—demonstrate how he demonstrates how... yes Suzuki even went a step further and claimed a very direct claim that for the majority of ordinary people who don't have time for big meditations and so on and so on, to spend days on them or years, absolute obedience to military discipline it's the only practical way to achieve Satori, the Zen Buddhist enlightenment. The idea is when the commander shouts 'shoot' and you shoot without thinking, you have overcome your false ego and so on and so on and so on. So again, my point is not: look, Suzuki was a dirty militarist in reality. No, this would have been easy. My point is you got my point: to to accept this gap. That at the same time, he could have justified terrible crimes and at the same time he was absolutely authentic authentic purveyor of spiritual experiences. So, the lesson is clear: it concerns the difficulty to fully accept the gap between the inner authenticity of one's life and the ethics one practices. Inner authenticity is no guarantee against ethical monstrosity. Let me engage now with a much more problematic maybe to some of you example, which I mean in with whole respect towards the victims, of course. When the United flight on September 11th and other three planes were kidnapped, it is significant that that the focus of the phone calls to their closest relatives from the passengers when who knew they were about to die was always something like 'I love you'. However, a suspicion remains here. Is this desperate confession of love also not something of a sham? The same kind of fakery as the sudden turn to God and prayer of someone who suddenly faces the danger or proximity of death. In other words, you know I'm talking now about a very desperate moment. They knew they were dying, you make the last call to your wife, beloved, whatever, 'I love you'. But I claim why should this be authentic? There is no reason to think to think this is authentic. Another example came to my mind which is known to every old United States leftist. I remember when I was young, we were all taught the horror about the Rosenberg trial, you know against the two of them Julius and Ethel Rosenberg accused of spying for Soviet Union. And we were fascinated by when their prison letters were translated, like this sincerity, this purity. Even their advocates have to admit today we know that, maybe not both of them, but that he, Julius, I'm sorry, we have to concede here to the devil, the right when they are right, he was a spy. He was a spy. So this makes all the more crazy this as it were moral, as it were moral naivety, purity, how he was able to insist in his life to the end. So I think that even when we are in this kind of a desperate situation—now I know I'm going to die—I don't think we are authentic at that point. At that point, we desperately construct a lie the way we would like to be remembered and so on and so on. You know what would have been a truly radical ethical act here for me? Please don't take it in an obscene way, I mean it deadly serious. Let's say I'm on a plane—of course this only holds if it's true, the implication—the the true act would have been: okay, I'm on a plane, I have a chance to call my wife, I know in two minutes I will be dead. To call my wife and to say, 'listen darling, in in half a minute I will die but frankly our marriage was hell, I'm glad' and so on. That would have been an act. That would have been something. To you know to avoid this search 'oh my god, now I must patch things up' and so on. At that point to assert that would have been something. And incidentally I'm thinking maybe even it would have been humanly the best thing, certainly for the wife it would have been easier to forget you in this way. Recall another tragic figure which really fascinated me from the Cold War era. Those Western leftists who heroically defied anti-communist hysteria in their own countries with the utmost sincerity. They were even ready to go to prison for their communist conviction and defense of Soviet Union, like I now read a biography of you know the great black singer Paul Robeson, who was up to the end total defender of Soviet Union. Isn't it the very illusory nature of their belief which makes their subjective stance so tragically sublime? The miserable reality of the Stalinist Soviet Union makes the inner fragile beauty of their conviction all the more sublime. This leads us to an unexpected radical conclusion. It is not enough to say that we are dealing here with a tragically misplaced ethical conviction, with a blind trust that avoids confronting the miserable terrifying reality of its point of reference. What if on the contrary such a blindness, such a violent gesture of exclusion, of refusing to see, such a disavowal of reality, such a fetishist attitude of 'I know very well that things are horrible in the Soviet Union but I nonetheless believe in Soviet socialism' is an innermost constituent of every ethical stance? Immanuel Kant was already aware of this paradox when he deployed his notion of enthusiasm propos the French Revolution in his late writing Conflict of the Faculties. According to Kant, the revolution's, French Revolution's, true significance does not reside in what actually went on in Paris, much of which Kant was the first to concede was terrifying and included outbursts of murderous passion, but in the enthusiastic response that the events in Paris generated in the eyes of sympathetic observers all around Europe. A quote from Kant: 'The recent revolution of a people which is rich in spirit may well either fail or succeed, accumulate misery and atrocity; it nevertheless arouses in the heart of all spectators a taking of sides according to desires which borders on enthusiasm and which, since its very expression was not without danger, can only have been caused by a moral disposition within the human race.' End of quote. So, to translate this into Lacanian language, the real event, the dimension of the real, did not reside in the immediate reality of the violent events in Paris, but in how this reality appeared to observers and in the hopes thus awakened in them. The reality of what went on in Paris belongs to the temporal dimension of empirical history; the sublime image that generated enthusiasm belongs to eternity. And mutatis mutandis I claim, does the same not apply to the Western admirers of the Soviet Union? The Soviet experience of building socialism in one country certainly did, to quote Kant, accumulate misery and atrocity, but it nonetheless aroused enthusiasm in the heart of the spectators who were not themselves caught up in it. The question here is: does every ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishist disavowal, of such a 'I don't want to see something' as a condition of my sublime ethical enthusiasm? I think yes, every ethics with the exception of the ethics of psychoanalysis. To wonder at this fact is not a proper philosophical attitude. That is to say, what if that which appears as an inconsistency, as the failure to draw all the consequences from one's ethical attitude, what if this is on the contrary the positive condition of possibility of ethics? What if such an exclusion of some form of otherness from the scope of our ethical concerns is co-substantial with the very founding gesture of ethical universality, so that the more universal our ethics is, the more brutal the underlying exclusion is? What the Christian all-inclusive attitude, Saint Paul's famous 'there are no men or women, no Jew or Greeks for me', what this attitude involves is a radical exclusion of those who do not accept inclusion into the Christian community. In other particularistic religions, even in Islam, there is a place for others; they are tolerated even if they are looked upon with condescension. The Christian motto 'all men are brothers', however, also means that those who do not accept to be my brothers are not men. In the early years of the Iranian revolution, Khomeini played on the same paradox when he claimed—I remember it plastically even now—in an interview for the Western press that the Iranian revolution is the most human in the entire history. 'Not one person was killed,' he claimed in the Iranian revolution. When the surprised journalist asked him about the death penalties publicized in the very Iranian media, Khomeini calmly replied: 'Those that we killed were not men but criminal dogs.' I think this logic is somehow implied by every ethical universalism. So what then does ethical universality exclude? Which dimension? There is a wonderful passage in Marcel Proust's recherche, In Search of the Lost Time, in which Marcel, the figure in the novel, uses phone for the first time, speaking to his grandmother. Her voice heard alone, apart from her body, surprised surprises Marcel. It is a voice of a frail old woman, not the gentle voice of the grandmother he remembers. And the point is that this experience then colors his entire perception of the grandmother. When later he visits her in person, he perceives her in a new way: as a strange mad old woman, drowsing over her book, overburdened with age, flushed, coarse, vulgar, no longer the charming caring grandmother he remembered. This is how voice as autonomous partial object can affect our entire perception of the body to which it belongs. The lesson of this is that precisely the direct experience of the unity of a person, where voice seems to fit its organic whole, involves a necessary mystification. In order to penetrate to the truth of the person, one has to tear this unity apart, to focus on one of its aspects in its isolation, and then to allow this element to color our entire perception. This is what Freud I think meant when he opposed hermeneutics, when he wrote that one should interpret en détail, not en masse. To locate every feature of a human being into the totality of the person is to miss not only the meaning of this detail but the true meaning of the whole itself. This is a very radical lesson of psychoanalysis, I think that. If I want really to understand you, no, I shouldn't see you as a whole person, I should do something like what Marcel experiences there: isolate one feature, where when I isolate this feature I see the vulgarity, the whatever, and then let this feature color all of it. And to put it in back to Lacan, Lacanian terms, or even theological terms: in this way I pass from neighbor in the simple sense of semblant, of one who is like me, to the neighbor in this more radical dimension. This would be maybe for psychoanalysis the the expression of a neighbor. There is some someone whom you think you know him or her perfectly, person with whom you spent decades and so on. But doesn't it often happen that that at a certain point this person does something: you catch an evil gaze, a nervous gesture, some vulgarity, unexpected brutality, and all of a sudden you ask yourself: 'My God, is this really the person that I knew?' At that point you encounter the neighbor. So when Freud and Lacan insist on the problematic nature of the Judeo-Christian injunction to love your neighbor, they refer precisely to the dark impenetrable abyss which is a neighbor. Beneath the neighbor as my mirror image, the one who is like me, with whom I can empathize, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical otherness, of someone about whom I ultimately do not know anything. Can I really know who he is? How can I be sure that his words are not a mere pretense? This is why Lacan applies to the neighbor the term thing, the thing, das Ding, used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction. The neighbor is the evil thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. Just think about Stephen King's The Shining, in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast who with an evil grin goes on to slaughter his entire family. This is a neighbor. Since a neighbor is primarily a thing, a traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life, or rather way of enjoyment, disturbs us, throws the balance of our way of life, throws the balance of our way of life off the rails. When the neighbor comes too close, this can also give rise to an aggressive reaction aimed at getting rid of this disturbing intruder. As Peter Sloterdijk—with whom politically I disagree but from time to time he says something penetrating—as Sloterdijk put it: 'More communication means at first above all more conflict.' This is why—that's another thing problem that I have with this we should hear everybody's his or their story from within and so on—this is why I don't think I think this is a typical superego injunction: 'No, you should understand everybody.' It's not possible, so then you feel guilty, you are never up to the level. No, I think that how should I put it very brutally, but I think this is the only honest position: I don't want to understand everybody. I don't care about majority of the people. I think what we need today when we are different cultures violently thrown together, I think we need as Sloterdijk put it, a new code of discretion. We need moral alienation. We need to learn to ignore each other. I don't think we need more to understand each other. This is again an impossible task which makes us forever guilty, 'But did you really understand, how did you know what I meant with that smile' and so on. We should this is typical liberal blackmail which we should which we should reject. Perhaps the best way to describe the status of this sorry, the status of this neighbor would have been—and this is I think there you see clearly politically the limit of this let's understand the neighbor—would be the deadlock of that Truth and Reconciliation procedure in South Africa. Of course I sympathize with it, but again it has its limits. You know the wager was very honorable human one: instead of engaging in revenge and so on, why don't we just offer to all Apartheid torturers the chance of confronting their victims, openly describing what they did, and in this way we guarantee them if they come and confess, they will be pardoned? The catch is that this procedure implies or rather only works when we can count how should I put it on a minimum minimum ethical responsibility and dignity of the torturer. What if what happens is what according to my sources did happen, at least a couple of times: that you got an Apartheid murderer, who torturer, who came there, confronted his black victims, and with a cynical smile said, 'Yes, don't you remember, I tortured you in this way, in that way, I confessed everything, okay, haha, now I'm over.' And he perfectly followed the rules. The problem was that this implication was not met. Which is why based on this, because the motto there in South Africa was 'we forgive, we don't sorry, we forgive you but we will not forget it.' I think this is a very limited motto. I'm opposed to it. It's a fake. First, again, it has limits. It works only at a certain level. Would you be ready to say this for Hitler or Stalin? 'We forgive you, dear Hitler, tell us the story of Holocaust, we will not forget it, but we forgive...' No, I think that when we are dealing with really radical crimes, I'm almost tempted to propose the opposite motto: 'I am ready to forget it, but I will never forgive you.' This is I was told in in Korea, South Korea, how the people there spontaneously, a friend told me this, relate to Japanese crimes. I mean they are still traumatized by what the Japanese did to Koreans under the occupation in World War II and before. The treatment was so brutal, you know, tens of thousands of women forced into prostitution, not to speak about other things. The idea is: it's so horrible that for our psychological sanity we cannot afford to remember it, to think about it. So, let's forget it, but we will never forgive you. I think this is a much more correct attitude when you are dealing when you are dealing with a neighbor. So again, the first conclusion is that neighbor, in this sense of the abyss of otherness which is simply the core of subjectivity, is is the limit to ethical universality. Which is why all these formulas of 'love your neighbor as yourself' are an impossible demand. Underlying this love is always fear. The predominant way to maintain a distance towards this inhuman neighbor's intruding proximity are customs, habits. What are habits? I would like here to repeat an old joke and maybe known to some of you and refer to the very important here in the United States philosophical debate which took place some four years ago in March The philosopher in question was Donald Rumsfeld. You remember when he engaged in that amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown. You remember? I quote him: 'There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.' It means very simply, like I don't know, I am now in Boston and I know that I know this. Clear. Then he went on: 'There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that we know we don't know.' Also it's clear, like I know there are probably some cars in front of this building, but I don't know how many cars are there. But I know that I don't know this. Then Rumsfeld went on: 'But there are also unknown unknowns; there are things we don't know we don't know.' It's clear what he meant, that was his argument. It's not only weapons of mass destruction which we at least know that we don't know. What if Saddam even has some weapons about the existence of which we don't even absolutely know, so we don't even know what we don't know? There may be something totally unexpected there. But did you notice the what's problematic here in his reasoning? That there is a fourth term which is missing: known knowns, things we know that we know; known unknowns, things we know that we don't know; unknown unknowns, things we don't know that we don't know even; and something is missing which is the most interesting category: not the not the known unknowns, but the unknown knowns. Not things that we know that we don't know, but things that we don't know that we know. And that's the Freudian unconscious. And that's why you are in trouble in Iraq, I claim. Because what the American politics didn't take into account is not some mystery there in Iraq or whatever, but the—to use this inappropriate name—the unconscious prejudices and so on. All these ideological prejudices, habits and so on which determined the American politics and military activity without American soldiers and politicians even being aware of it. The problem was here, I think the problem was not that you missed something, the CIA didn't do well the analysis up there. The problem were all these prejudices—usually racist cultural prejudices, political miscalculations, and so on and so on—which then brought the result in which we are. And these unknown knowns are located in habits. What are habits? I'm more and more convinced that habits are an extremely interesting dialectical category. They are not as simple as it appears. Okay, we know that every community in order to function from a from a university department to whole nations needs some rules. People obey rules. However, I think these rules are never simple. It's never 'these are the rules, if you obey them you are in, otherwise you are out'. The catch is that every rules, for structural reasons which in Lacanian terms can be nicely explained as the inconsistency of the big other and so on, every rules need meta-rules, higher level rules which tell you how to relate to explicit rules. The problem is that rules are never simply rules. We have often rules which explicitly prohibit something but the message between the lines is solicitation. Like most of the sexual prohibitions work in this way. When father tells a son 'don't mess with girls', it's basically 'do it but discreetly, prove me that you are a man' or whatever. And also many social rules are like this, I don't know when I was in the army and so on. It was always that often a prohibition was a direct call 'violate the rule in a discreet way'. But then an even more interesting reversal is the opposite one, the opposite gap: when you don't have explicit prohibition which between the lines you are called to violate, but you are explicitly allowed to do something but the message between the lines is 'you shouldn't do it'. Like you are given a certain freedom on condition that you do not use it. And I think this category is very useful in for example, I will not be too long, my God, time is running. Let me give you a nice example. Soviet ex-Soviet Union Russia was in deep crisis in the nineties, in the Yeltsin era. From what friends told me, the main problem was precisely the collapse of these implicit unspoken rules. Like in old Soviet Union, you knew where you stand. You knew what do you have to do when a policeman stops you. How much how can you bribe him. You know when you should take authority seriously. You know when something was offered to you, like 'we live in free society, there is freedom of speech', you knew what this means, that you shouldn't do it. It was clear. And then in the Yeltsin years, it simply wasn't clear. This is what fascinated me in old socialist regimes, how these implicit rules covered everything. For example in my country, ex-Yugoslavia, you okay there was free medical service. You wanted a quality operation done fast, it was exactly codified: for what type of operation, how much money, bribery to what doctor, how much to the nurse, how much to the top doctor, and so on. The implicit rules were clear. The most elementary level of these habits is made, and this I think are rules at its purest, is made of so-called empty gestures. Offers made or meant to be rejected. For example, a friend from Japan told me that in Japan workers have the right to days holiday every year. However, you are expected to use maximum half of this amount. So I, stupid as I am, I ask them, 'okay, why don't you simply put days?' They told me 'you are an idiot, you don't understand it'. And of course they were right. They were... what do you... that's the mystery of rules. Why this type of exchange? Let me give you another example which we have in our country, in my country or in Europe. I don't know if you have it here. Let's say I compete with my friend for a job. I lose, he wins. It's considered polite for a friend to tell me, 'Listen, I know you deserved it really, so I will step down and you get the job.' But of course I'm expected to say no. Like, 'no, no, you have it' and so on. And that's the mystery of it. Although it's clear to both of us that he doesn't really mean it. It's in a way a sincere lie. We both know it's a fake, but it works. Sometimes you can even save a friendship. And I think that every procedure of of of exchange, especially like apology, works like this. Let me in the American style of talk shows give you a confession. This happens to me with my good theoretical enemy, personal friend—I hope I'm allowed to say this—Judith Butler. When we were last summer together in some summer seminar, I, vulgar person as I am, I did something brutal. I used referring to her and to lesbians 'unnatural bitches'. I even prefer to forget what kind of name. Then I noticed she was a little bit hurt. Okay. So life is full of surprises. So I called her immediately afterwards and told her, 'Listen, I'm very sorry, you know blah blah whatever'. And she was very kind, of course. She said, 'Listen Slavoj, I know what person you are'—no this was so nice kind of you—'and of course I know you didn't mean it in any evil way, so please forget about it, you don't owe me an apology.' Now what's the catch here? You got the catch. The catch is that she was able to say 'you don't owe me an apology' only after I did offer an apology. And only in this way it worked. If I were to do what would have been logical—and the way my evil mind works I immediately wanted to do it—my idea was then to tell her, 'Okay, if it's not needed I take it back, the apology', no? It would have been impolite. On the other hand, if she were to say, 'Oh, finally you did apologize, yeah yeah you were nasty, you should apologize,' it would also not be correct. You get it? How something which logically if you analyze it it's meaningless, I offer something, I get it back as unnecessary. But in this very very paradoxical way, as superfluous it's necessary. That's a symbolic gesture at its purest. This is what habits are about. But habits can be more complicated. The true mystery of habits is that it's not only that something is prohibited, but that prohibition itself is prohibited. In the sense that it's prohibited to how should I put it to announce it publicly. I read this description of this scene in some book on on on Stalinism. It's a wonderful simple example. Imagine a dream for me, we are now in Moscow '36, '37, central committee. Okay, I am Stalin. I give a speech. Then one of you stands up and criticizes me, attacks me. Okay, everybody knows that. The next day the question would be 'who saw that guy the last...' okay. But then imagine that another guy would stand up and attack the first guy who attacked me, Stalin, and would say: 'Are you crazy? We don't attack Comrade Stalin in Soviet Union. Why are you doing this?' I claim that this second guy would disappear even faster than the first guy. That is to say, it wasn't only prohibited to criticize Stalin; it was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition. This is the level at which customs function. And it inter... it's interesting to me more and more the way this all this functions. Namely, this implicit—let's call it—the implicit obscene underside of prohibitions which one shouldn't announce, of transgressions which remain implicit. For example a very touchy example, problematic: the Catholic Church pedophilia. I claim it's it's definitely this kind of inherent transgression of the Catholic Church. You cannot say the way the church is saying, 'Okay, priests are humans like everybody else, of course some of them are pedophiliac, we we cannot control it' and so on. No, I even know some examples from a journalist who did research in my own country in Slovenia that of priests who when they joined church were how should I put it straight heterosexuals and it was the institution itself which made them pedophiliacs. So this is something this is what interests me, how institutions have this kind of a secret collective unconscious, not in the Jungian sense, but in sense of an implicit symbolic structure which is publicly disavowed but nonetheless constitutes a disavowed constituent of their identity. Which is why typically the church reacts to these cases in this ultra-protective way. Okay, so and I think that these implicit rules, these unwritten prohibited habits which control us but they are prohibited to mention publicly, this is where change is the most difficult. For example from my experience of the army when I served in '75, '76 in the Yugoslav army, this was my basic experience there. How on the one hand explicitly the military community was extremely homophobic, if somebody was discovered to be homosexual he was beaten every night, totally ignored and so on and so on. But that's only one side of the story. The other side of the story is that unbelievable to what extent the entire army life was penetrated with homosexual innuendos. Like for example even to say hello in the morning we didn't say hello, we say 'I'll smoke yours' or something like this, well it was unbelievable how again the explicit prohibition was sustained by a kind of a permanent reference to some kind of a thwarted implicit homosexuality. The difficult thing is to change things here. That is to say, to change things at the level of what Lacan called the big other. And now I'm coming, if you allow me a little bit you are my superego Irena, a little bit more. The problem is the big other. That's the tragedy today. We conservatives are telling us 'we live in a godless era, blah blah blah'. No, I think if anything we believe more than ever but we objectivize onto habits onto the big other our beliefs. What do I mean by this? What is the Lacanian big other? Of course the most obvious figure of the big other is the big other in the sense of God, the guarantor of meaning, some big symbolic institution. Here, so that I will not say only bad things about Christianity, here I think precisely every leftist materialist should fully appreciate the what in bombastic terms we call Judeo-Christian legacy, whose message I think is precisely basically there is no big other. In what sense do I mean this? I think the text, the first criticism of ideology—okay—is the Book of how do you call the guy who was screwed up by God? Job. The Book of Job. What's so interesting? Why is this the first criticism of ideology? Remember what happens: things look really bad for Job, he loses his wife, his goats whatever, everything. And what happens then? Okay, it's a traumatic situation loss. Then, do you remember? Three, I think there are three or four, three theological friends came each of them explaining, trying to convince Job that his suffering, his misfortunes have a deeper meaning. That's the point. It's not so much that he is guilty. That's only the first theological friend says God is just so if you are suffering even if you don't know what you must have done something. Then others give more refined accounts, like maybe God is testing you, but the message is clear: you must have this has a meaning. It's not just a contingent misfortune. And then comes the beauty. When at the end you remember God comes, his message is 'No, all that the three theological friends says is lie, everything that you said is true'. That is to say, God's answer is unbelievable. It's truly as my favorite theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton said: God there becomes for a moment a blasphemer and an atheist. God's defense is not, 'No, it looks to you that it's meaningless catastrophe but it has a deeper meaning.' No, God, you know when God then goes into this crazy rhetorics of 'But what about did you see how the sun rises? Did you see how when it rains, it can rain on a desert where nobody needs it' and so on. God's message is 'You are nothing special, the whole universe is crazy like this'. It's as if God concedes that his own creation is somehow meaningless, doesn't have a cover in meaning. Which is why I think we should effectively read Job as prefiguring Christ. Because I think to be brutal and to read the Bible, now I'm giving you a very condensed version of a longer theological argument, what dies on the cross is precisely this God which is the guarantor of a deeper meaning. Here I think Christianity has still a very radical message. What do I mean by this? You know that disgusting—for me at least—metaphor of evil as a stain. Like if you look at a picture, if you look too close at a picture, you see only the stain. But if you look from a proper distance, you see how what appeared to you as a stain is effectively just an element which contributes to the global harmony. So the idea is what to our finite perspective appears as a stain, evil, really from the omnipotent all-seeing divine gaze, for that gaze is part of a global harmony. Of course, now the problem is: can we really then say Holocaust, Gulag, or not just the usual suspects? For example and this always shocks me, here you can see the falsity of all this humanitarianism and so on. My God, everybody knows what is going on now. According to Time magazine cover story last summer, in the last ten years at least five million people died unnatural deaths in Congo. But they are not in, so nobody cares. So okay, Congo, Holocaust, Gulag, and so on. It's are we ready to say, 'No, this appears only in our perspective because of our over-proximity as a stain but really it contributes to global meaning, beauty of the universe' and so on. I think that Christ marks the moment when you no longer can say this. The death of Christ means precisely the death of that God up there which guarantees meaning. Because what comes after Christ is the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is simply the community of believers. The meaning of the death of Christ for me is 'There is no big other. I throw myself into the universe, it's up to you.' As every deep theologian knows, the message of Christ is not 'Trust God,' but 'God trusts you. It's up to you. Up to your freedom.' It's a very materialist message, if you want. Okay, that's one aspect. But then there is the opposite aspect of the big other, which is much more interesting: the aspect of appearances. You know the classical joke—I used it three, four times but now I will give a different twist to it—that famous joke about you know a man who thinks he is a grain, a seed, and okay is cured but then goes out of is dismissed from the psychiatric ward and then immediately comes back and says 'I encountered a chicken' and the doctor tells him 'But why are you afraid? You know now that you are not the seed and the chicken will not eat you.' He says 'Okay, I know it, but does the chicken know it that I am no longer...' Okay, now what I want to do now is to claim how this is a joke but it depicts a very real mechanism. A whole country fell apart in order to protect the chicken's ignorance. It's Yugoslavia. Namely, what it's clear now from some memoirs that they published is that already in the early mid-seventies, it was clear to the inner circle nomenklatura that the country is in deep economic trouble. But Tito, life-long president, was old and dying. So they made a collective decision that Tito should die happy. So they prolonged the false the false welfare by by collecting incredible debts. In a couple of years, for Yugoslavia more than billion of dollars. So that the seventies went so-so, relatively well. When Tito died, economic crisis did strike and so on. So you see it's literally this logic. We know it, the chicken should not. The chicken should not get it. And I claim this is ultimately what culture is. It's not we don't know, it is as if for a gaze of some big other there is always a chicken which shouldn't know it. This chicken can be a children. For example how do you let's say you are one of the parents, you are fighting with your partner, blah blah blah. How do you measure the amount of your civilization? It's if you are still able to say, 'But the the child shouldn't know it, no? Let's cover it, let's keep it secret from from the child.' Of course the tragedy is that usually the child does know it, but pretends not to notice, not to hurt you and so on. But the mystery is then that it works. This is, I mean, appearances are a big mystery here. Again, sorry for my old communist obsessions, an incredible story about appearances from Soviet Union again. It's here you can see the theological dimension of Stalinism. In '53 in the summer, Beria, the secret police boss, was arrested. At that very point, the first volume of the new edition of Soviet encyclopedia appeared where A, B, C, Beria. There was a page on Beria in it. What happened? This was printed just before Beria's arrest, so Beria was celebrated as a great leader. What then happened after Beria's arrest was that every subscriber—and we are talking about over two million subscribers—he was ordered to cut out that page and put in the new page, which re-established perfect continuity. The previous entry went on, then instead of Beria which was almost two pages, they replaced it with Bering Strait, you know between Alaska with some photos and so on. So, ask yourself a simple question: whom were they trying to deceive? For whom were they trying to re-establish this continuity? As if you know nothing should be the the appearances should not be disturbed. Not for any empirical person. There was no empirical chicken who shouldn't know. The chicken was the big other, because every empirical person knew it because he had to do it, to cut it out, put it in, and so on. Now that you will not say that I'm just making fun of Eastern Europe, you in United States have the same I know at least one wonderful example. You know of course Hitchcock's Vertigo. Remember the scene after Scotty saves Madeleine from when she jumps into the the Golden Gate Bay there beneath the bridge and takes her home. Okay, undresses her, puts her into his bed. Then you have in his living room a long panning shot showing him, then the camera passes the kitchen sink, about which her underwear is drying up. And then the camera passes on, shows the door of the bedroom where she is. There is only one problem with this scene. Put if you don't believe me, rent or if you have the video, put the freeze on that very moment when you see the underwear above the kitchen sink. It's not underwear. They are just abstract pieces of cloth, like like towels and so on. No underwear. You know why? I read in a book about Vertigo. The reason is that these were the last years of Hays Code censorship. They insisted that it shouldn't be underwear. Because if it's really underwear, it would have been a proof that Scotty saw her naked. This is not allowed, so it shouldn't be underwear. But it's the same mystery as with Stalin and Beria. Now, whom were they trying to protect? Because we viewers, we all automatically assume that we see underwear. It's there. So in other words, there is there is a big other here. So if you allow me a little bit more, please. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would like now to give you three examples... okay, I will try to condense it a little bit. A couple of examples of how this defense against the traumatic... what happens when this protective screen of habits disintegrates? How do you protect yourself of the over-proximity of the of the neighbor? One interesting example here would have been pornography. I claim that the role of this stupid protective screen is there played by the stupidity of the story. Because the problem of pornography would have been of course hardcore pornography the over-proximity of the neighbor, intrusive. Which is why I think to block too much of identification, they do something which did always surprise me as incredibly vulgar. But I think there is a necessity in it. Did you notice if you watch hardcore pornography how incredibly stupid the story, the narrative is which introduces the as if somehow it's the choice. You see it all, but the story should be openly ridiculous. Like I don't know, I remember when I was young I saw one which you know a plumber comes, fixes a hole in the sink, and then the housewife, 'I have another hole to be fixed, can...' it's indescribable. Now people are telling me, 'But today this is falling apart. You have this especially French Catherine Breillat Romance and so on, films which try to combine really engaged melodrama with hardcore pornography.' No, I think censorship did strike back with even stronger oppression. The latest fashion I was told is so-called Gonzo, Gonzo hardcore, which is what? Which is kind of a like we talk about embedded journalism, embedded a hardcore, which means that actors don't even pretend that they are part of the story, they with their comments, ironic grimaces, and so on, they directly address the camera. They don't pretend. And I think that this precisely is censorship. They fear that the proximity of the neighbor would have been too direct and so on and so on. Okay, the next example but I will skip it I wanted to use here is torture. The way to deal in order to deal with torture. We are now in the middle of the process where torture is being rehabilitated. How? There the dimension of the neighbor should disappear. And finally, my royal example as it were would be that of antisemitism. Because if there is in our Western tradition one epitome of the disturbing neighbor who is always too close and so on, it is the Jew. So let me make my position very clear here. Of course I totally reject those leftists who think that because of the international situation, all the suffering of the Palestinians and so on, one should make compromises and tolerate a little bit of antisemitism. Like one should understand them, you know they are... No, I think that antisemitism is for me the zero-level ideology. You don't make compromises there, to put it quite metaphysically. It's always bad. But something very strange is happening later. Sorry, is happening recently. I think that we are witnessing a strange new mode of antisemitism—and before you start shouting I will give you a proof at least wait to the end of my argument—Zionist antisemitism. Why? This idea came to me when I was in Israel with my friends, like my theoretical opponent, personal friend, filmmaker Udi Aloni. We had a debate and then he was ferociously attacked by hardline Zionists there. What did strike me is how the the criticism reproduced all the usual clichés against the Jews in the West. The reproach was, 'You just pretend to be one of us, but you are really uprooted, you don't you are not solidary enough with the with the state of Israel, you are really too cosmopolitan, you don't have roots, you are not identified with your community, you think only about only about commercial success' and so on and so on. In other words, what did shock me is how the the Zionist critique of those Jews who do not solidarize fully with the state of Israel takes over precisely all the standard clichés main clichés in the West against against the Jews. If you don't believe me, do something. Go on the internet and look under the www.masada2000.org/list_a. It's a Zionist website where you get the list of what they call self-hating Jews. It's a shocking document. Why? Because first the term they used is something like 'self-hating internal terrorist shit', like they call them shit. Point two, and you find there many of our friends: Judith Butler is there of course, Avital Ronell, What shocked me is that every person is described in an extremely aggressive way. The photo chosen is usually one that makes you look like a freak, ridiculous, and on the top of it, wherever they could have got it you have email address, a solicitation to hate mail of course. But the impression is really, 'My God, we are back at the'—like antisemite, you know—'the list of shitty Jews'. It's precisely the same the same logic. So again, here we have the problem with the neighbor and so on. So if you allow me just three minutes more, I would like to conclude with a question which maybe bothers you: 'So does this mean we should just in a kind of a Levinasian way respect our neighbors, no universality, just let's keep a distance and so on?' No, there is a positive universal ethics which does take into account this. What kind of ethics? Ethics I would say without morality. But this I don't mean the Nietzschean point when morality means how you relate to others and ethics means 'are you faithful to yourself, to your existential choice and so on'. I mean something else. For me, to use Schiller's opposition of naive and sentimental, morality is sentimental. You do something but you feel good doing it, no? Like you know when you pay for charity for the African kids you think, 'Isn't it nice, there is a happy kid there because I sent him ten dollars a month whatever.' Ethics is much more ruthless. And I would like just to finish to give you a brief example. You find it in the bookstores one of the defining novels for me. By a Hungarian writer, now an old lady who emigrated from Hungary in '56, Agota Kristof. Agota Kristof. I like the name, it looks as if some stupid Eastern European mispronounced Agatha Christie, no? She wrote a trilogy, she wrote a trilogy: The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie. It tells the story of two young boys, twins, living with their grandmother in a small Hungarian border town during the last years of the World War II and the early years of communism. These twins are absolutely immoral. They lie, blackmail, kill. But I think they stand for absolute ethics. Let me give you a couple of examples. One day they meet in a forest a starved deserter and bring him some things he asked them for. Then, that's their narration: 'When we come back with the food and blanket, he, the deserter, says "You are very kind." We say "We weren't trying to be kind. We've brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That's all."' I think this is a wonderful truly Christian ethical stance. You just do what is needed, you don't do it because it's good. You do it because the other needs it, because it has to be done. And no matter what the other asks you. For example one night, the twins find themselves sleeping in the same bed with a German officer, a tormented gay masochist. Early in the morning, the twins awake and want to leave bed. But the officer holds them back. Dialogue: '"Don't move, keep sleeping," says the officer. The boys said "We want to urinate. We have to go." "Don't go, do it here," we ask "where?" He says "On me, yes, don't be afraid, piss on my face." We do it. Then we go out into the garden because the bed is all wet.' Like totally cold normal, the guy wants to piss on his face, what's the problem? Why not? This is the true work of love, I think. Then the twins' closest friend is the priest's housekeeper, a young voluptuous woman who washes them and their cloth and plays erotic games with them and so on. Then something happens when a procession of starved Jews is led through the town on their way to the camp. One of the Jews asks them 'Please, bread.' The housekeeper, the young girl, shows a little bit of bread then smiles and eats herself the bread. The boys decide to punish her. They stole from the German officer a little bit of ammunition and put her in put into the kitchen stove so that her face explodes and disfigures her. It's considered just simple ethical act, I would have done absolutely the same. Then the two brothers blackmail the good priest. Because they have a young girl who is harassed by the whole village, poor girl, and the girl needs help to survive. So what do they do? They go to the priest and said, 'We heard the story that you were once playing with a small girl.' The priest said it's not true. And the boys said, 'We don't care, but the girl needs money so if you don't give us so much money every week, we will tell this to the whole village.' Then the priest said, I quote it, 'It's monstrous, have you any idea what you are doing?' The boys' answer: 'Yes, sir, we are blackmailing you.' 'At your age it's deplorable.' The boys' answer: 'Yes, it's deplorable that we've been forced to do this. But Harelip, the girl, and her mother absolutely need money.' I would do the same. There is nothing personal in this blackmail. Later they even become close friends with the priest. And when the girl can survive on her own, learns to work and so on, they go to the priest and said, 'Thanks very much, now we no longer need any money.' They tell the priest, quote, 'Keep it, you have given enough. We took your money when it was necessary. Now we earn enough money to give some to Harelip, to the girl, we have also taught her taught her to work.' And the same when the mother, the grandmother asked them to to ask them to kill her, they kill her and so on. That's where I stand. If you would ask me what kind of ethics I would like to follow, it's precisely this: an ethical monster without empathy, doing simply the duty to help others with blind spontaneity, but without any narcissistic self-satisfaction. I claim that with more people like these two monstrous children, the world would have been a pleasant place to stay. It is only in such a world that we would be really alive. You know the old religious question: 'Is there life after death?' Wolf Biermann, the German in the old days dissident poet, has a wonderful poem where he asks the true question. He says 'The true question is not is there life after death, but is there life before death?' And his answer is okay, only in with certain attitude and so on. And I think these two children, with their ruthless brutal ethics—you do it, it's needed, you blackmail the priest, it's needed, you kill, friend asks you to piss on his face, what's the problem, you do it—that's what I would like to be. Thanks very much.
Thank you very much. I'm very glad to be here. Thank you for Irena to inviting me, for Jeffrey for this wonderful introduction. I especially agree, without any irony, with that very precise point about dogmatics. I think that and especially, I would even go a step further and say dogmatics in the theological sense of the word. Why, maybe it will become clear from what I will be saying. So, let me go to the point and nonetheless, I hope you will not be too disappointed because there will it will not be only jokes in what I will be saying. Okay. Let me begin in a very traditional way with the big question: what can philosophy do today? What can it tell the general public haunted by the problems of ecology, racism, religious conflicts, and so on? I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem, mystifying it instead of enabling us to solve it. There are not only wrong answers; there are also wrong questions. These wrong questions are what we call ideology. When we are dealing with a problem which is undoubtedly a real problem, the ideological designation or perception introduces its inevitable mystification. So again, when people ask me, ecology or war, what can we do? Well, I don't know. What I can do as a philosopher is just to analyze how we perceive the problem. Let me take the example of tolerance. I'm opposed to this notion. I think it's a pseudo-notion. Now, of course, the immediate reaction of well-meaning liberals is: but how can you be for intolerance towards foreigners, how can you be for antifeminism, for homophobia, and so on and so on? But this is the catch. Of course I'm not for intolerance towards foreigners, for antifeminism, and so on. What I am against is the perception which is today more or less automatic of racism as a problem of tolerance. Make a simple experiment, I did make it. Go and check on the web Martin Luther King's speeches. If there is a great figure of antiracist fight, of course it's Martin Luther King. You will see that the word tolerance is practically absent there. For Martin Luther King, one doesn't fight racism with tolerance but with what? Emancipatory political struggle, even armed struggle. So, why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance rather than problems of inequality, exploitation, injustice, and so on? You see my point? That's for me the problem. Racism is a problem, but to perceive racism as problem of tolerance, it's not automatic. In this innocent shift of perspective, there is ideology. Why? I claim the reason is the liberal multiculturalist basic ideological operation, the—let's call it—culturalization of politics. Political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality or economic exploitation, are naturalized, neutralized into cultural differences. That is, into different ways of life which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, so they can only be tolerated. The cause of this culturalization is the retreat, the failure of direct political solutions such as welfare state or various socialist projects. Tolerance is their post-political ersatz. And I think the same goes for harassment, another heavily connotated ideological term. Again, of course I am very much against brutal harassments like rape, bigotry, and so on and so on. The problem is that in today's ideological space, real harassments, their perception, is irreducibly intertwined with the narcissistic notion of an individual who experiences all proximity of others as an intrusion into his or her private space. So I claim that the way we in the so-called highly developed Western countries, if you look closely how we effectively use the word tolerance, I claim it de facto as a rule means its exact opposite. Tolerance means 'don't harass me'. 'Don't harass me' means 'don't come too close to me'. You know, like are you washed, deodorants, don't smoke, and in other words, tolerance means 'I am intolerant towards your over-proximity to me'. Tolerance means 'don't come too close, stay at the proper distance'. So ideology is in this precise sense a notion which while designating a real problem blurs a crucial line of separation. Okay, another of such classical ideological notions today I think is this celebration, pseudo-Deleuzian, of nomadic existence and so on and so on. Why? Because instead of enabling us to draw the crucial distinction, it blurs it. It brings together under the same cover nomadic existence two totally different phenomena. One is the nomadic existence of—well, to be frank, somebody like me, an probably upper-middle-class intellectual traveling nicely, sometimes with upgrades and so on, even business class. But then you know, to put me together with let's say to be a little bit pathetic, a third world person refugee from a war-torn or starved country or starved population and claim we are both nomadic. It's a little bit like to quote Gayatri Spivak to take a rich fat lady who is dieting and a starving third world woman and say they are basically doing the same thing, eating less than. This ideology of tolerance can be reduced to the motto 'love your neighbor as yourself'. However, as we learned from Freud, neighbor is not simply another person with the rich inner life filled with stories she or he is telling himself, herself—this is the counter-revolution attacks or what? Enemy never... you see? I told... okay. This is what in Lacan we call intervention of the real and so on. Okay, let's go on. It's... so usually when we say neighbor, multiculturalist ideology tells us 'yes, we should know the other from within, we should not objectivize the other'. The premise of liberal tolerance is thus that such a person whom we know from within cannot ultimately be an enemy. Or to quote a well-known motto, which I totally oppose incidentally and but it sounds so sublime, so deep: 'an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard'. Okay, there is a nice literary example known to all of us: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It is true Mary Shelley does something that a conservative would never have done. In the central part of her novel, she allows the monster to speak for himself, to tell the story from his own perspective. Her choice expresses the liberal attitude towards the freedom of speech at its most radical. Everyone's point of view should be heard. In Frankenstein, the monster is not a thing, a horrible object no one dares to confront. He is fully subjectivized. Mary Shelley moves inside his mind and asks what is it like to be labeled, defined, oppressed, excommunicated, even physically distorted by society? The ultimate criminal is thus allowed to present himself as the ultimate victim. The monstrous murderer reveals himself as a deeply hurt, desperate individual yearning for company and love. Now along this line of practicing this noble motto of multicultural tolerance, the authorities in Iceland, Ísland, Reykjavík capital, but also now I heard in some other European countries, maybe even here in the United States, I don't know about it, they are recently imposing a unique form of enacting this subjectivization of the other. In order to fight the growing xenophobia, the result of the greater and greater number of immigrant workers in Western Europe, as well as sexual intolerance, they are organizing what is called Living Libraries. Members of ethnic or sexual minorities—gays, immigrant East Europeans, or blacks—are paid to visit an Icelandic or British or German family and just talk to them, acquainting them with their way of life, their everyday practices, their dreams, and so on. In this way, the exotic stranger who was perceived as a threat to our way of life appears as somebody we can empathize with, with the complex world of his or her own. So this sounds very nice. What's the problem? The problem is let's take this noble motto, 'an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard', and do something very vulgar in the sense of British empiricism. Let's just replace the general name with a concrete example. Would you also say Hitler was our enemy because we did not really try to hear his story? And the problem is deeper here than it may than it may appear. Namely, the automatic presupposition which we should abandon is that the story we are telling ourselves about ourselves, our inner authentic self-experience, is the point of truth. As if if you humanized the other, if you get him at his or her or their innermost, then you can say this is what they truly are. But I think that this precisely if there is a lesson of psychoanalysis is that this precisely is what we should radically abandon. If from what we know about Hitler, if we take again the worst example, one of the worst, Hitler, I think that even for him probably the same as Hannah Arendt claimed for Eichmann would have hold. Probably he was as we know from the memories of his secretary who died only two years ago or when, he was he could have been quite kind, compassionate, he liked to serve cakes to small children and so on, gentle vegetarian and so on. And I'm even quite sure that that he was absolutely sincere in this. This is the important lesson of Hannah Arendt, that people who cause great evil we should not elevate them into sublime Byron-esque demonic figures of evil. The gap between their intimate experience and the horror of their acts is always immense. So again, the experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie. That's not the point of truth. So let me give you two extreme examples which I already developed in some of my earlier books. One Western, one Eastern. The West: Père Joseph. You maybe know who he was, the grey eminence of Cardinal Richelieu. And you should maybe read the book Aldous Huxley, The Grey Eminence, about Père Joseph. What fascinated Aldous Huxley so much about Père Joseph? It's that he was—well, the most brutal Realpolitiker, real politician that you can imagine. Organizing kidnappings, torture, dark plotting. He is basically the guy, if we simplify history, who is responsible for Hitler, you know in one sense. In the Thirty Years' War, in Europe, he was the one who made a pact between Catholic France and Protestant Sweden against okay, Catholic Austria, in order to weaken Germany, to prevent the reunification of Germany. He succeeded. The result was the German delay, deferral of reunification, which was the structural condition for Hitler. Okay, the worst guy you can imagine. But there is something quite fascinating. After he did this dirty work every evening, metaphorically almost every evening, he was in permanent conversation, exchange of letters with some French convent with nuns and the exchange of letter demonstrates that he was a practicing mystic, this same Père Joseph, and you cannot escape the conclusion: his mystical meditations are how should I put it simply? Top of the top. Absolutely at the level of Saint Teresa of whatever you want. And this is what fascinated Huxley. How is it possible that the same person who was ruthless lying, poisoning, brutality itself, at the same time demonstrates a breathtakingly deep spiritual strength? Huxley's solution was a very simple one. Was that there must be something in Western Christianity which enables this, opens up the possibility of this deviation. He thinks is too much fixation on pain, fascination with the figure of Christ on the cross. So Huxley's solution: let's turn to Eastern spirituality. But there I think the story is the same. I read a book which I often quote, Brian Victoria—he himself is a Zen Buddhist—Zen at War. Where you learn again this is a book about how the Japanese Zen community related towards the Japanese war effort in the thirties and forties. And you learn in this book that with really a couple, like five, six minor exceptions, millions of them not only totally supported Japanese war effort but even provided the justification of it. Let me mention a figure which I'm sure is well known to many of you: Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. Popular in the sixties here in the States and in all Europe as the great popularizer of Zen Buddhism. Maybe we should also read his text from the thirties and forties, where for example in justifying Japanese invasion of China, he said that the Chinese should learn that from the cosmic perspective the sword which is killing them now is really a sword of love. Then he advises the attitude of a true warrior: that you should as it were overcome your ego and objectivize yourself, which makes killing much easier. He says like when you kill a man, you shouldn't think 'I'm pulling the trigger to hit him'. You should say 'I'm observing how my hand triggers a gun and when the bullet flies through the air, the enemy body stumbles upon it' so that instead of a substantial confrontation of me hurting another human being, you get some kind of a abstract abstract ballet. So even more, Suzuki and others—if you want detailed proofs, read the book—demonstrate how he demonstrates how... yes Suzuki even went a step further and claimed a very direct claim that for the majority of ordinary people who don't have time for big meditations and so on and so on, to spend days on them or years, absolute obedience to military discipline it's the only practical way to achieve Satori, the Zen Buddhist enlightenment. The idea is when the commander shouts 'shoot' and you shoot without thinking, you have overcome your false ego and so on and so on and so on. So again, my point is not: look, Suzuki was a dirty militarist in reality. No, this would have been easy. My point is you got my point: to to accept this gap. That at the same time, he could have justified terrible crimes and at the same time he was absolutely authentic authentic purveyor of spiritual experiences. So, the lesson is clear: it concerns the difficulty to fully accept the gap between the inner authenticity of one's life and the ethics one practices. Inner authenticity is no guarantee against ethical monstrosity. Let me engage now with a much more problematic maybe to some of you example, which I mean in with whole respect towards the victims, of course. When the United flight on September 11th and other three planes were kidnapped, it is significant that that the focus of the phone calls to their closest relatives from the passengers when who knew they were about to die was always something like 'I love you'. However, a suspicion remains here. Is this desperate confession of love also not something of a sham? The same kind of fakery as the sudden turn to God and prayer of someone who suddenly faces the danger or proximity of death. In other words, you know I'm talking now about a very desperate moment. They knew they were dying, you make the last call to your wife, beloved, whatever, 'I love you'. But I claim why should this be authentic? There is no reason to think to think this is authentic. Another example came to my mind which is known to every old United States leftist. I remember when I was young, we were all taught the horror about the Rosenberg trial, you know against the two of them Julius and Ethel Rosenberg accused of spying for Soviet Union. And we were fascinated by when their prison letters were translated, like this sincerity, this purity. Even their advocates have to admit today we know that, maybe not both of them, but that he, Julius, I'm sorry, we have to concede here to the devil, the right when they are right, he was a spy. He was a spy. So this makes all the more crazy this as it were moral, as it were moral naivety, purity, how he was able to insist in his life to the end. So I think that even when we are in this kind of a desperate situation—now I know I'm going to die—I don't think we are authentic at that point. At that point, we desperately construct a lie the way we would like to be remembered and so on and so on. You know what would have been a truly radical ethical act here for me? Please don't take it in an obscene way, I mean it deadly serious. Let's say I'm on a plane—of course this only holds if it's true, the implication—the the true act would have been: okay, I'm on a plane, I have a chance to call my wife, I know in two minutes I will be dead. To call my wife and to say, 'listen darling, in in half a minute I will die but frankly our marriage was hell, I'm glad' and so on. That would have been an act. That would have been something. To you know to avoid this search 'oh my god, now I must patch things up' and so on. At that point to assert that would have been something. And incidentally I'm thinking maybe even it would have been humanly the best thing, certainly for the wife it would have been easier to forget you in this way. Recall another tragic figure which really fascinated me from the Cold War era. Those Western leftists who heroically defied anti-communist hysteria in their own countries with the utmost sincerity. They were even ready to go to prison for their communist conviction and defense of Soviet Union, like I now read a biography of you know the great black singer Paul Robeson, who was up to the end total defender of Soviet Union. Isn't it the very illusory nature of their belief which makes their subjective stance so tragically sublime? The miserable reality of the Stalinist Soviet Union makes the inner fragile beauty of their conviction all the more sublime. This leads us to an unexpected radical conclusion. It is not enough to say that we are dealing here with a tragically misplaced ethical conviction, with a blind trust that avoids confronting the miserable terrifying reality of its point of reference. What if on the contrary such a blindness, such a violent gesture of exclusion, of refusing to see, such a disavowal of reality, such a fetishist attitude of 'I know very well that things are horrible in the Soviet Union but I nonetheless believe in Soviet socialism' is an innermost constituent of every ethical stance? Immanuel Kant was already aware of this paradox when he deployed his notion of enthusiasm propos the French Revolution in his late writing Conflict of the Faculties. According to Kant, the revolution's, French Revolution's, true significance does not reside in what actually went on in Paris, much of which Kant was the first to concede was terrifying and included outbursts of murderous passion, but in the enthusiastic response that the events in Paris generated in the eyes of sympathetic observers all around Europe. A quote from Kant: 'The recent revolution of a people which is rich in spirit may well either fail or succeed, accumulate misery and atrocity; it nevertheless arouses in the heart of all spectators a taking of sides according to desires which borders on enthusiasm and which, since its very expression was not without danger, can only have been caused by a moral disposition within the human race.' End of quote. So, to translate this into Lacanian language, the real event, the dimension of the real, did not reside in the immediate reality of the violent events in Paris, but in how this reality appeared to observers and in the hopes thus awakened in them. The reality of what went on in Paris belongs to the temporal dimension of empirical history; the sublime image that generated enthusiasm belongs to eternity. And mutatis mutandis I claim, does the same not apply to the Western admirers of the Soviet Union? The Soviet experience of building socialism in one country certainly did, to quote Kant, accumulate misery and atrocity, but it nonetheless aroused enthusiasm in the heart of the spectators who were not themselves caught up in it. The question here is: does every ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishist disavowal, of such a 'I don't want to see something' as a condition of my sublime ethical enthusiasm? I think yes, every ethics with the exception of the ethics of psychoanalysis. To wonder at this fact is not a proper philosophical attitude. That is to say, what if that which appears as an inconsistency, as the failure to draw all the consequences from one's ethical attitude, what if this is on the contrary the positive condition of possibility of ethics? What if such an exclusion of some form of otherness from the scope of our ethical concerns is co-substantial with the very founding gesture of ethical universality, so that the more universal our ethics is, the more brutal the underlying exclusion is? What the Christian all-inclusive attitude, Saint Paul's famous 'there are no men or women, no Jew or Greeks for me', what this attitude involves is a radical exclusion of those who do not accept inclusion into the Christian community. In other particularistic religions, even in Islam, there is a place for others; they are tolerated even if they are looked upon with condescension. The Christian motto 'all men are brothers', however, also means that those who do not accept to be my brothers are not men. In the early years of the Iranian revolution, Khomeini played on the same paradox when he claimed—I remember it plastically even now—in an interview for the Western press that the Iranian revolution is the most human in the entire history. 'Not one person was killed,' he claimed in the Iranian revolution. When the surprised journalist asked him about the death penalties publicized in the very Iranian media, Khomeini calmly replied: 'Those that we killed were not men but criminal dogs.' I think this logic is somehow implied by every ethical universalism. So what then does ethical universality exclude? Which dimension? There is a wonderful passage in Marcel Proust's recherche, In Search of the Lost Time, in which Marcel, the figure in the novel, uses phone for the first time, speaking to his grandmother. Her voice heard alone, apart from her body, surprised surprises Marcel. It is a voice of a frail old woman, not the gentle voice of the grandmother he remembers. And the point is that this experience then colors his entire perception of the grandmother. When later he visits her in person, he perceives her in a new way: as a strange mad old woman, drowsing over her book, overburdened with age, flushed, coarse, vulgar, no longer the charming caring grandmother he remembered. This is how voice as autonomous partial object can affect our entire perception of the body to which it belongs. The lesson of this is that precisely the direct experience of the unity of a person, where voice seems to fit its organic whole, involves a necessary mystification. In order to penetrate to the truth of the person, one has to tear this unity apart, to focus on one of its aspects in its isolation, and then to allow this element to color our entire perception. This is what Freud I think meant when he opposed hermeneutics, when he wrote that one should interpret en détail, not en masse. To locate every feature of a human being into the totality of the person is to miss not only the meaning of this detail but the true meaning of the whole itself. This is a very radical lesson of psychoanalysis, I think that. If I want really to understand you, no, I shouldn't see you as a whole person, I should do something like what Marcel experiences there: isolate one feature, where when I isolate this feature I see the vulgarity, the whatever, and then let this feature color all of it. And to put it in back to Lacan, Lacanian terms, or even theological terms: in this way I pass from neighbor in the simple sense of semblant, of one who is like me, to the neighbor in this more radical dimension. This would be maybe for psychoanalysis the the expression of a neighbor. There is some someone whom you think you know him or her perfectly, person with whom you spent decades and so on. But doesn't it often happen that that at a certain point this person does something: you catch an evil gaze, a nervous gesture, some vulgarity, unexpected brutality, and all of a sudden you ask yourself: 'My God, is this really the person that I knew?' At that point you encounter the neighbor. So when Freud and Lacan insist on the problematic nature of the Judeo-Christian injunction to love your neighbor, they refer precisely to the dark impenetrable abyss which is a neighbor. Beneath the neighbor as my mirror image, the one who is like me, with whom I can empathize, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical otherness, of someone about whom I ultimately do not know anything. Can I really know who he is? How can I be sure that his words are not a mere pretense? This is why Lacan applies to the neighbor the term thing, the thing, das Ding, used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction. The neighbor is the evil thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face. Just think about Stephen King's The Shining, in which the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast who with an evil grin goes on to slaughter his entire family. This is a neighbor. Since a neighbor is primarily a thing, a traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life, or rather way of enjoyment, disturbs us, throws the balance of our way of life, throws the balance of our way of life off the rails. When the neighbor comes too close, this can also give rise to an aggressive reaction aimed at getting rid of this disturbing intruder. As Peter Sloterdijk—with whom politically I disagree but from time to time he says something penetrating—as Sloterdijk put it: 'More communication means at first above all more conflict.' This is why—that's another thing problem that I have with this we should hear everybody's his or their story from within and so on—this is why I don't think I think this is a typical superego injunction: 'No, you should understand everybody.' It's not possible, so then you feel guilty, you are never up to the level. No, I think that how should I put it very brutally, but I think this is the only honest position: I don't want to understand everybody. I don't care about majority of the people. I think what we need today when we are different cultures violently thrown together, I think we need as Sloterdijk put it, a new code of discretion. We need moral alienation. We need to learn to ignore each other. I don't think we need more to understand each other. This is again an impossible task which makes us forever guilty, 'But did you really understand, how did you know what I meant with that smile' and so on. We should this is typical liberal blackmail which we should which we should reject. Perhaps the best way to describe the status of this sorry, the status of this neighbor would have been—and this is I think there you see clearly politically the limit of this let's understand the neighbor—would be the deadlock of that Truth and Reconciliation procedure in South Africa. Of course I sympathize with it, but again it has its limits. You know the wager was very honorable human one: instead of engaging in revenge and so on, why don't we just offer to all Apartheid torturers the chance of confronting their victims, openly describing what they did, and in this way we guarantee them if they come and confess, they will be pardoned? The catch is that this procedure implies or rather only works when we can count how should I put it on a minimum minimum ethical responsibility and dignity of the torturer. What if what happens is what according to my sources did happen, at least a couple of times: that you got an Apartheid murderer, who torturer, who came there, confronted his black victims, and with a cynical smile said, 'Yes, don't you remember, I tortured you in this way, in that way, I confessed everything, okay, haha, now I'm over.' And he perfectly followed the rules. The problem was that this implication was not met. Which is why based on this, because the motto there in South Africa was 'we forgive, we don't sorry, we forgive you but we will not forget it.' I think this is a very limited motto. I'm opposed to it. It's a fake. First, again, it has limits. It works only at a certain level. Would you be ready to say this for Hitler or Stalin? 'We forgive you, dear Hitler, tell us the story of Holocaust, we will not forget it, but we forgive...' No, I think that when we are dealing with really radical crimes, I'm almost tempted to propose the opposite motto: 'I am ready to forget it, but I will never forgive you.' This is I was told in in Korea, South Korea, how the people there spontaneously, a friend told me this, relate to Japanese crimes. I mean they are still traumatized by what the Japanese did to Koreans under the occupation in World War II and before. The treatment was so brutal, you know, tens of thousands of women forced into prostitution, not to speak about other things. The idea is: it's so horrible that for our psychological sanity we cannot afford to remember it, to think about it. So, let's forget it, but we will never forgive you. I think this is a much more correct attitude when you are dealing when you are dealing with a neighbor. So again, the first conclusion is that neighbor, in this sense of the abyss of otherness which is simply the core of subjectivity, is is the limit to ethical universality. Which is why all these formulas of 'love your neighbor as yourself' are an impossible demand. Underlying this love is always fear. The predominant way to maintain a distance towards this inhuman neighbor's intruding proximity are customs, habits. What are habits? I would like here to repeat an old joke and maybe known to some of you and refer to the very important here in the United States philosophical debate which took place some four years ago in March The philosopher in question was Donald Rumsfeld. You remember when he engaged in that amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown. You remember? I quote him: 'There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.' It means very simply, like I don't know, I am now in Boston and I know that I know this. Clear. Then he went on: 'There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that we know we don't know.' Also it's clear, like I know there are probably some cars in front of this building, but I don't know how many cars are there. But I know that I don't know this. Then Rumsfeld went on: 'But there are also unknown unknowns; there are things we don't know we don't know.' It's clear what he meant, that was his argument. It's not only weapons of mass destruction which we at least know that we don't know. What if Saddam even has some weapons about the existence of which we don't even absolutely know, so we don't even know what we don't know? There may be something totally unexpected there. But did you notice the what's problematic here in his reasoning? That there is a fourth term which is missing: known knowns, things we know that we know; known unknowns, things we know that we don't know; unknown unknowns, things we don't know that we don't know even; and something is missing which is the most interesting category: not the not the known unknowns, but the unknown knowns. Not things that we know that we don't know, but things that we don't know that we know. And that's the Freudian unconscious. And that's why you are in trouble in Iraq, I claim. Because what the American politics didn't take into account is not some mystery there in Iraq or whatever, but the—to use this inappropriate name—the unconscious prejudices and so on. All these ideological prejudices, habits and so on which determined the American politics and military activity without American soldiers and politicians even being aware of it. The problem was here, I think the problem was not that you missed something, the CIA didn't do well the analysis up there. The problem were all these prejudices—usually racist cultural prejudices, political miscalculations, and so on and so on—which then brought the result in which we are. And these unknown knowns are located in habits. What are habits? I'm more and more convinced that habits are an extremely interesting dialectical category. They are not as simple as it appears. Okay, we know that every community in order to function from a from a university department to whole nations needs some rules. People obey rules. However, I think these rules are never simple. It's never 'these are the rules, if you obey them you are in, otherwise you are out'. The catch is that every rules, for structural reasons which in Lacanian terms can be nicely explained as the inconsistency of the big other and so on, every rules need meta-rules, higher level rules which tell you how to relate to explicit rules. The problem is that rules are never simply rules. We have often rules which explicitly prohibit something but the message between the lines is solicitation. Like most of the sexual prohibitions work in this way. When father tells a son 'don't mess with girls', it's basically 'do it but discreetly, prove me that you are a man' or whatever. And also many social rules are like this, I don't know when I was in the army and so on. It was always that often a prohibition was a direct call 'violate the rule in a discreet way'. But then an even more interesting reversal is the opposite one, the opposite gap: when you don't have explicit prohibition which between the lines you are called to violate, but you are explicitly allowed to do something but the message between the lines is 'you shouldn't do it'. Like you are given a certain freedom on condition that you do not use it. And I think this category is very useful in for example, I will not be too long, my God, time is running. Let me give you a nice example. Soviet ex-Soviet Union Russia was in deep crisis in the nineties, in the Yeltsin era. From what friends told me, the main problem was precisely the collapse of these implicit unspoken rules. Like in old Soviet Union, you knew where you stand. You knew what do you have to do when a policeman stops you. How much how can you bribe him. You know when you should take authority seriously. You know when something was offered to you, like 'we live in free society, there is freedom of speech', you knew what this means, that you shouldn't do it. It was clear. And then in the Yeltsin years, it simply wasn't clear. This is what fascinated me in old socialist regimes, how these implicit rules covered everything. For example in my country, ex-Yugoslavia, you okay there was free medical service. You wanted a quality operation done fast, it was exactly codified: for what type of operation, how much money, bribery to what doctor, how much to the nurse, how much to the top doctor, and so on. The implicit rules were clear. The most elementary level of these habits is made, and this I think are rules at its purest, is made of so-called empty gestures. Offers made or meant to be rejected. For example, a friend from Japan told me that in Japan workers have the right to days holiday every year. However, you are expected to use maximum half of this amount. So I, stupid as I am, I ask them, 'okay, why don't you simply put days?' They told me 'you are an idiot, you don't understand it'. And of course they were right. They were... what do you... that's the mystery of rules. Why this type of exchange? Let me give you another example which we have in our country, in my country or in Europe. I don't know if you have it here. Let's say I compete with my friend for a job. I lose, he wins. It's considered polite for a friend to tell me, 'Listen, I know you deserved it really, so I will step down and you get the job.' But of course I'm expected to say no. Like, 'no, no, you have it' and so on. And that's the mystery of it. Although it's clear to both of us that he doesn't really mean it. It's in a way a sincere lie. We both know it's a fake, but it works. Sometimes you can even save a friendship. And I think that every procedure of of of exchange, especially like apology, works like this. Let me in the American style of talk shows give you a confession. This happens to me with my good theoretical enemy, personal friend—I hope I'm allowed to say this—Judith Butler. When we were last summer together in some summer seminar, I, vulgar person as I am, I did something brutal. I used referring to her and to lesbians 'unnatural bitches'. I even prefer to forget what kind of name. Then I noticed she was a little bit hurt. Okay. So life is full of surprises. So I called her immediately afterwards and told her, 'Listen, I'm very sorry, you know blah blah whatever'. And she was very kind, of course. She said, 'Listen Slavoj, I know what person you are'—no this was so nice kind of you—'and of course I know you didn't mean it in any evil way, so please forget about it, you don't owe me an apology.' Now what's the catch here? You got the catch. The catch is that she was able to say 'you don't owe me an apology' only after I did offer an apology. And only in this way it worked. If I were to do what would have been logical—and the way my evil mind works I immediately wanted to do it—my idea was then to tell her, 'Okay, if it's not needed I take it back, the apology', no? It would have been impolite. On the other hand, if she were to say, 'Oh, finally you did apologize, yeah yeah you were nasty, you should apologize,' it would also not be correct. You get it? How something which logically if you analyze it it's meaningless, I offer something, I get it back as unnecessary. But in this very very paradoxical way, as superfluous it's necessary. That's a symbolic gesture at its purest. This is what habits are about. But habits can be more complicated. The true mystery of habits is that it's not only that something is prohibited, but that prohibition itself is prohibited. In the sense that it's prohibited to how should I put it to announce it publicly. I read this description of this scene in some book on on on Stalinism. It's a wonderful simple example. Imagine a dream for me, we are now in Moscow '36, '37, central committee. Okay, I am Stalin. I give a speech. Then one of you stands up and criticizes me, attacks me. Okay, everybody knows that. The next day the question would be 'who saw that guy the last...' okay. But then imagine that another guy would stand up and attack the first guy who attacked me, Stalin, and would say: 'Are you crazy? We don't attack Comrade Stalin in Soviet Union. Why are you doing this?' I claim that this second guy would disappear even faster than the first guy. That is to say, it wasn't only prohibited to criticize Stalin; it was even more prohibited to publicly announce this prohibition. This is the level at which customs function. And it inter... it's interesting to me more and more the way this all this functions. Namely, this implicit—let's call it—the implicit obscene underside of prohibitions which one shouldn't announce, of transgressions which remain implicit. For example a very touchy example, problematic: the Catholic Church pedophilia. I claim it's it's definitely this kind of inherent transgression of the Catholic Church. You cannot say the way the church is saying, 'Okay, priests are humans like everybody else, of course some of them are pedophiliac, we we cannot control it' and so on. No, I even know some examples from a journalist who did research in my own country in Slovenia that of priests who when they joined church were how should I put it straight heterosexuals and it was the institution itself which made them pedophiliacs. So this is something this is what interests me, how institutions have this kind of a secret collective unconscious, not in the Jungian sense, but in sense of an implicit symbolic structure which is publicly disavowed but nonetheless constitutes a disavowed constituent of their identity. Which is why typically the church reacts to these cases in this ultra-protective way. Okay, so and I think that these implicit rules, these unwritten prohibited habits which control us but they are prohibited to mention publicly, this is where change is the most difficult. For example from my experience of the army when I served in '75, '76 in the Yugoslav army, this was my basic experience there. How on the one hand explicitly the military community was extremely homophobic, if somebody was discovered to be homosexual he was beaten every night, totally ignored and so on and so on. But that's only one side of the story. The other side of the story is that unbelievable to what extent the entire army life was penetrated with homosexual innuendos. Like for example even to say hello in the morning we didn't say hello, we say 'I'll smoke yours' or something like this, well it was unbelievable how again the explicit prohibition was sustained by a kind of a permanent reference to some kind of a thwarted implicit homosexuality. The difficult thing is to change things here. That is to say, to change things at the level of what Lacan called the big other. And now I'm coming, if you allow me a little bit you are my superego Irena, a little bit more. The problem is the big other. That's the tragedy today. We conservatives are telling us 'we live in a godless era, blah blah blah'. No, I think if anything we believe more than ever but we objectivize onto habits onto the big other our beliefs. What do I mean by this? What is the Lacanian big other? Of course the most obvious figure of the big other is the big other in the sense of God, the guarantor of meaning, some big symbolic institution. Here, so that I will not say only bad things about Christianity, here I think precisely every leftist materialist should fully appreciate the what in bombastic terms we call Judeo-Christian legacy, whose message I think is precisely basically there is no big other. In what sense do I mean this? I think the text, the first criticism of ideology—okay—is the Book of how do you call the guy who was screwed up by God? Job. The Book of Job. What's so interesting? Why is this the first criticism of ideology? Remember what happens: things look really bad for Job, he loses his wife, his goats whatever, everything. And what happens then? Okay, it's a traumatic situation loss. Then, do you remember? Three, I think there are three or four, three theological friends came each of them explaining, trying to convince Job that his suffering, his misfortunes have a deeper meaning. That's the point. It's not so much that he is guilty. That's only the first theological friend says God is just so if you are suffering even if you don't know what you must have done something. Then others give more refined accounts, like maybe God is testing you, but the message is clear: you must have this has a meaning. It's not just a contingent misfortune. And then comes the beauty. When at the end you remember God comes, his message is 'No, all that the three theological friends says is lie, everything that you said is true'. That is to say, God's answer is unbelievable. It's truly as my favorite theologian Gilbert Keith Chesterton said: God there becomes for a moment a blasphemer and an atheist. God's defense is not, 'No, it looks to you that it's meaningless catastrophe but it has a deeper meaning.' No, God, you know when God then goes into this crazy rhetorics of 'But what about did you see how the sun rises? Did you see how when it rains, it can rain on a desert where nobody needs it' and so on. God's message is 'You are nothing special, the whole universe is crazy like this'. It's as if God concedes that his own creation is somehow meaningless, doesn't have a cover in meaning. Which is why I think we should effectively read Job as prefiguring Christ. Because I think to be brutal and to read the Bible, now I'm giving you a very condensed version of a longer theological argument, what dies on the cross is precisely this God which is the guarantor of a deeper meaning. Here I think Christianity has still a very radical message. What do I mean by this? You know that disgusting—for me at least—metaphor of evil as a stain. Like if you look at a picture, if you look too close at a picture, you see only the stain. But if you look from a proper distance, you see how what appeared to you as a stain is effectively just an element which contributes to the global harmony. So the idea is what to our finite perspective appears as a stain, evil, really from the omnipotent all-seeing divine gaze, for that gaze is part of a global harmony. Of course, now the problem is: can we really then say Holocaust, Gulag, or not just the usual suspects? For example and this always shocks me, here you can see the falsity of all this humanitarianism and so on. My God, everybody knows what is going on now. According to Time magazine cover story last summer, in the last ten years at least five million people died unnatural deaths in Congo. But they are not in, so nobody cares. So okay, Congo, Holocaust, Gulag, and so on. It's are we ready to say, 'No, this appears only in our perspective because of our over-proximity as a stain but really it contributes to global meaning, beauty of the universe' and so on. I think that Christ marks the moment when you no longer can say this. The death of Christ means precisely the death of that God up there which guarantees meaning. Because what comes after Christ is the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is simply the community of believers. The meaning of the death of Christ for me is 'There is no big other. I throw myself into the universe, it's up to you.' As every deep theologian knows, the message of Christ is not 'Trust God,' but 'God trusts you. It's up to you. Up to your freedom.' It's a very materialist message, if you want. Okay, that's one aspect. But then there is the opposite aspect of the big other, which is much more interesting: the aspect of appearances. You know the classical joke—I used it three, four times but now I will give a different twist to it—that famous joke about you know a man who thinks he is a grain, a seed, and okay is cured but then goes out of is dismissed from the psychiatric ward and then immediately comes back and says 'I encountered a chicken' and the doctor tells him 'But why are you afraid? You know now that you are not the seed and the chicken will not eat you.' He says 'Okay, I know it, but does the chicken know it that I am no longer...' Okay, now what I want to do now is to claim how this is a joke but it depicts a very real mechanism. A whole country fell apart in order to protect the chicken's ignorance. It's Yugoslavia. Namely, what it's clear now from some memoirs that they published is that already in the early mid-seventies, it was clear to the inner circle nomenklatura that the country is in deep economic trouble. But Tito, life-long president, was old and dying. So they made a collective decision that Tito should die happy. So they prolonged the false the false welfare by by collecting incredible debts. In a couple of years, for Yugoslavia more than billion of dollars. So that the seventies went so-so, relatively well. When Tito died, economic crisis did strike and so on. So you see it's literally this logic. We know it, the chicken should not. The chicken should not get it. And I claim this is ultimately what culture is. It's not we don't know, it is as if for a gaze of some big other there is always a chicken which shouldn't know it. This chicken can be a children. For example how do you let's say you are one of the parents, you are fighting with your partner, blah blah blah. How do you measure the amount of your civilization? It's if you are still able to say, 'But the the child shouldn't know it, no? Let's cover it, let's keep it secret from from the child.' Of course the tragedy is that usually the child does know it, but pretends not to notice, not to hurt you and so on. But the mystery is then that it works. This is, I mean, appearances are a big mystery here. Again, sorry for my old communist obsessions, an incredible story about appearances from Soviet Union again. It's here you can see the theological dimension of Stalinism. In '53 in the summer, Beria, the secret police boss, was arrested. At that very point, the first volume of the new edition of Soviet encyclopedia appeared where A, B, C, Beria. There was a page on Beria in it. What happened? This was printed just before Beria's arrest, so Beria was celebrated as a great leader. What then happened after Beria's arrest was that every subscriber—and we are talking about over two million subscribers—he was ordered to cut out that page and put in the new page, which re-established perfect continuity. The previous entry went on, then instead of Beria which was almost two pages, they replaced it with Bering Strait, you know between Alaska with some photos and so on. So, ask yourself a simple question: whom were they trying to deceive? For whom were they trying to re-establish this continuity? As if you know nothing should be the the appearances should not be disturbed. Not for any empirical person. There was no empirical chicken who shouldn't know. The chicken was the big other, because every empirical person knew it because he had to do it, to cut it out, put it in, and so on. Now that you will not say that I'm just making fun of Eastern Europe, you in United States have the same I know at least one wonderful example. You know of course Hitchcock's Vertigo. Remember the scene after Scotty saves Madeleine from when she jumps into the the Golden Gate Bay there beneath the bridge and takes her home. Okay, undresses her, puts her into his bed. Then you have in his living room a long panning shot showing him, then the camera passes the kitchen sink, about which her underwear is drying up. And then the camera passes on, shows the door of the bedroom where she is. There is only one problem with this scene. Put if you don't believe me, rent or if you have the video, put the freeze on that very moment when you see the underwear above the kitchen sink. It's not underwear. They are just abstract pieces of cloth, like like towels and so on. No underwear. You know why? I read in a book about Vertigo. The reason is that these were the last years of Hays Code censorship. They insisted that it shouldn't be underwear. Because if it's really underwear, it would have been a proof that Scotty saw her naked. This is not allowed, so it shouldn't be underwear. But it's the same mystery as with Stalin and Beria. Now, whom were they trying to protect? Because we viewers, we all automatically assume that we see underwear. It's there. So in other words, there is there is a big other here. So if you allow me a little bit more, please. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would like now to give you three examples... okay, I will try to condense it a little bit. A couple of examples of how this defense against the traumatic... what happens when this protective screen of habits disintegrates? How do you protect yourself of the over-proximity of the of the neighbor? One interesting example here would have been pornography. I claim that the role of this stupid protective screen is there played by the stupidity of the story. Because the problem of pornography would have been of course hardcore pornography the over-proximity of the neighbor, intrusive. Which is why I think to block too much of identification, they do something which did always surprise me as incredibly vulgar. But I think there is a necessity in it. Did you notice if you watch hardcore pornography how incredibly stupid the story, the narrative is which introduces the as if somehow it's the choice. You see it all, but the story should be openly ridiculous. Like I don't know, I remember when I was young I saw one which you know a plumber comes, fixes a hole in the sink, and then the housewife, 'I have another hole to be fixed, can...' it's indescribable. Now people are telling me, 'But today this is falling apart. You have this especially French Catherine Breillat Romance and so on, films which try to combine really engaged melodrama with hardcore pornography.' No, I think censorship did strike back with even stronger oppression. The latest fashion I was told is so-called Gonzo, Gonzo hardcore, which is what? Which is kind of a like we talk about embedded journalism, embedded a hardcore, which means that actors don't even pretend that they are part of the story, they with their comments, ironic grimaces, and so on, they directly address the camera. They don't pretend. And I think that this precisely is censorship. They fear that the proximity of the neighbor would have been too direct and so on and so on. Okay, the next example but I will skip it I wanted to use here is torture. The way to deal in order to deal with torture. We are now in the middle of the process where torture is being rehabilitated. How? There the dimension of the neighbor should disappear. And finally, my royal example as it were would be that of antisemitism. Because if there is in our Western tradition one epitome of the disturbing neighbor who is always too close and so on, it is the Jew. So let me make my position very clear here. Of course I totally reject those leftists who think that because of the international situation, all the suffering of the Palestinians and so on, one should make compromises and tolerate a little bit of antisemitism. Like one should understand them, you know they are... No, I think that antisemitism is for me the zero-level ideology. You don't make compromises there, to put it quite metaphysically. It's always bad. But something very strange is happening later. Sorry, is happening recently. I think that we are witnessing a strange new mode of antisemitism—and before you start shouting I will give you a proof at least wait to the end of my argument—Zionist antisemitism. Why? This idea came to me when I was in Israel with my friends, like my theoretical opponent, personal friend, filmmaker Udi Aloni. We had a debate and then he was ferociously attacked by hardline Zionists there. What did strike me is how the the criticism reproduced all the usual clichés against the Jews in the West. The reproach was, 'You just pretend to be one of us, but you are really uprooted, you don't you are not solidary enough with the with the state of Israel, you are really too cosmopolitan, you don't have roots, you are not identified with your community, you think only about only about commercial success' and so on and so on. In other words, what did shock me is how the the Zionist critique of those Jews who do not solidarize fully with the state of Israel takes over precisely all the standard clichés main clichés in the West against against the Jews. If you don't believe me, do something. Go on the internet and look under the www.masada2000.org/list_a. It's a Zionist website where you get the list of what they call self-hating Jews. It's a shocking document. Why? Because first the term they used is something like 'self-hating internal terrorist shit', like they call them shit. Point two, and you find there many of our friends: Judith Butler is there of course, Avital Ronell, What shocked me is that every person is described in an extremely aggressive way. The photo chosen is usually one that makes you look like a freak, ridiculous, and on the top of it, wherever they could have got it you have email address, a solicitation to hate mail of course. But the impression is really, 'My God, we are back at the'—like antisemite, you know—'the list of shitty Jews'. It's precisely the same the same logic. So again, here we have the problem with the neighbor and so on. So if you allow me just three minutes more, I would like to conclude with a question which maybe bothers you: 'So does this mean we should just in a kind of a Levinasian way respect our neighbors, no universality, just let's keep a distance and so on?' No, there is a positive universal ethics which does take into account this. What kind of ethics? Ethics I would say without morality. But this I don't mean the Nietzschean point when morality means how you relate to others and ethics means 'are you faithful to yourself, to your existential choice and so on'. I mean something else. For me, to use Schiller's opposition of naive and sentimental, morality is sentimental. You do something but you feel good doing it, no? Like you know when you pay for charity for the African kids you think, 'Isn't it nice, there is a happy kid there because I sent him ten dollars a month whatever.' Ethics is much more ruthless. And I would like just to finish to give you a brief example. You find it in the bookstores one of the defining novels for me. By a Hungarian writer, now an old lady who emigrated from Hungary in '56, Agota Kristof. Agota Kristof. I like the name, it looks as if some stupid Eastern European mispronounced Agatha Christie, no? She wrote a trilogy, she wrote a trilogy: The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie. It tells the story of two young boys, twins, living with their grandmother in a small Hungarian border town during the last years of the World War II and the early years of communism. These twins are absolutely immoral. They lie, blackmail, kill. But I think they stand for absolute ethics. Let me give you a couple of examples. One day they meet in a forest a starved deserter and bring him some things he asked them for. Then, that's their narration: 'When we come back with the food and blanket, he, the deserter, says "You are very kind." We say "We weren't trying to be kind. We've brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That's all."' I think this is a wonderful truly Christian ethical stance. You just do what is needed, you don't do it because it's good. You do it because the other needs it, because it has to be done. And no matter what the other asks you. For example one night, the twins find themselves sleeping in the same bed with a German officer, a tormented gay masochist. Early in the morning, the twins awake and want to leave bed. But the officer holds them back. Dialogue: '"Don't move, keep sleeping," says the officer. The boys said "We want to urinate. We have to go." "Don't go, do it here," we ask "where?" He says "On me, yes, don't be afraid, piss on my face." We do it. Then we go out into the garden because the bed is all wet.' Like totally cold normal, the guy wants to piss on his face, what's the problem? Why not? This is the true work of love, I think. Then the twins' closest friend is the priest's housekeeper, a young voluptuous woman who washes them and their cloth and plays erotic games with them and so on. Then something happens when a procession of starved Jews is led through the town on their way to the camp. One of the Jews asks them 'Please, bread.' The housekeeper, the young girl, shows a little bit of bread then smiles and eats herself the bread. The boys decide to punish her. They stole from the German officer a little bit of ammunition and put her in put into the kitchen stove so that her face explodes and disfigures her. It's considered just simple ethical act, I would have done absolutely the same. Then the two brothers blackmail the good priest. Because they have a young girl who is harassed by the whole village, poor girl, and the girl needs help to survive. So what do they do? They go to the priest and said, 'We heard the story that you were once playing with a small girl.' The priest said it's not true. And the boys said, 'We don't care, but the girl needs money so if you don't give us so much money every week, we will tell this to the whole village.' Then the priest said, I quote it, 'It's monstrous, have you any idea what you are doing?' The boys' answer: 'Yes, sir, we are blackmailing you.' 'At your age it's deplorable.' The boys' answer: 'Yes, it's deplorable that we've been forced to do this. But Harelip, the girl, and her mother absolutely need money.' I would do the same. There is nothing personal in this blackmail. Later they even become close friends with the priest. And when the girl can survive on her own, learns to work and so on, they go to the priest and said, 'Thanks very much, now we no longer need any money.' They tell the priest, quote, 'Keep it, you have given enough. We took your money when it was necessary. Now we earn enough money to give some to Harelip, to the girl, we have also taught her taught her to work.' And the same when the mother, the grandmother asked them to to ask them to kill her, they kill her and so on. That's where I stand. If you would ask me what kind of ethics I would like to follow, it's precisely this: an ethical monster without empathy, doing simply the duty to help others with blind spontaneity, but without any narcissistic self-satisfaction. I claim that with more people like these two monstrous children, the world would have been a pleasant place to stay. It is only in such a world that we would be really alive. You know the old religious question: 'Is there life after death?' Wolf Biermann, the German in the old days dissident poet, has a wonderful poem where he asks the true question. He says 'The true question is not is there life after death, but is there life before death?' And his answer is okay, only in with certain attitude and so on. And I think these two children, with their ruthless brutal ethics—you do it, it's needed, you blackmail the priest, it's needed, you kill, friend asks you to piss on his face, what's the problem, you do it—that's what I would like to be. Thanks very much.