A Lecture by Slavoj Zizek

good evening good evening and to welcome everybody my name is Elena gorgeous CarGurus and I welcome you on behalf of the Institute for human sciences at the Boston University we are as many of you who come to our event now we are very much interested among other things in presenting European issues and Europeans European thinkers and Slovak is definitely a European thinker but also a global thinker or international thinker or kind of a flying public intellectual so we are very very happy and very lucky to have him this evening with us and I am NOT going to introduce him a the professor Jeffrey Melman is going to introduce him president madman has also many of you know his university professor and present of French at Boston University his list of publication is very long among his many interests he is also interested in philosophy and in Locka and many of his interests are shared with Slavoj Zizek we are going to have this introduction then savage Eric is going to talk after that we will have a discussion and I will ask everybody to queue here we have a microphone and and to ask questions and after the discussion so that the conversation is not interrupted and it continues we are going to have a very warm and wonderful reception outside outside the doors here to which everybody is very cordially invited so let's start and Professor Melman [Applause] well it's a great pleasure for me to welcome our speaker Slava Dziedzic back to Boston this evening where to begin well when in the year 1975 the editors of a volume entitled in French the technical writings of Freud by the archein French psychoanalyst Lacan when they chose as their cover illustration a photo of a giant elephant poised to rampage through the savanna the message to many of us was clear when it comes to the unconscious be prepared for absolutely anything or perhaps that implausibility or preposterous 'no stem selves are the touchstones of the unconscious now be that as it may I am not sure that any of us were prepared for anything so implausible so engaging ly traumatic as the revelation some fifteen years later that the future of Lacan Ian thought would lie with a Slovenian Slovenian enough to have run for the presidency of the Republic of Slovenia and prepared to argue convincingly that the Royal Road to the Lacanian interpretation of the unconscious was via American popular culture just savor the title of his 1993 volume everything you wanted to know you always wanted to know about Lacan but we're afraid to ask it's hitchcock and you'll have a sense of the irresistibility of the Dziedzic effect slavo Dziedzic is the world's premier virtuoso of Lacanian dogmatix lest that term dogmatix throw you I would suggest that you think of it as an invitation to bracket the truth claims of his premises in all of their systematicity until you are in a position to judge the rollicking richness of the results they can deliver with Dziedzic psychoanalysis so often decried for failing to meet the test of falsifiability psychoanalysis frequently ends up yielding results which in their paradoxical charge might be described as better than true he is the thinker who has dealt most ingeniously with the Joker in the Lacanian pack the category of the real he is also the thinker who has delivered us a super-ego drenched in its obscenely libidinal sources as it originally was in Freud's the Rat Man that is the super-ego not as venerable patriarch if you will but as dirty old man replete with the stained underwear of Haman Kafka that's Frances dad he has also made use of Lacan as he has somewhere written as a privileged intellectual tool to react xual eyes German idealism soul a call whose inspiration was in part the legendary seminar on Hegel of co-chef in the 1930s seems headed by og jack through a series of altogether unexpected turns back to Hegel and company well I could go on listing the tens of provocatively titled volumes he has written the next is to be I believe called in defense of lost causes I could go on mentioning his current position as director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck College University of London I could go on letting you know of the recently founded online international journal of jejak studies or of the documentary film Dziedzic that's right with an exclamation mark a video instead with one peak one detail my sources tell me that there is currently a chic nightclub in a Tony's section of win Osiris named you guessed it Mooji check please welcome our speaker whose subject this evening is fear thy neighbor as thyself the antinomies of tolerant reason thank you very much I'm very glad to be here thank you for Irina to inviting me for Jeffrey for this wonderful introduction I especially agree without any irony with that very precise point about dogmatix I think that especially I would even go a step further and say dogmatix in the theological sense in the world why maybe it will become clear from what I will be saying so let me go to the point and but nonetheless I hope you will not be too disappointed because there it will not be only drugs in what I will be saying okay let me begin in a very traditional way with a 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 absurd the notion now of course the immediate reaction of my well-meaning liberals is but how can you be for intolerance towards foreigners how can you be for anti feminism for homophobia and so on and so on but this is the catch of course I'm not for intolerance towards foreigners for anti feminism 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 anti-racist fight of course it's man Martin Luther King you will see that the world intolerance 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 let'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 cultural ization of politics political differences difference is conditioned by political inequality or economic exploitation are naturalized neutralized into cultural differences that is in two 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 results and I think the same goes for harassment another heavily connotated ideological turn again of course I am very much against brutal harassment like rape bigotry and so on and so on the problem is that in today's ideological space real harassment 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 they 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 if the fact 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 the solder hands don't smoke and in other words tolerance means I am intolerant to work you're over proximity to me tolerance means don't come too close they 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 caldo delusion 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 and 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 can or start population and claim we are both nomadic it's a little bit like to quote Gayatri Spivak to take rich fat lady who is dieting and a starving third-world woman and say they are basically doing the same thing it 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 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 objective eyes the other the premise of liberal tolerance is does 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 so blind 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 Park of her 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 it most radical every once 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 subjectivist 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 hurt desperate individual yearning for company and love now along these lines practicing this noble motto of multicultural tolerance the authorities in Iceland Iceland Reykjavik 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 forum of enacting this subjective ization of the other in order to fight the growing califo BIA 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 Iceland 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 a 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 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 then it may appear namely the automatic pressure position 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 humanize 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 the distress I see 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 iseman would have cold probably he was as we know from the memories of his secretary who died only two years ago 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 caused great evil we should not elevate them into sublime Byron esque demoniac figures of evil the gap between their intimate experience and the horror of their X 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 are already developed in some of my earlier books one Western one Eastern the West per Josef you maybe know who he was the grey eminence of Cardinal Rosalia and you should maybe read the book all those actually the grey eminence about purchase F what fascinated Aldous Huxley so much about person self it's that he was well the most brutal real political political real politician that you can imagine organizing kidnappings torture dark plotting he's basically the guy if we simplify history who is responsible for Hitler you know it one sense in the thirty years war 1918-19 sorry 1618 1648 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 everything 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 the same paragraph and you cannot escape the conclusion his mystical meditations are how how should I put it simply top of the top absolutely at the level of centuries 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 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 too much fixation on pain fascination with the figure of Christ on the cross so Hartley's solution let's go on to Eastern spirituality but there I think the story is the same I read the 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 the figure which I'm sure is well known to many of you dissect a taro sue okay 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 swert which is killing them now is really a sport of love then he advises the attitude of a true warrior that you should as it were overcome your ego and objective eyes yourself which makes killing much easier he says like when you kill a man you shouldn't think I am pulling the trigger to hit him you should say I'm observing how my hand triggers a gun and when the bullet flows 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 an abstract abstract ballet so even more suzuki and others if you want detailed proof read the book demonstrates out and he demonstrates how yes suzuki even went a step further and claimed very direct claim that for art 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 of 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 truth 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 now this would have been easy my point is you got my want to accept this gap that at the same time he could have justified terrible crimes and at the same time he was he was absolutely authentic authentic purveyor of spirit 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 93 plane flight on September 11th and other three planes were kidnapped it is significant debt 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 shame the same kind of fakery is the sudden turn to God and prayer of someone who suddenly faces the danger or proximity of death in other words you know and 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 less disc I remember when I was young we were all taught the horror about the Rosenberg trial you know against the two of them Julius Ethel Rosenberg accused of spying for Soviet Union and we were fascinated by when their prison letters patterns like this sincerity this purity even their advocates have to admit today we know that maybe not both of them but he Julius I'm sorry we have to consider here too the devil the right when they are right he was a spy he was a spy so this makes all more crazy this as it were moral as it were moral naivety purity how he was able to exist 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 seriously let's say I'm on a plane of course this only holds if it through 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 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 you know to avoid the search oh my god now I must pack 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 range 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 write a biography of Euro the great black singer Paul Robeson who was up to the end total defender of Soviet Union is it the very usual 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 action with a blind trust that avoid 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 the things are horrible in the Soviet Union but an analyst believed 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 apropos the French Revolution in his late writing conflict of faculties according to Kant the revolutions French Revolutions 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 event in Paris generated in the eyes of sympathetic observers all around Europe a quote from camp the recent revolution of the 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 sight 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 and the flow so to translate this into Lacanian language the real event the dimension of the real did not result 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 Matata smut and ease I claim that's the same not apply to the Western admirers of the Soviet Union the Soviet experience of building socialism in one country certainly did the code can't accumulate misery and atrocity but it nevertheless aroused enthusiasm in the heart of the spectators who are 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 a darkness from the scope of our ethical concerns is called 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 st. Paul's famous there are no men or women no Jew or grits 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 the most human in the entire history not one person was killed he claimed in the Iranian Revolution when the surprise journalist asked him about the death penalty's 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 with dimension there is a wonderful passage in Marcel Proust a reserve 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 hurt alone apart from her body surprise 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 colours his entire perception of the grandmother when later he visits her in person he perceives her in a new way as a strange met old woman browsing over her book overburdened with age flashed 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 were voice seems to fit its organic whole involves the 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 on the tie not unmask to locate every feature of a 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 know I shouldn't see you as an whole person I should do something like what Marcel experience is 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 same blonde of one who is like me to the neighbor in this more radical dimension this would be maybe for psychoanalysis that 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 the dead at a certain point this person does something you catch an evil gaze a nervous gesture of 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 neighbour 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 is 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 pretence this is why Lacan applies to the neighbor the term think the thing distinct used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our Dyer's in its intensity and impenetrability one should hear in this theorem 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 shining in which the father the mothers felt writer gradually turns into a killing beasts who with an evil grin goes on to slaughter his entire family this is a neighbor his neighbor is prim primarily I think a traumatic intruder someone who's different way of life or rather way of enjoyment disturbed us throws the balance of our way of life throws the balance of our way of life of the rails when the neighbor comes to close this can also give rise to an aggressive reaction aimed at getting rid of this disturbing intruder a spatter slaughter dyke with whom politically I disagree but from time to time he says something penetrating a slaughtered I 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 sisters story from within and so on this is Mike I don't think I think this is a typical super-ego injunction no you should understand everybody it's not possible so then you feel guilty you're never up to the level no I think that has to put it very brutally but I think this non on exposition 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 a slaughtered I'd put it a new code of discretion week more 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 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 welder was very honorable human one instead of engaging in revenge and so on why don't we just offer to all apartheid torturers the trends of confronting their victims openly describing what they did and in this way we guaranteed 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 to put it on a minimum minimal 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 remember i tortured you in this way in that way I confess everything okay haha now I'm over and he perfectly followed the rules the problem was that this implication was not met with his right 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 colour cows we will not forget it but we forget 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 relates to Japanese crowds I mean they are still traumatized by what the Japanese did to Korea's under the occupation in World War two and before the treatment was so brutal no ten 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 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 when you are dealing with a neighbor so again the first conclusion is that neighbor in in the sense of the abyss of AD earnest 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 neighbors including proximity our customs habits water 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 2003 the philosopher in question was Donald Rumsfeld you remember when he engaged in that a Matar 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 ant 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 ifs Adam 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 that 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 frightened and conscience 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 they to use this inappropriate name the 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 where all these prejudices usually racist cultural prejudice is political miscalculations and so on and so on which then brought the result in which we are and this unknown knowns are located in habits what our habits and 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 philosophy from the University Department to whole nations need some rules people obey rules however I think this 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 that every rules for structural reasons which in Lacanian terms can be nicely explained as the inconsistency of the bigger and so on every rules need metals 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 extrovert Union Russia was in deep crisis in the 90s in the Yeltsin era from what friends told me the main problem was precisely the collapse of this 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 know 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 all socialist regimes how this 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 this habit is made and this I think our rules at its purest is made of so-called empty dress traps offers made or meant to be rejected for example a friend from Japan told me that in Japan workers have the right to 40 days holiday every year however you are expected to use maximum half of this amount so I skip it the same I asked them okay why don't you simply put twenty days they told me you're an idiot you don't understand it and of course they were right they were what do you take 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 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 of explained 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 two lesbians unnatural Beatrice 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 Slava I know what person you are no this was a nice candle here and of course I know you didn't mean it in an evil way so please forget about it you don't owe me an apology now what is 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 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 way very paradoxical way 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 heard about it to announce it publicly I read this the description of this scene in some book on on Stalinism it's a wonderful simple example imagine dream for me we are now in Moscow 3657 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 good ok 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 approachable to publicly announce this prohibition this is the level at which customs function and it impressed it's interesting to me more and more the way this all these 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 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 pedophilia qui we cannot control it and so on no I even know some examples from journalists who did research in my own country in Slovenia that of priests q when they joined church where cuz they put it straight heterosexuals this was the institution itself which made them pet affiliates 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 the sense of an implicit symbolic structure which is publicly disavowed but nonetheless consider a disavowed constituent of their identity which is why typically the church reacts to disguises in this ultra protective way okay so and I think that this implicit rules this 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 7576 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 homo sexual innuendoes like for example even to say hello in the morning we didn't say hello we say I smoked yours or something like this like it was unbelievable how this is what interested me how again the explicit prohibition sustained by a kind of a permanent reference to some kind of a war that implicit homosexuality the difficult thing is to do to change things here that is to say to train things at the level of what Lacan called the big other and now I'm coming if you allow me you're my super-ego Elena little bit more earth the problem is the big other that is 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 objective eyes on two habits under 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 guarantee 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 lens do I mean this I think they detect the first criticism of ideology okay if the book of how do call the guy who was screwed up by God job the book of Job what 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 goat whatever everything and what happens then okay it's a traumatic situation loss then the 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 glass so if you are suffering even if you don't know what you must have done something then others live more refined accounts like maybe goddess I stink 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 messages know all that the three theological friend says is lie everything that you said is true that is to say God's answer is unbelievable it's truly as my favorite theologies 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 off 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 may see trees 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 drop s prefiguring Christ because I think to be brutal and to read the Bible now I am giving you a very condensed version of a longer theological argument what dies on the cross is precisely this God which is the guarantee of a deeper meaning here I think Christianity has still a very radical message what win by this you know that disgusting for me at least metaphor of evil as a stain like if you look at the picture if you look too close at the 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 Gulla or not just the usual suspects for example and this always shocks me here you can see the falsity of all these humanitarian summit so on my god everybody knows what is going on now according to Time magazine cover story last summer in the last 10 years at least 5 million people died a natural death is in Congo but they are not in so nobody cares so ok conquered Holocaust gulick and so on its are we ready to say no disappears only in our perspective because of our over proximity as a stain but really in 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 with 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 theology snows 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 ok 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's 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 me 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 that's the chicken know it that I'm no longer okay now what I want to do now is to claim how this is a drug but it depicts a very real mechanism a whole country fell apart so that in order to protect the chickens ignorance it he was la vía 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 lifelong president was old and dying so they made the collective decision that Tito should die happy so they prolonged the false the false welfare bye bye bye bye bye collecting incredible depth in a couple of years 15 for Yugoslavia 15 more than 15 billions of dollars so that the 70s went so so relatively well when Tito died economic crisis did strike and thrown 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 we didn'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 verbal bla bla how do you measure the amount of your civilization each if you are still able to say but the the trial it shouldn't know it now let's cover it let's keep it secret from from the child of course the tragedies that usually the trial 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 barrier the secret boss was arrested at that and became a non-person at that very point the first volume of the new edition of Soviet encyclopedia appeared were ABC Berea there was a page on barrier in it what happened this was printed just before various arrest so Berea was celebrated as a great leader what then happened after various arrests was that every subscriber got one leaf of paper which fitted exactly that page and he was ordered and we are talking about over two million subscribers he was ordered to cut out that page and put in the new bank which really established perfect continuity the previous entry went on then instead of Berea which was almost two degrees 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 - 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 about the for example you know of course Hitchcock's vertigo remember the scene after Scottie saves Madeleine from when she jumps into the the Golden Gate Bader beneath the bridge and takes her home okay and dresses her puts her into his bed then if you have in his living room along painting 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's there is only one problem with this scene the put if you don't believe me rent or if you have video put the freeze on that very moment when you see the underwear above the kitchen sink it's not underwear the dress abstract pieces of cloth like like towels and so on no underwear you know what I write in a book about vertigo the reason is that these were the last year's of hey Scott censorship they insisted that it shouldn't be underwear because if it's really underwear it would have been a proof that Scottie 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 there is so in other words in other words there is there is a big other here so if you allow me a little bit more please I 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 on 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 inclusive 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 SS as if somehow it's the choice you you see it all but the story should be openly ridiculous like I don't know a mere when I was young I so one which you know a plan bearer comes fixes a hole in the sink and then the house myself I have another hole to be fixed and it is undescribable now people are telling me but today this is falling apart you have this especially French Catherine Brea Romans and so on feelings 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 a kind of a like we've talked about embedded journalism embedded a hardcore which means that actors don't even pretend that they are part of the story they with their comment ironic grimaces and so on day 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 a 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 their the dimension of the neighbor should disappear and finally my royal example as it were would be that of anti-semitism 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 drew so let me make my position very clear here of course I totally reject those leftist 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 anti-semitism like one should understand them you know they're no I think that anti-semitism is for me the zero level ideology you don't make compromises there to put it quite metaphysically it's always bad but some very strange is happening later sorry it's happening recently I think that we are witnessing a strange new mode of anti-semitism and before we start shouting I will give you a proof at least wait to the end of my argument Zionist anti-semitism why this idea came to me when I was in Israel with my friends like my cinema maker Adi Aulani we had the debate and then he was ferociously attacked by hardline Zionists there what did strike me is how the the criticism reproduced all the usual cliche 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 Cosmo politically 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 shocked me is how the the Zionist critique of those Jews who do not solid eyes fully with the State of Israel takes over precisely all the standard to assess mayn't assess in the West against against the truth if you don't believe me do something go on the internet and look and the www.nasa.gov slash least a it's a Zionist website where you get the list of what they call self-hating Druze it's a shocking document why because first the term they used is something like a self-hating internal terrorist like they call them point two and you find there many of our friend Judith Butler is there of course avital Ronell four thousand 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 say 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 anti-semitic the list of shitty Druce 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 eleven a.cian may 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 sweet from Hungary in 56 Agatha Christophe Agatha Christoph I like the name it looks as if some stupid Eastern European mispronounced Agatha Christie no he wrote a trilogy wrote a trilogy The Notebook the proof the the third lie it tells the story of two young boys twins living with their grandmother in small Hungarian border town during the last year's of the World War two in the early years of communism these screens are absolutely immoral they lie blackmail kill but I think they spend for absolute ethics let me give you a couple of examples one day they meet in the forest a star of deserter and bring him some things he asked them for then that's the 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 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 awaken and want to live back but the officer holds them back dialogue don't move get keep sleeping says the officer the boy 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 red like totally cold no not the guy wants to piss on his face what the problem why not this is the true work of love I think then the twins closest friend is the priests housekeeper a young voluptuous woman who washes them and their clothes place erotic games with them and so on then something happens when a procession of starved Ruth is led through the town on the way to the camp one of the Druze asks them please bread the housekeeper the young girl shows a little bit of bread then smiles and it's herself the bread the boys decide to punish her they stole from the German officer a little bit of munition and put her in put into the kitchen stove so that her face explodes and disfigure sir it's considered simple they act I would have done absolutely the same then the two brothers blackmailed 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 is not true and the boy 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'd want it it's monstrous have you any idea what you are doing the boys answer yes sir we are blackmailing you at your age is 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 priests and when the girl can survive on her own learns to work and so on they go to the priest and set 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 are in 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 do to ask them to to kill her they killed 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 the duty to help others with blind spontaneity but without any narcissistic self-satisfaction I claim that with more people like this - 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 voles Biermann the German in the old is 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 a bit certain attitude and so on and I think these two children with their ruthless brutal ethics you do it it's needed you blackmailed the priest it's need that 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 now yes now we can pretend now we can pretend that we are in a democracy no for for some approximately half an hour for questions and so I would like to ask everybody to make them as short as possible so that we can have as many people as possible asking the questions okay thank you very enjoyable but go ahead but go to back directly yeah no I don't have a but I have a question um how um when you think about fundamentalism is it big other or no visit you now almost the opposite opposite okay it is the question what you want to elaborate it no I want you to elaborate it because if you look at a from the mental isn't you mean what we usually mean by fundamentalism so called the religious fundamentalism or what that's only one of many so I don't know leave it actually others for you know I just want to get the location of your question um well there's there's fundamentalisms I mean there's a kind of a secular fundamentalism that you saw in the 50s maybe in Eastern Europe are yeah yeah so I mean there's different ones but I think people think about religious fundamentalism um do you do you have a theory or an account of the rise of it in the 70s and in the location of the of the West in a certain sense or or why this time and not another time I just said no mean what I would have done first is I for the first thing here I would apply my own theory the way I began to this first I always try to ask are this designation to be taken for what they are I think that what people call fundamentalism often covers too very much a post phenomena I think that what we usually refer to as fundamentalism you know Pat Robertson Jerry Falwell they kind of that that kind of people I would even deny to them the term fundamentalism you know how I have a very naive naive criterion of defending what I'm really tempted to even claim is authentic fundamentalism from this kind of fake fundamentalism how do you relate is there any or not let me be very naive I don't have any illusions about Tibetan Buddhism but debate abet Tibetan Buddhist that I've met or Amish again I don't have users about the Amish according to some statistics they have the highest rate of family incest but they authentic fundament you know what did strike me when I met them they don't have this typical religious fake feminism obsession with what the others gays are doing or what they are very benevolent they don't have this hatred towards the others they don't have the attitude of envy they live in peace with others I think the fake fundamentalism this week is secretly secretly fascinated by the sinful ways of the others and so on and so on so my next criticism would have been that if we look at it closely so-called fundamentalism Pat Robertson Falwell and their gang dream is forgotten to mention the really big ones and so on but he did that the way they deliver their message undermines the message in the sense that oh the way they deliver their message is precisely an instance of what they criticize a big ego trip and so on and so on now a more difficult question I totally also agree with you that this that it's a misnomer that this is not the only fundamentalism we have I think even that the the you know what surprised me were the violent reactions to I don't think she's a great irritation but it's an interesting book now my clients new book shock therapy what the import maybe I'm not saying she's a great addition but it surprised me how violent the reactions were to the book why because she touched an important point how let's call it liberal economic fundamentalism how it is not ready to admit how okay we have markets they work but in order they work whatever the how but in order for the market to work you need quite a lot of extra market violence no it's not last this is the big maybe the biggest utopia of our time I claim it's the market utopia which is my for me it's not the official story goes like that the 90s I mean 89 90 is the end of utopias finally we learn to renounce big utopias plans to reconstruct society blah blah we learn to accept the lesser evil No and so on but I think the true utopia where the 90s the Utopia the Fukuyama utopia and you know it's easy to make fun of Fukuyama that idiot who thought the end of history but basically even most of my so-called leftist friends we are all Fukuyama's de facto most of the leftists that I know they silently accept the basic Fukuyama premise we Trish capitalism ok capitalism with a human face and liberal democracy are the frame weak we cannot overcome all we can do is make it a little bit more tolerant better and so on and so on and so on so this is for me this is for me the true fundamentalism it doesn't take into account the extent to which the occurs with the extent to which market in order to function and already there is a lot of violence millions losing drop and so on and so on there is a much more invisible objective violence of the market but even if we discount this market mechanism needs quite a lot of subjective violence I mean these are the big debates for example the well-known English of German origins philosopher Ralph dahrendorf called this the problem of the value of Tears like democracy functions after you have a certain level of development of economy but to get to that point you need 20 years at least of authoritarianism dictatorship he openly says if he says look at the third world countries ok third world outside the Western Europe which were are economically successful South Korea Killah and so on his conclusion is they had to go through penetrate or military dictatorship but the problem is deeper today for me if there is a lesson to be learned from China today it's dead because typically those who have sympathies for this dictatorship why don't they also support China then today China is doing exactly this in a much larger amount the irony is that I know but the problem is the following one for me because they have still this old liberal hope that China will get caught in the same dynamic when they still have distrust that after some ten-point that sooner or later capitalism does bring with it self democracy the way we understand it I think the lesson of China and so-called Asian values capitalism is not I think that is the true danger today I think that capitalism is entering a new stage we're no longer democracy the way even in this formal limited way we use the democracy is needed democracy is needed so in this sense so that I don't get lost in this sense I totally agree with you about how the term fundamentalism first should be used we should be very clear how we use it what we designate with it we shouldn't limit it to this so-called hardline religious freaks or whatever now I mean there is the basic fundamentalism today I think it precisely this liberal trust in the market mechanism in the sense of you just have to clear the space for market mechanisms to let it work market mechanism and the work will be done the other problem that I see for me is that the second distinction I would make is that the fundamentalists that I I wrote about this in my last big book parallels view what I spoke with some fundamentalists in this narrow sense really what surprised me is that they are truly a threat to believe no not in this sense authentic bill but in a much more formal sense I think there the way I understood them their mystery is that they treat their procedure is that they treat a religious statement like Christ cause rising from the dead and so on a simple positive knowledge statement which is five for example let's take the Turin Shroud I like this mysteries you know is it or not every genuine Catholic is horrified by the idea that it may be authentic because if it is you immediately have very delicate problems like okay then we do the DNA test and then the question who is the father of Christ becomes a very empirical question and to be cynically you would probably discover that some probably Arab slave of the Joseph family now had something to do and you never know in toward your death no but I spoke with some fundamentalists who are usually very precise they say nope they even have theory they say God does not have DNA so it will be Mary's DNA redouble just two times the same and so on you know what I mean the horrible thing is that for them again religious why true in this narrow sense religious fundamentalist they love they don't have any problem with science they they simply they basically reduce a religious statement to similar positive statements of science and I think that in this way even the true greatness of religious belief is lost as every authentic religious person knows belief is an existential wager believe it's not believed in fact believe is always a decision like believe is that I say all people have the same dignity and it's in a way a crazy thing because when I look at you at you to put it in simple rational terms I can say but I need more than you you more why sure I mean this is a pure this is a crazy decision which I accept in there must be something crazy absurd in an authentic belief so the paradoxical conclusion for me would have been that this kind of a the Darwinian fundamentalist and so on they are not attracted to science they're a threat to authentic religious belief the third problem I have here is that what do we mean by belief today more generally I think that again what I wanted but I lost the threat to develop a little one of the lines that I had to drop out like please for me even New York Times was kind enough to publish a text of mine but now the story goes even later about that I love the Chinese because it's madness you remember that two months ago they passed a law regulating reincarnation no and I love this that it's not a joke like you know if you want to reincarnate there you have to fill out a forum where how and then I can even imagine I have this evil imagination how some bureaucrat in Beijing says are you want to wring carnate as a llama sorry all posts are taken there are some insects free some dogs there make your choice but expected but now they are playing the game even further I read a couple of days ago that now Dalai Lama in reaction to this because this law regulating reincarnation the whole point is to prevent delay Dalai Lama choosing his successor now Dalai Lama claimed that maybe he will not reincarnate but he will organize something like that the council in Vatican some kind of a parliament of all Buddhist figures Tibetan to democratically elect the next Dalai Lama the iron is that the answer of Chinese government was no you are violating the tradition Dalai Lama should be reincarnated and so on because they want to control it my point is that it's too deep it's too easy to say that they are simply a possibility that they are simply faking we are back to that model that I used of a chicken a chicken doesn't know the mode of belief today for us is not that we directly belief is that we need to relate to another one a child or as for Stalinist the pure appearance it's another who believes for us that's our typical strategy today you don't have to believe but you need to know that the tricking doesn't know it as it were that we need the chicken and here okay to repeat an old joke I use it in my book here the formula of disbelief was given perfectly by Niels Bohr you know that wonderful story about Niels Bohr who he had at the entrance of his country house horseshoe superstitious object preventing blah blah blah evil spirits to enter the house and he was asked by a French scientist I do have this are you crazy do you believe in this Wilbur said of course I don't believe it up but friend asking but I do have it he says of course I don't believe that horseshoe protects the house but he said but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it that's how that's how beliefs function today we don't believe in it we are very rational cynical but we nonetheless believe that it works even if you don't believe in it and at this level we are ultra fundamentalist and this other belief this transpose believe this is the most difficult thing to accept it's not for you to be an atheist it's for you worrying that's my child nor the innocent figure now there things are this is where ideology is today we have no illusions but there is a chicken who has to have illusions for us first level did not okay I'm sorry I got lost a little bit but that's wonderful ending point um just because I was leading into my question you give a great arm position on ethics as it were but I was wondering where do you stand as for how we progress for the future with dealing with ideology you give a good criticism of the cynic in the sublime object yeah but if only there I what is the alternative in our now postmodern world I'd it's a good question I will tell you it ok I can only give you a very abstract I think that the problem I see is a political but not in this superficial sense to find a political forum the problem today is that we have on the one hand this let's call it liberal individualism whatever and then this new forums of rather return to old communities and so on is it possible to invent a new collectivities to overcome individualism without regressing into some kind of traditional community to invent a new form of collective and this I think it's deeply political it's why many thinkers philosophers to whom I feel very close like from Alain Badiou to Georgia Gambon and so on are so focused on st. Paul st. Paul is for them a political project of precisely community of believers which is not a traditional community it's not a traditional here organic community it's a based on universal truth community of believers I mean this is for me V this is for me the crucial question or to put it in another way the problem is how to not accept what I referred to apropos the death of Christ the fact that the big other doesn't exist but not as sometimes here I have problems with some Lacanian Miller even and others around him who basically adopt this this would be maybe an answer to you their view is that psycho analysis provides to put it lively the ultimate authentic insight but just a momentary insight you see there is no big other void whatever but then life goes on and you have to return to some kind of illusion in other words in other words the idea is that our social life is necessary illusory and all you can do is get this momentary insight I think if this is the case then life is boring I think that the whole point is can nonetheless this can the very fact that as Lacan puts it there is no big other and so on can does this mean that it's just of radical truth you know like Lacan develops apropos Antigone is truth just this momentary encounter for a moment you see it you shouldn't look too long into the truth then it renders you blind then you must somehow return to the world of illusions or can we make truth operative in politics in social life of course my whole point would be yes we can and I think more and more that we put it ok I will not develop it now how about that the the whole development pushes into this direction social development in the sense of problems from ecology to other problems they will push us in this direction for example ecology would be another mega example of what I said ideology on the one hand it's absolutely a real problem ecology but I think that precisely because of this ecology is one of the biggest fields of ideological investment today I mean I think there was a book written by an American is called Tim Martin something like this I'm sorry I'm bad for names with a wonderful title I think the title of the book is already ecology without nature I think that could be I'll show you haven't heard about no but it's a wonderful book no what he means is not some kind of subjectivism what he means is that what we mean by nature automatically when we talk about ecology the usual paradigm is there is some kind of camasta some kind of a harmonious organic reproduction balance disturbed by human hubris and then we should re-establish the balance I think this very paradigm should be radically dropped if there is a lesson from radical Darwinian slike Stephen Jay Gould and others it's precisely there is no nature if by nature we understand this kind of a balance which was this nature is crazy in itself I mean let's what is our our main source of energy oil what is oil can be even imagine what kind of a mega catastrophe had to occur on earth so that there was oil in other words that I think that this means that ecological crisis is even much more serious than we think we cannot even rely we have nowhere to withdraw there is no balance to which we can return the situation is totally open and I like a certain crazy German ecologist who draw this radical conclusion and said that that the goal of humanity should be not to reestablish any Natural Balance but to violate nature even more he said yes that nature left to itself would explode render human life impossible so since humanity can survive only in certain Geographic weather and so on conditions we should try and fix freeze the earth so we should be even more violent and so on in other words I think we should totally drop all reference stood all anti-scientific Sargon especially you know this is the usual ecological ideology now how the source of ecological troubles is our over-exploitation objective ization of nature we act as if nature is out there the object as if we are not embedded in nature breathing with it so we should step out of technological attitude and live with nature I think this is a problem not a solution the problem for me is the following one we all know we are in deep warning warming whatever the problem is why don't we act I think it's a perfect example of what in psychoanalysis is called the fetishes disavowal i know very well but we know it very well but you hear a talk you read the text about the ecology it convinces you then you step out you there is Sun there are birds rain and you precisely because we are embedded in it wired into it we cannot really accept the disking trend so I think paradoxically we need more more alienation from nature in the sense of we have to accept nature in its total contingency madness death nature nature is not balanced paradise nature is you know something happens small imbalance and everything goes crazy I mean every natural balance is temporary fragile and so on and so on why I am saying this because this would be for me to bring it to the end what Lacan says the big other doesn't exist to you know usually people say either you are a subjectivist self responsible and this means you are arrogant absolute subject or you defer to the higher authority the difficult thing is to separate between these two to accept that we are totally responsible but nonetheless we are not absolute subject you know that it's a very difficult position to sustain but I think we will be forced into it as it were I'm sorry okay it was I was - you should be my super-ego my god you should be my to evoke the most noble example from American culture you should be my Miss Bates you know from mother from from psycho yes sorry please I will try to be shorter I'm very sorry [Music] this is super-ego y7y not eight why not cheat okay okay sorry please I just like to ask you about your idea of ethics and how it's similar or different to richard rorty's idea of ethics because even when you said that helping when it's needed it sounds like rorty's idea of solidarity and were these particularly varieties idea of ethics without principles like this deeply unrooted ethics that's highly contextual so it's not very absolute yes so I guess like know what you think about that that's a nice question I'm Suzette I don't have time but first let me say I greatly appreciate that Rorty as a person he was one of the few academics that a new academics are usually very fielding plotting against each other he was one of the few person that I knew that I can authentically say he was a good person but I totally disagree I disagree first with the his underlying premise which is that again as you said no positive universal values but was this his liberalism at its purest it reverse history basically what makes us ethical subjects is our suffering and our right to tell about our suffering and so on the best way to develop I disagree with Rorty would have been with reference to Rorty opposes the private domain as he calls it embedded in philosopher Jacques Derrida Heidegger who have this private fantasies and then the boring Colossians who have objective rules for him the point is the balance between these two dimensions as he puts it Heidegger and the wild guys are good the moment you let them to gain power you get met but I think that what our team wishes is the way can't already uses in exactly the opposite way the distinction between public and private Kant is here still my ideal in order for Kant in his I think what is enlightenment text he there for pub what Kant calls private use of reason is precisely what Rorty would have called public for Kant when you work for a state it's private use of reason why because it's not just the abstract space of intellectual debate but it's part of the common good of a society it's already part it's predestined whom you serve and so on and for can't precisely when you subtract from your community and just talk in the free space of reason with others individuals this is the public use of reason so the paradox again for Kant is that state is a private institution but universities should be public exempted from so this Universal dimension is missing for me in Rorty I'm this is why I'm sorry that I didn't have time to develop it further because the conclusion of what I said it's definitely not some kind of total idiosyncrasy we are just this kind of terrible abysus of neighbor we cannot come no I'm and totally Pro universality how should I put it I believe in universality I think that one of the greatest ontological errors as it were undermine sustaining this liberal multicultural is ideology it's precisely this distrust of universality as if every universalities ideological impulse and so on I don't think this is the true problem today this problem of there are minority voices here there we should open more and more the space so that all these voices should be heard and so on now the problem today is not how to reach plurality more plurality the problem is precisely the opposite one unity universality so I'm very much from universality so again along these lines I don't have time now to go into it I think that I think that one should definitely move beyond Rorty to a kind of and without any shame to a kind of more aggressive Universal project the key problem is for me universality and truth because Rorty basically plays this game of you know there is no truth there are just stories that we are telling and so on and so on no emphatically here Rorty is a postmodernist i am not i believe in universal truth but with all the Leninist paradoxes that truth is partial truth is not what unites us through this division sorry I was at the end of your talk you were discussing a morality without narcissism and I've always seen certainly conventional morality as being inherently or de-facto very narcissistic yeah so can you just describe first of all is it possible to speak of morality qualitatively without narcissism and second of all how that work or what would it qualitative it's a good question like was I simply representing with this example to freak or it works okay all I can tell you is that very I will take your question very sincerely and try to answer it naively I mean like yes I know some people with whom this works that is to say who effectively do things and they are not naive in the sense that they don't reflect they can reflect very cruelly and so on but what I like is that there is simply a certain a certain nor not narcissistic ruthlessness in what they are doing there is none of this satisfaction I do it because it feels so nice doing it now here I have a slight disagreement with my good friend Irina not because me Lenin would enter that and you would have small problems here no like I sorry a big problem okay yeah which is why again when I take power you go to re-education camp but since I'm your friend I will tell you how lucky your life will be when you will be there in Siberia near education camp I will call as Bo I will call the boss of the camp and every Sunday you will get for free an additional plate of the the cabbie cube there you know in this knife so it will not be so bad for you that sorry please but no you see what I mean I think back to this no I think there are situations in her supported struggling struggling situation and so on when this kind of collective can work can work in a way and I think that in a way in a way if you read authentically I'm a total materialist but this is for me where I write a taste Christian books no this is the way I appreciate Jesus I mean what I mean not what Jesus there was no Jesus of course what I mean is the figure that it's that it's totally it has the boot it's not narcissistic in the sense that the way I see is that in Christianity you cannot say you cannot have a blessed view of Christianity because in a way Christianity is already its own blasphemy my friend Terry Eagleton already develops how the whole logic of Jesus is the logic of like you know this whole idea he is the king of the kink of the Druce it's clearly the DC state as a kind of a ridiculous carnival and so on it's so stupid it's I think totally this is how one should read all this statement Paul in Ian's about love and so on and so on is totally done is totally non narcissistic it's not love in the sense of I love myself loving somebody it's love without this dimension and again I think that it's not only freaky individuals who do it here and there I think that there are from time to time collectives like again maybe some political collectives and so on where this works okay recruits here interacting in our thanks as a high five you

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Keywords: Institute Human Sciences

Id: K5WNcRoCXCM

Length: 115min 59sec (6959 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2010