Is a Storm Coming? | Slavoj Zizek on Capitalism, Democracy and Coup Attempts (Part 3)

[Music] but you know when i see maybe if you allow me very briefly uh what does this mean for our i like to make these jumps for our concrete analysis today i i never accept simple oppositions like neoconservatives versus i don't know how you call them political correct cancer liberals and so on and now precisely a proposed uh russia putin ukraine and apropos the danger now approaching my part of the world there was a crisis in kosovo and so on you know what shocks me these basic contradictions of today's trump-style neoconservatives or or putin like european populist how on the one hand they pretend to to to defend traditional christian values stability and so on from from the from the post-modern historicist relativist madness and they are citing of course uh strawmen because if you read closely the rita his position was never dead there it was for me at his best when he pointed out how his position is not simple historical relativism historical relativism is the most arrogant position it means you pretend that you can step out of on your own bank and objectively look at the world and see the relativity of everything okay what surprises me is that this very brief i will be that these defenders of christian civilization in their textual practice by this i mean in their actual discourse how they act socially can you imagine people who are more obscene prone to dirty jokes and so on like it's never it was never clear for me how can you consider trump taking with regard to his lifestyle the way here he is isn't he a kind of a ridiculous caricature of a postmodern relativist cynicist and so on and that's why what we should emphasize is that what russia and their allies are doing now it's not just uh battle for a piece of ukraine it's a kind of a radical cultural revolution which again on one hand it presents itself as conservative neoconservative in the sense that we need but on the other hand i'm now systematically following and here is the true danger i think how this russian politics exemplary i know the case in serbia vouched their president recently made a speech where on behalf of the topic was defending christian values he spoke about gay people homosexuals in a breathtakingly openly vulgar way he didn't use the term gay or homosexual she used the term pederi which is like and he went and he established the line between the west in general liberalism and he painted what he called as the main danger to serp nation the main danger to the existence of serp nation and he ended his speech with there should be no long-leaved serbia you know and this is for me crucial this is not an here you have surplus enjoyment you cannot be a pure patriot today's neo conservatism this is its excess this is its truth okay and that's so horrible today okay um i'm conscious very conscious of time and um you know we've we've covered a lot of ground already and we're even entering kind of serbian politics now which i don't want to go into much further example of breast i'm going to put you on pause because we've got um other voices who want to join the conversation i think okay okay to hear from them we've got some some questions that have come in already via i'm looking on my screen we've had some through the chat we've had some three emails so i'm going to i don't if you can see them too but i'm going to filter these a little bit for the sake of economy and put them to you prefer not to see them okay yeah let me uh uh we've got a we got a young person who is fortunately or unfortunately writing a dissertation on trump now that that's a phrase to chill the bones if ever there was one but anyway um a year ago a year or so ago you wrote of trump did trump really want to make a coup d'etat unambiguously no was your answer and he's wondering if your view has changed based on the january 6th hearings did trump wish to make a coup d'etat what do you think now based on the january 6th hearings that's the first question from emmett pegs no i still did not do it but i think the real danger is coming now i think that at that point trump was still playing this populist game let's move the but it was all uh state which he mostly said he didn't he wasn't steve bannon who said i'm a leninist i want to destroy but you know what makes me really afraid now and i can already see the contours of some kind of a coup data it's not only raw versus weight it's that now we see what is happening with trump's uh supreme court you know he nominated three younger persons which means we will not get rid of them for decades and what really worries me this is happening now secretly but it it makes me horrified did you see how they now plan to reactivate one of these small points in the legal order which we're all ignoring that is the result of elections in a state is not clear then the state congress or i don't know even what organ of a state one of the american states can cancel election results and directly nominate delegates you know what this means you know what space this gives to trump to really make a kind of a constitutional coup d'etat so if i this is what makes me really afraid so if i may conclude with something for which i was already accused of promoting violence and so on did you see the movie pelican brief yes okay a big guy kills two judges of supreme court so that he wants to pass some that will some legal measures they know he knows these two guys will will sabotage it i'm almost tempted i'm not me i don't mean this seriously i'm not crazy but you know my idea was maybe we need a leftist pelican briefed organize the needs of those public the situation is so serious sorry that's the thing is that i even think that maybe as it was already hinted at in the sixth on the in the sixth of january last year maybe we the constitutional progressive will even need the help of the army okay i think it's interesting because yeah right because what i heard you saying almost was that trump didn't want just to make a coup d'etat or doesn't want to just make it something more radical than that because a coup d'etat really just suggests change of regime or in his case a continuation of regime what you're really describing is changing the nature of the eta altogether i think yeah okay let me pick out another couple of questions um uh that we've got a question about trans but um i the the one before that we've got one about jordan peterson we've got one about state crimes against democracy um where is oh yeah we also had one about make your choice okay cinema desire the cinema tells us what to desire there's a quote back um is that from the sublime yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah the early quote isn't it and uh the question here which i can't now sort of disappeared hang on just give me a second yeah cinema tells us how to desire uh the question is would you agree this attempt to physically control humans through biochemical means is just a new manifestation of something that's been around with us for much longer since the cinema itself so you know hegel and a wide brain for example is that argument really just a continuation of what you are already saying i suppose about the technologies of cinema not really first if you want it at a certain basic level it's not even only hegel only cinema that's the function of ideology not in a way to control us but you know like when you have a non-articulated desire with it structures your space so that the options which are already there in advance are offered to you as real as the only actual options so no i think that what will happen with this new surveillance strategies via brain and so on is nonetheless something more radical because the processes that i described cinema and so on it is still alienation in a good sense alienation in the sense that we are flowing within a space which nobody really controls and this is what hegel likes to describe how things go wrong you want something you get caught into what hegel would have called social substance something totally different comes out and so on now that the threat is much much greater i think good all right and i'm conscious of time and then the next question might have to be our last because it is such a big question um the one i'm picking out is from alexandra who barry you i think is her last name she is just about to submit her phd thesis on state crimes against democracy and her question is are capitalism and democracy inherently incompatible in your opinion they are in mine and if so have we ever have we ever witnessed a true modern democracy so capital and democracy inherently incompatible or can they be reconciled in some way well first i would say something which may sound strange for for still some kind of a marxist but i still think that don't underestimate capitalism marx was always emphasizing this although it was illusory freedom capitalism precisely by depriving us of all old patriarchal traditional ties did open up a space of freedom we should never before we criticize capitalist democracy or the notion of human rights as false we should never forget that uh progress immediately imposed itself by people who simply wanted to make a step further like yes notion of human rights just going to stop you on that one point before you continue because it's interesting you talked about the kind of feudalism of capitalism today but in a sense now what you're saying was actually the genius of capitalism in its origins in its early modern form was to be a post-feudal means of access to wealth for many more people beyond the feudal bound yeah right so it's uh it's kind of both all right but today but that aspect of capitalism is under threat today but again to be very brief as far as i can first never forget that for marx always the only path to uh hopefully higher form of freedom goes through capitalism and marx was right here i don't believe in any returns to pre-modern forums like some of my latino american friends who see even in the inca empire or whatever visions of future communism i don't buy that what my thesis is more specific my thesis is that today capitalism is less and less able to live with even however false it was the so-called for marxist bourgeois formal democracy and so on one way is to make it irrelevant maybe the state of the future is here switzerland i love it do you know first nobody no do you know who is the prime minister do you know nobody knows even swiss people transparent democracy no sorry look what i'm saying is that it's not just that this democracy is false and so on is that the approaching today global warming pandemic and so on i don't think that the the parliamentary democratic machine is strong enough to cope with them we need to reinvent a political system which a would open up the space for stronger international collaboration it's clear that with global warming tens of millions at least of people will have to move to other places and so on and point two we need a system and here china has an advantage although i'm not pro-chinese you know they can make long-term plans projections nobody in our democracies dares to do it you always worry about next elections and so on and so on so what i'm saying is i'm not just dismissing liberal democracy don't let's not make just fun of it it did bring great things how did workers movement arouse so that people start to ask yes we want also liberal freedoms but isn't it these freedoms always has to be rooted or only possible within certain social conditions if you don't have education access to access to health care and so on then your freedom is empty and so on so my point is that we should here address liberals as colleagues friends and then do you mean it seriously with your freedoms then you should join up okay very good i think that's a great note to um that is probably a great note to end on trevor there are more questions obviously and clearly there's all sorts of topics we could continue with i'll hand back okay just to remind people i'm doing your promotion for you here shlavaway just to remind you beautiful beautiful pink book that you can you can purchase in the english um thank you thanks for your time today i'll hand back to luke to give any finishing notices um but just to thank you again luke are you i'm really grateful to you for your patience and understanding because let's face it at some level i am with all my liveliness i am a little bit crazy and thanks very much for your patience and has to put it a democratically authoritative way to control me it's a pleasure you

Channel: How To Academy Mindset

Views: 64,823

Keywords:

Id: JbtNtzS3PDM

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2022