Science, Belief and Coffee - Slavoj Žižek [2011] | Intelligence Squared

I hope this works thanks very much I'm very proud to be here but I proud because of one and very specific reason I was just told that this Hall was once a church and now it's a kind of a cultural home for talks concerts my God this is what they were doing to churches in the late 20s and early 30s under Stalin no like you know turning them into homes of culture where they had the concerts and so on so it's nice to be here in the truly bevic part of London okay uh let me begin with uh ideology today the book that I'm supposed to present or rather somehow refer to living in the end times is basically an attempt to practice again the old half forgotten art part of critique of ideology first through a couple of examples I will simply try to convince you that ideology is well kicking alive and so on let me start with an example which may even surprise you the two big Oscar winners of the last year one British one The King's Speech and the other one the Black Swan I cannot imagine almost a better example of ideology let me begin with The King's Speech the problem of the to be king the cause of his stuttering if you saw the movie is what it's his inability to assume his symbolic function to identify with his title so I claim on the contrary at the beginning of the film The Future King is quite a normal reasonable person he simply displays a minimum of common sense like who can be stupid enough to say oh my God it's my divine right to be the king and so on and so on and I read a movie as a very sad tale of how to make this guy who obviously has some intelligence stupid enough to accept seriously that he is the king you remember how it happens towards the end of the film uh the trainer the Australian trainer sits on the king's chair the Furious King asks him how dares he to do this and the coach replies why not what right do you have to sit on this chair and not me the king shouts back because I am a king by Divine Right to which the coach just Nots with satisfaction I've rendered him stupid enough now he takes himself seriously and so on it's uh I think seriously that the message is very sad here it's you know we are all the time from all sides we are informed how we live in a crisis of authority male patriarchal authority of course the reactionary perception or rather conservative of the crisis and the lesson of the movie is precisely although you men know that to take your symbolic title father Master teacher k think seriously it's a little bit stupid but it's your duty to accept this stupidity to become stupid enough to play the role of authority now uh the uh other film The Black Swan I claim I hope you noticed it with Natalie Portman and so on is even much worse it's truly a kind of a anti-feminist counterpart uh it I claim resuscitates argu ably one of the most reactionary myths about femininity while in this same masculine universe that we encounter in The King's Speech while a man if you become stupid enough at least can have it both you can have your title Authority and still have a private life let's call it it's an old anti-feminist myth from old fairy tales to kovski Kristof kow's film double life of veronique namely this me that a woman has to make a choice your natural place is to withdraw from from public career to do your role in the family if you choose your let's call it Mission what you really care about as a career you will pay the price for it by death I think these are the coordinates of the second film so you see that's where we are in two popular films men become stupid enough play your Authority women don't play with career you will die now uh let me now uh uh how now let's make a step further through some other examples from movies uh how can we detect this ideological background in popular culture I think that the basic rule here is to apply the concept which was elaborated by structural Linguistics of so-called differentiality it doesn't only matter what a thing is it only also matters as its positive feature what a thing is not it doesn't only matter what you say it only also matters what you don't say while saying what you say of what is only implied in saying what you say of course I hope you know that there is a dialogue one of the best known dialogues in Sherlock Holmes stories uh this one is from Silver Blaze dialogue short dialogue between detective Gregory and Holmes himself which provides the best example of differentiality it's a short dialogue exchange about so-called curious incident of the dock in the ninth time here is the dialogue is there any other point to which you wish to draw my attention asks detective Gregory Sherlock Holmes to the Curious incident of the dog in the nighttime the dog did nothing in the nighttime that was the Curious incident uh how does this work in ideology uh there is a wonderful joke in Ernest luit Masterpiece ninochka the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream and here is the wonderful reply of the waiter sorry we have run out of cream we only have milk can I then bring you coffee without milk I think it's absolutely a correct answer it's not the same thing coffee without cream or coffee without milk what you don't get it's part of the identity of what you do get in what sense because uh if you bring this logic to its extreme you can also see how a double negation when you don't have just when you do not have in this case coffee without cream or milk the result is not zero but what another my last example from popular culture uh from I think it's from early '90s you remember the movie with Ian McGregor before he became a Jedi when he was still playing uh uh workingclass guys brasted off the hero accompanies to her home after their date a young pretty woman who at the entrance to her flat tells him would you like to come in for a coffee he answers there is a problem I don't drink drink coffee she retorts with a smile no problem I don't have any what I like is that you know what you get through this double negation is probably the most not vulgar but open erotic invitation like that's my point I invite you for a coffee then I negate coffee and the result is not zero the result is pure uh invitation why lose time with such dialectical jokes because I claim they allow us to grasp how ideology functions to detect so-called ideological distortions you should note not only what is said but the complex interplay between what is said and what is not said which unsa is implied in what is said do we get coffee without cream or coffee without milk there is even a direct political equivalent to this joke about coffee without cream without milk a friend an old president from Poland told me uh in a well-known joke from socialist Poland a customer enters a store and asks you probably don't have butter or do you the answer sorry but we are not the store which doesn't have butter we are the store which doesn't have toilet paper the one that doesn't have butter is across the street and so on okay but now let's take another a little bit more more elaborate example in today's Brazil they have carnivals and as they like to put it people from all classes dance together on the street momentarily obliterating their race class and so on differences but it is obviously not the same if a jobless worker delivers himself to free dance forgetting his worries about how to feed his family or if a rich Banker lets himself go and feels good about being one United with the people they are both dancing on the same street but the worker is dancing as it were without milk while the banker is dancing without cream you can also Imagine a brast of dialogue between United States and Europe in late 2002 when the invasion of Iraq was being prepared the US saying to Europe would you care to join us in the attack on Iraq to find the weapons of mass destruction Europe critical replied but we have no facilities to search for the weapons of mass destruction then ramsfeld or some American guy answers no problem there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq I mean it was exactly the same logic now uh now I now let's put things in a little bit more serious way why do we not see what nonetheless in a way we see in ideology how does IDE ology enact this suspension uh I claim I'm sorry if you know it already but it's crucial that there is a a wonderful apocryphal probably anecdote from the first world war which perfectly renders our predicament today and how we see things that we see but we don't see things that we also see it's uh the anecdote about the exchange of telegrams between German and Austrian Army headquarters in the middle of the first world war the Germans from Berlin sent the message to Vienna here on our part of the front the situation is serious but not catastrophic to which of course as you know the austrians replied here the with us the situation is catastrophic but not serious is this not more and more the way many of us at least in the developed World relate to our global predicament we all know about the impending catastrophe ecological social and so on but we somehow cannot take it seriously in psychoanalysis this attitude is called a fetishist split I know very well but but what but I do not really believe it and I think such a split is a clear indication of the material force of ideology which makes us refuse what we see and know we can also call this the mechanism of what Freud sometimes refers to as isolering isolation where you accept a fact but don't take it don't you do not what you abstractly know you do not really put it at a symbolic or affective level you do not really integrate it you just rationally deal with it as if this is the case but again you somehow suspend its let's call it symbolic efficiency this again I claim is how ideology more and more functions today ideology is not in in what you know or you don't know you can know quite a lot of things ideology is resides in this underlying selection where some things although you know them you behave act as if you don't know them uh let me improvise a little bit here because I think this ideological mechanism is crucial uh this is what I call the fetishist functioning of ideology the old traditional functioning of ideology was more symptomatic you know symptom like Return of the repressed you base your life on a lie you repress ignore some traumatic truth but as we say it whatever you do the repressed will somehow return in one or another symptomatic form just to give you a stupid everyday example the proverbial adolescent who is traumatized by sex and in order to in order to forget about it takes Refugee in physics and Mathematics but then you know sooner or later he tries to resolve a a task like how much energy is released when two bodies H hit each other and so on and it's there but much more interesting I claim is the fetishist functioning which again is operative today where you don't deny anything you just a fetish Ina a distance of not really accepting it not really taking it seriously incidentally as I developed also in this last book living in the end times this I think explains how why and how although we most of us at least probably not only believe scientists and in this sense know very well that the situation is potentially uh catastrophic but like really are convinced that this is the case but nonetheless are not ready to do anything again although we know there are threats of catastrophes we cannot bring ourselves to to act upon it to do it here fetish enters what is fetish I will repeat an old story of mine which is very tragic it happened to a friend of mine who was married and his wife died young beautiful wife the usual story you know she went to a doctor H breast cancer in two months she was dead what surprised us his friends is that this same lady sorry this same guy after the wife died was absolutely ready all the time to talk about the most painful moments of the wife dying you know we didn't have to play any of these games or don't mention these in front of him it will traumatize him no he was ready to talk about everything so we doubted my God we started to raise questions what's going on with this guy like is did he love his wife at all is he kind of a cruel cynical subject or what then we learned the secret every time that he was talking about his dead wife and the most painful moments of her death he was playing with a hamster in his hands and the hamster was obviously his fetish this was also uh the preferred pet animal of his wife so in a way playing with the hamster meant I can talk about it but hamster was the fetishist standing for my wife is still alive I don't accept she is dead now you will say this is primitive pelo analysis how do I know it unfortunately I do know it because this hamster died half a year later and immediately the guy collapsed start for a week every second day made the suicide attempt and had to be immediately hospitalized so again I claim that from here you can see how interesting is socially ideologically the functioning of a fetish fetishist are not idiots like you have your fetish feet and see nothing else no fetishist can be very brutal cynical realistic they pretend that they accept the life the way it is why because secretly their fetish enables them to acquire a distance not to as we put it in traditional terms fully emotionally assume what they rationally know uh for example my thesis is that if you look at modern top managers especially in the United States one of the model fetishes is uh what I ironically call Western Buddhism this kind of a vake spirituality Transcendental Meditation whatsoever that's their fetish they can play all the dirty Market games but deep in themselves they think oh I know this is just the game of appearances the truth is in my inner self and so on and so on so again you know I claim that you cannot really be a fully cynical subject people who pretend to be brutally cynical I don't have any ideal I know life is just a brutal struggle and so on I claim there always is a fetish the question to ask them is okay okay okay but where is your hamster or whatever form this this hamster this hamster has and this hamster can also be I don't have time to go into this direction but nonetheless externalized like in the sense of you should strictly distinguish between your subjective beliefs in the sense of what what you take seriously what you believe and I I will on purpose use this very clamy formulation and what you objectively believe without knowing that you believe it I claim that the basic lesson of psychoanalysis today still actual fully actual today is that it's exactly the opposite one of the one usually attributed to psychoanalysis that we just pretend to believe beneath we are hedonists with all the dirty obscene desires and so on no on the contrary We Believe much more than we know that we believe like you you can think I'm a totally cynical person I don't care but in your acts there is a belief embodied this category again is absolutely crucial today today I claim I'm sorry now if I repeat a short joke which I repeated at least 20 times but it's just the pure structure of this Paradox you know nil Bor quantum physics once was visited at a country in his at his country house by a friend there he had above the entrance Door a horseshoe in Central Europe the superstitious item signaling uh Destin that's the idea to prevent evil spirits to enter the house and the friend asks him why do have this here are you stupid are you superstitious and N Bor gave him a perfect answer no I'm not stupid I'm a scientist of course I don't believe in it but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it that's ideology today we don't believe in it we are all cnics but actually we believe in it much more

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Id: unoBj_MTdM8

Length: 22min 17sec (1337 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 31 2024