Slavoj Zizek: Defend the Enlightenment!

i want to go back to something you alluded to when you were talking about the haitian revolution um or the haitian revolution and the french revolution so you know as we know the principles of the enlightenment very heavily influenced the french revolutionaries and as you mentioned you can see that sort of being pulled through to the haitian revolution um i kind of feel like today especially in the u.s on the left the enlightenment has kind of fallen out of favor right uh and you you had sort of mentioned this or alluded to this as well um i think there's a conception among some people that you know enlightenment principles or enlightenment values are somehow um eurocentric or non-universal or perhaps i should say that the very enlightenment concept of universality is something that a lot of people on the left in the us now try to push against so i you know because we are talking about the french revolution and the enlightenment um i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about why the left today should embrace the enlightenment or what is it that we can take from the enlightenment uh i know of course in thanks very much for this question i know in detail this line of argumentation you know the problem is identity politics for me here and of course i have nothing against the identity politics in the sense of every group should be allowed or even solicited to retain assert its identity incidentally in the mid 1920s till the stalinist term soviet union practiced this type of identity politics in ukraine i read now a right-wing historical overview of the development of ukraine do you know that till october revolution ukrainians were not allowed to use in everyday level to practice the ukrainian language it was just russian ukraine developed its grammar dictionaries ukrainian became a literary language during the 1920s so they consciously proposed these identities the problem i see is somewhere where somewhere else and as i did it i think already i forgot where in a text the problem with identity politics for me is that it implies a kind of a horizontal image of social antagonisms i'm here you are there we should tolerate each other it should be allowed to build its identity and so on and so on and you can see the catastrophe of this the moment you apply it to class struggle now comes my provocation the movie which got which triumphed at oscars this year uh no matland it's honest nice liberal yeah but i think it's a wrong step towards what i'm tempted to call classism in the sense of class identity politics the thesis is implicit at least the way i experience the movies look even those poorest workers who cannot even afford a home permanent home who had to drive around searching for jobs and so on even they have their own cultural identity even they have their own way of life with small rituals solidarity and so on and so on i don't buy this i think that the problem of this type of nomadic proletarians is not cannot be solved in this sense that you provide a proper cultural identity for them but that you demonstrate precisely that their situation is so tragic that they cannot reach a full satisfactory self-identity as marx put it about proletariat their identity is self-contradicting they they cannot achieve that incidentally in the same way maybe i will even now write a new text criticizing this new world hollywood politically correct hollywood movies which i think are very dangerous like i didn't see it i read about it luca this new disney cartoon about a boy from the sea of italian comes sea monster who can adopt human image and then becomes friendly with i think a gay boy ordinary italian man and they overcome the barriers develop friendship and so on and so on we see of course this is meant to be as a parable for parable for every hatred of the otherness lgbt immigrants and so on and so on but i'm always very suspicious when a whole set of social contradictions like why are immigrants coming here what are the social antagonism among the immigrants what are we doing wrong with the immigrants why can't we deal with problem of immigrants just in this pure humanitarian way or there are poor people we are humans let's help them and so on and so on no the way to really help them is to question our politics of colonialism look at all these critical points refugees immigrants from africa not to mention isis syrian civil war and so on and so on i wrote a short text at proposed donald rumsfeld where i claim my god rumsfeld was the main creator of isis in the sense that is this catastrophic politics in iraq syria and so on which created isis changes had to happen at this level so you know how far i'm ready to go here now this will be a problematic part but please take me seriously i don't trust humanitarians who say but immigrants are suffering so much we should help them no i would much more trust a slightly conservative guy who says immigrants are annoying me they are too different i don't want them here but i want to be honest they live in a city place there so let's stop what we are doing economically politically so that they will be able to have normal life there the moment the problem is put in the terms of uh humanitarianism are we good enough to help them and so on something is terribly wrong again the problem is the global international situation the problem is not oh my god there are immigrants on our border should we allow them in or not of course we should allow them to avoid a misunderstanding much more than we do but this is not the solution at this level again i'm ready for years ago the species of this certain kind of identity politics you know what is my primordial experience here i remember i'm old enough before mandela and nc took over the last 20 years of apartheid rule in south africa you know that apartheid ideology was absolute identity politics their argument i read some of their texts against simply giving the blacks right to vote was my god but look they have wonderful authentic ancient culture if we give them the right to vote they will just became alienated consumerists like us and so on and so on yeah i love my friends from these minorities whose answer is not a hypocritical one but a wonderfully openness open one yes please why not let us allow us please to experience a little bit of your corrupted welfare state as a nation and so on you know there is so much there is so much hypocrisy here so that's my worry that uh how to really solve the problems and it's not just a moral level it's a question of survival for all of us if things that are now happening in still in the middle east and other parts guatemala parts of africa and so on if this is not resolved there then this situation of allowing a certain amount of them to come i'm not talking from my perspective western europe will just breed hatred here and even more closely we are not receiving here the true victims it's good to see the statistics every immigrant apart from a minor number are those who are aggressive strong enough to pay all the bribes and so on the truly poor remain there in terrible conditions i think again we should move to this level of seeing the global problem seeing where are the roots of the problem if not we are lost and so the you know the spirit of the french revolution and i think the enlightenment in general was kind of infused with this hope um and hoping progress for the future and i think on the left especially in academia there are there are certain trends such as like afro-pessimism or or post-modernism that don't have the same kind of hope and you know a lot of revolutions of the late 18th early 19th century were kind of fueled by these common um you know themes grievances social forces do you see any prospects for revolutions in the 21st century and if so you know what factors do you think will fuel them it's very risky this terrain we don't know but i i think that yes you know history is full of miracles in a good sense like who would have even imagined 20 25 years ago something like what happened okay we know how it finished then but nonetheless something like syriza in greece the literally majority of the population mobilized at this level and so on and so on and so i cannot be precise about what form some let's call it revolution or upheaval strong social upheaval will take i just want to emphasize one thing which seems to me crucial i've written about it a couple of times till now the predominant form of protests in third world and uh eastern european post-communist countries was what habermas in a very unfortunate term of the place called knockhole in the revolution catch up revolution like we in the developed western europe already had it you are just trying to catch up with us and that's all you can do cover must win so far here that he even attacked some east german dissidents like christophol the writer and so on who claimed but maybe in spite of all communist failures there were some forms of minimal social solidarity and so on that have some kind of a lesson which could remain operative and help us even if or when we integrate the west havermas was in panic about this project about this prospect for him no no this was the danger then of new totalitarianism and so on and so on but i think this skeptics by skeptics mean people who saw that what happened after the fall of really existing socialism it's not simply we want to catch up with the west why because first i remember from my youth i was part of those phenomena especially my links with poland i knew adam misnik and so on and they all told me you know at the beginning solidarnos was the workers committee it had a much stronger workers and even modern pop culture and so on the church took over later so basically if you look closely at what was moving even the majority of solidarity did it was not simply capitalism it was an open society where there is a freedom of expression and basic social safety welfare some welfare guaranteed and so on it was much closer to what was the best in the official ideology itself and the set paradox is that since then neoliberal takeover of post-european east posts or post-communist east european countries when this happened then this betrayed socialist legacy returned in the guise of his opposite as this new right populism which and that's the saddest thing which still has a much stronger social note than pro-western market liberals and rewards look at poland yes i hate them this kaczynski's party law and justice but you know what they did it's horrible horrible from the perspective of freedom loving liberals they raised average salary they made conditions for retirement much better student loans and so on and so on they did a whole series of measures for ordinary people which the ruling liberal even left liberal business elite was not ready to do so what i'm trying to say is that aren't we getting now something similar even in the west the revolt we are getting now there look at uh division the yellow vests in france okay they are mixed i don't totally support them but the important thing is this one they are not no longer catch up demand it's not no we want true parliamentary democracy they have they articulate a discontent precisely in this fukuyama's world of uh of capitalist liberal democracy and so on and so on so in the east and in the west we have a certain amount amount of critical energy which cannot be properly articulated more and more in the existing parliamentary system and again the right-wing capitalists manipulate with this in a very astute way and my formula is the only way even for the honest liberals to get ground again is to move to the left i think that's a pretty pretty good note to end on uh it looks like we are coming up on the hour so i want to thank you slavoy for being here again we will air this on bastille day so happy best deal day to you and to all the viewers i'm very grateful to all of you for being able to talk here you know why is me you allow me a brief conclusion because i always when i mention draco beans and so on even those who are sympathetic to me they take this as a kind of eccentricity you know you are playing a postmodern intellectual game or whatever but listen i now i even don't want to mention marxism too much i simply tell them look at seattle and no i don't like seattle my there are vancouver although the center the island is now occupied by the far east rich people they will have to do something uh no i have nothing against people from these to coming but not just the rich people from there and portland you know i like portland it still has i think the best bookstore in the united states connects that no so what i'm saying is that just look just look at it with some kind of a remainder of a healthy common sense when you have this effect of global warming pandemic is going on and so on and so on it's stupid to say let's leave the conclusion to the market the situation is too much an emergency state it's not i don't like the metaphor of war here but it is some kind of a warlike emergency state and let me give a metaphor which i hope all rough militaries will like are attacked by an enemy and you need planes and tanks and if you don't say okay let's let's address the market let's you know blah blah no you have to organize it in a voluntary way immediately we need 10 000 tanks we need bombers and so on and just saying that the same thing is here that voluntarism is needed again egalitarianism not in this abstract sense everybody the same celery but it is a simple sense of never should we in the pandemic for example sacrifice one part of the world of one part of our own population it doesn't work health care simply has to be universal not to mention the new crisis we will need some trans-national organizations with enough force to even enforce solutions i think it's totally realistic if these strengths of extreme heat drop in some places will go on to somehow execute large movements tens of millions even more of the population and we cannot afford today to do this through war as it was done in the past these are for me simply thinks of common sense survival so my concluding formula is that as we know many things but the most surprising thing is our self-proposed blindness how many things we refuse to know we simply act as if you know all the pandemic will be over or so what if some oysters are flying in the ocean near vancouver and so on and so on but it's clear that this phenomena are just are just popping up here and there and they are gradually combining in a more global kind of balance like what gives me panic is that it's not just their vancouver did you read what is happening now in those places which were usually proclaimed the coldest places in the earth in northern siberia they also are at 35 degrees now we have to get ready i'm not saying 10 i'm saying getting ready for large movement of the population emergency measures and so on and so on and i think here communism some form of communism will be necessary capitalism cannot confront these problems [Music] you

Channel: Jacobin

Views: 63,952

Keywords: slavoj zizek, enlightenment, bastille day, identity politics, zizek interview, jacobin, jacobin magazine, jacobin show, socialism, democratic socialism, what is socialism, socialism explained, bernie sanders, labor, labour, working class, social democracy, marxism, capitalism, politics, economics, neoliberalism, populism, left wing, leftist

Id: 2O98MEdnd6s

Length: 22min 57sec (1377 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 19 2021