Peter Sloterdijk in conversation w/ Slavoj Žižek [INDIGO Festival 2023]

[Applause] [Music] [Applause]

Dušan: Welcome to Friday, the day of, uh, Indigo—a long-expected day. Today we have two prominent guests: Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher and culture theorist. He is a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design, Karlsruhe. He's got many German and international awards for his work. He wrote a iconic book, *Critique of Cynical Reason*, published by Suhrkamp in 1983, and *Critique of Cynical Reason* in 2002. Sloterdijk began to co-host *The Philosophical Quartet*, a show on the German ZDF television channel devoted to discussing contemporary issues in depth. Peter Sloterdijk wrote numerous books where he finds unexpected and unsought connections which we don't see or don't want to see. If Peter Sloterdijk did not exist, we would have to invent him.

Slavoj Žižek, I hope I will not have to present, because he is really from Ljubljana—a very well-known theorist, professor, lecturer, and, as one might say, a treasure. He's a regular guest of the Indigo festival and he is here with his guests almost for four years now. I would like to thank and say hello also to Styria's many people from Graz arrived today for this lecture. Of course, I would like to say thanks to the Goethe Institute and especially director Alice Landrebe, who will take over the discussion about these two important persons. Thank you very much. [Music] [Applause]

Dušan: Yeah, good evening, ladies and gentlemen. There is a law in Sweden: as soon as two men appear on stage, there have to be two women as well. Probably this law will be soon introduced to all of Europe, and that's why I'm here today, although I'm only one. There's not enough time today to discuss all the topics we could, but we will all learn tonight, I trust, what it means to be wanting to die for the truth. Let me say a few words about Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Žižek. They're both from different philosophical schools and they see the world very differently, but they also have a lot in common. Sloterdijk was called the most cheerful philosopher of Germany—cheerful, cheerful, yes—and the funnest. They are both world-famous; they're both professors; they have fan clubs; and they both wrote bestsellers. And of course, they're both controversial and they have a lot to say to each other. Peter Sloterdijk, as Žižek has already mentioned, has written *Critique of Cynical Reason*, and the title was, you can say, a stroke of genius. It made him famous immediately, and this was the first philosophical bestseller after the Second World War in Germany. Let me hand over the word to Peter Sloterdijk. A warm welcome.

Peter Sloterdijk: And we are going to start with each… Shall I begin? Okay, thank you. So, we agreed to propose our personal concepts of what we think that philosophy means. Let me begin with an anecdote told by Rousseau, who, in his founding essays about modern politics, quoted an ancient author who reported the story of a woman, a mother from Sparta, who, after having received the message that five sons had died in battle, fell down on her knees and thanked God for becoming such an important mother of heroes. The strange thing is that Rousseau was very fond of this anecdote because his own concepts of modern society inclined into the direction of a neo-Spartan, homogeneous society, as it were, in a kind of social mass in which quasi-Islamic forms of coherence exist. He wanted to suppress the subversive qualities that Christianity had introduced in Western politics, and the split between conscious and political reason was, for him, so scandalous. But he introduced, at the same time—you could draw back one of the origins of what we later called fascist tendencies in modern thought—of course, you could draw that back to Rousseau. But at the same time, there is an element of extremely progressive and unheard-of point of view in his introduction to his famous *Discourse on Inequality*, where he declares: I would have preferred to be born into a small community so remote that the greed of a conqueror would not be triggered by this little state, and which is weak enough not to lead wars of aggression. And in this small society, I would have lived and died under the rule of laws that nobody would deny and would never come to mind to resist to these reasonable forms of order. The sensational aspect of this argument is that he assumes a point of view that is authentically philosophical, which is to say that he assumes the impossible position of a prenatal choice of his own existence. So, philosophy is something that unroots the thinking from existence, and you can find this gesture at the beginning and at the end of the history of philosophy: in the beginning with Plato—I shall say a couple of words about his new concept of truth—and in the end with this progressive Rousseau and later on with Heidegger, who invented the concept of *Dasein*, which is taken up by Hannah Arendt under the concept of *natality*. So, it is no longer mortality, the focus of philosophizing, but natality. And if you can adopt this impossible position of someone who puts his real existence in brackets and says, "I reject my real life, but, to tell you the truth, I would have preferred to be born in another world, in another society," then for the first time you really assume a philosophical attitude that is as strong as Plato's invention of truth, which has a double face. Let me read a short chapter of the famous paragraph 344 from *The Gay Science*, under the title "To What Extent Even We Are Still Pious." It is said with good reasons that convictions have no civic rights in the domain of science. It is only when a conviction voluntarily condescends to the modesty of an hypothesis, a preliminary standpoint for experiment, or a regulative fiction that it has access to the realm of knowledge, and a certain value therein can be conceded. In another context, Nietzsche says, "Truth has no stronger and more venomous enemies than convictions." Convictions are more dangerous to truth than lies. But Plato goes on when he says, "For what is the deeper reason why we think that truth is so important?" And his answer will be: Truth is important because we do not want to be deceived, and we do not want to be deceived, not even by ourselves. So we are, as it were, condemned to an attitude of absolute honesty, an honesty that goes beyond the limits of life interest. Therefore, Plato can say—and I will be understood—namely, that it is always a metaphysical belief on which our belief in science rests, and that even we knowing ones of today, the godless and antimetaphysical, we still take our fire from the conflagration kindled by a belief of a millennium old: the Christian belief, which was also the belief of Plato, that God is truth and the truth is divine. And it is absolutely clear Nietzsche cannot stop here, but he has to add one more question: What about if this belief, this conviction, has become untrustworthy in our old days? What happens if we are abandoned by truth and we are no longer in the position of someone who renounces completely to our faculty of self-deception? This is certainly a point where the ethical point of view of Žižek will interfere. But we find something very important: Plato introduces here only one concept of truth, that means the absolute sincerity, but what he does not say here, but Nietzsche is well aware of that, that truth is something that has one strong presupposition: that truth is more important than life, and that Socrates will die for the truth, and he will be the first martyr of the European concept of truth, which is so self-lost, a heroic self-lost in objectivity. When objective truth is there, the subject has to disappear. That is a metaphysical foundation of science: that the researcher, the subject who is doing science, has to be nullified with regard to the fact. And when we are no longer able to die for truth, there will be no truth anymore. So, I think such a history of philosophy is a long drama that is turning around the question: How can humans perform this comedy of selflessness? And how have we, modern we, reintroduced subjectivity into the drama of truth without completely corrupting the concept of truth itself? That is how I would propose my introductory remarks. What if God himself turns out to be our most persistent liar? Okay, time to reply.

Slavoj Žižek: Sorry, first a brief introductory remark. When it was announced that we will be here together, many of my leftist friends told me, "How can you speak with this neo-Nazi? Whatever… He should be your enemy." And I gave them back a reversal of a well-known English phrase. You know, when you have a friend who ruins everything for you, the usual way to reply is, "With friends like this, who needs enemies?" And my answer to those detractors is not the usual humanist one—no, we are really friends—my answer is, "Maybe we are enemies, but with enemies like this, who needs friends?" Yeah, that's how I see you.

Peter Sloterdijk: Yeah, I completely agree, but this is not the… To clarify our relationship, our strange friendship has also been expressed by yourself in former days when you said, after the revolution, you would make sure that I would go to the concentration camp as one of the first ones, but you would provide me with a position in the kitchen.

Slavoj Žižek: No, this is a wrong rumor. What I truly said is that you go to Gulag, of course.

Peter Sloterdijk: Yeah, of course. But I… In my Central Committee building in Moscow…

Slavoj Žižek: Yeah, we'll make a special phone call there so that you know, on Sunday, in Gulag, you got a little bit better meal, like one rotten head and one roast beef a week.

Peter Sloterdijk: No roast beef, just…

Slavoj Žižek: …roast… And I said I will make sure that you get two bowls of this soup every Sunday.

Slavoj Žižek: All right, sorry. Let's go seriously now. To think, please… Uh, I come to the conclusion which echoes, if I understood it correctly, what you wanted to say now: the underlying insight that… Uh, you know, it's not that we are spontaneously, naturally truthful, and then we are maybe cheated by some people and so on and so on. No, most of us irreducibly pretend to live in sincere convictions which are lies. And I don't believe in this some Marxist envisage it utopian moment when ordinary people will accept the full truth. So my first statement is: you all have heard about Abraham Lincoln's famous statement, which is not just a rhetorical trick. I think it's the ultimate foundation, this presupposition of democracy. Without this axiom, democracy doesn't work. It is, you know, it… You can cheat all the time some of the people; you can cheat some people all the time; but all the people cannot be deceived all the time. I'm saying yes, they can. I think that the moment when the majority, the crowd, however you call them—and I'm not here focusing on the poor people, with so-called educated people, it can be various—there are very rare moments when… Mhm… They are ready to… To… To confront this. And I agree here with you, who already drew my attention to this, that it's not here a question of this traditional Marxist notion of ideological illusion when you are cheated. No, we, in some sense, even want to cheat ourselves. It's much more comfortable to live in a certain type of sincere illusion. Now let's go a step further. What do I mean by this? Now comes my… Now I am attacked all around the world as a neo-fascist authoritarian. I stop to care about this, but let me give you the first conclusion here: spontaneously—we assume that people want to be free, and then some outer oppression causes them not to be free and so on and so on—no. I think that spontaneously—not in any organic, biological sense, but in the sense of in our daily life, the way we are educated and so on—we are not free. And our time today is, in this sense—here I go maybe a little bit further than you in my direction—that… Uh… Uh… Uh… Freedom hurts. To reach for freedom means to go against your—even if they are sincere—spontaneous intuitions and so on and so on. Which is why—now comes the problematic part—I think there is no struggle for actual truth, or if we had liberation without the figure of a master. Because what is, for me, the function of the master—almost in the Hegelian sense—when we act spontaneously, we stupidly follow our daily interests. Some… The message of the master, for me, is not the Stalinist one—"I know better than you what you want"—no. The message of the master is: to kick you out of this self-satisfaction, to step out of yourself, to take a risk. I will not go further into it, just to give you what I think about illusion, even if we didn't yet talk about it. My saddest recent experience—you see, this is the material power of… Okay, in some sense, illusions—in some understanding of them—a couple of months ago I was at a round table at Birkbeck College. We debated South Africa, and there were two old ladies, heroic African National Congress fighters, apartheid… And I couldn't resist asking them a simple question, which was: "Listen, I'm reading in Western media all the time how South Africa is on the edge of collapse, becoming another Zimbabwe. Please tell me the other side of the story." And a dignified lady there, an old fighter, started almost to cry and said, "Let me tell you something horrible: the black majority, poor majority, the predominant, the spiritual stance among them is nostalgia for apartheid." You shouldn't say this as a leftist, she told me. "Look, the standard of living of the poor majority was under apartheid the same as now, maybe even slightly higher, but precisely because apartheid was an authoritarian state, there was certain basic safety and so on and so on. Now is such a chaos and so on and so on." And you see how difficult and obscene is to get rid of this fact by simply saying, "They are manipulated and so on and so on," right? I don't know what… It's simply stupid to say this. Just want to point that… I give you back the word. Would you go here? I'm addressing you even a step further in this direction of the true truth and say that today maybe it's the time to turn around the eleventh thesis of Feuerbach. I think that what today we should say is: in the 20th century we maybe have tried to change the world too fast, too much, without understanding what we are doing. What we now… The time has come not just to change the world, but to understand it, because I think we are more and more missing what my Marxist friend, Fredric Jameson, calls cognitive mapping—even a vague idea of what is going on today. Just take China, the People's Republic. What is this? Is this still the old Communist regime manipulating capitalist elements, or what it is? It's a problem. Next thing… Just to finish, I think it's very important here—I don't think we have a difference, but if you can clarify your stance… I will first clarify my stance here. I take the lesson of psychoanalysis: I don't trust sincerity too much. There are a lot of lies, or whatever, which we can believe sincerely, and that's my big problem. I go immediately into hot waters of today's polemics. That's my problem with trans people. Yes, I give them all the rights, blah, blah, blah. No, but you know what's my problem? They talk as if the opposition is, on the one hand, it's biology—that our sex is biologically determined, blah, blah, blah—on the other hand, it is… And I read so many trans texts, it all amounts to this: arguments don't count. I feel like this; I feel that I'm a man and a woman, or whatever. And my spontaneous answer to this is: what you feel is up yours; feeling doesn't guarantee anything here. Trans people like to attack us: "Oh, you are reading Freud! Freud is…" Freud taught us something very important: to come from biology to social, sexual identity, it's a complicated, traumatic social process which is very ambiguous. We often desire what we are not even aware that we want and so on and so on. So that would be… That would be… That would be one of my points here. And the last one about sincerity and so on… I'm here becoming—as I presented myself to a German media—they asked me what are you, I said, "Moderately conservative communist." No, and they… At the… They said, "Perfect! We are moderately communist conservatives, so we can collaborate." And you know what is my point here? Uh… Uh… My point is that now it's something horrible that I will tell you—I'm sorry if I sound like a right-winger—but here I take very seriously what to say with "no" of the high truth. I'm incidentally totally a Platonist, much more than for Aristotle and so on, but I will immediately finish. Sorry if I talk too much. What I wanted to say is that what is happening now in the West… We—I still believe that yes, the West did many horrible things and so on, and I know many things—it's not only African slavery, it's Latin America, it's maybe one of the most horrible things, the British and others' attack on China, the Opium War and so on, horror—but are we aware that even when we criticize this, we strictly remain speaking within the Western tradition? And we have… Isn't it time that we are not ashamed of this, that we—sorry to use this word—proudly assume it and say many things? And then I just say my last story, then I stop. Listen: slavery… If I ask you about slavery, I admit, for 95% of you the first reaction would have been, "Yeah, yeah, white people kidnapping Africans," sorry. But if you look at the history of slavery, first it was in all societies from Neolithic on. The moment you build houses, permanent settlements, it's nice to have a slave to do it. Then… Listen: first there were no white people who went to Africa kidnapping their slaves. Are you aware that African—I don't know how to designate them, maybe not states in the Western way—already were highly developed in the sense of slavery? Go to Ghana, Accra Museum of Slavery, and they honestly admitted: white people merchants almost didn't put their feet on Africa; they were just parasitizing on and buying surplus—not surplus value, surplus slaves—from then on. Two: why only this focus? What about slaves by Arab countries from Eastern Africa? The number is practically the same, if not higher. So what is… I will end with this ultra-provocation: So what is unique about the West? I'm sorry to tell you this: it's the only, in the larger sense, civilization which, from the late 18th century, systematically developed a movement to abolish slavery. No other civilization did this. Some Islamist friends told me, "We did it!" Ah, ah, ah… Read their texts. Yes, slavery is permitted, just you shouldn't have Muslim slaves with others; it's not a problem. So I think that more than ever we should stop this absolute self-destruction of the West. Whenever somebody says "freedom," there will be a politically correct leftist, "Yes, but freedom is a mask of exploitation, slavery!" No, we should become—and that's the only thing we can give the world—we, Western Europe, modern United States, we should not be afraid to develop a certain pride in our tradition. Sorry, maybe we should send these people to Dubai so they can have a look at Dubai. They can see slavery in Gulag for… So… Uh… Uh… Quite short, my God, long, long answer to so many questions.

Slavoj Žižek: A short message from my virtual Gulag… But if… But Gulag is a good place to talk about Plato once again, because… Uh… The essence of the Platonic turn of thought is that he creates a profound divide between perception and reasoning. Yeah, and there is no truth in perception, and the biggest cheater of all cheaters, beyond personal interest, is the phenomenality of the world. So the phenomena are made to feel us at home in the world because we have become accustomed to that which appears, and appearances show us and tell us that we are at home where we are. The Platonic turn introduces something very horrible because he demonstrates the airy quality of thinking, of reasoning, because he can sometimes prove perception is a deception. And ancient philosophy is nothing but a huge collection of examples of how perception is seduction, introducing error, and helping you to indulge with your eldest illusions. So this divide between reasoning and feeling has been carried on through the whole history of philosophy. When philosophy became criticized from the early 19th century on, in the post-Hegelian position, the Young Hegelians all had one argument: the philosophers have understood everything, but they have forgotten reality; they left out reality; they found a truth beyond reality, but these truths are not rooted. And since from the 19th century on, philosophy is about counter-transcendence—yeah, we have transcended too far and too much, and we will want to re-transcend, descend into reality without abandoning the pretension of philosophizing—and that's… This is a point where everything becomes so critical. And if, at the end of this movement, a transperson shows up saying, "I feel like this, and my feeling is truth," we have reached the end of this re-transcendence, because we have reached the point from which philosophy originally started: that is, it renounces the immersion into the world of phenomenality. This renouncement is the creative act of philosophizing as such. You prefer thinking to seeing and hearing. This is one of the reasons why the fate of philosophy, the decadence of philosophy, began also already with Aristotle, when… When… When… When he pretended that all are looking for truth by their own nature, which is absolutely untrue, whereas Heidegger is true when he says: wherever man appears, wherever truth appears, humans run away. Humans run away when truth is in the air. Yeah, why? Because truth has an inhuman and so a counter-intuitive aspect. And so… And this… The Platonic Revolution was announced by the Ionic philosophers, Thales, when he made this enormous sentence that everything of the real cosmos is made out of water. There is no more stronger counter-intuitive assertion possible. When the Pythagoreans in their small community in Croton, in the south of Italy, pretended that the given world is nothing, but the truth is only to be found if you are able to decipher the mathematical partitioner of being, because everything is number, and what you see are numbers in disguise, they came from a musicological point of view, because they divided the string of ancient music instruments, and they discovered the rules of intervals, and they projected the numeric schema of the intervals onto being as a whole. And we know today that the Pythagoreans were basically correct, and that the counter-intuitive approach to reality is absolutely necessary in order to escape this field of immersion in which our existence is caught. And this is one of the reasons why Heidegger is so interesting, because in his thinking that is turning around the concept of *Dasein*, it seems to us that the last point of re-immersion into reality has been reached. At the same time, his master, Husserl, tried to do something similar when he introduced the term of *Lebenswelt* and tried to show that even the most abstract forms of thought are, in a way, rooted into something pre-philosophical, in a pre-philosophical reality. So the interest for the re-immersion of being in reality is what is the main passion of great thinkers in the 20th century. Think about Merleau-Ponty, who was one of the heroes of this gesture, or Sartre, whose whole idea turned around the concept of situation, because situation is, as it were, the French way to the *Lebenswelt*. Yeah, it is a *Lebenswelt* charged by a drama. Yeah, the… The… Situation is *la plus*… *Plus trauma*, *plus* decision, and *plus* tragedy, of course, whereas Husserl is the thinker probably the most distant, the most remote thinker, when it comes to the question of the tragedy of human existence. He has this God-like serenity until the end, and that is why we have to consider this asteroid quality of truth-seeking and truth-making. Truth is something that interrupts conventional forms of view, and it's the modern cosmology is nothing else but the biggest expression of this terrible side of counter-intuition. Because if matter does not really exist, but if matter, as the famous formula says, is… Um… So is energy in another state, yeah, so, and if energy is mass times the speed of light squared, you have reached the peak of something you cannot see, not feel, not hear. Yeah, you have, once for all, left the space of intuition and perception, and you have nevertheless to admit that a truth is told when Einstein speaks, and that is something that hurts that much. And the whole history of metaphysics has become dramatic because humanity as such is divided in those who will partake in the adventure of truth-thinking, which means of not fleeing from truth, and all the rest. And this is the split between monks and people, or, as Schelling said, monks and criminals. And this is the deep divide of humanity, just as Castoriadis divided humanity into the activist part of humanity into yogis and commissars. So God then divided humanity into monks and criminals, and the criminals are those who are content with self-deception and deception of others. Yeah, but finally, we cannot decide who is who between us. There's an old tradition that there is one crying philosopher, which is Heraclitus—that could be your role—and a laughing philosopher, which is Democritus.

Peter Sloterdijk: I'm for Democritus, but we both… We both cry, I'm afraid. We both… We pretend to laugh, but we cry both.

Slavoj Žižek: No, I deeply… Sorry, did you… Yeah, I… What you said now, it may appear just a rhetorical trick, no, this cry-laugh, no, but there is a deep truth in it. In what sense? I was attentive always—this is my old story, maybe you know it—to the fact that why are all relatively solid, not really good, but nonetheless films about the Holocaust comedies? I think that when truth is too traumatic, it's a fake; you translate it into our intuitions. If you make an ordinary… Like a prisoner in Auschwitz confronts the Nazi, or in Gulag, "Kill me, I'm proud!" No, when things are really horrible, there is no place for so-called normal human dignity. Only comedy works. And you know, I will not take your time now, but I learned wonderful stories from my Polish Jewish friends—you know that already in '43, '44 there were in Poland Jewish jokes by Jews about Jews—it was the only way to survive. You remember 30 years ago, the Srebrenica massacre? I will not bore you with them, but they're wonderful. I like them extremely brutal, vulgar jokes about Serbs, but let me not get lost. Let me go on with more important things. I find this your counter-intuition stuff so important, because first—now you answer yes or no, just if I got you correctly, then I go on—uh, this is why—and would you follow me here?—I totally opposed a certain—they like to call themselves anti-Cartesian—anti-Cartesian trend when they say this split between feelings and reason is a modern divide; we should unite the two and so on and so on. No, this is too easy, and I will give you—so I don't lose time—an example which I find very important on what to say. The worst ecological orientation today is to put it in terms: our science, abstract approach, screwed it up; we should return to organic unity with nature. That's a fast road to catastrophe, if anything. Yes, science is responsible, but I like to quote here Wagner: look, but without science there is also… There is also… There is also no way out of it. And it's so important what you said, how this counter-intuition grows already with Galileo; it begins—I will not go into detail—but then you have Einstein, not to mention quantum physics now and so on. I mean, it's… We are in a totally counter-intuitive… Uh… Work. So just two concluding remarks: the first one, what I'm nonetheless tempted to do—and here I move a little bit… Screw them, if they will be the topic of more metaphysics—I deeply appreciate your big, thick work on spheres and spheres, but would you accept what I will say now, something relatively precise: that this need for a sphere, in human sense, language and so on, appears only to a human being who is already out of its instinctual, natural sphere and exposed to wilderness. And following my beloved Hegel—I recently reread his, you know, third part of *Encyclopedia*, beginning anthropology—where, my God, Hegel is more radical than Michel Foucault. He said, at the beginning of being human, it's madness, self-destructive madness, and language, civilization, arouses you; you build a sphere to control your own madness. So I see subjectivity already at this level. The last point… Mhm… I will try to… And I wonder how you will react: what is in my nature—now I will be a hypocrite—God created me like this; I'm an obscene guy; I cannot function without a dirty joke, but I think this joke makes a point. Maybe some of you know it; it's a dirty one, but I'm not ashamed to tell it because it has a feminist twist: the woman wins. Wife is with her lover on the first floor in a bed, making love, and the wife tells her lover, "Don't be afraid, my husband is out drinking; he never comes home early; we have time." Nonetheless, then they hear some steps; a drunken husband is returning. The lover says, "Oh, my God, should I jump through the window?" "No, no," says the wife, "he will just fall asleep drunk; we can go on making love." And this is what happens, but then one hour afterwards the husband nonetheless awakens a little bit, kicks the wife who is between him and the lover, and says, "My God, darling, am I so drunk or what? But usually when I look down our bed I see four feet, two of you; now I see six." And then the wife—feminist, good—says, "Listen, yes, you are drunk; step out to the door and look again." So he does it and says, "Yes, you are right; there are only four feet." I think that what philosophy also can teach us is: don't forget into what you see, to include your own being, as it were; always reflect on how you are included into it. This has nothing to do with some subjective relativization of truth and so on. What does it mean politically, for example? We now talk about… I will go directly into dirty politics… Dir… We say Western liberal democracy is fighting new forms of Oriental domination and so on and so on. No, this would be four feet. We are divided; new forms of neo-authoritarianism and so on… There are six feet. You must include not only us as a United Western bloc, but the division here. Without our division you cannot see it. Or just… If I conclude with another… Sorry, similar example that I always use here. For me, not subjectivity, it's still objective truth. Come… Let's imagine… I will take you, him… We are in '35 in Germany; you are a non-antisemitic liberal; I am a Nazi; we debate Jews. And the moment we reduce the debate onto an objective level—how are really the Jews, are they like this or not?—we are lost. The true question is not: were Jews really the way Nazis describe them? There… The result is some cheap compromise, you know: "Yeah, maybe they had a little bit too much influence, but…" The true point is: why did the Nazis need a figure of a Jew to assert their identity? This reflexive term is, for me, at the everyday level, close to something maybe philosophical—this philosophical reflection. And now I speak too much, of course.

Peter Sloterdijk: Yes, you know how, after Wittgenstein, he says, "Now I say: Get out!"

Slavoj Žižek: He talked also to his horse…

Peter Sloterdijk: No, you know who… No, you are here in no way… King Charles speaks with Freud and horses.

Peter Sloterdijk: I would like to go back, for just for a moment, to that concept of immersion, yeah, because I think it has not only a technological meaning. The term as such stems from the field of virtual reality, these designers, and it describes this kind of optical devices you put in front of your eyes, and you look into a different world. But the reality of immersion is almost boundless, because once you understand the principle of that immersive or situationist thinking, you see… You see that everything is tinged by this question of immersion: how much are people in their situations, and to what extent they do not really belong to the situation in which they are. And Heidegger has reached the utmost limit of this immersive quality of existence when he spoke about *Dasein*, and in the *Dasein* you also… But… And his *Dasein* is this paradoxical unit of ecstasy and situatedness. Situatedness means to be included in a place, to share the quality of… *Dasein* means to be outside, to be in an ecstatic relationship with this situation. And the whole of modern philosophical anthropology, with Plessner and his eccentric positionality of human beings and all of them, they all have understood that there is something exceptional and rebellious about the human position. Marx called the human the *Selina* of the cosmos. Yeah, so he's just not a creature which is designed into… To… To fit completely into his environment, because every environment is exactly that which… What humans are leaving. That leads back to the question, to the difference between natality and mortality, because because life is something that is in the middle of both. The classical metaphysics were strongly oriented towards the finality of human life, and they interpreted the end of life as death, but they always neglected the fact that there is an original end at the beginning, and this original end is a moment when the ontological ecstasy begins, because we are born creatures, and we… We… We are leaving a natural space that we are used to call mother, but in that case it is a wrong expression; we rather should call it matrix or something like this, because this is a motherly situation we could call nature, and humans have the tendency to reproduce intrauterine situations in the outer world, especially when we are sleeping, because as we… As… As sleepers we… We stop this ecstatic ontologically ecstatic situation of our existence, and we turn the back to reality and turn towards an inner, inner, inner world that has maybe something to do with the outer one, but not necessarily. And… Um… But… So my point is that everything drives us back to the question: in which kind of situations do we really believe to be immersed? And we are surrounded by an exteriority which is highly structured by counter-intuitive truth. It is as if every truth was a spaceship or a satellite turning around the earth, and we are, as it were, besieged by truth that we do not really encounter. Can I make… If it's not too philosophical a risk, and then we can go to more popular stuff? I for a long time wanted to ask you, because I'm sincerely not sure: am I an idiot here? Did I get it right? For me, Heidegger is—I will explain how I know his critique of the notion of transcendental approach—the ultimate transcendental thinker. In what sense? For Heidegger, the ultimate event is a disclosure of being in a new way; things appear, not in a superficial sense, like doing means being, Z appears to us in a new, epochal, new way. But then, from time to time, I found this in the late 20s, in his seminar on *Being and Time*, up to some late book, short dialogue with Eugen Fink, he asks Heidegger this totally, totally naive question: "But what happens with entities, things independently of our perception of them?" And then very strangely Heidegger engages in some almost theosophic speculations which remind me even of Walter Benjamin. At some point he speculates that there is an infinite pain in nature, and that human language is a way for the pain which is already in nature, independently of us, coming to work. So the problem with which I… With my… In my books which nobody reads am obsessed is precisely this: can we move beyond this Heideggerian horizon which is different epochs of being? Now only our only hope is another disclosure of being, without, of course, returning to old naive materialist realism: yes, we are part of nature

In the Pidan sphere, he reintroduces a kind of presocratic regression, a state of meditation. Because the human, according to the late Heidegger, is provoked to abandon himself into a final meditation of his situatedness. So, within the innermost point of the sphere of Pidas, that is very strange, but it proves something: he finally abandoned his struggle with science. He lost the struggle with science because he was no longer ready to follow the path of science into the abysmal realities of counter-intuition. He wanted to win back a situation in which a simple being there, on your walking way through the wood, is enough to reconcile you with being as a whole. But the critical moment is that, in his interpretation of the history of the disclosure of being in technology, he hears nothing but the bad news of technological power. He no longer wants to hear that, but we have to deal with these powers in a position of a, as it were, divided immersion. To stay in contact without losing yourself to that. It reminds me a little bit of this, as you are quoting the suffering of animals and the whole nature. That's what the Apostle Paul already said: that the whole nature is waiting for redemption. Humans could only redeem the suffering of the world by extinguishing everything, especially some radical ecologists claim, especially extinguishing themselves. But they would miss the mission to redeem the unhappy animals and unhappy plants, where suffering begins. I totally agree with you here. My polemics with those ecologists who focus on humanity is: we ruin some kind of natural balance. My point is: are you crazy? Our sources of energy—coal, oil—can we even imagine what catastrophes must have happened on our Earth before humanity for us to have sources of energy?

Can I now move a step further in my good, human-face approach? Look, already five minutes, five more minutes, and then we open. Yes, sorry, I terribly would like to ask you, but I will bring together two questions, as you said, because it's important for our context. Here, at the beginning, you were right to emphasize the importance of *Critique of Cynical Reason*. I don't know if you are aware how important that book was here for the so-called “dissident movement,” at least parts of it. Because the way you wonderfully paraphrase—turn around marks—not nonetheless they are doing it. I remember that was my experience in the mid-to-late 80s. I had a friend at the Central Committee of the Communist Party; he sincerely believed in the ruling ideology. He lost his job because to really believe in official ideology was already a first step towards becoming a dissident; cynical distance was included. Now I refer very briefly—don't be afraid, maybe some of them are here—to my other two members of the Slovenian Lakanian triad, in the sense of Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar, who developed this in a wonderful way: how cynicism functions today. It's no longer simply this fetishistic denial. I know how it is, but nonetheless it is that the system reproduces itself through a permanent awareness of how it is. I think today the predominant talk on ecology: they say everything openly, but they say it in a way that guarantees that nothing will really be done. And I know this why: because this is neurotic logic, and I am a model of that. When I was with my analyst, I talked all the time, why? Because I was afraid that if I shut up for a second, he may ask me a really difficult question. So, do you have anything to add apropos today's situation?

My last question here is maybe not so much polemical as a question about your wonderful book, *The Sublime Object of Ideology*. In English, what happened in the 20th century? You do something which I think is now becoming more and more actual when you say that we need not domestication of men, but civilizing cultures. Today this is returning with a violence. Hegel is here the culprit; for him, the highest point of ethics of a citizen is war—to risk your life, and the whole ethical edifice; otherwise, we are just particular beings caught in our pleasures, is that from time to time you are called to do this? Okay, now I asked you one thing that I already asked you; I don't remember getting an answer. I quote you in English again, the title: *From the Domestication of Men to the Civilizing of Culture*. Okay, who, how, where do you see even a minimal hope will do it today? I'm trying to impute you a secret communism here, as you can imagine. You can formulate a perspective of hope as soon as you take a long-term view of human evolution. In the long run, there is a chance that cultures will overcome the situation of mutual distrust and combat, and become intertwined in such a way that mutual domestication can go on. The open state of war has returned. After the Second World War, there was a period of illusion because we believed that with the Cold War we would witness the last war, and that we would assist—and we observe the virtualization of warfare. As long as it is cold, we know that both parts of possible warfare know that this war can no longer be won. Now we have—we observe today—a regression into the ideology of victory. As long as the idea of victory is in the world, this is the real poison of world history. As long as the idea of victory is there, we live in the Heraclitean world; Heraclitus said: war, or *polemus*, is the father of all things. And the second part of his saying is more important: the result of war is the divide between God and man, let us say between commanders and those who are to obey, and masters and slaves. So the result of war is a division between the free one and the slaves, and this is the essential result of world history as war history. As long as war is there, slavery will exist. But in the long run, I could imagine that the progress of the process of mutual dependence, which makes strong progressive steps, that all this could disappear.

Let me comment on your first question as well. Forty years after the publication of *Critique of Cynical Reason*, I understand my main error. Because when I made this big chapter on the phenomenology of cynicism in the Roaring Twenties of the 20th century, I was sincerely believing I was describing a span of time with an amount of phenomena that could never return in the same way. And I was sincerely convinced that I was describing the peak of the cynical state of minds in the world, but this was an error. Because the old distinction that K. Freyer had made in the 80s—when he said the main moral problem of the West is cynicism and the main moral problem of the East is lies—he was right for his own time. But in the meantime, this enlightened false consciousness has conquered the whole planet. From Brasilia to the United States to Russia and many other parts of the world, we see the emergence of a thousand new forms of peaks of cynical manifestations. So maybe we should do a second edition. Can I really—I will stop—but one of my favorite sentences from you, I would like to—I think it's also ultra-actual whenever we talk about the relationship of different cultures blah blah blah today—it's always integration, understanding each other. But you said something absolutely wonderful; I forget what you said. More communication means, at first above all, more conflict. You pointed out that what we need today is not the eternal obsession with: “Of course I don’t understand you because I don’t even understand myself, and you don’t understand yourself.” We need to learn—I forgot the expression you used—to keep at a distance. Why should this be bad? I hate this eternal pressure. Here, for me, my concluding thought—I promise—for me, the formula of authentic multiculturalism—I hate even the word “multiculturalism”—exists. I think that, in the way it is used today—not this integration blah blah—but I love examples when, from a distance, another culture can understand a culture not in a racist way, but in a much more dialectical way, even better than that culture itself. I’m obsessed, for example, my eternal example: Shakespeare. I hate historicists who say to understand Shakespeare you have to know Elizabethan England. My first reaction is: no, to understand Elizabethan England, read Shakespeare; you will understand more than reading here. But, second point: you know there are things in Shakespeare that obviously he himself didn’t know what he said, what are the potentials. So I think we are—we, as foreigners coming later—what if we are in a position to see dimensions which are in Shakespeare? We don’t simply impute them on him, which were in some sense there, but we can bring them out. I’m here referring to the well-known saying by Walter Benjamin: that sometimes history is like—you take a short cinema, but the chemicals to develop the film are invented only later. My saying is, for example, Shakespeare: the greatest movie version of Shakespeare is, for me, Akira Kurosawa’s 1962 *Throne of Blood*. Hamlet returns from studies in the United States, blah blah blah, usual story. And it’s a wonderful title: *Only bad people can sleep well*, because of course they don’t have consciences. And I love this. Although I don’t like too much—I will really conclude—Salman Rushdie, but at one round table with him, an idiot from the public attacked him in a politically correct way, claiming: “But you are of Indian origins, you are now too much under British influence.” He gave a perfect answer: “No, it’s not true. Two great Indian writers are the main influence on me: Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.” He said: “To understand the middle class in India today is Jane Austen—these slightly impoverished families, how to marry your daughter. To understand poverty in India is Dickens.” You know this paradox, this interconnection where you have to go out to understand a culture. That’s the only multiculturalism that I admit, absolutely not this obsession with: “We should integrate, understand each other.” Why? There are many people, even nations, that I fully respect, but I’m not interested in them. Please.

We need to—last reply, last reply. Know. I would add something more elemental to that observation. This so-called post-colonial situation is conditioned by the fact that European cultures exported one of the most dangerous concepts that have ever been conceived on Earth: the concept of the nation-state. Because the nation-state is a political form that asks for being filled by the ideology of a coherent population—the *populus*. But in most cases, there is no coherent population. Take the example of Indonesia, for instance: a state created around 1945 in the shadow of the Second World War, a highly artificial construction consisting of at least 300 different peoples and more than a thousand different languages. But the concept of the nation-state that was introduced here—and the Europeans were unable to call it back. As we do with broken-down cars, with something that is not working, we call it back to the garage, but we cannot call back the concept of the nation-state. So Sukarno and his followers had to fabricate a special national identity and national ideology, which was brewed with elements of socialism, Hinduism, and Western humanism, and which delivers today the pretext for the most terrible persecutions of so-called dissidents. So when I look out into the world horizon, I almost always see the results of the unfulfilled promises of decolonization, because the colonial powers always left at a wrong moment—either too early or too late. And by the way, when it comes to the question of Indian identity, there were French and German scholars who gave back to the Indians their holy scriptures. In the 19th century, there was Max Müller who collected the writings of the Mahabharata and all the holy scriptures of the Indian, and this is the greatest gift a European scholar has ever made to a different culture. This is why the English and the German Goethe Institute in India are called Max Müller, and that is a beautiful example for a productive meeting of cultures. But what I mean is that it should not come too close; then it gets dangerous. Okay, now you have your task. The Institute should be a slaughterhouse institute. Yes, yes, we try to—Thank you so much, Mr. Žižek. I think we all had a great time and learned a lot again. I’m sure you can’t wait to ask questions; don’t let them be too PC. He has a question. You get a mic, no, because we will hear you, but probably the working class back there not.

First of all, allow me to give a very general comment. Lacan, who says there’s no sexual relation. It was nice to see you both sitting here talking and looking at each other, but there was no relation here, like—I felt like there were two languages spoken here, two different philosophical mentalities, or different ways of thinking. But it was nice also to hear you both speaking. My question is to you, Slavoj: when you were talking about pseudo-leftism, or people who keep on talking about slavery, or they are anti-slavery and they hold this very pseudo-leftist position, and I absolutely agree on what you said, and I’ve been following what you’ve been writing recently, but my question is: how would you formulate a leftist—if I may use this stupid word—authentic leftist position here? If I’m going to say: “No, I’m not with this very naive anti-slavery movement,” for example, if I’m going to use this discourse, what’s the radical position here? What’s the radical discourse here? And I do understand you, since I am a very good reader—I might say—of Hegel and of Lacan, who always talk about freedom from within the law, not from without the law. And I do understand what you said in relation to Hegel this way, but, if I’m going to say: how would you talk about this topic, for example racism, or how would you formulate your position as a leftist—not as a right-winger, since you’re always attacked and that you are fascist, that you’re a right-winger—how would you describe your position in right words, for example in relation to this topic? Am I clear here? Or I think I hope so. I mean, how do you describe it? How would you reply? What is your response to all those attacks who always say that you are I don’t know this and that? That’s my question.

First, I will say that I absolutely reject the position that if you criticize something you must have a complete positive program; otherwise you shut up. I think we live in a horrible time of—I call them—unholy alliances. For example, let’s forget about South Africa, but you know what a horrible phenomenon this is. I’ve written about it, but not here; I don’t want to be published here in this—as President Trump would have put it—[ __ ]hole of a country. Do you know what happened in Uganda now? It’s already half a year ago: with a big majority, their Parliament voted the most severe law against homosexuality, probably in the world. It’s: if you are caught in a homosexual act, it’s up to the death penalty. Okay, so what? Ah, ah, you know, but I did something that many journalists who protested this didn’t do: I went—because they speak English there—to check on the web their newspapers, you know how they formulated it. All of it as anti-colonial struggle. They said: LGBT and all that, this is the way Western imperialism tries to undermine our societies. Either you are with us here or you are with the West. And incidentally, I don’t want to lose time now for the—but this is what the game Putin is playing now; this is the idea of this new BRICS block. It means: allow Saudi Arabia to do what it does, allow the Taliban to do what they do. The model of where we are moving for me are immediately after the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan: the deal they immediately made is China said: “We recognize you; who cares about women’s rights, but you leave us alone that we do with Muslims there what we want.” That’s what—that’s where we are moving. So I just have this perplexion as for what you said—racism and so on. Now I will tell you something that may surprise you: I have—but it’s not in the same way as this racist saying goes. You know, if you say: “Some of my friends are Jewish,” this is the definition of anti-Semitism—not friends. I have many collaborators among the blacks, for example, a young guy who is very intelligent, Remy Addeoya. He wrote a book on cultural differences—not in a very deep sense—between Africa and Western Europe. He did something very simple: he made a large inquiry, which is politically the highest value for you in Europe: it was equality; in Africa, it was wealth—obtained illegally or legally, it doesn’t matter. It’s incredible how we talk about inequality; how we treat Africans. Africans, they want wealth, to survive; they don’t care about literally about equality. Here problems emerge. As for racism, feminism—sorry to repeat my old stories—but I got a lesson of a lifetime of this when I was—some of you may know the story—some 15 years ago in Montana, I met some Native Americans, so-called—you know what happened. They told me: “Don’t call us Native Americans; this is for us the true white racism.” Because: “First, Native American, and what are you? Cultural Americans or what?” And they gave me a wonderful—maybe you know it—Jewish answer. They said: “We much prefer to be called Indians, because in this way at least our title is a symbol of the white man’s stupidity, who thought they were in India here.” You know how often—that’s what’s the problem today with political correctness and so on. Are they aware of the extent to which their apparent criticism of racism and so on, and especially feminism, is secretly patronizing? Yes, for example, I spoke with Africans—I have friends there, friends—okay, we met in Long blah blah—who told me that for them the most refined form of Western liberal racism is when there are big crimes in Africa, like the Rwandan slaughter. Immediately the Western left reaction was: “This is just an effect of colonialism.” No. And he said—three points—you don’t even allow us to be bad, even when we are evil; it must be an effect; they are so… Or you know there is another form of racism here when some immigrants or whoever—and I’m open towards them blah blah—do something horrible, it’s always: “They are not guilty; it’s how we treat them; they’re conditioned.” Yeah, but so are we. The implicit presupposition of this is that there are primitive people who are conditioned by circumstances, but we whites should be blamed because we are nonetheless in some sense free. You know that’s why I never trust this white people self-humiliation. We shouldn’t assert our identity like: if Indians dance their dance there, it’s freedom; if you in a German village or me here dance a Slovenian dance, it’s neo-fascism or whatever. You know what? Apparently I humiliate myself, but secretly I adopt the universal position; this my self-humiliation is false. And—so—it’s the same with me too, with all that stuff. Do me too ideologists even—no—do they talk with real women about their problems? You know where for me the whole Me Too project went wrong? Not from the beginning. There is an old Black lady whom I met; we love each other; I was obscene with her; she returned obscenity; we embrace; that’s my form of love. But what I want to say: she—I forgot her name—she invented even the term “Me Too” some 10–15 years ago, and she told me she is horrified that because instead of confronting real women’s actual problems—did you notice one mistake of Me Too which immediately tells you about the class dimension? If you reduce it to principal examples, wasn’t it always about a typical dating scene? We met at a bar, yes or no? Did he rape me? Sorry, what about millions of women who, let’s say, are in their mid-30s, losing—so-called from our male Soviet standard—sexual attraction, have two, three children, have no way out? Who talks about all these horrors and so on? In this sense, let me just conclude: I must go here; this is my problem with cancel culture; this is a classical Hegelian case of falsity at the level of content. They are all about inclusion and diversity; in their practice, the only thing they do is exclusion, and it’s kind of a—I have friends there who admit this to me—it’s almost a Stalinist logic; you never know even what rules are when you will become suspicious. This is why, when I had a polemic with a right-winger in the United States, I told him: “If I were a rich billionaire who wants to destroy the left, I would support cancel culture,” why? Because the way it works, it’s permanent self-division. I suspect isn’t what you said already anti-feminist? It sabotages, blocks any possibility of a larger coalition of solidarity; these are my problems. And no, I’m sorry, I don’t have a formula. I know that there will not be a new Central Committee. If you ask me, I will stop immediately; then you focus on this guy. If you ask me: okay, but you are an idiot, tell me one way where the left at least did its work relatively well. Well, I was engaged a couple of times—among others, you may not agree—I knew the situation very well. I’m friendly with the ex-vice president of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera. Bolivia: the left was there 12 years in power; the standard of ordinary people almost doubled, and they did it in such an intelligent way that they didn’t scare the capital. That’s why you remember two years ago there was a coup, then new elections, which Morales’ forces won again. So I’m totally opposed to Cuba, Chávez, Venezuela, Nicaragua; they screwed it up; in Bolivia, they didn’t. So I see just particular hopes here and there. I’m very sorry; that’s why I like to define myself as a “war communist.” I think we are approaching some kind of a new emergency state, and what Europe is doing now, the world even more, is: you know, treat it like: okay, let’s change a little bit more, 5% here, tax, so just that our life goes on the way it does. We are still doing small things in order to do nothing. By “war communism,” a brutal term that I use with all the irony, of course, I mean: we have to prepare, with hope that it will not happen, to more global cooperation; it will be necessary. Imagine a stronger pandemic, imagine stronger ecological catastrophes and so on; we will have to collaborate; otherwise we will really enter new fascism. What Yanis Varoufakis, with whom I otherwise often don’t agree, predicts—I think to conclude really, really—that the problem today is not even any longer liberal capitalism or something else; liberal capitalism is already gradually disintegrated; it is either something new or something where the world is moving spontaneously, which is much worse than the capitalism that we knew. My God, the third—now—ask: is capitalism—is that what you just said, the thing that we’re moving to, is it part of capitalism, or is it something…? This is a big question of debate; I don’t know enough to give an answer, because some people like Varoufakis, Žižek thinks it’s already a neo-fascism; I don’t know enough to pass a judgment. *Spekula* capitalism, *spekula* capitalism. But all these terms—you know what I hate in the left—I hope we agree—whenever they see something they don’t like, they call it fascism without any serious analysis; it’s a simple word which prevents you to think. Yeah, they also called me a fascist. His claim was to be called a fool, and our claim should be to be insulted as much as possible. Absolutely agree with you. Yes, when somebody agrees with me, the wrong guy, then I’m in a panic. Once in the United States, somebody praised me, and I started to sweat: “What did I say wrong? What?” Sorry, sorry, please, next question, please.

Yes, thank you very much for the talk. I was just going to hone in on the relationship between philosophy and truth, as you both have sketched it tonight. There’s another speaker for the festival, Achille Mbembe, who was here yesterday and the day before, who, in a very similar Q&A, very explicitly said that philosophy and truth are totally separated; they don’t—the relationship—the interest of philosophy ought to be, in a kind of Deleuzian sense, a distinction between sense and nonsense. I’d just like to hear your comments on not only that, but maybe just broader the idea that the task of philosophy is to distinguish reason from madness, health from disease, the space of reasons from the space of causes—kind of a distinguishing act. Would you agree with that, disagree? Just curiously here. Yeah, but thinking begins with two gestures. The first gesture is to point to something, but as the totality is something you cannot point to, you must believe that the act of speech refers to something; that is a basic function of language—to make you believe that meaning exists. And if you cannot believe that meaning exists, language will die down, and you will have the feeling that there is nothing to say. But if you have something to say, you will probably, in the beginning, pronounce distinctions, because—and you will see that binary distinctions will help you to get oriented into the openness of the world. And the philosophical moment starts at the very moment if you understand that you have to go beyond the self-made dichotomies, the self-made dualities. And the very moment where the third term comes into the game of thinking, all these distinctions become remobilized, and the act of distinguishing itself will be made conscious. And then you see yourself make your distinctions, and as a distinction-maker you feel the freedom to distinguish in a different way. That’s what I could comment on that, but I would like to add something to this fascism question, because the air is full of this kind of political insulting. I would not go into the detail how the term “fascism” was coined; according to my analysis, it was an invention that was used by the inventors of the Third International shortly after the foundation of the Soviet Union. Must not forget that the Soviet Union was founded in December 1922, before Hitler’s first—yeah, before the first putsch, but it was founded six weeks after Mussolini’s rise to power. And the people in Moscow did not know if this is a helpful thing or not, yeah, and they had a long flirtation with the Italian revolution until they understood that Italy had delivered the pattern for what should happen in Russia: that means socialism in one country. And Bukharin wrote the textbook for Stalin, and they did not really understand that say obsession with fascism was so deep because they themselves imitated the Italian path: that means to create a dictatorship in one country with pseudo-revolutionary contents. Yeah, one should know this when you use these arguments. But as far as philosophical approach to reality is concerned, since antiquity we have two types of martyrdom. The first one clings to the pattern of Socrates; in Christian times, Jesus and Socrates were parallelized very often because both of them were martyrs of truth, in spite of the fact that the truth of Socrates was totally different from the Christian truth, and the Socratic truth in its own way was once more very different from the Platonic truth or the scientific truth, which is based on the elimination of subjectivity, whereas the Socratic truth, like psychoanalytic truth, insists on the fact that subjectivity must be taken into account. And these types of truths are still struggling. And there is a type of very toxic objectivism in classical Marxism because, as a metaphysics, as a Marxist metaphysics, is a continuation of classical metaphysics from the point of view that subjectivity has to disappear when confronted with the truth or with facts or objectivity. And one of the keywords of the Stalinist vocabulary in Europe, from the 30s and 40s and 50s and even 60s, was “objectively.” Whenever something was called objective, it was always implied that the intellectual had to disappear, yeah, and it was a gulag word. And I think this verbal gulag makers are still at work, but finally we could make phone calls in Moscow and recommend us mutually for a double portion of food on Sundays. Right? Can I very briefly? But I cannot—first—what you say about fascism, it’s so deeply true. Do you know, for example, I read in a book—I forgot which one—a report from the history of Stalinism, that the pact—when there was a pact in ’39, was it ’39, Molotov-Ribbentrop—no—and this collaboration—you know what Beria did? Beria, Proto-Gorbachev, he first opened the Soviet Union in the 50s; okay, he sent a special letter to all gulags, because you know there—guards shouted at you: “Fascist, English spy,” whatever trite—he prohibited the word “fascist,” so the Germans would not be met, it’s crazy. But another thing—ah, my God, now we—do you know this? Maybe I will—nonetheless—you know everything—teach you—let you know something. I now got two or three important books—not even Marxist books—about the link between the early development of the Chinese Communist Party and fascism. There was a meeting just before Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, met with young Mao Zedong, and this was ’24, ’25, Italy blah blah happened, and their conclusion was that we need the West, but not in the individual way; the only thing that we can take from the West politically is fascism; we should learn to apply that kind of industrial development, but covered by a strong authority. I find this fascinating, and there is a whole school now—not in China, would be prohibited—who claimed that that’s what in a soft way Deng did; he turned China from a communist country to a new version of a fascist country. By this I mean: patriotic ideology plus industrialization and so on. Let’s not lose time, but the second thing that—you know, Achille Mbembe—my God, we are old friends, I love her and so on, but I am not Deleuzian; I don’t believe in any big emancipatory potential of Deleuze. Whenever people tell me: “Deleuze is potentially conservative,” I just mention one book which I love; it should be obligatory reading for all Deleuzians; everybody knows it in Israel: a specialist of Mossad or who—for inner security—wrote a book—short book—*How to fight Palestinian terror*, which is all Deleuzian, anti-edus. He claims—you know, when Deleuze speaks about deterritorialization, different relations of space—he based on Deleuze—he elaborated the strategy of how, instead of from the street, from the side, you enter a Palestinian house, when and so on. I think that that’s absolutely not as self-evident as it may appear that Deleuze in this sense has some great emancipatory potential. I remain here with you and with myself. You know, truth is not simply something objective; truth is, up to a point, for me, something very paradoxical; it’s not the problem, this empiricist problem—it’s out there, we never can reach the truth—no, the problem is we never can really escape the truth; that’s the lesson of Freud. Even when you try to lie, the way you live, you lie, the truth penetrates it. So no, I’m sorry, I totally reject the notion which is popular that any reference to firm truth means the first step towards totalitarianism. No, all great totalitarianisms—if there was somebody who was in practice totally non-dogmatic, pragmatic, it was Stalin; everything depended on circumstances; with Hitler, totally pragmatic and so on. Sorry. Thank you very much.

Yes, I think time’s up, unfortunately. But who decides this? The boss. Where is the boss? Here’s the boss. Gulag. You go to gulag; you don’t even get a special second place on Sunday. Let’s—but we are here; it’s a—what happens if we stand five minutes more? My God. Yes. Okay, okay; that’s what I call a democratic dialogue. Yes, please. You have the guy here; the conclusion. Can you hear me? Questions? So I have a question about your critique of certain forms of ecology, because a lot of Marxist ecologists would say that in this fossil fuel society in which we’re living in, we’re extracting resources to produce a form of—should I stand up?—to produce a form of surplus energy. So why would you say that previous forms of civilizations created—or I guess committed—greater catastrophes than the one in which we’re currently living? My God, three points; you ask him, not me. I’m all the time here, so I will be very brief. Go to Google Philosophical Salon in a week; you get it for free. I have a long analysis of my good friend, the Japanese eco-Marxist, Kohei Saito, who tries to argue for a kind of ecological self-limitation and so on. And second thing, I didn’t say “much greater” blah blah up and down; I’m just saying, but you know how much nature was destroyed by humans even before modernity. Look, Easter Island; I was there; they told me when the stupid Vikings arrived there in the 7th–8th century, it was full of forests; in 30–40 years it was gone, building the stupid Viking boats or whatever. So don’t—so many already previous civilizations, they ruined so many things. I know today it’s something more special and so on, but you know what disturbs me with this new eco-feminists? They think that it is possible to slow down to some more balanced development and so on and so on. No, I think once we are in modernity, we cannot step out; it’s lost; so can go back to—Of course. Tell—I see a hand there, on extreme right.

So my question is about freedom and dictatorships, in the sense that I think freedom has these three elements: one is having the information to make the act; the second is having the choice to make the act; and the third is to execute the act you want. And in a dictatorship we can see that the level of information between individuals drops, in the sense that there’s less information and there’s worse information, so everybody becomes more anxious about the future, in the sense that they can’t make the decisions they would want. And so my question is: given that information becomes scarce or basically unusable in a dictatorship, is a dictator free in his dictatorship? The classical answer is that in tyrannical states the tyrant is the only free person, but there is a second thought to that statement; the philosophical irony wanted to demonstrate that the tyrant is 700 times more unhappy than an ordinary citizen, yeah. So freedom can mean the highest degree of unhappiness if you are the one who has to mishandle all your compatriots, yeah. But as you used very often the term of information, I think that you—in classical situations of acting, the information principle was reduced to the sign, to a sign that makes you act. There’s—in Suetonius, the Roman historiography—it’s a nice episode when he describes Caesar’s hesitation when he is resting with his army on the northern side of the Rubicon; he does not really know what to do, and one day he took a decision by interpreting a strange fact: that on the other side of the river a young, almost naked man, blond, playing on a flute, was sitting. And Caesar jumped on the occasion and said: “This is Theus who gave us a hint, and now let’s go and to fulfill what the unjustness of our enemies and the rightness of God command to us,” yeah, and then he went beyond the Rubicon. There’s always a connection between the disinhibition of the act of acting, the passage—yeah, in psychoanalytic terms—there must always happen a moment when…

The discontinuity between motivation and project has to be bridged. The bridging very often happens by the decision to take one part, one particle of this informational environment more seriously than others.

There's another nice example from the eighth song of the Aeneid. When Aeneas is sitting in front of an Italian city that has not yet been conquered, he is also waiting for his own decision. Then something very strange happens, leading to the peak expression of Roman imperialism. A lightning bolt appears out of a clear sky, striking him. Aeneas's reaction is very clear: "Let's do it! What we have to do is create that city of Alba, which will be the precursor of Rome." He then says what all these dictators and great men say: "O, poor Olympo," which means the Olymp is calling for me; so the gods are calling for me.

Acting is always something that creates a relationship between a divine sphere or a sphere of truth and the low sphere of tendencies or inclinations. In order to transform an inclination into an act, you need a kind of hinge point, as highly established as possible. That's why the term "information" is too weak to make clear what kind of energies are at stake in decision-making. Would you agree with this beautiful, haha, me again, temporal paradox formulated by some very good action theorists? Yes, we decide for reasons, but retroactively our decision creates reasons. We are never in this neutral position. Look, look, look, it's like falling in love. I like your hair, whatever, but that's why I fall in love with you, but only after I am in love I see reasons.

But to conclude, not to direct time to you, you know where I doubt what you said. Listen, you said something about democratic, non-totalitarian societies where information is available and you can decide and enact. Do you think we live in such a society? Mhmm, we don't, maybe even less than in some totalitarianisms where people, nonetheless, you cannot say it publicly, but they know the truth. In China, they know they are controlled; they're much less in illusion than us. Or to repeat my old formula: the worst kind of unfreedom is the unfreedom which you experience as freedom; you are not even aware. Stop, stop, stop. Now we have… can I repeat my Ural joke I read—I wrote in my analysis comparative—that when there is applause, a Stalinist leader always joins the applause because he's just an executor of its applause. Well, a fascist leader never joins the applause. We draw this distinction here. Thank you. I… to… yes.