Transcription
Dear guests, dear friends, after Venice, Los Angeles and Amsterdam, Slava arrives at the borderline. Slava is a man who never breaks his promise because he rarely ever promises anything, but he promised to come to our border and he kept his promise. I thank him from the bottom of my heart for this. He's coming to Epic. Epic is the European platform for interpretation of the 20th century, and he's coming with a brand new book, Quantum History. When I was translating one chapter from his book, I came across the following sentence: "We don't change the past facts. We just locate them into a different symbolic context. We change their meaning." I dare to say that this is the hardcore of Slava's method. Whether he calls it parallax view or, as tonight, superpositions, we always see the world, films, actors of history differently after his interventions that can be so harsh sometimes that some would have liked to take him off the stage, like it happened two years ago at the Frankfurt book fair when he told Germany, Europe and the world what had to be said about Gaza two years ago.
Here is today's disclaimer: After Professor Jekates the facts in a different context, it is not sure that all of us present here would return to where we came from. And I don't mean just the usual east-west divide. I also mean a more Hitchcockian, Shakespeareian one. Whoever goes here from the border to the north-northwest doesn't go mad but comes to Topo, and whoever goes south does not know a hawk from a handsaw but ends up in a park of Bazalia. So, where the west is not necessarily the west and the north is not only the north, it is at least possible to try to think differently, and it is easier to navigate between the much-needed sharpness of mind and everyday madness if you have such companions and contemporaries as Dr. Slav Jek is. So, Slav, the word is yours.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. Although this what you said paints me in such a high way that I was all the time tempted to look back like, who is that guy? And this brings that immediately into the very center of psychoanalytic theory because when somebody addresses me like you did, important thinker, blah, blah, I feel immediately this gap, me, miserable piece of sorry. And that image, this is what Lacan calls symbolic castration. And the whole Lacanian theory, very anti-patriarchal, is that this gap defines the function of the father. Father is never up at the level of being a true father. Now, if you think you are such a father, you are a psychotic, but that's another story. So, let me begin.
UK, Italian, Carlo Frances Vidto. These two persons are for me one of the greatest faces of Italy today. You know why? Because they are cosmopolitan, but in the way they are cosmopolitan. You feel their Italian identity. Cosmopolitanism is not, oh, you are somewhere up about there. So, if we are at this level, let me begin with Quantum History. What do I mean by this? I simply mean that some basic insights of quantum mechanics, superposition, in quantum waves of different versions of reality, and then the collapse of these superpositions into a single reality, or retroactive, so-called retroactive causality, and so on, should be used to analyze human history since Pelco. My friend told me that I am, it's a bad joke. I am allowed to speak a little bit longer, and I justify this like this. You know that one of the great achievements of already Einstein, but then elaborated further in quantum physics, is this, in a very precise sense, relativity of time. Time is not absolute. Time is how an object relates to its surrounding, different velocities of movements, and so on. So that time does not run at the same speed. So I will practice this here for you. For me, it will be 10 minutes. For you, it may be 1 hour and a half. That's your problem. No.
So, let me go on and bring you an example. I'm so sad to imply the madness of our world and how this vaguely metaphor relates to quantum physics recently, because I think now I'm unfortunately very serious. I think that fascism is relatively simply relatively to understand. I will not go into it now. But Stalinism, the horror of Stalinism, is something more enigmatic. We don't yet have a proper theory of it. Look, the best known leftist theory, maybe at least in Europe, of the 20th century, Frankfurt School, from first generation Adorno, Horkheimer, up to Habermas today, still alive, and his followers, they practically didn't write about Stalinism. There is one short book by Herbert Marcuse, but it's not really a general theory, just some remarks on the 20th speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. But there is one detail that I, that fascinated me. In '36, the year they decided to build in Moscow a big new hotel, rich hotel for important guests and so on. So, of course, since it was a big event or project, Stalin had to approve it. So they presented a plan to Stalin. But Stalin just quickly looked at it and didn't notice that there are two versions. One with a certain type of windows on one side of the building, on the sides of the building where there were two small towers, the other with different type of windows and so on. So Stalin just quickly signed, "I approve it." But this was Stalinism. No. So nobody dared to ask Stalin, "Listen, but okay, you approve what, which version?" There was a question. So, check it up, just go to Google and check it up, Hotel Moscow, or what. No. What happened then is that, to play it safe, they built the two sides of the building in two totally different ways. One with these narrow windows, a little like a prison. The other with wide windows, full of, I mean, all the height of a floor, glass and so on. And again, it worked. This is, I think, similar in our daily life to what quantum superpositions mean. Not quite. It's much more paradoxical. But what I like immensely is that it is as if, you know, to understand this building, you don't just, it is not just obligatory to know the plan. No, you must know two plans which are incompatible. So you have reality, but it's a reality which materializes an incomplete, inconsistent plan. So we, it's not a unity of reality.
Now, I think that this is what is needed today. What do I mean by this again? Why quantum physics? I cannot but begin by an anecdote which I often used 15, 20 years ago. Maybe some of you know it. You notice that I am a sadist. I speak quickly to embarrass the translators, to whom I apologize already now, because I know this hypocritical game that at the end, then I will approach them and tell them, "Thank you, I hope it wasn't too difficult for you," and they will have to say, "Oh, no, it wasn't a problem," while on the way out of here, they will go to a store, buy a voodoo doll of me, and put needles into it all the time. But let me go on. This well-known story, I love it. The idea is this one. You know, when you play a video game, how do you do it? When you are immersed into the digital reality, we all know that the game is not programmed to the end, all the details. For example, you play a war game, you are fighting in a street of a city. Nearby there is a mountain with trees. But since it's not part of the game that you can go up close to those trees, individual trees are not programmed in detail. It's simply, or the same when you shoot at others. If you approach a guy and cut him with a knife, at least in the games that I know, if you open his body, you will not see the inner organs fall out. It's not programmed to the end. And as I read in some popular introduction to quantum mechanics, this is the quantum mechanics view of our reality itself, that at, if you analyze reality in its extreme tiny details, you find the same nondetermination, as it were. It is as if, it's a wonderful theological metaphor. It is as if, and I say this with all respect, I define myself as an atheist, a Christian atheist. It is as if the God thought, and many quantum physicists laughed and agreed here with me, that the ontological premise of quantum physics is not that reality is out there so complex we cannot ever understand it, is that God was a little bit too lazy. He thought people are rather stupid. The structure of atom is as far as we can go, humans. So why bother with planning photons, electrons, and so on? People will never reach that level. We did it. And to use a wonderful vulgar English expression, we caught God by his pants down, you know, as it were.
In this sense, reality itself is fuzzy, undetermined. It's not just contingency. Things are contingent. No, quantum mechanics, yes, deals with different possibilities, options, and so on. But they are not just contingent. You have so-called Schrödinger's equation, which precisely describes the probability of something happening. Okay, I don't have time to go on, but with other implications. When something happens, it's always one of the options of what possibly could have happened. And now we come to the, you will say, obvious. No, no, no. Quantum physics theory is that it's not that we have multiple possibilities and then one thing happens and you say goodbye to other possibilities. To understand what happens, you have to understand what didn't happen, because it is as if at the quantum level all possible options happen. To repeat another old joke here, which I love. I used it already 25 times from one of my favorite films, Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka. You must know this joke. A guy enters a cafeteria and says, "Can I get coffee, but just without cream? Just coffee." And you probably know what the waiter answers. "Sorry, we have no cream. We only have milk. So since we don't have cream, I cannot give you coffee without cream. I just can give you coffee without milk because we have milk." No. And you, it's only meaningful to say "without cream" if there is an option that you have cream. Now, you will say this is an abstract, stupid joke. No, it's. And you know with whom I debated this point, and although we often fight, I'm friendly with her, and she agreed with me exceptionally. Judith Butler agreed that this is crucial for the history of feminism. Feminist experience is, we women are not treated or do not work, do not operate the way we deserve, the way we want. But to apply the metaphor of coffee, you know, are you then in reality a woman without cream or without milk? What does this mean? Originally, feminism was much more modest. It was okay. Let's say we women have our post in life. We have to be good housewives and so on, educating. But nonetheless, we demand certain minimum of decency. The husband should not beat us or humiliate us or what. But this is still a very modest position. This is like without milk. No, without the husband treating us with certain decency. But then, and that's good news, then things go on. Then they say, "But wait a minute. Why shouldn't we also be professionally active? I don't just want to be treated nicely by my husband. I want to stand on my own. I want to earn money." And then after this, we go even to a higher level and say, "Why not? Why am I not allowed to participate in public political life?" It's a level further. So you see, all the time women in a justified way complain, but it, although they are the, it in the same way that coffee is always the same in my example, plain coffee. But symbolically, there are three different coffees: plain coffee, coffee without milk, and coffee without cream. They're materially the same. But in our symbolic space, they are not the same. In the same sense, women who are exploited are women who are exploited. But it's a great progress if they don't just complain about how the husband is not treating them nicely, but why don't we access to jobs? For example, didn't you know that up to the 1950s, somebody told me in England, if a woman got married, a husband had to control her bank account? I mean, you know how recent these things are.
So, here I think that this approach where negativity counts can be applied also, or this actuality of possibilities, like to understand why, how something happened, implies also understanding, think what didn't happen, but could have, but could have happened. And this is what I mean by how I apply to history the quantum notion of retroactivity. A thing is open, and then retroactively it becomes this or that. My favorite example, which I'm sorry I mention all the time, is Shakespeare's. It's well-known, but that's why I'm mentioning it here. Shakespeare's Hamlet. Read it as a plain text, and you will see an incredible amount of simple contradictions, stupidities, and so on. And in my radical reading, which I will develop now in a short book that I'm writing, my idea is that Hamlet is really the bad guy of the play, not only from a feminist standpoint. Just read it closely. What he does to poor Ophelia. He humiliates her in all possible ways and so on. But it's much more, you know, are you aware what happens at the end of the play? Fortinbras, who is a Danish, a Danish invader, occupies Denmark. No, who is, sorry, Norwegian prince invader, occupies Denmark. So what Hamlet does is to restore the colonial state of his country. But what I want to say is that it is wrong to ask, "But what did Shakespeare really mean?" The point is not this usual psychological one. Who knows? We cannot penetrate his mind. No, probably he himself didn't know what he really meant. He just wrote this and that and so on. And we can reach much further today. And it, it's not just here. I would slightly, friendly disagree with that sentence of myself that you quoted. It's not just different interpretations so that we can say Hamlet is there. No, Hamlet is not there. What we have there is a patched-up, incomplete play, and we can fill it in with new versions. That's why Hamlet is such a great play, because every epoch has its own Hamlet. Do you know that after Shakespeare's death, with French Baroque, Racine, Corneille, and so on, Shakespeare was half forgotten. He was considered a cheap, a cheap, too popular British comedian. Then only with Romanticism, Hamlet returns. And we have for every epoch a new, we have modernist Hamlet, we have already postmodernist Hamlet. We have excellent cinematic Hamlets, like the best for me, Kurosawa, with a wonderful title, his movie from 1962, "Only Bad Men Sleep Well." Totally correct title, because let's say, to annoy you, maybe necessary. I will kill you. No night sleep with a knife. No. But since I'm not, I hope, a totally bad man, it will give me at least for a couple of nights some problems. No. But you know, if I were to be a truly bad man, I would say, "So what? Let's go to a hamburger and have a nice sleep." You know. But I want to say that this version of Hamlet, you know, it's not just this artificial interpretation. Say, the contemporary version, it gives you to see something that was potentially in Hamlet, but we were not, we were not aware of. You know, who is my ideal here? The greatest theorist of ideology, although he didn't know. You know that when Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, this is the spirit of quantum physics. I forgot his name, I'm very sorry. Darwin's friend was a very orthodox Church of England theologian, and he had a problem. According to Darwinist evolution, evolutionary theory, it took tens, I don't know, 100,000 years for humanity to evolve. So how could we combine this with the Bible, which, if you take it literally, some English men, I love their empirical sense, even literally, tried to reconstruct, taking into account all the generations from Adam and Eve, you know, literally tried to reconstruct when, and came to the conclusion, I love it, that God created the world the year 423 before Christ, at 9 in the morning. I love this. God had an early breakfast here, and then let's do some work, you know. But what I love, and now you will say, but how do we explain then the fossils and all the signs? Ah, here comes the most wonderful theory. This priest proposed. It's nonsense as a biological theory, of course, but it's correct as a theory of ideology. He said, "When God created the world, he created directly fossils as fossils. He created the past by directly creating fossils." You know, it's like a kind of a false opening, as in a movie, where you have the fake background and so on. No.
So, this is my vision. I quote here a conservative British poet. I always quote him, T.S. Eliot, who says that "Every really new work of art not only means a break with the past but subtly changes its entire past." Just think about Christianity. After Christianity, we read the history of religion, all previous religions, in a different way. And the same goes for history. For example, my favorite example, it's fake news. It didn't happen, but it circulates. Beautiful that in 1953, when Zhou Enlai, the second guy after Mao in China, was in Geneva doing the Korean War negotiations, somebody asked him, "What do you think about the French Revolution?" And Zhou Enlai answered, "It's too early to say what it meant." Zhou was right. You know why? Because the disintegration of socialism, really existing socialism, in 1989, you see the wonder, exactly 200 years after the French Revolution, can be read in a different way. For the majority of liberal historians, it meant the epoch of traditional modern revolutions which began with the French Revolution is over. Now we live in a totally different world where revolutions are no longer possible. But let's hope, and there are signs today, that the legacy of 1789 is not yet dead, but it's open. We are in an open situation.
Now, let me characterize further this openness. I always like, but not for the usual reasons, Antonio Gramsci. You know why? Because it's such a paradox. This great Marxist is now extremely popular in right-wing circles in the United States. You know, I discovered it's incredible. Don't underestimate Trump. How people around Trump sometimes believe more in Marxism than today's Marxists themselves. For example, you know, Peter Thiel and his pupil JD Vance. Maybe some of you know René Girard, a great theorist of mimetic desire and so on. You know that Peter Thiel studied philosophy. This billionaire who produced great events studied philosophy with René Girard and then read it in his own reactionary way. So why Gramsci? Here is maybe the best, the best known sentence from Gramsci's Prison Notebooks: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." He doesn't say symptoms. I don't know where they translated the symptom. Gramsci said phenomena. So it's incredible how leftists and rightists, they all tend to agree and they quote Gramsci: "We live in this interregnum. The old is dying. Capitalism, welfare state, liberal democracy. The new is not yet here. Something." So it's the time of interregnum. But if you read closely Gramsci, you see that Gramsci is more complex. From Gramsci's view, and remember that Gramsci wrote this as a reaction to Italian fascism. But if you can read Gramsci between the lines, you can see that it's not simply Italian fascism. He even had suspicions about the emerging Stalinism. So we have first plurality of these morbid phenomena. But my rereading of Gramsci, I wonder if you would agree, is that if we read Gramsci in a simple way, okay, the old is dying, the new is not yet here, so we improvise strange phenomena. I think that the most dangerous illusion is if we keep still this progressive, linear notion of history and just say, "Okay, things get complicated. The new didn't arrive early enough." But I think the greatest morbidity is the very first notion of the new, which is a catastrophe. For example, a totally wrong Marxist theory, not by Marx, of course, but 20th century, is that they explain Stalinism by saying, "Yeah, it was a historical mistake. Marx and Engels thought that communist revolution will happen in the developed West. It happened at the wrong place, in backward Russia. So because of despotic oriental tradition there, we got Stalinism." No, I'm totally opposed to this. I think that this allows you to maintain the illusion that there is a normal logic. It just got a little bit complicated. But these complications, I claim, are always necessary. For example, the great Rosa Luxemburg, you know her famous statement, among others, "The future will be communist, or it will be a new barbarism." Well, you know what she didn't miss? It can also be, as it was in Stalinism, both at the same time: communist and barbarism. No.
So, what do I mean by this notion of morbid phenomena? I think we should complicate Gramsci, that the true morbidity is that when the old is dying, you see, you think that you already have the model of the future. But in a true revolutionary process, you always have to take into account that the first attempt to build the new will be a catastrophe. And it's only in a second time, as a reaction to the catastrophe, that maybe something new will emerge. So how does the new populist, Trumpian right use Gramsci? I'm totally anti-Trump. I have written enough about it. I will not now talk. But I would say that in a way, they used perfectly another old, great, Gramscian idea, the notion of struggle for ideological hegemony. Why the notion of hegemony in Gramsci has a very deep implication? Okay, you have different social groups: workers, bourgeois, this, that. For Gramsci, ideological struggle is not simply a struggle between workers' ideology, bourgeois ideology, whoever. No, it's something much more complex. The space of ideology is composed by a multiplicity of inherited notions. You have patriotism, you have even working class, whatever. And you win in the hegemonic struggle if you succeed in building an ideological totality which includes all these notions. That's for me, for example, one of the mistakes of the contemporary left. I'm far from stupid patriotism, but I think why should we abandon the notion of patriotism to the right? Simply, this was the triumph of Trump. You know what? He succeeded. Proposing, he noticed that the politically correct left after '68 focused on cultural phenomena. No, for example, to be evil. Now it's getting better, but 15, 20 years ago, if you mentioned feminist struggle, nobody really cared about women's daily exploitation. And so it should be called he, she, all these upper-middle-class strictly problems. Trump detected something crucial. Trump detected that this new cultural left totally neglected workers' exploitation and class struggle, and his big act was to emphasize that he is speaking for the white exploited working class in America. So he did something very ingenious in his project of hegemony. He took the key moment of the traditional left, exploited working-class interests, and appropriated for the right-wing populism. And the left, in its total confusion, confusion till now, now there are some signs, Bernie Sanders, etc., they said, "No, no, no, questions of cultural identity, cultural minorities, and so on." Trump, this one has to admit this. Trump, for me, is a historical event because an epoch, the epoch of this traditional cultural left where you worry about identity politics, cultural autonomy, and so on, this is over with Trump. So, what I'm saying is that the left should learn to do the Trumpian job better than Trump. Not only should we say, "Sorry, you are mystifying the white working class. In reality, your politics means even lower standards, more exploitation of the working class." No, we should also shamelessly take attack Trump from within, how he treats with regard to his own ideology. This is, I developed it in my books. This is my idea. You know what Trump is for me? Don't laugh. A pure '68 phenomenon. By '68, I mean the '68 revolution, which was for me the beginning of the end of the left, the origin of the cultural left, and so on. Because, you know, Trump pretends to be a conservative, Christian, traditional values, but compare this with his, with how he acts publicly. If there ever was a postmodern, historicist politician who doesn't care about the truth, who says this today, you know, like with Mandami. First, he says a month ago, "Mandami is 100% communist, I will take all the money from New York." Now, a week ago, he said, "Great, I will help New York." He's a totally pragmatic relativist also as a person, morally. While my hero of the old guys is Bernie Sanders. First, he perfectly got the key point of Trump, where he said Democrats should stop worrying. You know, Democrats, American, we're obsessed by this idea, we shouldn't move too much to the left because then we will lose the center. They should have learned from Trump. Did you notice what Trump did? Trump did the exact opposite. He said, "Screw the center. Let's put our radical right agenda openly, and he won." And Mandami learned this, did the same. Or as Bernie Sanders said, our, if we want to win our American democratic voters, should not be this middle classes that we should get by not being too radical. It should be disappointed Trump voters, those who vote for Trump. And it's not empty words. He succeeded in Vermont. You know who votes there for Trump? Precisely poor white farmers and so on. The people who otherwise would have, and who votes from Bernie Sanders, who otherwise would have voted for Trump.
So, let's go on. Why do we live in this confused universe? What went wrong? Let me give you, I just want to shock you and give you different ideas, and then I go to sleep, and you can think about it. I recently met a very intelligent Chinese social theorist, who of course has difficulties in China and works mostly in Germany, Kai-Wing Bao. He elaborated, I don't know how to translate it, the notion of "nearby," not neighbor, but "nearby" as something that is, that is disintegrating today. It's a very simple insight, but although he actualized it in detailed analysis of the Chinese situation, I think it holds even more for us in the West. Today, his idea is we are more and more withdrawing into a narrow circle of two, three professional colleagues, narrow family, and so on. And on the other hand, the big other, in the sense of society as such, what is disappearing is what Ba calls the "dear B," in the sense of your immediate surroundings, a group of, let's say, 100, maybe less, maybe more people, whom you do not select, but you are thrown into this group, you find. And these are people you don't have to be friends with all of them, but they provide this kind of immediate social network. And this is clearly. Now, I know because I was two weeks ago in Los Angeles. What horrified me in Los Angeles is that all these places of the "nearby" are disappearing. For example, Santa Monica, the Third Street. 30 years ago, it was a wonderful street with cafeterias, bookstores, people just walked there. You know. Now there are all closed spaces of shopping malls and so on. It's no longer a social space like the old town square was in small American cities. Not to mention the, to be a little bit vulgar, but not really, the problem of sexual seduction and so on. I know friends of my wife and so on, quite a couple, to be obscene, beautiful women who find themselves found themselves alone in their early 30s and don't have this "nearby" society where to flirt may be fine. No, they all do these horrible things that I, if I were to be in power as a good Stalinist, I would, they all get gulag, Bumble and Tinder, you know, these horrors. Sorry, this is not authentic social interaction for slow building erotic tension and so on. This is just a horrible, for me, exchange of clichés. You present yourself as what you think you are and so on. It doesn't work. So my point is that the dream of digital space is that they will recreate this dimension of "nearby" in the digital space. I think it doesn't work because all the groups in digital space are always explicitly excluding some others. They are identified with some gay people, lesbians, sadomasochists, fascists, leftists, whatever. There is already a selection. So, what Trump wants to do and his ideologies is when he speaks about speaking for ordinary Americans, he wants to recreate this sense of local community, but in a racist way, excluding immigrants or whoever they are. Here they are opposing two notions which are very important in the sense of, we must distinguish them. What Ba calls "nearby," it's not "il prossimo," the neighbor, it's just those who are my local surrounding. And the neighbor in proper Catholic Christian sense, "il prossimo." But for Freud and Lacan, already the neighbor is not simply a "nearby." The neighbor is, you know, what's the best idea of the neighbor? Let's say you have a friend and you think you know him perfectly. Then at some point, this friend does something totally unexpected. Either in a good sense, sacrificing him. "Oh my God, I didn't know he was such a great guy." Or unfortunately, more often, he does something horrible, betrays you or whatever. At that point, when you said, "My God, but I really didn't know this guy." This is the moment of the neighbor. That's why Freud and Lacan problematized this traditional notion from the Bible of "love your neighbor as yourself." This is the only way I think to make sense of this is to say, "Yes, I can do this because I hate myself." And you project what you hate in yourself onto the neighbor. So where does this, did this disappearance of the "nearby," of authentic local community, lead us? To be a little bit pathetic, and then we'll go, don't be afraid, back to serious theory. I tried to ask myself a simple question. What is the most horrible place today in the world? First, I began, of course, with the usual candidates: Gaza, West Bank, Ukraine, then Sudan, Eritrea. But I came to another conclusion that this is what is wrong in today's world at its purest, the transnational outside state, but not quite outside state logic of global capital. You know that the strangest place today in the world is a region, relatively small region, 40, 50, I don't know, square miles, in the triangle near Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar, at the X-Burma border. What they have there is something terrifying. Gangsters there organized scam in the sense of treating so-called scam centers. They have, if you look at it from satellite, it looks nice buildings, lawn stores and so on. But if you penetrate there, you see they have at least 100,000, probably more slaves, and slaves in the most brutal sense. They get, they kidnap them, young women also from Europe or whoever. And what they do is they have to spend 14 to 17 hours per day. You know all those messages that you get on the web: "Do you want to earn 100,000 blah blah blah?" or these erotic messages: "I am a young lady. I would maybe like to blah blah." Okay, I will not go into details because I don't know them. But the horror is just to give you an idea. I will say, so what a settlement there. Yes, but you know how much money they turn around financially? They are that area there, the third strongest economy in the world after the United States and China. And you know what they do with persons whom they have there imprisoned? It's a standard procedure, three steps. First, they exploit you, but you have to reach a certain, through digital media, seduce so many men, get money from them, or get their money through other forms of cheating. When you no longer reach the quota, you are put in a nearby building which pretends to be a hospital, but you are there in chains, and they are gradually selling your organs. When they sell all possible organs, they kill you. And since they know, they torture, they learn who is your family. And this is for me really nightmarish. To add insult to injury, your family gets a message: "Unfortunately, your son, daughter had an accident. You can get their body for the usual price is between $1 and $300,000." So they sell even that. And what makes me really depressed is that two things. First, some journalists made interviews with these bosses. You know how they present this? They said, "Well, the colonial West was stealing from us. We are anti-colonial fighters. We just get some of this back." And so it's as simple as that. They conceived that. And second thing is that it's all satellite-controlled. It's an enigma for me if these countries wanted to destroy this, it would have been very simple. It's a small domain. Why don't they? And maybe with the help of China, simply with, I don't know, two, three thousand soldiers, occupy this territory, destroy it. No, because there are secret links with Chinese gangs. Myanmar, X-Burma, earns money from them and so on. But the thing that something like this can be happening today, it's for me very sad. The second sad thing, and I will say something politically incorrect. The second sad thing is for me, decolonization. I'm more and more opposed to this notion. You know what made me suspicious? Decolonization sounds progressive. Yes. We Europeans exploited third world countries. We should feel guilty and so on. But wait a minute. How come then that the postcolonial, decolonial theory was still now absolutely the most popular theory in at least Western European and American academia? I think I am opposed to this approach because again, by focusing on decolonization, they, as a rule, portray third world countries as united people. They almost wanted to make of third world countries ideal fascists, people who are united against the Western colonizers, and they behave like that quite often. Often. For example, I had a debate with two South African ladies. One for me, ethically problematic, the other very good, high figures in ANC, African National Congress in South Africa. And not me, but a friend of mine, Gatlin Rose at Birkbeck Institute, asked them, "What about the extraordinary amount of rapes in South Africa? Because it's breathtaking." Just to give you an idea, their specialty is now in the last years, a rape where the man, while raping a woman, is killing her, cutting with a knife, or suffocating her. And it's so frequent. It happens two, three times per day in all of South Africa. They, they, I forgot it, they have a new term for it. And you know what this lady asked me? This is answered me. This is political correctness at its worst. She said, "What right do you have to talk about rape in my country when you colonized it, raped the entire South Africa?" Okay. You know, it sounds convincing, but it basically means don't talk about feminism, about homosexuality. These are your Western notions. No wonder that many, for example, some leftist idiots now, like how is he called? Timbuktu, or what? The boss of Burkina Faso. Yeah, but you know that a month ago, in Burkina Faso, the parliament unanimously prohibited homosexuality, punishing it with three, four years of punishment. And when you criticize it, they clearly say, "No, this is a Western import, an imperialist tool," and so on and so on. So, then the other lady almost made me cry, and I am a big fat boy, I don't cry. I don't like it. She, I asked her, "What is the ideological situation now with the economic crisis in South Africa?" You know what she told me? That among the poor black people, the predominant atmosphere, not so much is nostalgia for apartheid, because he said, "You know, under apartheid, the standard of living of the poor black was more or less the same as now, maybe even a little bit higher, but there was, because it was a police state, at least elementary safety and order. Now it's unsafety, disorder, and so on." So, you know, the usual decolonizing idea is, "Yeah, because the whites still control everything." No, I think it's much more complex. We should also, it's too arrogant to take the blame just on ourselves, as if Africans are passive blacks, passive idiots, and just we the white behind everything that happens. We must be behind. No. In large majority of cases, decolonization didn't work. And you should critically approach this.
What about Israel? There also, we have a problem, which but a problem which could be put nicely in psychoanalytic terms. What is happening now in Israel is, I think, a big, in psychoanalytic terms, it can be put ideally, the disintegration of, let's say, public law, rules of decency and so on, and a regression to what Freudians call "super-ego." But be careful, for us Freudians, super-ego is not an ethical agency. As Lacan says, the command of super-ego is "Enjoy." Mask it as ethical act, but enjoy. What is for me super-ego at its purest? Did you see those shots that some extremely courageous and honest Jews smuggled out of that prison south of Jerusalem, where you see white prison guards are raping Palestinian prisoners? And it's clear how they were doing it, sticking up their ass big metal sticks, and with it they had planted razors and pieces of it. It was a nightmare. And then there was a big debate, and the official conclusion was that these prisoners there are terrorists. You can do whatever you want with them. No limits. You know, this is super-ego. You do horror. And what adds to the horror is that you even justify this as your ethical activity. Happily, we have many honest Jews who name call this by their name. Namely, people often ask me, "Okay, now Israel is in this grip of just destroy Palestinians. What should the Israeli do?" A Palestinian friend of mine said something very problematic that I don't agree with. He told me, "Jews who should commit symbolic suicide, not real." By this, he meant they should totally change their identity. No longer this arrogant Zionism, but much more modest identity. "We are one among here." I told him, "I disagree with you because Israel is already doing this." What predominates now in Israel is already a symbolic suicide in the sense that they are renouncing their greatest historical legacy and imitating the worst of European history, the barbarism. The guy whom I'm sure you know, Yuval Noah Harari. I'm on friendly terms with him. We don't always agree, but he put it in a wonderful way. Please tolerate this quote: "Judaism has survived. It has become the world champion in surviving catastrophes. But it has never faced a catastrophe like we are dealing with right now, which is a spiritual catastrophe for Judaism itself. The worst-case scenario that we are facing right now is the potential of an ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and the West Bank, resulting in the expansion of 2 million Palestinians. From there, the establishment of Greater Israel, the disintegration of Israeli democracy, and the creation of a new Israel based on an ideology of Jewish supremacy. The worship of what were for the last 2,000 years completely anti-Jewish values." So, you know, this is for me crucial. With all my respect for the Jews, when we criticize what Israel is doing now, it's not enough to say, "Oh, you have your extremes. Palestinians have other extremes, terrorists. Let's make a compromise." No, we should tell to the Jews, "You are symbolically killing yourself. You are betraying your identity. You are no longer the notion of civilized people." You know that Jews were crucial for European enlightenment. You are betraying. You are betraying all that.
So, my problem here, slowly, slowly, we are approaching the end, if you are stupid enough to believe me. So, in this confused situation in which we are, of course, people are desperately searching for some new stable form of communal life. And the natural, let's call it candidate for it, would be religion. I don't think that religion, even at the level of fundamentalism, is the true danger today. I, maybe you know this old line of thinking of mine. I think that today, you know, Marx said religion is the opium of the people. I think we have now two new opiums of the people. You know my joke: they are opium and the people. Like, on the one hand, right-wing populism, which is observed the notion. The whole point of populism is to obfuscate inner antagonisms. So all of a sudden, there are "the people," this very notion masks exploitation, class distinctions, and so on, and so on. On the other hand, opium in the white cells of which reaches from hard drugs, fentanyl, heroin, opium, and so on, up to these modest things like, not even these sleeping pills and so on. I don't know what's the situation here on the border. If you look across the window to Italy, I wonder, I wonder if it's the same there. But in the United States, I read statistics that in this, how do you call them, intellectual professions, relatively students and professors at university, journalists and so on, around 90, not one, nine, 90% of the people depend on drugs. Not opium, but how does it usually work? Shamelessly, I admit it. I am doing this. I feel, as you can see, too nervous. So I take a drug to calm me. Then I'm too passive. So I take a drug to bring me alive a little bit. So there is no natural normality. Normality is something to be achieved with the right combination of drugs. No wonder that, and I find this crucial, no wonder that it's a phenomenon which is taking place now in three countries which will maybe decide our future, I think, for China, Taiwan, South Korea, and up to a point, Japan. There is a new tendency there. Forget about dissident, and in China, anti-West, no, sorry, those who want Western capitalism, no problem. In China, they have something they call "bailan," I think it is literally translated as "let it rot." The attitude adopted by tens of millions of young people who are simply losing interest in public life. They say, "Get a modest job so that you survive. Enjoy it. Exclude yourself from society." Did you see a movie? I forgot the title. Done by, was it Volker Schlöndorff, I think, about a Japanese guy? Sorry, Vinterberg. Yes. About a Japanese guy whose work functions precisely like this, in total. And and Chinese are now so worried that their president gave recently a new speech where he complains about this inactivity. He openly admits this is much more dangerous than some pro-Western dissident or what. And you know, it's very interesting what he proposes as solution. Not communism, didn't care about it. It's no longer active. But return to Confucianism. They said, "Let's return to our big Confucian tradition." I don't think this will work. This is a perfect example of what I call contemporary soft fascism. Not soft in the sense of being good, but at least in the sense that there is not too militarily active, that you have a state which tolerates industrial capitalist modernization, but at the same time worries about social cohesion and mobilizes traditional ideology. This is Turkey. This is India. Modi is doing this, pure form, brutal exploitation, capitalism and Hinduism reactivated. China is doing this, Indonesia is doing this, and so on and so on.
So now, if you allow me, just a couple of points. First, how should we who want to be still faithful to the Freudian legacy react to this? There are two confusions in psychoanalysis. One is, let's call it the leftist confusion. "We psychoanalysts should be for sexual freedom. And if we have false forms of sexual freedom, it means that we are not yet really, really sexually free, that we are still under the domination of the old patriarchal ideology." I totally don't buy this. Sorry, but with all my critique of patriarchy. Don't we get it? Adorno knew this in '36 or '7 when he drew attention to an obvious fact: whatever Hitler was, he wasn't a paternal figure. He was rather a figure of an obscene, dirty uncle. Uncle. It's not a paternal figure. And today, whatever Trump is, he's an
obscene comical figure of abso master. Trump is not a paternal figure. Okay.
Then uh as I already said, Trump is for me the result of '68. Uh, what do I mean by this? You know, in '68, that's why I never liked it, and I was there. The formula was secretly anti-feminist. I know I was there. The idea was hysteria is bad. Hysterical subject just protest, but in an ambiguous way. They really want a new master, while we should be perverts. You know, the big formula in French was, was uh, to enjoy it fully without obstacles. Lon wonderfully reacted to this. He said, "If you want to do your songs on yes, you will destroy the master." And Lon wrote this in [snorts] '69. He predicted Trump and he said, "Yes, you will get a new master, but the master who will be much more obscene than you. You think you are provoking, you will get a master, a new figure like Trump, the leader who will be even more obscene." And Lon, that's Lon at his best. [snorts] He says his message to students was, "Learn shame." Shame is not an expression of uh of of repression, limitation. Like I want to, I don't know, I'm consciously provoking now and then. Oh, I want to with three boys and five girls at the same time. No, these are cheap fantasies which don't even touch your unconscious. Freud, remember what Freud said? He said, "Nowhere is the unconscious more out of reach, hidden than in perversion." Totally opposite to the usual idea. In perversion, you did all your dirty dreams. No, sorry. That's not, that's not the, that's not [snorts] the unconscious.
Okay, I could go on here, but by my new books. I will just now really conclude with the point of so how we are in deep seat. I hope we all agree there are bright points here and there. Mami, who knows what here and there, but basically I don't see any clear way out. How do we react to this crisis? First, the first logic is outward denial, and it's quite popular not only on the right but also on the left. It's not only Trump who said, you remember that uh, the idea of global warming is the greatest uh, tip trick, false idea in the entire human history or whatever. You know, even some leftists, for example, I will not name them, some leftist critics of mine have, I think, quite a strange conspiracy theory. They claim that all the crisis that we experience lately, ecological panic, COVID pandemic, war in Ukraine, and so on, are just inventions by big capital to keep workers under control. You want higher, better salaries, higher quality of money. Sorry, ecological crisis. Sorry, war in Ukraine. You cannot get it. And this friend of mine, I will not name him, uh, is pretty intelligent because he told me recently that he already knows what the next step will be: aliens. That if this will not work, they will try to scare us, but you know, they saw some aliens there, blah, blah, and that's why we cannot have it and so on. So this is one strategy. You simply deny the big problems.
The second strategy, it's not explicit, but it affects most of us, is uh, a fascination with apocalyptic threat and uh, uh, decadence. For example, did you see or read or see some of the movies? Margaret Atwood's uh, The Handmaid's Tale. I think it's a very ambiguous novel because first, I thought I'm the pervert when I was reading the novel immediately when it appeared. You know what fascinated me? What new and new forums they produce to f to to uh, to oppress women. You know, they cannot read, they shouldn't eat this, that, and uh, it was a wonderful strategy because I could say myself, "Oh, I'm just reading this to experience the horror." No, me, I enjoyed it. But I enjoyed it under the pretext that I'm just horrified by it and so on. You know, so this is the second uh, strategy.
Now I'm coming to the end. The last, most dangerous uh, and uh, pervasive strategy is the one uh, [snorts] developed by my good friend Alena Zupantich under the notion of disavow. Disavow in German, "Verleugnung." It's not the same as negation. Negation is, you say no. Disavow is something much more subtle. This is the usual formula is the well-known French phrase. Maybe you know it. "Je sais bien, mais..." Isn't this how we usually relate to ecological threat? Yeah, I know it's all very serious. But listen, go out, there is sun, enjoy life. It's not, we are not yet there. We still have 40, 50 years and so on. I, I will give you. It's time to finish in a more [clears throat] self-critical mood. I will finish in a more obscene way by and admit to me if it happened also to you by a more personal obscene story. Pure disavow. A friend of mine pretended that he knows to read destiny in palms. You know, these lines [snorts] here. So I laughed. I said, "What an idiot. You take this seriously." My friend won me. Oh, I mean, beat me. He said, "Okay, let me then allow me to read your palm." I said, "No, of course not. It's nonsense." Then he said, "But wait a minute. If you know that it's nonsense, why don't you then allow me to do it, you know?" And basically he caught me. I knew it's nonsense. Let's not play with it, you know. It can be. And that's how I think again we are uh [snorts] we are functioning today. We know very well ecological trouble, artificial intelligence and so on. But we are not ready to take it seriously.
So the problem, what we need here uh, now comes really my final point. What we need is don't be shocked more stupidity. But the correct stupidity. You know whom I quote here? It's uh, Otto von Bismarck. You know, the German counselor who, let's say it today, deserves to be celebrated. You know that he was Germany was the first in the whole West to establish a minimum of welfare state, uh, um, uh, uh, retirement money, pensions for workers, some form of universal health care and so on. So Bismarck wrote, quote, "Stupidity is a gift from God, but it should not be abused." I tend to agree. But uh, how should we not, how to, what would be stupidity? When I say this doesn't end, I cheat like, yeah, ecological crisis, but it's [snorts] not so serious. We still have time. Do just take it seriously. Focus on what you know. It's more complex. Things are open, inconsistent. We really don't know in detail what will happen. And this uncertainty opens up the way for what I called in a good sense, stupid, stupid activity in the sense of, "Yes, it's a mess, but I know very well it's a mess, but nonetheless, let's act." And this is what I'm trying to formulate in a more consistent way now. A logic of despair, but despair which can be productive.
I like the last page, last paragraph. I like to watch old uh, modest movies where unexpectedly you get some wonderful line. So recently I saw a movie, short TV movie, Munich – The Edge of War, from 2021. It takes place among lower, lower diplomats when Hitler was negotiating with Chamberlain. There is an English guy who said, who says, "Okay, it's not a good treaty, this Munich treaty, but let's not lose hope. Let's continue to negotiate. We still have hope." And a German guy who is radically anti-Nazi says something wonderful. "Hoping is waiting for someone else to do it. We would all be much better off without it." For me, despair is not simply, "Oh, we can't do anything." Despair means there is no hope. But hope is always defined by the present horizon. Despair means if we leave our social structure the way it is, we cannot resolve anything with small changes here and there. And I took, that's why I took the title of uh, one of my books from a text by my another Italian good friend, Giorgio Agamben. Courage of hopelessness. No, hopelessness gives you courage because you know you are stepping into the unknown.
So to conclude with the Italian quote from one of the absolutely greatest ones, Dante's Inferno. You know, when a priest asked me, I have very good connections with priests. You can better talk about materialism with them than with stupid atheists. A priest uh, asked me, "Let's say that, that Dante's Inferno, Dante's Divine Comedy is true. Where would you like to be?" I immediately answer, "The first, not lower, the first circle of hell." Because you know, there only those who were not couldn't be Christian, but are otherwise good people, you know, with whom you can talk. In the first circle of hell, for example, Dante says Aristotle, Plato, and they are all there, you know. And my proposal to this priest, and I almost convinced him to agree, is that, uh, what if Christ is really there? That Christ is not the figure of heaven, you know, it's boring in heaven. You know, Christ is down. I still think that hell is a place where things happen. Not your, but French great one, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, approaches this question, which is a wonderful question. [snorts] The idea is that in heaven, you will be able to see the entire truth. So, will you be able to see when you're in heaven the suffering in hell? You know, what is Aquinas' answer? He's obviously cheating. Yes. But then the obvious question arises, but then you will sadistically enjoy. "Ho, I'm here. Haha, they are suffering there." You know how he tries to get out of it by claiming, "You will not enjoy suffering, you will just enjoy the greatness of divine justice. You know, how all are punished." Haha. No. So then I elaborated a dream which was accepted with great laughter and a certain sympathy by my Catholic friends. Uh, that hell is, what, first circle, it's nice. There is some oil burning, but back there you have a nice heart, you dance, it's warm, you can roast meat in oil. And then, the problem in he, they have in heaven is that there is in heaven uh, uh, it's boring. No. So people said, "Why are we here?" Blah, blah. So once a week, let's say in heaven, they said, "Do you really don't like it here?" So let me, let us show you hell." So they, in those in heaven are allowed to see for 10 minutes hell. But how does this look in hell? Some devils uh, substitute and comes and say, "Guys, end of fun. Now the camera from heaven, pretend to suffer. Cameras are on." And then people, then after 10 minutes, they say, "Cameras are off. Okay, have fun again." You know, but you know where I don't agree with you if you are [snorts] more Catholics here, both sides of the border, on at one point, would you admit or not that's Catholic uh, Christianity at its greatest? You Catholics, predominantly, it's not so clear, have a wrong reading of the wife of Pontius Pilate. In some version of Catholicism, she is even celebrated as a saint because, you know, she tried to convince Pontius Pilate that Jesus Christ is nonetheless a sacred person. "Don't, don't crucify him." And so the Catholic, they even in some circles, Catholic proclaim her a lower saint, you know, not the high. When I was in Norway, I talked with the Protestants. They said the opposite. The wife of Pontius Pilate was the worst agent of the devil. Imagine Christ not being sacrificed. Where is Christianity? Where is redemption? And they agreed with me. The only authentic hero in the Bible is Judas because it's clear from that kiss with Jesus Christ and so on that they made a deal, and he is a hero because he knows he will be damned forever. But he is ready to do it so that Christ will be able to do his mission, die to redeem us. That's a true, that's that's a true heroism. No. So I think that we need even in theology a little bit more of this type of crazy thinking.
But now to really conclude with a quote from Dante, one line I think uh, that we should say, we should apply to radical politics today. You know that famous inscription at the entrance to Inferno. I would just like, "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate." That this, it's truly a hell. But hell in the sense that it's not as in old times of Marxism where we clearly knew what to do, you know, line of history, revolution. We are in an open situation. We are holy spirit. What, why, why does holy spirit mean Christ, God? Is that we are given our own freedom? We are responsible only to ourselves. That the greatest divine gift to us, and we have to accept this. We are in a horrible situation, and there is no clear formula of what to do. To really conclude. Not yet. H. Do you have in Italian? They have it in French, and we have it in Slovene. In French, they have this wonderful duality: "futur" and "avenir." Because "futur" is future. It is the way things will be, even if they remain the same. Future is the continuation of what goes on now. "Avenir" is something new to come. So the great formula of "avenir," of better future, is no future. You must realize that it cannot go on like this. [snorts] Gratia, thank you very much for your patience. I'm sorry if I was too long, but what could you do? You had to suffer. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. [applause] >> [applause] >> Stop, stop, stop. My old joke. I'm sorry, but I cannot resist. Wait till we communists will take over. Then you will have to applaud. You know, wait for that moment. You know, reserve your energy. [applause] Please. [cheering] Where are we now? How much? >> Perfect. Perfect. Thank you very much. >> Why do you speak that strange language? >> You know how you should now my really last joke that I love it. I know you probably know the full Italian proverb. No, with a dirty word in between, but I like to apply it to thinking. No. So, would you agree? "Piero duro, vuoi non penso." I know which dirty word you know should be, but that's how as a philosopher I read this great Italian proverb. [applause] What I wanted to say is that the stomis, so he will stay behind this table, and he's there for your, for his signature. You're welcome. No, because I had a horrible experience in the United States. A crazy guy approached me and said, "Professor, I admire your dirty jokes. Please do something, write something that will be absolutely unimaginably obscene." Politely I told him, "Are you aware that you are talking to a madman, psychotic? And we psychotics take things literally. If you want something obscene, you will get it." He said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." Then he was hurt because I wrote, "Your mother up her ass standing in a dirty toilet," and so on and so on, and he was hurt, you know. So that's why don't ask me questions, you will get this type of answer. Okay. [laughter] [applause] No, but really, what I want to do is to provoke you, begin thinking. Thinking is needed today more than ever. Gratia. Okay.