Best of Slavoj Žižek | On cynicism, pleasure, philosophy, and more

[Music] listen I'm dreaming of having sex with you you don't have to argue you shouldn't torture people the Fate realized itself through knowing it and avoiding it I don't believe in going deep into your inner self you should always ask yourself what other options failed so that this could have happened Freedom has to be grounded in a complex set of Unwritten rules I don't make a compromise here I want this passionate [Music] love now the Paradox which applies to us today I think unfortunately is that what if we are dealing with a fate Destiny or

determinism which realizes itself only through being known I'm a pessimist I think this is happening today in a perverted way we hear all the time about you know global warming threat and it's all a perverted game that the more we know about it the more we are entering it you know which story I and at the end I have in my mind you know that wonderful old story about appointment in Samara you find it in Somers ATM some other writers It's a Wonderful story a servant on an errand in the busy Market in Baghdad meets

death he is terrified by death G and runs to his master and says give me a horse I will ride uh day and night to reach Samara in the north of Iraq where that will not find me the good Master provides to Servant a horse and goes himself to the market finds death and shouts at death how could you do this to my faithful servant you know what the death answers you must know no my G was not a threat my G was a look at surprise what is the guy doing here here when tomorrow

I have an appointment with him in Samara but don't you know that it's the same with edus story our founding myth edus you remember edus realized itself only through prediction what would have been the wise things of edu's parents where they were told your uh your son will screw you Mur and before that kill you it will say off we don't take it seriously and everything would have been happy the Fate realized itself through knowing it and avoiding it that's our predicament today it's a very tragic one that knowing it not only doesn't help but

precisely through knowing what awaits us and the wrong way to react to it we fall even more deeply into it certain thing are accepted in a good sense dogmatically like I would like to live in a society like this where you don't have to argue you shouldn't torture people women shouldn't be raped if you need to argue for it it's already you are already losing something this is why what horrified me is that although uh who did this dick chain or who and then you remember how some 10 15 years ago when all of a

sudden torture became a topic of debate maybe if we do it in the soft way water B blah blah blah and even if the majority was opposed to it this was even more horrible it became a topic of debate not to mention rape who was I always forget his name he's not my best friend some American senator who claimed there is no rape the moment we debate for it we are uh lost uh just uh uh the last thing uh when we talk about uh uh objective research I still think that here this is philosophical

problematic maybe to you and to you we should what horrifies me most is examples when factual truth about just what is really out there uh serves as clearly an instrument of something we don't agree with like racism and so on like an example if I were to be a pro neonazi German I guarantee you that I could write a book full of facts only facts where I say wait a minute it's not so simple look at the statistic 60% of journalists in early 30s were were Jews and so on and so on so the true

question here when we fight anti-Semitism it's not the question of objectivity are facts really like that the way anti-semite describes them my point is the moment you accept this as a topic of a debate you sold your soul to the devil because qu the question is not are Jews or Palestinians today whoever are really like that the true question is why do the Nazis need the image of the Jew the anti-semitic image of the Jew to sustain their world view so there is some that's for me the tragedy the most dangerous propaganda for something which

is obviously ethically reprehensible is the propaganda which at the level of facts can be uh can be mostly truthful we effectively are in an era of cynicism as a form of ideology it not only doesn't matter if you take your official ideology seriously or not that's the beautiful Paradox that I learned from my communist past I mean think in communist Yugoslavia it was a beautiful Paradox you know we had an official ideology self-management socialism and so on and so on but if you took the official ideology too seriously you were in danger of being treated

as a dissident and you were perceived as a danger to those in power so an ideology functioned in such a way that you were expected not to take it seriously it wasn't only that it didn't matter if you take it seriously you had to not take it seriously it's a beautiful example and this is how it is today with Trump and so on all of them and this is again the most dangerous moment when ideology appears as just neutral common sense you know like forget big ideologies go to actual problems and so on oh ideology

begins here what do we perceive as an actual problem ideology is already in the definition of problems that's why for me the first task in critique of ideology is not to claim okay we have problems we must approach them in a this or that way but is this really a problem an example of this ideology did you notice how in the last decade or two racism sexism especially racism are usually formulated in the terms of Tolerance you know we should tolerate but this is for me already an ideological move a proof go I did it

through the speeches text whatever he wrote of Martin Luther King he never uses practically the word tolerance his complain is not why it's don't tolerate us we should tolerate each other more no his point is different legal system social rights economic Justice and so on and so on the whole notion of tolerance as a main problem uh changes the entire field so that it becomes a cultural problem you know this is what those in power like even a false form of psycho analysis enters here like if you if I'm intolerant towards you then this mean

I have psychic problems I should analyze myself what is wrong and so on and so on no wonder that you remember when Mel Gibson made an anti-semitic Outburst you know what was his excuse I will search a help of a psychiatrist to no sorry anti-Semitism is not a psychic problem it's a material social force it involves a certain way to deal with those and with others and so on and so on so again here I follow Lou altiser only at this point that never forget that ideology is a material falce in the sense that even

if it's factually wrong like anti-Semitism or anti- Palestinian racism and so on the point is not are they right or wrong of course they are wrong but the point is how they structure our political social reality how they are uh inacted and that's really difficult to uh to [Music] change evil we humans are Masters in justifying horrible acts by constructive narrative which makes them acceptable uh stalinists were Masters in and others here I would like to return to uh Hanah arand who me you in a crucial text early one I think she draws a wonderful

difference between sa the early Nazi tax and SS she said sa those who were pered in 34 were vulgar brutal evil raping beating and so on with SS you get something much more horrifying you get this cold imp personal bureaucratic evil they don't have this type of passions and so on and so on in this sense I claim that which I would nonetheless be ready to talk with all reservations about just two points to finish about first social forms of evil let me take some in extreme example it's really depressing even if you check it

just on Wikipedia the Opium War 1800 424 against China it's I'm very close to say this was evil because you cannot imagine what it did to China 1820 China had a functioning system against hunger and drought it was its economy was not per capita but absolutely three times stronger than British and so on then they did it on behalf of the notion of good and civilization they prohibited import of opium and the uh the Western justification was free trade is the condition of civilization it's our duty not only right to invade China to force it

to be civilized when I'm in Mexico or in United States I said why don't you do this and Mexican and uh Colombia cartels declare war on United States because they are prohibiting to but you see what I'm saying you cannot simply say they were this was the dark side of the liberal market system itself then don't talk about liberal capital and you have here across the sea even the almost the worst problem uh you know that Ireland the potato iine you know that Ireland was all that time even exporting wheat and so on they believed

that to mix immediately okay so you got my point that's the last Point very last uh you know now when we are talking about uh ignoring evil and so on aren't we today approaching something much more horrifying we learned how to say described correctly things but in a way that doesn't engage us like my example it was disgusting I would plant a bomb there able remember two years ago or the Glasgow conference on global warming it was all very ethical even basically correct insights but the very for precluded us to do something so that's sorry

just one sentence literally with a couple of commas and so on that is for me the problem give me the last example already mentioned it I hate all those big Bales Venice Castle their justification is pure anti- capitalism we are all exploited by Capital colonialist blah blah and they decare the and nonetheless this banal work in a perfect way as part of capitalist so you know the tragedy today is you can say the truth but it doesn't awaken us there is for me a strange psychological fact that uh often you cannot say something in reality

but if it's put in the terms of a game even theater play you can do it for example the great classic Jane Austin's Mansfield Park a young couple is in love they are too constrained to say this openly but they select Shakespeare piece I think where they in the game but they they can say it so this is what Jac laom meant I think when he says this that the the truth has the structure of a fiction and I deeply believe believe that in this sense masks are never just masks when we adopt a mask

to play a game we can bring out there something that we are not ready to confront in our so-called uh in our uh so-called uh real life in this sense also let me give you another example I'm ashamed to mention it it's so stupid but you saw for weddings and the funeral uh that moment when hu Grant declares love you see uh he does it uh in the sense of uh uh uh you know he's stuttering repeating himself but precisely through this apparent breakdown of the game he gets his message through sometimes the failed game

is the only way to get the message through that's why incidentally I hate male sists who when a woman reports to be raped she they say but you see she she contradicted herself and so on sorry but I would be very distrustful if a woman were to get totally perfect cold report on okay I wouldn't discard it but you know what I think sometimes the truth can only articulate it through uh failures and so on and so on so uh uh the last thing I want to I emphasize this I don't believe in going deep

into your inner self sorry to be brutal if you go deep into it you find deep there I CL monstrous fantasies and so on I believe that the only way to uh overcome yourself is to ident identify with your mask just to conclude I don't drag on my favorite movie here rosellini you should see it you can get it on YouTube from 1960 I think with Victoria DEA vorio General de R Thea plays a poor guy who is caught it still occupied Italy caught by the Nazis and since he looks exactly like like General DEA

ReRe a big name of resistance they tell him we killed DEA ReRe but resistance that we have in prison don't know this so go there pretend that you are General de R and people will confin in you and you will tell us that you can guess what is the ending he identifies so much to his role that he is ready to die he doesn't say anything at his shot public Al as general DEA R in this sense I am for good alienation who cares about his real self a poor beggar and so on in this

complete identification with another you can find Freedom but also horror did you see with Jim Cary his best film I think did you see the musk where he is completely free but nightmare comes out this complete freedom to do what you want he experiences it as a as a nightmare so in this more precise sense I think that uh uh uh that first there is something liberating in games and cliches can you imagine how horrible life would have been if you were to uh tell just the truth sincerely without hypocrisy there is no life without

hypocrisy here I would warn also against I wonder if you will you would agree another uh extremism extremism of so-called deep ecology uh let's avoid misunderstanding not in this cheap sense they go too far we cannot abandon everything and so on but I found hidden in their line of argumentation an extreme anthropo ISM where you know how they argue they argue like this not only humans have rights we live on earth we are just one among the species who who said this sorry so-call deep ecologists deep ecologist okay sorry yes no the idea is this

one that we have to learn modesty we have to learn that we are just one among the living species so we have to take care of also of the well-being right they get here ambiguous of all other parts of nature not only animals not only plants but even they speak about the rights of rivers of beautiful mountains and so on and so on but now back to what Yuval said and I agree with him but they animals okay animals at least make sounds which signal their suffering but Rivers uh uh Rivers uh mountains whatever they

they they don't know they have rights because because in some sense they don't know anything so what deep ecology means is that beneath this false modesty we are just among the species that we are really the the universal beings the one who should be responsible for everything he here it's hidden another potential of how we humans should really control the Earth and then you get to all those plants which are often masked as uh progressively ecological like to to put more carbon monoxide in the air to prevent uh but but I would agree with youal

nature is so unpredictable here with never know what can the secondary non-intended consequences be so yes we should be radical ecologist but always beware of this that the longterm consequences can run against that's why immediately I give him the word just that's why I am a hegelian today I think the formula today should be back back from Marx to Hegel Marx still had a plan if we do this this this then there will be at least a substantially better Society Hegel is not doing this you know what Hegel says in his most quoted but people

don't take it seriously introduction to re's philosophy to philosophy of right he said a thought philosophy can only grasp the present order when it begins to disintegrate and future we cannot say anything we have to be extremely careful about the future what this practically means it's not pacifism let's do whatever we want we don't know what will happen no it's just that you know what what where is Hegel at his best in the spirit of what you said when he takes an extreme idea and demonstrates how unexpectedly in actuality it turns into its opposite for

Hegel the classical example I think even he exagger there but uh French Revolution Freedom ahh you get Terror uh the second half of 20th of 19th century it was in Europe not elsewhere relative period of half a century of column progress women's rights you get World War I Soviet Union October Revolution whatever you think an attempt at emancipation you get stalinism the last example fukuyama happy '90s end of history and so on haha we are now where we are so the my basic approach would be beware that as a rule when you are making big

plans things will always in some sense go wrong and try to take this into [Music] account do we really want what we think that we want quite often what appears as an obstacle to getting what we want is really what sustains our desire for example I read years ago I remember this a biography of of TS Elliot you know while his wife was it's not clear did he put her there was it really in a psychiatric uh Hospital he had a distant Affair it's only letters it seems with another lady and all the letters were

their letters where oh let's just wait for the moment when my wife will die then we will be able to be together you know what happened when the wife died they split also all and I think this is a general structure of our desire did you see maybe the frano film it's old you are too young to see it uh day for night L American there is a wonderful marginal scene there that I love a guy one of the cast wants to seduce another script girl whatever I don't know so their car breaks down they

go to a lake close to the road and then the guy tells her listen I'm dreaming of having sex with you for uh for for for days all the time here now we are alone nobody knows know that we are here why don't we quickly do it you know what the woman does she said okay why not and started to pull his trousers down uh her trousers down and he is totally shocked what do you mean like just like that or whatever and so on so I think that this logic of theour and so on

is is part of our sexual games you cannot go directly for it it's very difficult that's why laon characterizes the ethical position in psycho analysis as do not betray your desire usually we do betray it for example it happened to me a dirty detail not problematic Don't Be Afraid when I was young I was in love with a girl the link was that the girl had a father who was a philosopher and the ritual was to arrive at her apartment first have a talk with her father and then let's go out to her but at

a certain point she dropped me because she said I got it what you really want is the Surplus enjoyment I really it was the other way around from what it looked it was not father is just the detour it's she told me I was a detour for you what you really enjoy is this let's call it intellectual foreplay talking with her father or uh uh uh uh he has a wonderful he sorry Darian leader your great lenan who also writes good books has a wonderful example in one of his early books where he mentions a

case that allegedly happened uh to him a patient came to him and said yesterday I invited the lady out and I wanted to uh of course we went to a hotel with a good restaurant the idea was we have a nice meal and then I take her up to a room but he said he made a terrifying slep of Tong when entering the restaurant he said to the waiter a B for two please instead of a table for two and uh Darian leader does something wonderful he said how to read this sleep slep of tongue

it's not as you would have thought he was already thinking about uh sex later it's quite the opposite he was afraid that he will enjoy eating there too much and he will lose the will to even go upstairs later so it was a reminder to himself don't enjoy this too much you know so again what I am uh saying here is that uh uh the lesson of all these reversals and so on is very simple one is that we enjoy uh uh there is no enjoyment in directly attaining the goal it's like falling in love

again I'm sorry you walk on a street sorry for the tasteless example but not vulgar you you you sleep on a banana peel a lady helps you to get up make maybe you discover it's the love of your life so although you know well it was a pure contingency but the way you experience it all the your life if you're a romantic like I am you are waiting for that moment we have to live with this contradiction so philosophy is like falling in love absolutely absolutely I think philosophy is falling in love in the sense

that it's uh you know what Harari I would have many things to debate with him but there I sincerely agreed with him where he said freedom is freedom is uh is uh never a conclusive State now I'm am free freedom is the very Eternal doubt am I free or not and so on and I think it's the same with love the moment you don't doubt your love the moment you think think you know why you are in love it's finished so they both have this uh this uh this uh Retro Retro activity and what I

find it so sad today I hate it my frch friend alen but you pointed this out in English and in French and in some other languages not in all the verb a very correct one which uses to fall in love and one should give to the verb fall all this radicality you go all of a sudden boom you fall what I hate so much I don't believe it I'm here old meta metaphysician with this idea but I have different needs maybe poly Armory works you are good for this you are good for that no sorry

this is not love this is your different needs and so on love is something else it's much more nonconditional and what I fear is that you know when I was young there was a more conservative erotic pedagogy to be to have multiple partners was considered pathological even psychoanalysts were usually anal what are you why are you running if you are men sorry for the male chines and heterosexual why are you running from one woman to another what are you escaping from your mother or what now in Argentina maybe the most psychoanalyzed country in the world

when I was there they told me and I find this sad decadence that it's the opposite if you jump from one woman to the other for women also if you change Partners it's considered normal if you are faithful to your partner they say oh my God this is pathological fixation we have to analyze it and so on I think beneath this is not just Liberation no it's a sad redefinition of love in the term of your needs maybe you need more this more of that and then maybe only different people can do it this is

not love I don't make a compromise here I want this passionate love but not you know where I not romanticist I I understand uh orus and uidic you may don't know it but the German cultural critique he is now old 30 years ago CLA deite provided a wonderful interpretation of why does bringing her up from Underworld why does orus look back it's not that because he was worried you read made some sounds he was worried the idea is that when while she was following him and he was prohibited to look at her back when she

was following him up by divine grace he started to ask serious question like okay she is my ideal but wait a minute to live with this woman who will was the dees all that stuff what if I get disappointed isn't it better to get rid of her and I retain her as an ideal I write poems but I can do what I want with other women so she look she looked back bye-bye I will celebrate you all my life but I will be rid of you that's not true love true love is that true love

Lon says this somewhere doesn't idealize the partner true love is not idealization you expect all the small imperfections and you love the person even more because of [Music] this [Music] yes of course I agree that and this is for me the great tragedy of the 20th century that not only the fascist right but the radical left also when it came to power enacted new forms even of Terror of unfreedom and so on and so on and I consider totally legitimate the question of how this was possible I don't write the stories every was okay in

the Soviet Union then unfortunately Salin took over and everything went wrong but so in what sense I do remain a leftist who Advocates Freedom my basic point and even some conservatives my God would agree I hope with me is that that freedom has to have a material base I don't mean this vulgar Marxist way of this but simply okay you are free but to exercise that freedom you always that's the Paradox of Freedom have to obey certain rules the most metapic example we are free in our thoughts but to freely think articulate what we want

we have to perfectly Master the rules of language I don't want to live in a situation where I have to learn or invent the rules again and again obeying the rules of language is the basis of Freedom uh of to think then also of course we have to extend this on the social level for in order for us to feel or and act freely there are so many things at the level of what German calls zitten Customs like you walk along the street you should be relatively sure that others will also obey the same rules

of politeness and so on and so on then I can move further of course to the social economic domain how state agencies function and so on and so on and here I agree with the point made by the last speaker that uh we shouldn't get too focused on what I would have called the explicit ideological stances freedom and so on and so on look at the material practice the examples mentioned uh of actual unen are for me precisely examples of uh and this is for me crucial in debates today what heel called Z mors customs

which are not just explicit rules but the implicit rules which tell us how to act in a certain situation we can have for freedom but you in the UK have MI6 other mechanisms which de facto under privilege or exclude or exclude other people this is what for me the reality of ideology of ideological exclusions and so on and so on freedom has to be grounded in a complex set of Unwritten rules which are acceptable look the first thing about video games is that their universe is incomplete you're in a game stupid game where you are

shooting fighting on the Main Street of a small town let us say and in the back you see forest with trees but it's not part of the game that you can approach those trees and see them in detail it's part of the game that younot go there so the programmer say why lose time on that programming let's leave it open and the way I got this from a popular introduction to philosophy sorry forgot the name but very intelligently I think written the guy says uh is not quantum physics does it not have the same lesson

when God was programming the universe he said people are too stupid to reach beyond the atom so why should I bother their programming he lived it undetermined and we were a little bit too bright for God and we as you say in English CAU got with his pants down as it were you know and do you then believe then or are you positing in terms of that argument so is the are you saying or maybe it's not possible within quantum physics this question um is reality discret or continuous so is reality like Minecraft where you

kind of zoom in further and further and further and then you get as you say down further further to these tiny little you know to the leptons and further and further down is that a spontaneously but that don't any empirical ground for this I am for discrete nature in what sense and I think this is almost maybe the lesson of quantum physics but I'm very much speculating now I think that it's not this endless divisibility you can further split that at certain point you can come to the you I can split this in half this

and that this and that but I believe when you approach the zero point the division is between something and nothing you see you get something its Counterpoint is void is nothing and uh so I'm not saying this is bad metaphysical reading of that in this freedom is grounded no First Freedom is not contingency know it's not my free act if I but even this is not of course it's deterministic but let's say for me it's a contingency if to make a decision I throw a coin up and said head tail or what no that's contingency

from my view really it's not but freedom is a necessity of its own freedom is a positive decision that you do is this only as they say users illusion I think not I think we have to it's more important than ever we have to accept this ontological openness of nature already of history for example we are now in an open situation and retroactively it will become necessary if there will be a World War if there will be people who will survive it they will tell the story of how it was all pointed towards this war

it's all we were doomed if there will not be a war they will say it was like cold war false alarms and so on what I'm claiming is that these are not simply Illusions the situation is genuinely open and another lesson which I I know it's not legitimate I apply it too quickly from quantum physics to Humanities nonetheless is that to understand something a historical event you should read it as a super with in a superposition with other possible events when something happens you should always ask yourself what other options failed so that this could

have happened first as you rert nicely deployed yes I would go even a step further the usual idea of materialism is small somewhere in empty space there are just small bits of matter and they somehow chaotically mix and everything comes out of that my type of materialism would have been I called it that materialism without matter I take the lesson of as far as I'm able to understand them of quantum physics and so on and I claim we should not get fixed on a certain figure of matter this mechanistic idea you know like little billiard

balls whatever encountering each other reality can be totally abstract it can be immaterial waves whatever we call it what makes it eight days for me and this is the crucial point is uh is uh that it's not run by an overreaching intelligence or whatever that it's basically blind a blind process not mechanist it's a blind process but for me so-called reality we can debate what it is is as I often develop open ontologically non constituted that's why I totally oppose those readings of quantum physics which see a kind of hidden idealism in it you know

ah the role of observation this means that reality is somehow constituted through our G no n b re him was to the end not a religious guy but again this idea of I think changes enough this idea of reality as ontologically incompleted with gets even in itself incomplete universe and at the same time very important uh the growing exploding gap between what science presents us as reality and our ordinary everyday experience of reality look at Classic Greek thought Aristotle he basically constructs an ontology out of our ordinary daily experience of reality you know the objects

fall down up the sky and so on but already with Galileo this image becomes counter intuitive than Einstein then quantum physics uh uh yes it is I will wrap up so that's the first thing so uh this is the problem that I have even with some people like Hawking who thesis is that uh that the time of philos the time of philosophy is over science took science is now replacing it not only religion but even philosophy uh science is taking it over it's true it's very interesting observation that the uh that uh in the last

decades we were trained to even look for the solution of of one's metaphysical question in science if you are today interested is our word final or infinite you look into Quantum cosmology not to metaphysics if you want to know we have a free will or not you ask cognitive scientists and so on and so on but I think okay I will explain it later to wrap up I think that there is a dimension of reflexive thinking which remains a domain of philosophy and mor philosopher her and which for structural reasons cannot be covered up by

S and point two on this I would especially like to in this we should be very careful about what do we mean by belief today we have not only beliefs which we publicly profess but secretly don't take seriously we also have things that we publicly mock but we act as if we believe in them to conclude one line literally don't be mad at me with my favor you you must know it most of you joke idea attributed to nil Bor you know a friend of him saw at the entrance to his house horo superstitious item

preventing evil spirits to enter house and the friend asked him okay but you are an a scientist why do you have that about the entrance to your house B answered I know I don't believe in it I'm a scientist but I was told it works even if you don't believe in it that's our Ed [Music] you