Žižek in Croatia at Subversive Festival, 16 May 2013.
EROS: Postmodern economy dissuades against stable love, quotes from Badiou In Praise of Love, you “fall” in love. It is a Platonic experience.
Passionate fall in love, the entire balance of your life is lost. It is a violent experience. All the advisors we have today are trying to DOMESTICATE or erase this EXCESS of love. How to find yourself in love without falling love.
AGAPE functions in a holy different way. WHich political regimes in the 20th century consolidated their power by invoking ‘love’ of their leader. North Korea.
Buddhism discipline sacrifice. Suzuki in the 1960s supported in his youth Japanese military expansion. The attitude of total immersion into selfless now. Anonymous impassive observer of life, you simply observe your knife hitting the body of another. Even the most radical spirituality is no guarantee that we won’t be doing awful things in our daily life.
Praise of Christian Love Buddhism all encompassing passion is one of indifference, quenching all passion which strive to install differences, while the Christian love, intolerant violent love, privilege one object above others.
Violent accept of LOVE. Get ride of Platonic Love of EROS, love of form, love of supreme good … THis is not true love, true love is going for a single person, the highest ethical act, not forsake all terrestial things for eternity, love is I know you are a miserable human being but I’m ready to forsake eternity for this
It is the of Christianity, a sword which separates and sets free, God rejoices in separation of universe into difference
Love your Neighbour Jesus says, I did not bring peace but a sword, he who loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his mother and sisters and yes even himself … I have come to cause conflicts on earth, father against son, son against father.
How are we to read these statements? Pagan: global balance ying-yang, cosmic balance. An individual is good when they act in accordance with social edifice, respect for his superiors, cares for his children etc. Evil is defined when individual is no longer satisfied with their place. This ethics is re-emerging in New Age Wisdom, Holistic approach.
Christianity does absolutely the opposite. Each individual has immediate access to universality, universality of human rights, freedoms, I can particpate in this universal dimension directly irrespective of my place in global social order. When God says if you do not hate your mother/father you can’t be my follower, father/mother here condense the entire hierarch socal order, the network of domination, the hatred Christ mentions is the hatred of established social hierarchical order.
Core of Christian Insight: Neither men nor woman, neither Jew nor Greeks, Christ dies God dies, all that survives is Holy Spirit which is a radically egalitarian society that opposes social hierarchy and social inequality
Che Guevara Revolutionaries as killing machines, hatred is a element of struggle. What you need is to love with hatred. Toughen yourself, harden yourself without losing tenderness. What makes love angelic, elevates it over pathetic sentimentality is cruelness itself.
Agape as political love (Eagleton) unconditional egalitarian love for the NEIGHBOUR can serve as foundation for a new social order. Form of appearance of love is communism, the urge to realize an egalitarian social order of solidarity, love is the force of this universal link, which in an emanicpatory collective links bypassing particularistic determinations.
Reply to terrorists: you shirk from authentic terror of the work of love.
Charity is a form of NON-LOVE today. Starbucks … don’t think, just act buy a coffee contribute money, you can continue your ignorant pleasurable life and feel good you contributed in struggle against suffering, you feel good, see I’m helping all the children starving ….
Authentic Violent Love: If Europe is in gradual decay what is replacing its hegemony?
Capitalism with Asian Values, the clear and present tendency of capitalism to restrain democracy. What is the hidden price of progress. This very success engenders antagonisms, keep in view its dark underside.
Universality Yes every universality can be false, it is always overdetermined by some particular content, Human Rights yes, but it secretly privileges white property male.
But this historicist relativism, beware universality is false universality, Marx is saying something, we are not only less universal than we think, we are also much MORE universal than we think we are. As agents on a market, we as individuals occupy a universal position, we relate to ourselves as universal subjects, we are no longer identify ourselves, I relate to myself as engineer, today, I lose my job, I become an taxi driver etc. Universality is a way of life, it is a mode of our immediate experience.
Capitalism force of capitalism to dissolve all particular modes of life. I want to rehabilitate 2 texts of Marx usually dismissed as case of Marx’s racism and Eurocentrism. British Rule in India and future results of British rule in India Žižek begins his defense of Marx All Marx claims is that British Colonisation of India unintended created conditions for double liberation of India. British knew if caste system collapsed that would create revolutionary conditions, so they put hard work into re-establishing and resusitating old ideological religious systems, so as to keep it stable and inert so it would remain ripe for exploitation. Respect for local cultures was a crucial component of process of colonialization, British rule wanted India to remain with local religious cultural conditions, Yes we bring progress to India, false respect for the Other is crucial to colonization, if you remove this you lose colonialism itself. Radical ambiguity of colonization, the very power of social disintegration unleashed by colonization, which at the same time opens up the space for liberation and ANTI-COLONIAL liberation
Žižek pulls out his India story about English blah blah But this is his most formal presentation of this story, he even has a quote. Brahmin intellectuals yelled out Žižek is a colonizer, the lower Dallics Untouchables immediately accepted my message. Message: It’s true when a foreign language is imposed, you feel deprived of the very core of your identity, but that which you feel deprived of is a specter engendered by this very colonialist imposition of a foreign language. The very loss of something creates the lost dimension.
We don’t have a pre-colonial India and then brutal colonization which makes the people aware of what they lost and then in anti-colonial struggle they are trying to regain what they lost. NO! The pre-colonial India was something totally different, its irredemiably lost. In so far as it is not lost, it precisely serves colonizers. This ‘new’ dimension that you are craving for, A New Modern Democratic India, the very program of de-colonialization is something engendered by colonialization itself as a reaction to it.
Malcolm X Not let’s return to those roots. We don’t have any genuine tradition to rely on, we have to collectively re-invent our identity as condition of our freedom. He found the new universalist frame in Islam. He had no dreams of returning to origins.
The greatness of ANC rejected the bullshit of returning to African roots, the one who wanted to return to roots was King Buthelzi who was in cohoots and supported by the brutal Apartheid state. MANDELA we should be white people at own game, by being more universal than they are.
Decolonization: India has a chance of achieving a more egalitarian democratic society. Western conservative are aware of this. WE shouldn’t be too glad about primacy of English language, it is no longer the english of true British people, but spoken by Mumbai and bankers in Bombay. I don’t believe in anti-colonial resistance in name of LOST ROOTS, if anything advocate a FURTHER LOSS OF OUR ROOTS.
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WHERE THE DANGER IS GROWS ALSO WHAT CAN SAVE US Friedrich Holderlin
This point of extreme loss is opportunity for REVERSAL. The whole eschatology of Marx, capitalism is utter alienation, workers are deprived of all substantial objective conditions of their work but this VERY DEPRIVATION LIBERATES THEM FROM ALL PARTICULAR roots and creates them as universal subjects who may re-approapriate universal SUBSTANCE.
We had a revolution, for Hegel it was French revolution, for us it was the commie revolutions, and things went terribly wrong. The whole problem of HEgel, is how in these conditions of failure, commie how we experienced in 20th century was a fiasco, how to remain faithful to commie idea, there is a big unease with modernity, strange bedfellows: conservatives up to Eva Morales who said capitalism killed Mother Nature NO! when we are faced with horrors of global capitalism we must remain faithful to Marxist insight that modernization is an ambiguous process, the only way out is to bring modernization to its end.
The crude Mary Magdalen joke
Beware of the people too intent on healing other people’s wounds. People found themselves in actual pre-colonial reality, they would scream as Mary M. There is no way back, we have to play the game of modernist project. I am totally against imperialism, but anti-imperialism is a misused word. When Japanese and Germans were fighting they used the words anit-imperialism, so I am no ready to sacrifice Eurpean modernity, AGAPE, universal love, not the wisdom of keeping a distance, fully following into love, full engagement, losing oneself without reserve. I don’t agree with that so-called Wisdom which says: Don’t attach yourself to worldly objects, NO, I say, Attach yourself to the end with worldly object with all the risks this involves.
Questions and Answer Session
In matters of love, miracles do happen, LOVE WHICH LUSTS FOR LIFE. André Gorz wrote book, he fell passionately in love, for 58 years they were absolutely in love, in the end when she was dying of cancer, he killed himself with her together. The mass media propoganda, everything is changing you have to experience life, no when I meet the right person I don’t want to experience too much of life … A certain dismissal of ‘ordinary’ people. I found nothing dismissive or cheap in the fact that an ordinary person wants his peaceful life. I’m not ready to betray this as some form of alienation. The only changes which truly count are those at the everyday level, these are the hardest to change. Maybe we no longer live in an ideological in a big sense, projects to die for, ideology is in the everyday sense. What is happening in Greece is not just political change, but a change in everyday ethics.
Erotic love passionate love, and political passion, the latter is limited, temporary, the former,EROTIC LOVE is not. Even if it doesn’t last, when you engage it should be withing the prospect of eternity. IT must be the prospect of eternity.
It’s a very dangerous game to engage in cultural thinking, this is western thinking, Yugoslave commies, Russia is slavic barbarian, so revolution happened in stupid despotic Asiatic country etc. What surprised me in Russia, some conservative told me opposite, Russia was good, all the evil came from western modernizers Peter the Great up to Stalin. Communism was a western brutal imposition. In China, you can’t call Mao a great Christian. The Great Leap Forward of late 1950s which is brutal event beyond imagination, over 50 millions died from 1958 – 1961.
The point of my negative reference to Buddhism, I reject that Christianity is totalitarian and Buddhism is peaceful. NO. UNIVERSAL LOVE: an authentic commie perspective is NOT Love for Humanity. No. All Men are Brothers. No thanks there are people I don’t want to love or be my brother etc. IT is always something wrong in proclaiming Universal love in all-encompassing love, I love you all, I love you all so much that I’m ready to kill who undermine this universal welfare, the ultimate example of this kind of Universal Love in East Germany the last session of commie party, boss of Stazi when people shouted to shout at him, he looked surprised, But I Love You All. Terror is for me always grounded in a false Universal Love. Authentic Love the majority of people are stupid, but I love you, and you. Agape. Love as a category of Political Struggle. Let’s establish solidarity. The only UNIVERSALITY is the UNIVERSALITY OF STRUGGLE. WE have problems here, there they have problems, is there a common front in each of our coutnries fighting against enemy. love as universal struggle.
And of course Žižek now standard explanation of his infamous claim that “Hitler wasn’t violent enough” He killed millions because he was afraid of making social change, it was a reactive violence. Stalin: The violence was enactment of utter failure of how to include farmers in socialism. Brutal direct violence is sign of impotence.
An important philosophical point on nature of Truth Jews are seducing our German girls, exploiting German workers. The moment you accept the debate at this point you are lost. Where, in what do you see the solution, neo-Keynsian solution? Varvougis REPLIES: We need a Keynsian stablization, it buys us breathing space to dream about the good society.
Question on the film The Lives of Others
Bertolt Brecht: Humans are by natures evil, you can’t change humans, you can only change conditions to take away opportunity to do evil. We have maybe a certainty propensity for violence for acting out, which can be put to different uses. I don’t see a problem here. I’m totally the most brutal realist you can imagine. I didn’t use the word ideal, I used the word miracle. Life is shit, but miracles happen. Some people are just waling around being consumers working, boring and all of a sudden they same, ENOUGH. I cannot go on with this anymore. and risk his life to change something. I believe in miracles, life is generally shit, miracles happen, once here and there we find Andre Gorz.
Žžek thanks his translators and is very funny story about Haiti
Last question I don’t believe in intimate self-experience, vulnerable fragile person, the lie he invented for himself so he could do the horrors he did. I’m sure he played with kids and served cookies, the more brutal they are the more they need a private fetish, big bank managers who destroy lives of millions, the same role with private charities, let me give 2% of my wealth to them to Somalia. We lie to ourselves. We need a private myth. Maybe the fundamental form of ideology today, is I’m not just embodiment of economic or ideological categories I”m also a warm fragile person. That’s the lie. Brecht precisely reduces capitalist to their social roles, don’t give me the bs that you are a warm caring person. This isn’t just commie, this is the great legacy of Jewish ethics. The total EXTERNALIZATION, the truth is how you INTERACT WITH OTHERS. Not how does it mean to your spiritual growth, inner spiritual growth, authentic self-experience is b.s. I believe in total externality.
A black lady in South Africa running away from a policeman, her heel breaks on her shoe and falls off. The policeman stops picks up her show and gives it to her. They both look at each other and feel foolish, should she put the shoe back on and they continue chasing each other, the policeman give her the shoe, bids her a good day and turns around and leaves. Now this is the morality I believe in. The policeman probably inside was an incredible racist, but it was what he did on the outside, how he treats other people. Superficial manners can do miracles. Do this 10 times and you might change. Huck Finn help a runaway black slave … their inner bad feeling is what is non-authentic. I believe in surfaces in good manners. what they did externally was right, on the outside on the surface … they did a good thing.
We should hate them, we should just learn to pretend to act like we like them. and to maintain a proper distance. Respectful distance, we should know the other, how can we know the other when we don’t know ourselves, and neither does the other, I believe in superficial manners.
Terror – Anxiety
Žižek the VOIDED SUBJECT always has something, I don’t believe in this pure existentialist bull shit, I am just a void. Object and subject small a, doesn’t
Is there a place in Badiou’s ediface for DRIVE in the Freudian sense. Badiou says death drive is decadent, wish for death etc. Oops. Hegel on Madness. Hegel has this idea of how the possibility of madness, radical negativity of madness is constitutive of being mad. It doesn’t mean we all have to be mad, but the only way to account for terror is a reaction against the threat of madness. Death drive, radical negativity, for something to emerge.
Negativity has to emerge from time to time to remind us of our pure subjectivity to prevent it from falling into social order complacency.
In order to have anxiety and terror there must be at least a perspective of the event. Anxiety and terror is the shadow of how an event affects animal life. NO!
Where, what do we mean by subject?
Badiou promises to do in Logics of Worlds, to elaborate how multiplicity of being structures itself into multiplicity of worlds. No passage from pure mathematized infinity into different worlds. How can something like a world emerge within the multiplicity of multiplicity of Being.
Badiou’s ontology, multiplicity of multiplicities is TOO FLAT there is no inherent antagonism, tension.
Multiplicity of multiplicity of multiplicity … ontology is the discourse of the VOID, but why then isnt an event simply the order of BEING, why is it an exception.
Secretly he introduces another order of Being. The EVENT IS AN EXCEPTION but not with regard to order of BEING as such. Here he cheats.
when he speaks about EXCEPTION, there are only language and bodies with the exception of EVENTS. Not far enough There is something which is NOT. There are only bodies and languages BUT there are occurences which break with this logic.
The true problem with Alain, his ontology relies too much on the opposition between presence and representation. Anti-statist As if we have some AUTHENTIC presentation: mass movement, and then you have some form of state, Here I am for REPRESENTATION.