Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Slavoj Zizek sul '68

Il piu' importante analista Marxista vivente, 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizek
parla del '68 e dei conflitti di oggi.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/11/everybody_in_the_world_except_us
AMY GOODMAN: Our next guest has been called “the Elvis of cultural
theory,” widely considered to be one of Europe’s leading
intellectuals. Slavoj Zizek is a philosopher, psychoanalyst, cultural
theorist. Born in Slovenia, he has written more than fifty books,
speaks to sold-out audiences around the world. In 1990, he campaigned
unsuccessfully to be president of Slovenia, the first Yugoslav
republic to hold a free election.
He’s in New York right now to give a lecture tonight called “Resist,
Attack, Undermine: Where Are We Forty Years After ’68?” The event
opens this year’s Left Forum. Slavoj Zizek joins us here in the
firehouse studio.
We welcome you to Democracy Now!
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Thank you very much. I am honored to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: When I asked you specifically how to pronounce your name,
you said you’re nervous about people who pronounce it correctly.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yes, because I—no, but this is more a private trauma,
like I don’t like to see myself. Whenever I see myself, like there on
the screen, I’m tempted to adopt the position of an observer and ask
myself, if I were to have a daughter, I would never allow that guy to
take me to a movie theater. So—
AMY GOODMAN: But you also said you would be concerned if it was
pronounced exactly, that perhaps that person came from the police.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yeah. Effectively, yeah, because only they really know.
You know, this is at least my East European myth, that police are the
ones who know.
AMY GOODMAN: This is a radio and a television and an internet show,
broadcasting all at the same time. We showed, during Charlie Haden’s
music break, coverage of Prague in ’68. This had an enormous influence
on you. For an audience who would not even know what those two
connections are—Prague ’68—explain what happened. And where were you?
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: It’s like, by chance, I was very young at that point. I
was in Prague. But OK, so that we don’t lose time—there is something
really tragic about Prague ’68, namely—let’s be very frank, and it’s
something very hard to swallow for a leftist. What if the Soviet
intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the
Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering
authentic democratic socialism and so on. I’m a little bit more of a
pessimist there. I think that the Soviets—it’s a very sad lesson—by
their intervention, saved the myth. Imagine no Soviet intervention. In
that ideological constellation, it would have been either, sooner or
later, just joining the West or, nonetheless, at a certain point, the
government is still in power, would have to put the brakes. It’s
always the same story. It’s the same in—now you see my conservative,
skeptical leftist side.
It’s the same in China, Tiananmen. I will tell you something horrible.
Imagine the Communists in power giving way to the demonstrators. I
claim—it’s very sad things to say, but if Tiananmen demonstrations
were to succeed, like the Communist Party allowing for true democratic
reforms and so on, it would have been probably a chaos in China. No,
I’m not saying now that we should opt for dictatorship or some kind of
a strong arm as the only solution; just let’s not dwell in safe
illusions.
I think all too often today’s left falls into this play, which is why
they like to lose. And I think this is the original sin of the left,
from the very beginning. I—and I still consider myself, I’m sorry to
tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn’t help noticing how
all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure. They
have this incredible—like, why did Paris Commune go wrong?
Trotskyites. Why did the October Revolution go wrong? And so on. You
know, this deep satisfaction—OK, we screwed it up, but we can give the
best theory why it had to happen. I mean, this is what my title, the
title of tonight’s talk, implicitly refers to, this comfortable
position of resistance. Don’t mess with power. This is today’s slogan
of the left. Don’t play with power. Power corrupts you. Resist,
resist, withdraw and resist from a safe moralistic position. I found
this very sad.
AMY GOODMAN: The second part of the topic, “Resist, Attack, Undermine:
Where Are We Forty Years After ’68?” Talk about what you see as the
pivotal moments in ‘68 and where we are in relation to them now.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: It’s a very nice question. Why? Because precisely a
propos ’68, I think, we can see how—I will use consciously—an outward
ideological struggle is still going on. Struggle for what? ’68, it’s
the same as right here, one or two weeks ago, a wonderful commentary
on Martin Luther King, how every child knows here “I Have a Dream.”
Almost nobody knows what was that dream. It wasn’t just racial
equality. Martin Luther King moved way to the left later. That’s
obliterated.
It’s the same with ’68. If you ask people today, what will you get?
Ooh, that wonderful explosion of creativity, anti-bureaucratic, sexual
liberation, and so on. That’s, for me, precisely the least interesting
part of ’68. That’s the ’68 which was perfectly integrated into
today’s ideology, self-expression and so on. So if you want to draw
the line, one line from ’68, it is what, for me, as an old-fashioned
guy who likes erotics but with love, is the nightmare. Today’s legacy
of that ’68 is alive. And, you know, they have in California, and now
it’s spreading to Europe, a terrible thing called masturbation. People
gather, you masturbate publicly, you’re not allowed to touch the
other, and, of course, each one has to pay some money, which goes to
politically correct causes and so on. And the idea, it’s like self-
expression: you are alone, but in a crowd. This kind of—this is what I
don’t like.
But there is another ’68, where people—about which people don’t want
to talk. The crucial moment, I remember, it went—something incredibly
happened: students, thousands of them, demonstrating, establishing a
link with workers. People tend to forget that France was in a general
strike, that this wasn’t just a student demonstration. Everybody would
have swallowed that. So that legacy of ’68 is worth saving. So it’s
not simple nostalgia. If we indulge a simple nostalgia for ’68, it
means sexual revolution and all that, so I will tell to those guys,
“Go to masturbation. Leave me alone.” No? What—’68 was a dream, and it
failed, a dream of the possibility of these student protests reaching
a wider audience.
Of course, the game is over. My dream is not “Let’s do it today in
that way.” Unfortunately, I don’t believe there will be a working-
class movement which will join with students. But there are still
domains today, where what? Let me ask you briefly—sorry, answer you
briefly. What’s the serious question today? I mean, it’s fashionable
to make fun of Fukuyama now, “Ooh, that idiot who thought history is
over.” But aren’t we all today de facto, even the leftists—what would
be the adverb—Fukuyamaists? Basically, we believe—nobody asks the
question, “Will capitalism stay? Will States stay?” We basically
accept the frame.
Liberal democracy—as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want
socialism with a human face. Today’s left effectively offers global
capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on.
So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I
think not. I see a series of, to use this ridiculous old-fashioned
term, contradictions, or I would have said antagonisms, tensions, from
ecology, intellectual copyrights, new slumps excluded, where I think
in the long term the global capitalist system will not be able to cope
with these tensions. Here is the true legacy of ’68.
AMY GOODMAN: And now we’re in 2008, and right here in this country, in
the midst of this presidential race. I don’t know how long you’ve been
in the United States right now, but you are—
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: No, but I follow you [inaudible]. It’s the talk of the
world. This may amuse you. It’s going to—when I was asked by a
academic journal to say if I were to hold the power for one day as
president, what—and I would have kind of absolute power to introduce a
law, what law that would have been? My immediate answer was not as
some humanist suggested, since United States at least thinks they are
a global empire, so let every adult in the world be allowed to vote;
my advice would be the opposite one: let’s everybody in the world,
except US citizens, be allowed to vote and elect the American
government. I think it would have been much better for you, even,
because we all outside the United States would project our desires
into how you should be. I think it would have been better, so that
only non-Americans vote for—I know this is a nightmare from Pat
Buchanan or somebody like that, but—
AMY GOODMAN: And who do you think would win?
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: I think there would have been like left of Barack, if I
may put it this way, no? It would have been probably not. But going
seriously, no, of course, I am—my god, it’s stupid to say—for Barack
and so on. But I see a tragedy here, because like let’s say he wins.
What will he do? The tragedy of today’s left is what? It’s always the
same story. Lula in Brazil, Mandela even. The good guy wins, we are
enthusiastic, then you have around two years usually of period of
grace, and then you have really to decide—do you play with global
capitalism, or do you want to mess with it?
With this, I am not saying it doesn’t matter. Barack Obama can do
things. There are many important gestures, like Guantanamo, stop with
these waterboarding jokes, open relations with Cuba, recognize this
would be incredibly important, recognize the Hague international
tribunal. I will tell you from my European perspective, this was
perceived in Europe as the worst, let’s say, ethical, political
catastrophe of the United States. First they push for international
court, then they sabotage it. People ask today, why are such crazy
nationalists in Serbia? I’ll tell you. I spoke with them. They told
me, first, United States push—they are still—sorry, I will be very
brief—putting pressure on us, deliver Milosevic, Karadzic, all the
criminals to Hague. Then, the same people, time and—
AMY GOODMAN: Ten seconds.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yeah. And sign the non-extradition treaty. So you are
digging your own grave.
AMY GOODMAN: Slavoj Zizek, I have to break right now, but we’re going
to continue our discussion, and we will broadcast this this week, part
two. Slavoj Zizek is our guest, leading European intellectual,
speaking at the CUNY Grad Center tonight. Part two of our discussion
in the next few days.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/12/world_renowned_philosopher_slavoj_zizek_on
I recently interviewed Slavoj Zizek here in the firehouse studio, just
before he spoke at the Left Forum in New York. I began by asking
Slavoj Zizek to talk about how he saw the dynamic between President
Bush and Osama bin Laden.
      SLAVOJ ZIZEK: I think that this is a deeper problem, in the
sense that, of course, it would be easy to say they need each other,
and I agree, at some level of ideological functioning. If you were to
ask me to do a simple caricature for a journal, I would do it—you know
that famous Escher paradoxical drawing of one hand drawing—two hands
drawing each other? Know? One hand is drawing another person whose
hand is again drawing—I think there definitely is, in this sense of a
relationship between the two of them, in a way structurally they, the
two, need each other.
      So—but there is a different problem here, which is I think this
deadlock of American politics, foreign politics. Again, I’m now not
talking about anti-American—quite on the contrary, you know? I think I
mentioned it in my yesterday’s talk, namely the problem is, what is it
in the United States politics that they achieve exactly the opposite
of what they want? As they put it—as we sometimes put it, they win the
war—they win the battle, but lose the war.
      For example, let’s take, again, Iraq. This is my supreme
example. They went there to do what? (a) To defundamentalize the
country, to introduce their—some kind of a secular democracy, which
would then serve as a model for the others; (b) to contain Iran. Now,
three, four years later, what’s the result? (a) Almost two million,
all the educated, secular, middle classes, majority of them left the
country. The country is more religiously fundamentalist than ever. (b)
We know that among the Shia political elite, the orientation is
fundamentally pro-Iranian. So isn’t this a nice paradox that the
ultimate result in Iraq of the US intervention is the exact opposite?
It’s really a little bit like Oedipus’s story, you know? The parents
were told, your son will kill you, blah, blah. They acted to prevent
it, and in this very way they realized it. So something is obviously
wrong here.
      And although I don’t have too many big hopes about—because I’m
naturally a pessimist—about Barack, I think that here he has, if he
will be elected, some space to do—to do things, you know, small
symbolic gestures, but which are not only small symbolic gestures, like
—I don’t know—a [inaudible] tribunal to clarify all this Guantanamo
waterboarding stuff, repair relations with Latin America, open
relations with Cuba, and so on. I think that in this tense situation,
he has some—
      AMY GOODMAN: Why he? Why do you not see that for Hillary
Clinton?
      SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Well, from what I know—maybe I’m too primitively
old-line leftist here, maybe I’m wrong, OK, but from what I know,
didn’t Hillary make a little bit too many compromises with the
establishment? I don’t think she has the guts, or rather that this is
her type of acting. I don’t see her as doing this. I think she’s too
much into politics.
      But because—you know what you should—you know what’s the mystery
of true politics? We have something which appears possible, and then a
truly great politician does something which appears crazy impossible,
like in this case: simply against all the majority, maybe, of the
public opinion, you totally open relations with Cuba. And then, all of
a sudden, people notice that what they perceived as impossible is
possible itself. You may—politics, it’s not the art of the possible.
True politics is the art of the impossible.
      And I don’t mean here only some crazy leftist moves. Let’s take,
my god, Nixon. I remember. I was there. I’m old enough. Nixon in
China. Everybody thought, OK, we talk with Soviets; Chinese are crazy,
Mao. He did it. It worked. A simple gesture. You have to risk. To put
it in more theoretical terms, if I may indulge for ten seconds in my
philosophical jargon, it’s that a true act creates the conditions of
its own possibility. That is to say, it appears impossible, you do it,
and the whole field changes: it’s possible.
      AMY GOODMAN: What about the lead-up to the war, 2003, something
that wasn’t just on a theoretical realm, to say the least? Where were
you? And what did you see the mechanism—what was happening all over
the world?
      SLAVOJ ZIZEK: You mean the Iraq war, you mean.
      AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
      SLAVOJ ZIZEK: What it means about this war is not simply that
it’s a wrong war. Of course, I condemned it. But it’s a wrong war in a
much more fundamental way. It’s a [inaudible] conflict, it’s a wrong
conflict. This is also my basic view about the entire Middle East Arab-
Israeli conflict, that it’s a wrong conflict. There shouldn’t have
been that kind of a conflict. Now, of course, we have to deal with it.
But this, I think, is the true triumph of the enemy, not that the bad
guys win, but that the very conflict you are dealing with is a wrong
conflict. If I’m told, “You have to choose Jews or Arabs,” sorry, no,
I refuse to choose. I only—the only thing I can do is honestly to
criticize both sides.
      And I succeeded. If there is a thing I am proud of, it’s that my
book about September 11th and its aftermath, Welcome to the Desert of
the Real, I can proudly tell you that in Israeli media—friends send me
clips—it was accused of supporting terror, Arab terror. In Al-Ahram,
it was accused to be a Zionist book. So maybe this is a good sign,
that I’m moving in the right direction. First, of course, I have all
my sympathies for Palestinians and so on, and maybe what the American
public—because I visited Ramallah and all those places—doesn’t know
enough is, you know, you only get news here of terror and so on.
      You know what was for me the most devastating, frustrating
thing? Not the big terror. There, one has to admit it. OK, they have
their dirty side, but I mean, let’s face it: Israelis, they are not
Nazis. It’s ridiculous. I mean, no, it’s—all this idea, a new
holocaust, it’s ridiculous. Israelis are nonetheless relatively
civilized and so on. These comparisons are tasteless. But what is
really breathtaking—again, if you really visit ordinary Arab villages
on the West Bank—it’s these—how should I call it?—micro-political
everyday, legal and other annoyances to make life difficult.
      Just to give you an example, do you know that if you are a
farmer, Jewish or Palestinian, on the West Bank, as a Palestinian
farmer, you are allowed to dig a hole for water only three inches deep—
if you are Jewish, you can do whatever you want—claiming the—I don’t
know what’s even the idea, that you will dig some tunnels for
terrorists or whatever? Or you know that on the West Bank the big
problem is water. As a Jewish farmer, you get seven times more water
per capita, because this has to be distributed to [inaudible]. So this
is so frustrating about Palestinians. They admit it, my god. This is
not Nazism. They are not just picking us up on the street and
shooting, but they’re trying on this micro level to make things so
frustrating, impossible to live.
      On the other hand, I think that the problem I have, not so much
with Palestinians—they are much better—is with Arabs who support them.
It’s—I always find it suspicious when you focus on one problem,
Israel, and made it the big cause, which of course, everybody knows
this, then allows other Arab states to obfuscate their own problems,
like I would much prefer Arabs to say, “OK, Israel, fine, we’ll deal
with it later. What about corruption in Saudi Arabia? What about”—and
so on and so on, you know?
      So that’s—here is what I see, if I may add, Amy, my duty, even
as an intellectual. That’s crucial, because people today, I don’t know
what they expect of intellectuals. If I’m honest, at least as a
philosopher, I don’t have answers. We intellectuals do not have
answers. If you ask me what to do about ecology, bah, what do I know?
What we can do is change the very questions. We can show to what
extent the very way we approach a problem, which is a very real
problem, is part of that problem.
      We can show where the problem—for example, maybe you know it.
I’ll briefly repeat it, my ultimate example: Racism. Racism, and so
on, sexism, this is a problem. But are we aware that it’s not self-
evident? The way we approach today this problem, we automatically read
it, interpret it as a problem of tolerance. Wait a minute. Racism is
not in itself a problem of tolerance. I [inaudible]—look at Martin
Luther King’s speeches, you know? He almost doesn’t use the term
“tolerance.” For him, racism is a problem of legislation, laws,
economic exploitation, and so on and so on. I mean, it would be
ridiculous for his dignity of Martin Luther King to say “We blacks
want more tolerance from the whites,” in the same way as—you know this
as a woman—it would be a ridiculous [inaudible] thing to say “We women
want more tolerance from men,” or whatever. It’s not that.
      So where we can enter, philosophers, is to say, “Wait a minute.
Racism is a real problem, or sexism or whatever. Why? Why do we treat
it as a problem of tolerance?” And here, I have an answer, old-
fashioned Marxist one. It has to do with this breakdown of this great
leftist politics, social welfare, and so on. We live in, what I’m
tempted to claim, post-political universe, where politics is more and
more a matter of expert administration and so on. So all conflicts
which remain are then translated into cultural problems, problems of
lifestyle, and so on, but then all that remains is to play the problem
of tolerance and so on.
      The same as with, for example, ecology. What to do? Is global
warming clearly a threat? I don’t know. What I know is that while
ecology is definitely a serious problem, maybe even the problem which
threatens us, the way it is formulated, it’s a big field for
ideological investment, you know, all that stuff of Gaia, Mother
Earth, like our spontaneous confrontation of ecology is that there was
a kind of a natural balance, homeostasis, we evil humans disrupted it,
now we have to repair it. An entire mythology is there. And I think
that—so, my paradoxical solution is that we need ecology without
nature, that without nature, if we understand, is nature, a kind of a
primordial, innocent, balanced mechanism. Nature is crazy. Nature is
one big catastrophe. Oil, our main source of energy—can you even
imagine what kind of ultra-unthinkable ecological catastrophe must
have happened on earth in order that we have these reserves of oil? So
let’s first clarify things with nature. Nature is not Mother Earth, a
big balanced universe where we humans raped her, and so on and so on.
Nature is imbalanced, crazy mechanism, which for—it’s much more
complex. So, you see, here, I’m, in a way, much more modest. No, we
intellectuals, we are really like Socratic intellectual, who—we don’t
have answers, we can just clarify the questions.
      AMY GOODMAN: Back to that question about before the invasion—
      SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yes.
      AMY GOODMAN: —you look at the protest, you look at the invasion,
you look at the occupation, you look at war, and you say it’s all of a
piece, one reinforces the other. Can you talk about that?
      SLAVOJ ZIZEK: No, it’s not so much that I was against the
protests. I myself participated in protests. I just do not share the
enthusiasm of some of even big European intellectuals, like Jacques
Derrida, Jurgen Habermas, who saw in that widespread movement of
protest almost a birth of the new civil society movement in Europe.
What bothered me is the way the protest was in a way parasitic upon—
upon—OK, the other guys, those in power who wanted the war, how they
legitimized each other.
      For me, that protest was part of what I see as the main failure.
But it’s not a subjective failure. It’s in the situation of modern
left, which all too often for me adopts this rather comfortable
moralizing position of we condemn, we criticize, but like we can’t do
anything more, so this safe moralizing position, which is why, as I
like to emphasize, I was in Great Britain, in United Kingdom in that
point. And what did strike me is how, after the big protests, both
sides appeared satisfied in a strange way. The organizers of
demonstrators made their point: you see the majority is behind us,
people oppose war, we made our point. But silently, they knew they
didn’t stop the war, nothing. Blair government, the other side, was
also satisfied. You see what an open society is: even when a country
goes to war, we can—and again, the best answer, I think, was provided
unintentionally by George Bush when he visited at that time UK. I
remember, when asked by journalists, “How do you comment on big
protests against you?” he said, “I totally support them, because, you
see, that’s why we are going to Iraq, so that things like this,
massive protest against the government, so that things like this could
happen only—will happen also in Iraq.” So, of course, this was either
a bad joke or hypocrisy or whatever you want. But there is a truth in
it. Everyone, in a way, all the sides, felt satisfied. And this is
what often worries me, this—how should I put it?—secret, symbiotic
relationship. Those in power like a certain type of moralistic
protest, which does nothing.
      And again, I think that even—of course, everybody likes them
Zapatistas in Mexico—that even Zapatistas fell a little bit into that
trap. At the beginning, they were a little bit of a serious threat.
Then when their—this famous anonymous leader, Subcomandante Marcos,
then he made the choice of playing this, how should I call it, moral
authority, you know, and at that point making comments on what is
wrong in Mexican society. From that point on, everybody loves him now,
you know? Everybody—oh, yes, he’s our moral consciousness, and so on
and so on.
      But again, I’m not simply reproaching the left for it, because,
how to put it, of course now then there is the cruel question: but
what can the left do? What can you effectively do? So I’m not saying
we shouldn’t be doing this. I’m just saying—what I’m saying is
basically one simple thing. I repeat it in all my talks, and so on.
It’s fashionable to make fun of Fukuyama, End of History, but even the
majority of today’s left is effectively, if I may make an adverb,
Fukuyamaists. Basically, isn’t it that most of us leftists silently
believe capitalism is here to stay, parliamentary democracy is what we
[inaudible], so the problem is simply how to make it work better? Our
ultimate horizon is, again, in the same way as we were talking about
socialism with a human face, global capitalist democracy with a human
face. And for me, the key question is, is this enough?

 Il piu' importante analista Marxista vivente
Lancia la sfida al più grande sistemista situazionista morente?
Pp
-- 
Il dubbio è il padre della pigrizia [shadal]

 theory,”
sarebbe un complimento o una presa per il culo? Mica niente, sarò
stronzo, ma se io fossi uno scrittore quotato e mi chiamassero l'Elvis
delle lettere un cartone sul muso del giornalista lo allungherei
volentieri...