Slavoj Žižek: belief

Transcript context

…I’m Jesse Tomalty from the philosophy department here at the University of Bergen. Now, you came here today to tell us that you are still a Communist. That’s not an affirmation, that’s a reaffirmation. So my questions are two I’ve got. The first is, what has prompted this reaffirmation of your commitment to Communism? And the second question is, has your commitment to Communism evolved over the years, and if so, how? I think I implicitly — maybe I failed — answered this in my whatever you call it, bombastic word, speech, talk, or whatever. The big dilemma for me is this one. It’s still, again, as I said, the Fukuyama dilemma. We are confronting a series of problems today, among them not only global migrations, the new forms of dominations based on digital universe, ecology, and so on, and so on. Is the existing liberal democratic capitalist system strong enough to cope with these problems or not? And my answer is, unfortunately, no. I’m not saying now that this means anything. “Go, let’s reinvent. Let’s return to 20th-century Communism.” I totally agree with you that all these problems reappear, only now we are discovering all the ecological catastrophes. Go to East Germany. Whole areas are there totally contaminated. Go to parts of the Soviet Union, which are even now prohibited, and so on, and so on. But, to put it very simply, I was never naively pro-Communist. My diploma work — this was early ’70s, late ’60s — was rejected by university — these were still Communist times — as not Marxist. This may surprise many of you, but you know that I began as a Heideggerian. My first book was on Heidegger and language in Slovene. Today, I would settle accounts with the book in Nazi style — burn it, you know. But what I’m saying is that this is, to put it in very simplistic commonsense terms, this is my . . . That’s why I’m so distrustful about this usual liberal optimism. Of course, all my sympathy goes with, for example, refugees, but don’t turn it into a humanitarian problem. But not in this politically correct way. Western people from developed countries like to blame themselves. “Yeah, yeah, whatever happens in third world, it’s colonialism. We are guilty.” And so on. No, we are not responsible because what one should never forget . . . Here, I’m still — I’m sorry to disappoint you — staunchly pro-European Enlightenment tradition. Even political correctness itself is, I think, a misdirected application of something that is part of European tradition of Enlightenment. You cannot even, I think, imagine something like political correctness outside the Western tradition. It’s not that once I was a traditional, authentic Communist, but I was very lucky in Yugoslavia. You know why? Because I don’t have any illusions about ex-Yugoslavia. I’m not nostalgic, but you know what was our luck? From early ’60s, borders were maybe for literally 20 dissidents, but other side were completely open. As a student, late ’60s, I was going once at least every two months, if not more often, by plane or by train to London, Paris, or Munich to buy books, and so on. So for us, in ex-Yugoslavia, the end of Communism was not this traumatic experience — “Oh, my God, now we know what it is.” No! We were there all the time, going to the West. No illusions, and maybe this was my luck, that I had no illusions about Yugoslav Communism. umatic experience — “Oh, my God, now we know what it is.” No! We were there all the time, going to the West. No illusions, and maybe this was my luck, that I had no illusions about Yugoslav Communism. I didn’t buy the stupidity of some Western Communists: “Yugoslavia is different; it was an authentic democratic Communism.” But borders were open, so I also didn’t have great illusions about the West. And it goes to my honor — check it up. It appeared in ’88, ’89 in New Left Review — a short text of mine, “Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead,” a reference to Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, where it was clear to me that I predicted there, explicitly, that East European post-Communism will take this nationalist, fundamentalist turn, and so on, and so on. So, again, it’s not that I ever was a traditional Marxist because you know what was my formative experience? I remember, when I was young student, the big conflict in Slovenia was between Marxist Frankfurt School and Heideggerians. Heideggerians, more dissidents; Frankfurt School, official Marxist. Then, the big French wave exploded, so-called structuralism, poststructuralism. And both sides — dissidents and the party officials — used the same language attacking it. That’s what made my identity. The French experience — I’m sorry if I disappointed you — but again, my point is this one: simply that we are approaching problems, catastrophic potentials, and it will not be able to deal with it within the liberal democratic capitalist system. That’s my foundation, very simple one. Yes.…

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