Slavoj Žižek: evaluation

Transcript context

…This is sounding like more nostalgia to me. Army tales, we talked about smoking the prick, right? Okay, but, but, but the lesson I learned there — I don’t care if you call it nostalgia — the lesson — and I will tell you where I see real nostalgia today — the lesson, for me, is how an ideology can function, not only even if you don’t believe in it, but it is prohibited to believe in it. This was the beautiful paradox of ex-Yugoslavia. I had two friends who were in the central committee of the Slovene Party. They lost their job. You know why? Because they were stupid and took the ruling ideology too seriously. But you know who are for me — change of topic, but along the same line — the true nostalgics today? That’s why I don’t like the novel — this will again hurt some of you — Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. This is, for me, true nostalgia. It’s what Fredric Jameson called “nostalgia for the present.” It paints this horrible near future. It doesn’t raise the crucial question. But she’s still too fascinated by our permissive societies, and so on and so on. Sorry, go on. These are side issues. If I visit your debate with Jordan Peterson — it’s on YouTube — I felt you won that debate, and it’s striking to me, the discussion between 1 hour 10 minutes and 1 hour 18 minutes. In that part of the discussion, you say that you calling yourself a Communist is a bit of a provocation. But now, I’d like to draw a comparison. Take the writer who just won the Nobel Prize in literature, Peter Handke, right?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.