Likes Soviet cinema.

Transcript context

…You need this nostalgia, right? Why not free yourself by jettisoning the nostalgia and take the next step? If I were your therapist, this is what I would be asking you to do. Okay, okay. Let’s go on. I don’t want to lose your time, but what really fascinates me in Stalinism is, if you look at it closely, how fascinated Stalinism was by America. For example, do you know, that’s why I like Soviet cinemas — the absolute model of Soviet cinema was Hollywood. They had desperate plans in the ’30s to build on Crimea their own version of Hollywood. How they imitated Hollywood and so on and so on. I claim that even explicitly, when Stalin was asked, around 1930, his definition of a Bolshevik, he said, “The one which combines ration, dedication to a sacred cause, with American pragmatism, efficiency,” and so on, and so on. But behind this what you call nostalgia is, for me, nonetheless much more pragmatic, if you want it. I’m the first to admit — maybe we share your opinion here — that’s my criticism, one of the criticisms of Frankfurt School, is they always repeat, “Look at Habermas, at his work.” He began publishing in early ’50s. Read all his work, and I don’t think you will even guess from his published texts that there is something like Communism in East Germany. Frankfurt School, in a strange way, almost totally . . . I know there is Marcuse’s book Soviet Marxism, but it’s very specific. And you know what makes it so strange? The central thesis of late Frankfurt School is dialectic of enlightenment. Horrors of 20th century — fascism, Stalinism — are not simply regressions to some dark past. They are deployment of a certain totalitarian — whatever we call them — potentials in the project of modernity itself. Okay. But isn’t Stalinism a much more traumatic example of this than fascism? With fascism, things are relatively simple, I think. It’s a model of conservative revolution and so on and so on. But Bolshevism, which tried to do a radical emancipation and it turned into a traumatic . . . Even today, we don’t have a good theory of Stalinism. That’s what bothers me, not any return to it. I will give you — as a proof that it’s not, in this sense, nostalgia — I will give you another example. I have such a memory. I always tell my friends jokes about life in the army. I served in the mid ’70s in Yugoslav army. It was a nightmare, I know, but what fascinated me was, never did I learn so much about ideology and my politically correct fremdung. For example, I wonder if some of you know . . . You don’t have here anymore military service in Norway. But basically, on the one hand, Yugoslav army was, as all armies probably, absolutely homophobic. You were gay, you were beaten by fellow soldiers every night, discreetly, before being thrown out. But at the same time, corruption, absolutely corruption. The entire life was totally penetrated by homosexual innuendos, and so on. In my unit, we didn’t say, “Good morning”; we say, “I’ll smoke your prick.” “Thanks, and after, I finish with yours.” So you live these oldest paradoxes. penetrated by homosexual innuendos, and so on. In my unit, we didn’t say, “Good morning”; we say, “I’ll smoke your prick.” “Thanks, and after, I finish with yours.” So you live these oldest paradoxes. What fascinates me about ideology is — and this is where Communism interests me — is how — this is why Yugoslavia, which was a relatively liberal Communism, interests me. Do you know that in Yugoslavia it wasn’t that we have our own ideology, self-managed socialism. I mean this literally. Slovenia was a small country. We knew everybody else. Nomenklatura —…

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