‘Second nature’ is more relatable today

Slavoj Žižek

I hate heat. The place where I dream to be nowadays is on Svalbard islands north of Norway, halfway to the North Pole. But since I am stuck at my home, all I can do is turn on the air conditioner and read… about the ongoing heatwaves and global warming, of course.

And it’s quite something to read about. Temperatures rising over 50 degrees Celsius are no longer big news, it happens in the crescent from Emirates to southern Iran, in parts of India, in the Death Valley, and now we learned that the prospects are much darker, threatening not only desert areas. In Vietnam, many farmers decided to sleep during the day and work at night because of the unbearable heat.

The most populous region in the world – China’s northern plain from Beijing to Shanghai, densely populated and food-producing – will become uninhabitable if global warming goes on. The cause will be the deadly combination of heat and humidity measured as the “wet bulb” temperature (WBT). Once the WBT reaches 35C, the human body cannot cool itself by sweating and even fit people sitting in the shade die within six hours.

So what is going on? We are becoming more and more aware of the ultimate uncertainty of our survival: a devastating earthquake, a big asteroid hitting earth, a deadly heatwave, and it’s all over. Gilbert Keith Chesterton wrote: “Take away the supernatural and what you are left with is the unnatural.” We should endorse this statement, but in the opposite sense, not in the sense intended by Chesterton: we should accept that nature is “unnatural”, a freaky show of contingent disturbances with no inner rhyme. But there is more, much more, going on.

Global warming makes us aware that, with all our spiritual and practical activity, we are, at the most basic level, just another living species on planet Earth. Our survival depends on certain natural parameters which we automatically take for granted.

The lesson of global warming is that the freedom of humankind was possible only against the background of the stable natural parameters of the life on earth (temperature, the composition of the air, sufficient water and energy supply, and so on): humans can “do what they want” only insofar as they remain marginal enough, so that they don’t seriously perturb those parameters of life. As our freedom to grow as a species starts impacting the world, nature’s response then curtails our freedom. “Nature” becomes a sort of social category in itself.

Science and technology today no longer aim only at understanding and reproducing natural processes, but at generating new forms of life that will surprise us; the goal is no longer just to dominate nature (the way it is), but to generate something new, greater, stronger than ordinary nature, including ourselves. Exemplary here is the obsession with artificial intelligence, which aims at producing a brain stronger than a human brain. The dream that sustains the technological endeavour is to trigger a process with no return, a process that would exponentially reproduce itself and go on its own.

The notion of “second nature” is therefore today more pertinent than ever, in both its main meanings. First, literally, as the artificially generated new nature: monsters of nature, deformed cows and trees, or – a more positive dream – genetically manipulated organisms, “enhanced” in the direction that fits us.

Then, the “second nature” in the more standard sense of the autonomisation of the results of our own activity: the way our acts elude us in their consequences, the way they generate a monster with a life on its own. It is this horror at the unforeseen results of our own acts that causes shock and awe, not the power of nature over which we have no control.

The process which threatens to run out of control is no longer just the social process of economic and political development, but new forms of natural processes themselves, from a nuclear catastrophe to global warming and the unforeseen consequences of biogenetic manipulations. Can one even imagine what can be the unforeseen result of nanotechnological experiments: new life forms reproducing themselves out of control in a cancer-like way?

We are thus entering a new phase in which it is simply nature itself which “melts into air” (in the words of Marx’s Communist Manifesto): the main consequence of these scientific breakthroughs in biogenetics is the end of nature. This compels us to give a new twist to Freud’s title Unbehagen in der Kultur – discontent, uneasiness, in culture. With the latest developments, the discontent shifts from culture to nature itself: nature is no longer “natural,” the reliable “dense” background of our lives. It now appears as a fragile mechanism which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic direction.

Thinking about heatwaves and getting lost in theoretical speculations, I thus ended up forgetting about the miserable reality of unbearable heat. In short, I got caught into the trap of what Freud called fetishist disavowal: I know very well (how serious the danger is), but I nonetheless cannot take it quite seriously, I don’t really believe it can happen.

Maybe, unfortunately, only the shock of an actual catastrophe can awaken us. And then we will become aware of the ridicule of the fights between our nation-states, of America First and Brexit games, when our entire world is slowly disintegrating and only a large collective effort can give us hope.

UNTANGLING THE LEFT’S NIXON DEBATES

August 2, 2018

Jen Roesch writes from New York City on Cynthia Nixon’s outsider primary challenge against Gov. Andrew Cuomo — and the questions it raises for socialist organizations.

https://socialistworker.org/2018/08/02/untangling-the-lefts-nixon-debates

CYNTHIA NIXON’S Democratic Party primary campaign against despised New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is generating enthusiasm and intense discussion on the left. After weeks of debate, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in New York endorsed her campaign last weekend.

The primary election will take place on September 13. Cuomo is far ahead in opinion polls, but a long-shot upset can’t be ruled out. Nixon is giving progressives and leftists inside the Democrats a positive alternative to Cuomo, a committed servant of corporate and establishment interests and a ruthless opponent of any genuine left challenge.

If Cuomo does win, this raises the question of whether Nixon would run against him in the November election as an independent, using the ballot line of the Working Families Party (WFP) — which is nominally independent and dedicated to progressive politics, but has typically backed Democratic candidates in general elections, including Cuomo’s two previous campaigns for governor.

The WFP’s support for Nixon against Cuomo this time — at the cost of incurring the wrath of the governor and the unions who support him — is another important aspect of the situation to assess.

But both Nixon and the WFP have said they won’t run against Cuomo in November if he wins the primary vote to be the Democratic candidate. So where will the WFP, the DSA and other left forces be left on September 14 if Nixon loses?

The question is especially important since there will be an independent, socialist challenge against Cuomo in November — from Green Party veteran Howie Hawkins, who won 4.9 percent of the vote against Cuomo four years ago, and whose running mate this time is Jia Lee, a teacher activist and member of DSA herself.

The Nixon campaign and the left’s response to it brings a new dimension to the discussions about socialists and electoral strategy following the surprise win of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a congressional primary against powerful Democrat Joe Crowley.

Nixon is trying to position herself as part of the wave of insurgent left campaigns like Ocasio-Cortez’s. But Nixon and the WFP are firmly rooted in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, not DSA.

What does all this mean for the debate about elections, the Democratic Party and the left? This article will follow some of the different strands of the discussion.

---

What Does Cynthia Nixon’s Campaign Represent?

The Nixon campaign is benefiting from the enthusiasm and national media attention generated by Ocasio-Cortez’s victory.

Hours before a campaign forum held by New York City DSA in July, Nixon said that she sees herself as a democratic socialist. Her request for DSA’s endorsement prompted an extensive debate in DSA chapters across the city — one covered by the mainstream media.

While half the chapters voted against, an online poll of members showed stronger support for an endorsement, and the group’s citywide leadership body has now voted to officially endorse Nixon and her running mate Jumaane Williams.

Nixon says she identifies with democratic socialist ideas if that means believing basic needs like housing, health care and education should be a right, rather than a privilege. But her organizational ties are to the Democratic Party’s liberal wing.

As a letter opposing endorsement signed by more than 100 DSA members pointed out: “She has filled her campaign with personnel associated with Mayor Bill de Blasio, including her campaign manager, who helped write the mayor’s “affordable” housing plan  —  a Trojan horse for gentrification and mass displacement of poor, predominantly Black families.”

Nixon’s running mate, Jumaane Williams, has a long history as a progressive City Council member, particularly on issues of racial justice. But he is no outsider when it comes to Democratic Party politics as usual. Under pressure, he has agreed to refuse corporate campaign contributions in this election cycle, but he has long accepted donations from the real estate industry and police unions before this.

Moreover, Williams has a history of trying to appease conservatives on social questions like abortion, gay marriage and freedom of speech for BDS activists.

None of this changes the fact that the Nixon-Williams campaign represents a progressive challenge within the Democratic Party against a governor who has pursued an austerity agenda and worked with Republicans to secure the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

The campaign is a breath of fresh air for New Yorkers disgusted by attacks on public education, a deteriorating subway system and years of political corruption.

But their histories do show how Nixon and Williams are different from the DSA candidates whose campaigns are generating a new sense of energy on the left — and, more to the point, how that energy could be diverted, through someone like Nixon, into existing channels within the Democratic Party if socialists don’t put forward a different path.

---

A Predicament of Its Own Making

A lot of the left’s attention to the Nixon campaign has focused on the DSA endorsement, and understandably so.

But Nixon’s campaign is more deeply tied to the Working Families Party and its long-standing strategy of running progressive Democrats on its ballot line. As many new socialists inspired by the Sanders campaign explore the possibility of building a left-wing alternative within the Democratic Party, the experience of the WFP is worth assessing.

When the WFP broke ranks with Cuomo this year to support Nixon, Cuomo made it clear that he would retaliate against any of the unions or community organizations backing the WFP who went with Nixon. They might as well “lose my number,” Cuomo said.

It was a successful threat. On the eve of the party’s endorsement vote, the two unions that remained in the WFP pulled out in protest. United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew chided the party: “When asked to behave responsibly, they react like children throwing a tantrum in the classroom.”

The loss of the unions that contributed the bulk of the WFP’s funding is a blow. But it’s clear that the discontent within the party’s ranks, especially among the community organizations that make up its activist base, had reached a breaking point.

Nevertheless, the party faces a looming crisis if Nixon loses to Cuomo — one that arises out of the contradictions at the heart of the WFP’s “inside-outside” strategy.

The WFP was founded in 1998 and was a successor to the short-lived New Party. The New Party had developed the idea of “fusion voting,” in which it would endorse major party candidates on its own ballot line, while also laying the ground for independent campaigns. It hoped to establish itself as a vehicle that could exert pressure on the Democrats to shift left, while building its own base of power.

In New York state, a party has to get 50,000 votes for its candidate for governor to maintain its ballot line in the next election. The WFP earned ballot status by getting 50,000 votes for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Peter Vallone in 1998.

After that, the party fused community and union organizing with an impressive electoral canvassing operation that made it a real contender in local politics — as long as it didn’t challenge the Democratic Party itself.

Ultimately, the party’s successes tied it ever more closely to the inside part of the “inside-outside” strategy — by increasing the perceived cost of going against a known winner in the Democratic Party.

When Cuomo decided to run for governor in 2010, he put forward a neoliberal program of cutting wages for state workers, enacting pension “reform” and capping property taxes. The WFP, needing the 50,000 votes for its ballot line, endorsed him anyway.

Howie Hawkins, a socialist and Teamster UPS driver, ran as an independent on the Green Party ballot line and came in third. He only got 60,000 votes, but he proved that you don’t need to make a deal with Cuomo in order to keep a ballot line for a party outside the Democrats.

Nonetheless, the WFP pursued the same strategy four years later.

In 2014, Zephyr Teachout ran a primary challenge against Cuomo that won more than a third of the vote. For the general election, Cuomo played hardball and threatened to destroy the WFP by not running on its ballot line and depriving it of 50,000 votes. Liberal Mayor de Blasio intervened to engineer a deal in which Cuomo agreed to run simultaneously on the WFP line — and made a number of progressive promises to help the party save face.

Ted Fertik described the stakes at the time in an article for Jacobin:

Union leaders, considering the near-certainty of Cuomo’s re-election, his famous vindictiveness and his powerful influence over many of their members’ contracts, are convinced that there was never a worse time to deploy the “outside” weapon of the inside-outside strategy. The party’s future may well hang in the balance.

This was a moment of truth for the WFP. When push came to shove, its successes made it more, not less, vulnerable to the intense pressure, not just from Cuomo, but the array of forces that ultimately had tied their coattails to the success of the Democratic Party itself.

---

The Toll of the Road Not Taken

This illustrates in stark terms the reality at the heart of any strategy that tries to build up the left’s forces inside the Democratic Party: There will never be a time that a break doesn’t come at a considerable short-term cost.

But there was an alternative, as there is today. As I wrote for Socialist Worker in 2014:

WFP leaders could have taken the bold step of endorsing Howie Hawkins, and added the WFP’s institutional clout to a real challenge to Cuomo. In the process, they would have opened up possibilities for a genuinely independent political alternative in New York. But this would have meant abandoning the non-negotiable core mission of their party — that to which every other struggle and principle must bow: To be a loyal opposition attempting to pressure the Democratic Party to the left.

There was widespread support for this alternative among WFP supporters and rank-and-file union activists who were loathe to get behind Cuomo. Some 40 percent of delegates at the WFP convention voted against his endorsement, and plenty of supporters defected to Hawkins in the general election.

Hawkins and his running mate Brian Jones, a member of the International Socialist Organization, were able to consolidate some of this discontent. They won endorsements from six teachers’ union locals and several progressive Democratic clubs. With 184,000 votes, Hawkins tripled his total from 2010, receiving the most votes of any third-party candidate in decades.

Meanwhile, WFP leaders, along with supporters such as the Nation magazine, were forced to make the tortured argument that voting for everything people hated, but on the WFP ballot line, was the best way to advance a progressive agenda.

The Nation invoked DSA founder Michael Harrington in its editorial endorsement: “Yes, this is practical politics. But it is a practical politics of the left — what author and democratic socialist Michael Harrington used to refer to as ‘the left wing of the possible.’”

The WFP held onto its line, but just barely. As several unions began the stream of defections from the party, the activist base grew increasingly angry — especially when Cuomo failed to deliver on the promises he made as part of de Blasio’s deal.

This set the stage for the situation today. The WFP found itself in an untenable position: Endorse Cuomo for a third time and lose all credibility in a climate in which Bernie Sanders had shown the popularity of a Democratic primary challenge — or risk its funding and institutional clout, not to mention the wrath of a powerful governor, to back Nixon.

That the WFP chose the latter speaks to the desire for change among the party’s base. But unfortunately, it doesn’t signal a fundamental shift away from the inside-outside strategy.

The WFP already had a backup plan in place to move Nixon off the WFP line for governor if she loses the Democratic primary. The party’s political director, Bill Lipton, has stated multiple times that the WFP will not be a “spoiler” — by siphoning off votes from the Democrat that could lead to a Republican victory.

And while the WFP is supporting Nixon at the top of the ticket, it has endorsed a host of Democrats further down the ballot, some of whom could barely be considered progressive. Ironically, and much to the party’s chagrin, Joe Crowley remains the WFP candidate for the House seat where he lost the Democratic primary to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In endorsing Crowley over Ocasio-Cortez, the WFP was making the same calculated decision it has routinely: to back the candidate they thought would be the winner over the one that agreed with their progressive politics, in order to maintain influence and not alienate the Democratic machine.

The WFP is caught in a predicament that Howie Hawkins described well in an op-ed article: “I feel for rank-and-file WFP progressives. It’s an abusive relationship. They got double-crossed by Cuomo in 2014 when they endorsed him. This year, they got strong-armed by Cuomo when they didn’t.”

The future of the WFP hangs even more in the balance then it did in 2014. But the stakes for socialists trying to develop an electoral strategy are also high.

By endorsing Nixon’s campaign — which squarely accepts the limitations of the WFP’s method by renouncing an independent “spoiler” campaign — the DSA is endorsing a compromised strategy, and at exactly the moment that a real independent alternative could attract people.

---

DSA and the Endorsement Debate

THE NIXON endorsement debate within DSA has also shed light on the arguments that those committed to the Democratic Party at all costs will use against a left that hopes to use the Democrats’ ballot line for its own ends.

In an op-ed article for DSA’s website, Charles Lechner offered up “ten theses” on Nixon and socialism that downright bait his own organization. He writes:

The fact that so many of our active members are young and white, and so many leaders are young white men, creates the impression that we might be brash, arrogant, untrustworthy, temporary and not worth investing time in. It’s on us to correct such perceptions with our actions (such as endorsing Nixon/Williams), not with statements about our ideology/strategy (which make us look weird).

Lechner, a founder of People for Sanders, seems to lack any awareness that these were the same spurious arguments used by Democratic Party operatives against Bernie Sanders’ campaign two years ago. Equally ironic, they follow the reasoning of union leaders who have cut ties with the WFP and are supporting Cuomo.

These are arguments that the Democratic Party machine has always used to shame and isolate those who challenge it. The left should have no part of them.

Lechner’s argument is the stick, but the carrot offered in defense of endorsing Nixon has been the promise that this can be a means for the left to win meaningful victories. A statement signed by more than 90 DSA members in support of a Nixon endorsement argues:

It is not hyperbole to say that both of our citywide priorities [universal rent control and a single-payer health care system] live or die based on the Nixon/Williams bid for statewide office. No other candidates with a realistic ability to win this year have demonstrated anything close to the passionate support of our two priorities that Nixon/Williams have. The basic needs of millions of our fellow New Yorkers are on the line.

Leaving aside the fact that a Nixon victory is unlikely, the idea that our side will “live or die” based on who wins the governor’s office betrays a very narrow vision of socialism.

While there is ample reason to believe that Nixon would be more committed to left-wing causes than Cuomo, she would still face the institutional clout of Corporate America, which maintains a grip on both parties in power.

This transactional, electoral-based understanding of power is what drives left and working-class dependence on the Democratic Party beyond DSA. By the same logic, health care unions are backing Cuomo, despite eight years of attacks, because he has promised a safe-staffing bill that would benefit their members.

The DSA members who argued against an endorsement are right to insist: “We do not share this theory of power. We believe that our fight for socialism lives or dies by the working class fighting for themselves, not by who sits in the governor’s mansion.”

---

An Independent Socialist Campaign

The irony here is that there is a genuinely independent socialist alternative on offer in New York this year: the campaign of Howie Hawkins and Jia Lee.

Hawkins is a recently retired Teamster driver for UPS who has dedicated his life to building independent politics and working-class organization. He is actively involved in fights against fracking, for climate justice, against mass incarceration and much more.

Lee is a New York City teacher who was a leader in the fight against high-stakes testing — a campaign that forced Cuomo to put a moratorium on an evaluation system that linked teacher scores to student scores.

Both are socialists, and Lee is a member of the DSA. Whereas Nixon’s responses to the DSA candidate questionnaire gave vague lip service to democratic socialist values, Hawkins and Lee offered a bold vision. Hawkins wrote:

To me, socialism means the movement for self-emancipation by working class and oppressed people. Socialism means democracy. Rosa Luxemburg: “There is no democracy without socialism, and no socialism without democracy.”

Hawkins goes on to insist that socialism entails social ownership of the means of production, independent political action by the exploited and oppressed, uprooting racism and all other forms of oppression, and international solidarity by the working class and oppressed across borders.

It’s an inspiring vision that could connect with tens of thousands of people eager to learn more about socialism.

Socialists who are supporting Nixon contend that a third-party challenge like Hawkins-Lee is symbolic. If the definition of symbolic is that it has no real chance of winning, then this is inarguable. Then again, a Nixon victory is a long shot, too.

But if the goal is to deepen the influence of socialist ideas, present a genuine working-class alternative and lay the basis for political independence, then this campaign could represent an important step forward for our side.

More attention is being paid to what socialists have to say than has been true for decades. If ever there was a time for socialists to speak confidently for what they believe in, it is now. And if ever there was a campaign representing a vision that speaks to the desire for a socialist alternative at the ballot box, it is Hawkins-Lee.

Socialists have a choice. We can use the platform we’ve been given to further advance the idea that working class people ourselves have the power to fight for a different future, and build a political alternative at the ballot box reflecting that. Or we can tie our fortunes to candidates of a party that is willing to use us when it seems convenient, but will turn on us the moment we become a real threat.

Nixon has promised to give Cuomo a run for his money this year, but she has shown no commitment to seeing that fight through beyond that. By contrast, we know that Hawkins and Lee will be on the ballot in November — and will be with us in the struggles to come.

We have the opportunity to start now in laying the basis for a real alternative for the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who won’t want to choose on Election Day between a Republican and a Democrat they despise.

Getting a Grip on Slavoj Žižek (with Slavoj Žižek)

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek is famous for his provocative takes, but how should we understand his basic ideas?

Mike Bulajewski

https://daily.jstor.org/getting-a-grip-on-slavoj-zizek-with-slavoj-zizek/

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural critic, and Lacanian psychoanalyst. A prolific writer and lecturer, he is best known for his seemingly endless supply of brilliant and provocative insights into contemporary politics and culture.

From his home in Ljubljana, Žižek was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about how we should best understand his ideas. In the wide-ranging style that he has come to be known for, I also learned why he cannot resist a dirty joke, why the task of philosophy is to corrupt the youth, and why the man once dubbed “the most dangerous philosopher in the West” is aiming at something much more modest.

Mike Bulajewski: What is the best text to read to understand your work?

Slavoj Žižek: Although there are a couple of candidates to understand the philosophical background, maybe the first book of my colleague and friend Alenka Zupančič on Lacan and Kant, Ethics of the Real, comes pretty close to the top.

But it depends which type of writing you mean because obviously in the last decade or so I’ve written two types of things: on the one hand, these more philosophical books, usually about Hegel, post-Hegelian thought, Heidegger, the transcendental approach to philosophy, brain sciences, and so on. On the other hand, more politically engaged work. First, I think that my philosophical books are much superior. My more political writings like The Courage of Hopelessness, Against the Double Blackmail, and so on, these are things that I myself don’t fully trust. I think I’m writing them just to say something that I always expect somebody else should have said. Like, why are others who are more professional not doing it?

Of philosophical books, I think it’s the one that comes after Less Than Nothing: Absolute Recoil. I think this is the ultimate statement of my philosophical position up until now. Now I’m trying to catch up with that one because I’m always obsessed by the idea that the essential insight skipped me, that I didn’t catch it. My big trauma was finishing that mega book Less Than Nothing. It’s over 1,000 pages, but immediately after finishing it I was afraid I didn’t catch the basic thought, so I tried to do it in Absolute Recoil. But it’s a more difficult book.

What do you think is the most misunderstood concept in your work? Do you think there’s something that we, the readers, don’t want to understand?

It’s not so much a concept as maybe a topic. I think that my philosophical books are not even so widely read, and they are usually misunderstood. What I aim at is a very precise intervention. We are in a certain very interesting philosophical moment where the deconstructive approach, which in different versions was predominant in the last couple of centuries, is gradually disappearing. Then we have—how should I call it—the new positivism, brain sciences, even quantum physics—these scientific ways to reply to philosophical questions. Stephen Hawking said in one of his later books that today, philosophy is dead, science is approaching even basic philosophical questions, and he was right in some sense. Today, if you ask, “Is our universe finite or infinite? Do we have an immortal soul or not? Are we free or not?” People look to answers for these questions in evolutionary biology, brain sciences, quantum physics—not in philosophy.

So, between these two extremes, is there a place for philosophy proper? Not just this deconstructionist, historicist reflection asking, “What is the social context or the discursive context of a work,” but also not a naïve realism, let’s look at reality how it is, and so on. Usually this basic thrust of my work is not understood. So, for me, it is quite comical how I am often for the same work attacked by both sides attributing to me the opposite position. For some Habermasian theorists of discourse, I am a naïve psychoanalytic positivist. For brain scientists, I am a still naïve European metaphysician or whatever.

But now we come to the interesting part. In my political writings, I noticed, the same is happening. You remember, maybe you caught an echo of the ridiculous exchange I had a few months ago with Jordan Peterson. You know what I find so comical there? On the one hand, politically correct, transgender, #MeToo people attacked me for being—I don’t know—anti-politically correct, anti-gay basically, even a Trump supporter, alt-right guy or whatever. Many of them—especially after my criticism of some of the aspects of #MeToo and the transgender movement—see me as an enemy. But the large majority of partisans of Jordan Peterson who reacted to my two short texts attacked me as a pure example of deconstructionism, cultural Marxism, and so on. What was really interesting about their reactions to my work was how, for the same text, I am often attacked by both sides. My old political book, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, I find it quite funny… My Arab friends accused me of being too sympathetic to Zionism and that I am spreading some Zionist lies there and so on. An Egyptian friend told me there was an attack on my book in Al Achram, the main Egyptian daily, almost two decades ago, attacking me as the most perfidious Zionist propaganda. On the other hand, Jerusalem Post, the main center-right daily in Israel, attacked me as the most dangerous version of new anti-Semitism.

So, this is what I find superficially interesting in reactions to my work. I think it is a sad proof that people are not really reading it and following the line of argument, they just look for some short passages and quotes which can be read in their way. But I am not a pessimist because of this. I follow here Jean-Paul Sartre, who said that if, for the same text, you are attacked by both sides, it’s usually one of the few reliable signs that you are in the right.

Is there something symptomatic about that? In the sense that between two sides, pro- and anti-Zionism, they’re trying to reassert the parameters of the discourse or the debate. It’s O.K. to be on either side at some level, but to occupy some kind of third position is most destructive, or controversial, position. Are we locked in these debates?

Yes, these are false debates, that’s my thesis. For example, look at transgender political correctness and #MeToo. You would have thought that the only choice is either morally conservative common-sense criticism of politically correct transgender “excesses” or fully supporting transgenderism. My position here is, of course, not to criticize #MeToo or the transgender position from the right-wing or conservative attitude, but from the progressive way. My reproach to the #MeToo movement is not that they are too crazy, too moralist—no! It is that their moral puritanism and fanaticism is really not radical enough.

For me, advocates of political correctness are of course basically right. Women are oppressed, there is racism, and so on. But the way they approach it doesn’t work. I am not advocating some third space of a compromise. I am saying the way these problems are approached is, in its entirety, both poles, is wrong. Let me give you an example which is often considered problematic. There is a big debate now, and it is a totally justified debate: how do you do dating, seduction, after #MeToo? What are the new rules? As you probably know, I’ve written about it.

One of the rules people try to emphasize is the right to say no at any moment. Like, let’s say you, as a woman, you are seduced, you say yes. Then in the middle of sexual activity you discover your partner is rough, inconsiderate, there’s something vulgar about him or you become aware that your yes was an enforced yes. You have the right to withdraw. But a new form of extremely humiliating violence, not physical violence but mental violence, is opened up if we just follow this rule. Let’s say a guy is seducing a girl. She says yes sincerely; it is not an enforced yes. And when she gets fully excited and so on, all red in the face, the guy says, “Sorry, I have the right to withdraw, I changed my mind.”

My point here is not that sometimes no doesn’t mean no. It always means no. I’m just saying that sexuality is a complex domain with implied meanings, ambiguities. You cannot translate it into rules. And that is my basic reproach to the way I read their proposals. The #MeToo new seduction rules precisely are under the spell of a certain legalism. They think the solution is to explicate the rules. The problem cannot be solved at this level. That’s all that I wanted to say.

I’m not downplaying violence. My obsession—and I think it is a big legacy of critique of ideology of the last centuries, is how a certain rule, slogan or practice which may appear to open up the space for new freedom, emancipation, nonetheless can be misused or has potentially dangerous consequences. As I said viciously at some point, I don’t bring clear answers; I like to complicate things. Usually people say a philosopher when you are confused should bring clarity. I say no! We think we see things clearly in daily life; I long to confuse things.

You mentioned Jordan Peterson, and he is influenced by Carl Jung. Do you have any comments about psychoanalysis in general? Because at least in the United States, we probably are primarily influenced from Anna Freud’s ego psychology? Carl Jung is influential in some ways, partly through the New Age movement…

Don’t underestimate Jung’s influence. In most countries, Freud is seriously debated, but more in literary criticism, maybe in psychology, philosophy, and theoretical circles. But Jung’s work is much more popular. His books are best sellers. For example, after the fall of communism in Russia, ex-Soviet Union, forget about Freud, I was told that Jung was selling hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies, and so on. And of course, here, O.K., we don’t have time to go into detail, but I claim here I am an old-fashioned Stalinist. Jung is a wrong way. Jung is a New Age obscurantist reinscription of Freud. But, you know, in my debate with Jordan Peterson, I totally ignored the Jungian aspect.

Where I see red (as they say) is how Peterson makes a sudden jump from criticism of #MeToo and of transgender politics to his obsession with the terror of cultural Marxism in a totally illegitimate way. All of a sudden he mobilizes one of the basic ideological motifs of new conservatives in Europe, which is that after the fall of Stalin, after the revolution failed in Western Europe in 1920s, some mysterious Communist center decided we cannot destroy the West directly, we must first destroy it morally, its Christian ethical foundations, so through the Frankfurt School and so on, they mobilized the cultural Left. And they see all these phenomena—radical feminism, transgenderism, and so on—as the final outcomes of so-called cultural Marxism and its bent to destroy the West. Now, I consider this a total nonsense which is even factually inaccurate.

It is interesting to reread texts by Horkheimer, Adorno, and other great names of the Frankfurt School. For example, one should reread today Horkheimer’s text from late 30s “Authority and Family,” where Horkheimer does not simply condemn the patriarchal family, but emphasizes how in today’s capitalist society, patriarchal society is very ambiguous. Yes, it is the model of oppression and so on, but at the same time without paternal authority, a child cannot develop an autonomous moral stance which would enable him to gain some kind of ethical autonomy to critically oppose society. So, for Horkheimer and later Adorno, things are clear. A society without paternal authority is a society of youth gangs, of young people who elevate peer values, who are not able to take a critical stance toward society, and so on. It’s ridiculous how inaccurate this image is that paints the terror of cultural Marxism.

My view here is exactly the opposite. What people like Jordan Peterson call cultural Marxism is precisely, as I put it a little bit aggressively, one of the last bourgeois defenses against Marxism. It is falsely radical. I’m not saying that Bernie Sanders is a Marxist. He is just a relative moderate measured by the standards of half a century ago, but he is maybe the first serious American social democrat in the last decades. But did you notice how there were immediate clashes between him and transgender and #MeToo people? Once he said in a famous statement—that’s why I like Bernie Sanders—that it’s not enough for a woman to say, “I’m a Latina, vote for me.” We should also ask, “O.K., nice, but what’s your program?” Just for saying that he was attacked for white supremacism. This is why I think that this so-called cultural Left is one of the main culprits for democratic defeat, the price left-liberals paid for their obsession with these cultural issues. My god, you remember a year and a half ago, if you opened up the New York Times, you’d have thought the main problem is what type of toilet we should have. Then you get Trump!

Can you comment on your style? From various things I’ve heard you say, you’re uncomfortable being treated as an intellectual authority, as a type of a father figure. There’s the dirty jokes, you’ve said you don’t like the formal titles of “Professor Žižek?”

But I take my work seriously. I don’t want to be treated with respect because I think there is always a hidden aggression with respect. At least in my universe, and maybe I live in a wrong universe, this type of respect always subtly implies that you don’t take someone’s work totally seriously. I don’t want to be respected as a person. I don’t care how you call me, Slavoj or an idiot, whatever. I want you to focus on my work.

Here, I am a little bit divided. You know where maybe you can catch me? On the one hand I say that I want you to focus on my work. But in my work and maybe even more so in my speech, there is obviously some kind of compulsion to be amusing and to attract attention. So yes, I have a problem. This is why I more and more like writing and not public speeches and talking. Because in writing, you can focus on what it is all about. And I will tell you something that will surprise you. The best lesson that I had in the last decades is how my philosophical books, which are considered unreadable, too long, too difficult, often sell better than my political books. Isn’t this wonderful?

The lesson is we shouldn’t underestimate the public. It’s not true what some pessimists say, that people are idiots, you should write short books, just reporting or giving practical advice—no. There still is a serious intellectual public around. That’s what gives me hope.

We often expect intellectuals to conform to a certain image of seriousness when they appear in public, and obviously you don’t do those kinds of things, and maybe you even undermine this image. Does that limit your influence?

Yes, I agree with you. It’s a very nice insight. You can say up to a point that what some people take my so-called popularity as basically a subtle argument against me. People say, “He’s funny, go listen to him, but don’t take him too seriously.” And this sometimes hurts me a little bit because people really often ignore what I want to say. For example, the point of madness was reached here—maybe you read it—John Gray’s review of Less Than Nothing in the New York Review of Books. It’s a complex book on Hegel. I made this test with my friends who had only read Gray’s review. I asked them what was their impression of the book? What do I claim in the book? They didn’t have any idea. The review just focuses on some details which are politically problematic, excesses, and so on. But my God, I wrote a book on Hegel. What do I say in it? It is totally ignored. But on the other hand, I think I shouldn’t complain too much here, because, you know, this happens to philosophers. It is happening with Heidegger, with the Frankfurt School, with Lacan, and so on. One simply has to resign to it and accept it. Philosophers are here mostly to be misunderstood.

Does the darkness of your work come through more in your movies, the Pervert’s Guide to…?

I never thought about it, but can I tell you another secret here? Sophie Fiennes was very friendly with me and we did the two movies together, but do you know that I hated making them? It is so traumatic for me to perform in front of a camera, especially to be treated as an actor. Like once I was improvising something for 20 minutes, and then Sophie Fiennes told me, “It was excellent, Slavoj, but there was some problem with the sound. Could you do it again?” She is my friend but at that point I was ready to kill her! You know, who cares about the fucking sound, my God. I was successfully developing a line of thought; I was improvising; I wasn’t acting in the sense of following a script, and now let’s go back and do it again? It was a nightmare.

But the tone comes through. The movies have a certain ominous quality.

You are right here, and you know what is important here? This is maybe one of the existential wagers of my work, to use this fashionable term. To be a radical leftist, you don’t have to be some kind of a stupid optimist, where you believe that, if not for capitalism and oppression, people would be happy, and we are building a new society, and so on. No! In my last theoretical book, Incontinence of the Void, I go openly into how, at a different level, if there will be something like communism, maybe people will be much unhappier. Life will be much more tragic. I don’t think we should confuse happiness and these psychological categories with progressive politics.

Bottom of Form

I wrote something published in The Philosophical Salon attacking happiness studies, and I go to the end there. I claim that happiness is not an ethical category; it is a category of compromise. To be happy, you have to be hypocritical and stupid. I’m getting more and more dark here. I think that—if I may use this bombastic category—creativity is something that does not make you happy. It is something very traumatic and painful. It is the same with love: There is no happy love, not in the sense that it always goes wrong, but if you remember how it is being really passionately in love, my God! Your peace of life is ruined; everything is thrown out of balance, and this intensity is what matters. There is nothing happy about it.

You write in Incontinence of the Void: “Only hysteria produces new knowledge, in contrast to the University discourse, which simply reproduces it.” How should we think about this statement in relation to what you are trying to achieve with your work?

I’m not new here. I’m repeating Lacan here, Freud already. The target there, if you remember correctly, is perversion. My old animosity to May ‘68, where the idea is perverts are radical. They even quote Freud, who wrote that hysterics are ambiguous, since they just provoke the master with a secret call for a new, more authentic master, while perverts go to the end. And here I think we should totally change the coordinates. No! Perverts are constitutive of power. Every power needs a secret pervert underground, backside.

But now we have Trump, and Trump is on the side of perversion, no? He seems to revel in transgressing norms.

Up to a point, yes. Who for me is the symptom of Trump? Steve Bannon. If you look at his economic proposals, he says something that is usually attributed to the Left and that no social democracy today dares to do: raise the taxes to 50% for the rich, big public works, and so on. And that’s the general tragedy of our time, that Left moderates have become the cultural Left and the new populist Right is taking over even many of the old social democratic motifs. Social democracy in Europe, even more than in the U.S., is disappearing. That’s why I think people like Bernie Sanders are important.

As some intelligent observers wrote, Sanders succeeded in mobilizing for the Left many people who would have otherwise voted for Trump. But on the other hand, when you ask about Trump as perversion, yes, I agree with you, especially in this sense—here I am a classical moralist. For me the new motto of the Left should be, “We are the Moral Majority.” What I mean is this: Look at Trump’s speech and how the level of public discourse has degraded. Things he says publicly were unthinkable two, three decades ago. And it’s not just the United States. We in Europe are no better. I really think we live in a time of let’s call it ideological regression. History is not necessarily progressive. This is what Hitler did with fascism. Things that were already part of public life but strictly limited to crazy conversation in some small cafeteria where you talk all the obscenities becomes part of public speech. Again, it is happening also in Europe.

O.K., going back to “Only hysteria produces new knowledge…”

Remember what hysteria is? To simplify it, from a psychoanalytic standpoint, society confers on you a certain identity. You are a teacher, professor, woman, mother, feminist, whatever. The basic hysterical gesture is to raise a question and doubt your identity. “You’re saying I’m this, but why am I this? What makes me this?” Feminism begins with this hysterical question. Male patriarchal ideology constrains women to a certain position and identity, and you begin to ask, “But am I really that?” Or to use the old Juliet question from Romeo and Juliet, “Am I that name?” Like, “Why am I that?” So hysteria is this basic doubting of your identity.

People often identified me as a hysteric with my outbursts. O.K., why not? I am hysterical. But you know what gave me hope? Lacan beautifully designated Hegel as “le plus sublime des hysteriques,” the most sublime of all hysterics, because dialectics is precisely this reflexive self-questioning, questioning of every position. That’s why Hegel was aware of the feminine dimension. In his reading of Antigone, he said that woman is the eternal irony of human history, precisely through these ironic questions. I experienced this a couple of times—this is primitive sexual difference, but I think there is a moment of truth here—that when I am talking with a woman, sometimes I get engaged into my reflections and, all of a sudden, I get caught into my own game of taking myself too seriously. And then I see in the woman, my partner in conversation, a kind of a silent mocking gaze—like, “What, are you bullshitting me?” No direct brutal irony, just a silent gaze which destroys you.

Your work has sometimes been criticized as not systematic. Is that intentional? You mentioned previously that, as a philosopher, what you’re trying to do is not to clarify, so much as to problematize.

At the same time, I must say that although I like to use jokes and stories, I do try to put things clearly. But I am here in good company. Take Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, maybe the greatest philosophical work of all time. It was often reproached for the same reason: that it is not clear what Hegel’s position is, that he just seems to jump from one position to another, ironically subverting it, and so on. In a way, from the very beginning, from Socratic questioning, philosophy is this. Without this hysterical questioning of authority, there is no philosophy, which is why, as my friend Alain Badiou recently put it, it is not an accident that Socrates was condemned to death for corrupting the youth. Philosophy has done this from the very beginning. The best definition of philosophy is “corrupting the young,” in the sense of awakening them from an existing dogmatic worldview. This corrupting is more complex today, because constant self-doubt, questioning, and irony is the predominant attitude. Today, official ideology is not telling you, “Be a faithful Christian,” but some sort of post-modernist ideal, “Be true to yourself, change yourself, renovate yourself, doubt everything.” So now the way we corrupt young people is getting more complex.

You are often described as a very provocative thinker, but this seems overstated to me. Do you think you are in fact not provocative at all?

That’s a really nice insight. I really like it. I’m always telling people who claim, “You know you are talking madness, you cannot mean it seriously.” Whenever they say something like that, I immediately explain it in a way which makes it almost common sense, and I’m not saying anything big or revolutionary. I’m saying that today we need a little bit more radical politics, but like, social democracy. I’m very much against all this Nietzschean “against good and evil” ideas. I’m for kind of a common morality. There are no big provocations here.

Even in philosophy, I’m not claiming I’m bringing out something radically new. I’m just trying to explain what I see already there in Hegel. But I will tell you something else I liked in what you said, and that’s my maybe silent hope. Do you know that all big ruptures, or most of them, in the history of thought, occurred as a return to some origins? I always quote Martin Luther. His aim was not to be a revolutionary; his aim was to return to the true Christian message, against the Pope and so on. In this way, he did perform one of the greatest intellectual revolutions where everything changed and so on. I think it is a necessary illusion, paradoxically. To do something really new, maybe the illusion is necessary that you are really just returning to some more authentic past. It must be misperceived as being already there. And I will take the ultimate example here: As many people noticed, it is clear that when Jacques Lacan talks about the return to Freud, well, this Freud is to a large extent something that he rediscovered in Freud, but it is more that he filled in Freud’s gaps and so on. We should never forget that Lacan, who confused everything and brought a revolution to psychoanalysis, perceived himself just as someone who returned to Freud. That’s why I like this idea. For me, true revolutionaries always had a conservative side.

I will give you another example which maybe you will like. At the beginning of modernity, all those apparent radicals, empiricists, whatever, they really didn’t get it. One of the guys who really got what modernity is about is Blaise Pascal. But his problem was not, “Let’s break with the past,” but precisely how to remain orthodox Christian in the new conditions of science and modernity. As such, he understood much better what was emerging with modern science than all those scientific empiricist enthusiasts or whatever. What may appear as a conservative move is something that enables you to see things that others may not see.

Another example which has always fascinated me: the passage from silent to sound cinema. Those who resisted it spontaneously—from the Russian avant garde up to Charlie Chaplin—they perceived much more clearly the uncanny dimensions of what was happening there. As I developed in my books, for almost 10 years Chaplin resisted making a full sound movie, no? An early movie to use sound, City Lights, just uses music. Then in Modern Times, you hear sounds and human speech, but it is always sound which is part of the narrative. For example, you hear human speech if it is the voice of a radio shown in the movie. Only with The Great Dictator do you have speaking actors. But who is the agent of sound? Hitler, with this wild shouting. So Chaplin as a conservative saw this threatening, living-dead, destabilizing dimension of the voice, while those idiotic proponents of sound cinema perceived the situation in stupid realist terms, “Fine, now that we have also sound, we can reproduce reality in a more realist convincing way.”

That’s why I don’t like a guy like Ray Kurzweil. In his idea of Singularity, he misses something. It’s so simple, like, yes, we will all become part of the singularity. He doesn’t even address the key questions: How will this change our identity? He kids there. He thinks all these great things will happen, but we will somehow remain the same human beings, just with additional abilities.

Fox & Friends Poll Designed to Discredit Medicare for All Explodes in Their Face

"A majority say yes to healthcare for all! The benefits: Guaranteed medical care, dental, vision and hearing, for all Americans, free at the point-of-care. The savings: $2 trillion over 10 years."

by Jake Johnson, staff writer

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/08/01/fox-friends-poll-designed-discredit-medicare-all-explodes-their-face

When President Donald Trump's favorite right-wing television program "Fox & Friends" launched a Twitter poll on Tuesday asking whether the benefits of Medicare for All "outweigh the costs," they likely didn't expect 73 percent of the nearly 32,000 respondents to answer yes—but that's precisely what happened.

"Bernie Sanders' 'Medicare for all' bill estimated to cost $32.6 trillion, new study says. Would the benefits outweigh the costs?" the survey asked, referencing a recent Koch Brothers-funded study that found Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-Vt.) universal healthcare program would save $2 trillion over ten years—a fact that "Fox & Friends" conveniently neglected to mention in both its poll and its coverage of the new analysis.

Despite the misleading framing "Fox & Friends" deployed, the results of the unscientific survey were overwhelming.

Bonnie Castillo, executive director of National Nurses United, responded to the poll results on Twitter, when just 13,000 people had voted:

The failed attempt by "Fox & Friends" to falsely document Medicare for All as unpopular—despite recent surveys showing that progressive policies like single-payer are experiencing unprecedented support, including among Republicans—fits an emerging pattern of right-wing media outlets falling face-first in their attempts to discredit commonsense, straightforward, and bold ideas.

As Common Dreams reported, right-wing Daily Caller editor Virginia Kruta attended a rally last week featuring a speech by democratic socialist congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In an appearance on Fox News, Kruta recounted the "truly terrifying" experience of hearing Ocasio-Cortez advocate policies that "everybody wants, especially if you're a parent."

"They talk about education for your kids, healthcare for your kids, the things that you want," Kruta said of democratic socialists like Ocasio-Cortez.

Responding to Kruta's remarks, journalist Sarah Jaffe asked, "Does Fox know that they're unwittingly creating commercials for socialism?"

I Was Warned Not To Go Up Against Hillary Clinton | Tulsi Gabbard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eq1IOK7pkq0