"Zizek Delenda Est" full transcript

"Zizek Delenda Est" (Žižek must be destroyed) Left Forum Panel Transcript
Audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrEJW3INm58
Text is broken up for ease of reading and does not necessarily indicate change of topic or speaker.

Last updated 2/9/2018.

Jacob Levich: Slavoj Zizek has been variously characterized as the Elvis of cultural theory, the most dangerous philosopher in the West, and the world's leading Marxist philosopher. He has been named by the neoconservative foreign policy magazine as one of a hundred most important local public intellectuals alive today. This panel has already generated a certain amount of controversy online and even a little bit of my generation (?) and I have no doubt that some of the attendants will disagree with what our panelists have to say today but you'll have an opportunity to respond to and question the panelists later this afternoon, so, I would ask that we hold comments until then. My name is Jacob Levich, I'm no expert on Zizek. I'm here purely to moderate and facilitate, and I'll leave the analysis to the panelists and to you. I will put in a plug for a panel that I have, that I'm running tomorrow called Toxic Philanthropy, the Gates Foundation, Public Health and Imperialism, and that's going to be at noon tomorrow, and that is a subject on which I have some small expertise, whereas today I have very little to none.

(1:15) By way of introduction let me quote from a profile of Zizek that appeared recently in the New York review of books. Born and educated in Ljubljana, the capital of the People's Republic of Slovenia, of the former Yugoslav federation until the federal state began to break up, and Slovenia declared independence in 1990, Zizek has held academic positions in Britian, America and Western Europe as well as in Slovenia. His prodigious output, over 60 volumes since his first book in English, "The Sublime Object of Ideology" that was published in 1989. Innumerable articles and reviews, together with films, such as Zizek! and the Pervert's Guide to Cinema, have given him a presence that extends far beyond the academy. [unintelligible] Particularly film, he has a following among young people in many countries, including those in post-communist Europe. He has an entire journal dedicated to his work, The International Journal of Zizek Studies founded in 2007. His readership(?) is registered via Facebook and in October 2011 he addressed members of the Occupy movement in Zuccotti Park in New York, in an event that was widely presented [unintelligible] on YouTube. If any of the summary I've just quoted understates the breadth of Zizek's fame and the depth of his influence, his thoughts on current affairs are disseminated to a global audience through columns in the Guardian, London Review of Books, he's a regular presence on the BBC, LaMonde, the New York Times, The New Left Review, Rupert Murdoch's Vice, ProPublica, der Spiegel, et al. His books are consistently among the best-selling academic literature in the English language. For many mainstream newspapers and television news broadcasts, Zizek is the go-to leftist for commentary on the latest obsessions in popular culture and political affairs. He has become virtually an industry in himself. Now as Marxists and as consumers of mass media, I hope all of us at this point all of us have learned to take a critical attitude towards ideas and narratives that are enthusiastically promoted by the mainstream. We know, for instance, that many of the leading left-ish journals of the 1950s, including Encounter and the Partisan Review, were funded by the U.S., by a front organization, CIA front organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom. We know that one of the most effective pieces of war propaganda preceding the first Gulf War, a story about Iraqi soldiers throwing babies out of incubators in a Kuwait hospital, was a complete fabrication concocted by what was then the world's largest public relations firm. There was no (?).

(4:40) We know from the investigative journalist and (?) prize-winning reporter Carl Bernstein that U.S. intelligence agencies work hand-in-glove with major news organizations. I could go on, but my point is simply this: in a world of ubiquitous stealth marketing, covert propaganda operations, internet sock puppets, et cetera, things are seldon what they seem. So, I would ask you to listen with an open mind as our panelists take a close look at the agenda of Slavoj Zizek and his legion of acolytes and promoters. Now, I should say that John Steppling and Hannah Wolfe who were listed to be on this panel were unable to attend today. So, we do have today Molly Klein and Ethan Hallerman, and we'll start by hearing from Ethan Hallerman who's a graduate student at the law school (?).

Ethan Hallerman: Hi, thanks Jake. So, more and more there have been reviews of Zizek's work published that have expressed concerned that he is or he effectively is a fascist, or a left fascist. Writers have expressed concern for his praise of authoritarian violence, his contempt for democracy and its defenders, his vituperation against anti-racism and feminism. There's one defense against this I wanted to look at. This is something that was published by Adam Kotsko, who's written on Zizek. He published an article in the LA Review of Books that was meant to present an alternate reading of Zizek that would show why these concerns are baseless. Kotsko says that these dismissals of Zizek are meant to say that Left-wing thinkers are "simultaneously laughable and dangerous, disorganized and totalitarian, overly idealistic and driven by a lust for power, all just to suggest that there is no alternative." But many of Zizek's critics ARE on the left and criticize him because he carries on what is very much a performance of a laughable, disorganized, authoritarian leftist. Kotsko suggests that critics suffer from the same kind of symptomatic contradictory [unintelligible] Zizek purports to diagnose, that readers of a review of his work always learn that he's politically dangerous, and a clown of no program(?), that he's an apologist of the worst excesses of 20th(?) century communism, and a total right-wing reactionary, over world famous left-moving (?) intellectual, and an anti-Semite to rival Hitler himself.  With the oppositions that the article sarcastically set up here aren't intrinsically contradictory in the way that it's meant to suggest, since somebody can be politically pernicious with an incoherent program, can praise authoritarian violence because they're a right-wing reactionary, and can be labelled a left-wing intellectual while also being a racist. Kotsko proposes that we should read Zizek's right-wing statements as a performance of over-identification, in other words, the claim is Zizek takes up, inhabits and advocates for right-wing ideas in order to show their contradictions. Which is basically kind of just a pretty standard definition of (?) critique, it's nothing particular to Zizek, what's distinct is the identification part, the idea that he has to spend his time arguing FOR these views, in order to (?) the contradictions.

(7:54) This is potentially, at first glance, I think an elegant explanation, and I think it works in some cases, but there are a lot of exceptions. I also want to point out that, at a minimum, like the best case scenario version of this, to do this, Zizek has to spend his time conceding a huge amount to the legitimacy of dominant media narratives, legitimating their effectual inaccuracies and ideological mystifications. But this also ends up basically working as an apologetic theology of Zizek, because it's still totally dependent on the reader to kind of figure out which are the things that Zizek are performatively, ironically inhabiting and what he means. It ends up amounting to being able to say, well, whatever we don't like, that's what he's performing, so he actually ends up meaning whatever it is that we think he should've meant. We can sort of assign anything he says that we're uncomfortable with as, oh, he doesn't mean that, he's just pretending.

(8:46) So I want to look at some instances to see whether this actually works as an explanation. Zizek has a habit of publishing on issues in the news cycle in a way that pushes discourse to the right. So, for example, the hagiography of Margaret Thatcher that he published in the New Statesman, which participated in a mass capitulation by not only left-ish mainstream media to Thatcher's suddenly great legacy, went even further than a typical boilerplate about her strong leadership style to advocate for mystical Schmittian political theology. Now I know [Carl] Schmitt is very in right now academically, I'm not saying that everything that tries to draw on right-wing thought is irrevocably tainted by fascism, but people should at least have a very good reason for using it since Schmitt was a Nazi who did directly take his project as an apologetics for Nazi glorification of the Führer. Although, Zizek doesn't mention Schmitt, he misattributes the theory to Winston Churchill. On the sheet here, you can see the first paragraph of the article. So, look at how Zizek uses the Schmittian. It's not for just constructing some general theory of sovereignty like Ugandan(?) or something but it's for praising the necessity of the kind of sovereign that Schmitt admired: a single individual with absolute power of decision. He even capitalizes the word "Master" throughout this whole thing.

(10:16) Someone who, through force of will operating beyond question is going to break through the deadlocks of liberal society's vitiating consensus process. And this is a common theme of Zizek's. Now, his anti-democracy, he's let us know now on many occasions, is not performance, it's something he sincerely believes, although, that's changed over the years. But it is one reactionary view that he's let on, he holds sincerely, and it's... I mean, if you read the article, the Thatcher one, it's easy close to Occupy Wall Street to talk about whether leftists need certain kinds of decision-making structures and organization: that's not what Zizek is doing, that's his entry, but what he ends up doing is he fences in and presents the debate around this in a certain way. First, he completely collapses any distinction among things like anarchist horizontalism and liberal democracy. All of that just gets characterized as democracy in general, and then he sets up this cartoonish opposition between all these forms of democracy, and the only alternative, which is, some kind of authoritarian dictator with the power of absolute decision. So, you see this again and again with Zizek. You have this really superficial reading that could excuse it, but there's no internal necessity for all the Nazi rhetoric about the unquestionable 'Master' to make this point. He constructs this false field of options, this weak left liberal one, and this very specifically, rhetorically specific fascist characterization of leadership, to say the latter is preferable. There's no real way to excuse this kind of decision by saying it's over-identification, because he's not criticizing the Nazi political theology, it's the view that he's advocating. We can see this in other instances also. So, one of Zizek's main themes is the value of the European legacy and this relationship to multiculturalism. He's written about this a lot. There was a New York Times op-ed in 2006 that he published called "Defenders of the Faith" that was his response to protests over the cartoons of Mohammad that were published in a Danish newspaper.

(12:38) Here, also, the moment of reversal never actually comes. The whole thing is this blatantly Euro-supremacist bombast about the threat from an irrational Muslim horde. It opens with this Richard Dawkins-type attack on religion as such, which is actually directed at Muslims. Leftists are always happy to make fun of Dawkins, rightly so, when he kind of spews this stuff, as this, superficially-coded white supremacist bile. But Zizek always gets a pass. This happens even though Zizek, who claims to be a Marxist, his public interventions are never materialist, Marxist, they're not even anti-capitalist. The whole thing relies on these Fox News-level mainstream media stereotypes. His whole analysis of the issue relies on him drawing his own cartoon, so he says, "these weird alliances confront Europe's Muslims with a difficult choice. The only political force that does not reduce them to second-class citizens, and allows them the space to express their religious identity, are the godless atheist liberals, while those closest to their religious social practice, their Christian mirror-image, are their greatest political enemies." All the action of these events, everything that actually happened, for example that there was a group of Danish imams that took the newspaper to court over this because they thought that it violated Danish laws against hate speech, all of that's erased, the whole thing is reduced to this kind of cartoonish stereotype where you've got these three positions that are abstracted into some kind of generalized significance and then Zizek can make his banal points about the clash of civilizations.

(14:09) He does this operation constantly: describe a specific political conflict in terms of these discrete sections that he's kind of arbitrarily divided it into, prescribe to each section some kind of intrinsic conceptual significance, like an action figure, a piece on a gameboard, and then rearrange the game pieces to propose a resolution on a conceptual level that has no relation to the actual events. He goes on to say, "what makes modern Europe unique, is that it's the first and only civilization in which atheism is a fully legitimate option, not an obstacle to any public post." So, ok, this is facily false for any number of reasons, and obviously, any of us could think of any number of non-European countries, or civilizations if you want, where atheism is permitted. As the saying goes, it's pure ideology. The idea of this discrete civilization, Europe, that has this essence of being this unique secular space, this is a piece of ideology with a specific history that fits alongside Zizek's clash of civilizations rhetoric perfectly. Zizek always says, ideology is really important, really think about ideology but he's always dispensing these kinds of right-wing cliches in his op-eds. He says that because atheism, unlike religious behavior, permits autonomous ethical choice, it's modern Europe's most precious legacy. So, Zizek's rigorous argument here is that Europe is the unique space in the world where autonomous ethical behavior is permitted. I mean, he goes on like this. He says respect for others' beliefs is the highest value, will only mean that we end up treating others patronizingly, or we adopt some kind of harmful relativism. This is characteristic of this kind of punditry operation as well, a folks'(?) choice is imposed so that we'll pick a side. Zizek is the only one talking about respect for others' beliefs as the highest value, but we don't really need it as the highest value to know that going into the New York Times to talk about Europe needing to defend itself from violent Muslims isn't something that we should be expecting from a leading Leftist philosopher. I mean, among other questions we could ask, isn't a case of bigoted expression the worst point to take a stance on like this given that Denmark and other countries in the EU have restrictions on hate speech. But Zizek really frequently uses racism as his go-to example of speech that's harmfully excluded from the public sphere.

(16:35) What Zizek writes in the New York Times op-ed is excerpted from, or parts of it are excerpted from a longer essay called "The Antinomies of Tolerant Reason" that you can find on his website. This was also written in 2006. He begins by talking about how fundamentalist Muslim rage comes from their – Muslims in general – it comes from an inner sense of their inferiority. He compares their feelings toward us towards Hitler's feeling toward the Jews. Zizek is going to compare Muslims, or "the Muslim world" to Hitler a few times in this essay. So the course is cheap pop psychology about millions of people as a group. He manages to conflate Muslim protestors – or any Muslims – with terrorists, to compare them with Hitler and affirm the kind of Bush-era rhetoric about clash of civilizations and World War III. The difference that Nazi hatred of Jews was based on propagandized lies is something that Zizek doesn't seem to see. He does something similar to what he does in the Times when he goes elsewhere, he kind of posits an antinomy between two positions that he himself conjures, he doesn't actually attribute these views to any existing individuals.

(17:58) He uses these sockpuppets of two Western liberals, it's always these Western liberals that articulate his views, along the way taking up this kind of maximally ambiguous voicing between the views he's inventing and his own explanation so it's not always clear whether any given utterance is attributable to the "liberal," or it's him explaining their view. In the course of doing this he talks about how Muslims are humorless, casually mentions that Muslims don't use toilet paper, and that they have a tribal superstition about writing as such with no concept of secular writing, and yeah if you squint and force it there's a tenuous case that he's speaking as a Western liberal but, which views? All of it, it's not clear. He does say there is more of this than there may appear. In any case, I don't know of any liberals who think that Muslims don't use toilet paper.  The cartoons, he goes on, mark the end of the myth of Scandinavian power. So tolerance was apparently a myth, according to Zizek and he takes this for granted. Racist attitudes were always there but were just suppressed and intensified. The role of the media, the rhetoric of political leaders, plays no role here and no actual or possible role in intensifying those attitudes. So Zizek's already smuggled in his conclusion. In the meantime he presents the prohibition against Holocaust denial charicaturishly as "sacred" and as an inner contradiction of liberalism, as he does elsewhere with prescriptions on hate speech. He goes on, at this point, unambiguously speaking for himself, that Muslim overreaction(?) was "rising up to murderous violence and expanding to the whole of Europe or of the West." In all this the idea that Danish Muslims aren't themselves Danish, aren't themselves EU citizens, all of this is pre-excluded. Now, Zizek who's going to return later to the notion of an essential deadlock of the world(?) thinking that threatens liberal society, hasn't said why this is an antinomy, rather than just a disagreement or a manner(?) a lapse in the [unintelligible] enforcement.

(20:07) We can agree that this instant, the talk (?) is something about Danish society. Zizek never explains why what if the talk (?) is the intrinsic weakness of political liberalism, and how it leaves us open to threats from foreigners rather than, maybe, an indication of the way that hostile bigotry from US, UK and Danish mainstream media aid imperial power through propaganda. He summons this air of inevitability as he allegorizes the incident to a sign of cultural malignancy. He goes on. "It's as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure will be on you." Continuing, "in the guise of the raging Muslim crowds we stumble upon the limits of multicultural liberal tolerance with its propensity for self-blaming and effort to understand the 'other'. Here the other is a REAL 'other' REAL in his hatred. We encounter the paradox of tolerance at its purest. How far, Zizek wonders, should tolerance for intolerance – meaning Muslims – go? Here we come to Zizek's point: Muslims are irrational, along with all the other racist cliches he's kind of casually tossed out here, and they compel us, solemnly or sorrowfully or whatever, to question the limits of our exquisite tolerance and enlightenment. This argument for the decadence of the pluralism of liberal society, because in its indifference to generosity, it permits the backdoor entry of a threat that's going to take advantage of our naive faith in law and an open public sphere. It's an argument with a history. It's the history that's laid out by writers like Sernho and Iche Landa (sp?) in their histories of fascist rhetoric and fascist cultural attitudes. The pattern of Zizek's rhetoric here is identical. He says what lurks at the horizon if we avoid this path, the deadlock of power and reason, is the nightmarish prospect of a society regulated by a perverse pact between religious fundamentalists and the politically correct creatures of tolerance and respect for the others' beliefs, a society immobilized by concern for not hurting the other, no matter how cruel and superstitious this other is.

(22:18) And if we had any reason to doubt his contempt is real he goes on to mention how there's a poetic justice in the fact that the all-Muslim outcry against godless Denmark (??) was immediately followed by a heightened violence between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq. Now, the promised resolution of the antinomy, the supposed antinomy of tolerance, does come at the end, albeit in slightly oblique language. And this is, the quote for this is on the handout too, tossing in quotes from Peter Sloterdijk, he explains that proximity with alien cultures will inevitably lead to violence. Glossing "alienation" to mean a distance from others unlike ourselves in social space, Zizek here using a very different sense from Hegel or Marx, to mean "a separation from other cultures" says, "what we need is more alienation." Then after spending a couple of paragraphs using Lacanian semiotics to suggest that cultures speaking different languages inevitably have incompatible worldviews and will clash, he adds this gem: "Perhaps the fact that reason, ratio, and race, have the same roots, tells us something." So here Zizek goes one better than the Heideggerian Wesensschau approach to etymology where the Greek or Latin meaning is the essential meaning of the word rather instead of just an older one, because this isn't even true, Zizek is just making this up, this etymology. So, you guys can tell me, why someone would invent a philosophico-linguistic myth that reason and race are essentially related. So, continuing on Zizek's interest in multiculturalism. In 2008, Sara Ahmed, a professor of race and cultural studies, wrote an article challenging Zizek's claim that multiculturalism is hegemonic. There was a conference where he said this repeatedly and that it was an empirical fact, but didn't really explain it. So in his response Zizek kind of doubles down on his claim, suggesting that Ahmed and others, by defending multiculturalism, are in fact, the REAL racists. Zizek claims with annoyance that the celebration of minorities is the dominant ideology of US and EU culture. He goes on to attack feminism or anti-patriarchy, along the way kind of gratuitously misusing this line from The Communist Manifesto which uses the term "patriarchy" in a completely different sense. This is also in the, this sheet here, this is in the essay called "Multiculturalism: The Reality of an Illusion."

(24:52) He says "the statement that patriarchal ideology continues to be today's hegemonic ideology, *is* today's hegemonic ideology. Its function is to enable us to evade the deadlock of the hedonistic permissiveness which is effectively hegemonic. So Zizek complains here about how liberal rights allow parents to sue their children, elsewhere he'll complain about how now with all your liberal freedoms people are allowed to fuck their dogs. It's a position you can get from John Derbyshire, anyone else who plays that role, and here it's coming from Zizek. Of course since Zizek is branded as a leftist, what he ends up doing is kind of re-signifying these views as left.

(25:33) Now note here Zizek isn't just saying that feminist critics of patriarchy overstate patriarchy's reach. He's saying opposition to and criticism of patriarchy is itself the hegemonic ideology. This is like, I mean, this is bullshit. It's a very common complaint among, for example, Men's Rights Activists that anti-patriarchy is hegemonic. Zizek will make similar claims in this essay and elsewhere about how anti-racism is hegemonic although obviously there's never been a time in the EU and the UK and the US when politicians weren't loudly making the same kind of histrionic complaints that Zizek's making here. This isn't something that he's performatively over-identifying with, this is his view, stated in his own voice. Ok, so there's one more thing from this essay that we should look at. Kind of casually halfway through a paragraph in the course of making another point, similar to how he brings up the Muslims not using toilet paper line, Zizek mentions this incident that happened in Slovenia. He says that there was a Roma family living on the edge of a Slovenian town called Ambrus that was harassing the villagers, stealing from them, making noise and threatening people and they even killed a guy. The townspeople, he says, formed a vigilante gang to chase them out. This excerpt from the essay is also in the handout. You can look at how he writes about it. So, he's using this to criticize the liberals who condemn the townspeople unsympathetically. So, ok, the argument is, the defense will go, he's making a point that abstract condemnation of racism doesn't actually address the causes of the incident, which, ok. But he's not just saying that anti-racism isn't enough, you also need some kind of, you know, theory or account of racism. He's attributing anti-racism exclusively to an imagined, anonymous group of sneering, urban upper-class liberals, comparing this image of the simple townsfolk, these farmers, who were left to themselves. You can also see, in the handout, some excerpts from how the Guardian described the events. "Wielding clubs, guns and chainsaws, several hundred villagers converged on the cottage in a clearing in the beach forest with a simple demand: 'Zig raus [Gyppos out],' they called in German, deliberately echoing Nazi racist chants. 'Bomb the Gypsies.' The mob threatened to bomb the family and crucify their children, one witness compared it to Kristallnacht. The police eventually intervened and they kind of acceded to the mob's demands by relocating the family. They resettled the family, the Strojan family, elsewhere. At one point they tried to come back, the family tried to come back to get their stuff, and according to the article, "a mob of 1000 people set up roadblocks and fought with riot police." There's also a New York Times article where you can read about this. So, Zizek was apologizing for a pogrom. He repeats racist, anti-Roma clichés: that they're dirty, they steal. He falsely accuses them of murdering someone, so it should probably go without saying that none of this is true. None of this was ever corroborated anywhere. But Zizek's interest is in blaming some abstract group of liberals that *he's* invented. He puts "racists" in scare-quotes. He implies a class contrast between the comfortable liberals who live in the city and the frightened people in their village which inverts the actual class relationship between the Slovenian majority and Ambrus. Both of the articles describe the town as being upper-middle class, and the Strojan family living at the edge of town. Zizek constantly attributes racism to the working class, and anti-racism exclusively to an imagined group of snooty cosmopolitan liberals. It's always racist populism. It's always hypocritical leftists who don't understand that racism is a working class attitude. Somehow, for Zizek, Muslims, immigrants, Black people, Roma, get excluded, over and over again, from Zizek's working class. Somehow those people are never themselves anti-racist, it's always something that belongs to the working class. Just like for Zizek, in this instance, the locals are the Slovenians but not the Strojan family that had been living there for decades. He always does this casually, in passing as if it's a given: homogenizing working class status with non-Muslim or Slovenian status. Again this transformation of working class solidarity into ethnic solidarity by deliberately blurring the two in rhetoric is also a specific rhetorical technique that belongs to a specific tradition. This wasn't just a one-time thing, the next year Zizek gave a lecture where he addressed that there'd been some reaction to his misrepresentation of the incident. His only response was to repeat his original claims more strongly, to say – and, you can find this also on the sheet, a transcription of what he said at the Birkbeck(?) Institute in 2010. He says, oh well according to his son's babysitter, don't idealize them, they really do steal, they really are like this. They, the Roma in general, steal from people, attack people, and so on.

(30:41) Emphasizing again, what we know to be false, that it's always upper middle class or at least middle class people who are blaming(?) the poor redneck ordinary guys, he says, being racists. The Strojans themselves, apparently, don't get a vote in this. So, I'd encourage people to play close attention to how much of Zizek's right-wing rhetoric, his anti-anti-racism, his anti-feminism, his authoritarianism, his valorization of violence as a good in itself, can't be written off as a performance, and to take him seriously in that regard. That he in fact does want an authoritarian terror(?) state instead of democracy, does think anti-racism and cultural mixing threaten white Christian Europe. Now of course there are some things that Zizek says that do still sound Left and that don't seem to line up with this. So first off, there are lots of views and utterances that by themselves you might call left-wing or seem left-ish, that do have a place historically in certain strands of right-wing thought. But there's another thing too. Kotsko's example of over-identification comes from Zizek's time, according to Kotsko, in Communist Yugoslavia. So, for example, during fixed elections, Zizek would pretend with exaggerated naivete that the election was really up for grabs, you know, to make a point that it wasn't.

(32:10) Now if, like Zizek, you think left-wing values dominate and threaten society as he says, then it just becomes a matter of which values to performatively over-identify with now.

(32:32) Jacob Levich: Thank you, Ethan. We will now hear from Molly Klein, former media analyst with an extensive knowledge of Zizek's career and writings.

(32:43) Molly Klein: Ok, that was really great. I hope everyone followed that. Let's start the story, I'm going to start with a quote from someone called, who calls himself Turbulent Velvet. "With Zizek, it's the smell. The affect, the affectation. It's the whole functional sociology of what he represents, how he massages the desire of those who endlessly tout him. I think now he occupies for the academic Left the same functional position that Nietzsche has, he's the primary current heir of that whole pathology. Nietzsche's hook has always been his identity as an intellectual, his pre-emption of any other model of what that could mean. Among the many dismal things that he's always seduced out of the Left is making an identity as an intellectual supersede other kinds of identifications. Training in Nietzsche appreciation serves a kind of forensic purpose on the Left: you have to pass radical muster by showing on the one hand that you're passionately angry at all the politically correct causes but that insofar as your identity as an intellectual is invoked, you'll renounce all your little democratic and empathetic naivetes and defend obviously fascist ideas and affect constellations as mere perspectivism or deconstructing aphoristic freeplay or whatever you're told to say this year. The content of the latest fashionable whitewash reading of Nietzsche isn't as important as the fact that you start working against the humane impulse that would make you object to so many aspects of his writing, and that you experience this suppression as a maturation. Nietzscheanism also provides a training in confusing emotive bombast and aphoristic sharpness for action and engagement. Just those two aspects of the pathology taken together underscore how and why Nietzscheanism could be so easily retrofitted as a proxy for the defense of the corporate institution of the academy. Performing your "dangeous" Nietzschean thinking is essentially a way of broadcasting that your threat is and never will be anything but rhetorical. That's also the meaning of the most common defense of Nietzsche. His thought, we're told, is so lethal that he'll melt the skull of any pussy bourgeois. But if you press the issue of his fascioid delectations it's always the same yuppie larf(?) "oh come on he's only joking." During Katrina a certain very bright commentator remarked about the story of the National Guard hold-up from maneuvers in the stadium while children died of thirst on the other side of the wall. That couldn't have been an accident, he said, it was designed to harden, to extinguish moral objection, even with regard to one's own citizens.

(35:27) Left Nietzschean pedagogy serves the same purpose in a more focused and subtle kind of venue(?). Bray your moral passion about George Bush and the war, about torture, about sexual repression and tyranny, but when it comes to the academy, when it comes to your identity as a scholar or intellectual, flip switch over to the cool rejection of bourgeois sentimentality, a contempt for slavish empathy, a fascination with violence, a search for authoritarian daddy figures. Watch where the flip between the two morally and tonally incompatible discourses comes, it's always around the threat to the academic and scholarly intellectual identity. Zizek doesn't have an easily traceable Nietzsche influence – I disagree with that, but this is what he's saying – but he inherits this function. In some ways it's even worse than Nietzscheanism because at least Nietzsche's exoteric anti-systemic style led to some enduring elaborations of the anarchist spirit.
(36:27) By contrast, Lacan's system is this sort of monstrosity of abstraction that brings out the worst in disciples especially since it combines memorized and applied (??) hierarchies with the will to (?) power of psychoanalyzing interlocutors from a position of supposed superiority. No Deleuzian creation of concepts for a new situation with the risk and difficulty, just interminable readings of movies that pretend to be politically ferocious and threatening to the State. Always this smugness of the old psychoanalytic objection of interlocutors' motivations as a way of avoiding their arguments. Calls to political hatred unless it's an inconvenient kind of hatred in which case it's ressentiment(?) or some other pathology. The old mimetic violence which you'd think a Lacanian would understand and perhaps they do since they're so skilled at firing up reconnaissance about it. And of course there's the absorption of political engagement into mere rhetorical gesture. Zizek's revolutionary gestures are circus antics. He's quite deliberate about designing a space of psychoanalytic radical purity that can only be inhabited emotionally and rhetorically, which of course serve the needs of the academic star circuit that keep him in the style(?) to which he's become accustomed.

(37:59) Ok, so, Zizek's similarity to Nietzsche that's being pointed out here is the core of his connection to a long process of rhetorically diverting challenges, discourses that are challenging to the State, and challenging to the status quo, into – by poisoning them and transforming them into reactionary discourses, or associating them with shameful discourses such as anti-Semitism. And this goes back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And the beginning of Zizek's operation is, Zizek type of operation is something similar that – similar to the way the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was created out of a work of 19th century critique that had a lot in common with Marx, a 19th century critique of the government of Napoleon the third in France. Sorry, I lost my place here. And, the same kinds of operations that Nietzsche performed on anarchists and critical thought are put into practice by Zizek with these techniques that have been developed for marketing and advertising and also propaganda operations. I want you to look at your two little handouts here. One of them is very – is this – "Gambits for Deception" which was part of the Snowden leaks but it's really just, I mean, they're saying this is what the CIA uses. I mean of course they do but it's really just a marketing tactic, it's for guerilla marketing products, to make products cool, to do advertising that doesn't seem like advertising. And then also this, which we'll get to later, which is the cover of Zizek's book.

(40:24) Ok so I want to tell the story of how Zizek's – I want to suggest that Zizek is something like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that has a relationship to Marxism that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had to the critique of the status quo of liberal democracy in the 19th century. And this operation that Zizek is performing really began in the West, in 1990 when Zizek was invited to write an article in New Left Review which would introduce to the left, to the Anglophone left the main strain of propaganda that was going to accompany the destruction of Yugoslavia as the imperial project of destroying Yugoslavia.

(41:15) So, that happened in 1990, he had had a little bit of, he was a little bit known before that for his book "The Sublime Object of Ideology" which is very similar, actually, to the Protocols, but I'll get to that in a moment. So 1990 is when the story begins, the Zizek deformation of Marxism in the Anglophone world. There are four backstories that lead up to this. One is the post-war, is US policy in the – toward the end of the Cold War, and for the post-USSR world. The other is what was going on in academia to accompany this. The third is what was going on in Slovenia where Zizek comes from, and the fourth is what was going on at the New Left Review. So, let's begin with the backstory of the end of the Cold War. There's a project, the US, the United States, the empire went on a mission for the post-USSR world which was basically to destroy what we normally think of as the post-war settlement and the rule of law, the global rule of law. This is the democracy, the parliamentary democracy and civil rights and human rights structures domestically and internationally, and the Westphalian system that has been established, that is guarded by the UN.

(42:49) The US's project after the fall of the Berlin wall was to unleash this new conquest of the planet, to go around and destroy all the regional powers, one by one, and to erode the system of law and inter-State systems that had been established, that had been the status quo in the two-superpower world. Now, in the academy, of course in academia, all kinds of ideas are produced, just about everything you can think of is being produced. There's no management from the top. But what happens is those ideas that are convenient to the ruling class become promoted, they're rewarded and honored et cetera et cetera. And what was happening in the last decade of the Cold War was rewarding things that were going to be useful to this project of eroding the rule of law and the liberal democracy and social democracy and destroying the inter-State legal arrangements that are the UN charter. So, what you had is, of course, famously everybody knows, post-structuralism. The French post-structuralists had revived Nietzsche and Heidegger. They put Nietzsche and Heidegger, a proto-Nazi and a Nazi, at the center of their kind of cuckoo discourse, this discourse that would replace Marxism, and that was very popular. And toward the end of the '80s Schmitt was added, and Schmitt was very portently(?) added because that is the Nazi – this is the classic Nazi critique of liberalism. And the purpose of this discourse was to erode people's commitments to things like their rights, human rights, because actually as you erode people's commitments the rights disappear because they are a social product. And the legitimacy is very important.

(45:09) So meanwhile this is going on, also the New Left Review was one of the places that – the New Left Review existed as a bridge between academia and, kind of, public affairs journalism, public intellectuals. The New Left Review was one of the places where the academic fashions were – was a spigot to pour the academic fashions into the normal left-wing public intellectual discourse. Perry Anderson liked it(?), Althusser and a lot of the post-structuralists came along with this, they wrote(?) about Foucault, and they were also sort of connected to Euro-communism which was European – well, it was something that, a name that was given by, actually mostly by Leftist critics who, European – the direction of the European communist parties at the time to become, to go into social democratic governments and become part of social democracy.

(46:12) In Slovenia at this time, there was, through the '80s, this was the beginning of Zizek's career. He had been a sort of failed academic and then he worked for the Communist Party briefly. And then in the mid-'80s he got involved with what was actually the US-sponsored league of dissidents who would eventually form the Liberal Democratic Party, and his aim was to destroy the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia and also to have – to allow Slovenia to secede as a country and take basically most of the treasury of Yugoslavia with it.

(47:02) They were similar to, sort of, Pussy Riot. They were funded by US front organizations, and sometimes directly, to do pranks, basically, and to create a discourse that delegitimized the government of Yugloslavia. It was important that – they didn't want – after the death of Tito there was a democratization that was happening in Yugoslavia. It was going along – it might've been that the country would break up, or that the Republic would be reconstituted with different – with a more parliamentary apparatus and everything. But for Slovenia, what was important, the US and Germany at the time wanted to destroy Yugoslavia, break it up. But Slovenia, which was just a tiny country of two million people, wanted to not – they wanted to avoid having to pay their debt to the federal government. This was this country of 40 million people [should say 30 –Klein] and the two million people wanted to take basically most of the public equity of the whole country. So, they were determined that Yugoslavia should break up with a war, with a violent war, that they would be the good guys in as(?) the U.S. client. So they started to do these things, Ethan explained some of the pranks that they did. But, Zizek got involved with something called the Neue Slowenische Kunst, which is a group that's most famous – you know, a sort of Pussy Riot-style group, but its most famous element was this band, Laibach. And Laibach became – Laibach is the German name of Ljubljana – and Laibach became a hit a little bit in Britain and France as well. And what they did is they originated this idea of over-identification that Ethan was referring to, the idea that they performed as, kind of, Nazis, and that this was supposed to somehow reveal the Nazi nature of the Yugoslav government. And it was very – the message, their white supremacy and everything that they were performing was understood by the rest of the – of people in Yugoslavia outside of Slovenia, and this has an old – it had a connection to a sort of, a style of white supremacy in Slovenia, which is a specifically Aryan white supremacy, the belief that Slovenia, which was never under the Ottoman rule, had always been part of the Hapsburg empire and was Catholic, was sort of kept, was sort of carried off by the Balkan majority, but really needed to be restored to its European home. And that's what Laibach performed. And disseminated this set of tropes and this paradigm.

(50:05) At the same time Zizek's, this little group had a bunch of magazines and there was a journal called "Problemi" there was the youth magazine called "Youth" - "Mladina"(sp?) and "Tribuna." And Zizek was involved in all of these. Now, in "Problemi" he started to develop these ruses. He made himself famous by using sockpuppets and pseudonyms to, for example, he wrote a book that was not very successful, a Lacanian book. Lacan was the master of all this, he was the authority that most of these, these dissidents were honoring. But, he wrote a book and it didn't do very well, but he wrote a pan of it under a pseudonym where he developed this persona to write this attack on his own book and it actually become kind of a successful book. And this kind of thing he was using these – he developed this theory of these ruses but also was putting them into practice. Now with "Mladina"(sp?) and "Tribuna," anti-Semitism was at the core of these practices. And "Tribuna" in 1988 actually republished the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which was this sort of guidebook of all this stuff. This had been the first, this was the first Slovene-language edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion since 1945. And they were – the magazine was sued by the Jewish community of Ljubljana, of Slovenia. And the excuse that they gave was that they really mean communists. When they were talking about the Jewish plot, they were trying to reveal how communists work. So, it's pretty clear, I mean, the intense anti-communism of Zizek is not in question. Then also "Mladina" arranged – this was his other magazine – had, another thing they were doing, Zizek and his wife and his group, they were starting to develop the ideology, I mean, the propaganda that we'll all be, that we all know, which was that this vision of Serb nationalism, that the Serbs were the new Nazis, and this is why the US would have to intervene on behalf of secessionist movements.

(52:55) Zizek and his wife were the principle propagandists of this view in the press and also to the West. They staged stuff in a Pussy Riot style. They staged stuff where Slovenes would dress up wearing stars of david to suggest that they were the new Jews who were about to be exterminated by the new Nazis, who were the Serbs. This was before Milosevic. Milosevic was the president of Serbia then, he hadn't yet become the president of Yugoslavia. And they were sued for this as well. And then on the cover of "Mladina" after this, there was a lawsuit about this, these performance, there was a cover of "Mladina" that smells of Zizek, that we all know was him, where it said "what do these Jews want?" and then it said "probably money."

(53:59) Ok so, Zizek is at the center of this operation of over-identification and trying to stir up, both abroad, to popularize these ideas of what's happening in Yugoslavia, mostly in France, and this menacing thing. So now eventually, I'm getting a little ahead of my story, because this happened after the New Left Review, but eventually, "Mladina" took a further step. Because they wanted to, in fact, this magazine, "Mladina" that Zizek was one of the founding editors of, created the crisis that would precipitate the secession of Slovenia. And what they did is they somehow got hold of an intelligence document and threatened to publish it. This document still has not been revealed, whatever it was. They got ahold of an intelligence document of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia They were going to publish it. The journalists who were blamed for this were thrown in jail. This became an enormous scandal in Yugoslavia. The dissidents all signed petitions for them to be free speech and free press, et cetera et cetera. We don't know what it says. There was a BBC documentary about this, though, where some of the passages from the inquiry, from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia's inquiry into this incident, some of these passages are read on the BBC documentary. Among them, the statement that the intelligence of, Yugoslav intelligence, saying that "Mladina" was funded by the CIA.

(55:56) Ok. At the New Left Review at this time, in the 80's, New Left Review had become sympathetic to a lot of the French post-structalist stuff, but it also had these two people working there, Quintin Hoare and Branka Magas, who are a couple. Branka Magas is a Croatian, I think ethnically Croatian I don't know if she was born in Croatia. The two of them in the '80s had lost faith in socialism and they became attracted to the Croatian nationalist separatist Franjo Tudjman, who is a Nazi, a neo-Nazi. And they were not overly – they pretended to criticize his Nazism and everything and his virulent anti-Semitism but they backed the Croatian nationalists and they started to use the New Left Review to promote this mythology that had been created mostly, you know, partly in Slovenia about the Serbs as the new Nazis.

(57:18) And eventually they were chased out of the New Left Review by Tariq Ali (?) and other people, and he had some comments about it, and I won't read them now because I think I'm going to go long, but, they were eventually chased out of the New Left Review. They went on to found the Bosnian Institute which was an arm of the – an important base of this US propaganda which is also being led by AIPAC in the destruction of Yugoslavia that demonized the Serbs and portrayed them as the new Nazis and new Holocaust and all of this. So, in 1990, after Zizek had published this book, "The Sublime Object of Ideology" which has – it's just a book – every fourth word is "Jew," it's all about Jews and it's really quite banal, I mean, theoretically the important thing that he's saying is that, you know, "things aren't what they seem!" But it's basically, he's rolling out all these old crackpot, all these old motifs, that he's picked up from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which he's published in Slovenia.

(58:44) So, he goes to the New Left Review in 1990 before any of, before, you know, when – Americans have any idea what's going on there, that there's been a financial crisis, that there are separatists. It was a little better known in Britain, but the Anglophone left is basically introduced to the story of Yugoslavia. And that's the handout here, Eastern European's Republic of Gilead. He basically lays out what is going to be the propaganda for the US aggression against Yugoslavia and later against the rump(?) of Yugoslavia, Serbia, in 1999.

(59:37) Ok so, the same kinds of techniques that, it's a little bit more subtle now, this is 1990, than in the pieces that Ethan was examining, but the same techniques are being used. And these are that – he's got this – there's this ostensible analysis that once, that,  just as with the later pieces, make use of this imaginary liberal hypocrite, this Western, this posh Western multiculturalist who looks at the Balkans and sees, you know, a savage land. And this is another, this is the same story he used to delegitimize the critiques that Peter Handke, the playwright, German playwright, was issuing at the start of the breakup of Yugoslavia, of the destruction of Yugoslavia, and Germany – he was criticizing the German policy of fostering the secessionist movements, and Zizek attached him as just wanting to think of Slovenia the way Freud thought of Slovenia, as the id. Freud said that Slovenes aren't civilized enough to psychoanalyse, which is something that Zizek is a little bit obsessed with. Ok so, in "Eastern Europe's Republics of Gilead," what we get from Zizek is he lays out exactly the – he sets the stage and he gives us the characters that we're going to see repeated throughout the '90s and up until the 1999 72-day bombing of Serbia, and they are that – but he introduces a sockpuppet, and in fact he uses all the types, that he's going to be laying out as their own, as the sockpuppets, to examine, to say about the other what he really wants to have said. He wants it out there, but he doesn't want to be responsible for it. So he tells us that Serbs think that Slovenes are too hardworking, and Slovenes think that Serbs are dirty and lazy. So he's laying out a kind of racial picture where he's letting the audience know that the Slovenes are the English in this scenario, in the white supremacist scenario, that they're the superior ethnicity, that they are hardworking and saved(?) and more developed. And the Serbs are the backward savages.

(1:02:59) And later, and this is something that he develops later in his essay when he's championing the bombing of Serbia in 1999, he says, he portrays the Serbs as standing on the bridge defiantly, I mean I think people remember this (?), during the bombing, taunting the US, and he says, "and look at them, they're cavorting while 300 kilometers away a genocide of African proportions is taking place." And that's the kind of move that he uses all the time. I've often asked people who defend Zizek, like, is an African genocide supposed to be bigger or smaller than a European genocide? But, this answer, there's no answer to that because his idea is that he's just trying to, his attempt there is just to portray, to use a series of associations with his racist phantasmagoria, his 19th-century racist scheme, to identify the various players in order to carry out his propaganda. So in the "Eastern Europe's Republics of Gilead," he uses the liberal sockpuppet to – as the excuse to lay out this scheme of the superior Slovenes and the backward savage Serbs, and also to repeat, exactly, the propaganda scheme, the propaganda story, that he was developing in Slovenia, that the Serbs are the new Nazis. He portrays them as in conflict with every other Republic, that they are captive to an idee fixe, that they're victimologists, and he goes through the whole thing. That they're – the diagnosis of the Nazis as full of ressentiment, and that there's a dangerous thing, that there's going to be a genocide. I mean, basically he lays it out on the table that, you know, wait for a genocide! And this is 1990, long before that became the main story.

(1:05:30) Ok so then, that's how he's introduced, and he's not, in that piece, in 1990, pretending to be a Marxist. This comes a little later and it's not really clear when, he doesn't in every single environment, turn into a Marxist at the same time. But sometime in the mid-'90s, he starts to pretend he's a Marxist and he's a – in fact a Stalinist, a raving Stalinist. And he performs as this caricature figure who is, you know, he says "as a Marxist I just want to say, Hitler wasn't violent enough," and make these kinds of – he does this performance in order to provoke people like Adam Kirsch at the New Republic, which we will see. Ok so.

(1:06:18) In 1990, ok, then, after he does this, then he and his wife suddenly have this tremendous fame, it's a little bit strange. They get invited to American universities for semesters in unusual arrangements as guests, that, they can kind of name their terms. His wife is also working – she did a lot of writing about this, the Serb – the Serbs as the new Nazis where she was also reviving a lot of this vocabulary of the Protocols, and the image of the Jew as dirty and in a conspiracy, and a Bolshevik, and behind the Communists. That was their association that they were working to propagate, this idea that the Jews were behind the Communists. And he presents that in the New Left Review, but as if it were someone else's proposal and not the proposals that were coming out of his own magazines in Slovenia.

(1:07:28) Ok so, after this he runs for Slovene president unsuccessfully and makes a joke that he just wants to be the head of the secret police. And then Slovenia secedes as a result of this crisis and also the fact that the German and US governments guaranteed that the secessionists would be loan-worthy, that they would be considered in possession of the treasury that they claimed. And then his party takes power in Slovenia and they commit an ethnic cleansing. Now the first thing that they did was – well it's thought of as a soft ethnic cleansing in that they simply erased the identities of 2% of the population, gypsies mostly and some Kosovo Albanians, people that Zizek called non-Slovenians in Slovenia, so, the ethnic 'other.'

(1:08:47) Zizek apologized for this, I mean, he's never really addressed this ethnic cleansing although the ethnic cleansing – it's called a 'soft' ethnic cleansing but people were actually deported, people were taken and driven to Bosnia at the height of hostilities. People who were in danger, they were taken to their deaths, people died, there were lots of suicides, it was not – you know they didn't round people up and shoot them, but it was definitely bloody. And the point of it was to make a more 'Slovene' in Zizek's idea, a more 'Slovene' country. And his notion of the Slovene ethnicity is that it's Aryan. Ok so, in 1996 or so he gave an interview to Geert Lovink about this where he sort of said, "oh my leftist friends hate me for fully supporting my party and its actions, and we made some corrupted moves" and he did a macho thing. Dušan Bjelić, Yugoslav commentator said, "while 'soft' ethnic cleansing was being carried out, Zizek consistently argued against pluralism and multicultural tolerance and promoted state monopoly and social discipline." And this would be in the magazine "Mladina" which became an organ of the Liberal Democratic Party. And Zizek was the chief ideologist of this Party. Ok, in 1996 he gave an interview to Geert Lovink in which he was asked about his political involvement in Slovenia, "his statements about immigration in the published interview are disingenuous in the extreme."

(1:10:40) And anybody who wants to follow that up that's Dušan Bjelić, "Normalizing the Balkans," I put that on the reading list. Over the next 10 years, I mean, his career has taken off in the United States to a point, and he starts to become a celebrated commentator, public commentator on, you know, he writes these movie reviews, he's supposed to be explicating Lacan to people, and he starts to promote himself as this sort of raving, this crazed Stalinist Marxist complaining that, as Ethan was discussing, basically attacking multiculturalism, feminism, and – but in this way that, of course these things just stand– "political correctness" which is a stand-in for uppity people of color. This is the first stage of his fame, is this pseudo-Marxist act where he's – and, during this period he gets this reputation for being very incoherent, like in some environments he'll sound just like a liberal, in some environments he will be demanding, you know, he will be seeming to worship violence, and demand authoritarian – he seems to advocate terror in other environments, for example in the Strojan piece he's very upset about supposedly, you know, somebody's stealing a car.

(1:12:42) This incoherence, though, is just superficial. In fact he's very coherently attacking all challenges to empire, which in the '90s meant mainly attacking the alter-globalization movement. And he's seeding – he's trying to do a sort of white supremacist Nazi revanchism where he seeds these themes of old-fashioned biologistic racism, and he's trying to import this old-fashioned Protocols-ian anti-Semitism from, that's very current in Eastern Europe, actually, and was at that time (?) into the US and France and Britain, and he hasn't had a lot of success in the US with this, but there is definitely a resurgence of these ideas in France and Britain, as we can see with the recent elections. (How much time do I have?)

(1:13:52) Ok so I'm going to try – I haven't really gotten – I wanted to give examples of all this stuff, but I have it here, if anybody wants to read. The other thing that he was doing that's very important was that he inserted himself between young people and the classics of Marxism and the revolutionary tradition, and doing these introductions to the – Verso invited him to introduce Mao and Robespierre, and he's basically created this cartoon image of – when he's performing as a Stalinist, he's created this cartoon image of this heroic savior, the Thatcher of the left, but anyone can serve this purpose for him, he transforms Robespierre, Toussaint, Mao, Mussolini, Nixon, Leonidas from the movie "300," any of these figures can serve for this action figure, that is, his caricature Stalinist. And then, ok so, I'm going to have to finish up, but. The way that, there's something called, that Situationists called "masperisation" after a French publisher, Maspero, and what this is is the name for the kind of détournement that transforms Joly's "Dialogue in Hell" into the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And what this is is to take an argument and to vitiate it, but to imitate it, and vitiate it, and change a few things, in order to keep the structure of the critique but alter its target. And that is what Zizek has done, he's offering these Golevinksy cuckoos of established arguments. And in the 1990s he was focused on the alter-globalization movement and his books mimic and transform Naomi Klein's book, and he did this also with "Shock Doctrine" but mainly with "No Logo" and the introduction of "No Logo." And then he's repeatedly taking – actually he doesn't even bother anymore with trying to mimic Marxism, but he takes popular lefty positions and seems to adopt them, and then vitiates them, he infuses them with racism and anti-Semitism

(1:16:49) And at the same time, this has a double effect. On the one hand, for the liberals, I mean you can see this in the review that was done, that he provoked, by Adam Kirsch from the New Republic, where Adam Kirsch said, well, he's a fascist and this is what all Communists are, pretty much. I mean, Adam Kirsch looked and rightly analyzed his anti-Semitism and his racism and his idealism, his Schmittianism, and then he said, but look: this is why the new Communists are so bad. So the idea was obviously for liberals to get an impression that Communism is a kind of Nazism. And then on the other hand, for another audience, what he's doing – people who are more attracted to his poses and his kind of petty bourgeois ressentimental violence: he's smuggling in, he's feeding them all these anti-Semitic and racist and anti-feminist views. And at the same time he uses this cred that he's developed to do just straight disinfo. He's got a few things that he's consistently misrepresenting. For example, almost two articles a year he suggests that Milosevic was tried by the International Criminal Court, and he does this by a sophistry about "the Hague" he calls it "the Hague court" to confuse the courts; he's always propagating a false story about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the American support for al-Qaeda, the creation of al-Qaeda there, and all kinds of ruses.

(1:18:56) I'm just going to get the the last one. The other, another thing that he does is like, he was vending this fake Brassillach quote that he got, that he patched together from stuff that he obviously found on an Aryan power website called SKADI where, you know, he's trying to give Brassillach this image as a moderate, as a moderate multiculturalist. He defends Breivik with these, also, these misrepresentations. And then one of the other things on the handout, this is sort of my favorite thing, is that he ends, the New Left Review actually printed this, where he's got this passing off basically what is a Goebbels quote, as Gramsci.

(1:19:41) Audience member: could you repeat that word(?) for us?

Klein: He's passing off what is basically a quote from Goebbels, as Gramsci. He says, Gramsci – ok. So, and the quote is – and anyone who knows Gramsci would know – it says, "the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters." Which sounds like something from a video, Nazi video game. Anyone would know. For some reason there's no editorial oversight of his articles at the New Left Review. Ok so I think I'm going to have to stop, do I have to stop now? Am I pretty much done?

Levich: Yeah I think we need to give people a chance to respond.

Klein: Ok so, that's it for now. There's more.

[Audience clapping]

(1:20:29) Jacob Levich: Obviously there was an enormous amount of material to be covered about Zizek, I think we got to a lot of it, and I want to–

Klein: Oh, sorry, that's random(?).

Levich: Do people have questions, responses? Yes?

Audience member 1: Yeah, actually, the New Left Review comes up many many times, obviously. That his main [unintelligible] outlet(?) in the beginning. What are your thoughts about the New Left Review? Why is this stuff getting in there?

Klein: Is anyone here from the New Left Review? [Silence] Well as I said I thought, the beginning, I mean it seemed pretty clear that they had these right-wingers, they had these Croatian nationalists who were not in charge of the paper but obviously, my guess is that they brought him forward. Now, someone on Facebook the other day said that something like, well, I doubt that they chose him. But, I don't know. So I'm assuming that that was his introduction. There was, from core(?), Quintin Hoare and Branka Magas, who went on to create the Bosnian Institute, which is a sort of crazy fascist–

(1:21:48) Levich(?): Do you have the Tariq Ali quote?

Klein: I do.

Unidentifiable: I think [unintelligible]

Klein: Ok, and after that, you know, why do they keep publishing him? I would love to– I wish somebody had come from the New Left Review and Verso because I want to ask them why they keep publishing him. I mean one of the things is that obviously he's very profitable. He's one of the only books that really sell. But on the other, you know, it's – it's fascist and racist if you ac– a lot of people defend him who haven't actually read his books. Or who are so titillated by his forbidden stuff that they, you know, they have reactions that are almost like, hysterical, you know, how dare you! I always think of it like the classic, kind of, repression, like, how dare you say Dora's father could possibly be molesting her! Or something like that. There's this kind of reaction. But I think mainly it's that people, a lot of people pretend to read stuff they don't. And that's a big factor, but. I don't know, I think they should stop publishing him actually. I think– yeah.

Audience member 2: So, I'm trying to understand the panel, and so, correct me if I'm wrong.

Klein: Yeah.

Audience member 2: Is the panel's position that Zizek is a propagandist orchestrated by the CIA?

Levich(?): The panel doesn't have a position on that.

Klein: I'll tell you that – I don't, I –  the CIA doesn't do these kinds of things anymore. It's usually the NID, NED or other.

Audience member 2, talking at the same time as Klein: [unintelligible] If, if that's the position...I just don't see it. I apologize–

Unknown: But that's not the position.

(1:23:22) Klein: No no I mean my position is that, it's not un– to me, this is a very fishy operation. I don't understand how he is – I mean because it's not just that the New Left Review, that may be doing it because they don't have anyone else who makes this kind of money. It's the BBC, Le Monde(?), the Nouvel Observateur, Le Monde Diplomatique (?)

Audience member 2: So, are the millions – and I'm not, I have nothing invested in Zizek at all, I really don't – but is it, an issue that, then, the millions of people that do follow his work – either very in-depthly or superficially – are they just missing the boat? Are they brainwashed? I mean [unintelligible]

Klein: I don't know if there are millions.

Ethan Hallerman: Sorry just like, I've, I don't know, I've heard a lot of excuses for this stuff, which are, oh it's like, a typo, or oh he's just like, playing around or something. I mean I've pointed out some of the things that I mentioned, which are like, no, he means it. I mean, he says that he means it.

[intermittent interrupting]
Audience member 2: Ok but still there's a difference between someone who's an ambiguous writer, such as [unintelligible] Nietszche, right? I mean to write aphorisms is inherently going to be ambiguous.

Hallerman: Well the stuff that Nietzsche writes about the Jews isn't ambiguous. [Audience member 2 speaking at the same time is unintelligible]

Audience member 2: Alright, but, it's another thing to say that he's doing this on purpose to be a propagandist.

(1:24:35) Hallerman: Well, look, I mean I don't know, I haven't spoken to Zizek. I've heard different theories about like, oh, well I don't know, like, my explanation is, he's – I mean, my position is he's doing the ideological work that I said he's doing. Whether or now he's, like, hawking(?) out – the psy-op thing isn't my line, Molly can speak for herself on that. I, you know, personally, I'm – my position is, you could take that as a harmless provocation, like when Zizek says Muslims don't use toilet paper, or that Breivik can teach us lots of stuff about multiculturalism. My position is, he's doing the ideological work, that he is in fact doing. As far as like, oh, what he tells himself at night, I don't know. It seems – like in my conversations with people the reasoning seems to be, well Zizek says interesting stuff, I'm not racist, but I like Zizek so therefore he's not racist. I mean, you have to ask them.

Audience member 2:  Ok but even then, so, if it's millions or let's say hundreds of thousands of people, only two people in the world, are able to decipher, this kind of propaganda from Zizek.

[Various negative response]

Hallerman: But lots of people have written about it, particularly in the New Republic (??), in Jacobin, all over the place. I mean there's lots of articles pointing this stuff out.

Klein: Yeah and also that he's –[Hallerman speaks briefly but it's unintelligible] As far as the CIA thing, I mean, if you can go on, you can look at his YouTube for example, at one point, he's talking in a meeting of Slovene– of his Party, this Liberal Democratic Party in Slovenia, and he says, he takes credit for being the chief ideologist of the Greens of Iran. And a guy sitting next to him said, "Oh really? Did you really do that?" and he said, "Oh yes, and in fact they started having articles across Iran about how I was the CIA's liaison to the Greens." So, I'm not the only person who thinks this, it's been– But, but also, and then in another YouTube thing you can see him talking in Brazil and somebody begins to heckle him and says, "You work for the CIA" or "You work for the US," because it's kind of obvious that he's working, also, his early career, the part in Slovenia he doesn't deny, I mean he talks about his being a political provocateur whose aim was to destroy Yugoslavian socialism.

(1:26:49) You know, he brags about it, you can see in one of his crazy lectures about Mel Gibson and Simone de Beauvoir where he gives this argument – you have to see it to believe it – where he says, if you deny that black people are inferior, you're the real racist because you're not saying how powerful white racism is, that it in fact has performative efficiency and makes black people actually inferior and white people superior." And in that piece he goes into his history in Slovenia of doing these provocations. This is something that he's discussed. If he's – he doesn't admit to doing things in the US but this is his career. And that's his – it would be surprising if you were unable to, or that it would be so strange (??).

(1:27:45) Hallerman: Sorry, one last thing on that point, just quickly. To the, like – whether or not Zizek is in this role as(?) like, an empirical question, I think Molly made a good case that there's stuff fishy about it, like. If I had doubts about it it's not because of some naïve faith that this sort of thing doesn't happen. The CIA and the State Department have a long history of–

[Audience member 2 interrupting: Oh, I don't doubt for a second]

Hallerman: Ok, so, ok. Fair enough.

Klein: Hannah!

Hannah Wolfe: Thank you. Yeah, so I was going to be on this panel to present the psychological perspective which has to do with, really, why– I mean, it's really that historical materialist perspective: why do so many people like Zizek? What is it that's appealing about him? Why are so many people enamored of him? I mean, I think, he as the persona, I always think of Bakunin or Ahmed Shawki, for example, this sort of blustering. And he – if you read a little bit, like most people do, not a lot, like, "Oh I read the book!" (I looked at the first sentence of each chapter). And, you know, they hear his name and there's not a hell of a lot else on offer in the mainstream press. (1:28:53) It's not just young white petit bourgeoisie men who are attracted to this, there are a lot of people–

Klein: Though mainly, though mainly.

Wolfe: It is. No no no, and we– so that was my next question, is, who is attracted to him? What is their class, what cultures are they? We need to really understand this. And some of the people who are attracted to him, like, I mean, that's what happens with the petit bourgeoisie, some will move to the right and some will move to the left. And I think one of the most important things we can do, and that I think this panel is part of, is finding the people and talking to them, who are into Zizek, and trying to pull them to the left rather than to the right. And so that is, I hope, what this discussion can be. But, you know, from a historical perspective, psychologically, how does this kind of person in history, what kind of role have they played? How has this kind of propaganda been effective or not in the past? And what can we most effectively do to counter it?

(1:29:48) And not to say, oh you like Zizek, you petit bourgeoisie fool, but to say, you know, wow, you know, I read him and some of his stuff is really interesting, tell me what you like about it. I'll tell you what I think is questionable, and some of what I know. You know, it's just, like, basic organizing stuff.

Audience member 2: In humble my opinion, this whole conversation seems like holding the next line (??) to me. [unintelligible]

Levich, talking over audience member 2: Ok, I think we need to move on to the next question now please. Excuse me, I think, you've had plenty of time, sir.

Samuel Farber: What Hannah said is very relevant to what [unintelligible] The reason I came here is [unintelligible] A couple of people that I work with got me into this stuff. So I said, my god, I've been there.

Wolfe: Exactly. Mike(?), that's why they [unintelligible]

Klein: I think there is a history here, that's–

Samuel Farber: [unintelligible] Mexican Trokskyists(?) was getting [unintelligible] with whom I corresponded, [unintelligible] Zizek bullshit and I said well I'd better find out [unintelligible]. Now, this is what's extremely useful to me. [unintelligible] And if you have it on the Internet, I would like to know where to send it to this person in particular. So, after we're all–

Wolfe: Molly has a big anti-Zizek Internet–

Klein: I have a big anti-Zizek–

Wolfe: Molly has single-handedly smashed him in the ground

Klein: I want to stress that it's not the first time, there's–

[multiple people speaking]

Levich: Let him finish

Samuel Farber: The CIA thing, I – while he was active in Yugoslavia I can't(?) see why he wouldn't be CIA as part of his [unintelligible] influencing the direction of politics in Yugoslavia in the direction that he(?) would like to see. My opinion though, once he abandoned the field(?) I find that if they are [unintelligible] and rational(?) agents, which of course they may not be, as we know, [unintelligible] They were wasting their money and their effort.

Wolfe(?): Mhm.

Samuel Farber: And the CIA to bother with a guy like this. I find that really far-fetched. When he was in Yugoslavia, it's possible, because he was tied to a political party that actually won the election so, but once he left that scene. the issue that Hannah raised I think is the critical one. You have addressed the issue, [unintelligible] By no means the only people who vote(?) for him. Or the only journals that vote(?) for him. So, what is it, only(?) the New Left Review, that gets(?) this left-wing journal [unintelligible] the BBC [unintelligible] left-wing journals. I believe he was at least at one Left Forum before.

[multiple people talking]

Samuel Farber: So, what is it? Is it that the left has degenerated so much? That would be far more something to worry about [unintelligible].

Klein: There's this traditional thing, I mean, in the early 20th century it was called "the socialism of fools."

Samuel Farber: The socialism of what?

Klein: The socialism of fools, which was the name for political anti-Semitism that was based in, you know, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Now the interesting thing about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is it's a vitiation of an actually very good book, so, people are attracted – a lot of people don't know what it – actually, in the United States people don't know what it says. In Europe, people have read, are familiar with this. But the reason that people were attracted to that book is it's got a lot of good stuff in it. Now, the – and it lays it over this crazy story of the Elders of Zion. But the actual analyses of how power works is excellent analysis. It's by this guy Maurice Joly from the middle of the 19th century, it's very similar to Marx, and it's a real political analysis. (1:33:32) And in fact the first – what the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was, which, I keep raising also because it's important to Zizek and he published it – was that, it was the first case of demonizing political – the kind of political analysis that Marx does in his, in the 18th Brumaire, as "complotisme," as the paranoid fantasy of a Jewish conspiracy or a conspiracy. So that's the first case of that, and this is something that the Left is dealing with all the time, is this kind of demonization of any kind of political thought, any critique of the praxis of the ruling class as conspiracy thinking.

(1:34:23) Wolfe: I just forgot to say, I invited Zizek to come to the panel.

Klein: You did?!

Wolfe: And he emailed me back, I think was one word. "Seriously?"

[Audience laughter]

Klein: Oh, too bad.

Wolfe: Just in case you had any doubts about how full of himself–

Klein [Wolfe talking at the same time, unintelligible]: Well actually, he does answer me. I put stuff on the web all the time, I mean I argue with people all the time about him, and he has answered me. I mean, one of the things that you read, his bringing up of the – to reiterate his slanders of the Strojan family, which is really horrific. I mean, he was instrumental in inciting this pogrom against them. And he – that was in reply to stuff that was argued on the web, you know, where he was being accused of lies, so he justified them. Yeah?

(1:35:15) Audience member 4: My only really – I've got the first pages of a couple of his – a couple of books, I couldn't – it was too dense and weird, and I – whatever, it was, so, a lot of what I understand comes, in, 30 minutes I've been here, 40 minutes I've been here. What it sounds like you're describing is something a lot like Lynden LaRouche

Klein. Yes. He's very like Lyndon LaRouche.

Audience member 4: And, the thing about LaRouche is, that bothers me is my friends who are journalists like myself will often go on a panel with a bunch of LaRouchies. And I'll say, look – someone will tell me, look, I can't get published anywhere else except in a LaRouche publication. And there is no – you don't get paid by anyone else, or – they don't pay you. But, I told one friend, look, if you go – we generally presume that he's an infiltrator of some kind, he's paid by the other side, and –

Klein: LaRouche?

Audience member 4: You know, the LaRouche people. Therefore, if you do go up on a panel and you want to get some attention, you may want to say "I don't agree with everything, you know, that the LaRouche group says"

Klein: Right.

Audience member 4: And then make your own presentation to kind of distance yourself. But, they don't want to hear this stuff. It's like – there's something – I don't know. I question the reader, the writer, and. I'm really curious about the New Left Review now. Because I want to respect it, it's dense as hell, but–

Klein: Well, I'm not accusing them. Yeah. I'm not accusing them. I think that they're probably just, it's that he's their star. But I think that when he was introduced there that yeah, they had a motive that they weren't yet admitting. I mean they had these two people who were pretending to be communists. And, you know, five years later they were running the Bosnian Institute and helping the US to–

Samuel Farber(?): What do they stand for, the Bosnian Institute? Could you elaborate?

(1:37:18) Klein: They're a US propaganda organization and they back the US clients in Yugoslavia. They back the neoliberal privatizing parties of Yugoslavia. And they do kind of pretty disgusting revisionism, I mean, they're obsessed with trying to argue the numbers down of the number of Serbs who were killed by the Nazis, they put out some kind of creepy stuff. Although of course in a very, in a dignified package. But they, they're, you know, and they backed, they were supporters of the Croatian separatists who were, you know, flew the Ustaše flags, and, you know. Crazy people.

Levich(?): I want to make one comment which is just that I (?) but Molly didn't really have time to get into it but really, since Zizek got this platform with the Guardian which is distributed worldwide through the Internet and has a pretty big audience, it seems to me that his columns about worldwide political affairs, always have the same thrust. That is to say, he always ends up on the side of whatever the agenda of Western imperialism may be at the time. Whether it's in Syria, whether it's in Libya, or whether it's – in his column about the torture in Guantanamo, that essentially ends up, I think, as an apology for the torture in Guantanamo. In which he adopts precisely the same arguments that Rush Limbaugh famously did, basically saying that what happened in Guantanamo, as we can see–

(1:39:05) Klein: Abu Ghraib.

Levich: I'm sorry, Abu Ghraib. What, as we can see from the Abu Ghraib pictures, was really nothing more than a sort of fraternity prank. And I wanted to make one more observation, which is that one of the things that the legacy of Zizek that I think is most damaging in some ways, is that he puts himself forward – and Molly mentioned this briefly – as a sort of prism through which University students view the classic works of Marxism. And he does this by writing forewords to these classic works, which seem to me to have the purpose of confusing, and obscuring and obfuscating what these words really say. A good example would be his introduction to Mao's essay on contradiction, and also his essay on praxis. And Zizek's foreword – these are remarkably straightforward works of political analysis from Mao. Whether you agree with them or not, there's really not much question about what Mao is saying, he's a very lucid and straightforward thinker. But, Zizek, it seems to me in is foreword, tries to, deliberately tries to complicate the argument, throwing in references of all kinds, you know, sort of, showing off his familiarity with pop culture, with literature, with history which I might add is a widely superficial familiarity. But he also includes in this foreword outright falsehoods, and I'll give you an example. He says that Mao felt that the Great Leap Forward, this attempt to industrialize China at high speed in 1958 – '58, is that correct? – yeah, 1958 – that, that Mao said that this would kill half of China, and that it would be worth it.

(1:41:13) Now what's fascinating is that if you look up the source of this quote, it comes from the Chang and Halliday biography of Mao, which was actually so full of slapdash scholarship, distortions, and outright propaganda that even Nick Kristof found it offensive. And if you look up what Mao actually said, it comes from, you can find it in a footnote in Chang and Halliday. They're minutes from a meeting of a communist committee about the industrialization and how it's going. And what Mao says is that he's worried that it's going too fast. And he says the most important thing is the preservation of human life.

Unidentified audience member: Oh come on, [unintelligible] Are you apologizing, now, for Mao?

[Multiple people talking, unintelligible]

Levich: Can I finish? I'm telling you, I'm telling you what the minutes actually say.

Unidentified audience member: That's bullshit, come on.

Levich: No it is. This is what the minutes actually say. Whether you agree – this is not a debate–

Unidentified audience member: [unintelligible] Much more serious people [unintelligible]

Levich: Excuse me, [unintelligible]

[Multiple people talking, unintelligible]

Levich: May I finish? May I finish? May I finish? What, um – he's quoting a specific document, and you can look up the document, and what Mao is saying, is if the pace of industrialization doesn't slow, then half of China could die.

(1:42:42) [Multiple people talking, unintelligible]

Unidentified audience member: That settles the issue? That one quote?

[Multiple people talking, unintelligible]

Different unknown audience member: He's not commenting on Mao's record he's commenting on the misuse of the Mao quote in Zizek's introduction.

[Multiple people talking, unintelligible]

Hallerman: I pointed out another, where he quotes Marx talking about patriarchal society specifically in Europe and he's talking about, like, planet(?) societies and Zizek quotes this to say, even Marx thought that patriarchy is over, and that feminism doesn't need to exist. He does this all the time. I mean, whatever you think of Mao, like, in that particular instance, he's using Mao as a sockpuppet to say something that Mao is not saying in that case. He doesn't–

[Multiple people talking, unintelligible]

Klein: He did the same thing with Aristide, he does the same thing with Chavez, there's a constant misquoting of Lenin.

Unidentified audience member: [unintelligible] To look at the historical record, and make some sort of an assessment, about how many people did die–

Different unidentified audience member: But it's not a lecture about Mao.

Unidentified audience member: But I think it's fair to express concern about what actually did happen. You know, we can debate over whether somebody quoted this phrase [unintelligible] But it's also important to think about and acknowledge, how many lives may have been lost, as a result of certain [unintelligible]

Hallerman: You can criticize Mao without claiming that Mao said something he didn't say.

Unidentified audience member: Fair enough. I mean, I'm just sort of trying to find (?) [unintelligible]

Klein: But it's also a systematic thing, with people that you may not feel the same way about, for example Aristide. You know, he quotes him as exactly the opposite, as proposing that the Lavalas party necklace the rich at their swimming pools. I mean, he pretends and he says that he's used gangs (?) that were like [unintelligible]. And this he says about Aristide, so, every, every – yeah, it is, but – and it's every left-wing leader.

(1:44:37) Levich: So I guess we need to vacate the room. I want to thank everybody very much–

[Multiple people talking, noise]

-------------------------------------

Specific media referenced in panel, in order of appearance:

"The Sublime Object of Ideology" book by Slavoj Žižek

"Zizek!" film, dir. Astra Taylor

"The Pervert's Guide to Cinema" film, dir. Sophie Fiennes

"How to Read Žižek" by Adam Kotsko: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-to-read-zizek/#!

Zizek's hagiography of Margaret Thatcher in the New Statesman: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/04/simple-courage-decision-leftist-tribute-thatcher

"Defenders of the Faith" NYT Op-Ed by Slavoj Zizek: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/opinion/defenders-of-the-faith.html

"The Antinomies of Tolerant Reason" essay by Slavoj Zizek: http://www.lacan.com/zizantinomies.htm

Sarah Ahmed's 2008 response to Zizek claming that multiculturalism is hegemonic: http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2008/02/19/%E2%80%98liberal-multiculturalism-is-the-hegemony-%E2%80%93-its-an-empirical-fact%E2%80%99-a-response-to-slavoj-zizek/

"The Communist Manifesto" book by Karl Marx

"Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion" by Slavoj Zizek: http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=454

Guardian article on the Strojan family: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/nov/27/eu.politics

"In Slovenia, Villagers Block Gypsies' Return to their Homes" NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/world/europe/27slovenia.html

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

Neue Slowenische Kunst journals "Problemi," "Mladina" and "Tribuna"

"Eastern Europe's Republics of Gilead" by Slavoj Zizek: https://newleftreview.org/I/183/slavoj-zizek-eastern-europe-s-republics-of-gilead

"Normalizing the Balkans" book by Dušan I. Bjelić

1996 Geert Lovink interview with Zizek: http://geertlovink.org/interviews/interview-with-slavoj-zizek/

"the Shock Doctrine" and "No Logo" books by Naomi Klein

"The 18th Brumaire" book by Karl Marx

"Mao: The Unknown Story" book by Chang and Halliday