The philosopher Slavoj Žižek is sitting in the heat of the hottest Italian summer calling the director of the new documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Utopias “a fucking bitch”. This is followed with a pornographic imperative that extends into body horror. Sophie Fiennes, his director, laughs: the publicist rolls her eyes and Žižek insists to the departing journalist that it’s all part of the language game.
A Belgian colleague is told: “You only have paedophiles and chocolate. But even this is connected because the paedophiles use the chocolate to get the children.” Another requests a photograph. “What do you want a picture of this old cunt face for?” he asks.
Provocation, bad jokes, bad language, outrageousness, the occasional affectionate reference to Stalin and all the while the physical ticks and the Slovenian accent of sea water, Hegel and gravel sloshing around in that cement-mixer of a mouth. But what is real? And what is meant? What is wrong and what is right? And what are we going to do?
But first the important question:
“Did you see The Invite by Olivia Wilde?” Žižek asks, pointing at me.
Yes.
I like that one. It mixes comical moments with despair. The basic atmosphere is despair, and that’s our situation. Reality is comical, but not comical in the sense of dying of laughter, but comical in the sense of the situation is so crazy that you cannot but laugh, but at the same time it’s despair.
And here I like to refer to Jews. Do you know that I learned from a Jewish friend in Auschwitz that already there was a whole series of jokes that prisoners in Auschwitz made about themselves. It wasn’t obscenity. It was the only way to survive for them.
Is that why you use humour?
There is something in a very tragic sense, comical in today’s social reality. That’s why satiric imitations of Donald Trump usually don’t work, because they cannot be as crazy as he already is in himself. So I think that without a certain sensitivity for humour, you cannot understand today’s politics. We live in a very strange time, which affects even the status of language. What is true and so on. Trump and many around here, they operate at the level of rumours. He says something, then he says another thing, and he doesn’t care about consistency and so on. And this is happening more and more.
Does this lead some critics to dismiss you? The old “Borat of philosophy” crack.
This says more about those who call me that, because you know, all I tell them is, my God, look at my big fat books, which are very serious. So it tells me a lot of them remain at this superficial level. No, the worst was Noam Chomsky: you know Chomsky? Jeffrey Epstein’s friend. He hated me so absolutely irrationally. But I think that again, it’s not just the jokes.
Although I’m definitely not antisemitic, but in Israel, when you show them their own clips of how to torture Palestinians, you know what’s the answer they usually give? “Are you aware that now you are saying what Hamas would like you to say?” The truth doesn’t matter. Only the rhetorical effect matters. Here, I’m an old-fashioned European. Truth matters.
I’m not – as usually people take me – postmodernist, and you know when Borat was made, I wrote a critique of a movie because they defended themselves. No, that Kazakhstan or where it’s just used as a metaphor that in reality it can be any country, no. And my answer was that it’s not as simple as that. Would they be able to replace Kazakhstan with Israel and have a Jew in that role? No, you would be prohibited. You know. So I am always for racist jokes, but on one condition: you begin with making fun of yourself, shared jokes.
I’m against this general humanism: “All people are nice, interesting.” No! The majority are boring for me, and I give absolutely the same right to others to treat me the same. My real target is the stupid pacifist multiculturalist supreme stupidity, which says, “an enemy is only somebody whose story you have not read.” What a stupidity! So Hitler isn’t our enemy? Because, sorry, I read Mein Kampf and it made me even more against him.
So my point is that we have too much direct immersion, too many different cultures living together. Let’s be friendly, tolerate each other. Yes. But let’s not go too deep. I should understand you? How could I understand you when you probably don’t understand yourself? And I don’t understand myself? The big lesson for me here is: look at America. How did the Americans in Hollywood understand themselves? Mostly through European directors who moved there. Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang. Michael Curtiz. I’ll stop talking now.
Utopias used to feel like the prerogative of the left. But now with Brexit and MAGA, the utopian energy seems to be all on the right, if not the far right.
I totally agree. MAGA and so on. It’s the greatest utopia today. What we should do here is to do it in a Hegelian way: not to criticise it from an external position, but just look at what MAGA means in practice. The true MAGA guy is – I almost like him – Steve Bannon. He says “I’m a Leninist. I want to abolish the state.” All that, but what is the reality under Trump? The state is more active, more intervening than ever.
You know, this is the Hegelian moment. You plan to do something, but in reality you do the opposite. That’s what in my last book, Liberal Fascisms, I try to prove about MAGA people. They pretend to be radical liberals. They end up almost in a new form of fascism, and for Nietzsche, if there is a symbol of this that is true evil, it’s Peter Thiel, because concerning artificial intelligence, they are total liberals. They say no state should control us. At the same time, they offer contracts with defence, with police, they are supporting very strong state control. But it does not apply to them.
The problem I have with the film Oppenheimer is that maybe it’s a little bit too naive. The point is that what Oppenheimer does, he begins to have doubts. This is the standard attitude today. All the people have doubts about AI, but they are doing it. It’s incredible.
Artificial intelligence today… it’s like atomic energy half a century ago, they all have doubts. But who cares? The system expands, hundreds of billions of dollars are invested, and, probably, they will never make a profit. And we are not really doing anything to stop it.
You mentioned Oppenheimer. What did you make of The Odyssey this year?
Maybe I’m an idiot, but I expected a big spectacle and so on. No, it’s a relatively modest B-level movie. You remember Scylla and Charybdis? It’s very non-pompous. Even Troy. Nothing special. Almost at no time do we see more than 50 or 100 people. So I like this chamber-approach.
“Let’s be friendly, tolerate each other. Yes. But let’s not go too deep. I should understand you? How could I understand you when you probably don’t understand yourself?”
Second thing, I find this ingenious as a feminist. Did you notice how it’s totally desexualised? Look at Calypso, they just talk and so on. But according to the poem they should be fucking like crazy. There are even some other cases like this, and in a strange way, I liked it. I wasn’t bothered by the fact that Helen of Troy is black. But you know how I would end the movie? They go with the boat to the west, and then during the credits, they arrive at some island where there are cannibals, and they eat them.
Do you like Christopher Nolan?
I don’t think it’s the best. If you ask me, the best Nolan is for me The Prestige. That’s a great movie. And then the one I like is the last Batman with Tom Hardy. You know why? Because it’s a kind of a wonderful dream. The city, Gotham City, is New York. It’s like radical communists taking over Manhattan.
He sounds like Winston Churchill in that.
Yes. And he runs a Stalinist dictatorship, and this is my dark side. So what I’m saying is that Christopher Nolan, I don’t totally agree with him. If I take power, he gets three years of re-education camp.
So utopia is a bad thing?
Maybe even my friend Sophie didn’t emphasise it enough – in our movie “utopia” is meant as a negative term. We don’t praise utopia. Our basic thesis is that we live in systems which are utopian in the sense that to exist they have to break their own rules, and you know, and so what you should look at is the implicit, unwritten rules, and I mean at all levels. I am a Hegelian. The truth is not what you know in advance. No, you take a phenomenon and measure it by its own consequences, how it necessarily goes wrong in reality.
But what interests me even more is how, in many dystopias, you have tiny utopian elements. In The Last of Us, they come to a city which is thriving, and one of them asks, “But you have communism here?” And they said, “Yes, we have communism here.” After the catastrophe there’s no more money. You go into the supermarket and take what you need.
The film begins in Norway where the military are exercising for a potential Russian attack.
I hate simple pacifists who say “No. It’s a pseudo problem. Vladimir Putin is not dangerous.” Sorry, I think he is dangerous. I hate leftists who claim Nato is worse than Putin. Nato is provoking. Sorry. Look at history. Putin began with Georgia. Then he moved to Armenia, some other countries. Then, OK, you can say Ukraine mistreated the Donbas a little, but not Crimea. Putin’s occupation of Crimea, there were no protests there. They simply occupied Crimea and so on. And now, unfortunately, because of this, many leftists accuse me of being like neo-fascist, pro-Nato, and so on.
Listen, the west doesn’t talk a lot about nuclear war. They all fear it, but Putin officially changed the nuclear doctrine, and changed the circumstances where Russia will have the right to use first tactical nuclear weapons. No, I’m sick and tired of this criticism of Nato. Sorry, I am generally against Nato.
But wait a minute, we live in a crazy devil’s world. Even you know when they claim expansion of Nato, but those Finland and Baltic countries, they want to join Nato. They are terrified. I spoke with people there. I have friends. And they called me, from Latvia, Estonia. People are so afraid that they invest much less in buildings and apartments. The birth rate is down. They say, “What if?” And so they are really afraid.
You’ve had pushback on this position.
The situation is not complex. It’s clear, but complicated, so unfortunately, it’s happening to me all the time. It often happens to me that for the same text I’m attacked from both sides, like Palestine, because I caused a scandal in Frankfurt Fair, “blah blah, pro-Palestinian”. I was proclaimed a Hamas supporter, antisemitic, which is madness. At the same time, I published a big text in German: Hamas must be finished. Then now radical Palestinians who have this radical version, which is Hamas is the only authentic freedom organisation, and Jews are colonisers.
No, I think I totally disagree with it because the truth is much darker. I have my connections in Israel. They tell me. Do you know who financed, quite extensively, Hamas? Israel, because they wanted to keep Palestinians divided. There is an interview with [Bezalel] Smotrich, that horrible guy, who said it openly. It’s our vital interest that Palestinians do not reunite. So we should support Hamas. So all this makes the situation much darker there.
Ed Miliband has just announced sanctions against the illegal settlers on the West Bank.
He did? Do you know how far Netanyahu went? He said that the United Kingdom is now the first Muslim land with nuclear arms. The idea being England is now Muslim land. It’s nuts. But Slovenia, I’m seriously thinking of renouncing… no, I cannot renounce my Slovenian citizenship, but this Slovenian move now. We put a veto on the European Union declaration condemning the settlements.
The left seems to be at a loss with these new challenges.
Political correctness is a mega catastrophe. You know why? Look at trans people. I support them, but they think in these terms: “although we are a tiny minority, we are the true victims. You, even if you are leftists, you should all feel guilty.” But that’s not how you build solidarity. That’s how you try to make guilty the large majority.
My big example is the Mahsa Amini rebellion in Iran. The Revolutionary Guard killed a young Kurdish lady. First, it was Kurdish women who demonstrated, then it was all the Kurds, then it was the Muslim majority. It’s a unique case where a small feminist rebellion turned into general protest, and as I’m told by my spies, as I call ironically my friends in Iran, do you know what happened there? That the idea is that Iran made more aggressive moves against Israel. They wanted a conflict to calm the inner situation, like… forget about this protest. Now we are in danger, and so on.
I agree up to a point with your [Greek economist and politician] Yanis Varoufakis, who said that OK, we still are looking for the name “liberal fascism,” “techno feudalism”. But it’s clear that what is happening today – the way people like Elon Musk and so on act – this is no longer old capitalism. And that’s for me the true tragedy. The left is talking about overcoming capitalism. The right took from us almost everything. Like the left dreams about revolutionary action. The crowd occupies the place of power. Yes, Trumpians did it on the sixth of January.
A new world order?
Yes, things are radically changing. A new world order. And here I am still pro-European, because everybody is against Europe. Trump and Putin are both saying Europe is our main enemy. Latin America, Europe, neo-colonial Africa, Europe, racist slave trades, and so on. But how can it be that from all sides of the political spectrum they are all against Europe?
Did you see what Trump did? He is crazy. He published now as a joke, but with him it’s never a joke, a map where Mexico, Canada, Greenland, and Iceland are all part of the United States. So he has his sphere. Then Putin, we know the game. No, then China is silently expanding, and so on. And why is Europe impotent?
I’m Eurocentric still, more than ever today. Be serious. Socialism, feminism, all that, human rights. This is part of the western discourse. I’m sorry, you don’t find this either in Africa or anywhere else. And I’m sick and tired of this game of always blaming Europeans, like in South Africa, you know, if you ask now, they say “there’s more poverty than ever in South Africa, because white people still control us”. No, what happened is that in South Africa, the old white ruling class was joined by a much more inefficient and corrupt new black ruling class, and the economic results are catastrophic.
So what I want to say is let’s get rid of this mythology. We Europeans are guilty of everything. Yes, we did horrible things, but as for slavery, to annoy my friends from Arab countries, I always ask, why talk only about whites from western Africa taking slaves? Muslims were, if anything, getting from eastern Africa even more slaves. They tell me slavery is prohibited in Islam. No, what Islam prohibits is slavery of Muslims, but if you claim that you got prisoners of war, then you can have them as slaves.
“I am not a snob who likes art movies. My first rule is: even in Hollywood, you can find good movies, and among the art cinema, you can find very shitty, boring movies”
So I still believe that, although we should criticise Europe, we should be at the same time aware that our European legacy is still… I wouldn’t say even the best, but the only ethical standard we have. That’s the basic lesson of a philosopher. When you criticise something, always ask yourself, but what is the conceptual, ideological base on which I criticise it?
I was surprised Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men wasn’t in the movie. It is one of the best dystopias of recent times.
I read the PD James novel, which is very reactionary. At the end, a pure white race couple’s baby is born, and it’s the revival of the white British race. Well, Alfonso Cuarón did a wonderful thing by portraying that closed area with immigrants as the only area of actual emancipation. But details matter. You know, at the end, they go to a small vessel, and they approach a big boat? The idea is they have a cure, whatever. I told Cuarón, but isn’t it clear that this is very ambiguous? It may be fiction. No, he is more stupid than his films. “No,” he said. “It’s real.” No, and I told him. You see how you directors may make a good film, but this doesn’t prevent you from being stupid, you know? No, no, no.
How do you get time to watch all the films you do and write so many books as well?
First, I must be honest. Half of the films I talk about, I didn’t see them. For example, I wrote a long text on [Roberto] Rossellini’s films. I haven’t seen one of them. What I did is that I read about them and I liked them, and then I was afraid to see them because I was afraid that I had a nice idea, but the movie may ruin my idea. So I sacrifice reality, you know, for theory.
Are there types of movies you are drawn to?
I am not a snob who likes art movies. My first rule is: even in Hollywood, you can find good movies, and among the art cinema or third world movies, you can find very shitty, boring movies.
The PR comes in and is hailed as “Comrade Stalin”. Throughout the talk, Žižek has pulled at his T-shirt, wiped his face and jabbed his finger at me, energetic, enthusiastic. Žižek has always been one of those thinkers who has always seen the world as topsy-turvy. What if the conservatives are actually the true revolutionaries? What if the nightmare is actually the fantasy? What if the utopia is actually dystopian?
But with news that experts are warning that there’s a credible chance AI will destroy civilisation, and the hottest summer ever now being thought of as the coolest summer we’re going to get from now on, it feels that finally the world has aligned with Žižek’s crazy worldview.
