Slavoj Zizek: Brauchen wir eine globale Umstrukturierung? | Doku HD | ARTE

Source: Slavoj Zizek: Brauchen wir eine globale Umstrukturierung? | Doku HD | ARTE, Irgendwas mit ARTE und Kultur, 55:55, uploaded 2023-10-30, Watch Later position 1063.

Slavoj Žižek opens with a joke from his childhood. In 1960, a poster in Moscow shows happy people beneath the promise that communism will have arrived in twenty years. Someone laughs and jumps for joy. Asked why, he explains that he has terminal cancer and will therefore be dead before the prediction can come true. The joke turns a political promise into a question of historical time. Which future are we being asked to inhabit, and who has to live through the interval before it arrives?

The ARTE conversation, recorded in Ljubljana for the programme Deep Thought, follows that question through climate change, war, capitalism, communism, Europe, class, ideology and nationalism. Žižek speaks as a philosopher who keeps his claims close to political events, although the interview often gives him space for provocation rather than proof.

From Fukuyama’s peace to a time of accumulated disasters

The period between the end of communism in Eastern Europe in 1990 and the attacks of 11 September 2001 appears to Žižek as the “Fukuyama epoch”. The West treats liberal democracy and global capitalism as the best available arrangement, in the sense of Winston Churchill’s familiar claim that democracy is the worst system except for all the others. Even many people on the left accept that history has reached a stable endpoint. The arrangement remains imperfect, yet every alternative seems worse.

The attacks of 11 September weaken that confidence. Global capitalism has lost its claim to universal ideological appeal, whilst the financial crisis of 2008 exposes tensions within the system itself. Žižek brings in the French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, whose work on catastrophe asks how people can think about a disaster that has not yet fully arrived. Dupuy’s answer reverses ordinary reasoning. The future is open in principle, yet the course of events left to itself points towards catastrophe. People can interrupt that course only after they accept the direction in which it is moving.

Žižek links this to Walter Benjamin’s image of the emergency brake. History does not carry humanity towards automatic progress. It is a train that may require an abrupt stop. The point of revisiting the past is therefore active. A new interpretation can change what the past makes possible in the present, which may create a chance to stop the movement towards disaster.

The disasters have already begun. Žižek names ecological collapse, migration, the possibility of nuclear war and the return of large-scale conflict. He rejects the comfortable phrase that it is five minutes to midnight. In his view, the clock has already passed midnight. The examples are presented as a political diagnosis rather than as a documented survey of risks. The source’s claim is that people adapt to each crisis so quickly that they can fail to recognise the cumulative change in the world around them.

The climate examples give that accumulation a physical scale. The destruction of forests and the dangers associated with nuclear energy have become familiar enough to lose their force. In the summer before the interview, temperatures around Seattle and Vancouver rose close to 50 degrees Celsius. Žižek treats the heat as a regional event with effects on circulation across the northern hemisphere. That scale leads him to ask whether local organisation can answer a crisis whose causes and consequences cross every border.

A coordination problem called communism

Žižek returns to the word communism because he thinks socialism has become too broad to distinguish anything. A social conscience already appears in many political positions, including concern for migrants. Communism names a stronger demand for international solidarity and cooperation. The examples are practical. Large movements of people will follow regions becoming uninhabitable. A nuclear war leaves no winner who can rebuild a normal order. The world requires forms of coordination that markets and states have so far failed to provide.

He calls this “war communism”, borrowing the name of an exceptional wartime economy and using it provocatively for a global response to shared emergencies. He does not propose the nationalisation of every institution. His proposal remains vague by his own admission. He imagines cooperation among civil societies across national borders and says that he sees no way through the coming crises without some form of it.

The vagueness is part of the tension. Žižek wants a transformation large enough to match the crisis, yet he rejects a fixed historical script that would tell people which system must replace capitalism. He calls himself a pragmatist. Hegel’s warning against predicting the future matters here because the task is to understand the present system and its internal antagonisms. Marx remains useful for the analysis of those antagonisms, whilst the idea of an inevitable communist destination becomes a liability.

His practical test is harsher than the language of hope. Small acts of awareness and individual care cannot carry the whole weight of the crisis. An efficient economic system can continue to produce goods whilst directing society towards ecological or military ruin. The required change therefore concerns the organisation of collective life, even when its institutional form remains unknown.

The new division of the political field

The interviewers ask whether the old conflict between left and right still explains the present. Žižek answers that the field has changed. Russia’s open relationship with Iran, China’s state capitalism and the growing links among authoritarian powers create a new bloc. Liberal capitalism can absorb the language of LGBT rights and anti-racism whilst continuing to organise exploitation. A fundamentalist reaction can then present itself as the answer to the social damage produced by that arrangement.

Žižek does not identify himself with a left defined by woke language or cancel culture. He sees a political danger in a set of rules that people cannot clearly name, yet which can still punish them when an accusation catches hold. He also sees why some people turn towards right-populist parties. The liberal order offers moral language about inclusion while leaving material grievances unresolved. The tension allows a movement that speaks for ordinary people to gain support even when its policies strengthen existing power.

The question becomes concrete in Ukraine. Žižek says that he supported Ukraine after Russia’s invasion in February 2022. He had expected the country to fall quickly, an expectation he thinks many Western Europeans shared without admitting it. Ukrainian resistance disrupted that picture. In the source’s framing, the war has become a conflict over the political orientation of Europe as well as a war between Russia and the Ukrainian state supported by Western countries.

He identifies two bad outcomes. Russia could win and destroy Ukraine and part of Europe, or Ukraine could survive inside a new conservative and populist bloc. The European left, he argues, missed an opportunity to state plainly that it stood with Ukraine whilst still criticising political crimes and manipulation on every side. He objects to the guilty reflex that treats support for Ukraine as a provocation against Russia. The achievement that gives him a small measure of hope is that a nation decided to defend itself and sustained that defence with outside help.

Žižek borrows a formulation from a political discussion of war, although the subtitles render the speaker’s name uncertainly. The useful goal is to say that Ukraine should not lose rather than to promise a simple victory. He also criticises a narrow European pragmatism that treats the war as an interruption of comfortable life. The war could create pressure for an energy transition away from oil and coal, although he presents that possibility as a political choice rather than as an automatic effect of war.

Europe and the problem of the class subject

Žižek’s pro-European position rests on the institutions that already exist. He describes Europe as a partly functioning connection across states, with social provision, free education and social-democratic rights built into its political space. He objects to critics of Eurocentrism who treat equality and women’s rights as universal values with no historical location. In his account, these arguments carry a European inheritance, and Marx remains one of its most European thinkers.

The class question has moved away from the traditional social-democratic parties. The achievements of the welfare state have improved the position of many workers, whilst the right populists now speak more effectively to farmers and workers than the left does. Bernie Sanders’s appeal to people who might otherwise vote for Donald Trump gives Žižek a model for recovering that constituency. Sanders’s question is simple: who counts as the worker in a society where the old industrial figure no longer covers the whole class?

Žižek expands the category through several examples. The classical Marxist worker was often a textile worker, miner or steel worker. In contemporary Slovenia, he says, strike action is easier for state employees such as judges and doctors than for people employed by private companies, who risk dismissal. A worker may be exploited whilst still having a permanent job and health insurance. That position contains real security and real dependence at once.

The Bolivian politician and theorist Álvaro García Linera helps him move beyond the standard factory subject. A politics of the working class has to include people with insecure contracts, migrants whose legal position remains unclear, domestic workers and cleaners. Bruno Latour’s phrase “ecological proletariat” adds people whose habitat is destroyed by large companies, including Indigenous communities affected by extraction in Ecuador and Canada. The category changes because the forms of exploitation change.

Žižek also points to the women-led protests in Iran. Their demands concern immediate questions such as the compulsory headscarf and the power of the state. He presents the movement as a possible source of political change that does not wait for an already privileged group to grant emancipation to everyone else. The example supports his larger claim that politics can emerge from a concrete conflict and take a direction no theory predicted in advance.

Ideology as a distortion of antagonism

The interviewer returns to The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek’s book from the late 1980s, which has recently appeared in a new German translation. The question asks how the philosophical account of ideology relates to his present political interventions. Žižek keeps Hegel as the central reference and uses Jacques Lacan as a means of renewing Hegelian questions.

For him, ideology is not simply a lie that hides a set of facts. A statement can contain accurate information and still function ideologically when it covers over the antagonism inside a society. The test is whether an idea makes a basic conflict visible or turns it into something natural, accidental or caused by an outside intruder.

He illustrates the point through an imagined conversation in Germany in 1935. An antisemite can point to real facts about Jewish participation in cultural life and use those facts to construct a false account of society. The anti-Semitic story places the cost of social conflict on Jews and imagines the community as harmonious once they are removed. Žižek’s conclusion is that anti-Semitism remains false independently of the truth or falsity of the individual facts it cites because it changes the structure of the explanation.

The same mechanism appears in conspiracy theories. Žižek allows that conspiracies exist. He objects to the theory that turns every complex event into the work of a hidden group. He mentions Covid and the war in Ukraine as crises in which some people on the left accepted explanations centred on capital or the arms industry. The problem is the desire for a clean agent who can carry the whole burden of an antagonism that actually runs through the social order.

He calls for a pessimistic Hegelianism. Hegel’s interest lies in the way apparently stable arrangements contain forces that can undo them. The First World War followed a long period of European peace, welfare reform and confidence in progress. Žižek says that Friedrich Engels had already recognised the possibility of such a reversal in the early 1880s. The lesson he draws from Hegel runs against Fukuyama’s endpoint: the fall of communism creates new antagonisms rather than closing history.

Humour, cruelty and political correction

A question about what makes people human leads Žižek to a story about a person slipping on a banana peel or spilling a drink. The first response is laughter at another person’s misfortune. When the person is clearly hurt, the laughter gives way to help. Žižek treats this movement from a small act of cruelty to practical solidarity as part of human life. It contains the capacity for harm and the capacity to respond once harm becomes visible.

He then argues that the new left has lost its sense of humour. The rules of political correctness often remain unwritten, which leaves people unsure about what will trigger an accusation. He describes a lecture in Santa Cruz, near San Francisco, where he used a deliberately offensive joke involving a Roma musician, a white man and an ape. The story’s structure places the white man in the position of the fool and the two other figures in control of the scene. The audience still treated the joke as an attack on minorities, and a committee nearly cancelled his appearance.

Žižek’s defence is that irony can expose the lie inside a moral posture that claims to protect people whilst denying them agency. His example is hard to separate from the stereotypes and slurs it uses, which gives the episode a limit that the interview does not fully address. The larger claim remains clear. A political culture that cannot forgive a failed joke loses one of the ways people test and revise their own positions. Žižek connects that loss to his description of himself as an atheist Christian. Forgiveness allows a person to acknowledge guilt and continue. Cancel culture, in his account, turns guilt into a permanent identity.

Switzerland, nationalism and the end of prediction

The final exchange moves through Switzerland. Žižek’s idealised image combines politeness, distance, ignorance and a refusal to over-identify with one’s own culture. He asks how people can understand one another when they have not fully understood themselves. The distance among Switzerland’s language regions becomes, in his telling, a condition for a larger European connection. A functioning union needs cultural contact without demanding complete cultural fusion.

This differs from nationalism, which wants to protect a supposedly pure national culture from mixture. Žižek accepts that national defence can become necessary in an emergency such as the invasion of Ukraine. He rejects the phrase “my country, right or wrong” as an ethical guide. Russian citizens who oppose Vladimir Putin even when they risk arrest offer him a stronger example of political responsibility because they act against their own state’s power.

He remains wary of every nationalism, including anti-imperialist versions. He invokes Mahatma Gandhi’s opposition to the partition of India and Nelson Mandela’s refusal to build political legitimacy only on racial identity. Angola supplies a darker example. Žižek says that most people there remain in poverty under conditions that can be worse than those under Portuguese rule. The claim appears in the conversation without supporting data, so its place here is as Žižek’s argument against treating national independence as a complete political answer.

The documentary ends with the interviewer asking what could change Žižek from a pessimist into an optimist. He answers that he believes in small material miracles. Political events cannot be predicted in the way an official historical line suggests. They arise from conditions that may already be present yet remain invisible until something happens. Bolivia under Evo Morales becomes his example. The project failed in important ways, yet its emergence still counted as a miracle relative to the pessimism that preceded it.

His final joke reverses the opening one. An optimist sees so much disaster that every small success feels ordinary. A pessimist can enjoy the rare event that goes well because it exceeds expectation. The position remains modest. Hope comes from political action that interrupts a course of events, whilst the future stays open enough to surprise the people living through it.

Limits and references

The documentary is an interview and a philosophical intervention. It gives Žižek’s reading of Fukuyama, Dupuy, Benjamin, Marx, Hegel, Lacan, Lenin, Freud, Latour and several political figures. It does not provide the studies, administrative records or historical sources needed to verify every factual example. Claims about temperature records, Ukraine’s future political alignment, Angola’s poverty, and the effects of war on energy policy remain attached to the speaker. The captions contain occasional transcription errors, especially around names and the final credits, so the note follows the argument and named context rather than preserving those errors.

The source explicitly names or discusses the following works and figures:

• Francis Fukuyama and the post-Cold War argument associated with The End of History and the Last Man.
• Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s writing on catastrophe and Walter Benjamin’s image of the emergency brake in history.
• Karl Marx, G. W. F. Hegel, Vladimir Lenin and Jacques Lacan as the philosophical frame for Žižek’s account.
• The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek’s book from the late 1980s.
• Bernie Sanders and Álvaro García Linera as examples of a class politics that reaches beyond the old industrial worker.
• Bruno Latour’s idea of an ecological proletariat.
• Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and the Iranian women-led protests as examples in the discussion of nationalism and political agency.