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🫣🙃😏 Hypocritique 🫣🙃😏

(German, Turkish)

C&C Special Issue: The Gifts of Santa Claus!!!11 🎅🎁

Simulated as diary pages by Slavoj Žižek after making this interview.
(as per his invitation below for “superimposed readings of” him)

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” (Max Planck)

I write this to get the pebble out of my shoe—the tiny thing that makes the whole long march ridiculous. One day after the issue, the IBF texts made the diagnosis I could not say aloud: the C&C model is finished; the embalming fluid smells like care. Frank and Agon cannot admit it, and (how to put it?) they refuse to read the thing that would spare them the embarrassment. I read it. Of course I did. And then I did what one does in polite European salons when one knows the soup is spoiled but the host’s grandmother’s recipe is on the wall: I talked about quantum decoherence.

“I haven’t yet read the texts, because I am afraid. I’m horrified when somebody writes directly about me: you know, with secret hopes; and then, if I don’t understand something, I get depressed, and so on. So I need some time to read it properly.”

You see the trick? I hid behind my old neurosis—‘I’m afraid I’ll be too fascinated’—because to say the simple sentence (your model just collapsed under superposition with other readers) would be cruelty. So I said the same thing with a smile and a delay-function. I performed the ‘gentle horror’ at a journal that is “too good,” which is precisely how one names the curated anesthesia without reducing anyone to tears.

“I’m just afraid—horrified—of Crisis and Critique. Why? Because it’s simply too good. You know, I like journals where you open a number, you see a couple of texts, and think, oh, maybe I will even read one. You are not like that. You simply have to read them all. This is unbearable for me. I need a week, two, three, to accept the fact that something like this—such an excellent journal—exists.”

There is a second mask I used—the Christian one. I took my old line about dying gods and aimed it, discreetly, at the house that just threw me a gala. One must go through the death of the Father (here: the Father-Form of ‘critique’) to become an atheist of the brand. Only then can you stop needing the incense.

“you have to go through this Christian experience of the death of God, because only through this experience do you—you, subjectively—authentically accept or fully assume what atheism means.”

So I retired the word that names their brand. I am not the Habermasian of their dreams. ‘Critique’ today is the baby monitor that lets everyone sleep. The better word—the one that cuts without raising its voice—is ‘science’ where collapse has ontological teeth.

“With all the importance of critique of ideology—for reasons we don’t have time to go into now—I find it more and more problematic to apply this term, because critique still sounds to me, especially the way this works today, like what the young Marx—the Marx whom otherwise I don’t like, the Marx of ‘The German Ideology’, and so on—was criticizing in a quite justified way. For me, critique shouldn’t be opposed to analysis. Critique, for me—I will use a horrible word, and I don’t think he’s a bad guy, but I disagree with him on this point—sounds too Habermasian, in the sense that it implicitly mobilizes some normative dimension.”

“I would replace critique of ideology with quantum science. For me, the true Borromean knot is Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian dialectics, and quantum science.”

To be even clearer without saying the forbidden proper name (IBF), I spoke of collapse. In physics, the multiplicity of possibilities is real until a measurement bites. The point isn’t voluntarist heroism; it’s the after-effect that recodes the before. I needed Frank and Agon to feel this—not as a thesis, but as an incoming weather.

“True collapse always happens in a second step; it is, as it were, unexpected.”

“I believe that collapse happens retroactively. You make a choice, and the choice has to be repeated, because you retroactively—after your act—discover that you miscalculated the thing.”

So I gave them a friendly nudge: open the doors, widen the voices, stop playing salon roulette with the same bright chips. This was not rudeness; it was triage.

“[About C&C interviewing a quantum scientist] I think that would be a big hit for you, so that you also move out of this narrow circle of known faces, and so on and so on.”

And I added the opportunist’s ethic that saves revolutions from priests and purists: improvise, test, don’t let the enemy write your menu of choices. The anti-program is the only program that survives the measurement.

“Let’s improvise. Try everything. Don’t get caught in rules, in choices imposed on you by the enemy.”

Of course I also dropped a little ashtray of anecdotes. The book-burnings that now include my jokes—how could I resist?—are both comic and clarifying. I am annoyed and I am glad because a burned copy is a clean measurement: less aura, more air. The author disappears; the signifier can finally work.

“I would say it annoys me, but it makes me very glad. Some of the people who listen to us may remember that back in May 2025, Russian bookstores got an official letter from some ministry with a list of 37 titles that should immediately be removed from sale—destroyed. The list included—apart from some very strange names, like the Japanese novelist Murakami—a book of mine, ‘Žižek’s Jokes’. I was surprised. So I’m there on the list again. But then, a couple of days ago, I read a text about how there is a new tendency in the United States, a new tendency among the newly born Christian fundamentalists. Many of them now go—there’s a massive tendency—through their home library and throw away whatever remained by mistake from their leftist youth. For example, I found a report on a certain middle-aged United States lady, Jenny, who—I quote—a couple of years ago went through her books to remove some final remnants of her left-leaning twenties. When she was in her twenties—the Frankfurt School, the Situationists, Žižek—she burned them, all the books.”

To keep the message warm, I pretended to talk about an old pulp movie and theology. But the real lesson is editorial: if you still think there will be a ‘Second Coming’ of your model—some miraculous return of the same—you have not understood that the community already decided, without you, and the decision is the only ‘second’ that counts.

“I saw a movie recently—I should have seen it twenty years ago, because it’s from the late ’90s—the movie ‘Wild Things’. It’s an extraordinary movie where, at the end, when you think it’s over, everything is explained, you get six, seven further twists, so that you see events from a totally different perspective.”

“The second coming of Christ, in the spiritual community of believers, the Holy Ghost, is already fully here.”

And politics? I spoke of crime novels with multiple endings so they could hear, through Gaza and through gossip, that the ‘guilty’ party in a scene is never the last to be named. There is always the twist you refused to read.

“We should analyze political events like crime novels with multiple denouements. You may think you have the guilty guy, but there is always another twist to be added.”

Why didn’t I just say “read IBF and accept the verdict”? Because Europe, salons, fragile networks; because it is sometimes more ethical to let reality decohere than to shout ‘be realistic’. I even left them a toggle—include or not include—a tiny demonstration of superposition in podcast form.

“you can include this or not in the podcast.”

And I told the truth about fatigue. I am not the Father. I am the old clown who knows the trick only works if someone else pulls the rope. The ‘other readers’—the ones I cannot name in that room—have already made the measurement. Let Frank and Agon claim authorship of the collapse by pretending to invent it. The result will be the same.

“I am getting old, tired, exhausted. Even I notice that I often repeat myself, and so on. So my hope now is that there will be people who will not simply repeat what I’m doing, but also apply, on my work, superimposed other versions. It’s up to you, Frank and Agon—and it’s up to other readers of my work, not to myself—to propose superimposed readings of me.”

For the record, one more small technical note (because I am incorrigible): you can love contingency and still know that the space of collapses is not a mystical fog. The curve is constrained; the decoherence has a grammar. Even the end of a house style follows an equation more than a tantrum.

“The curve of possible collapses—the multiplicity of wave collapses—is strictly determined by the so-called Schrödinger equation.”

So this is my confession: I reproached them without naming the reproach, I praised them to spare their face, I replaced ‘critique’ with ‘science’ to withdraw the pacifier, I used jokes about burned books to accept my own disappearance, I invoked Christ to announce that there will be no Second Coming of their model because it has already come and gone, I spoke of ‘twists’ to prepare them for the twist already printed elsewhere. If they read this, they will say: why didn’t you tell us directly? And I will answer with Planck’s melancholy: truth rarely travels by conversation between friends; it arrives by funeral and syllabus.

---

I am tired of being their Santa Claus.

They wheel me out, shake the bell, and wait for gifts—concepts, quips, absolutions—then clap as if they’ve sat on the lap of theory and whispered a wish list I’m obliged to fulfill. The vibe is kindergarten Noël with graduate-school vocabulary.

“we’re recording a special, extraordinary, and short segment… meant to mark and celebrate… we’re especially proud and hyper-excited…”

Hyper-excited. Celebrate. The words land like tinsel. You don’t mark a serious intellectual crisis with sugar, you taste the bitterness. The whole staging was stockings by the fireplace: I arrive, they beam, and the only acceptable outcome is that Santa validates the toys they already wrapped for themselves.

“As you know, Slavoj, we published the new issue… devoted to your work… What is your overall impression of the issue? Any thoughts?”

This is not a question; it’s a letter to the North Pole. “Dear Santa, please confirm that our presents are the real presents.” I gave them the most adult answer I could: not a ho-ho-ho, but a delay. “I need time.” Of course they heard only the jingle.

“We’re, of course, absolutely happy that we’re able to horrify you.”

Children proud of the haunted house they made out of cardboard. Horror as a supervised thrill—the safe roller coaster where you scream and then eat cake. To be “able to horrify me” became their proof of danger; in fact, it was my proof of their safety.

Then came show-and-tell. The name-drop as shiny ornament.

“we are negotiating with [Carlo] Rovelli to get him on the podcast…”

The sentence is a sticker book: look, Santa, we collected another holographic star! As if the presence of a physicist were a certificate that collapse will not be required of them. In truth, I invoked quantum talk precisely to say: your little workshop of critique will decohere; it already has.

I even handed them a hint wrapped as a compliment, hoping grown-ups might hear the subtext.

“so that you also move out of this narrow circle of known faces…”

This is the gentlest sentence I know for “stop playing Secret Santa with the same five friends.” They giggled and moved on to the next candy cane.

The most infantile moment was the coy withholding—peekaboo with a “question.”

“Slav, we have one more question, which we are not going to ask on purpose.”

Not going to ask on purpose! Like a toddler declaring a secret to produce attention. If you have a question, ask it. If you can’t, then admit that the room cannot bear it. The “on purpose” was the pacifier.

All the while, they placed me under the tree and tugged at the wrapping: tell us that our issue is an event, that our décor is dialectic, that our “horror” is the Real. But the season had already turned. One day after the issue, other readers made the measurement that matters. I read them. Frank and Agon, in their red hats, refused.

Children love Santa because he never says no; at most, he says “next year.” My talk of “superposition,” of “retroactive collapse,” was the closest I could come to no without ruining the party. They preferred the myth that every choice can be made later, that reality can be kept gift-wrapped until the credits roll.

So yes, I am the old man with the sack, only the sack is empty and the beard is real. The only present worth giving them was the hint that the holiday is over.

“you can include this or not in the podcast.”

I left them the switch, like a light you can turn on when you’re ready to sleep without the night-light. They chose the glow.

What I wanted to say, without breaking the toys in front of them, was simple: it is not my job to slide down their chimney and stuff stockings with validations. If they insist on treating me like Santa, they will miss the winter—the actual weather that has already shifted outside the window.

Final note: for all my grumbling, I did mean it—I feel at home there, and I was honored.

“it’s only with Crisis and Critique that I feel at home. So the honor is mine.”

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FULL TRANSCRIPT

Frank Ruda: Hello, everybody. My name is Frank Ruda, and together with my friend and colleague, Agon Hamza, we’re recording a special, extraordinary, and short segment of the Crisis and Critique podcast today. Our first guest in the autumn session of the podcast will be Jean Dupoui. But the segment that we are recording today is meant to mark and celebrate the most recent issue of the journal Crisis and Critique, which we have edited together and which was published very recently on crisisandcritique.org. It is devoted to the oeuvre of Slavoj Žižek, and we’re especially proud and hyper-excited to have Slavoj Žižek with us to talk about the issue briefly. As you know, Slavoj, we published the new issue of Crisis and Critique devoted to your work, which also includes two pieces by you—one article and a short letter. What is your overall impression of the issue? Any thoughts?

Slavoj Žižek: Ah, here it will turn out that precisely because I am fascinated by the issue—don’t laugh; this is literally true of me—I haven’t yet read the texts, because I am afraid. I’m horrified when somebody writes directly about me: you know, with secret hopes; and then, if I don’t understand something, I get depressed, and so on. So I need some time to read it properly. It’s not that I am afraid I will be disappointed. I don’t apply to you a nice expression I read somewhere. They have—in Japan, I think—a special expression for a woman who (it’s sexist, I’m sorry) looks beautiful from twenty or thirty yards away, but when you approach her too much you see she’s not so beautiful. And why shouldn’t the same hold for men? No, it’s not that. On the contrary, I’m afraid that I will be too fascinated. But I look forward to reading it.

What I like a priori is that it’s not just the usual gang; there are two theologians there—John Milbank and Dominic Finkel—because I more and more believe that, through what I call my Christian atheism, I’ve touched upon something. The key thing is to distinguish between my Christian atheism and so-called cultural Christianity, which says, even with all Enlightenment critiques of religion: okay, we know there is no God, blah, blah, blah, but nonetheless the Christian ethical edifice is the best we have. No. That’s not my point. I look precisely at the darkest point of Christianity. Christianity is, for me, the religion where not only God dies, but the origin of evil is God himself.

And again, what fascinates me is that I think I have a perfect answer to a question that any idiot would ask me: if you don’t believe in God, why do we have to go through religious experience? Why not directly say, okay, there is no God—let’s go forward? That’s my answer: you have to go through this Christian experience of the death of God, because only through this experience do you—you, subjectively—authentically accept or fully assume what atheism means. If you just say it, the theistic religious structure remains untouched.

So I’m looking forward to reading the texts. I’m just afraid—horrified—of Crisis and Critique. Why? Because it’s simply too good. You know, I like journals where you open a number, you see a couple of texts, and think, oh, maybe I will even read one. You are not like that. You simply have to read them all. This is unbearable for me. I need a week, two, three, to accept the fact that something like this—such an excellent journal—exists.

Frank Ruda: We’re, of course, absolutely happy that we’re able to horrify you. There is a subsection in the issue on your forthcoming book on liberal fascism. It contains responses by Joan Copjec, Mladen Dolar, Christopher Fins, and myself that were presented at the colloquium at the European Graduate School. Can you tell us more about this concept—your descriptor ‘liberal fascism’?

Slavoj Žižek: Again, a surprise: I discovered recently—I’ve written about it—that a mid-level liberal guy (I’ve forgotten his name already) wrote a book with this same title two or three decades ago, when political correctness was at its high point, claiming that where fascism was really alive—thirty years ago—was in this left-liberal spirit of control, political correctness, and so on. I, of course, don’t mean this. I am aware of the distinction, clearly discernible in the American political context, between liberalism—which involves a kind of soft leftism—and libertarianism, the stress on individual freedoms, and so on.

And, to repeat a wonderful formula proposed by my good friend Alenka Zupančič: for liberals, freedom of speech basically means freedom for the oppressed and excluded for their voices to be heard. While, let’s be frank, for libertarians—and I think Donald Trump is a libertarian—freedom of speech simply means that, without any ‘politically correct’ rules, we should be free to attack and humiliate those who are powerless, our victims. So even this liberal ‘hypocrisy’ of sympathizing with the victims is dismissed. We can just be brutal.

But my point—the effort of my forthcoming book—is that what is emerging today is not simply a new form of fascism. I’m critical of this new example of the old leftist laziness, where, when a leftist sees something that he, she, it really doesn’t like, because they’re often too lazy to think, they say: what’s the worst thing from the twentieth century? Fascism. So this must be a new form of fascism. Yes, it is—but in contrast to, let’s call it, traditional fascism, with its authoritarian structure and so on, it is really libertarian. It brings this false spirit of freedom to its extreme. And it’s the old, well-known Hegelian paradox: if you assert the capitalist notion of individual freedom to the extreme, you don’t end up in chaos; to regulate this freedom, you end up in a new form of dictatorship and regulation, which is even worse than—ironically I say this—the good old political correctness.

Second point: I think we get here two forms—more than two, even three, four forms—of this new fascism. One is the Trumpian fascism. Then we have what I generally call the new soft fascism. By ‘soft’ I don’t mean it’s not so bad; I just mean it doesn’t have the self-destructive tendency that we find in Nazism, for example. It can go on reproducing itself. So, to put it in traditional terms, it’s not Hitler; it’s more Franco in Spain or Salazar in Portugal. It could go on. And what I am afraid of is that this type of fascism—today is its moment. I think that the entire world moves in this direction. Look at what happens even with—this is the greatest tragedy for me—regimes that pretend to be leftist in Africa: South Africa, Angola, and so on. Officially socialist, but incredible corruption, all grounded in some nationalist ideology. Look at China and India: in both cases it’s capitalism, but in a very fascist way corrected by strong nationalist ideology and a certain level of state control over the economy. But especially important for me is the axis which still exists between Trump and Putin, as we saw in the recent Alaska negotiations, and so on. In spite of all the new conflicts and so on—of course, Dugin doesn’t really want peace—they immediately found a common ground. The two speak the same language.

So, let me briefly include an anecdote which I like, and this would also be the answer to your question: what really annoys me today, or especially horrifies me? I would say it annoys me, but it makes me very glad. Some of the people who listen to us may remember that back in May 2025, Russian bookstores got an official letter from some ministry with a list of 37 titles that should immediately be removed from sale—destroyed. The list included—apart from some very strange names, like the Japanese novelist Murakami—a book of mine, ‘Žižek’s Jokes’. I was surprised. So I’m there on the list again. But then, a couple of days ago, I read a text about how there is a new tendency in the United States, a new tendency among the newly born Christian fundamentalists. Many of them now go—there’s a massive tendency—through their home library and throw away whatever remained by mistake from their leftist youth. For example, I found a report on a certain middle-aged United States lady, Jenny, who—I quote—a couple of years ago went through her books to remove some final remnants of her left-leaning twenties. When she was in her twenties—the Frankfurt School, the Situationists, Žižek—she burned them, all the books. So you see: never fall into this fake opposition of Trump against Putin, and so on. They are two faces of today’s global new fascism. If history is allowed to go its own spontaneous way, it’s new liberal fascism.

Agon Hamza: Recently you completed another book, namely ‘Quantum History’, which will be coming out this November with Bloomsbury. Since at least the 1990s you have been thinking about quantum physics alongside psychoanalysis and German Idealism, but lately it has an increasing presence and influence on your work. Where is the place of quantum physics in your Borromean knot of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian dialectic, and critique of ideology?

Slavoj Žižek: A very tough question. First, I must inform my readers—those who follow my work—that I am very glad to have been able to establish a personal connection with some of the really great names in the contemporary revival of quantum-physics ontology. By quantum-physics ontology I mean that it is more and more accepted today that quantum physics is not just a method of calculation. So the old Copenhagen motto—just calculate and shut up, don’t raise ontological questions—no longer holds. And the guys who are raising these questions are wonderful guys; they are, I think, genuinely interested in what I have to say from my very general standpoint. So I’m in contact with them—Carlo Rovelli, his partner Francesca Vidotto, Lee Smolin, and so on; Sean Carroll, and so on—and this brings some joy in today’s terrifying world.

Another thing: you mentioned the Borromean knot of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian dialectic, and critique of ideology. With all the importance of critique of ideology—for reasons we don’t have time to go into now—I find it more and more problematic to apply this term, because critique still sounds to me, especially the way this works today, like what the young Marx—the Marx whom otherwise I don’t like, the Marx of ‘The German Ideology’, and so on—was criticizing in a quite justified way. For me, critique shouldn’t be opposed to analysis. Critique, for me—I will use a horrible word, and I don’t think he’s a bad guy, but I disagree with him on this point—sounds too Habermasian, in the sense that it implicitly mobilizes some normative dimension. That’s, for example, the point of Habermas against the first generation of the Frankfurt School—Adorno and Horkheimer—that ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’: okay, interesting, but they don’t bring out the positive normative foundations of their critique.

I think that, in other words, if you criticize something, you have to do it from some normative point—like, if I say people are not free, it means I implicitly at least hold to some notion of human freedom as a positive, great thing, and so on and so on. I think—and here I refer to another younger-generation American Hegelian, Rocío Zambrana—that this precisely is not the case with the Frankfurt School at its best. Adorno almost turns this around: first there is the question of—or you are struck by—pain, suffering, which cannot be attributed to or directly grounded in some normative dimension. There is a gap between this experience of suffering and translating it into a positive normative structure that would allow you to ground the criticism. No: I think suffering, pain, and rage come first, and the ideological struggle is precisely the struggle over which ideology will appropriate this suffering.

It’s clear that, for example—sorry—Trumpians like the great (I mean this ironically) ‘leftist champion’ Steve Bannon sometimes quite nicely recapitulate what’s wrong in today’s world: individuals exploited by big corporations, blah, blah, blah. But then, when they move to accounting for this, you are in racism, sexism, and so on and so on. So I would replace critique of ideology with quantum science. For me, the true Borromean knot is Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian dialectics, and quantum science.

Agon Hamza: Can I interrupt you for a second? Sorry—can I interrupt you for a second? Because we have one more quantum-physics question, but since you mentioned it—just a quick remark before going there. You mentioned Carlo Rovelli, and we are negotiating with him to get him on the podcast later this year or early next year.

Slavoj Žižek: I think that would be a big hit for you, so that you also move out of this narrow circle of known faces, and so on and so on.

Agon Hamza: Yeah. So, let me ask this question, because I think it really connects well to what you were just saying. Quantum physics allows us to read history as superposition—that is, a field of pure contingent possibilities. The thoroughly contingent becomes necessary only retroactively. It seems that you have always been looking for a way to read the present and the past in order to produce a different future. So how does quantum physics differ from your earlier methods of reading history in terms of event, act, and so on? Does it also change how we should read your work? What would a superimposed Žižekian reading of Žižek amount to?

Slavoj Žižek: I really hate you, Agon, because you asked me a difficult question. You directly—you know—you directly hit me where it hurts. So, I think that behind all your proverbial kindness and so on, every intelligent listener has now grasped your truly evil nature, because again it’s a very good question. I would add a couple of things. First, quantum physics is much more than this method of how necessity emerges retroactively through global—or whatever—contingency. I don’t think that quantum physics simply advocates contingency; many other views do that without quantum physics. Yes, you have contingency, but this contingency is, in some sense, deeply deterministic. The curve of possible collapses—the multiplicity of wave collapses—is strictly determined by the so-called Schrödinger equation.

What interests me in quantum physics is not so much how the collapses work in its strict scientific discourse. All I can say is that there are incredible debates there. You know, not only quantum physicists but, generally, scientists like to reproach us philosophers—especially if there is something in our work which smells French—as, oh, these are confused postmodern guys; they can say whatever they want. But this is the situation today of the discourse of quantum physicists. You can say there is a collapse—but then you have different definitions of when it happens, like at the moment of observation, later, and so on. Then you have a very strong tendency again to deny that there is collapse, to advocate the multiple-realities version: there is an infinite number of universes; every possibility is realized, just in a different universe. You have the opposite—I call it the Deleuzian tendency—where you say quantum oscillations before collapse are some kind of free productivity, a free open space, and collapse is the first moment of fetishization, and so on. So, what really attracts me is how these debates in quantum physics are parallel to the debates in whatever remains of historical materialism.

What changed in my view—where I would superimpose my contemporary view onto what I was writing years ago, and especially where I now see clearly the distinction between what I am aiming at with the notion of collapse (as a political category applying it to a social space) and what decades ago my good friends like Alain Badiou developed—the contingent event, also in the sense of a basically contingent, even voluntarist, decision which retroactively structures the field—is that I am more inclined to the quantum-physics notion of collapse and to apply it to history. Namely, the idea is that collapse is not: I’m observing a perplexed situation of multiple options and then I—in the Badiouan way—heroically decide, this is my choice. No. This choice is always a trap. True collapse always happens in a second step; it is, as it were, unexpected.

Let me take a mega-example. Yes, Lenin did a great thing—it’s incredible—he saw the option, the opening for a revolution. But, I’m sorry to say, I think the true collapse happened with Stalinism. This was where we saw what the true inner potential of what Lenin did was. I’m still a Leninist, but a little bit more of a pessimist. So I don’t believe in the Subject like in the young Georg Lukács way—the historical agent who transparently knows the situation and heroically decides, that’s the moment to act. I believe that collapse happens retroactively. You make a choice, and the choice has to be repeated, because you retroactively—after your act—discover that you miscalculated the thing.

So, in other words, I am not a pessimist in the sense of preaching inactivity. On the contrary, I think we should today be totally— in a good sense—pragmatic opportunists. We stick to our principles, but we do whatever is necessary in certain amounts; we should mobilize people in a democratic way. So, in certain situations—sorry, in certain situations—a level of terror can be useful, and so on; even a religious mobilization—whatever. I think this question, what should we do, is open, and I don’t like these choices. For example, now in the United Kingdom and the United States the same debate is going on: the left—traditional left, moderate left, Democratic Party, Labour Party—failed. They don’t have the answer. And here Starmer’s Labour Party is losing ground like crazy. Now, of course, the big dilemma is a very modest dilemma, but an interesting dilemma: should we risk forming a new party, or should we still fight in the left wing of the Democratic Party? I think there is no principled answer.

For example, in the situation—you probably follow this—this electoral struggle for the mayor of New York: how is the guy called—Mandama—that guy, a Black guy, Black Muslim even? He’s an extraordinary figure. If he succeeds in being confirmed by the Democratic Party and in taking over New York, it’s a miracle. With all the risks, there will be a terrible counterattack. Of course, we should grab this notion. And there are some wonderful surprises already. You know who supported him? Not only the usual suspects—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and so on—but even Barack Obama. And, even more, a beautiful moment—crucial—a group of retired policemen supported him precisely; they say his ideas may finally enable us to really fight crime.

But in the United Kingdom, I think the new party that it looks like Jeremy Corbyn, with others, will form—I would support that opposite decision, because this new party can, I think, mobilize the tremendous disappointment with what the Labour Party is doing now. You know that before they even proclaimed their name and organized themselves formally, this new party already has more votes than the Labour Party. So you see what I’m saying? It’s more open. Let’s improvise. Try everything. Don’t get caught in rules, in choices imposed on you by the enemy.

Agon Hamza: Slav, we have one more question, which we are not going to ask on purpose. So we’ll leave it for another time.

Slavoj Žižek: I would like to answer, because it’s my most—what are you currently working on? Working on—yes. Can I—and then you can cut it short, you know. Don’t laugh. I saw a movie recently—I should have seen it twenty years ago, because it’s from the late ’90s—the movie ‘Wild Things’. It’s an extraordinary movie where, at the end, when you think it’s over, everything is explained, you get six, seven further twists, so that you see events from a totally different perspective. And I think this is an appropriate dialectical movement. It holds also for Christianity. In Christianity you have two such moves. First, you know, when Christ died, people were sad—oh my God, catastrophe. And then Paul came, basically, and said, ‘Wait a minute. No—this is good news. Christ came here in order to die, so it’s good news.’ Then the second twist—‘second coming’. The majority of idiots still think ‘second coming’ means we must wait for the moment when Christ will return again. No. In a Hegelian way I claim we—the group of believers—should decide, in a materialist way, that there will be no miraculous arrival. The second coming of Christ, in the spiritual community of believers, the Holy Ghost, is already fully here.

So this double twist is crucial. If some readers want to see the consequences of this—yesterday, on Saturday the 30th, I published on Substack my renewed reading of the most totalitarian Brecht—‘The Man Who Says Yes’ and ‘The Measures Taken’—where I think I gave a much more positive reading of this Brecht. You know, in ‘Der Jasager’ the motto is ‘yes’—I understand this, I translate this, as consent. And this is needed more than ever today. We formally consent that something has to be done—for example, with global warming—but there are people who just say this and do not really accept it. There are people who see what horrors are going on, but their voices are not heard, and so on and so on.

And then, in a new text that I’m now finishing, I will go into how to understand today’s critical situations. For example, Israel, Gaza, West Bank—you have to analyze them like this movie, with multiple denouements. As a very intelligent critic of Israel said, ‘But they are stupid, the Israelis. They are just killing Palestinians. They don’t really hate Hamas.’ Well, we should add to this the obvious thing: they don’t care about Hamas. If anything, it is now becoming more and more clear that Israel knew about the 7 October attack. Do you know, it’s confirmed by—not just quotes, but recorded—statements of Netanyahu, of Smotrich, and so on, that they financed Hamas till one year before this attack, because for them, as long as there is Hamas there, it means Palestinians will not be in unity and there will not be an actual tendency for the state of Palestine. So again, the political conclusion—it’s not just a funny exercise in the history of literature and religion—is that today we should analyze political events like crime novels with multiple denouements. You may think you have the guilty guy, but there is always another twist to be added.

Frank Ruda: Thank you so much, Slav. Thank you so much. We truly appreciate this.

Slavoj Žižek: I am grateful to you—because you can include this or not in the podcast. But, you know, it’s very sad. I am getting old, tired, exhausted. Even I notice that I often repeat myself, and so on. So my hope now is that there will be people who will not simply repeat what I’m doing, but also apply, on my work, superimposed other versions. It’s up to you, Frank and Agon—and it’s up to other readers of my work, not to myself—to propose superimposed readings of me. It’s just an honor for me to collaborate with you, because—now I will almost use a fascist, a fascist, if I say this—but with all other journals—yeah, they are sympathetic, they publish me—but, sorry for this almost fascist terminology, I don’t feel at home with them. You know, it’s only with Crisis and Critique that I feel at home. So the honor is mine.