Slavoj Žižek RT

Slavoj Žižek: The difference
between ‘woke’ and a true

awakening
Slavoj Zizek
is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy
at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York
University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the
University of London.
10 Jun, 2021 17:53
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A woman wears a pink "pussy hat" as she takes part in a march. © Whitney Saleski/SOPA
Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The supposedly liberal ‘wokeness’ and cancel culture

have little to do with awakening to what’s going on in
the world and trying to change it – it’s just noise for
the sake of noise, while the status-quo is carefully
preserved.
The usual liberal-conservative reproach to the so-
called woke cancel culture is that it is too radical: Its
partisans want to destroy all statues, cleanse our
museums, rewrite our entire past… in short, they
want to deprive us of our entire collective memory
and purify our everyday language into a flat, heavily
censored jargon. However, I think Ben Burgis is right
in his claim that the woke agents of cancel culture
are “Canceling Comedians While the World Burns”:
Far from being ‘too radical’, their imposition of new
prohibitions and rules is one of the exemplary cases
of pseudo-activity, of how to make sure that nothing
will really change by pretending to act frantically. No
wonder new forms of capital, in particular anti-Trump
tech capitalists (Google, Apple, Facebook),
passionately support anti-racist and pro-feminist
struggles – ‘woke capitalism’ is our reality. One does
not really change things by prescribing measures
which aim at establishing a superficial ‘just’ balance
without attacking the underlying causes of the
imbalance.
Here is a fresh case of the politically correct struggle
against privilege: California’s Department of
Education proposed that the gap between well-
performing students and their less able peers must
disappear. Professors should hold well-performing
students back and push their less intellectual peers
forward, as if they were all equal in abilities.
Justification? “We reject ideas of natural gifts and
talents,” since “there is no cutoff determining when
one child is ‘gifted’ and another is not.” The goal is
thus to “replace ideas of innate mathematics ‘talent’
and ‘giftedness’ with the recognition that every
student is on a growth pathway.”
This is a showcase of fake egalitarianism destined to

just breed envy and hatred. We need good
mathematicians to do serious science, and the
proposed measures certainly don’t help in this
regard. The solution? Why not more access to good
education for everyone, better living conditions for
the poor? And it is easy to imagine the next step in
this direction of the false egalitarianism: Is not the
fact that some individuals are much more sexually
attractive than others also a case of supreme
injustice? So should we not invent some kind of push
towards equity in enjoyment also, a way to hold the
more attractive back, since there is no cutoff
determining when one person is sexually attractive
and another is not? Sexuality effectively is a domain
of terrifying injustice and imbalance… Equity in
enjoyment is the ultimate dream of false
egalitarianism.
There are rare voices of authentic Left opposition to
this drive towards false justice – apart from Burgis,
one should mention Angela Nagle and Katherine
Angel. The only problem I have with
Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Againis its title,
which seems to imply that sex was once good (not-
antagonistic) and will be that again. I’ve rarely read a
book with whose basic premise I agreed so fully –
since this premise is formulated concisely in the
publicity paragraph for the book, I will shamelessly
quote it:
“Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and
empowerment, they must proclaim their desires
clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest
that women’s desire is often slow to emerge. And
men are keen to insist that they know what women—
and their bodies—want. Meanwhile, sexual violence
abounds. How can women, in this environment,
possibly know what they want? And why do we
expect them to? Katherine Angel challenges our
assumptions about women’s desire. Why, she asks,
should they be expected to know their desires? And
how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not
knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and
personhood?”
The parts italicised (by me) are crucial: Any feminist

theory should take into account not-knowing as a key
feature of sexuality and ground its opposition to
violence in sexual relationship not in the usual terms
of ‘yes means yes’, but by evoking this not-knowing.
This is why the motto that women “must proclaim
their desires clearly and confidently” is not just a
violent imposition on sexuality but literally de-
sexualizing, a promotion of ‘sex without sex’. This is
why feminism, in some instances, enforces precisely
the same ‘shaming and silencing’ of women’s
sexuality that it seeks to oppose. What lies under the
direct physical (or psychological) violence of
unwanted male sexual advances is the patronizing
assumption he knows what the ‘confused’ woman
doesn’t know (and is thereby legitimized to act upon
this knowledge). It could thus be argued that a man
is violent even if he treats a woman respectfully – as
long as it’s done under this presumption of knowing
more about her desires than she does herself.
This in no way implies that women’s desire is in
some sense deficient compared to that of men (who
are supposed to know what they want): The lesson of
psychoanalysis is that a gap always separates what
we want from what we desire. It may happen that I
not only desire something but want to get it without
explicitly asking for it, pretending that it was imposed
on me – demanding it directly would ruin the
satisfaction of getting it. And inversely, I may want
something, dream about it, but I don’t desire to get it
– my entire subjective consistency depends on this
not-getting-it: Directly getting it would lead to a
collapse of my subjectivity. We should always bear in
mind that one of the most brutal forms of violence
occurs when something that we secretly desire or
fantasize about (but are not ready to do in real life) is
imposed on us from outside.
The only form of sex that fully fits the politically
correct criteria is a sado-masochist contract.
Leftist partisans of political correctness often
reproach to its critics that their focus on PC
‘excesses’, on the prohibitive aspect of cancelling
and woke culture, ignores a much graver threat of
censorship. Just in the UK, we have police infiltrating
trade unions, regulation of what gets published in the
media and appears on TV, underage children from
Muslim families questioned for terrorist links, up to
single events like the continuing illegal imprisonment
of Julian Assange… While I agree that censorship is
much worse than the ‘sins’ of cancel culture, I think it
provides the ultimate argument against the woke
culture and PC regulations: Why does the PC Left
focus on regulating details of how we speak, etc.
instead of bringing out the above-mentioned much
bigger things? No wonder Assange was also
attacked by some PC feminists (not only) from
Sweden who did not support him because they took
seriously the accusations about his sexual
misconduct (which were later dismissed by the
Swedish authorities). An unproven infraction of PC
rules outweighed the fact of being a victim of state
terror…
However, when the woke stance touches on a really
important aspect of the reproduction of the
hegemonic ideology, the reaction of the
establishment changes from ridiculing the opponent
for its excesses to a panicky attempt of violent legal
suppression. We often read in our media complaints
about the ‘excesses’ of critical gender and race
studies which try to reassess the hegemonic
narrative of the American past. But we are now in the
middle of an ongoing reactionary counter-offensive to
reassert a whitewashed American myth. New laws
are proposed in at least 15 states all across the US
that would ban the teaching of ‘critical race theory’,
the New York Times’ 1619 Project, and,
euphemistically, ‘divisive concepts’.
Slavoj Zizek: We’re at a grim
ALSO ON RT.COM
crossroads in this pandemic: one path leads

to utter despair, the other to total extinction
Are the prohibited theories really divisive? Yes, but
only in the precise sense that they oppose (divide
themselves from) the hegemonic official myth
which is already in itself divisive: It excludes some
groups or stances, putting them in a subordinate
position. Furthermore, it is clear that to the partisans
of the official myth, truth does not matter here but
only the ‘stability’ of the founding myths – these
partisans, not those dismissed by them as ‘historicist
relativists’, are effectively practicing the ‘post-truth’
stance: They like to evoke ‘alternate facts’, but they
exclude alternate founding myths.
While criticizing the PC cancelling culture, we should
thus always bear in mind that we share their goals
(for feminism, against racism, etc.), and that we
criticize their inefficiency in reaching these goals.
With advocates of the founding myths, the story is a
different one: Their goals are unacceptable, and we
hope they will fail to reach them.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in
this column are solely those of the author and do not
necessarily represent those of RT.
Slavoj Zizek: Israelis’

SHAME over what their state
is doing in West Bank would
be sign of truly belonging to
Israel
Slavoj Zizek
17 May, 2021 19:36
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Members of Israeli police in Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, May 14, 2021©
REUTERS/Mussa Qawasma
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The latest Arab-Jewish escalation reveals that rule of

law is disintegrating in Israel – at least for
Palestinians, who are left to themselves and cannot
appeal to any higher agency that will intervene when
they are attacked.
Sometimes the Slovene government does something
that makes me deeply ashamed of being a citizen of
Slovenia. One such moment came earlier this month
when, in an act of solidarity with Israel, it decided
(together with Austria and the Czech Republic) to fly
Israeli flags along the national and EU flags on
government buildings. The official explanation was
that Israel is under rocket attacks from Gaza and has
to defend itself – none of the usual calls for mutual
restraint, just a clear assignation of guilt.
But the current escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict did not begin with rockets from Gaza; it
began in East Jerusalem, where Israel is again trying
to evict Palestinian families. The frustration of the
Palestinians is easily understandable: for over 50
years following the 1967 Six-Day War, they have
been stuck on the West Bank in a kind of limbo, with
no identity, refugees in their own land.
This protraction is in Israel’s interest: they want the
West Bank, but they don’t want to directly annex it,
because in doing so they would have to make the
Palestinians living there Israeli citizens. So the
situation just drags on, and is from time to time
interrupted by negotiations which were perfectly
described by a Palestinian participant: both sides sit
at the opposite sides of a table with a pizza in the
middle, and while they negotiate over how to divide
the pizza, one side constantly eats its parts.
When, as a sign of solidarity with protesting
Palestinians on the West Bank, Hamas began to
launch rockets against Israel, this act (which should
be condemned) could have served as the perfect
ground for Netanyahu to gain political points: a
genuine desperate protest against the Israeli ethnic
cleansing became yet another Hamas-Israel conflict,
with Israel just responding to rocket attacks. But
Netanyahu had to admit that the civil unrest in Israel
was a greater threat than the rockets from Gaza. He
condemned the “anarchy” of Jewish-Arab violence in
cities across Israel.
One of the focal points of the protests is the Israeli
city of Lod, south-east of Tel Aviv, with a strong
Palestinian presence. Lod’s mayor has described the
events as a “civil war.” Gangs from both sides are
terrorizing individuals, families, and stores, up to
direct lynchings.
‘Civil war’: Israeli mayor laments
ALSO ON RT.COM
‘Kristallnacht’ as Netanyahu sends troops to

Lod, gripped by rioting & clashes
“Far-right Jewish Israelis, often armed with pistols
and operating in full view of police, have moved into
mixed areas this week. In messages shared by one
online Jewish supremacist group, Jews were called
to flood into Lod. ‘Don’t come without any instrument
for personal protection,’ one message read,” the
Guardian reported on Saturday. “Amir Ohana, the
public security minister, has encouraged vigilantism,
announcing on Wednesday that ‘law-abiding citizens
carrying weapons’ were an aid to authorities. He
made the comments after a suspected Jewish
gunman was accused of killing an Arab man in Lod.
The minister, without presenting evidence, said it
was in self-defence.”
The most dangerous aspect of the situation is that
the Israeli police are not even pretending to be acting
as a neutral agent of the law and public safety; they
were reportedly applauding the far-right Jewish mob
waving Israeli flags in Lod.
In short, the rule of law in disintegrating in Israel, at
least for its Palestinian citizens – they are left to
themselves, alone; they cannot appeal to any higher
agency that would intervene when they are attacked.
This scandalous situation is just a consequence of
what has been going on in Israel in recent years: the
openly racist extreme right (who want to assert what
they obscenely call Israel’s “full sovereignty” over the
West Bank and treat Palestinians who live there as
unwelcome intruders) is more and more recognized
as legitimate and becoming part of the public political
discourse. This racist stance has always been the de
facto foundation of Israeli politics, but it was never
publicly acknowledged; it was just the secret –
although known to everyone – motivation of the
Israeli politicians whose public official position was
always (at least until recently) the two-state solution
and respect for international laws and obligations.
Israel is deliberately obliterating
ALSO ON RT.COM
media buildings in Gaza to cover up the war

crimes that will follow
Now that this facade of respect for the law is
dissolving, it is not enough to say that the reality we
see now was the truth behind the appearance all
along. Appearances are essential; they oblige us to
act in a certain way – so without the appearance, the
way we act also changes. The distance between the
public appearance and the dark reality behind it
enabled Israel to present itself as a modern state of
law in contrast to Arab religious fundamentalism, but
with this public acceptance of the religious
fundamentalist racism, Palestinians are now a force
of secular neutrality, while the Israelis act like
religious fundamentalists.
The wider context of this escalation of events in
Israel makes the entire picture even darker: first in
France, then in the US, a considerable group of
military officers and retired generals published letters
warning against the threat to the national identity and
the way of life of their countries. In France, the letter
attacked the tolerance of the state against
Islamization, and in the US, they warned about the
“socialist” and “Marxist” politics of the Biden
administration. The myth of the depoliticized
character of the armed forces is dispelled: a
considerable part of the army supports the nationalist
agenda. In short, what happens now in Israel is part
of a global trend.
‘You weaken our institution’: Top
ALSO ON RT.COM
French cop hits back at 93 ex-officers who

signed letter calling for ‘civil war’ to be
avoided
But what does this mean for the Jewish identity? As
one of the Holocaust survivors said, “In the past, an
anti-Semite was a person who dislikes Jews; now,
an anti-Semite is a person whom Jews dislike.” The
title of a recent dialogue on anti-Semitism and the
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement
in Der Spiegel was: “Wer Antisemit ist, bestimmt der
Jude und nicht der potenzielle Antisemit” (“The Jew,
not the potential anti-Semite, determines who is an
anti-Semite”). OK, sounds logical; the victim should
decide their victim status, so in the same sense that
this holds for a woman who claims she was raped it
should hold also for Jews. But there are two
problems here: (1) Shouldn't the same also hold for
Palestinians on the West Bank, who should
determine who is stealing their land and depriving
them of elementary rights? (2) Who is “the Jew” who
determines who is anti-Semitic? What about the quite
numerous Jews who support the BDS or who, at
least, have doubts about the State of Israel politics
on the West Bank? Is it not the implication of the
quoted stance that, although empirically Jews, they
are in some “deeper” sense not Jews, they betrayed
their Jewish identity? (I was once ferociously
attacked as anti-Semitic for just using the term “the
Jews”…)
Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg proposed the notion
that a shame for one’s country, not love of it, may be
the true mark of belonging to it. A supreme example
of such shame occurred back in 2014 when
hundreds of Holocaust survivors and descendants of
survivors bought an ad in Saturday’s New York
Times condemning what they referred to as “the
massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing
occupation and colonization of historic Palestine.”
“We are alarmed by the extreme, racist
dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society,
which has reached a fever-pitch,” their statement
read.
Maybe today, some Israelis will gather the courage to
feel shame apropos of what the Israelis are doing in
the West Bank and in Israel itself – not, of course, in
the sense of shame of being Jewish, but, on the
contrary, of feeling shame for what the Israeli politics
in the West Bank is doing to the most precious
legacy of Judaism itself.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in
this column are solely those of the author and do not
Slavoj Žižek: Biden’s words
about Putin’s (lack of) soul
are a regression to vulgar
racism
Slavoj Zizek
29 Mar, 2021 15:51
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FILE PHOTO: Vladimir Putin (R) shakes hands with Joe Biden during their meeting in Moscow
March 10, 2011 © REUTERS/Alexander Natruskin
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I am far from having any admiration for Trump, but

Joe Biden’s words about ‘killer Putin’ and his
supposed lack of soul made me almost nostalgic for
some aspects of the Trump years.
When Biden was asked if he believes Putin is a killer,
he replied, “I do.” He also spoke of how in 2011,
while serving as US vice president, he personally told
Putin that Putin does not “have a soul.”
“I wasn’t being a wise guy, I was alone with him in
his office,” Biden said. (What does this mean? Is that
supposed to imply bravery in staying alone with
‘soulless killer’ Putin?) “That’s how it came about. It
was when President [George W.] Bush had said,
‘I’ve looked in his eyes and saw his soul.’”
“I said, I looked in your eyes and I don’t think you
have a soul. And he looked back and said, ‘we
understand each other.’” (What the hell was this
supposed to mean? Putin’s admission that he has no
soul? That neither of them does? Or simply that they
truly despise each other?)
READ MORE
Tara Reade: ‘Enemy’

leader or dissident like me, Democrat media’s
playbook is the same – demonize,
dehumanize, delegitimize
Putin’s quick reply was masterful, wishing Biden
good health and inviting him to a public debate about
big existential and ethical issues on Zoom.
Biden’s strong words stand in sharp contrast to
Trump who, in 2017, when Fox News host Bill
O’Reilly called Putin a “killer,” suggested that
America’s conduct was just as bad.
“There are a lot of killers, we’ve got a lot of
killers,” Trump said. “You think our country’s so
innocent?” Trump displayed a dose of honest realism
here – just like he showed moderation apropos of
some other issues of international politics (he fired
John Bolton who wanted a more aggressive
approach to Iran and North Korea – he clearly
wanted to avoid war). One should not be afraid to go
even further here and argue that there was a rational
kernel in Trump’s trade war against China: US big
capital had a silent pact with China – its cheap labor
force not only lowered the price of commodities in the
US, it also helped big capital exert pressure on US
workers, keeping their wages low and raising their
unemployment.
The Biden presidency signals a more interventionist
international politics, a greater threat to world peace.
Biden’s progressive measures (a much stronger
stance on the Covid-19 pandemic, more financial
help to those suffering its consequences) should not
blind us to this darker aspect of his administration.
#ChickenJoe trends on Twitter
ALSO ON RT.COM
after Biden avoids debate with Putin

following ‘killer’ accusation
But let’s return to Biden’s claim about Putin having
no soul. It is simply a projection. Monstrous killers
are not the ones without a ‘soul’, because it takes a
‘soul’, a rich inner life, to produce fantasies which
somehow justify their terrible acts – fantasies like
their enemies having no ‘soul’, or their enemies’
‘soul’ being somehow wrong. Behind every big
political crime there is a poet or a religious myth. For
example, there is no ethnic cleansing without poetry.
Why? Because we live in an era which perceives
itself as post-ideological. Since great public causes
no longer have the force to mobilize people for mass
violence, a larger sacred Cause is needed, which
makes petty individual concerns about killing seem
trivial. Religion, ethnic belonging or quality of the
‘soul’ fit this role perfectly. Of course, there are cases
of pathological atheists who are able to commit mass
murder just for pleasure, but they are rare exceptions
– the majority needs to be anaesthetized against
their elementary sensitivity to the other’s suffering,
and for this, a sacred Cause is needed. Religious
ideologists usually claim that, true or not, religion
makes some otherwise bad people to do some good
things; from today’s experience, one should rather
stick to Steve Weinberg’s claim that while, without
religion, good people would have been doing good
things and bad people bad things, only religion can
make good people do bad things.
Denying that your political enemy has a soul is
nothing less than a regression to vulgar racism which
rhymes with some of Biden’s gaffes – for example, in
support of Barack Obama, he said: “I mean, you got
the first mainstream African-American who is
articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking
guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” What this
means is that if Biden’s presidency turns out better
than Trump’s, it will not be because of his soul. The
less he relies on his soul, the better for all of us.
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Slavoj Zizek feat.

Rammstein: ‘We have to live
till we die’ is the Covid-era
inspiration we all need
Slavoj Zizek
14 Feb, 2021 12:10
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Rammstein vocalist Till Lindemann performs at Horsens Prison in Horsens, Denmark. 25th, May
2017. © Avalon/PYMCA/Gonzales Photo/Nikolaj Bransholm/Universal Images Group via Getty
Images
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One piece of wisdom the media bombards us with is

that the Covid-19 pandemic taught us about our
mortality and biological limitation: we should abandon
our dreams about dominating nature and accept our
modest place in it.
Is there a more sobering lesson than being
humiliated and reduced to near-impotence by a virus,
a primitive self-reproductive mechanism which some
biologists don't even count as a form of life? No
wonder that calls for a new ethic of modesty and
global solidarity abound.
But is this the true lesson to be learned here? What if
the problem with living in the shadow of a pandemic
is exactly the opposite: not death but life, a strange
life that drags on, allowing us neither to live in peace
nor to quickly die?
READ MORE
Slavoj Zizek: We’re at a

grim crossroads in this pandemic: one path
leads to utter despair, the other to total
extinction
So, what should we do with our lives in this
predicament?
Maybe the Rammstein song “Dalai Lama” indicates
the right answer. The song is vaguely based on
Goethe’s "Der Erlkönig" ("King of the Elves"), a poem
which tells of a father and son riding a horse when
the wind begins to hypnotize the child, who
eventually dies. In the song, the child is on an
airplane with his father; as in the poem, the travellers
are menaced by a mysterious spirit which “invites”
the child to join him (though only the child can hear
it). However, in the poem, the alarmed father rides
for help, holding the child in his arms, only to find that
his son is dead; in Rammstein’s song, it is the father
himself who causes the child’s death.
What does all this have to do with the Dalai Lama?
The title of the song does not just make fun of the
current Dalai Lama's fear of flying – there is a more
intimate link with the core of Buddhist teaching. The
Dalai Lama’s fear of flying strangely echoes the
words of the Lord in heaven in Rammstein’s
song: “Man does not belong in the air / So the Lord
in heaven calls / His sons on the wind,” to cause a
strong turbulence that will kill the child. But how? Not
just by crashing the plane but by directly haunting the
child’s soul: “A choir drips from the clouds / Crawls
into the little ear / Come here, stay here / We are
good to you / We are brothers to you.” The devil’s
voice is not a brutal cry but a soft loving whisper.
We have to live till we DIE
This ambiguity is crucial: the external raw threat is
redoubled by a chorus of seductive voices heard only
by the child. The child fights the temptation to
surrender to these voices, but the father, holding him
too tightly to protect him, does not notice his
shortness of breath and “pushes the soul out of the
child.” (Note the ambiguous ending of the song: the
lyrics never say that the plane really fell down, just
that there was strong turbulence.) The father (who
obviously stands for the Dalai Lama) wants to protect
the child from the external threat of reality, but in his
excessive protection he kills his son – there is a
deeper identity shared by the Dalai Lama and the
“king of all winds”. The obvious implication is that the
Buddhist protection from the pain and suffering
mortifies us, excludes us from life. So, to quote a
well-known ironic paraphrase of the first lines of the
GDR anthem, the message of Dalai Lama effectively
is “Einverstanden mit Ruinen / Und in Zukunft
abgebrannt” (“In agreement with the ruins / and in
future burned down”).
However, “Dalai Lama“ gives this standard pessimist
wisdom an additional spin – the central refrain of the
song is: “Weiter, weiter ins Verderben / Wir müssen
leben bis wir sterben” (“Further, further into ruin / We
have to live till we die”) – this is what Freud called the
“death-drive” at its purest, not seeking death itself but
the fact that we have to LIVE till we die, this endless
dragging of life, this endless compulsion to repeat.
READ MORE
Lockdown is a disaster
for kids’ mental health, and they need support
– but we also cannot pathologize an entire
generation
The refrain sounds like empty tautological wisdom –
like “a minute before he died, Monsieur la Palice was
still alive” – what in France they call a lapalissade.
But Rammstein turn around the obvious statement
that “no matter how long you live, at the end you will
die”: till you die, you have to live. What makes the
Rammstein version not an empty tautology is the
ethical dimension: before we die we are not just
(obviously) alive, we HAVE to live.
For us humans, life is a decision, an active obligation
– we can lose the will to live.
This stance of “we have to live till we die” is the
proper one to adopt today when the pandemic
reminds all of us of our finitude and mortality, on how
our life depends on an obscure interplay of (what
appears to us as) contingencies. As we experience it
almost daily, the true problem is not that we may die
but that life just drags on in uncertainty, causing
permanent depression, the loss of the will to go on.
We HAVE to live till we die

The fascination with total catastrophe and with the
end of our civilization makes us spectators who
morbidly enjoy the disintegration of normality; this
fascination is often fed by a false feeling of guilt (the
pandemic as a punishment for our decadent way of
life, etc.). Now, with the promise of the vaccine and
the spread of new variants of the virus, we live in an
endlessly postponed breakdown.
Notice how the time-frame is changing: in spring
2020, authorities often said “in two weeks, it should
get better”; then, in the fall of 2020, it was two
months; now, it is mostly half a year (in the summer
of 2021, maybe even later, things will get better);
voices are already heard which place the end of the
pandemic in 2022, even 2024… Every day brings
news – vaccines work against new variants, or
maybe they don’t; the Russian Sputnik is bad, but
then it seems it works quite well; there are big delays
in the supply of vaccines, but most of us will still get
vaccinated by summer… these endless oscillations
obviously also generate a pleasure of their own,
making it easier for us to survive the misery of our
lives.
As in “Dalai Lama,” Covid-19 is the turbulence which
shattered our daily lives. What provoked the rage of
today’s gods? Were they offended by our biogenetic
manipulations and destruction of the environment?
And who is the Dalai Lama in our reality? For Giorgio
Agamben and many protesters against lockdown and
social distancing, the Dalai Lama who pretends to
protect us but in reality suffocates our social
freedoms is the authorities, who while ostensibly
seeking to protect us, choke out our ability to live
before we have to die.
We have to LIVE till we die
Agamben recently wrote a short poem titled Si è
abolito l’amore, which makes his position clear. Here
are two lines from his poem:
If freedom is abolished
in the name of medicine
then medicine will also be abolished.
...
If man is abolished
in the name of life
then life will also be abolished.
But one can also argue the exact opposite: is the
stance advocated by Agamben – let's stick to our
social life as usual – also not a seductive voice of
angels which we should resist? Agamben's own
words can be reversed and turned back on him: “If
medicine is abolished in the name of freedom, then
freedom will also be abolished. If life is abolished in
the name of man, then man will also be abolished.”
The Rammstein conceit that “we have to live till we
die” outlines a way out of this deadlock: to fight
against the pandemic not by way of withdrawing from
life but as a way to live with utmost intensity. Is there
anyone more ALIVE today than millions of healthcare
workers who with full awareness risk their lives on a
daily base? Many of them died, but till they died they
were alive. They do not just sacrifice themselves for
us in exchange for our hypocritical praise. Even less
could they be said to be survival machines reduced
to the bare essentials of living. In fact, they are those
who are today most alive.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this
column are solely those of the author and do not
Slavoj Zizek: Trump’s

GREATEST TREASON is the
betrayal of populism
Slavoj Zizek
is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the
University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and
international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London.
11 Jan, 2021 16:07
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Cassiopeia Goldenstein, of Ontario, holds a sign saying "Stolen election = treason" at a rally in support of
U.S. President Donald Trump at the Oregon State Capitol in Salem, Oregon, U.S. January 6,
2021 © REUTERS/Terray Sylvester
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In his erratic grasping at power, outgoing US President

Donald Trump is doing the right thing for the wrong
reasons. The undemocratic electoral system needs to be
dismantled, but he doesn’t have the good of his supporters
in mind.
When the district judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected the US
demand to extradite Julian Assange, many Leftist and
liberal critics commented on this decision in terms which
recall the famous lines from T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the
Cathedral: “The last temptation is the greatest treason /
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” In the play,
Becket is afraid that his “right thing” (the decision to
resist the king and sacrifice himself) is grounded in
a “wrong reason” (his egotist search for the glory of
sainthood). Hegel would have answered to this
predicament that what matters in our acts is their public
content: if I do a heroic sacrifice, this is what counts,
independently of the private motives for doing it, which
may be pathological.
But the refusal to extradite Assange to the US is a
different case: it was obviously the right thing to do, but
what is wrong are the publicly stated reasons for doing it.
The judge fully endorsed the US authorities’ assertion that
Assange’s activities fell outside of the realm of
journalism, and justified her decision purely on mental
health grounds – she said: “The overall impression is of a
depressed and sometimes despairing man, who is
genuinely fearful about his future.” She added that
Assange's high level of intelligence means he would
probably succeed in taking his own life.
READ MORE
What happened at the

Capitol was bad. But the Democrats' rhetoric of
‘sedition’ and ‘insurrection’ is paranoid and
authoritarian
Evoking mental health is thus an excuse to deliver justice -
the implicit but clear public message of the judge is: “I
know the accusation is wrong, but I am not ready to admit
it, so I prefer to focus on mental health.” (Plus, now that
the court also rejected bail for Assange, he will remain in
the solitary confinement in prison which brought him to
suicidal despair…) Assange’s life is (maybe) saved, but
his Cause – the freedom of the press, the struggle for the
right to render public any state crimes – remains a crime.
This is an indicative example of what the humanitarianism
of our courts really amounts to.
But all this is common knowledge – what we should do is
apply T.S. Eliot’s lines to two other recent political events.
Is the comedy that took place in Washington on January 6
not the final proof – if one were needed – that Assange
should not be extradited to the US? It would be like
extraditing dissidents who escaped Hong Kong back to
China.
The first event: when Trump put pressure on Mike Pence,
his vice-president, not to certify electoral votes, he also
asked Pence to do the right thing for the wrong reason:
yes, the US electoral system is rigged and corrupted, it is
one big fake, organized and controlled by the ‘deep state.’
The implications of Trump’s demand are interesting: he
argued that Pence, instead of simply acting in his
constitutionally-prescribed proforma role, could delay or
obstruct the Electoral College certification in Congress.
After the votes are counted, the vice-president has just to
declare the result, whose content is determined in advance
– but Trump wanted Pence to act as if he is making an
actual decision… What Trump demanded was not a
revolution but a desperate attempt to save his day by
forcing Pence to act within the institutional order, taking
the letter of the law more literally than it was meant.
The second event: when pro-Trump protesters invaded
Capitol on January 6, they also did the right thing for the
wrong reasons. They were right in protesting the US
electoral system, with its complicated mechanisms whose
aim is to render impossible a direct expression of popular
dissatisfaction (this was clearly stated by the Founding
Fathers themselves). But their attempt was not a Fascist
coup – prior to taking power, Fascists make a deal with
big business, but now “Trump should be removed from
office to preserve democracy, business leaders say.”
So did Trump incite the protesters against big business?
Not really: recall that Steve Bannon was thrown out of the
White House when he not only opposed Trump’s tax plan
but openly advocated raising taxes for the rich to 40 per
cent, plus he argued that rescuing banks with public
money is “socialism for the rich.”
Trump advocating ordinary people’s interests is like
Citizen Kane from Welles’ classic movie – when a rich
banker accuses him of speaking for the poor mob, he
answers that, yes, his newspaper speaks for the poor
ordinary people in order to prevent the true danger which
is that the poor ordinary people will speak for themselves.
ALSO ON RT.COMThe American Empire has
fallen, though Washington may not know it yet
‘Swamp’ creature with a populist facade
As Yuval Kremnitzer demonstrated, Trump is a populist
who remains within the system. Like any populism, his
version also distrusts political representation, pretending
to speak directly for the people – it complains about how
its hands are tied by the ‘deep state’ and financial
establishment, so its message is: “if only we didn’t have
our hands tied, we would be able to do away with our
enemies once and for all.”
However, in contrast to old authoritarian populism (like
Fascism) which is ready to abolish formal-representative
democracy and really take over and impose a new order,
today’s populism doesn’t have a coherent vision of some
new order – the positive content of its ideology and
politics is an inconsistent bricolage of measures to
bribe “our own” poor, to lower the taxes for the rich, to
focus the hatred on the immigrants and our own corrupted
elite outsourcing jobs, etc. That’s why today’s populists
don’t really want to get rid of the established
representative democracy and fully take power: “without
the ‘fetters’ of the liberal order to struggle against, the
new right would actually have to take some real
action,” and this would render obvious the vacuity of their
program. Today’s populists can only function in the
indefinite postponement of achieving their goal since they
can only function as opposing the ‘deep state’ of the
liberal establishment: “The new right does not, at least not
at this stage, seek to establish a supreme value – for
instance, the nation, or the leader – that would fully
express the will of the people and thereby allow and
perhaps even require the abolition of the mechanisms of
representation.”
What this means is that the true victims of Trump are his
ordinary supporters who take seriously his babble against
liberal corporate elites and big banks. He is the traitor of
his own populist cause. His liberal critics accuse him of
just seemingly controlling his supporters ready to violently
fight for him, while he is really at their side, inciting them
to act, even violently. But he is NOT really ON their side.
On the morning of January 6, he addressed the rally on the
Ellipse: “We're going to walk down to the Capitol. And
we're gonna cheer on our brave senators and
congressmen and women. And we're probably not going to
be cheering so much for some of them, because you'll
never take back our country with weakness, you have to
show strength and you have to be strong.” However, when
the mob did this and approached the Capitol, Trump
retreated to the White House and watched on television as
the violence unfolded on Capitol Hill.
ALSO ON RT.COMAmerica’s risible coup
attempt showed us yet again that white men are
facing an existential crisis
Unmasking fake democracy
Did Trump really want to effect a coup d’etat?
Unambiguously, NO. When the mob penetrated the
Capitol, he made a statement: “I know your pain, I know
your hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It
was a landslide election, and everyone knows it,
especially the other side. But you have to go home now.
We have to have peace. We have to have law and
order.” Trump blamed his opponents for the violence and
praised his supporters, saying, “We can’t play into the
hands of these people. We have to have peace. So go
home. We love you; you’re very special.”
And when the mob began to disperse, Trump posted a
tweet defending the actions of his supporters who stormed
and vandalized the Capitol: “These are the things and
events that happen when a sacred landslide election
victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped
away.” He concluded his tweet with: “Remember this day
forever!” Yes, we should – because it displayed the
fakeness of US democracy as well as the fakeness of the
populist protest against it. Just a few elections in the US
really mattered – like the California gubernatorial election
in 1934: the Democratic candidate Upton Sinclair lost
because the entire establishment organized a previously
unheard-of campaign of lies and defamations (Hollywood
announced that, if Sinclair wins, it will move to Florida,
etc.).
On Thursday January 7, Trump gave another short speech
in which, contradicting what he said before, he
unambiguously condemned the attack on the Capitol as a
threat to law and order, and promised to collaborate in the
peaceful transition of power. Although he probably said
this out of fear for his personal fate, this act just confirmed
that he was and is a member of the establishment, not even
a Rightist hero but a coward. No wonder masses of his
fans are already describing him as a “traitor,” a part of the
Washington “swamp” he’d promised to clear. This, of
course, doesn’t mean that his supporters are in any sense
progressives betrayed by Trump: they expressed their
actual grievances in a Rightist populist way. There is a
grain of truth in their complaints, but they themselves
betrayed it by the form of their activity. Crazy as it may
sound, if they mean it seriously, they should join Bernie
Sanders.
The furious, dissatisfied crowd attacking the parliament on
behalf of a popular president deprived of his power
through parliamentary manipulations… sounds familiar?
Yes: this should have happened in Brazil or in Bolivia –
there, the crowd of the president’s supporters would have
the full right to storm the parliament and re-install their
president. A totally different game was going on in the
US. So let’s hope that what happened on January 6 in
Washington will at least stop the obscenity of the US
sending observers to elections in other countries to judge
their fairness – now the US elections themselves need
foreign observers. The US is a rogue country, and not just
when Trump became its President: the ongoing (almost)
civil war displays a rift that was there all the time.
Slavoj Zizek: We’re at a grim

crossroads in this pandemic:
one path leads to utter despair,
the other to total extinction
Slavoj Zizek
5 Jan, 2021 12:59 / Updated 5 months ago
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FILE PHOTO. © Pexels / Andrew Neel
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A quote from Woody Allen, from back in 1979, is now an

apt if disturbing description of mankind’s predicament
with Covid. We have a stark choice to make if we are to
survive and construct a new society.
We read again and again in our media that we are at the
“beginning of the end” of the pandemic: although numbers
of infections and deaths are still rising, millions are
already vaccinated, so there is now at least the proverbial
light at the end of the tunnel.
In spite of worries about how we will survive the next few
months, there are signs of relief. We deserve this
relaxation since what was so depressive about the
pandemic was precisely that there was no clear exit in
sight – the feeling of the end of the world dragged on
without end. Now it looks like the nightmare will be over
soon, we will try to obliterate it from our memory and
return to normal life as soon as possible.
Some intellectuals bent on finding a deeper meaning in
every catastrophe even evoke these famous lines from
Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymn ‘Patmos’, “Wo aber Gefahr
ist, wächst das Rettende auch” (“Where the danger is, that
which saves is also growing”), as relevant for our
predicament. In what precisely resides this relevance? Is it
simply that science saved us by inventing vaccines in a
record time? Is it that the pandemic reminded us of our
mortality and vulnerability, and thus cured us of our
arrogance, teaching us we are part of nature, not its
masters?
However, it would be much more appropriate to turn
around Hölderlin’s verses: “But where that which saves us
is growing, there are dangers also.” And these dangers are
multiple. Let’s begin with the World Health Organization
experts’ warning that, though the effects of the pandemic
have been very severe, it is ‘not necessarily the big one’,
and the world will have to learn to live with Covid-19.
Zizek: There will be no return to
ALSO ON RT.COM
normality after Covid. We are entering a post-
human era & will have to invent a new way of life
Not only is the Covid pandemic far from over, given
numbers are still rising, but new pandemics are on the
horizon; global warming, fires, and droughts are ruining
our environment; the economic effects of the pandemic
will strike later in 2021 giving a new boost to social
protests; digital control of our lives will remain; mental
health problems will explode… and we will have to learn
to live not just with Covid-19, but with all this medley of
interconnected phenomena. This is why we are now going
through the most dangerous moment of the entire
pandemic. To relax now would be like falling asleep
behind the wheel of a car moving fast on a winding road.
We have to make lots of decisions that cannot all be
grounded in science – our moment is now the moment of
radical political choices.
True, science may save us. Greta Thunberg was right that
we should trust it, but in a true scientific spirit, we should
also admit two things noted by Juergen Habermas: we
didn’t just learn new things, we also got to know how
many things we didn’t know, plus we were forced to act in
an impenetrable situation without knowing what the
effects of our acts would be.
This not-knowing does not concern only the pandemic
itself – we at least have experts there – but even more its
economic, social, and psychic consequences. It is not
simply that we don’t know what is going on, but that we
know we don’t know, and this not-knowing is itself a
social fact, and it is inscribed into how our institutions
act.
We should take even a step further here: it is not just that
we know more and more what we don’t know, it
sometimes appears as if reality itself acts as if it forgot its
own laws. We know the joke about ‘knowledge in the
real’ – that a stone knows the law it must obey when it’s
falling down. But the basic lesson of quantum physics is
that nature itself doesn’t know all its laws, and this is why
Albert Einstein reacted with such anxiety to quantum
physics and its basic premise of the indeterminacy of
nature – for Einstein, this simply meant that quantum
physics is an incomplete theory that ignores some
unknown variables.
Slavoj Zizek: We should look to how
ALSO ON RT.COM
Cuba coped with the fall of the Soviet Union to
deal with our new Covid world
There is a supreme irony in the fact that, although both
Einstein and physicist Niels Bohr were atheists, their most
famous exchange is about God: Einstein remarked, “God
does not play dice,” and Bohr snapped back, “Stop telling
God what to do.” Their disagreement was not about God,
but about the nature of our universe: Einstein couldn’t
accept that nature itself is in some sense “incomplete”.
The pandemic seems to be signaling that Bohr was right.
This indeterminacy, which reaches all the way down to
subatomic level, opens up the space for our interventions,
but only if we fully assume it – that is, if we reject
determinism in both its main versions: naturalism and
divine providence. A Slovene theologian who advocates
keeping churches open in spite of quarantine regulations
answered the reproach that many lives would be lost in a
simple and straight way: “The mission of the Church is not
health but salvation.”
In short, the death and suffering of thousands doesn’t
matter with regard to their salvation in eternity through
God. This is what Mother Theresa was doing in Kolkata:
her mission was to take care of “the hungry, the naked, the
homeless, the crippled, the blind, the lepers, all those
people who feel unwanted, unloved, uncared for
throughout society, people that have become a burden to
the society and are shunned by everyone” – but,
as critics have demonstrated, more than their health, she
took care of their salvation and deathbed conversion to
Catholicism. So, we can easily imagine what she would
have been doing now when the pandemic is ravaging the
world: no vaccination, not even respirators, but just
spiritual solace in a grey environment for the last hours of
our life.
And we can also imagine what will happen in the near
future if the pandemic explodes even more, through new
mutations of the virus, and renders vaccines inefficient:
people will be dying in even bigger numbers than from the
Spanish flu and, lacking any vision of how to contain the
pandemic, our authorities will resign themselves to just
providing care for the dying, inclusive of pills for a
painless death, while the Church will offer mass
conversions to diminish depression with the promise of
salvation for the faithful.
Zizek: Covid crisis sparked fear of
ALSO ON RT.COM
communism & China’s rise as superpower. But
best way to prevent communism is to FOLLOW
China
Our ultimate choice is thus best encapsulated by the
beginning of a text written by Woody Allen back in 1979:
“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a
crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter
hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we
have the wisdom to choose correctly.” The correct choice
is the decision to assume the despair and utter
hopelessness of our predicament: only if we pass through
this zero-point we will be able to construct a new society-
to-come.
The wrong step may lead us to a new divided society with
the privileged living in isolated bubbles while the majority
vegetates in barbaric conditions. Today, more than ever,
egalitarianism is not just a vague ideal, but an urgent
necessity: vaccines for all, universal healthcare, a global
struggle against global warming… Here is a small
unexpected sign in this direction: Uğur Şahin, BioNTech’s
CEO, a Turk living in Germany who played a key role in
inventing the best vaccine, said in an interview at the end
of 2020: “At the moment, it doesn’t look good – a hole is
appearing because there’s a lack of other approved
vaccines and we have to fill the gap with our own
vaccine” – a wonderful moment when the CEO of a
company wants the competitors to get stronger because he
knows that only all together can they win the struggle
against the pandemic.
So, maybe the proper way to conclude is to repeat the
well-known warning that is sometimes added to the idea
of the light at the end of the tunnel: let’s make sure that
this light is not that of another train rushing towards us
from the other side.
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story!
Zizek: There will be no return

to normality after Covid. We
are entering a post-human era
& will have to invent a new way
of life
Slavoj Zizek
8 Dec, 2020 08:08
Get short URL
Jakarta, Indonesia, October 2, 2020 © REUTERS/Ajeng Dinar Ulfiana
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It’s time to accept that the pandemic has changed the way
we exist forever. Now the human race has to embark on
the profoundly difficult and painful process of deciding
what form the ‘new normality’ is going to take.
The world has lived with the pandemic for most of 2020,
but what is our situation with regard to it now, in early
December, in the middle of what the European media is
terming ‘the second wave’? Firstly, we should not forget
that the distinction between the first and second wave is
centred on Europe: in Latin America the virus followed a
different path. The peak was reached in between the two
European waves, and now, as Europe suffers the second of
these, the situation in Latin America has marginally
improved.
We should also bear in mind the variations in how the
pandemic affects different classes (the poor have been hit
more badly), different races (in the US, the blacks and
Latinos suffer much more) and the different sexes.
And we should be especially mindful of countries where
the situation is so bad – because of war, poverty, hunger
and violence – that the pandemic is considered one of the
minor evils. Consider, for example, Yemen. As the
Guardian reported, “In a country stalked by disease, Covid
barely registers. War, hunger and devastating aid cuts
have made the plight of Yemenis almost unbearable.”
Similarly, when the short war erupted between Azerbaijan
and Armenia, Covid clearly became less of a priority.
However, in spite of these complications, there are some
generalisations we can make when comparing the second
wave with the peak of the first wave.
ALSO ON RT.COMGeorge Galloway: Britain’s
£1bn in “aid” to Yemen as it sells bombs to Saudi
is the very definition of blood money
What we have discovered about the virus
For a start, some hopes have been dashed. Herd immunity
doesn’t appear to work. And deaths are at a record level in
Europe, so the hope that we have a milder variation of the
virus even though it is spreading more than ever doesn’t
hold.
We are also dealing with many unknowns, especially
about how the virus is spreading. In some countries, this
impenetrability has given birth to a desperate search for
guilty parties, such as private home gatherings and work
places. The oft-heard phrase that we have to ‘learn to live
with the virus’ just expresses our capitulation to it.
While vaccines bring hope, we should not expect they will
magically bring an end to all our troubles and the old
normality will return. Distribution of the vaccines will be
our biggest ethical test: will the principle of universal
distribution that covers all of humanity survive, or will it
be diluted through opportunist compromises?
It’s also obvious that the limitations of the model which
many countries are following – that of striking a balance
between fighting the pandemic and keeping the economy
alive – are increasingly being demonstrated. The only
thing that appears to really work is radical lockdown.
Take, for example, the state of Victoria in Australia: in
August it had 700 new cases per day, but in late
November, Bloomberg reported that it “has gone 28 days
with no new cases of the virus, an enviable record as the
US and many European countries grapple with surging
infections or renewed lockdowns.”
And with regard to mental health, we can now say, in
retrospect, that the reaction of people at the peak of the
first wave was a normal and healthy response when faced
with a threat: their focus was on avoiding infection. It was
as if most of them simply didn’t have time for mental
problems. Although there is much talk today about mental
problems, the predominant way people relate to the
epidemic is a strange mix of disparate elements. In spite of
the rising number of infections, in most countries the
pandemic is still not taken too seriously. In some strange
sense, ‘life goes on’. In Western Europe, many people are
more concerned if they will be able to celebrate Christmas
and do the shopping, or if they will be able to take their
usual winter holidays.
ALSO ON RT.COMSlavoj Zizek: We should look
to how Cuba coped with the fall of the Soviet
Union to deal with our new Covid world
Transitioning from fear to depression
However, this ‘life goes on’ stance – indications that we
have somehow learned to live with the virus – is quite the
opposite of relaxation because the worst is over. It is
inextricably mixed with despair, violations of state
regulations and protests against them. Since there is no
clear perspective offered, there is something deeper than
fear at work: we have passed from fear to depression. We
feel fear when there is a clear threat, and we feel
frustration when obstacles emerge again and again which
prevent us from reaching what we strive for. But
depression signals that our desire itself is vanishing.
What causes such a sense of disorientation is that the clear
order of causality appears to us as perturbed. In Europe,
for reasons which remain unclear, the numbers of
infections are now falling in France and rising in
Germany. Without anyone knowing exactly why,
countries which were a couple of months ago held as
models of how to deal with the pandemic are now its
worst victims. Scientists play with different hypotheses,
and this very disunity strengthens a sense of confusion and
contributes to a mental crisis.
What further strengthens this disorientation is the mixture
of different levels that characterises the pandemic.
Christian Drosten, the leading German virologist, pointed
out that the pandemic is not just a scientific or health
phenomenon, but a natural catastrophe. One should add to
this that it is also a social, economic and ideological
phenomenon: its actual effect incorporates all these
elements.
READ MORE
Suicides in Japan rise to

highest level in 5 years amid coronavirus crisis
For example, CNN reports that in Japan, more people died
from suicide in October than from Covid during the
entirety of 2020, and women were impacted most. But the
majority of individuals committed suicide because of the
predicament they found themselves in because of the
pandemic, so their deaths are collateral damage.
There is also the impact the pandemic is having on the
economy. In the Western Balkans, hospitals are pushed
over the edge. As a doctor from Bosnia said, “One of us
can do the work of three (people), but not of five.” As
France24 reported, one cannot understand this crisis
without reflecting on the “brain drain crisis, with an
exodus of promising young doctors and nurses leaving to
seek better wages and training abroad.” So, again, the
catastrophic impact of the pandemic is clearly caused also
by the emigration of the workforce.
Accepting the disappearance of our social life

We can therefore safely conclude that one thing is sure: if
the pandemic really does proceed in three waves, the
general character of each wave will be different. The first
wave understandably focused our attention on the health
issues, on how to prevent the virus from expanding to an
intolerable level. That’s why most countries accepted
quarantines, social distancing etc. Although the numbers
of infected are much higher in the second wave, the fear of
long-term economic consequences is nonetheless growing.
And if the vaccines will not prevent the third wave, one
can be sure that its focus will be on mental health, on the
devastating consequences of the disappearance of what we
perceive as normal social life. This is why, even if the
vaccines work, mental crises will persist.
The ultimate question we are facing is this: Should we
strive for a return to our ‘old’ normality? Or should we
accept that the pandemic is one of the signs that we are
entering a new ‘post-human’ era (‘post-human’ with
regard to our predominant sense of what being human
means)? This is clearly not just a choice that concerns our
psychic life. It is a choice that is in some sense
‘ontological’, it concerns our entire relation to what we
experience as reality.
The conflicts over how best to deal with the pandemic are
not conflicts between different medical opinions; they are
serious existential ones. Here is how Brenden Dilley, a
Texas chat-show host, explained why he is not wearing a
mask: “Better to be dead than a dork. Yes, I mean that
literally. I’d rather die than look like an idiot right now.”
Dilley refuses to wear a mask since, for him, walking
around with a mask is incompatible with human dignity at
its most basic level.
ALSO ON RT.COMIf the ‘Great Reset’ really is
so good for us, let’s hold a referendum on it, so it
can have a democratic mandate (or not)
What is at stake is our basic stance towards human life.
Are we – like Dilley – libertarians who reject any
encroaching upon our individual freedoms? Are we
utilitarians ready to sacrifice thousands of lives for the
economic wellbeing of the majority? Are we
authoritarians who believe that only a tight state control
and regulation can save us? Are we New Age spiritualists
who think the epidemic is a warning from nature, a
punishment for our exploitation of natural resources? Do
we trust that God is just testing us and will ultimately help
us to find a way out? Each of these stances relies on a
specific vision of what humans are. It concerns the level at
which we are, in some sense, all philosophers.
Taking all this into account, Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben claims that if we accept the measures against the
pandemic, we thereby abandon open social space as the
core of our being human and turn into isolated survival
machines controlled by science and technology, serving
the state administration. So even when our house is on
fire, we should gather the courage to go on with life as
normal and eventually die with dignity. He writes:
“Nothing I’m doing makes any sense if the house is on
fire. Yet even when the house is on fire it is necessary to
continue as before, to do everything with care and
precision, perhaps even more so than before – even if no
one notices. Perhaps life itself will disappear from the
face of the earth, perhaps no memory whatsoever will
remain of what has been done, for better or for worse. But
you continue as before, it is too late to change, there is no
time anymore.”
One should note an ambiguity in Agamben’s line of
argumentation: is “the house on fire” due to the pandemic,
global warming etc? Or is our house on fire because of the
way we (over)reacted to the reality of the pandemic?
“Today the flame has changed its form and nature, it has
become digital, invisible and cold – but precisely for this
very reason it is even closer still and surrounds us at
every moment.” These lines clearly sound Heideggerian:
they locate the basic danger in how the pandemic
strengthened the way medical science and digital control
regulate our reaction to it.
Why we cannot maintain our old way of life

Does this mean that, if we oppose Agamben, we should
resign ourselves to the loss of humanity and forget the
social freedoms we were used to? Even if we ignore the
fact that these freedoms were actually much more limited
than it may appear, the paradox is that only by way of
passing through the zero point of this disappearance can
we keep the space open for the new freedoms-to-come.
If we stick to our old way of life, we will for sure end in
new barbarism. In the US and Europe, the new barbarians
are precisely those who violently protest against anti-
pandemic measures on behalf of personal freedom and
dignity – those like Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-
in- law, who, back in April, bragged that Trump was
taking the country “back from the doctors” – in short, back
from those who only can help us.
READ MORE
Zizek: Covid crisis

sparked fear of communism & China’s rise as
superpower. But best way to prevent communism is
to FOLLOW China
However, one should note that in the very last paragraph
of his text, Agamben leaves open the possibility that a new
form of post-human spirituality will emerge. “Today
humankind is disappearing, like a face drawn in the sand
and washed away by the waves. But what is taking its
place no longer has a world; it is merely a bare and
muted life without history, at the mercy of the
computations of power and science. Perhaps, however, it
is only by beginning from this wreckage that something
else can appear, whether slowly or abruptly – certainly
not a god, but not another man either – a new animal
perhaps, a soul that lives in some other way…”
Agamben alludes here to famous lines from
Foucault’s Les mot et les choses when he refers to
humankind disappearing like a figure drawn on sand being
erased by waves on a shore. We are effectively entering
what can be called a post-human era. The pandemic,
global warming and the digitalisation of our lives –
including direct digital access to our psychic life – corrode
the basic coordinates of our being human.
So how can (post-)humanity be reinvented? Here is a hint.
In his opposition to wearing protective masks, Giorgio
Agamben refers to French philosopher Emmanuel
Levinas and his claim that the face “speaks to me and
thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a
power exercised.” The face is the part of another’s body
through which the abyss of the Other’s imponderable
Otherness transpires.
Agamben’s obvious conclusion is that, by rendering the
face invisible, the protective mask renders invisible the
invisible abyss itself which is echoed by a human face.
Really?
There is a clear Freudian answer to this claim: Freud knew
well why, in an analytical session – when it gets serious,
i.e. after the so-called preliminary encounters – the patient
and the analyst are not confronting each other face to face.
The face is at its most basic a lie, the ultimate mask, and
the analyst only accedes to the abyss of the Other by NOT
seeing its face.
Accepting the challenge of post-humanity is our only
hope. Instead of dreaming about a ‘return to (old)
normality’ we should engage in a difficult and painful
process of constructing a new normality. This construction
is not a medical or economic problem, it is a profoundly
political one: we are compelled to invent a new form of
our entire social life.
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mainstream media won’t tell you.
Slavoj Žižek: Trump’s flexible
relationship with the truth
made him more dangerous than
a fascist
Slavoj Zizek
26 Nov, 2020 15:20
Get short URL
U.S. President Donald Trump gestures during a campaign rally at Fayetteville Regional Airport in
Fayetteville, North Carolina, U.S., November 2, 2020 © REUTERS/Hannah McKay
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Donald Trump has been a US president who has revelled
in lies and obscenity. As we consider his legacy, his
continued crass behaviour should make us ask how such a
worthless person got the job in the first place.
On November 23, Donald Trump finally agreed to begin
the transition of power, but the way it was announced tells
us a lot about him.
Head of the General Services Administration Emily
Murphy said in a letter to President-elect Joe Biden that
she had determined the transition from the Trump
administration could formally begin. She added that she
came to her decision “independently” and did not receive
pressure from the executive branch. (Murphy referred to
Biden as the “apparent election winner” – the opposite of
appearance is essence, so her qualification implies that
‘essentially’ Trump won, whatever the final results.
Minutes after Murphy’s letter was first reported, Trump
tweeted that he had given her permission to send the letter,
but he vowed to continue protesting his own defeat. His
campaign team continues to push supporters to back
fundraising efforts in a last-ditch bid to beat the election
outcome.
I want to thank Emily Murphy at GSA for her steadfast dedication and loyalty to our
Country. She has been harassed, threatened, and abused – and I do not want to see this
happen to her, her family, or employees of GSA. Our case STRONGLY continues, we will
keep up the good...
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 23,

2020
So, Trump approves transition without conceding defeat;
he permits acts which are made independently of his will.
He is a living contradiction: the ultimate post-modern
ironist presenting himself as a guardian of traditional
Christian values; the ultimate demolisher of law and stable
order presenting himself as its unconditional enforcer.
We find the same tension in how Trump relates to
conspiracy theories. When he is asked about radical
Rightist groups which propagate violence or conspiracy
theories, Trump is ready to formally distance himself from
the problematic aspects, while praising the group’s general
patriotic attitude.
This distance is empty, of course, and is a purely rhetorical
device: the group is silently expected to act upon the
implicit calls to violence Trump’s speeches are full of –
when he constantly attacks alleged Leftist violence, he
does it in terms which are divisive and a call to violence in
themselves.
A prime example of this was Trump’s answer when he
was asked about the violence propagated and practised by
the Proud Boys in the first presidential debate. As
was reported at the time, “Minutes after Trump told the
Proud Boys, a far-right group with members who espouse
white supremacism, to ‘stand back and stand by’, on
national television… members of the men-only group took
to fringe social media sites to celebrate what they
considered a ‘historic’ moment for their ideological push
against leftists.”
READ MORE
Chris Hedges: The ruling

elite’s war on truth
This is – if I can be pardoned using an expression which is
very problematic here – Trump at his best. He does tell
them to “stand back” – ie to restrain from violence. But
he adds “and stand by” – ie to get ready, but for what?
The implication is clear: to practise violence if Trump
loses the election.
In Trump, we thus encounter a new variation on the old
idea of the emperor’s new clothes. While in the original
Hans Christian Andersen version an innocent child’s gaze
is needed to publicly proclaim that the emperor is naked,
in today’s reign of public obscenity, the emperor himself
proudly proclaims he has no clothes. But this very
openness functions as a redoubled mystification. How?
In homology with Ernst Kantorowicz’s thesis on the
King’s Two Bodies, today’s populist emperor has double
clothes. So, while he boasts that he is divested of his
personal ‘clothes’ of dignity, he keeps his second clothes,
the instruments of his symbolic investiture.
For this reason, what makes Trump’s obscenity perverse is
that he is not just lying brazenly, without any constraint –
he also directly tells the truth when one would expect him
to be embarrassed by it. When, in August 2020, he
announced his intention to defund the US post service,
there was no need for a complex analysis to prove that he
was proposing this to make more difficult postal voting
and thus deprive the Democrats of votes: he openly stated
this was the case.
Lying means you still recognize implicitly some moral
norms, you just violate them in reality. But what happened
with Trump in this case is worse than lying: in saying
what is literally true, he undoes or suspends the very
dimension of truth.
We can also clearly see this in how Trump dealt with
QAnon, a far-rightconspiracy theory alleging a secret plot
against him and his supporters by a supposed ‘deep state’.
This is how ABC reported his reaction: “The White
House… defended the President’s embrace of a fringe
conspiracy group, with press secretary Kayleigh McEnany
saying that he was “talking about his supporters” when
he called QAnon followers people who “love the country”
and said he appreciates their backing.”
Obama producing anti-Trump
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Netflix ‘comedy’ series: Hollywood refuses to give
up on cash cow obsession, even with Biden in office
Trump was careful not to say that he takes the QAnon
theory seriously. Instead, he limited himself to only two
facts, both of which are true: those who advocate QAnon
theories are supporters of him, and they love America.
Plus, he added a subjective fact – which is also true – that
he appreciates their backing. The question of the factual
truth of QAnon didn’t even enter the picture.
We are thus gradually approaching what effectively can be
called a post-truth discursive space, a space which
oscillates between pre-modern superstition (conspiracy
theories) and post-modern cynical scepticism. This is why
Trump is not a fascist; he is something maybe even more
dangerous.
With Trump, we see the polar opposite to Stalinism, where
the figure of the leader should be kept unblemished at any
price. While the Stalinist leader fears that even a minor
indecency or indiscretion would destroy his position, our
new leaders are ready to go pretty far in renouncing
dignity. Trump is famous not in spite of his obscenities,
but on account of them.
In the old royal courts, a king often had a clown whose
function was to destroy the noble appearance with
sarcastic jokes and dirty remarks, thereby confirming – by
contrast – the king’s dignity. Trump doesn’t need a clown;
he already is his own clown, and no wonder that his acts
are sometimes more funny or tasteless than the
performances of his comic imitators. The standard
situation is thus inverted: Trump is not a dignified person
about whom obscene rumors circulate; he is an openly
obscene person who wants his obscenity to appear as a
mask of his dignity.
READ MORE
Trump’s planned TV
network would take broadcasting to new depths.
Here’s an idea of the horrors it might have in
store…
All this, unfortunately, doesn’t mean that his ‘excesses’
are not to be taken seriously. In a rare appearance on the
electoral campaign, Melania
Trump denounced Biden’s “socialist agenda”. So what
about Kamala Harris who is usually perceived as more
Leftist than the extremely moderate Biden? Her husband
was clear on this point: “She’s a communist. She's not a
socialist. She's well beyond a socialist. She wants to open
up the borders to allow killers and murderers and rapists
to pour into our country.” Incidentally, when did open
borders become a characteristic of communism?
Biden immediately reacted:“There’s not one single
syllable that I’ve ever said that could lead you to believe
that I was a socialist or a communist.” Factually true, but
this rebuttal misses the point. The dismissal of Biden and
Harris as socialist or communist is not simply a rhetorical
exaggeration; Trump is not just saying this, even though
he knows it to be untrue.
His ‘exaggerations’ are perfect examples of what one
should call realism of notions. Notions are not just names,
they structure political space and, as such, have actual
effects.
Trump’s ‘cognitive mapping’ of the political space is an
almost symmetrical reversal of the Stalinist map in which
everybody who opposes the party is considered to be part
of a fascist plot. In a similar way, from Trump’s
standpoint, the liberal centre is disappearing – or, as his
friend, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán put it,
liberals are just communists with a diploma, which means
there are only two true poles: populist nationalists and
Communists.
There is a wonderful expression in Serb: “Ne bije al’
ubija u pojam.” Roughly translated, it means, “It doesn’t
beat but it kills the concept/notion.” It refers to somebody
who, instead of destroying you with direct violence,
bombards you with acts which undermine your self-
respect so that you end up humiliated, deprived of the very
core – or ‘notion’ – of your being.
To ‘kill in a notion’ describes the opposite of the actual
destruction (of your empirical reality) in which your
‘notion’ survives in an elevated way (like killing an enemy
in such a way that the enemy survives in the minds of
thousands as a hero). This is how one should proceed with
Hitler and Nazism: not just to destroy him – to get rid of
his ‘excesses’ and save the sane core of his project – but to
kill him in his notion.
And it’s the same with Trump and his legacy. The true
task is not just to defeat him (because there is always the
possibility that he will return in 2024), but to ‘kill him in
his notion’. To make him visible in all his worthless vanity
and inconsistency, but also – and this is the crucial part –
to ask how such a worthless person could have become the
president of the US. As the German philosopher Hegel
would have put it, to kill Trump in his notion means to
‘bring him to his notion’ – ie to allow him to destroy
himself by way of just making him appear as what he is.
story!
Slavoj Zizek: Biden’s win

changes nothing and signifies
stalemate that could see Trump
run again in 2024
Slavoj Zizek
9 Nov, 2020 15:53
Get short URL
FILE PHOTO: President-elect Joe Biden points a finger at his election rally in Wilmington, Delaware,
November 7 © REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
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Don’t expect Joe Biden’s election victory to make a major

difference to the US. He will be hamstrung by the Senate
and Supreme Court, and unable to impose any
fundamental change.
‘Democracy Reborn’, the title of a book from 2007 by the
historian Garrett Epps, is used in US historiography to
designate the time after the Civil War when all
progressives joined forces to add Amendment XIV to the
Constitution.
This amendment provided African Americans with full
citizenship and prohibited any state from denying any
citizen equal protection under the law. It changed almost
every detail of US public life, which is why some scholars
even call it the ‘second constitution’. It was not a
reconciliation between the winning North and the defeated
South, but a new unity imposed by the winner, a big step
forward towards universal emancipation.
Did something similar not happen in Chile with the
victory of APRUEBO in the referendum? The process of
changing the constitution approved by the large majority is
not aimed exclusively at getting rid of the legacy of
General Pinochet and a return to the pre-Pinochet
‘democratic’ era. It also wants to inaugurate a more radical
change, a new level of emancipation. Here also,
‘democracy reborn’ is not a return to some old, idealized
state, but a radical break with the entire past.
READ MORE
Wayne Dupree: Why

should Biden get any more unity than Trump
‘didn’t get’ four years ago?
In the era of Donald Trump, the USA was again de facto
in a state of ideological-political civil war between the
populist new right and the liberal-democratic center, with
occasional threats of physical violence. Now that Trump’s
authoritarian populism has been defeated, is there a chance
for a new ‘democracy reborn’ in the USA? Unfortunately,
this slim chance was lost with the marginalization of
democratic socialists such as Bernie Sanders and
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Only the alliance of left
liberals with democratic socialists may have pushed the
process of democratic emancipation a step further.
What’s more, with the Senate remaining in the hands of
the Republicans and the Supreme Court with a
conservative majority, Biden as president will have very
limited room for maneuver and will not be able to impose
any serious change.
This is exacerbated by the fact that Biden himself is a
‘moderate’ agent of the economic and political
establishment, who is horrified at being accused of
socialist tendencies. AOC was thus fully justified when, in
a post-election interview, she broke the truce
and criticized the Democratic Party for incompetence,
warning that if the Biden administration does not put
progressives in top positions, the party would lose big in
the 2022 midterm elections.
The US is now almost symmetrically divided, and Biden’s
words of unity and reconciliation sound vacuous – as
former US secretary of labor Robert Reich put it: “How
can Biden heal America when Trump doesn’t want it
healed?” And this division is here to stay. As academic
Michael Goldfarb argued: “Trump was no accident. And
the America that made him is still with us.”
It is quite possible then, that in the same way the post-
Civil-War ‘democracy reborn’ ended up with a
compromise with anti-black southern democrats which
prolonged anti-black racism for a whole century until the
1960s, something similar will happen after a couple of
years of Biden reign.
ALSO ON RT.COMBiden administration will find it hard
to integrate itself in a world changed by Trump
But the outcome of the elections is not just a stalemate –
there is a clear winner: the big capital and deep state
apparatus, from Google and Microsoft to the FBI and the
National Security Agency. From their standpoint, a weak
Biden presidency with the Senate in Republican hands is
the best possible outcome. Without Trump’s eccentricities,
international trade and political cooperation will get back
to pre-Trump normality, while the Senate and Supreme
Court will block any radical measures.
The paradox is thus that, in the US, the victory of the
‘progressive’ side was at the same time its loss, signifying
a political stalemate which may even give Trump a chance
to return to power in 2024.
This is why, precisely at the moment of Trump’s defeat,
we should ask how he was able to seduce half of the
American people. And one reason is undoubtedly an
attribute that he shares with Bernie Sanders. Like Trump,
Sanders inspires fierce loyalty among his supporters – as
they say, once you go Bernie, you never go back.
READ MORE
Trump was a symptom of

American decline that Biden is unlikely to reverse
There is no mystic affection here, just a recognition that he
really addresses them and their troubles, that he really
understands them – in clear contrast to most of the other
Democratic candidates. It’s not a matter of the feasibility
of Sanders’ program, it is that he touches a raw nerve of
his partisans. Could a voter worried about what will
happen if – or, rather, when – someone in their family gets
really sick, seriously claim that Michael Bloomberg or
Biden really understands them?
Here, Trump is superficially similar to Sanders. Although
his solidarity with ordinary people is mostly limited to
obscene vulgarities, he also addresses their everyday
worries and fears in simple terms, giving the impression
that he really cares for them and respects their dignity.
One has to admit that, even in dealing with the pandemic,
Trump cunningly adopted a ‘human’ approach: he tried to
maintain calm, telling people that the epidemic will soon
be over and that they can carry on with their lives.
I once wrote that Biden is Trump with a human face, more
civilized and kind. But one could also say the opposite:
Trump is Biden with a human face, where, of course,
‘humanity’ is reduced to its minimum of common
vulgarities and insults, in the same sense that a drunkard
who babbles nonsense is more ‘human’ that an expert
talking about complex formulas.
Now we are at such a low point that getting a president
who will not change anything is the most we can hope for.
The only group that deserves to be celebrated as heroes are
those who simply ignored the violent threats of Trump’s
partisans and calmly went on with their job of counting
votes. Such praise is usually reserved for ‘rogue states’
where a peaceful transfer of power is a cause for
celebration.
The only small hope is that an unintended result of the
Trump era may survive: the partial withdrawal of the US
from world politics. The US will have to accept that it is
just another state in a new, multi-centric world. This is the
only way for all of us to avoid the humiliating situation of
following with fear the counting of the votes in the US, as
if the fate of the entire world depends on a couple of
thousand of American ignoramuses.
column are solely those of the
Slavoj Zizek: Jeremy Corbyn

wasn’t suspended from the
Labour Party for anti-
Semitism, he was defenestrated
for anti-Capitalism
Slavoj Zizek
2 Nov, 2020 18:29
Get short URL
© AFP / Paul ELLIS
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The former leader is just the latest left-wing figure to be

brought down by vexatious allegations of Jew-hating so
opponents don’t have to engage with his real argument,
that capitalism has and is failing.
On October 29, 2020, Jeremy Corbyn was suspended from
the British Labour Party – why? The Equality and Human
Rights Commission, the UK equality watchdog, concluded
its 130-page investigation with the claim that the Labour
Party could have tackled antisemitism more effectively “if
the leadership had chosen to do so,” and Corbyn was
suspended after he said antisemitism in the party was
“dramatically overstated for political reasons.” This act of
purge will, of course, ignite open conflict between the
party’s new leader, Keir Starmer, and Corbyn-supporting
MPs, among them John McDonnell. Starmer already said
that the EHRC report amounts to “a day of shame” for the
party.
But what if the purge of Corbyn is the Labour Party’s day
of shame for the opposite reason, because it took place at
all? What if Corbyn was purged not because of his (non-
existent) anti-Semitism, but because of his critical stance
towards capitalism, with anti-Semitism used as a cover?
What if Corbyn’s purge is just the sad latest link in the
chain of current anti-Leftist propaganda which brands as
“anti-Semitic” every agent who seriously critiques the
existing order, from Bernie Sanders to Yanis
Varoufakis.
Slavoj Zizek: Biden’s just Trump
ALSO ON RT.COM
with a human face, and the two of them share the
same enemy
But things reach even deeper here. One would expect that,
with the horror of the pandemic, other conflicts would step
back, the way that, during WWII, Conservatives and the
Labour Party (Churchill and Atlee) formed a well-
functioning coalition. But with the ongoing pandemic,
many other conflicts are exploding in an even stronger
way (Armenia, and Azerbaijan, Islam and the West…).
The reason is not just using the opportunity when attention
is caught elsewhere. The pandemic is such a shock that it
forces each society to question its very social and
ideological foundations. This is clear in the US where the
overreaching basic conflict acquires an almost
metaphysical dimension: everyday common sense versus
science. Trump stands for the disavowal of the Covid
pandemic, for the continuation of our social life whatever
the price – for him, the reason media focus on Covid is a
political, it is a strategy to obfuscate Trump’s
achievements.
In a rare appearance for her husband, Melania Trump
denounced Biden’s “Socialist agenda”– so what about
Kamala Harris who is usually perceived as more Leftist
than the extremely moderate Biden? Donald Trump was
clear on this point: “She's a communist. She's not a
socialist. She’s well beyond a socialist. She wants to open
up the borders to allow killers and murderers and rapists
to pour into our country.” (Incidentally, from when are
open borders a characteristic of Communism?)
Biden immediately reacted: “There’s not one single
syllable that I’ve ever said that could lead you to believe
that I was a socialist or a communist.” Factually true, but
this rebuttal misses the point: the dismissal of Biden and
Harris as Socialist/Communist is not simply a rhetorical
exaggeration, it is an exemplary case of what one should
call “realism of notion” – notions are not just names, they
structure political space and have as such actual effects.
Trump’s “cognitive mapping” of the political space is an
almost symmetrical reversal of the Stalinist map in which
everybody who opposes the Party is considered as part of
a Fascist plot. In a similar way, from Trump’s standpoint,
the liberal centre is disappearing – or, as his friend Viktor
Orban put it, liberals are just Communists with a diploma,
which means there are only two true poles, populist
nationalists and Communists (or, as the Bolsheviks used to
say in the Summer of 1917, there is no neutral middle
space between the Tsar and Bolsheviks).
Zizek: Covid crisis sparked fear of
ALSO ON RT.COM
communism & China’s rise as superpower. But
best way to prevent communism is to FOLLOW
China
The radical Left should agree with Trump in regard to this:
yes, one should not exclude tactical alliances with liberals
to fight racism, to defend women’s rights, etc. – but the
ultimate conflict is the one between the establishment
(divided into the populist wing and the liberal wing) and
the Left. We should thus reject the mapping proposed by
the liberal center: the idea that liberal democracy should
be defended against both Rightist and Leftist extremes.
For today’s politics holds what German philosopher
Theodor Adorno said about psychoanalysis: “nothing is
more true in it than its exaggerations.”
Such politics of radical choice is the only principled one:
we should make a choice where choice is necessary and
reject a choice where it is a false one. Today, we should
firmly reject the political misuse of Zionism that
condemns every sympathy with Palestinians as anti-
Semitic, and we should simultaneously ruthlessly reject
Islamist terrorism manifested in recent slaughter attacks in
France (Paris, Nice). There is no choice here, no right
measure between the two extremes – as Stalin would have
put it, they are both worse. This principled stance was the
true reason of Corbyn’s downfall.
story!

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Slavoj Žižek: The difference

between ‘woke’ and a true

The supposedly liberal ‘wokeness’ and cancel culture

This is a showcase of fake egalitarianism destined to

The parts italicised (by me) are crucial: Any feminist

crossroads in this pandemic: one path leads

Slavoj Zizek: Israelis’

The latest Arab-Jewish escalation reveals that rule of

‘Kristallnacht’ as Netanyahu sends troops to

media buildings in Gaza to cover up the war

French cop hits back at 93 ex-officers who

I am far from having any admiration for Trump, but

Tara Reade: ‘Enemy’

after Biden avoids debate with Putin

Slavoj Zizek feat.

Get short URL

One piece of wisdom the media bombards us with is

Slavoj Zizek: We’re at a

We HAVE to live till we die

Slavoj Zizek: Trump’s

Get short URL

In his erratic grasping at power, outgoing US President

What happened at the

Slavoj Zizek: We’re at a grim

FILE PHOTO. © Pexels / Andrew Neel

A quote from Woody Allen, from back in 1979, is now an

Zizek: There will be no return

Get short URL

Jakarta, Indonesia, October 2, 2020 © REUTERS/Ajeng Dinar Ulfiana

Suicides in Japan rise to

Accepting the disappearance of our social life

Why we cannot maintain our old way of life

Zizek: Covid crisis

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 23,

Chris Hedges: The ruling

Slavoj Zizek: Biden’s win

Don’t expect Joe Biden’s election victory to make a major

Wayne Dupree: Why

Trump was a symptom of

Slavoj Zizek: Jeremy Corbyn

The former leader is just the latest left-wing figure to be

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