The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012)

1. - I'm giving you a choice.

2. Either put on these glasses or start eating that trashcan.

3. - I already am eating from the trashcan all the time.

4. The name of this trashcan is ideology.

5. The material force of ideology

6. makes me not see what I'm effectively eating.

7. It's not only our reality which enslaves us.

8. The tragedy of our predicament,

9. when we are within ideology, is that

10. when we think that we escape it, into our dreams,

11. at that point, we are within ideology.

12. - "They Live" from 1988 is definitely

13. one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood Left.

14. It tells the story of John Nada.

15. Nada, of course, in Spanish means nothing.

16. A pure subject deprived of all substantial content.

17. A homeless worker in L.A. who, drifting around

18. one day, enters into an abandoned church

19. and finds there a strange box full of sunglasses.

20. And when he put one of them on,

21. walking along the L.A. streets,

22. he discovers something weird,

23. that these glasses function like

24. critique-of-ideology glasses.

25. They allow you to see the real message

26. beneath all the propaganda, publicity,

27. glitz, posters, and so on.

28. You see a large publicity board telling you,

29. have your holiday of a lifetime,

30. and when you put the glasses on,

31. you see just on the white background a gray inscription.

32. We live, so we are told, in a post-ideological society.

33. We are interpolated, that is to say,

34. addressed by social authority,

35. not as subjects who should do their duty,

36. sacrifice themselves, but subjects of pleasures.

37. Realize your true potential.

38. Be yourself.

39. Lead a satisfying life.

40. When you put the glasses on,

41. you see dictatorship in democracy.

42. It's the invisible order which

43. sustains your apparent freedom.

44. The explanation for the existence of these

45. strange ideology glasses is the standard story

46. of the "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

47. Humanity is already under the control of aliens.

48. - Hey buddy, you gonna pay for that or what?

49. Look buddy, I don't want no hassle today.

50. Either pay for it or put it back.

51. - According to our common sense,

52. we think that ideology is something

53. blurring, confusing our straight view.

54. Ideology should be glasses which

55. distort our view, and the critique of

56. ideology should be the opposite like,

57. you take off the glasses so that you can

58. finally see the way things really are.

59. This precisely and here, the pessimism of

60. the film, of "They Live" is well justified.

61. This precisely is the ultimate illusion.

62. Ideology is not simply imposed on ourselves.

63. Ideology is our spontaneous relationship

64. to our social world, how we perceive

65. each meaning and so on and so on.

66. We, in a way, enjoy our ideology.

67. - Alright.

68. - To step out of ideology, it hurts.

69. It's a painful experience.

70. You must force yourself to do it.

71. This is rendered in a wonderful way with

72. a further scene in the film where

73. John Nada tries to force his best friend,

74. John Armitage, to also put the glasses on.

75. - I don't want to fight you.

76. - Come on!

77. - I don't want to fight you. - Come on!

78. - Stop it! - No!

79. - And it's the weirdest scene in the film.

80. The fight takes eight, nine minutes.

81. - Put on the glasses!

82. - It may appear irrational because why does this guy reject

83. so violently to put the glasses on?

84. It is as if he is well aware that,

85. spontaneously, he lives in a lie,

86. that the glasses will make him see the truth,

87. but that this truth can be painful,

88. can shatter many of your illusions.

89. This is a paradox we have to accept.

90. - Put the glasses on!

91. Put 'em on!

92. - The extreme violence of liberation.

93. You must be forced to be free.

94. If you trust simply your spontaneous sense of wellbeing

95. or whatever you will never get free.

96. - Look!

97. - Freedom hurts.

98. The basic insight of psychoanalysis is to distinguish

99. between enjoyment and simple pleasures.

100. They are not the same.

101. Enjoyment is precisely enjoyment in

102. disturbed pleasure, even enjoyment in pain,

103. and this excessive factor disturbs

104. the apparently simple relationship

105. between duty and pleasures.

106. This is also a space where ideology,

107. up to and especially religious ideology, operates.

108. This brings me to maybe my favorite example,

109. the great classical Hollywood film "The Sound of Music."

110. We all know it's the story of a nun who is

111. too alive with too much energy,

112. ultimately, sexual energy, to be

113. constrained to the role of a nun.

114. - Oh, oh Reverend Mother, I'm so sorry.

115. I just couldn't help myself.

116. The gates were open and the hills

117. were beckoning and before I—

118. - Maria, I haven't summoned you here for apologies.

119. - Oh, please mother do let me ask for forgiveness.

120. One, two, three, one, two, three,

121. one, two, three, step together, now—

122. - So, Mother Superior sends her to

123. the von Trapp family where she takes care of the children.

124. - Hop and under (chuckles) Kurt, we'll have to practice—

125. - Do allow me will you?

126. - Mm-hmm.

127. - And at the same time, of course,

128. falls in love with the Baron von Trapp.

129. And Maria gets too disturbed by it,

130. cannot control it, returns to the convent.

131. - Oh there were times when we would look at each other.

132. Oh Mother, I could hardly breathe.

133. - Did you let him see how you felt?

134. If I did, I didn't know it.

135. That's what's been torturing me.

136. I was there on God's errand.

137. - No wonder that in old communist Yugoslavia

138. where I saw this film for the first time,

139. exactly this scene, or more precisely,

140. the song which follows this strange hedonist, if you want,

141. advice from the mother superior,

142. go back, seduce the guy, follow this path.

143. Do not betray your desire.

144. Namely the song which begins with, "Climb every mountain."

145. The song which is an almost embarrassing

146. display and affirmation of desire.

147. These three minutes were censored.

148. - I think the sensor was a very intelligent man.

149. He knew, as probably an atheist communist,

150. where the power of attraction of Catholic religion resides.

151. - If you read intelligent

152. Catholic propagandists, and if you really try to

153. discern what deal are they offering you,

154. it's not to prohibit, in this case sexual pleasures.

155. It's a much more cynical contract, as it were,

156. between the church as an institution and the believer,

157. troubled with, in this case, sexual desires.

158. It is this hidden obscene permission that you get.

159. You are covered by the divine Big Other.

160. You can do what ever you want, enjoy.

161. - This obscene contract does not

162. belong to Christianity as such.

163. It belongs to Catholic Church as an institution.

164. - It is the logic of institution at its purest.

165. - This is again a key

166. to the functioning of ideology.

167. - Not only the explicit message,

168. renounce, suffer and so on, but the true hidden message.

169. pretend to renounce and you can get it all.

170. My psychoanalytic friends are telling me that

171. typically today, patients who come to the analyst

172. to resolve their problems feel guilty,

173. not because of excessive pleasures,

174. not because they indulge in pleasures which go against

175. their sense of duty or morality, or whatsoever.

176. On the contrary, they feel guilty for not

177. enjoying enough, for not being able to enjoy.

178. Oh my god, one is thirsty in the

179. desert and what to drink but Coke.

180. The perfect commodity, why?

181. It was already Marx who long ago emphasized that a commodity

182. is never just a simple object that we buy and consume.

183. A commodity is an object full of

184. theological, even metaphysical niceties.

185. Its presence always reflects an invisible transcendence,

186. and the classical publicity for Coke

187. quite openly refers to this

188. absent, invisible quality.

189. Coke is the real thing or Coke, that's it.

190. What is that it, the real thing?

191. It's not just another positive property of Coke,

192. something that can be described

193. or pinpointed through chemical analysis.

194. It's that mysterious something more.

195. The indescribable excess which is

196. the object cause of my desire.

197. In our postmodern, however we call them,

198. societies, we are obliged to enjoy.

199. Enjoyment becomes a kind of a weird perverted duty.

200. - The paradox of Coke is that you are thirsty.

201. You drink it, but as everyone knows,

202. the more you drink it, the more thirsty you get.

203. A desire is never simply

204. the desire for a certain thing.

205. It's always also a desire for desire itself,

206. a desire to continue to desire.

207. Perhaps the ultimate horror of a desire is

208. to be fully filled in, met,

209. so that I desire no longer.

210. The ultimate melancholic experience is the

211. experience of a loss of desire itself.

212. It's not that in some return to a

213. previous era of natural consummation

214. where we got rid of this excess

215. and were only consuming for actual needs,

216. like you were thirsty, you drank water, and so on.

217. We cannot return to that.

218. The excess is with us forever.

219. So, let's have a drink of Coke.

220. It's getting warm.

221. It's no longer the real Coke, and that's the problem,

222. you know, this passage from

223. sublime to excremental dimension.

224. When it's cold, properly served,

225. it has a certain attraction.

226. All of a sudden, this can change into shit.

227. It's the elementary dialectics of commodities.

228. We are not talking about objective,

229. factual properties of a commodity.

230. We are talking only here about that elusive surplus.

231. Kinder Surprise egg, a quite astonishing commodity.

232. The surprise of the Kinder Surprise egg

233. is that this excessive object,

234. the cause of your desire is here

235. materialized in the guise of an object,

236. a plastic toy which fills in the

237. inner void of the chocolate egg.

238. The whole delicate balance is between these two dimensions,

239. what you bought, the chocolate egg, and the surplus,

240. probably made in some Chinese gulag or whatever,

241. the surplus that you get for free.

242. I don't think that the chocolate frame

243. is here just to send you on a deeper

244. voyage towards the inner treasure,

245. the, what Plato calls the agalma,

246. which makes you a worthy person,

247. which makes a commodity, the desirable commodity.

248. I think it's the other way around.

249. We should aim at the higher goal,

250. the gold in the middle of an object,

251. precisely in order to be able to enjoy the surface.

252. This is what is the anti-metaphysical

253. lesson, which is difficult to accept.

254. What does this famous "Ode to Joy" stand for?

255. It's usually perceived as a kind of ode to humanity as such

256. to the brotherhood and freedom of all people.

257. And what strikes the eye here is the

258. universal adaptability of this well-known melody.

259. It can be used by political movements

260. which are totally opposed to each other.

261. In Nazi Germany, it was widely used

262. to celebrate great public events.

263. In Soviet Union, Beethoven was lionized,

264. and the "Ode to Joy" was performed

265. almost as a kind of a communist song.

266. In China, during the time of the great Cultural Revolution,

267. when almost all western music was prohibited,

268. the 9th symphony was accepted.

269. It was allowed to play it as a

270. piece of progressive bourgeois music.

271. At the extreme right in South Rhodesia,

272. before it became Zimbabwe, it proclaimed independence

273. to be able to postpone the abolishment of apartheid.

274. Therefore, those couple of years of independence,

275. South Rhodesia, again the melody of the "Ode to Joy"

276. with changed lyrics of course,

277. was the anthem of the country.

278. At the opposite end, when Abimael Guzman,

279. Presidente Gonzalo, the leader of

280. Sendero Luminoso, the Shining Path,

281. the extreme leftist guerrilla in Peru,

282. when he was asked by a journalist

283. which piece of music is his favorite,

284. he claimed, again, Beethoven's 9th symphony, "Ode to Joy."

285. When Germany was still divided,

286. and their team was appearing together at the Olympics,

287. when one of the Germans won golden medal,

288. again, "Ode to Joy" was played

289. instead of either East or West German national anthem.

290. And even now today, "Ode to Joy" is the

291. unofficial anthem of European Union.

292. So it's truly that we can imagine a kind of a

293. perverse scene of universal fraternity

294. where Osama Bin Laden is embracing President Bush,

295. Saddam is embracing Fidel Castro,

296. white racists is embracing Mao Zedong,

297. and all together, they sing "Ode to Joy."

298. It works, and this is how

299. every ideology has to work.

300. It's never just meaning.

301. It always has to also work as an empty

302. container open to all possible meanings.

303. It's, you know, that gut feeling that we feel

304. when we experience something pathetic and we say,

305. oh my God, I am so moved.

306. There is something so deep.

307. But you never know what this depth is.

308. It's a void.

309. Now, of course, there is a catch here.

310. The catch is that, of course, this neutrality of a frame

311. is never as neutral as it appears.

312. Here, I think the perspective of Alex from

313. the "Clockwork Orange" enters.

314. - We were all feeling a bit

315. shagged and fagged and fashed,

316. it having been an evening of some small

317. energy expenditure, oh my brothers.

318. So we got rid of the auto and stopped

319. off at The Korova for a nightcap.

320. - Why is Alex, this ultimate cynical delinquent,

321. the hero of "Clockwork Orange"?

322. Why is he so fascinated, overwhelmed

323. when he sees the lady singing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy"?

324. - And it was like for a moment,

325. oh my brothers, some great bird had

326. flown into the milk bar and I felt all the malenky

327. little hairs on my plott standing endwise,

328. and the shivers crawling up like slow, malenky lizards,

329. and then down again because I knew what she sang.

330. It was a bit from the glorious 9th by Ludwig van.

331. - Whenever an ideological text says,

332. all humanity unite in brotherhood,

333. joy, and so on, you should always ask,

334. okay, okay, okay, but are these all,

335. really all, or is someone excluded?

336. I think Alex, the delinquent from "Clockwork Orange,"

337. identifies with this place of exclusion.

338. And the great genius of Beethoven is that

339. he literally states this exclusion.

340. All of a sudden the whole tone changes into

341. a kind of a carnivalesque rhythm.

342. It's no longer this sublime beauty.

343. Excuse me, brother,

344. I ordered this two weeks ago.

345. Can you see if it's arrived yet, please?

346. - Just a minute.

347. - We hear this vulgar music precisely when

348. Alex enters a shopping arcade and we can see from

349. his movements that now he feels at home.

350. He is like fish in the water.

351. - Pardon me, ladies.

352. - Beethoven is not a cheap celebrator

353. of the brotherhood of humanity and so on.

354. We are one big happy family enjoying

355. freedom, dignity, and so on.

356. - Enjoying that, are you my darling?

357. - The first part, which is falsely celebrated today,

358. you hear it in all official events

359. is clearly identified with Beethoven

360. as ideology, and then the second part tells

361. the true story of that which disturbs the official ideology,

362. and of the failure of the official

363. ideology to constrain it, to tame it.

364. This is why Beethoven was doing something

365. which may appear difficult to do.

366. He was already in the purely musical work

367. practicing critique of ideology.

368. If the classical ideology functioned in the way

369. designated by Marx in his nice

370. formula from, "Capital Volume I,"

371. "They don't know what they are doing,"

372. "but they are none the less doing it."

373. Cynical ideology functions in the mode of,

374. "I know very well what I am doing"

375. "but I am still none the less doing it."

376. This paradoxical constellation is staged in a beautiful way

377. in the famous song "Officer Krupke"

378. in Bernstein's and Sondheim's "West Side Story."

379. - Hey you!

380. - Who me, Officer Krupke?

381. - Yeah, you!

382. Give me one good reason for not

383. dragging you down to the station house, you punk.

384. - The delinquent gang enact

385. a whole explanation as a musical number,

386. of course, of why they are delinquents.

387. - Addressing the police officer, Krupke,

388. who is not there but all is addressed at the police officer.

389. - That's a touchin' good story!

390. - Lemme tell it to the world!

391. - Just tell it to the judge.

392. - So one of them adopts the position of a judge.

393. - Then, the psychological explanation.

394. - I am sick!

395. - The paradox here is how can you

396. know all this and still do it?

397. This is the cynical functioning of ideology.

398. They're never what they appear

399. to be cynical brutal delinquents.

400. They always have a tiny private dream.

401. This dream can be many things.

402. It can even be something quite ordinary.

403. Let's take the English riots

404. of August 2011.

405. The standard liberal explanation really sounds like

406. a repetition of "Officer Krupke" song.

407. We cannot just condemn this riot

408. as delinquent vandalism.

409. You have to see how these people live in

410. practically ghettos, isolated communities,

411. no proper family life, no proper education.

412. They don't even have a prospect of a regular employment.

413. But this is not enough because man is not simply

414. a product of objective circumstances.

415. We all have this margin of freedom

416. in deciding how we

417. subjectivize these objective circumstances

418. which, of course, determine us,

419. how we react to them by

420. constructing our own universe.

421. The conservative solution is we need more police.

422. We need courts which pass severe judgements.

423. I think this solution is too simple.

424. If I listen closely to some of David Cameron's statements,

425. it looked as if okay, they are beating people,

426. burning houses, but the truly horrible thing is

427. that they were taking objects without paying for them,

428. (chuckles) the ultimate things that we can imagine.

429. In a very limited way, Cameron was right.

430. There was no ideological justification.

431. It is the reaction of people who are totally caught

432. into the predominant ideology but have no ways

433. to realize what this ideology demands of them,

434. so it's a kind of a wild acting out within this

435. ideological space of consumerism.

436. Even if we are dealing with apparently

437. totally non-ideological brutality,

438. I just want to burn houses, to get objects,

439. it is the result of a very specific social

440. and ideological constellation where big ideology,

441. striving for justice, equality, etcetera, disintegrates.

442. The only functioning ideology is pure consumerism,

443. and then no wonder what you get as a form of protest.

444. Every violent acting out is a sign that

445. there is something you are not able to put into words.

446. Even the most brutal violence is the enacting

447. of a certain symbolic deadlock.

448. The great thing about the "Taxi Driver"

449. is that it brings this brutal outburst of

450. violence to it's radical, suicidal dimension.

451. We are not dealing here with something which simply concerns

452. the fragile psychology of a distorted

453. person, what Travis in "Taxi Driver" is.

454. It has something to do with ideology.

455. - Listen, you fuckers, you screw-heads.

456. Here is a man who would not take

457. it anymore, who would not let.

458. Listen, you fuckers, you screw-heads.

459. Here is a man who would not take it anymore,

460. a man who stood up against the scum,

461. the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit.

462. Here is someone who stood up.

463. - In the "Taxi Driver," Travis, the hero,

464. is bothered by the young prostitute played by Jody Foster.

465. What bothers him are, of course, as is always the case,

466. precisely his fantasies, fantasies of her,

467. victimhood of her hidden pleasures.

468. And fantasies are not just a private matter of individuals.

469. Fantasies are the central stuff

470. our ideologies are made of.

471. Don't look at him.

472. - Fantasy is, in psychoanalytic perspective,

473. fundamentally, a lie, not a lie in the sense

474. that it's just a fantasy but not a reality,

475. but a lie in the sense that fantasy

476. covers up a certain gap in consistency.

477. When things are blurred, when we cannot really get

478. to know things, fantasy provides an easy answer.

479. The usual mode of fantasy is to construct a scene,

480. not a scene where I get what I desire,

481. but a scene in which I imagine

482. myself as desired by others.

483. "Taxi Driver" is an unacknowledged remake of

484. perhaps the greatest of John Ford's Westerns,

485. his late classic,"'The Searchers."

486. - I take many...

487. - Scalps.

488. - In both films, the hero tries to save a young

489. woman who is perceived as a victim of brutal abuse.

490. In "The Searchers," the young Natalie Wood

491. was kidnapped and lived for a couple of years

492. as the wife of an Indian chief.

493. In "Taxi Driver," the young Jodie Foster

494. is controlled by a ruthless pimp.

495. - You walk out with those fucking creeps and lowlifes

496. and degenerates out on the street,

497. and you sell your little pussy for nothing, man?

498. For some low life pimp?

499. Stands in a hall?

500. I'm the, I'm square?

501. You're the one that's square, man.

502. I don't go screw and fuck with a bunch of

503. killers and junkies the way you do.

504. - The task is always

505. to save the perceived victim.

506. But what really drives this violence of the hero

507. is a deep suspicion that the victim is not simply a victim.

508. That the victim, effectively, in a perverted way,

509. enjoys or participates in what appears as

510. her victimhood, so that, to put it very simply,

511. she doesn't want to be redeemed, she resists it.

512. - Let's go home, Debby.

513. - And this is the big problem.

514. If I make an immediate jump to the political dimension,

515. the big problem of American military interventions,

516. especially so-called humanitarian interventions,

517. from Iraq to already Vietnam

518. half a century ago,

519. we try to help them, but what if

520. they really did not want our help?

521. The result of this debilitating deadlock

522. can only be an outburst of violence.

523. We do get, towards the end of the film,

524. Travis exploding in a killing spree,

525. killing the pimps, all the people around the young girl.

526. Violence is never just abstract violence.

527. It's a kind of brutal intervention in the real

528. to cover up a certain impotence concerning

529. what we may call cognitive mapping.

530. You lack a clear picture of what's going on, where are we.

531. Exactly the same holds for the

532. terrifying outburst of violence,

533. Anders Behring Breivik's murderous spree in Oslo,

534. exploding a bomb in front of the government building

535. and then killing dozens of young members

536. of the social democratic party in an island close to Oslo.

537. Many commentators tried to dismiss this as

538. a clear case of personal insanity,

539. but I think Breivik's manifesto is well worth reading.

540. It is palpably clear there how

541. this violence that Breivik not only

542. theorized about but also enacted,

543. is a reaction to the impenetrability

544. and confusion of global capital.

545. It's exactly like Travis Bickle's

546. killing spree at the end of the "Taxi Driver."

547. When he is there, barely alive, he,

548. symbolically with his fingers, points a gun at his own head.

549. Clear sign that all this violence was basically suicidal.

550. He was on the right path, in a way,

551. Travis in the "Taxi Driver."

552. You should have the outburst of violence, and you should

553. direct it at yourself but in a very specific way,

554. at what in yourself change you,

555. ties you to the ruling ideology.

556. - Pippin, Pippin, Pippin?

557. - In Steven Spielberg's "Jaws," a shark

558. starts to attack people on the beach.

559. What does this attack mean?

560. What does the shark stand for?

561. There were different, even mutually

562. exclusive, answers to this question.

563. Did you see that?

564. - Yes.

565. - On the one hand, some critics claimed

566. that obviously the shark stands for

567. the foreign threat to ordinary Americans.

568. The shark is a metaphor for either natural disaster,

569. storms, or immigrants threatening

570. United States citizens and so on.

571. On the other hand, it's interesting to note that

572. Fidel Castro, who loves the film,

573. once said that for him, it was obvious that

574. "Jaws" is kind of a leftist Marxist film,

575. and that the shark is a metaphor for brutal

576. big capital exploiting ordinary Americans.

577. - Alice?

578. - So which is the right answer?

579. I claim none of them and at the same time all of them.

580. Ordinary Americans, as ordinary people

581. in all countries, have a multitude of fears.

582. We fear all kind of things.

583. We fear maybe, immigrants or people

584. whom we perceive as lower than

585. ourselves attacking us, robbing us.

586. We fear people raping our children.

587. We fear natural disasters, tornados, earthquakes, tsunamis.

588. We fear corrupted politicians.

589. We fear big companies which can basically

590. do with us whatever they want.

591. The function of the shark is to unite all these fears

592. so that we can in away trade all

593. these fears for one fear alone.

594. - Smile you son of a—

595. - In this way, our experience of reality gets much simpler.

596. Why am I mentioning this?

597. Because isn't it that, for example,

598. the most extreme case of ideology

599. maybe in the history of humanity,

600. the Nazi fascist anti-Semitism,

601. work precisely in the same way?

602. Imagine an ordinary German citizen

603. in the late 20s, early 30s.

604. His situation is, in an abstract way,

605. the same as that of a small child.

606. He's totally perplexed.

607. Social authority, symbolic order is telling him,

608. you are a German worker, banker,

609. whatever, but nothing functions.

610. What does society want from him?

611. Why is everything going wrong?

612. The way he perceives the situation

613. is that newspapers lie to him.

614. He lost his work because of inflation.

615. He lost all his,

616. all his money in the bank.

617. He sees moral degradation and so on,

618. so what's the meaning of this all?

619. The original fascist dream is to

620. of course, as the dream of every ideology,

621. to have a cake and to eat it.

622. As it was often pointed out, fascism is,

623. at it's most elementary, a conservative revolution.

624. Revolution, economic development, modern industry, yes,

625. but a revolution which would nonetheless maintain or even

626. reassert a traditional hierarchal society.

627. A society which is modern, efficient,

628. but at the same time controlled by

629. hierarchic values with no class or other antagonisms.

630. Now, they have a problem here, the fascists, but

631. antagonism, class struggle and other tangents

632. is something inherent to capitalism.

633. Modernization, industrialization,

634. as we know from the history of capitalism,

635. means disintegration of old stable relations.

636. It means social conflicts.

637. Instability is the way capitalism functions.

638. So how to solve this problem?

639. Simple, you need to generate an

640. ideological narrative which explains

641. how things went wrong in a society,

642. not as the result of the inherent tensions

643. in the development of this society,

644. but as the result of a foreign intruder.

645. Things were okay 'til Jews penetrated our social body.

646. The way to restore the health of our

647. social body is to eliminate the Jews.

648. It's the same operation as with the shark in "Jaws."

649. You have a multitude of fears,

650. and this multiplicity of fears confuses you,

651. like you simply don't know what's

652. the meaning of all this confusion.

653. And you replace this confused multitude

654. with one clear figure, the Jew,

655. and everything becomes clear.

656. - The search for cuts in the

657. social security provision to lone-parent

658. families in part spurred this report.

659. The social security department fears

660. that the accelerating budget for single mothers

661. on benefits could reach nearly

662. 5 billion pounds by the end of the decade.

663. But the issue of the lone parent

664. has increasingly been seen as the heart

665. of John Major's Back to Basics crusade.

666. - Remember, I think around two, three decades ago,

667. when the prime minister of United Kingdom was John Major,

668. there was a kind of ideological campaign

669. to return the morality and so on.

670. And all the evils of society were

671. embodied in the conservative narrative, in the figure of

672. unemployed single mother, like there is violence in our suburbs,

673. of course, because single, unemployed mothers

674. cannot take care of their children,

675. don't properly educate them and so on.

676. We have a lack in our budget, not enough money.

677. Of course, because we have to support unwed,

678. single mothers and so on and so on.

679. In an ideological edifice, you need

680. some pseudo-concrete image like

681. this to fixate your imagination,

682. and then this image can mobilize us.

683. Imagine ideology as a kind of a filter,

684. a frame, so that if you look at the same

685. ordinary reality through that frame,

686. everything changes, in what sense?

687. It's not that the frame

688. actually adds anything.

689. It's just that the frame opens the abyss of suspicion.

690. - If we look at the anti-Semitic image

691. of the Jew, it's crucial to notice how

692. contradictory this figure of the Jew is.

693. - Jews are at the same time extra intellectual,

694. like mathematicians, whatever, and vulgar.

695. - Not washing regularly.

696. - Seducing innocent girls

697. all the time and so on and so on.

698. - This is typical for racism.

699. You try to imagine how the other enjoys

700. all the secret orgies or whatever, because in racism,

701. the other is not simply an enemy.

702. Usually, it is also invested with

703. some specific perverse enjoyment,

704. or in an inverted way, the other can be someone

705. who tries to steal from us our enjoyment, our,

706. to disturb, as we usually put it, our way of life.

707. We should be, here, very precise

708. not to fall into the usual trap of disqualifying

709. all elements out of which the Nazi ideological

710. edifice is composed, to disqualify

711. all them as proto-fascist.

712. We should never forget that the large majority

713. of these elements which we today associate with fascism

714. were taken from the workers' movement.

715. This idea of large numbers of people marching together,

716. This idea of strict bodily discipline as our duty,

717. the Nazis directly took this over

718. from social democracy, from the left.

719. Let me just take some other central

720. concepts of the Nazi worldview.

721. The solidarity of the people, my God,

722. there is nothing bad in this notion as such.

723. The problem is solidarity to what kind of people?

724. If by people you mean Volksgemeinschaft,

725. the organic community of people,

726. where then the enemy is automatically the foreign intruder.

727. In this case, we are in Nazism.

728. The crucial thing is to locate ideology

729. where it belongs.

730. Let's take a clear example, the well-known song

731. "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" from the film "Cabaret."

732. - Some of my friends, after seeing the film,

733. Bob Fosse's "Cabaret," thought that

734. after they heard this song, they finally understood

735. what, at it's deepest as to its

736. emotional impact, what fascism is.

737. But I think this precisely is the mistake to be avoided.

738. This song is rather ordinary, popular song.

739. Incidentally, it was composed while they were

740. shooting the movie, by a Jewish couple.

741. Nice irony.

742. If you look not only at the music,

743. at the way it is sung, but even at the words,

744. "Awakening of a nation, tomorrow belongs to me."

745. One can well imagine, with a slight change of words,

746. radically leftist, communist song.

747. - The German hard rock band Rammstein

748. are often accused of flirting, playing with

749. the Nazi militaristic iconography.

750. But if one observes closely their show,

751. one can see very nicely what they are doing, exemplarily,

752. in one of their best known songs, "Reise Reise."

753. - The minimal elements of the Nazi ideology

754. enacted by Rammstein are something like

755. pure elements of libidinal investment.

756. - Enjoyment has to be, as it were,

757. condensed in some minimal tics, gestures,

758. which do not have any precise ideological meaning.

759. What Rammstein does is it liberates

760. these elements from their Nazi articulations.

761. It allows us to enjoy them in their pre-ideological state.

762. - The way to fight

763. Nazism is to enjoy these elements,

764. ridiculous as they may appear,

765. by suspending the Nazi horizon of meaning.

766. This way, you undermine Nazism from within.

767. - So how does, nonetheless, ideology do this?

768. How does it articulate pre-ideological elements?

769. These elements can also be seen as a kind of a...

770. bribe.

771. The way ideology pays us to

772. seduce us into its edifice.

773. These bribes can be purely libidinal bribes,

774. all those tics which are condensed enjoyment,

775. or they can be explicit discursive

776. elements like notions of solidarity

777. of collective discipline, struggle

778. for one's destiny, and so on and so on.

779. All these, in itself, are free-floating

780. elements which open themselves

781. to different ideological fields.

782. Let's turn to the high point

783. of our consumerism.

784. Let me take a drink.

785. Some of it, Starbucks coffee, I am

786. regularly drinking it, I must admit it.

787. But are we aware that when we buy a cappuccino

788. from Starbucks, we also buy quite a lot of ideology.

789. Which ideology?

790. You know when you enter a Starbucks store,

791. it's usually always displayed in some posters there,

792. their message which is, yes, our cappuccino

793. is more expensive than others,

794. but, and then comes the story,

795. we give 1% of all our income to some

796. Guatemala children to keep them healthy,

797. for the water supply for some Sahara farmers,

798. or to save the forests, to enable organic

799. growing coffee, whatever, whatever.

800. Now, I admire the ingeniousity of this solution.

801. In the old days of pure simple consumerism,

802. you bought a product and then you felt bad.

803. My God, I'm just a consumerist

804. while people are starving in Africa.

805. So the idea was you had to do something to

806. counteract your pure distractive consumerism.

807. For example, I don't know, you

808. contribute to charity and so on.

809. What Starbucks enables you is to be

810. a consumerist and be a consumerist

811. without any bad conscience because

812. the price for the countermeasure,

813. for fighting consumerism, is already

814. included into the price of a commodity.

815. Like you pay a little bit more and you are not just

816. a consumerist but you do also your duty

817. towards environment, the poor starving

818. people in Africa, and so on and so on.

819. It's, I think, the ultimate form of consumerism.

820. We should not simply oppose a principal life

821. dedicated to duty and enjoying our

822. small pleasures.

823. Let's take today's capitalism.

824. We have, on the one hand, the demands of the circulation

825. of the capital which push us towards profit making,

826. expansion, exploitation and destruction of nature,

827. and on the other hand, ecological demands.

828. Let's think about our posterity and about our own survival.

829. Let's take care of nature and so on.

830. In this opposition between ruthless pursuit of

831. capitalist expansion and ecological awareness,

832. duty, a strange perverted duty of course,

833. duty is on the side of

834. capitalism, as many

835. perspicuous analysts noted.

836. Capitalism has a strange religious

837. structure.

838. It is propelled by this absolute demand.

839. Capital has to circulate to reproduce itself

840. to expand, to multiply itself,

841. and for this goal, anything can be sacrificed,

842. up to our lives, up to nature, and so on.

843. Here, we have a strange, unconditional injunction.

844. And a true capitalist is a miser who is ready

845. to sacrifice everything for this perverted duty.

846. What we see here in Mojave Desert,

847. at this resting place for abandoned planes,

848. is the other side of capitalist dynamics.

849. Capitalism is all the time in crisis.

850. This is precisely why it appears almost indestructible.

851. Crisis is not its obstacle.

852. It is what pushes it forwards towards

853. permanent, self-revolutionizing, permanent,

854. extended self-reproduction, always new products.

855. The other invisible side of it is

856. waste, tremendous amount of waste.

857. We shouldn't react to these heaps of waste

858. by trying to somehow get rid of it.

859. Maybe, the first thing to do is to accept this waste,

860. to accept that there are things

861. out there which serve nothing,

862. to break out of this eternal cycle of functioning.

863. The German philosopher, Walter

864. Benjamin, said something very deep.

865. He said that we experience history,

866. what does it mean for us to be historical beings,

867. not when we are engaged in things, when things move.

868. Only when we see this, again, rest waste

869. of culture being half retaken by nature, at that point,

870. we get an intuition of what history means.

871. Maybe, this also accounts for the redemptive value of

872. post-catastrophic movies like "I Am Legend" and so on.

873. We see the devastated human environment, half-empty

874. factories, machines falling apart, half empty stores.

875. What we experience at this moment,

876. the psychoanalytic term for it would

877. have been the inertia of the real,

878. this mute presence beyond meaning,

879. what moments like confronting planes here

880. in Mojave Desert bring to us is maybe a chance

881. for an authentic, passive experience.

882. Maybe without this properly artistic moment

883. of authentic passivity, nothing new can emerge.

884. Maybe something new only emerges through the failure,

885. the suspension of proper functioning of the

886. existing network of our lifework, where we are.

887. Maybe, this is what we need more than ever today.

888. What does the wreck of the Titanic stand for?

889. We all know the standard reading

890. of the impact of the sinking of the Titanic,

891. not only the film but the real accident.

892. This sinking had such an impact because it

893. happened in a society, at that point,

894. still in all its glitz and glory,

895. unaware of the decay that awaited it

896. in the near future, the World Wars and so on.

897. But there is something in excess

898. of this entire field of meanings

899. which is the very fascinating presence

900. of the ruin of the Titanic at the bottom of the ocean.

901. When James Cameron organized a

902. trip to the real wreck of Titanic,

903. he also made a similar remark.

904. When the explorers approached the wreck,

905. they had this almost metaphysical experience

906. that they are approaching a forbidden territory

907. in which the sacred and the obscene overlap.

908. - Yeah, Roger that, okay, drop down

909. and go into the first class gangway door.

910. I want you guys working the D deck.

911. - Every effective political, ideological symbol

912. or symptom has to rely on this

913. dimension of petrified enjoyment,

914. of the frozen grimace of an excessive pleasure in pain.

915. What am I doing here in the middle of the ocean,

916. alone in a boat surrounded by frozen corpses?

917. - Jack?

918. - I am in a scene from

919. James Cameron's "Titanic."

920. - Jack?

921. - Which is the supreme case

922. of ideology in recent Hollywood.

923. Why?

924. Because of the imminent tension to the story of the film.

925. - I don't know this dance.

926. - Neither do I, just go with it, don't think.

927. - We have at least three levels.

928. First, there is what people ironically refer to as

929. James Cameron's Hollywood Marxism,

930. this ridiculous fake sympathy with lower classes.

931. Up there, first class passengers,

932. they are mostly evil, egotistic, cowardly.

933. - You know I don't like that, Rose.

934. - Embodied in Kate

935. Winslet's fiancé played by Billy Zane.

936. - She knows.

937. - This whole narrative is sustained

938. by a much more reactionary myth.

939. - Did you see those guys' faces?

940. - We should ask what role

941. does the iceberg hitting the ship

942. play in the development of the love story?

943. - When the ship docks, I'm getting off with you.

944. - This is crazy.

945. - (chuckles) I know.

946. - My claim is here a slightly cynical one.

947. This would have been the true catastrophe.

948. We can imagine how maybe after two, three weeks

949. of intense sex in New York, the love

950. affair would somehow fade away.

951. - As a paying customer, I expect to get what I want.

952. - Kate Winslet is an

953. upperclass girl in psychological distress.

954. Confused, her ego is in shatters.

955. And the function of Leonardo DiCaprio—

956. - Over on the bed, the couch.

957. - Is simply that he

958. helps her to reconstitute her ego.

959. - Good, lie down.

960. - Her self image, literally, he draws her image.

961. - Tell me when it looks right.

962. - Put your arm back the way it was.

963. - It's really a new version of one of the

964. old, favorite, imperialist myths.

965. The idea being that when the upper class people lose their

966. vitality, they need a contact with lower classes.

967. Basically, ruthlessly exploiting them in a vampire-like

968. way as it were sucking from them the life energy.

969. Revitalized, they can join their secluded upperclass life.

970. - My heart was pounding the whole time.

971. It was the most erotic moment of my life,

972. up until then at least.

973. - The ship hits the iceberg, not immediately after

974. sex, but when the couple goes up to

975. the open space and decide to stay together.

976. - Oh yes, hey, look at this.

977. - You know, often in history, the event

978. which may appear as a catastrophe

979. saves persons or an idea, elevating it into a myth.

980. Remember the intervention of the Soviet army

981. and other Warsaw-backed armies in 1968 in Czechoslovakia

982. to strangle the so-called Prague Spring.

983. The attempt of the Czech democratic communists

984. to introduce a more human-faced socialism.

985. Usually, we perceive this brutal Soviet

986. intervention as something that destroyed

987. the brief dream of Prague Spring.

988. I think it saved the dream.

989. Either Czechoslovakia would have turned into an

990. ordinary, liberal capitalist state,

991. or at a certain point, which was usually the fate of

992. reformist communists, the communist in power

993. would be obliged to set a certain limit.

994. Okay, you had your fun, your freedom, that's enough.

995. Now, we again define the limits.

996. Again, the paradox is that precisely the Soviet intervention

997. saved the dream of, the possibility of

998. another communism and so on and so on.

999. So, here again—

1000. through the temporal catastrophe,

1001. we have a love story, which is at it were,

1002. redeemed in its idea, saved for eternity.

1003. We can ultimately read the catastrophe as a

1004. desperate maneuver to save the illusion of eternal love.

1005. We can see how ideology works effectively here.

1006. We have two superficial levels,

1007. all the fascination of the accident,

1008. then the love story, but all this which is quite acceptable

1009. for our liberal, progressive minds, all this is just

1010. a trap, something to lower our attention

1011. threshold, as it were, to open us up,

1012. to be ready to accept the true conservative message

1013. of rich people having the right to revitalize

1014. themselves by ruthlessly appropriating

1015. the vitality of the poor people.

1016. - There's nothing there, sir.

1017. - There is a wonderful

1018. detail which tells everything.

1019. - Come back!

1020. - When Kate Winslet notices that

1021. Leonardo DiCaprio is dead, she, of course, starts to shout,

1022. I will never let go, I will never let go,

1023. while at the same moment—

1024. - I'll never let go, I promise.

1025. - She pushes him off.

1026. He is what we may call, ironically, a vanishing mediator.

1027. This logic of the production of a couple

1028. has a long history in Hollywood.

1029. Whatever the story is about, it may

1030. be about the end of the world,

1031. an asteroid threatening the very survival

1032. of humanity, or a great war, whatever,

1033. as a rule, we always have a couple whose

1034. link is threatened and who somehow, through

1035. this ordeal, at the end, happily gets together.

1036. This logic does not hold only for Hollywood films.

1037. - In the late 40s, in Soviet Union,

1038. they produced arguably one of the most expensive

1039. film of all times, "The Fall of Berlin,"

1040. the chronicle of the Second World

1041. War from the Soviet standpoint.

1042. And it's incredible how closely this film

1043. also follows the logic of the production of a couple.

1044. The story begins just before the German attack

1045. on the Soviet Union, when a model worker who is in love with

1046. a local girl but is too shy to propose to her,

1047. is called to Moscow to get a medal from Comrade Stalin.

1048. There, Stalin notices his confusion,

1049. distress, and Stalin gives him some advice,

1050. which poetry to quote and so on.

1051. This part, unfortunately, was lost

1052. because in the background of this scene there was Beria,

1053. a Soviet politician who after Stalin's death,

1054. became a non-person, was shot as a traitor.

1055. But we know from the screenplay what was there.

1056. If Stalin gives you love advice, it has to

1057. succeed so the couple embraces.

1058. He tells her probably to make love.

1059. At that very moment, there is the triumphant,

1060. violent entrance of the obstacle.

1061. German planes come, dropping bombs.

1062. - The girl is taken prisoner.

1063. - The boy, of course, joins the Red Army,

1064. and we follow him through all the great battles.

1065. The idea being that in a deeper logic of the film,

1066. what these battles were about was

1067. really to recreate the couple.

1068. The boy has to get his girl.

1069. This is what happens at the end

1070. but in a very strange way which reconfirms

1071. Stalin's role as the supreme divine matchmaker.

1072. The scene itself, Stalin emerging himself into

1073. a crowd of ordinary people, never happened.

1074. Stalin was totally paranoid about flying,

1075. about taking planes, but nonetheless,

1076. when he saw this scene, he cried.

1077. - Of course, he, himself, as you know, wrote the lines.

1078. When the couple encounters each

1079. other, the girl first sees Stalin.

1080. Then, she turns around and, surprised,

1081. sees her lover for whom she was

1082. waiting all the time of the war.

1083. So it's only through the presence of Stalin

1084. that the couple gets reunited.

1085. This is how ideology works.

1086. Not the explicit ideology of the film,

1087. which we hear at the end Stalin saying,

1088. now, all the free people will enjoy

1089. peace and so on and so on, but precisely,

1090. ideology at its more fundamental.

1091. This apparently totally subordinated motive,

1092. unimportant in itself, the story of a couple,

1093. this is what is the key element

1094. which holds the entire film together,

1095. that small surplus element which attracts us,

1096. which maintains our attention.

1097. This is how ideology works.

1098. - Nice.

1099. Everything clean, oiled

1100. so that your action is beautiful.

1101. Smooth, Charlene.

1102. - We usually think that military discipline

1103. is just a matter of mindlessly

1104. following orders, obeying the rules.

1105. You don't think, you do what is your duty.

1106. It's not as simple as that.

1107. If we do this, we just become machines.

1108. There has to be something more.

1109. This more can have two basic forms.

1110. The first more benign form is an ironic distance,

1111. best epitomized by the well-known

1112. movie and TV series, "M.A.S.H."

1113. - Hawkeye?

1114. - Where the military doctors are involved in

1115. sexual escapades, make jokes all the time.

1116. Some people took Robert Altman's movie "M.A.S.H."

1117. even as a kind of an anti-militaristic,

1118. satiric product, but it's not.

1119. We should always bear in mind that these

1120. soldiers with all their practical jokes,

1121. making fun of their superiors and so on,

1122. operated perfectly as soldiers.

1123. They did their duty.

1124. - Trapper, this one's for you, babe.

1125. - Nice.

1126. - Much more ominous is a kind of obscene

1127. supplement to pure military discipline.

1128. - The Marine Corps, one, two, three—

1129. In practically all movies about the U.S. Marines,

1130. the best-known embodiment of this obscenity are

1131. marching chants, a mixture of nonsense—

1132. - And obscenity.

1133. - This is not undermining,

1134. making fun of military discipline.

1135. - It is its inner most constituent.

1136. - You take this obscene supplement away

1137. and military machine stops working.

1138. - Well, no shit, what have we got here, a fucking comedian?

1139. Private Joker, I admire your honesty.

1140. Hell, I like you.

1141. You can come over to my house and fuck my sister.

1142. You little scum bag, I've got your name.

1143. I've got your ass!

1144. You will not laugh, you will not cry.

1145. You will learn by the numbers.

1146. I will teach you.

1147. Now, get up, get on your feet!

1148. You had best unfuck yourself or I will unscrew

1149. your head and shit down your neck.

1150. - Sir, yes, sir!

1151. - Private Joker, why did you join my beloved corps?

1152. - I think that the drill sergeant,

1153. the way it is played in an exemplary way

1154. in Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket,"

1155. that the drill sergeant is rather a tragic figure.

1156. I always like to imagine him as the person who

1157. after his work, returns home, is quite decent, and so on.

1158. - All this obscene shouting is just

1159. a show put on not so much to impress

1160. ordinary soldiers whom he is training,

1161. as to bribe them with bits of enjoyment.

1162. - It's not just a question of these obscenities,

1163. which sustains the military machinery.

1164. It's another more general rule which holds for

1165. military communities, but even more

1166. I would say, for all human communities,

1167. from the largest nations, ethnic groups,

1168. up to small university departments and so on.

1169. You don't only have explicit rules.

1170. You always, in order to become part of a community,

1171. you need some implicit, unwritten rules

1172. which are never publicly recognized

1173. but are absolutely crucial as the point of

1174. the identification of a group.

1175. In the U.K., everyone knows about

1176. the obscene, unwritten rituals,

1177. which regulate life in public schools.

1178. - That'll be all, thank you, Finchley.

1179. I want to see all whips in my study after break.

1180. - Right, sir.

1181. - Oh, how was India, enjoy it?

1182. - Jolly good. - Bridges!

1183. - Just think about Lindsay Anderson's classic, "If..."

1184. The public life is democratic.

1185. We have professors who interact

1186. with their pupils, nice atmosphere,

1187. teaching friendship, spirit of cooperation,

1188. but then we all know what happens beneath the surface,

1189. older pupils torturing, sexually abusing the younger.

1190. This same mixture of obscenity and sadistic violence.

1191. And again, what is crucial here is

1192. we should not simply put all the blame

1193. or all the enjoyment on the older pupils.

1194. - No, no! (screaming)

1195. - The victims even are part of

1196. this infernal cycle of obscenity.

1197. It is as if in order to really be a member of a community

1198. you have to render your hands dirty.

1199. And I think that even the Abu Ghraib scandal

1200. of American soldiers torturing

1201. and especially humiliating Iraqi

1202. prisoners is to be read in this way.

1203. It's not simply we, the arrogant

1204. Americans, are humiliating others.

1205. What Iraqi soldiers experienced there

1206. was the staging of the obscene underside

1207. of the American military culture.

1208. In "Full Metal Jacket," it's the character of

1209. Joker, played by Matthew Modine,

1210. who is close to what we would call

1211. a normal soldier, a "M.A.S.H." type of soldier.

1212. He has a proper ironic distance.

1213. He proves at the end, militarily,

1214. the most efficient soldier.

1215. Returning back to me, why then will I soon shoot myself?

1216. Something went wrong there, but what?

1217. - Lock and load!

1218. - I did not just run amok.

1219. - Order, huh!

1220. This is my rifle!

1221. There are many like it, but this one is mine!

1222. - But I got too directly identified

1223. with these obscene rituals.

1224. I lost the distance.

1225. I took them seriously.

1226. - What in the name of Jesus H. Christ

1227. are you animals doing in my head?

1228. - If you get too close to it, if you

1229. over-identify with it, if you really

1230. immediately become the voice of

1231. this super ego, it's self destructive.

1232. You kill people around you.

1233. You end up killing yourself.

1234. - No!

1235. - Oh, shh, shh, shh, so you think

1236. Batman's made Gotham a better place, hmm?

1237. Look at me, look at me!

1238. You see, this is how crazy Batman's made Gotham.

1239. You want order in Gotham?

1240. Batman must take off his mask and turn himself in.

1241. Oh, and every day he doesn't,

1242. people will die, starting tonight.

1243. I'm a man of my word.

1244. - So who is Joker?

1245. - If we're gonna play games—

1246. - Which is the lie he is opposing?

1247. - I'm gonna need a cup of coffee.

1248. - Ah, the good cop, bad cop routine? (clicks teeth)

1249. - Not exactly.

1250. - The truly disturbing thing about "The Dark Knight"

1251. is that it elevates lie

1252. into a general social principal, into the principal

1253. of organization of our social political life.

1254. As if our societies can remain stable,

1255. can function, only if based on a lie.

1256. As if telling the truth, and this telling the truth

1257. is embodied in Joker, means distraction,

1258. disintegration of the social order.

1259. - Never start with the head.

1260. The victim gets all fuzzy.

1261. He can't feel the next—

1262. - Towards the end, it is as if lie functions

1263. as a hot potato passing from one

1264. person's hand to another person's hand.

1265. First, there is Harvey Dent.

1266. - So be it, take the Batman into custody.

1267. - The public prosecutor who lies.

1268. - I am the Batman.

1269. - Claiming that he is the real person

1270. behind Batman's mask, that he is Batman.

1271. Then, we have Gordon, honest policeman,

1272. Batman's friend, who fakes, stages his own death.

1273. - I'll see you later! - Wait, are you going back?

1274. - Five dead, two of them cops, you can't sweep that off.

1275. - At the end, Batman,

1276. himself, takes upon himself—

1277. - But the Joker cannot win.

1278. - The crimes, murders committed by Harvey Dent,

1279. the public prosecutor turned criminal.

1280. - Gotham needs its true hero.

1281. - In order to maintain the trust of

1282. the public into the legal system,

1283. the idea is if the ordinary public were to learn

1284. how corrupt it was or is, the very core of our

1285. legal system, then everything would have collapsed,

1286. so we need a lie to maintain order.

1287. - A hero, not the hero we deserved,

1288. but the hero we needed,

1289. Nothing less than a knight, shining.

1290. - There is nothing new in this.

1291. This is an old, conservative wisdom

1292. asserted long ago by philosophers from Plato,

1293. but especially, and then Immanuel Kant,

1294. Edmond Burke, and so on and so on.

1295. This idea that the truth is too strong.

1296. That a politician should be a cynicist who,

1297. although he knows what is true,

1298. tells to ordinary people what Plato

1299. called a noble fable, a lie.

1300. - The United States knows that Iraq

1301. has weapons of mass destruction.

1302. The U.K. knows that they have weapons of mass destruction.

1303. Any country on the face of the earth

1304. with an active intelligence program

1305. knows that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

1306. - Which could be activated within 45 minutes,

1307. including against his own Shia population.

1308. - The choice is his and if he does not disarm,

1309. the United States of America will lead a coalition

1310. and disarm him in the name of peace.

1311. - Let's be frank, we can have a state

1312. public system of power as legitimate

1313. as you want submitted to critical press,

1314. democratic elections, and so on

1315. and so on, apparently it just serves us.

1316. But nonetheless, if you look closely into

1317. how even the most democratic state power

1318. functions in order for it to display true authority,

1319. and power needs authority, there has to be,

1320. as it were between the lines all the time

1321. this message of, yeah, yeah, yeah,

1322. we are legalized through elections,

1323. but basically, we can do with you whatever we want.

1324. - Because that's what needs to happen.

1325. Because sometimes, truth isn't good enough.

1326. Sometimes people deserve more.

1327. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.

1328. - One of the great platitudes, which are popular today

1329. when we are confronted with acts of violence,

1330. is to refer to Fyodor Dostoyevsky's

1331. famous statement from "Brothers Karamazov,"

1332. "If there is no God, then everything is permitted."

1333. Well, the first problem with this statement is that

1334. Dostoyevsky, of course, never made it.

1335. The first one who used this phrase,

1336. as allegedly made by Dostoyevsky,

1337. was Jean-Paul Sartre in '43, but the main point is that

1338. this statement is simply wrong.

1339. Even a brief look at our predicament

1340. today clearly tells us this.

1341. It is precisely if there is God,

1342. that everything is permitted to

1343. those who not only believe in God,

1344. but who perceive themselves as instruments,

1345. direct instruments, of the divine will.

1346. If you posit or perceive or legitimize yourself

1347. as a direct instrument of the divine will,

1348. then of course all narrow, petty,

1349. moral considerations disappear.

1350. How can you even think in such narrow terms

1351. when you are a direct instrument of God?

1352. This is how so-called religious

1353. fundamentalists work, but not only them.

1354. Every form of so-called totalitarianism

1355. works like that even if it is presented,

1356. or if it presents itself, as atheist.

1357. Let's take Stalinism.

1358. Officially, Stalinism was based on

1359. atheist Marxist theory, but if we look

1360. closely at the subjective experience

1361. of a Stalinist political agent,

1362. leader, we see that it's not a position of

1363. an arrogant master who can do whatever he wants.

1364. It's, on the contrary, the position of a perfect servant.

1365. In the Stalinist universe, there definitely is

1366. what in psychoanalytic theory we call the Big Other.

1367. This Big Other in the Stalinist universe has many names.

1368. The best known of them are the necessity of historical

1369. progress towards communism, or simply history.

1370. History itself is the Big Other,

1371. history as the necessary succession of historical stages.

1372. A communist experiences himself as simply

1373. an instrument whose function is to

1374. actualize a historical necessity.

1375. The people, the mythic people whose

1376. instrument that the totalitarian leader is,

1377. are never simply the actually existing

1378. individuals, groups of people and so on.

1379. It's some kind of imagined, idealized point of reference

1380. which works even when, for example,

1381. in rebellions against the communist rule,

1382. like in Hungary '56, when the large majority of actually

1383. resisting people raises up, is opposed to the regime.

1384. They can still say, no, these are just individuals.

1385. They are not the true people.

1386. When you are accused of, my God,

1387. how could you have been doing all these horrible things,

1388. you could have said, and this is

1389. the standard Stalinist excuse,

1390. of course, my heart bleeds for all the poor victims.

1391. I am not fully responsible for it.

1392. I was only acting on behalf of the Big Other.

1393. As for myself, I like cats, small children, whatever.

1394. This is always part of the iconography

1395. of a Stalinist leader.

1396. Lenin, in Stalinism, is always presented as

1397. someone who likes small children and cats.

1398. The implication being Lenin had to

1399. order many killings and so on,

1400. but his heart was not there.

1401. This was his duty as instrument of

1402. historical progress and so on and so on.

1403. The way to undermine Stalinism is not simply

1404. to make fun of the leader, which can be,

1405. up to a point, even tolerated.

1406. It is to undermine this very reference,

1407. mythic reference, which legitimizes

1408. the Stalinist leader, the people.

1409. This is how I read the by far best work

1410. of Milos Forman, his early Czech films,

1411. "Black Peter," the "Loves of a Blond,"

1412. and "Firemen's Ball," where he mocks

1413. precisely the ordinary people...

1414. in their daily conformission, stupidity,

1415. egotistic lust, and so on and so on.

1416. - It may appear that this is something

1417. very arrogant, but no, I think that this is the way to

1418. undermine the entire structure of the Stalinist universe,

1419. to demonstrate not that leaders are not leaders.

1420. They are always ready to say, oh, but we are

1421. just ordinary people like you.

1422. No, that there is no mythic people

1423. which serves as the ultimate legitimization.

1424. - So what is the Big Other, this basic

1425. element of every ideological edifice?

1426. It has two quite contradictory aspects.

1427. On the one hand, of course, the Big Other

1428. is the secret order of things like

1429. divine reason, fate or whatever,

1430. which is controlling our destiny.

1431. But it is maybe the least interesting aspect

1432. of the Big Other as the agents,

1433. which guarantees meaning of what we are doing.

1434. - Much more interesting is

1435. the Big Other as the order of appearances.

1436. Many things which are prohibited are not simply prohibited,

1437. but they should not happen for the Big Other.

1438. - A supreme example of this agency of

1439. the Big Other as the agency of

1440. appearance is the prattling busybody

1441. in David Lean's masterpiece, the "Brief Encounter."

1442. At the very beginning of the film,

1443. the two lovers, Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard,

1444. arrange for their last meeting in

1445. a cafeteria of a small train station.

1446. - Laura, what a lovely surprise.

1447. - Oh, Dolly.

1448. - My dear, I've been shopping till I'm dropping.

1449. My feet are nearly off, and my throat's parched.

1450. I thought of having tea at Spindle's,

1451. but I was terrified of losing the train, oh, dear.

1452. - Oh, this is Dr. Harvey.

1453. - How do you do?

1454. - Would you be a perfect dear and get me my cup of tea?

1455. I really don't think I could drag

1456. my poor old bones over to the counter.

1457. - Why is this situation so interesting?

1458. Because on the one hand, we cannot but experience

1459. this annoying lady as a brutal intruder.

1460. - There's your train. - Yes, I know.

1461. - Oh, aren't you coming with us?

1462. No, I go in the opposite direction.

1463. - My practice is in Churley.

1464. - Oh, I see.

1465. - I'm a general practitioner at the moment.

1466. - Dr. Harvey's going out to Africa next week.

1467. - Oh, how thrilling.

1468. - Instead of the two lovers being allowed,

1469. at least, their final moments alone,

1470. they have to maintain the appearances

1471. that nothing is happening between them,

1472. that they are just acquaintances and so on and so on.

1473. - He'll have to run, or he'll miss it.

1474. He's got to get right over to the other platform—

1475. - This precisely is

1476. the function of the Big Other.

1477. We need, for our stability, a figure of Big Other

1478. for whom we maintain appearances.

1479. - And I arrived at the station with exactly half

1480. a minute to spare, my dear, I flew.

1481. - But are things really as simple as that?

1482. The next scene, the scene of Celia Johnson,

1483. totally desperate, she knows that

1484. she will never again see her lover.

1485. - Yes, he's a nice creature.

1486. - You known him long?

1487. - No, not very long.

1488. I hardly know him at all, really.

1489. - Well, my dear, I've always

1490. had a passion for doctors.

1491. - Then, we hear the

1492. line of Celia Johnson's thought.

1493. - I wish I could trust you.

1494. I wish you were a wise, kind friend

1495. instead of a gossiping acquaintance I've known

1496. casually for years and never particularly cared for.

1497. - What is the nature of this deadlock of Celia Johnson?

1498. She is split between the two figures

1499. in the film of the Big Other.

1500. On the one hand, it's her husband, the ideal listener,

1501. but it's out of question to confess to him.

1502. - Fred, Fred,

1503. dear Fred, there's so much that I want to say to you.

1504. You're the only one in the world with enough

1505. wisdom and gentleness to understand.

1506. - (chuckles) Wild horses wouldn't drag me away from England

1507. and home and all the things I'm used to.

1508. I mean, one has one's roots after all, hasn't one?

1509. - Oh, yes, one has one's roots.

1510. - On the other hand, you have here this stupid

1511. person who is available as a confessor,

1512. but there is not even an elementary trust.

1513. - For months and months.

1514. - I wish you'd stop talking.

1515. I wish you'd stop prying and trying to find things out.

1516. I wish you were dead.

1517. No, I don't mean that.

1518. That was silly and unkind, but I wish you'd stop talking.

1519. - My dear, all her hair came out,

1520. and she said the social life was quite, quite horrid.

1521. Provincial, you know, and very nouveau riche.

1522. - Oh, Dolly.

1523. - What's the matter, dear?

1524. Are you feeling ill again?

1525. - So that's the tragedy of our predicament.

1526. In order to fully exist as individuals,

1527. we need the fiction of a Big Other.

1528. There must be an agency which,

1529. as it were, registers our predicament,

1530. an agency where the truth of ourselves

1531. will be inscribed, accepted,

1532. an agency to which to confess.

1533. But what if there is no such agency?

1534. This was the utmost despair of many

1535. women raped in the post-Yugoslav

1536. war in Bosnia in the early 90s.

1537. They survived their terrible predicament,

1538. and what kept them alive was the idea,

1539. I must survive to tell the truth.

1540. If, when if, they survived,

1541. they made a terrible discovery.

1542. There is no one to really to listen to them,

1543. either some totally ignorant bored social worker

1544. or some relative who usually made obscene insinuations like,

1545. are you sure you were not even enjoying

1546. a little bit the rape and so on and so on.

1547. They discovered the truth of what

1548. Jacques Lacan claims, there is no Big Other.

1549. There may be a virtual Big Other to whom you cannot confess.

1550. There may be a Real Other,

1551. but it's never the virtual one.

1552. We are alone.

1553. I think Kafka was right when he said that

1554. for a modern secular, non-religious man,

1555. bureaucracy, state bureaucracy is the only remaining

1556. contact with the dimension of the divine.

1557. It is in this scene from "Brazil" that we see the intimate

1558. link between bureaucracy and enjoyment.

1559. What the impenetrable omnipotence of

1560. bureaucracy harbors is divine enjoyment.

1561. - My name's Lowry, Mr. Warren, Sam Lowry.

1562. - The intense rush of

1563. bureaucratic engagement serves nothing.

1564. - Glad to have you on board.

1565. - It is the performance

1566. of its very purposelessness—

1567. - You like it up here?

1568. - That generates an intense enjoyment,

1569. ready to reproduce itself forever.

1570. - Expecting big things, too complex to finance.

1571. Ah, don't let progress see those.

1572. Between you and me, Lowry, this, no no,

1573. department, tell records to get stuffed,

1574. is about to be upgraded and the, ah!

1575. Here we are, your very own number on your very own door,

1576. and behind that door, your very own office.

1577. Congratulations, DZ-015, welcome to the team.

1578. Yes, no, cancel that, send two copies to finance.

1579. - The adverse of this is a wonderful scene

1580. more towards the beginning of the film.

1581. - Harry Tuttle, heating engineer, at your service.

1582. - The hero who has a problem in his apartment

1583. with plumbing tries to get the State agency to fix it.

1584. - Are you from Central Services?

1585. - Of course, two guys come, they just want

1586. forms to fill in, they do nothing.

1587. - I called Central Services.

1588. - And then the ultimate subversive figure comes,

1589. a kind of clandestine plumber, played by Robert De Niro.

1590. - Just a minute, what was that business with the gun?

1591. - Just a precaution, sir, just a precaution.

1592. - Who tells him, just tell me what is

1593. the problem and promises quickly to fix it.

1594. This, of course, is the ultimate offense to bureaucracy.

1595. - Are you telling me that this is illegal?

1596. Thanks.

1597. - Listen, kid, we're all in it together, go on.

1598. - In the ordinary theological universe,

1599. your duty is imposed onto you by God

1600. or society, another higher authority,

1601. and your responsibility is to do it.

1602. But in a radically atheist universe,

1603. you are not only responsible for

1604. doing your duty, you are also responsible

1605. for deciding what is your duty.

1606. There is always in our subjectivity, in the way we

1607. experience ourselves, a minimum of hysteria.

1608. Hysteria is what, hysteria is the way

1609. we question our social, symbolic identity.

1610. - You're sure it's God?

1611. You're sure it's not the devil?

1612. - I'm not sure, I'm not sure of anything.

1613. - If it's the devil, the devil can be cast out.

1614. - But what if it's God?

1615. You can't cast out God, can you?

1616. - What is hysteria at it's most elementary?

1617. It's a question addressed at the

1618. authority which defines my identity.

1619. It's why am I what you are telling me that I am?

1620. In psychoanalytic theory, hysteria is much

1621. more subversive than perversion.

1622. A pervert has no uncertainties while again,

1623. the hysterical position is that of a doubt,

1624. which is an extremely productive position.

1625. All new inventions come from hysterical questioning,

1626. and the unique character of Christianity is that

1627. it transposes this hysterical questioning

1628. onto God himself as a subject.

1629. - Who's that, who's following me, is that you?

1630. - This is the ingenious idea of

1631. "The Last Temptation of Christ,"

1632. as in Kazantzakis' novel and Scorsese's film,

1633. namely the idea that when Jesus Christ,

1634. in his youth, is told that he is

1635. not only the Son of God, but basically,

1636. God himself, he doesn't simply accept it.

1637. This is for Jesus Christ, boy,

1638. traumatic news like, my God, why am I dead?

1639. Am I really dead?

1640. How did we come to that unique point,

1641. which I think, makes Christianity an exception?

1642. It all began with the "Book of Job."

1643. As we all know, things turn out bad for Job.

1644. He loses everything, his house,

1645. his family, his possessions and so on.

1646. Three friends visit him and each of them

1647. tries to justify Job's misfortunes.

1648. The greatness of Job is that he

1649. does not accept this deeper meaning.

1650. When, towards the end of the Book of Job,

1651. God himself appears,

1652. God gives right to Job.

1653. He says everything that the theological

1654. friends were telling Job is false.

1655. Everything job was saying is true,

1656. no meaning in catastrophes.

1657. Here, we have the first step in

1658. the direction of delegitimizing suffering.

1659. - Father, stay with me, don't leave me.

1660. - The contrast between Judaism and Christianity

1661. is the contrast between anxiety and love.

1662. The idea is that the Jewish God is

1663. the God of the abyss of the other's desire.

1664. Terrible things happen, God is in charge,

1665. but we do not know what the Big Other,

1666. God, wants from us.

1667. What is the divine desire?

1668. To designate this traumatic experience,

1669. Lacan used the Italian phrase, che voglio,

1670. what do you want, this terrifying question,

1671. but what do you want from me?

1672. The idea is that Judaism persists in this anxiety,

1673. like God remains this enigmatic, terrifying other.

1674. And then Christianity resolves the tension through love.

1675. By sacrificing his son, God demonstrates that he loves us.

1676. So it's a kind of a imaginary,

1677. sentimental even, resolution of

1678. a situation of radical anxiety.

1679. - Father, forgive them.

1680. - If this were to be the case, then Christianity

1681. would have been a kind of ideological

1682. reversal or pacification of the deep,

1683. much more shattering Jewish insight.

1684. But I think one can read the Christian

1685. gesture in a much more radical way.

1686. This is what the sequence of crucifixion

1687. in Scorsese's film shows us.

1688. What dies on the cross is precisely

1689. this guarantee of the Big Other.

1690. The message of Christianity is here radically atheist.

1691. It's the death of Christ is not any kind of

1692. redemption or commercial affair in the sense of

1693. Christ suffers to pay for our sins,

1694. pay to whom, for what, and so on.

1695. It's simply the disintegration of the God which

1696. guarantees the meaning of our lives.

1697. And that's the meaning of that famous phrase,

1698. Father, why have you forsaken me?

1699. - Father, why have you forsaken me?

1700. - Just before Christ's death, we get what,

1701. in psychoanalytic terms, we call subjective destitution,

1702. stepping out totally of the domain

1703. of symbolic identification,

1704. cancelling or suspending the entire field of

1705. symbolic authority, the entire field of the Big Other.

1706. Of course, we cannot know what

1707. God wants from us because there is no God.

1708. This is the Jesus Christ who says,

1709. among other things, I bring to Earth not peace.

1710. If you don't hate your father,

1711. your mother, you are not my follower.

1712. Of course, this doesn't mean that you should

1713. actively hate or kill your parents.

1714. I think that family relations stand here

1715. for hierarchic social relations.

1716. The message of Christ is, I'm dying,

1717. but my death, itself, is good news.

1718. It means you are alone, left to your freedom,

1719. be in the Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit,

1720. which is just the community of believers.

1721. It's wrong to think that the second coming

1722. will be that Christ as a figure will return somehow.

1723. Christ is already here when believers

1724. form an emancipatory collective.

1725. This is why I claim that the only way, really,

1726. to be an atheist is to go through Christianity.

1727. Christianity is much more atheist than

1728. the usual atheism, which can claim

1729. there is no God and so on, but nonetheless,

1730. it retains a certain trust into the Big Other.

1731. This Big Other can be called natural

1732. necessity, evolution, or whatever.

1733. We humans are, nonetheless, reduced to a

1734. position within a harmonious whole of evolution, whatever,

1735. but the difficult thing to accept is,

1736. again, that there is no Big Other,

1737. no point of reference which guarantees meaning.

1738. We are in John Frankenheimer's "Seconds,"

1739. a neglected Hollywood masterpiece from 1966,

1740. from the very heart of the hippy era,

1741. which preached unrestrained hedonism.

1742. Realize your dreams, enjoy life fully.

1743. The film is the story of a late, middle-age businessman

1744. leading a gray, totally-alienated life,

1745. and then he decides at some point that he has enough of it.

1746. Through one of his friends, he contacts

1747. a mysterious agency which offers him a deal.

1748. They will reorganize his life so that he will be reborn.

1749. - The cost runs in the neighborhood of $30,000.

1750. I know this seems rather high,

1751. but in addition to the rather extensive cosmetic

1752. renovation by way of plastic surgery for you,

1753. CPS has to provide a fresh corpse

1754. that perfectly matches your physical

1755. dimensions and medical specifications.

1756. - CPS?

1757. - Oh, Cadaver Procurement Section.

1758. - They use some corpse.

1759. They change it to look like his own body.

1760. They plant this corpse, stage a pseudo-accident

1761. so that police thinks he is dead.

1762. - You know, Mister Wilson,

1763. you represent something of a milestone around here.

1764. - And then, the agency

1765. organizes an ultimate life

1766. in a nice villa somewhere around L.A.

1767. They even organize a nice lady who conveniently

1768. stumbles upon him when he is taking a walk along the beach.

1769. He is thus reborn no longer as a boring

1770. businessman but as a modernist painter.

1771. - Tony Wilson.

1772. Called Tony Wilson,

1773. played by none other than Rock Hudson.

1774. - Sure.

1775. - So, the woman, Nora, his new love,

1776. tries to engage him in life, even takes him to some

1777. wine orgy where people get drunk, dance naked and so on.

1778. Everything seems okay.

1779. - Yes, yes, yes!

1780. - But Tony Wilson starts to miss his old life.

1781. More and more, he is haunted by his past.

1782. Finally, he breaks down, approaches, again,

1783. the agency, telling them that he

1784. wants to return to his old life.

1785. The boss of this mysterious company,

1786. a kind of kindly cruel—

1787. - Hello, son.

1788. - Superego paternal figure tells him the truth.

1789. He disappointed them by not being able to

1790. adapt himself to his new life.

1791. - You know, I sure hoped you'd

1792. make it, find your dream come true.

1793. - What?

1794. - I said, I sure hoped that you'd

1795. make it, find your dream come true.

1796. Oh, you can call it wishful thinking,

1797. son, but life is built on wishing,

1798. and you gotta just keep plugging away at 'em.

1799. You can't give up, and we can't

1800. let the mistakes jeopardize the dream.

1801. - So what went wrong here?

1802. The problem was that his past, in its

1803. material existence, was erased.

1804. - Well, here's your transportation.

1805. - What? - Surgery, sir.

1806. - He lived in a totally new environment,

1807. new job, new friends, and so on.

1808. What remained the same were his dreams

1809. because when the company organized his rebirth,

1810. when the company provided new existence for him,

1811. they simply followed his dreams.

1812. His dreams were wrong dreams, and this is quite

1813. a deep lesson for the theory of ideology.

1814. - Just remember, son, we gotta

1815. keep plugging away at the dream.

1816. The mistakes teach us how.

1817. It wasn't wasted, remember that.

1818. - On the way to the operation hall,

1819. he discovers the horrible truth.

1820. He will not be reborn but he will

1821. be used as a cadaver for another

1822. person who wants to be reborn.

1823. We should draw a line of distinction

1824. within the very field of our dreams,

1825. between those who are the right dreams,

1826. pointing towards a dimension effectively beyond

1827. our existing society, and the wrong dreams,

1828. the dreams which are just an idealized consumerist

1829. reflection, mirror image of our society.

1830. We are not simply submitted to our dreams.

1831. They just come from some unfathomable depths,

1832. and we can't do anything about it.

1833. This is the basic lesson of psychoanalysis

1834. and fiction cinema.

1835. We are responsible for our dreams.

1836. Our dreams stage our desires, and

1837. our desires are not objective facts.

1838. We created them, we sustained them,

1839. we are responsible for them.

1840. - This is an area of ancient lake beds

1841. deposited five to 10 million years ago.

1842. - The scene of mass orgy in "Zabriskie Point"

1843. is a nice metaphor of what went wrong

1844. with the 1960s hippy revolution.

1845. It's crucial that "Zabriskie Point" was made in 1970

1846. when the authentic revolutionary energy

1847. of the '60s was already losing its strength.

1848. This orgy is somewhere between

1849. subversion of the existing social order

1850. and already the full estheticized

1851. reincorporation of this allegedly

1852. transgressive activities into the hegemonic ideology.

1853. Although Antonioni meant this as

1854. a kind of transcendence of the existing constraints,

1855. we can easily imagine this shot in some publicity campaign.

1856. The first step to freedom is not just to

1857. change reality to fit your dreams.

1858. It's to change the way you dream.

1859. And again, this hurts because all satisfactions

1860. we have, come from our dreams.

1861. - The Great Supreme Commander, Chairman Mao

1862. issued a world shaking call to us.

1863. You should pay attention to state affairs

1864. and carry the great proletarian

1865. Cultural Revolution through to the end.

1866. - One of the big problems of all great

1867. revolutionary movements of the 20th century,

1868. such as Russia, Cuba, or China,

1869. is that they did change the social body,

1870. but the egalitarian communist society was never realized.

1871. The dreams remained the old dreams,

1872. and they turned into the ultimate nightmare.

1873. Now, what remains of the radical left waits for a magical

1874. event when the true revolutionary agent will finally awaken

1875. while the depressing lesson of the last decades is that

1876. capitalism has been the true revolutionizing force,

1877. even as it serves only itself.

1878. How come it is easier for us to imagine the end of

1879. all life on earth, an asteroid hitting the planet,

1880. than a modest change in our economic order?

1881. Perhaps, the time has come to set our possibilities straight

1882. and to become realists by way of demanding

1883. what appears as impossible in the economic domain.

1884. The surprising explosion of Occupy Wall Street protests,

1885. the mass mobilization in Greece,

1886. the crowds on Tahrir square, they all bear

1887. witness to the hidden potential for a different future.

1888. There is no guarantee that this future will arrive.

1889. No train of history on which we simply have to take a ride.

1890. It depends on us, on our will.

1891. In revolutionary upheavals, some energy,

1892. or rather, some utopian dreams take place.

1893. They explode, and even if the actual result of

1894. a social upheaval is just a commercialized

1895. every day life, this excess of energy,

1896. what's get, what gets lost in the result,

1897. persists not in reality, but as a dream

1898. haunting us, waiting to be redeemed.

1899. In this sense, whenever we are engaged

1900. in radical, emancipatory politics, we should never forget,

1901. as Walter Benjamin put it almost a century ago

1902. that every revolution is not only,

1903. if it is an authentic revolution,

1904. is not only directed towards the future but it

1905. redeems also the past failed revolutions,

1906. all the ghosts, as if we're the

1907. living dead of the past revolution

1908. which are roaming around, unsatisfied will finally

1909. find their home in the new freedom.