Zero

Point

ESSAYS NO.002

•
lavoJ
ZiZek B L O O M S B U R Y
Zero Point

i
 Žižek’s Essays
Series Editors: Liza Thompson and Hannah Wilks

Žižek’s Essays showcase the best of Slavoj Žižek’s thought and writing in
short, punchy collections of essays. Carefully curated to chart the
intellectual journeys of one of the world’s prominent philosophers, each
book brings together writings addressing the most urgent issues facing
the contemporary subject. Written with Žižek’s characteristic verve,
expansiveness, erudition and imagination, the essays combine the enduring
Žižekian preoccupations of Marxism, psychoanalysis, contemporary
politics and film with emerging themes – particle physics, new theories of
history, authenticity in the age of AI, war and ecological collapse in all its
catastrophic forms. Žižek’s Essays invite both seasoned readers and new
discoverers to experience thinking life, politics and history through the
idiosyncratic and topsy-turvy brilliance of the ultimate philosopher for a
world turned upside down.

Also Available from Bloomsbury

Against Progress, Slavoj Žižek

Christian Atheism, Slavoj Žižek
Freedom, Slavoj Žižek
Surplus-Enjoyment, Slavoj Žižek
Hegel in a Wired Brain, Slavoj Žižek
Sex and the Failed Absolute, Slavoj Žižek
Disparities, Slavoj Žižek
Antigone, Slavoj Žižek

ii
Zero Point

Slavoj Žižek

iii
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
Bloomsbury Publishing Ireland, 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, D02 AY28, Ireland
BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are
trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in Great Britain 2025
Copyright © Slavoj Žižek, 2025
Slavoj Žižek has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
Cover design: Ben Anslow
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be: i) reproduced or
transmitted in any form, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or by means of any information storage or retrieval system without
prior permission in writing from the publishers; or ii) used or reproduced in
any way for the training, development or operation of artificial intelligence (AI)
technologies, including generative AI technologies. The rights holders expressly
reserve this publication from the text and data mining exception as per
Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive (EU) 2019/790.
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given
in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and
publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites
have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: PB: 978-1-3505-3784-2
ePDF: 978-1-3505-3785-9
eBook: 978-1-3505-3786-6
Series: Žižek’s Essays
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
For product safety related questions contact [email protected].
To find out more about our authors and books visit
www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

iv
 Contents

Editor’s Note vi
Note on Text x

Part 1. Back to Ground Level 1

Zero Point 3
Everything is Not Going to be OK 5
All Words are Not Equal 15
What Hysterics Only Dream About 19
Worlds Blown Into Space 31
Heroes of the Metaverse 39
Death Cramps 49
Part 2. When is the Right Time to Speak? 61
Appendix: Frankfurt Speech October 2023 123

Notes 127
Index 141

v
 Editor’s Note

At the heart of Zero Point, there is a playful yet sobering tension. A

constant play between irreconcilable poles and a challenge to the
reader. It is for this reason that the title was chosen, a motif
throughout the essays with a double meaning. What is ‘zero point’?
It is ground zero, rock bottom, the place of annihilation, the place
where the despair that pervades our societies can no longer be
evaded. But it is also a place of regeneration, the only place from
which revolution can begin again, the base camp from which
ascent can be resumed. Slavoj Žižek argues in these essays that
attempting to escape the bone-deep sense of collective disaster, the
evidence for which is all around us, leads only to acts of brutal, self-
defeating violence or a condition of permanent, low-level dread;
zero point can only be postponed, not escaped. What is most feared
is also the only remedy. Instead of trying to outrun defeat or
passively drifting in a fog of disorientation and apathy, confronting
zero point – digging into the futility and pointlessness of all
revolutionary endeavours – is necessary. Rock bottom contains the
possibility – even if fragile and remote – of a kind of political and
existential summit. Our only realistic strategy, Žižek suggests, is to
become utopian dreamers. There are plans to be made. There are
ways out of this mess.
The previous book in this series warned against Leftist and
Liberal complacency, and it is telling that many of the breaches in
global order Žižek predicted – from the collapse of the Assad
regime in Syria to the re-election of Donald Trump and the faltering
or suppression of environmental agendas – have been actualized
with terrifying speed. The power of political speech acts, whether
obscene and incendiary or uncomfortable and self-negating, are a
persistent theme in Zero Point, the second half of which deals with

vi
 E D I T O R’ S N O T E

the fallout from the controversial speech Žižek gave at the Frankfurt
Book Fair in 2023. As we write this in February 2025, with
horrifying numbers of dead in Gaza, an immense humanitarian
crisis and the president of the USA mooting a takeover of Palestine
and the permanent displacing of an already decimated and
traumatised people, this ‘outrageous’ speech seems strangely tame;
it is hard to imagine it provoking anything like the same response.
Is this precisely why it had to be given when it was? Is it only really
possible to tell the truth when standing at zero point?
It is, perhaps, this impulse which animates ‘Everything is Not
Going to be OK’, Žižek’s response to the re-election of Trump in
November 2024. Neither the complacent Liberalism of Harris nor
Trump’s appearance of sincerity, the perverse authenticity born out
of reactionary spontaneity, escape searing critique. Part of the
enduring appeal of Žižek’s political writing is the gleeful energy
with which he shreds each self-deceiving figleaf at which the Left is
clutching, and here he takes aim at the standard explanations for
Trump’s appeal, drawing on Freudian concepts of the theft of
enjoyment and the return of the repressed. It is here that Žižek
begins the reckoning with the legacy of the European Enlightenment
and secular modernity which is sustained throughout Zero Point;
in a post-ideological society, in which the ability to mobilize for a
cause has gone unaccountably missing, do Trump and his
neo-populist peers represent the return of the political? ‘All Words
are Not Equal’ takes up this theme, asking whether actions taken by
international courts to halt the violence in Gaza signal that
something can be salvaged from the European project; can life be
infused into the hypocritical mask of human rights by taking the
West at its word? And, foreshadowing part two of this book, is
there a way of speaking truth to power which does not, will not,
become a lie?
Žižek’s claim that ‘we do not only escape into a fantasy to avoid
confronting reality, we also escape into the reality (of brutal acts) to
avoid the truth about the futility of our fantasies’ leads directly into
his tour de force, ‘What Hysterics Only Dream About’, the essay
that most directly reckons with the role of psychoanalytical
thinking in our contemporary reality. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s
response to the student protests of May ’68, Žižek explores

vii
 E D I T O R’ S N O T E

shamelessness and dignity in protest and psychotherapy, in feminist

Chinese filmmaking and in the case of Giséle Pelicot, in whose
courageous response to unimaginable brutalization he finds a
roadmap for confronting the ruptures that define our subjectivity.
The terrifying alternative is laid out starkly in ‘Worlds Blown Into
Space’, in which Russian attempts to elevate the invasion of Ukraine
into a metaphysical struggle between good and evil – and its
potential consequences for nuclear escalation – are charted. Žižek
confesses to enjoying podcasts about the secrets of magicians, and
it is with a typical flourish that he turns the tables on the reader,
conjuring up a vivid picture of a reality in which it is precisely a
metaphysical conflict that is taking place, with a war between
competing definitions of what it is to be a human and to exist in
relationship to the other. And in ‘Heroes of the Metaverse’, the
digital ‘big other’ is placed under the microscope once again as
Yanis Varoufakis’s concept of ‘neo-feudalism’ is employed to make
connections between the horrors of publicity as a self-sustaining
organism, the cracks in the impossible Trumpian alliance of digital
feudal masters and exploited workers, and the horrors of
neo-colonial violation in Africa. ‘Death Cramps’ continues to focus
upon the role of global capitalism in sucking dry the developing
world, and its intimate links with authoritarian governments
cracking down on (in particular) the rights of women. It asks
whether the violation of human rights is inscribed in the very
notion of Western secular modernity, or whether the values rooted
in the European Enlightenment are precisely the tools with which
the houses of the new corporate feudal masters must be dismantled,
a tension which the competing meanings of ‘zero point’ once more
hold in balance.
Each piece in Zero Point contains a kernel of hope – whether it’s
proposing an alliance of anti-establishment forces, a ruthless
exploitation of enemy weaknesses, or realising the true adversary is
not the populist right but the Capitalist system, there is a white-
knuckled optimism which mingles determination and panic. It is
this commitment to resistance and refusal to capitulate which is
tested most strenuously in Part Two of the book. Unlike the pithy,
punchy essays in Part One, ‘When is the Right Time to Speak’ takes
us on a kind of diaristic journey, offering the reader an intimate

viii
 E D I T O R’ S N O T E

window into the year of thinking, writing and processing which

followed Žižek’s controversial speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Delivered on 17 October 2023, this speech was deemed so
controversial that it was interrupted by local politicians backed by
police, and became a cause célèbre for a time with attacks coming
from all sides. Assembled in rough chronological order, these
writings show Žižek reacting to the critiques of his speech as well
as to evolving events in Gaza, grappling with what it means to
speak to a moment in the moment – and how to go on calling
things by their names in the face of growing disorientation, horror
and suffering. If Part One delineates ‘zero point’, Part Two lives it;
starting from and returning to a point of despair, defeat and futility,
over and over again – and each time, through sustained engagement
with precisely that experience of pain and pointlessness, finding its
way to the finding a first foothold for another ascent.

Liza Thompson and Hannah Wilks

ix
 Note on Text

Some of these pieces appeared in earlier versions on Slavoj Žižek’s

Substack but have been fully revised and extended for the book.

x
Part 1. Back to Ground Level

1
2
 Zero Point

In 1922, when the Bolsheviks had to retreat into the ‘New Economic
Policy’ of allowing a much wider scope of market economy and
private property, Lenin wrote a short text ‘On Ascending a High
Mountain.’ He uses the simile of a climber who has to retreat to
‘zero-point’, back to ground level, from his first attempt to reach a
new mountain peak. It’s an illustration of how one might retreat
without opportunistically betraying one’s fidelity to the Cause.
Communists ‘who do not give way to despondency, and who
preserve their strength and flexibility “to begin from the beginning”
over and over again in approaching an extremely difficult task, are
not doomed.’1 This is Lenin at his Beckettian best, echoing the line
from Worstward Ho: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’
Such a Leninist approach is needed today more than ever when
Communism, the only way to confront the challenges we face
(ecology, war, A.I…), has become increasingly inoperative as a
political vision. Whatever remains of the Left is less and less able to
mobilize people around a viable alternative to the existing global
order. How do we break out of this deadlock? This endless, circular
re-visiting of the weaknesses of the Left, complaining about how
much easier it is to imagine the end of the world than the end of
capitalism. One way might be to shift the focus to capitalism itself.
Capitalism has not just successfully imagined post-capitalism but is
already transforming itself into a new post-capitalist order. What
this implies is that the multiplicity of crises we are confronting
can only be addressed by focusing on the ongoing economic
restructuration of our societies, a restructuration which is pushing
us towards the abyss of self-destruction. Noam Chomsky is a keen
and often brutal critic of me, but I must say that I fully subscribe to
his statement on the end of organized society:

3
 ZERO POINT

we are at a unique moment in human history. Decisions that

must be made right now will determine the course of future
history if there is to be any human history, which is very much
in doubt. There is a narrow window in which we must implement
measures to avert cataclysmic destruction of the environment,
measures that are quite feasible.2
Chomsky targets our (well-orchestrated) indifference towards the
threat to our environment, but I think we need to go further
and extend his point to our general unwillingness to engage
meaningfully in political struggles. The ‘decisions that must be
made right now’ are eminently political decisions. Europe today is
simply not ready to fight for a big common Cause – even the
‘peaceniks’ who want to end the Russia-Ukraine war are mostly
simply defending their own comfortable lives and would willingly
sacrifice Ukraine to maintain such lifetstyles. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
is fully justified in talking about ‘the disintegration of the Western
world’3 – our very survival as a society depends on regaining the
capacity to mobilize for a cause rooted in European Enlightenment.
Zero point is thus not the point at which things cannot get any
worse – they can and they arguably will get much worse. Zero point
is the point – which can last quite a long time – when we are caught
in a downward spiral and see no way out from within the
coordinates of the existing order. This book tries to provide a
general outline of our socio-economic zero point, as well as a sense
of how the downward spiral appears in different domains, from the
threat of global war to rape culture.
One of the places where global tensions threaten to explode is
the ongoing war in the Middle East, the zero point at which the
‘civilized’ West revealed itself to be even more despicable than the
Muslim ‘barbarians’ it is so keen to vilify. This is why the second
part of this book is focused on how this war can only be understood
if it is analysed within the context of the antagonisms of the existing
global order. There are no good guys in this story, just guys who are
more or less bad and choices are never easy.

4
 Everything is Not Going to be OK

Where does Trump’s victory in November 2024 leave (whatever

remains of) the Left? One thing is clear, with this victory, as well as
with the rise of the populist Right in Europe, the Left has reached
its zero point: it will have to reinvent itself thoroughly or it will
perish.
Before we plunge into platitudes about ‘Trump’s triumph,’ we
should note some important details, first among them the fact that
Trump did not get more votes than in the 2020 election where he
lost against Biden – it was Kamala Harris who lost approximately
10 million votes from the Biden victory! So it’s not that ‘Trump won
big’ – it’s Harris who lost, and all Leftist critics of Trump should
begin with radical self-criticism. Among the points to be noted,
there is the unpleasant fact that immigrants, especially from Latin
countries, are almost inherently conservative. The majority came to
the US not to change the system but to succeed within it, or, as
Todd McGowan put it: ‘They want to create a better life for
themselves and their family, not to better their social order.’1
This is why I don’t think Kamala Harris lost because she is a
woman of colour – remember that two weeks ago Kemi Badenoch,
a black woman, was triumphantly elected as the new leader of the
British Conservatives (a different country but you see my point). I
think the main reason for Harris’ defeat is the fact that Trump
stood for actual politics; he (and his followers) acted as engaged
politicians, while she stood for non-politics. Many of Harris’
positions were good ones : healthcare provision, abortion access
etc. However, Trump and his partisans repeatedly made very clear
(albeit extreme) statements while Harris succeeded avoiding
difficult choices, offering empty platitudes instead. In this respect
Harris resembles the political tempo of Keir Starmer in the UK.

5
 ZERO POINT

Just recall how he carefully avoided a clear stance on the Gaza war,
losing the votes not only of radical Zionists but also of many young
black and Muslim voters and Leftist campaigners.
What Democrats failed to learn from Trumpians is that, in a
passionate political battle, ‘extremism’ works. In her concession
speech, Harris said: ‘To the young people who are watching, it is
OK to feel sad and disappointed, but please know it’s going to
be OK.’ No, everything is NOT going to be OK, we should NOT
trust that progress will win out and history will somehow restore
balance.
Throughout the election campaigns, Trump painted a picture of
Harris as an even worse candidate than Biden (not just a Socialist,
a Communist!) To confuse her stance with Communism is a sad
index of where we are today – a confusion clearly discernible in
another populist rallying cry: ‘The people are tired of far-left rule!’
An absurdity if there ever was one. Populists categorise the (still)
hegemonic liberal order ‘far left’ when it is simply the progressive-
liberal center which is much more interested in fighting (whatever
remains of) the Left than the new Right. If what we have now in the
West is ‘far-left rule,’ then von der Leyen is a Marxist Communist
(as Viktor Orban effectively claims!).
The new populist Right treats Communism and corporate
capitalism as the same. But the true identity of the opposites resides
elsewhere. Back in 2016 I was criticized for claiming that Trump
was a pure liberal – how could I ignore his dictatorial and Fascistic
tendencies? My critics missed the point. Perhaps the best
characterization of Trump is that he is a kind of liberal, namely a
Liberal Fascist; the ultimate iteration of Liberalism and Fascism
coalescing, two sides of the same coin. Trump is not just an
authoritarian, he also wants to allow the market to function freely
at its most destructive, from brutal profiteering to dismissing all
ethical considerations in public media (e.g. restrictions on hate
speech) as a form of Socialism.
Here we should begin with a critique of Trump’s opponents.
Boris Buden rejected the predominant interpretation which sees
the rise of the new Rightist populism as a regression caused by the
failure of modernization. For Buden, religion as a political force is
an effect of the post-political disintegration of society, of the

6
 EV E RY T H I N G I S N OT G O I N G T O B E O K

dissolution of traditional mechanisms which guaranteed stable

communal links. In this sense, fundamentalist religion is not only
political, it is politics. Even more poignantly, it is no longer just a
social phenomenon but the very texture of society, so that in a way
society itself becomes religious phenomenon. It is thus no longer
possible to distinguish the purely spiritual aspect of religion from
its politicization. In a post-political universe, religion is the
predominant space for antagonistic passions to play out. What has
happened with the rise of the religious Right is thus not the return
of religion in politics but simply the return of the political as such.
So the true question is: how did the political in the radical secular
sense, the great achievement of European modernity, lose its
formative power?
Retroactively, we can locate the key rupture somewhere around
1990, a time when most Socialist regimes had fallen and the seeming
triumph of global capitalism was complete. This notion was most
famously articulated in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History
which described the end of history as a post-ideological era where
big political struggles were now a thing of the past and conflicts
were disputes of interests which should and could be resolved
through pragmatic negotiations. This post-ideological process
operated at almost every level of society: expert administration
instead of politics; individual freedoms instead of collective rights
and solidarity; private charity instead of social care; culture instead
of art; particular identities instead of class struggle; sex instead of
love. Since this vision dominated secular public space, politics
proper could now only persist in the sphere of religion.
David Goldman commented on Trump’s electoral victory with
‘It’s the economy, stupid!’ – but, as he added, not in a direct way. The
main indicators show that under Biden the economy was doing
quite well, although inflation hit poor Americans in particular very
hard (and perhaps this is what they remember come polling day).
The trend towards a greater gap between rich and poor has been a
global tendency in the West for the last 30 years. Yes, higher prices
of everyday products, especially food, higher rents and medical
costs, pushed millions towards poverty, but Biden was, in his
economic politics, definitely the most Leftist president since F.D.
Roosevelt who did a lot for worker’s, women’s and student’s rights.

7
 ZERO POINT

Temporary inflation during Biden’s presidency doesn’t explain why

so many Americans perceived their economic predicament as
permanently dire. Yes it made the divide between the ‘haves’ and
the ‘have nots’ more visible but this chasm is part of an ongoing
trend in the US and certainly not something new. There is
something else at play here: namely, ideology.
I am not talking here about ideology as a system of ideas and
guiding principles, but ideology in a more basic sense: how political
discourse functions as a social link. Aaron Schuster observed that
Trump is ‘an over-present leader whose authority is based on his
own will and who openly disdains knowledge – it is this rebellious,
anti-systemic theater that serves as the point of identification for
the people.’2 This is why Trump’s serial insults and outright lies (not
to mention his criminality) work for him. His ideological triumph
resides in the fact that his followers experience their obedience to
him as a form of subversive resistance, or, as Todd McGowan put it:
‘One can support the fledgling fascist leader in an attitude of total
obedience while feeling oneself to be utterly radical, which is a
position designed to maximize the enjoyment factor almost de
facto.’3
Here we should mobilize the Freudian notion of the ‘theft of
enjoyment’. An Other’s enjoyment inaccessible to us or our rightful
enjoyment stolen from us by an Other or threatened by an Other.
Russel Sbriglia noticed how this dimension of the ‘theft of
enjoyment’ played a crucial role when Trump’s supporters stormed
the Capitol on January 6 2021:
Could there possibly be a better exemplification of the logic of
the ‘theft of enjoyment’ than the mantra that Trump supporters
were chanting while storming the Capitol: ‘Stop the steal!’? The
hedonistic, carnivalesque nature of the storming of the Capitol
to ‘stop the steal’ wasn’t merely incidental to the attempted
insurrection; insofar as it was all about taking back the
enjoyment (supposedly) stolen from them by the nation’s others
(i.e., Blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, LGBTQ+, etc.), the element of
carnival was absolutely essential to it.4
What happened on 6 January 2021 in the Capitol was not a coup
attempt but a carnival. The idea that carnival can serve as the model

8
 EV E RY T H I N G I S N OT G O I N G T O B E O K

for the progressive protest movements – such protests are

carnivalesque not only in their form and atmosphere (theatrical
performances, humorous chants), but also in their non-centralized
organization – is deeply problematic: is late-capitalist social reality
itself not already carnivalesque? Was the infamous Kristallnacht
in 1938 – this half-organized half-spontaneous outburst of violent
attacks on Jewish homes, synagogues, businesses, and people
themselves – not a carnival if there ever was one? Furthermore, is
‘carnival’ not also the name for the obscene underside of power –
from gang rapes to mass lynchings? Let us not forget that Michail
Bakhtin developed the notion of carnival in his book on Rabelais
written in the 1930s, as a direct reply to the carnival of the Stalinist
purges.
The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message
(conservative values) and the style of his public performance
(saying more or less whatever pops up in his head, insulting
others and violating all rules of good manners…) tells a lot about
our predicament: what world do we live in when bombarding
the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last
barrier to protect us from the triumph of the society in which
everything is permitted and old values go down the drain – as
Alenka Zupančič put it, Trump is not a relic of old moral majority
conservativism, he is to a much greater degree the caricatural
inverted image of postmodern ‘permissive society’ itself, a product
of this society’s own antagonisms and inner limitations. Adrian
Johnston proposed
a complementary twist on Jacques Lacan’s dictum according
to which ‘repression is always the return of the repressed’:
the return of the repressed sometimes is the most effective
repression.5
Is this not also a concise definition of the figure of Trump? As
Freud said about perversion, in it, everything that was repressed, all
repressed content, comes out in all its obscenity, but this return of
the repressed only strengthens the repression – and this is also why
there is nothing liberating in Trump’s obscenities, they merely
strengthen social oppression and mystification. Trump’s obscene
performances thus express the falsity of his populism: to put it with

9
 ZERO POINT

brutal simplicity, while acting as if he cares for the ordinary people,

he promotes big capital.
How to account for the strange fact that Donald Trump, a lewd
and destitute person, the very opposite of Christian decency, can
function as the chosen hero of the Christian conservatives? The
explanation one usually hears is that, while Christian conservatives
are well aware of the problematic character of Trump’s personality,
they have chosen to ignore this side of things since what really
matters to them is Trump’s agenda, especially his anti-abortion
stance. If he can succeed in securing conservative members of the
Supreme Court which will then overturn Roe vs. Wade, then this
act will obliterate all his sins. But are things as simple as that? What
if the very duality of Trump’s personality – his high moral stance
accompanied by personal lewdness and vulgarities – is what make
him attractive to Christian conservatives? What if they secretly
identify with this very duality? This, however, doesn’t mean that we
should take too seriously the images that abound in our media of a
typical Trumpian as an obscene fanatic – no, the large majority of
Trump voters are everyday decent people who otherwise behave in
rational ways. It is as if they externalize their madness and obscenity
onto/into Trump.
The obscene background of our ideological space is made more
conspicuous. To put it somewhat simply: the fact that we now have
the space, online and otherwise, to make public statements (racist,
sexist etc.) which, till recently, belonged to private space in no way
means that the time of mystification is over now that ideology is
made visible. On the contrary, when obscenity penetrates the public
scene, ideological mystification is at its strongest: the true political,
economic and ideological stakes are more invisible than ever. Public
obscenity is always sustained by a concealed moralism, its
practitioners secretly believe they are fighting for a cause, and it is
because of this hypocrisy that they should be attacked.
Recall the number of times the liberal media announced that
Trump was metaphorically caught with his pants down and had
committed public suicide (mocking the parents of a dead war hero,
boasting about pussy grabbing, etc.). Arrogant liberal commentators
were shocked that their continuous acerbic attacks on Trump’s
vulgar racist and sexist outbursts, factual inaccuracies, economic

10
 EV E RY T H I N G I S N OT G O I N G T O B E O K

nonsense etc. did not hurt him at all but probably enhanced his
popular appeal. They missed how identification works: we as a rule
identify with other’s weaknesses, not only or even not principally
with their strengths, so the more Trump’s limitations were mocked
the more ordinary people identified with him and perceived attacks
on him as condescending attacks on themselves. The subliminal
message was: ‘I am one of you!’, while ordinary Trump supporters
felt constantly humiliated by the liberal elite’s patronizing attitude
towards them – as Alenka Zupančič put it succinctly,
The extremely poor do the fighting for the extremely rich, as it
was clear in the election of Trump. And the Left does little else
than scold and insult them.6
Or, we should add, the Left does what is even worse: it patronizingly
‘understands’ the confusion and blindness of the poor. This Left-
liberal arrogance explodes at its purest in the genre of political-
comment-comedy talk shows (Jon Stewart, John Oliver etc.) which
mostly enact the pure arrogance of the liberal intellectual elite – as
Stephen Marche put it in LA Times back in 2017:
Parodying Trump is at best a distraction from his real politics; at
worst it converts the whole of politics into a gag. The process has
nothing to do with the performers or the writers or their choices.
Trump built his candidacy on performing as a comic heel – that
has been his pop culture persona for decades. It is simply not
possible to parody effectively a man who is a conscious self-
parody, and who has become president of the United States on
the basis of that performance.7
Many of those who voted for Trump claimed that he appeared
authentic and sincere in his public statements. In contrast, Kamala
Harris, appeared carefully calculating and performative. However,8
the very characteristics and features which function as proof of
Trump’s sincerity are precisely what his opponents reproach
him for: his vulgar obscenities and his obvious lies. In terms of
his obscenities, the appeal is obvious: Trump openly says what
he really thinks, no holds barred. With his consistent lying, the
situation is more paradoxical – if you tell the truth you are
well prepared in advance while if you are caught lying it means

11
 ZERO POINT

that you speak spontaneously which has the unmistakable air of

authenticity.
In my past work, I used a joke from the good old days of Really-
Existing Socialism popular among dissidents. In the fifteenth-
century Russia occupied by Mongols, a farmer and his wife walk
along a dusty country road; a Mongol warrior on a horse stops at
their side and tells the farmer that he will now rape his wife; he then
adds: ‘But since there is a lot of dust on the ground, you should hold
my testicles while I’m raping your wife, so that they will not get
dirty!’ After the Mongol finishes his job and rides away, the farmer
starts to laugh and jump with joy; the surprised wife asks him: ‘how
can you be jumping with joy when I was just brutally raped in your
presence?’ The farmer answers: ‘But I got him! His balls are full of
dust!’ This sad joke tells of the predicament of dissidents: they
thought they are dealing serious blows to the party nomenklatura,
but all they were doing was getting a little bit of dust on the
nomenklatura’s testicles, while the nomenklatura went on raping
the people… And can we not say exactly the same about Jon Stewart
and company making fun of Trump – do they not just dust his
balls, in the best of cases scratch them?
The problem is not that Trump is a clown. The problem is that
there is a program behind his provocations, a method in his
madness. Trump’s (and others’) vulgar obscenities are part of their
populist strategy to sell this program to ordinary people, a program
which (in the long term, at least) works against ordinary people:
lower taxes for the rich, less healthcare and workers’ protection, etc.
Unfortunately, people are ready to swallow many things if there are
presented to them through obscene laughter and through false
solidarity.
The ultimate irony of Trump’s project is that MAGA (make
America great again) effectively amounts to its opposite: make
the US part of BRICS, a local superpower interacting on equal
foot with other new local superpowers (Russia, India, China). An
EU diplomat was right to point out that, with Trump’s victory,
Europe is no longer the US’ ‘fragile little sister.’ Will Europe find the
strength to oppose MAGA with something that could be called
MEGA: make Europe great again through resuscitating its radical
emancipatory legacy?

12
 EV E RY T H I N G I S N OT G O I N G T O B E O K

At the beginning of January 2025, Trump repeatedly proclaimed

his territorial aspirations: the US should annex Canada and
Greenland plus take control of the Panama canal, and he pointedly
doesn’t want to exclude the use of military means to achieve this
goal. Does this not sound exactly like Putin’s expansionism applied
to the area surrounding the US? Trump’s MAGA is thus a copy of
Putin’s MRGA (Make Russia Great Again), and together they bear
witness to how the new multi-centric world envisaged by BRICS
will look: a co-existence of a couple of big powers, each of them
free to control smaller countries in their environs.
The lesson of Trump’s victory is the opposite of what many
liberal Leftists advocated: (whatever remains of) the Left should get
rid of its fear that they will lose the centrist voters if they will be
perceived as too extremist, it should clearly distinguish itself from
the ‘progressive’ liberal center and its Woke corporatism. To do this
brings its own risks, of course: a state can end in a tripartite division
with no big coalition possible. However, taking this risk is the only
way forward.
Hegel wrote that through its repetition a historical event asserts
its necessity. When Napoleon lost in 1813 and was exiled to Elba,
this defeat may have appeared as something contingent: with better
military strategy he might have won. But when he returned to
power again and lost at Waterloo, it became clear that his time is
over, that his defeat was grounded in a deeper historical necessity.
The same goes for Trump: his first victory could still be attributed
to tactical mistakes, but now that he won again, it should become
clear that Trumpian populism expresses a historical necessity.
Many commentators expect that Trump’s reign will be marked
by new shocking catastrophic events, and there are indications of
such dangerous gestures here and there – say, Trump announced
that he will try to annex Canada and Greenland to the US (ironically
calling Justin Trudeau ‘the governor of Canada’ as one of the US
states). But the worst option is that there will be no great shocks:
Trump will try to finish the ongoing wars (enforcing a peace in
Ukraine, etc.), the economy will remain stable and perhaps even
bloom, tensions will be attenuated and life will go on… however, a
whole series of federal and local measures will continuously
undermine the existing liberal-democratic social pact and change

13
 ZERO POINT

the basic texture that holds together the US, what Hegel called
Sittlichkeit, the set of unwritten customs and rules which concern
politeness, truthfulness, social solidarity, women’s rights, etc. This
new world will appear as new normality, and in this sense Trump’s
reign may well bring about the end of the world, of what was most
precious in our civilization.
So let’s conclude with a vulgar and cruel joke which perfectly
renders our predicament. After his wife underwent a long and risky
surgery, the husband approaches the doctor (who is his friend) and
inquires about the outcome. The doctor begins: ‘Your wife survived,
she will probably live longer than you. But there are some
complications: she will no longer be able to control her anal
muscles, so she will be shitting herself constantly; there will also be
a continuous flow of a bad smelling yellow jelly from her vagina, so
any sex is out. Plus her mouth will malfunction and she won’t be
able to eat unassisted…’ Noting the growing expression of worry
and panic on the husband’s face, the doctor taps him comfortingly
on the shoulder and smiles: ‘Don’t worry, I was just joking!
Everything is OK, she died during the operation.’ If we replace the
doctor with Trump who promises to cure our democracy, this is
how he will explain the outcome of his reign: ‘Our democracy is
well and alive, there are just some complications: we have to throw
out millions of immigrants, limit abortion to make it de facto
impossible, use the National Guard to crush protests… don’t worry,
I was just joking, democracy died during my reign!’

14
 All Words are Not Equal

On May 20 May 2024 Salman Rushdie said that if a Palestinian

state was established today, it would be a ‘Taliban-like state’
government by Hamas. He also criticized the anti-Israel student
protests, saying that it was ‘strange’ that progressive youth would
support Hamas, which he called a ‘fascist terrorist group.’1 I fully
understand his bitter stance after what he went through with the
fatwa by Khomeini and then the knife attack that almost killed
him; I fully sympathize with him when some of his Leftist friends
reproached him for ‘unnecessarily provoking’ Muslims. Such
reproaches are obviously sustained by the pathological fear some
Western liberal Leftists harbour of being guilty of islamophobia.
Any critique of Islam is denounced as an expression of Western
islamophobia, Salman Rushdie is denounced for unnecessarily
provoking Muslims and thus (partially, at least) responsible for the
fatwa condemning him to death, etc. The result of such a stance is
what one can expect in such cases – the more the Western liberal
Leftists probe into their guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim
fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred
of Islam. This constellation again perfectly reproduces the paradox
of the superego: the more you obey what the Other demands of
you, the guiltier you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the
stronger its pressure on you will be.
However, in the case of a Palestinian state, I nonetheless disagree
with Rushdie. When he mentions the Taliban, my first thought is:
how did the Taliban take over in Afghanistan? It was a relatively
open state receptive to modernization until 1978 when Communists
took over in a coup. The Soviet Union militarily intervened to
bolster its waning power while the US and Pakistan provided arms
to Muslim resistance (the Taliban was organized by the Pakistani

15
 ZERO POINT

secret service), and the rest is history. So it was actually foreign

interventions (the Soviet Union, Pakistan, the USA) which pushed
a relatively peaceful and pluralist country towards fundamentalist
authoritarian rule. And, in a similar way, what pushes Palestinians
in the occupied territories towards Hamas. Brutal resistance to the
fact that Israel doesn’t allow the Palestinians under its control to
organize themselves as an autonomous political. To cut a long story
short, Israel ‘hamasizes’ Palestinians to justify their ethnic cleansing
and present the expansion of Israel ‘from the river to the sea’ as an
act of self-defense.
For this reason, the recognition of Palestine as a state and the
clear condemnation of what Israel is doing in the occupied
territories as a crime against humanity is the only way not only to
put reins on Israel’s military terror against civilians but also to
compel the Palestinians themselves to act as a legitimate political
force bound by international laws and rules. Lately, there have been
some unexpectedly pleasant surprises in this direction. It is not
only the student protesters who are active: Spain, Ireland, Norway
recognize Palestine, and other Western states are getting ready to
do the same. On 20 May 2024, France’s Foreign Ministry came out
in support of the International Criminal Court and its issuing of
arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders for war crimes and
crimes against humanity. In its warrant, the ICC does not make any
direct comparisons between Israel and Hamas, except to say they
have both committed crimes.2 Days later, France was joined by
Belgium and Germany.
No wonder the Biden administration had threatened sanctions
on the ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan – US Senator Lindsey Graham
warned, ‘if they’ll do this to Israel, we’re next!’3 Graham is right: till
now, the ICC was automatically presupposed to deal with Asia,
Africa and Latin America, but now it wants to apply the so-called
‘rules-based international order’ universally with no exceptions. I
find these procedures important precisely because they do not
reject universal human rights as just a mask of Western domination:
they take them more seriously than they were meant.
The threat doesn’t only come from hypocritical advocacy of
universal rights from the West. In one or another way, all the big
power blocks play the same hypocritical game. It is not only that

16
 A L L WO R D S A R E N O T E QUA L

universal rules are not consistently applied – there is also a false

‘universality’ which puts aggressors and victims on the same
footing. Here is an incident which, as is often the case, made me
ashamed of Slovenian ‘Leftists’: when, on 23 May 2024, the freight
ship Borkum landed on the Slovenian coastal town of Koper,
rumors began circulating that the ship was carrying arms destined
for Israel. As expected, pro-Palestinian protesters immediately
demanded that the Slovenian government prohibit Borkum from
landing in Koper. But when a government agency explained that
there were no arms on the ship, 43 protest organizations made the
following statement:
Irrespective of the final destination of the arms, Israel or the
Czech Republic and from there perhaps Ukraine, we are dealing
with weapons for the armed forces of imperialist states which
do not contribute to peace and do not defend working people.
We, the signatories of this statement, advocate peace and oppose
armament. Trafficking arms for imperialist wars is unacceptable.4
I totally reject the underlying equation of the Israeli destruction of
(not only) Gaza with Ukraine’s self-defense against Russian attack
(i.e the labelling of Ukraine’s desperate struggle for survival as
‘imperialist war.’) This is why Putin’s recent ‘free Palestine’ pledge is
a lie sustained by a factual truth – it serves to obfuscate the ‘free
Ukraine’ pledge brutally violated by Russia.
On 24 May 2024, the International Court of Justice, the UN’s
top court, ordered Israel to ‘immediately halt’ its military offensive
in Rafah. Are such big public acts of condemnation ultimately
empty gestures which will not significantly impact the situation on
the ground? In this case, such a cynical stance is clearly false. We all
saw the panicked reaction of the pro-Israeli establishment to the
ICC warrant and the moves to recognize Palestine. Jean-Paul
Sartre put it in a precise way: ‘when the authorities find it useful to
tell the truth, it’s because they can’t find any better lie. Immediately
this truth, coming from official mouths, becomes a lie corroborated
by the facts.’5
This is largely the case with Western countries expressing
‘concerns’ about the IDF violence in Gaza and on the West Bank:
alongside the criticisms of the Israeli government, they also continued

17
 ZERO POINT

to deliver arms to the IDF. However, Sartre’s thesis is not universal –

there are ways of telling the truth which do not automatically become
lies. Recognising Palestine as a state and fulfilling the ICC warrant
for Netanyahu’s arrest as a war criminal are such cases. In today’s
inflation of solemn declarations, we should never forget that all
words are not equal, that there are still words which are not just
factually true but which produce the effect of truth.
Most of us know the oft-quoted climactic moment in A Few
Good Men (Rob Reiner, 1992) when Tom Cruise demands ‘I want
the truth!’, and Jack Nicholson shouts back: ‘You can’t handle the
truth!’ This reply is more ambiguous than it may appear. This
statement shouldn’t be taken as a claim that we are too weak to
handle the brutal reality of things. If someone were to scrutinize a
witness about the horrors of the Holocaust and the witness were
to reply ‘You can’t handle the truth!’ we wouldn’t assume that
they meant that we were unable the process the atrocities of the
Holocaust. At a deeper level, those who were not able to handle the
truth were the Nazi perpetrators themselves; they were unable to
accept the fact that their society was traversed by an all-encompassing
antagonism, and the desperation to avoid this reality was a genocidal
driver. As if eradication of the perceived cause of the antagonism
would re-establish a harmonious social body.
And therein resides the final lesson of the horrors in Gaza and
in Ukraine: we do not only escape into a fantasy to avoid confronting
reality, we also escape into the reality (of brutal acts) to avoid the
truth about the futility of our fantasies. Israel is escaping into the
reality of destroying Gaza to avoid the truth about its predicament
in the Middle East. Russia is escaping into the reality of destroying
Ukraine to avoid the truth about the futility of its Euroasian
ideological fantasies. The stupid wisdom ‘Don’t just talk, do
something!’ should be turned on its head: ‘Don’t just do things, say
the right word!’

18
 What Hysterics Only Dream About

Psychoanalysis is as a rule misunderstood either in a pseudo-Leftist

way (we should strive to abolish all forms of repression, for a fully
liberated sexuality) or in a conservative way (a level of repression is
necessary to prevent social disintegration and preserve public
morality). Jacques Lacan’s definition of the goal of psychoanalytic
treatment is hence a surprising one: in our era of permissiveness,
he sees the task of psychoanalysis as the restoration of a minimum
of shame.1 The true opposition is not between free sexuality and
repression but between shamelessness and dignity.
It is difficult to overestimate the political relevance of Lacan’s
stance: All around us, protesters attack the shamelessness of their
opponents and demand to be treated with dignity. We are not
talking here just about shameless populists like Donald Trump.
A year or so ago, a unique photo appeared in (some of) our
media: shot from the Gaza border, it showed IDF bombs (made by
the US) falling on buildings and destroying them, while in the
background, parachutes with packages of food and medicines
(dropped by the US) approached the ground. The tension implied
by this shot, as the same country that produced the bombs
destroying Gaza delivers aid to those starving and suffering in
the humanitarian crisis caused by the Israeli offense, was finally
resolved in an event whose brutal irony cannot be overestimated.
On 20 October 2024, a three-year-old Palestinian boy named Sami
Ayyad was killed by air-dropped aid in the southern city of Khan
Younis. ‘We don’t want aid. We want dignity,’ said the boy’s
grandfather, also named Sami Ayyad. ‘Enough with the humiliation
and insult that we are receiving from the Arabs, not just the Israelis.
Those who have no mercy on us — look at our children, our
women, our elderly.’2

19
 ZERO POINT

Ayyad is right: there is something humiliating in receiving aid

from the air sent by those for whom it would be easy to put pressure
on Israel to allow more provisions to reach Gaza on the ground.
Usually you deliver provisions by parachute when an enemy force
is surrounding your units or your allies (like the Germans did in
1942 when their forces were surrounded in Stalingrad), but here
the US is acting on both sides, for both besieger and besieged.
However, there is another aspect of Ayyad’s desperate plea which
deserves even more attention. Although there is massive hunger
and an immense medical crisis in Gaza, he is not asking for more
aid but for dignity. One should recall that the appeal to dignity is
global: in spite of poverty, hunger and violence, in spite of economic
exploitation, it is dignity that has been repeatedly evoked in the
protests that have exploded across the world in recent decades
from Chile to Turkey, from Belarus to France. I remember talking
to my friends in Istanbul who told me that their watchword, their
primary demand, the focus of all their main slogans was ‘dignity’:
Even more than the denial of political freedoms and the economic
injustices they suffered, it was the humiliation they felt at being
treated like idiots by the Erdoğan regime that they couldn’t endure.
How to understand this?
Dignity implies that there are things which matter more than
bare life – is this not also the primary message of those protesting
police violence against Blacks? Black people (and those who
support them) are not demanding mere survival, they are
demanding to be treated with dignity, as free and equal citizens,
and for this they are ready to risk a lot, including sometimes their
lives. That’s why they gather to protest even when it increases the
risk of spreading or contracting Covid-19, as it was the case a
couple of years ago. Subjectivity proper enters the space of
universality only through this negation (or, rather, neglect of
pragmatic circumstances) – and this negation also opens up every
constellation to its uncertain future.
Dignity is thus crucial when it concerns the exploited and
oppressed because it turns around the common sense vulgar-
materialist wisdom ‘you first have to eat and only then comes
morality’ (or, as Brecht put it in his Beggar’s Opera, ‘erst kommt das
Fressen und dann kommt die Moral’): the poor and starving people

20
 W HAT H YST E R IC S O N LY D R E A M A B OU T

who insist on their dignity thereby signal their rejection of attempts

to reduce them to objects of material needs – they are the true
idealists in the noble sense of the term. ‘Dignity’ is thus the popular
answer to the open cynicism of those in power, or to be more
precise, to their shamelessness. As Peter Sloterdijk pointed out
almost half a century ago, today’s formula of ideology is not ‘they
don’t know what they are doing, but they are nonetheless doing
it’, it is ‘they know what they are doing, and they are nonetheless
doing it’.
What has psychoanalysis to say to this knowing shamelessness
on the part of individuals and regimes? And has psychoanalysis
and psychotherapy itself become shameless in its denial of dignity
to the victims of atrocities? Consider Eliran Mizrahi, a 40-year-old
father of four and an Israeli military reservist, who returned from
Gaza deeply traumatized by what he had witnessed and what he
did in the war. He was struggling with post-traumatic stress
disorder back at home, and before he was due to redeploy, he took
his own life. During his deployment in Gaza, Mizrahi was tasked
with driving a D-9 bulldozer, a 62-ton armored vehicle that can
withstand bullets and explosives. Guy Zaken, Mizrahi’s friend and
co-driver of the bulldozer, said: ‘We saw very, very, very difficult
things. Things that are difficult to accept.’ In his testimony to the
Knesset Zaken said that on many occasions, soldiers had to ‘run
over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds’. This, then, is the
true cause of Mizrahi’s post-traumatic disorder: massive brutal
killings that he not only witnessed but also committed. An IDF
psychologist said that ‘one of the ways the military helps traumatized
troops resume their lives is to try to “normalize” what they went
through, partly by reminding them of the horrors committed on
October 7’.3 The aim of such ‘therapy’ is thus to normalize the
profoundly abnormal, acts of criminal brutality; to make Mizrahi’s
crimes into experiences which can be integrated into his
understanding of himself as a decent, justifiable family man and
good citizen – in short, to obliterate the last remainders of shame
and unbearable guilt in his subjectivity and make him a person
who will be able to run over hundreds of dead and alive persons in
cold blood (‘Everything squirts out,’ Zaken said) . . . The
mystification is redoubled here: not only is Mizrahi’s criminal

21
 ZERO POINT

activity ethically neutralized into a ‘traumatic experience’, but the

focus on his inner suffering also ignores the painful death of
hundreds overrun by his bulldozer. As a UN report in August 2024
pointed out, the experiences of Gazans defy traditional
categorizations of trauma-related disorders such as PTSD; ‘there is
no “post” in Gaza’s context’. I am not saying that human suffering
should not be attended to, including that of perpetrators. But when
those providing help insist upon the essential rightness and
necessity of the acts which have traumatized those who have
carried them out, suffering is not being attended to; it is being
ignored. Imagine a treatment model which aimed to help the
perpetrators of the Holocaust to ‘normalize’ what they went
through and considered atrocious acts like pushing bodies into gas
chambers as compatible with, and able to be integrated into, some
sort of ‘healthy’ self-image. Shamelessness reigns unchecked here.
And how else but through the lens of shamelessness are we to
understand the pattern in which we are repeatedly confronted
by the IDF committing the same acts it accuses Hamas of
committing?4
Where does shame enter here, where can it intervene? In his
1969-70 seminar ‘The Reverse of Psychoanalysis’, reacting to the
events of May ʼ68, Lacan made a provocative statement which
is often quoted and much decried: ‘What you aspire to as
revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.’ However, there is a
much more important point which is less attended to in Lacan’s
critique of protesting students when he says ‘all you are lacking
precisely is a bit of shame’. Lacan repeatedly varies this motif, like
saying that students ‘fear they might be carried away by buffoonery.
Let us start rather from the fact that buffoonery is already there.
Perhaps by mixing in a little shame, who knows, we may be able to
hold it back.’ And he even concludes the Seminar with: ‘what I put
forward, for the majority of you, it is just that: I manage to make
you ashamed, not too much but precisely enough.’5
Jacques-Alain Miller6 contextualizes this statement by way of
pointing out that we have to read contemporary shamelessness
from the perspective of a certain mutation in capitalism; no longer
a capitalism that relies on ‘repression of enjoyment’, as in Max
Weber’s famous analysis of permissiveness, the ‘new mode – if it

22
 W HAT H YST E R IC S O N LY D R E A M A B OU T

bears the mark of a style at all – is rather that of permissiveness,

where what can sometimes be the cause of difficulty is the
prohibition on prohibiting.’7 Lacan isn’t advocating for a minimum
of morality and/or repression that should be maintained to prevent
social disintegration – on the contrary, he draws attention to what
the Frankfurt School members were in the 1940s already referring
to as ‘repressive desublimation’. What we are getting today is a kind
of generalized perversion (openly doing what hysterics only dream
about), and as Freud knew well, nowhere is the Unconscious more
inaccessible, more repressed, than in perversion. The catch is that
desire is in itself immanently inconsistent, self-contradictory,
traversed by what Freud called ‘primordial repression’, which is why
the permissiveness of perversion ends up in a self-destructive
deadlock which gives birth to the call for a new Master. And, as the
ongoing wave of new populism aptly demonstrates, this new
Master’s shamelessness by far exceeds the shamelessness of the old
Leftist protesters.
There is an obvious reproach that imposes itself here: Is shaming
not one of the basic ideological procedures deployed by those in
power to dismiss many radical critical stances? ‘Shame on you if . . .
(you criticize Israel, you distrust democracy, you despise other
races, you recognize LGBT+ rights or its opposite, sexual
binarism)!’ I would respond that such shaming is as a rule directed
at some form of the Other (a political opponent), and the way to
counteract it is through self-reflection: in the same way that,
according to Hegel, the true evil resides in the subject who sees evil
everywhere around itself, the one who should truly be ashamed is
the one who is constantly shaming others. Not to mention the fact
that today’s hegemonic cynical stance less and less relies on shaming
others: it is self-consciously shameless, it openly admits horrors it is
committing. This is why today’s predominant ideology more and
more tries to eviscerate the last remainders of shame and dignity in
its subjects – and its desperate efforts to annihilate shame and
dignity proves that they remain a force to be reckoned with.
The next step is to analyse the deep link between dignity and
justice: dignity implies that I demand justice even when it goes against
my material interests or my survival itself. So what is justice? While it
is, of course, a category which is always rooted in a certain historical

23
 ZERO POINT

context, there are some general formal features which reach beyond
its historic specificity. Justice is a value in itself, it has nothing to do
either with revenge or with the ‘best’ outcome (from the standpoint of
the wellbeing of all concerned). Consider Clint Eastwood’s recent
film Juror #2 (2024) which takes place in Savannah, where journalist
and recovering alcoholic Justin Kemp is called for jury duty on a case
concerning Kendall Carter’s death. A year prior, Kendall had a fight
with her boyfriend James Sythe at a local bar and was later found dead
under a bridge; Sythe is charged with her murder. Hoping to attract
voters with a high-profile domestic violence conviction in her run
for district attorney, Faith Killebrew acts as prosecutor. Witnesses
confirm Sythe was drunk and disorderly on the night in question and
that he followed Kendall after she stormed off. During the proceeding,
Justin becomes more and more convinced that he himself is the true
culprit: he may have hit and killed Kendall. So he convinces the jury
to vote to convict Sythe but is not present when the verdict is given.
Sythe is sentenced to life without parole, while Killebrew also begins
to suspect that Justin is the guilty one.
After the sentencing, Killebrew sits down with Justin who
suggests that if someone else accidentally killed Kendall, that
person should not receive harsh punishment, but she argues that
with an innocent man convicted, it is no longer an accident. Justin
points out that if Killebrew were to go after another killer after
pushing so hard for Sythe’s conviction, she would lose her position
as DA and a ‘good man’ would see his life and family destroyed. He
implores her to leave the case alone, adding that Sythe had a history
of violence and, if freed, would probably commit other crimes.
When Killerbrew asks Justin ‘But what about justice?’, he answers
vaguely: ‘What is justice?’ and walks away . . . Killebrew is elected
DA, and Justin sells his car to eliminate his connection to the crime.
However, in the final scene of the movie, as Justin and his wife Ally
are playing with their newborn daughter, Killebrew knocks on their
door8 – a clear indication that she has chosen justice and will go
after Justin whatever the consequences for her career. From a
pragmatic standpoint, Justin is right: Killebrew’s decision will mean
that she loses her position, the lives of Justin – a basically good man
– and his family will be destroyed and a criminal will be set free to
potentially commit new violent act. But justice will not be done.

24
 W HAT H YST E R IC S O N LY D R E A M A B OU T

The supreme case of the link between dignity and justice is

provided by a terrifying real-life series of events which deservedly
captured the attention of the public. Here are the basic facts. Over a
period of nine years, from July 2011 to October 2020, a man from
Mazan in south-eastern France named Dominique Pelicot
repeatedly drugged his wife Gisele, raped her, and invited strangers
to rape her while she was unconscious. Gisele, who was unaware of
the abuse being perpetrated against her, was raped 92 times by 72
men while her husband filmed them. She was shown a photograph,
but did not recognize the sleeping woman or the man raping her. It
was only when shown further images that she recognized herself.
She later testified that she had asked the police officer to stop
showing her the images: ‘It was unbearable. I was inert, in my bed,
and a man was raping me. My world fell apart.’ Her world fell apart
because, until this moment, she had fully trusted her husband and
believed she had a happy marriage: ‘It is difficult for me to listen to
this. For 50 years, I lived with a man who I would’ve never imagined
could be capable of this. I trusted him completely.’9
The crazy implication of this statement is that, when Dominique
refused to accept the harm he had done, he was in some weird
sense right: the trial had ‘destroyed his life’, and if he hadn’t been
arrested, he ‘would still be happy, and she too – everything would
have continued the same way’. It is crucial to fully absorb this weird
fact and not try to interpret it away. What I feel compelled to
consider is the question of Dominique’s real intentions. What did
he want – to go on happily as he had done up until this point, with
his victim unaware of the abuse she was suffering? Or would he
always have intended to make Gisele aware, at some point, of what
was happening to her, and thus to make her world fall apart? The
second option fits the standard notion of sadism (the sadist wants
his victim to subjectivize her horrible predicament and thus to
have her world ruined, potentially to die of shame). But the first
option is much more unsettling: Dominique wanted to carve out a
radical division in Gisele’s life, to split her existence in two without
her being aware of it, so that she was at one and the same time
living the normal daily life of a happily married woman and an
awful life of brutal mistreatment, drugged and violated. It is
incredible how for long years the two domains were successfully

25
 ZERO POINT

kept apart, and I think Dominique’s goal was just this –to perpetuate
division, to estrange Gisele from herself and her own experiences.
(One cannot know if he also divided his own life – my presumption
is that he didn’t.)
One can thus risk the hypothesis that Dominique invented an
original form of perversion, beyond the standard two forms: the
masochist contract (the person to be tortured sets the precise
conditions of and limits to what the torturer should do to him,
physically or verbally), or the sadist who is constrained by no
contract but simply enjoys his victim’s pain at what is happening to
her. Dominique effectively objectivized Gisele, using her as an
instrument of his (and his friends’) pleasure, totally unaware of
how she is used. Yes, the very fact that she was not aware of what
was happening to her generated the surplus-enjoyment – but for
whom? It is crucial that in her life of abuse, of which she was not
aware, she exists for the big Other, the big Other of the digital space
in which the shots of her being raped circulated.
This crucial role played by digital space arguably provides the
source (or the context, at least) of Dominique’s new form of
perversion. Does what Dominique Pelicot chose to do not act out
something of how digital powers treat us today? When we freely
circulate on the web, we experience ourselves as fully free, doing
just what we want; however, we are effectively enslaved by the
digital programs like Google which not only control and regulate
our surfing but even make us work for them for free, the machine
collecting data about us which the company then uses or sells
further. So we are divided, not unlike Gisele: unbeknownst to us,
every click on our computer confirms our status as digital slaves.
The division imposed on Gisele (her awareness of herself and self-
image as a free and happy wife combined with her total sexual
objectivization and exploitation) definitely functions as a zero
point in sexual relations, a level difficult to imagine as happening in
real life, something that till now belonged to the level of obscene
imagination.
How to break out of the perverse oppression of women by men?
Empty platitudes about the deep entrenchment of rape culture in
our societies is not enough. Neither is the Cancel Culture paranoia
of omnipresent oppression. We should begin by realizing that

26
 W HAT H YST E R IC S O N LY D R E A M A B OU T

Dominique, the manipulating master of Gisele, is not a strong man

but a weakling unable to assert openly his power, able to be active
only when his object is reduced to a living corpse – the suffering is
not Dominique’s, but he is also a slave. We should also absolutely
not ignore or avoid the role played by digital media: their
manipulative use is not directly inscribed into their technology as
such, they can be ex-apted for emancipatory purposes (Stephen Jay
Gould defined exaptation as the process by which features acquire
functions for which they were not originally adapted or selected).
The system desperately tries to control digital media because it is
fully aware that they can be used as the tool of a massive awakening
of women (as it was done a decade or so ago in South Korea). The
latest proof of such an emancipatory use comes from an unexpected
place: China.
A movie called Her Story (director-screenwriter Shao Yihui)
exploded on Chinese screens in December 2024:
A 9-year-old girl pushes back against period shame, telling
adults at the dinner table, ‘more than half the world’s population
bleeds’. Two men fight for a woman’s heart by boasting how
many books they’ve read by Japanese feminist icon Chizuko
Ueno. A stalker following a young woman home is confronted
and chased away by a female neighbor. These scenes have
become the talk of Chinese social media
which praise the movie for
its unabashed celebration of ‘awakened’ womanhood and bold
social commentary on modern China – all delivered with laugh-
out-loud humor. But its witty critique of gender norms has also
offended some men on Chinese social media, who have accused
it of provoking ‘gender antagonism’ – a phrase often used by
state media to police online feminist discourse that authorities
deem to have crossed the line.10
Her Story deserves to be celebrated as an exemplary case of the
feminine awakening which avoids falling into the trap of the self-
consciously politically correct with its moralizing stiffness. The film
takes aim at and accurately targets both the strong presence of male
chauvinism in Chinese society and the ruling Communists’

27
 ZERO POINT

solidarity with it (not to mention other critical stabs at the state

power). As in Iran a couple of years ago, a feminist protest serves as
a focal point for voicing general social discontent. But the key
feature is that the protest takes the form of fun and irony – it is a
jocular protest staged from the sovereign stance of inner strength,
aware of its superiority over its enemies, able to discern their brutal
acts as signs of their weakness and cowardice.
How does this relate to what happened in Mazan? Isn’t it
obviously an obscene madness to react with jokes and fun to a
brutal mass rape? It’s not as simple as that. Of course one is utterly
horrified by the crimes that occurred; as I said above, it’s a nadir of
human cruelty and insensibility towards the humanity of the other.
However, in Gisele’s decision to go public with her name, we see an
extraordinary demonstration of her inner strength. Refusing to
play the role of passive victim, of anonymized object, Gisele Pelicot
embraced the shame and humiliation of allowing what had
happened to her to be known, and through that not only attained
justice but simultaneously fully asserted her dignity. Instead of
feeling ashamed and preferring to remain in anonymous privacy,
she became a symbol of dignified pride. Crazy as it may sound, I
predict that joyful humor which targets male weakness will be the
next step.
But does such playful joy not bring us dangerously close to the
playful obscenity of our new populist leaders? No, since it is easy to
distinguish between the two. Playful obscenity is the way a Master
figure enacts his fake solidarity with the common people while
renouncing none of his actual power; it signals the arrogance of
those in power who can afford to mock themselves while their
subordinates have to treat them with respect. The message of the
playful joy of the underdogs is the exact opposite: it asserts their
sovereignty even in their direst situation. Should we be really
surprised that one of the jokes from Sarajevo, when the city was
under siege and, due to Serbian bombing, the supply of gas was
often cut off, was: ‘What’s the difference between Auschwitz and
Sarajevo? In Auschwitz, they at least never run out of gas.’ Or what
about the cruel joke popular among the survivors of the Srebrenica
massacre? (To understand this joke, one has to remember that,
decades ago, when one went to a butcher to buy some beef, the

28
 W HAT H YST E R IC S O N LY D R E A M A B OU T

butcher usually asked ‘With bones or without?’, bones often being

added to make the beef soup taste better.) After the war, a refugee
returns from Germany to Srebrenica and wants to buy a piece of
land there to build a house, so he asks a friend about the price of
land, and the friend answers: ‘It depends – do you want it with or
without bones?’ This is how you deal with the trauma which cannot
yet be properly mourned and symbolized, for which there is as yet
no ‘post-’ as there is not for the people of Gaza – you turn it into a
joke. Some people may see this as disrespectful, but I do not; on the
contrary, such jokes depend upon the awareness that the memory
is still too hot to apply to it the process of mourning. More generally,
the persistence of jokes signals that there are things in our psychic
life we can never really come to terms with.
This brings us back to the beginning of this chapter: the aim of
psychoanalysis, of psychoanalytic treatment. It is not to make the
analysand aware of how he is ultimately a puppet of unconscious
desires but to restore him to his full dignity as a subject. It is not to
enable him to live a more satisfying sexual life deprived of ruptures
and inhibitions but to make him confront the ruptures that define
his subjectivity. It is not to soften the rigidity of ethical norms or to
endorse ignoring unpleasant facts to enjoy a more happy life. In
short, it is not therapy practiced to make us feel and act better.
Christian R. Gelder deserves to be quoted here in extenso when he
tries to explain why psychoanalysis seems so untimely, so out of
place in our therapy-positive culture:
it can sometimes be just as much an account of why the
therapeutic encounter is liable to fail than a robust theory of
why it works. At first glance, its key concepts – the unconscious,
transference, resistance, repetition compulsion, defense
mechanisms, screen memories – are all explanatory mechanisms
that aim to account for why people who undergo therapy find it
so difficult to change, why the therapeutic encounter is at risk of
faltering or stumbling at a particular moment, why the relation
between therapist and patient can entrench certain behaviors
rather than dislodge them. Psychoanalysis is a fundamentally
incredulous activity and seeks to disrupt even the sturdiest
narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves. [. . .] For these and

29
 ZERO POINT

other reasons, as I once heard an esteemed analyst say, there is

no reason why it has to survive – and indeed, given our current
culture’s obsession with measuring every aspect of every second
of every day, the future institutional reproduction of
psychoanalysis appears less assured than ever. Freud once said
that the point of psychoanalysis was to turn ‘neurotic misery
into ordinary unhappiness’. But what future does ordinary
unhappiness have in the happiness industry?11
Does this not bring us back to the notion of justice? Justice, which
doesn’t need any pragmatic justification since it is its own goal?
Lacan’s ethical motto, ‘do not compromise your desire’, could (and
should) be paraphrased as: do justice to your desire. When Lacan
evokes shame as the aim of psychoanalysis, he doesn’t mean that we
should be ashamed of our true desires; what he means is that we
should be ashamed of openly enacting (what we perceive as) our
desires because when we are doing this we are following fantasies
which obfuscate the core of our being.

30
 Worlds Blown Into Space

I must admit that I occasionally enjoy podcasts which explain

secrets of the best-known magic tricks (the three-shell game, the
tricks of mentalism, levitation . . .). And after reading recent news
from Russia, I came to the conclusion that these tricks also provide
a way in to understanding how Russian propaganda achieved what
appears impossible to our common sense: proclaiming that the
Russian attack on Ukraine is an act of self-defense. The standard
explanation of magic tricks is that they rely on at least two different
strategies and unite them to produce the desired effects – and
Russia is doing exactly the same.
Two recent statements by Putin and the Russian government
have raised the level of tensions around Ukraine. First, the Russian
government has approved a list of 48 foreign states and territories
accused of implementing policies which impose destructive
neoliberal ideological attitudes that contradict traditional Russian
spiritual and moral values. The list was approved in accordance with
the decree on the provision of humanitarian support to persons
‘sharing traditional Russian spiritual and moral values’, which Putin
signed on August 19 2024.1 States on this list are now officially
designated as ‘enemy states’ simply because they don’t share
‘traditional Russian spiritual and moral values’. Obviously, these
values are somehow shared by North Korea and Afghanistan –
but Russia is not cheating here: what its respect for traditional values
has in common with North Korean or Taliban ideology is the
rejection of the European Enlightenment as the ultimate evil in
history.
The conflict is thus elevated to a metaphysical-religious level –
and the coordinates of the possible escalation of the Russian attack
on Ukraine into a full nuclear war were set at the very beginning.

31
 ZERO POINT

The wager that sustained Russian aggression was clearly formulated

by Dmitry Medvedev, a former president who now serves as deputy
chairman of Russia’s Security Council, who said in early 2023 that
‘the US-led NATO military alliance would be too scared of a
“nuclear apocalypse” to directly enter the conflict in response to
Russia using tactical nuclear weapons’:
I believe that NATO will not directly intervene in the conflict
even in this situation. After all, the security of Washington,
London, Brussels is much more important for the North Atlantic
Alliance than the fate of a dying Ukraine that no one needs. [. . ]
The supply of modern weapons is just a business for Western
countries. Overseas and European demagogues are not going to
perish in a nuclear apocalypse. Therefore, they will swallow the
use of any weapon in the current conflict.2
The presupposition of this claim is full sovereignty of a state: in
Western commercialized societies, one’s own state or nation is no
longer something that is worth dying for, while a state is fully
sovereign only if its citizens are ready to die for it – recall Putin’s
words: ‘In order to claim some kind of leadership – I am not even
talking about global leadership, I mean leadership in any area – any
country, any people, any ethnic group should ensure their
sovereignty. Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state:
either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the
colonies are called.’3 It is clear that, in Putin’s view, Ukraine falls into
the latter category: it is a colony, no matter what it is called; or even
less, a pseudo-entity of a non-existent nation which doesn’t deserve
any kind of sovereignty.
Here we unexpectedly enter the domain of philosophy: Putin’s
and Medvedev’s words clearly echo the most famous passage in
Hegel’s Phenomenology, the dialectic of master and servant. If, in
the confrontation of the two self-consciousnesses engaged in the
struggle for life and death, each side is ready to go to the end in
risking its life, then there is no winner – one dies, the other survives
but without another to recognize it. The whole history of freedom
and recognition – in short, the whole of history, the whole of
human culture – can take place only with an original compromise:
in the eye to eye confrontation, one side (the future servant)

32
 WO R L D S B L OW N I N T O SPAC E

‘averts its eyes’, blinks; it is not ready to go all the way. Medvedev
presumes that the decadent hedonist West will avert its eyes –
however, what complicates the situation is that, as we know from
the Cold War, in a nuclear confrontation there is no winner. Both
sides disappear.
Beneath all the talk about a new multi-polar world, there is the
vision of a total war to extinction between the two opposites, and
when religion directly enters politics, the threat of deadly violence
is never far behind. This was made abundantly clear when, to return
to 19 August 2024, Putin declared a new nuclear doctrine. He said
that ‘a number of clarifications ... defining the conditions for the use
of nuclear weapons’ are being made to Russia’s nuclear doctrine. He
added that draft amendments to the doctrine expand ‘the category
of states and military alliances in relation to which nuclear
deterrence is carried out’. In a pointed warning to the West, Putin
announced that any attack on Russia by a non-nuclear state that
was backed by a nuclear-armed nation would be considered a ‘joint
attack’.4 Putin also said Moscow reserves the right to use nuclear
weapons in case of an attack on Belarus, as it’s part of the ‘Union
State’ with Russia — a special partnership between the neighbors
and allies. That includes cases when the enemy, using conventional
weapons, ‘creates critical danger to our sovereignty’, Putin said.
Such statements cannot but make us nostalgic for the good old
Cold War days when both sides wisely avoided any direct nuclear
threats and made it clear they would use nuclear arms only as a
reply to the opposite side’s nuclear strike – the threat of a direct
nuclear strike was unmentionable in the Cold War era. Now Russia
not only asserts the right to strike first but even expanded the
conditions of its use. Of course an actual Russian first strike remains
unlikely, but especially in the military domain words are never
only words – it regularly happens that we get caught into our own
rhetoric.
After thousands of pagers exploded in Lebanon, Iran’s delegate
to the UN said that Israel had again ‘crossed a red line’ – but today
red lines are crossed regularly, and this makes the situation even
more dangerous because each side thinks it can safely cross the red
line. The catch is that you cannot do this indefinitely: somewhere
there is a real red line, and the only way to find out which is the

33
 ZERO POINT

Rubicon is to cross it. So our response to Russia should be that it

was Russia itself which crossed the red line by issuing nuclear
threats.
Those who see the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war as a proxy war
of NATO against Russia will riposte that Russia is under attack
from NATO. This is only true in the same sense that Israel is just
acting in self-defense in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Lebanon –
the catch resides in how I define the ‘self ’ in self-defense. If I occupy
a part of a land that is not mine and proclaim it mine (like the West
Bank, or parts of Ukraine), and if, as expected, the land or the
people there resist, of course I can say that in trying to crush them
I am acting in self-defense . . .
These, then, are the two basic magic trick strategies the Russian
state propaganda relies on: accuse the opponent of what you
yourself are doing in a much more open and brutal way – in this
way, you distract the attention of the public and make it swallow
your basic magic trick, the claim that what you stole from the
opponent was originally yours. Russia is just defending itself . . . if
we accept that Crimea and Donetsk (and who knows what, from
the Baltic countries to Moldova) belong to it, and that Ukraine as a
nation doesn’t really exist but is something that emerged out of the
mind of Lenin and the Nazis. Accuse the opponent of coming
dangerously close to crossing a red line . . . after you’ve blatantly
crossed the only true red line, that of the use of nuclear weapons.
Such a combination of strategies renders a rational peace
negotiation practically impossible because the very terms of
negotiation are falsified from the outset. Apropos calls for peace in
Ukraine, Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič was right to write: ‘Peace is all too
precious to be left to peaceniks.’5
And if you add to this the third strategy of deception, that of
presenting a brutal war of conquest as a defense of your spiritual
values, you gain social power and experience your acts as the
assertion of highest spirituality. What could work better than a
brutal conquest masked as a metaphysical defense? The combination
is almost unbeatable. All our hope resides in this ‘almost’ – how to
make use of it? Not by dismissing the metaphysical dimension as a
mask of material interests but by taking it seriously and thinking it
to the end.

34
 WO R L D S B L OW N I N T O SPAC E

The lesson is thus that the ongoing conflict between Russia and
the West has deep philosophical roots, and that the same holds for
the conflict between Israel and Palestinians – with an unexpected
reversal of roles: although Israel presents itself as the only beacon
of European democracy in the Middle East, it is the Israeli Zionists
who speak like religious fundamentalists, repeatedly evoking
sacred decrees (God gave them the land), while (generally, at least)
Palestinian Muslims speak the Enlightenment language of
multicultural tolerance in a land shared by different people. The
Russian metaphysical tint reached its apogee in a recent statement
by Anton Alikhanov, the governor of the Russian exclave of
Kaliningrad: according to Alikhanov, Immanuel Kant, who spent
his entire life in the region of Kaliningrad (German Koenigsberg),
has a ‘direct connection’ to the war in Ukraine. According to
Alikhanov, it was German philosophy, whose ‘godlessness and lack
of higher values’ began with Kant, that created the ‘sociocultural
situation’ that led, among other things, to the First World War:
Today, in 2024, we’re bold enough to assert that not only did the
First World War begin with the work of Kant, but so did the
current conflict in Ukraine. Here in Kaliningrad, we dare to
propose — although we’re actually almost certain of it — that it
was precisely in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and
his Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals [. . .] that the ethical,
value-based foundations of the current conflict were established.6
In some crazy sense, Alikhanov was right when he went on to call
Kant one of the ‘spiritual creators of the modern West’, saying that
the ‘Western bloc, which was shaped by the US in its own image’, is
an ‘empire of lies’. Kant, he said, is referred to as the ‘father of almost
everything’ in the West, including freedom, the idea of the rule of
law, liberalism, rationalism, and ‘even the idea of the European
Union’.7 And if Ukraine resists Russia on behalf of these Western
values, Kant is effectively also responsible for the Ukrainian
resistance to Russia. Alikhanov’s ‘crazy’ statements are thus a useful
reminder of the high metaphysical stakes of the ongoing war
between Russia and Ukraine.
Along the same lines, patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox
Church stated there is no need to instill fear of nuclear weapons, as

35
 ZERO POINT

Christians are not afraid of the end of the world. In a supreme act
of obscenity, Kirill thanked Russian scientists for developing
‘incredible weapons’ and mentioned that too much concern about
nuclear apocalypse ‘is not good for spiritual health’: ‘We await the
Lord Jesus Christ who will come in great glory, destroy Evil, and
judge all nations.’8 One can and should, of course, add a whole list
here of other things that too much concern about is ‘not good
for spiritual health’: global warming, the prospect of Artificial
Intelligence controlling our lives, and of course, new ‘incredible
weapons’.
The standard ‘clash of cultures’ interpretation of the Russia-
Ukraine war as a conflict between Western liberalism and Russia’s
authoritarian traditional culture is deeply misleading. Putin is not
a Russian traditionalist, he is the last heir to a legacy of brutal
modernizers, after Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, Catherine the
Great, and Stalin. When, in the late 1920s, Stalin was asked to define
Bolshevism, he replied: ‘A combination of Russian dedication to a
Cause and American pragmatism.’ And he was in a sense right –
recall that back in the 1920s Henry Ford enjoyed cult status in the
Soviet Union as a great modernizer of industry, so no wonder
Stalin more than anyone else tried to brutally erase traces of
Russian tradition (which was also the aim of the violent
collectivization of farms in the late 1920s).
No wonder Stalin was a great admirer of Peter the Great, who
built a new capital of Russia on the Baltic sea (Saint Petersburg) to
establish a direct link with Western Europe – the human costs of
this project ran into the hundreds of thousands. Putin’s regime has
thus nothing to do with an authentic ancient Russian spirituality
that rejects European modernization. It uses a fantasized ‘Eurasia’
to legitimize its own project of brutal modernization and conquest.
This is why we should not dismiss Russia as a country caught in a
neo-conservative vortex resisted only by a tiny liberal minority:
those who want a Russia free of Putinism will not be able to do it
without awakening the dormant authentic Russian spirituality
which resists authoritarian state power.
The word ‘spirit’ should be used here without any irony: the
ongoing war is not just a struggle for the control of territory or for
economic power. It is also more than an effort to annihilate a

36
 WO R L D S B L OW N I N T O SPAC E

nation, although the dimension of a genocide is clearly discernible

in it – not in the literal sense of killing all members of a nation but
in the sense of depriving the survivors of their ethnic identity and
making them Russians. It is even more than an indicator of a global
geopolitical shift – it is a war of spirit against spirit, of two mutually
exclusive visions and practices of what a human being is. Maybe,
we should return here to Nietzsche who, towards the end of the
nineteenth century, presented in Ecce Homo his dark vision of the
next century:
For when Truth battles against the lies of millennia there will be
shock waves, earthquakes, the transposition of hills and valleys
such as the world has never yet imagined even in its dreams. The
concept [of] ‘politics’ then becomes entirely absorbed into the
realm of spiritual warfare. All the mighty worlds of the ancient
order of society are blown into space—for they are all based on
lies: there will be wars the like of which have never been seen on
earth before.9
Before we dismiss these lines as obscurantist brooding, we should
at least note that Alain Badiou,10 definitely not a Nietzschean, in his
booklet The Century arrives at similar conclusions. Badiou’s
metaphor for the twentieth century is the wounded body of a beast
(a term he borrows from Osip Mandelstam’s 1923 poem ‘The Age’).
The beast was surviving the nineteenth century in a relative state of
comfort, ensconced in the illusion of gradual economic and
political progress. With the twentieth century, the beast got tired of
patiently approaching the imagined goal of progress – it decided to
confront history face to face and to fulfill the promises of the
nineteenth century through acts of brutal voluntarism. The result
was, as Nietzsche predicted, a new kind of ‘spiritual warfare’: two
world ‘wars the like of which have never been seen on earth before’,
accompanied by a series of violent revolutions, all of which just
wounded the beast without giving rise to a New Man. So what will
follow this unique mixture of hope and brutal disappointment that
was the twentieth century? In The Will to Power, Nietzche extends
his speculations to the next century (ours, the twenty-first), noting
that it would see ‘the total eclipse of all values’, based on the rise of
‘barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods’:

37
 ZERO POINT

Nobody should be surprised when /…/ brotherhoods with the

aim of robbery and exploitation of the nonbelievers /…/ appear
the arena of the future.11
Here we are now, and the irony is that those who advocate a return
to traditional old values are the most brutal in their ‘robbery and
exploitation of the nonbelievers’. We will all have to be ready to risk
our lives, and the only difference between Russia and Western
Europe is that, as we have seen, Russia claims it doesn’t fear death
because it believes in a higher divine power which will redeem
Russians after their death, while we in Western Europe know
that there is no higher guarantee, that death is just death. This
basic European Enlightenment secular value – there is no life after
death – is not only a potential safeguard against nuclear annihilation,
but also a safeguard against climate change: if this earth is all we
have, we should protect it at any cost. Our hope is that Russia’s
readiness to die is a fake, part of a strategy of bluffing, but faking
can also lead to real consequences. The only God that seems
appropriate to our time is an all-encompassing indifferent God,
and Clarice Lispector concisely formulated the horror of such
a God:
What still frightened me was that even the unpunishable horror
would be generously reabsorbed by the abyss of unending time,
by the abyss of unending heights, by the deep abyss of the God:
absorbed into the heart of an indifference. So unlike human
indifference.12

38
 Heroes of the Metaverse

Has the downward spiral of our public life reached its zero point
with the phenomenon of the CostCo Guys? This duo of Andrew
‘A.J.’ Befumo Jr. and his son Eric Justice Befumo found popularity
on TikTok and YouTube in 2024 for their videos at the warehouse
store CostCo. Their first video to go viral on the platform showed
them shopping for meatballs for Eric’s mother. They subsequently
began making videos of themselves rating products therein, either
positively as a ‘boom’ or negatively as a ‘doom’.1 These videos are full
of paradoxes which defy understanding: they appear to be
spontaneous amateur recordings, but we now know that they were
carefully staged with the help of assistants; they appear to be
publicity for CostCo, but (at first, at least) made for free, with no
support from or even permission from CostCo – at one point, the
Befumos were even thrown out of a CostCo store while recording
there. As such, the CostCo Guys epitomize a widespread tendency
of free publicity – just think of the thousands of girls making and
sharing social media videos that publicize some brand of body
lotions or lipstick or nail polish… a capitalist’s dream come true,
and an unexpected outgrowth of the neo-feudalist economy. This
paradox of publicity made for free is much worse than its antithesis,
supposedly free creation which is secretly financed as publicity. It
designates the moment when publicity assumes life of its own –
and this is, perhaps, one of the definitions of the end of the world.
This tendency is grounded in the new way of life that is emerging
among the younger generations all around the world; its material
base are the new digital spaces of communication (Facebook,
Instagram, X, TikTok…) which imply short attention spans, quick
jumps from one piece of ‘content’ to another and multitasking. The
much celebrated new media first appeared as an anarchist dream

39
 ZERO POINT

come true, the overcoming of the divide between private and public,
between producers and users-consumers: we are all produsers (a
neologism coined by Yanis Varoufakis), involved in direct exchange
with no central regulation, no big Other limiting our freedom…
and we ended as serfs in a neo-feudal private corporate space.
With regard to Donald Trump, he is a liberal in the sense of
allowing corporations to operate outside state control – a stance
especially dangerous when we are dealing with global warming. We
recently learned that ‘the Environmental Data and Governance
Initiative is working to preserve scientific data and research on
public government websites amid fears that topics like climate
change and green energy will be removed from government
websites after President-elect Trump takes office’2 – a nightmarish
scenario where the broad public will be simply deprived of proper
information and thus rendered unable to make rational decisions
about proper measures in ecology… Along these same lines, on
7 January 2025 Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will get rid
of factcheckers and in this way ‘dramatically reduce the amount of
censorship’, arguing that ‘factcheckers have just been too politically
biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created’.3 This
decision might be packaged as a measure protecting free speech
and cutting down on censorship, but what it effectively amounts to
is much more regulation and manipulation by the neo-feudal
masters who de facto control digital mass media.
There were never so many billionaires in a US government as
there are in the list of candidates for office which Trump, the self-
professed partisan of working people, is proposing. In short,
Trump’s liberalism de facto amounts to much more freedom for the
new digital feudal masters (as Varoufakis would have it), and the
irony is that Trump himself, who officially opposes big corporations
and claims that they are globalists which exploit American workers,
relies on the support of these new feudal masters whose perfect
embodiment is Elon Musk. This is why one should be very careful
when categorizing Trump as a Fascist: there is no place for feudal
corporate masters in Fascism since the ruling Fascist party by
definition exerts political monopoly. What is happening now in the
US – techno-feudal masters directly occupying high government
positions – is unimaginable in Fascism.

40
 H E R O E S O F T H E M E TAV E R SE

No wonder cracks are already appearing in Trump’s political

edifice in the guise of the conflict between the digital-corporate
masters who support Trump (Musk, Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg, Peter
Thiel) and the MAGA populists who pretend to speak for the
ordinary workers. Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chairs of
Trump’s new ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, are defending
the tech industry’s reliance on foreign-born engineers as the
incoming Trump administration prepares to crack down on
immigration; Ramaswamy openly complained that Americans are
not up to snuff when it comes to competing with brainy foreigners,
and he blamed a series of 1990s TV sitcoms for what he saw as a
decline in US dynamism in science and technology, leading tech
companies to hire more qualified foreign-born and first-generation
workers over their mentally lazy American counterparts: ‘A culture
that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or
the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,’
he wrote on (where else) X.4
It is, of course, difficult to reconcile this stance with Trump’s
long history of ‘America First’ nativism and racism, calling for
‘bloody’ mass deportations, the end of birthright citizenship, and
claiming immigrants were ‘poisoning the blood of the country’. So
it is no surprise that the populist MAGA reaction was both quick to
come and quite brutal; as expected, the most vocal was Steve
Bannon, the old Trumpian ‘Leftist’ who openly declares himself a
(or the) ‘Leninist for the twenty-first century’: ‘I’m a Leninist. Lenin
[…] wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to
bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s
establishment.’5 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, as well as arguing that rescuing
banks with public money was ‘socialism for the rich’.
In a CNN interview back in June 2018, Steve Bannon declared
his political ideal to be the unity of Right and Left populism against
the old political establishment. He praised the coalition of the
Rightist Northern League and the Leftist populist Five Star
movement which ruled Italy a decade or so ago as a model for the
world to follow, and as the proof that the politics is moving beyond
Left and Right… The stake of this (politically and aesthetically)

41
 ZERO POINT

disgusting idea is, of course, to obfuscate the basic social antagonism,

which is why it is condemned to fail – although it can cause a lot of
misfortunes before its final failure.
While any pact between Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders is
excluded for obvious reasons, a key element of the Left’s strategy
should be to ruthlessly exploit divisions in the enemy camp and
fight to get Bannon followers to their side. To cut a long story short,
there is no victory of the Left without the broad alliance of all anti-
establishment forces. One should never forget that our true enemy
is the global capitalist establishment and not the new populist
Right which is merely a reaction to its impasses. If we forget this,
then the Left will simply disappear from the map, as is already
happening with the moderate social-democratic Left in much of
Europe (Germany, France…), or, as Slawomir Sierakowski put it: ‘As
left-wing parties have collapsed, the sole option remaining for
voters is conservatism or right-wing populism.’
The split in the Trumpian movement is thus personalized in two
names: Elon Musk versus Steve Bannon. Bannon demanded
‘reparations’ from Musk and other tech leaders for cutting Americans
out of jobs; for him, the visa issue is ‘central to the way they gutted
the middle class in this country’. He noted: ‘We love converts, but the
converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years to
make sure you understand the faith and you understand the nuances
of the faith and understand how you can internalize the faith.’ They
should not ‘come up and go to the pulpit in their first week here and
start lecturing people about the way things are going to be. […] If
you’re going to do that, we’re going to rip your face off.’6
Trump is in deep trouble here: his appeal entirely depends upon
the ‘impossible’ or at least unsustainable coalition between digital
feudal masters and exploited workers who feel threatened by
immigrants, the LGBT+ movement, etc. – if he chooses one side,
the MAGA movement falls apart. At the end of December 2024, in
his first clear choice, Trump took the side of Musk, but in the long
term he is condemned to make compromises – what compromises?
The only way out for him that I see is to mobilize the distinction
between ‘good’ (highly skilled and educated) immigrants and the
‘bad’ ones (criminals, rapists, poor homeless refugees) – in short, he
will have to play more and more the racist card.

42
 H E R O E S O F T H E M E TAV E R SE

This strategy may work in the short term, but the paradox is that
if it succeeds, its unintended result will rebound upon the people
that supported it: new highly-skilled immigrants will be well paid
and thus strengthen the rich strata of the US society, while ordinary
low-paid Americans will have to take the jobs hitherto reserved for
poor or illegal immigrants – anti-immigrant populists will thus be
even more dissatisfied with the system. Not to mention the fact that
immigrants are doing many (mostly illegal) jobs, from domestic
ones (housecleaning, gardening, babysitting…) to seasonal harvest
collecting, which enable the middle classes to enjoy their way of
life. If Trump goes too far in throwing out illegal immigrants, he
will soon face discontent from an unexpected source: it is totally
naive to presume poor white Americans will take over the jobs now
covered by illegal immigrants.
Now already a rage is burning among poor Americans, directed
at well paid and highly educated immigrants who employ white
Americans to take care of their home life – the Indian programmers
already achieved a mythic status (although they are not as numerous
as it may appear). More than a decade ago, a young British babysitter
employed by a (relatively) wealthy couple of Indian programmers
living in Boston was accused of causing the child’s death by her
neglect – the surprising fact was that in this case, the public
sympathy was on the side of the British nanny, and the hatred
directed at the Indian couple. (When the Indian is a nanny serving
a white couple, then she is demonized, of course…)
There is also an ideological tension immanent to each of the two
aspects of Trumpian politics: the corporate feudal masters present
themselves as radical liberals, they advocate the use of mass media free
from restrictions imposed by state (the actual result of this freedom is,
as we have already seen, the freedom of digital masters to control their
digital feudal domain), while the self-declared partisans of ordinary
people are deeply authoritarian, advocating stronger state control over
political and cultural life, banning phenomena they consider
subversive (LGBT+ pressures, Leftist protest movements…) – just
recall what legislation was passed in Florida in the last years, from
book prohibitions to direct state interventions in curriculums.
Trump advocating ordinary people’s interests is like the
eponymous Kane in Welles’ classic movie – when a rich banker

43
 ZERO POINT

accuses him of speaking for the poor mob, he answers that, yes, his
newspaper speaks for the poor ordinary people, but it does that in
order to prevent the true danger which is that the poor ordinary
people will speak for themselves.
So how will this tension resolve itself? There is no automatic
solution: the outcome depends on political struggle, not on
‘objective’ socioeconomic processes. We can in no way be sure that
the described tensions will led Trumpian politics to ruin – it is
quite possible that it will endlessly postpone its downfall through
improvised new compromises. We can only be sure of two things.
Firstly, the longer Trumpian politics will reign, the more catastrophic
the long-term situation will be. Secondly, the neo-feudal masters –
celebrated as the heroes of our time – who support Trump and
control the majority of produsers, can only be properly understood
if we connect them with another type of neo-feudal master who are
perhaps the ones who truly deserve to be known as those heroes.
If we use this term with irony, as the designation of a brutal, evil
person who condenses the worst tendencies of our age, the names
that usually pop up are well-known war criminals and mass
murderers like Yahya Sinwar, Benjamin Netanyahu, Kim Jong-Un
or Vladimir Putin. But while we are bombarded with news about
these guys, I think we should refocus our attention on horrors
which are largely ignored by our big media, like the ongoing civil
war among local warlords in Sudan. The shocking surprise is the
cruelty and indifference of the new warlords towards their own
people (or people who live in the region they control): they as a rule
block the humanitarian aid that trickles towards them, demanding
an exorbitant cut (often well over 50 per cent) to allow the aid to
pass through, and then sell this food to their own people.
This phenomenon is most clearly exemplified by events in
Sudan over the past few years, which clearly bring out a logic that is
more obfuscated in other cases. Back in 2019, civic demonstrations
overthrew a long-time dictator, Omar al-Bashir, whose reign at
least maintained some kind of peace and stability after negotiating
the secession of the predominantly Christian Southern Sudan
(which is, of course, now caught in its own civil war). Then a
military coup brutally abolished democracy, and, as expected, what
followed was a split between the plotters. A brutal war exploded

44
 H E R O E S O F T H E M E TAV E R SE

between two Muslim warlords: General al-Burhan, leader of the

Sudanese Armed Forces who is still the nominal head of state, and
the richest and most powerful person in Sudan, Mohamed Hamdan
Dagalo (generally referred to as Hemedti, ‘little Mohamed’),7
the commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) based in the
Darfur region. The atrocities of the Khartoum massacre on 3 June
2019 in which a hundred protestors were killed, hundreds
more wounded, thousands of women raped and homes pillaged,
were carried out in large part by the RSF under Hemedti’s leadership.
A new cycle of violence began on 15 April 2023 when Hemedti’s
RSF launched various attacks against Sudanese Army bases across
the country, including in Khartoum.8 Later, fighting broke out
between the Rapid Support Forces and the Army, as clashes were
reported at the Presidential Palace and at the residence of General
al-Burhan.
There is a racial background to this conflict: RSF warriors are
mostly black Muslims, while the Sudanese Armed Forces are mostly
white Arabs. Although both sides express a vague commitment to
democracy, no one takes this seriously – the stance on both sides is
‘first we have to win the war and then we’ll see….’ One can
understand this stance: a benevolent dictatorship like Kagame’s in
Ruanda is arguably the best one can realistically hope for.
Hemedti’s RSF is receiving help from foreign countries: Russia’s
Wagner Group, Libya’s LNA commander Khalifa Haftar, and the
United Arab Emirates had reportedly helped the RSF with military
supplies, helicopters, and weapons, so that the RSF has better arms
than the SAF which is now looking for help elsewhere (mostly
China). The RSF’s ascendancy is, predictably, grounded in economic
links: Hemedti controls a region with abundant gold reserves, and
he is selling gold to UAE for (not food but mostly) weapons.
The sad truth is that, for Third World countries, natural resources
are more often than not a source of violence and new poverty. The
curse of the Democratic Republic of Congo is its minerals,
diamonds and gold: if Congo were to be magically deprived of its
resources, it would have been a poorer but much happier place to
live. Congo also provides an exemplary case of how the developed
West participates in creating the circumstances for the flow of
refugees. Beneath the facade of the supposed ‘primitive ethnic

45
 ZERO POINT

passions’ exploding yet again in the African ‘heart of darkness’, it is

easy to discern the contours of global capitalism.
After the fall of Mobutu, Congo no longer exists as a united
operating state. Its eastern part especially is a patchwork of
territories ruled by local warlords controlling their terrain by
means of an army which as a rule includes drugged children. Each
warlord has business links to a foreign company or corporation
exploiting the (mostly) mining wealth in the region. This
arrangement suits both partners: the corporation gets the mining
rights without paying state taxes, the warlord gets money… The
irony is that many of these minerals are used in high-tech products
like laptops and cell phones – in short: forget about the savage
customs of the local population, just take away from the equation
the foreign high tech companies and the whole edifice of ethnic
warfare fueled by old passions falls apart.
Not only Sudan, but also the de facto dismemberment – or,
rather, ‘Congoization’ – of Libya after the French-British
intervention (the country is now composed of territories ruled by
local armed gangs who sell oil directly to their customers) indicates
that Congo is no longer an exception: one of the strategies of today’s
capitalism, desperate to secure a steady supply of cheap raw
materials unencumbered by a strong state power, is to finance,
encourage and sustain the dismemberment of the state damned
with possessing rich minerals or oil.
The tragic conclusion that imposes itself is that there are no
innocents here – there is no side on which you can stand alongside
only angels. In Sudan, although the RSF seems worse, both sides are
playing the same brutal game. And this game absolutely cannot be
reduced to the racist argument that ‘primitive’ Africans are not
ready for democracy: the true master of the game is the continuing
economic colonization of Africa not just by the West but also by
China, Russia, and the rich Arab countries. Should we then be
surprised that central Africa is more and more dominated by the
Russian military and Muslim fundamentalists?
When Yanis Varoufakis writes about the passage of capitalism to
neofeudalism,9 his examples are digital tech corporations which
hold a de facto monopoly over their domain (Amazon for books, X
for message exchanges, Microsoft for digital software, etc.). How

46
 H E R O E S O F T H E M E TAV E R SE

did this state of affairs come to be? When, due to the crucial role of
the ‘general intellect’ (social knowledge and cooperation) in the
creation of wealth, forms of wealth are more and more out of all
proportion to the direct labor time spent on their production, the
result is not, as Marx expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism,
but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the
exploitation of labor into rent appropriated by the privatization of
the ‘general intellect’ and other commons.
Let us take the case of Bill Gates: how did he become one of the
richest men in the world? Because Microsoft imposed itself as an
almost universal standard, (almost) monopolizing the field, a kind
of direct embodiment of the ‘general intellect’. Things are similar
with Jeff Bezos and Amazon, with Apple, Facebook and so on and
so forth. In all these cases, the commons themselves – the platforms,
the spaces of our social exchange and interaction – are privatized,
which puts us, their users, into the position of serfs paying a rent to
the owner of a common as our feudal master. We recently learned
that 2 per cent of Musk’s wealth could solve world hunger10 – not
just a scathing indictment of basically everything, but a clear
indication of corporate neo-feudalism. With regard to Facebook,

Mark Zuckerberg ‘has unilateral control over 3 billion people’

due to his unassailable position at the top of Facebook, the
whistleblower Frances Haugen told British MPs as she called for
urgent external regulation to rein in the tech company’s
management and reduce the harm being done to society.11

The big achievement of modernity, the public space, is thus

disappearing. Days after the Haugen revelations, Mark Zuckerberg
announced that his company was changing its name from
‘Facebook’ to ‘Meta’, and outlined his vision of the ‘metaverse’ in a
speech that is a true neo-feudal manifesto:
Zuckerberg wants the metaverse to ultimately encompass the
rest of our reality – connecting bits of real space here to real
space there, while totally subsuming what we think of as the real
world. In the virtual and augmented future Facebook has
planned for us, it’s not that Zuckerberg’s simulations will rise to
the level of reality, it’s that our behaviors and interactions will

47
 ZERO POINT

become so standardized and mechanical that it won’t even

matter. Instead of making human facial expressions, our avatars
can make iconic thumbs-up gestures. Instead of sharing air and
space together, we can collaborate on a digital document. We
learn to downgrade our experience of being together with
another human being to seeing their projection overlaid into
the room like an augmented reality Pokemon figure.12
The Metaverse will act as a virtual space beyond (meta) our
fractured and hurtful reality, in which we will smoothly interact
through our avatars, with elements of augmented reality (reality
overlaid with digital signs). It will thus be nothing less than
metaphysics actualized: a metaphysical space fully subsuming
reality which we will be allowed to enter in fragments only insofar
as it will be overlaid by digital guidelines manipulating our
perception and intervention. And the catch is that we will get a
commons which is privately owned, with a private feudal lord
overseeing and regulating our interaction.
However, as we have already seen, this is just one half of the
story: in countries like Sudan and Congo we get a much more
primitive feudalism of warlords who control their territory, like
they did in early medieval times. This is more and more our reality
today: a high-tech feudalism combined with a primitive feudalism.
This is why Hemedti is, even more than Elon Musk or Benjamin
Netanyahu, a true hero of our time. There could be no sadder
indictment of the world in which we are living.

48
 Death Cramps

We find ourselves in the midst of a new trade war between the USA
and China, with the EU slavishly obeying American instructions
even when it is clear that they run contrary to Europe’s own economic
interests. The general idea is that Chinese exports should be limited
because of unfair competition (say, their electric cars are state
subsidized) or as a protest against political oppression and violation
of human rights (Uyghurs, Tibetans, pressure on Taiwan…), and the
main measure is either the limitation of specific imports or very high
import tariffs which might be as much as 100%.
From the Chinese perspective, such limitations evoke very
traumatic memories: in the early 1800s China prohibited the
import of opium from India (which was under British rule at the
time), and all the big Western powers (plus Japan) attacked them
claiming that a country which limits free trade excludes itself from
civilized society. Furthermore, such a place needs to be brought
back into civilization, even if this requires military intervention.
The result was the incredible social and economic devastation of
China which, in a couple of decades, lost more than half of its
production. And today, the developed West is imposing its own
tariffs on China, a desperate measure of backward countries to
protect their own obsolete industries. Imports from China were
fine as long as Chinese factories were just assembling parts which
were engineered in the developed West (recall Foxconn doing this
for Apple). However, when Chinese industry becomes inventive
and creative, often surpassing its Western counterparts, the West
rediscovered what it despised most in the past.
Even more important than this is the threat to US dollar as the
universal medium of financial transactions. Yanis Varoufakis
described this process more than a decade ago. We are approaching

49
 ZERO POINT

the end of an era of global economic systems, and Trump’s

otherwise completely misguided vision is nonetheless based on a
correct insight: that the existing world system no longer works. An
economic cycle is coming to an end, a cycle which began in the
early 1970s, the time when what Varoufakis calls the ‘Global
Minotaur’ was born, the monstrous engine that was running the
world economy from the early 1980s to 2008. The late 1960s and
the early 1970s were not just the times of oil crisis and stagflation;
Nixon’s decision to abandon the gold standard for the US dollar
was the sign of a much more radical shift in the basic functioning
of the capitalist system. By the end of the 1960s, the USA economy
could no longer continue the recycling of its surpluses to Europe
and Asia; its surpluses had turned into deficits. In 1971, the US
government responded to this decline with an audacious strategic
move: instead of tackling the nation’s burgeoning deficits, it decided
to do the opposite, to boost deficits. And who would pay for them?
The rest of the world! How? By means of a permanent transfer of
capital that rushed ceaselessly across the two great oceans to finance
America’s deficits. These deficits thus started to operate
like a giant vacuum cleaner, absorbing other people’s surplus
goods and capital. While that ‘arrangement’ was the embodiment
of the grossest imbalance imaginable at a planetary scale /…/,
nonetheless, it did give rise to something resembling global
balance; an international system of rapidly accelerating
asymmetrical financial and trade flows capable of putting on a
semblance of stability and steady growth. /…/ Powered by these
deficits, the world’s leading surplus economies (e.g. Germany,
Japan and, later, China) kept churning out the goods while
America absorbed them. Almost 70% of the profits made
globally by these countries were then transferred back to the
United States, in the form of capital flows to Wall Street. And
what did Wall Street do with it? It turned these capital inflows
into direct investments, shares, new financial instruments, new
and old forms of loans etc.1
This increasingly negative trade balance demonstrates that the US
is the non-productive predator: in the last decades, it has had to
absorb 1 billion dollars daily from other nations and is, as such, the

50
 D E AT H C R A M P S

universal Keynesian consumer that keeps the world economy

running (so much for the anti-Keynesian economic ideology that
seems to predominate today!). This influx, which is effectively like
the tithe paid to Rome in Antiquity (or the gifts sacrificed to the
Minotaur by ancient Greeks), relies on a complex economic
mechanism: the US is trusted as the safe and stable center, so that all
others, from the Hyphenate Arab countries to Western Europe and
Japan, and now even China, invest their surplus profits in the US.
Since this trust is primarily ideological and military, not economic,
the problem for the US is how to justify its imperial role – it requires
a permanent state of war. The invention of the ‘war on terror’
providing the ideal role as the universal protector of all other
‘normal’ (as in not ‘rogue’) states.
The entire world thus tends to function as a universal Sparta
with its three classes, now re-emerging as the First, Second, and
Third Worlds: (1) the US as the military-political-ideological
power; (2) Europe and parts of Asia and Latin America as the
industrial-manufacturing region (crucial here are Germany and
Japan, the world’s leading exporters, plus, of course, China); (3) the
undeveloped rest, today’s helots, those ‘left behind.’ In other words,
global capitalism brought about a new general trend to oligarchy,
masked as the celebration of the ‘diversity of cultures’ while equality
and universalism continue to disappear as actual political
principles.
From the global financial crash in 2008 to now, we see this
neo-Spartan world system breaking down. Throughout the Obama
years, Paul Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, gave
another breath of life to this system by ruthlessly exploiting the fact
that the US dollar is the global currency. He financed imports by
printing huge amounts of money. Trump decided to approach the
problem in a different way by simply ignoring the delicate balance
of the global system. He focused instead on the ‘unjust’ aspects of
the system for the US: imports reducing domestic jobs etc. But
what he decries as ‘injustice’ is part of a system which profited the
US who were effectively ‘robbing’ the world by importing stuff and
paying for it through debt build-up and printing money. And the
same exploitative game will doubtless continue. Trump not only
lowered the taxes for the rich, he also silently endorsed many

51
 ZERO POINT

Democratic demands to alleviate the situation of the poor building

up huge deficits in the process. Trump will probably repeat the old
Roland Reagan response ‘Our deficit is big enough to take care of
itself!’
One should also bear in mind the change in the economic
performance of new digital media. As with freely produced
publicity, I do not pay directly for participating in these new media
rather I am exploited by using them freely – again, we are produsers.
Money functions here in a totally new way – the point is no longer
to possess money, state banks freely print it and give it away for
nonproductive purposes, so one can be ‘wealthy’ even if one is
deeply indebted.
We live in a weird new world in which lack and excess, new
poverty and excess of money, are the two sides of the same coin
since money (cash, especially) no longer really matters. As one
other than Steve Bannon put it in one of his podcasts, today ‘money
is for jerks.’ We are afloat in virtual money, (many) people quite
literally don’t know what to do with money), but this affluence is
like a house of cards which can collapse at any moment (as it almost
did in 2008 financial meltdown). Hegel was the first to describe this
paradox when he pointed out that in a capitalist society, there is not
enough money because there is too much of it, and this imbalance
is structural, not just rebalancing it (taking from the rich and give
to the poor).
The notion of a ‘trillion-dollar coin’ deserves special attention
here – the idea is that the US government should mint a physical
coin out of platinum with a face value of $1 trillion, which could
then be used to reduce the national debt. This strategy was first
proposed in 2011 as a potential alternative to raising the debt
ceiling, but although there were several high-profile proponents
of the idea, it was rejected in 2013.2 Do we not encounter here
symbolic efficiency at its purest: a little bit of real (a small coin)
doing nothing, just lying locked in a state bank, would deeply affect
the entire financial – and therewith also economic – situation of a
country?
In this process a commodity’s market value gets totally separated
from its intrinsic use value – or, as they put it in The Ferengi Rules
of Acquisition from Star Trek: ‘Profit is its own reward,’ something

52
 D E AT H C R A M P S

clearly discernible in some Asian countries in which artisans who

produce expensive brands objects are illegally selling some of their
products for a much lower price: is such a product still a fake when
it is exactly the same as the original? When my friend Alex Taek-
Gwang Lee elbowed his way through the crowd on a Chinatown
street market in Kuala Lumpur, a vendor clasped his sleeve and
insisted: ‘This is a fake, but the same as the original one.’3
Such economic politics will create a situation which is, of course,
untenable for China: not only remains by far the biggest producer
in the world (over 30% of world production takes place in China),
but is now also emerging as a new gigantic creative technological
power, so the ongoing financial madness puts it into a weird
position of being controlled by purely financial means. This is
why
‘Chinese cloud capital (Apps, Big Tech etc.) is working with
Chinese finance to create something Wall Street will never allow
to happen in the US/West: a seamless cloud finance merging
(Chinese) Big Tech and Big Finance. The result of this Chinese
advantage is that China is now building the international digital
payment system that can, in principle, dethrone the US dollar
from its role as monopolist of international transactions. Beijing
does not want to do this yet. Why? For a number of reasons:
First, its 3 trillion dollars’ worth of savings (why undermine the
currency in which you hold your loot?) Secondly, China is not
ready to turn the BRICS into what the original Bretton Woods
system was (with the yuan playing the role of the dollar). Thirdly,
Xi is still holding on to the possibility of a decent deal with
Trump. So, they are not planning, yet, for the yuan to replace the
dollar in any shape or form. But they are developing the capacity
to do it at a time of their choosing.’4
China also possesses means to resist the US financial control,
principally a strong state which limits the effects of market
mechanisms. This is why the attempt of China to break out of the
US$ domain and create a new universal currency, even if it will be
virtual (a version of bitcoin), is to be unconditionally supported,
and from the standpoint of rational economic interests not only
Europe but also the US Left should rejoin it: the Minotaur system is

53
 ZERO POINT

what sustained the growing gap between the rich and the poor in
the US themselves. Trump quite correctly sensed the danger of
creating a new world currency and reacted appropriately – in pure
panic: ‘Trump threatens 100% tariff on BRICS countries if they
pursue creating new currency.’5
However, one should nonetheless not idealize China – to quote
Zorana Baković, an outstanding Slovene journalist specialized in
China, for quite some time the Chinese leader was not as relaxed
and loquacious as he was during the meeting with the presidents
on the greatest American companies”:
The only serious interlocutor of the Communist Party of China
is for a long time the capital. And the only argument the Chinese
party and state leader Xi Jinping is ready to comply with and
then maybe even to change a little bit some of the segments of
his politics is something that relates to the question if the
Western investments with continue to participate in the market
idyll on the Chinese ground or will they find a better domain for
their profitable enrichment.6
When, on 16 June 2023, Xi Jinping met Bill Gates in Beijing, he
called Gates ‘an old friend’ and said he hoped they could cooperate
in a way that would benefit both China and the United States.7 A
direct axis between Chinese state power and the American new
feudal masters – big corporations – is clearly taking shape; so where
do the Third World states stand in this game? The way China acts
in Africa and South Asia is ultimately just another form of economic
neocolonialism combined with clear problematic political choices.
In Myanmar, China supports the brutal military regime and even
enabled its survival after large public protests. In Zambia, Chinese
companies bought copper mine and the level of exploitation was
such that local people attacked the building that housed Chinese
managers, burning the house and killing many of them. With
regard to the Ukrainian war, China pretends to remain neutral
while de facto supporting Russia. These features are just moments
of a new global project – which one?
Let me begin with a moment which is by no means marginal:
the struggle for women’s rights. The trap to be avoided here is to
treat the issue of women’s (and gay and trans…) rights as something

54
 D E AT H C R A M P S

independent from the Third World resistance to imperialism, so

that in a situation where we have to choose, we (even if reluctantly)
take the side of anti-Western resistance. After the fall of the Assad
regime in Syria, Varoufakis wrote that ‘we had a duty to oppose,
with equal fervor, both US imperialism and the jihadists that US
imperialism strengthened through its brutality.’ Imperialists
could not see that a US imperialist invasion only strengthened
the jihadists who wanted to place the women of Afghanistan
under gender apartheid. For them, if you did not support Assad
you must have been a supporter of the jihadists who opposed
Assad, and their US-Israeli cheerleaders. Same logic as that of
US imperialism’s cheerleaders: ‘If you are not with us you are
against us’. My anti-imperialist detractors could not see that the
Assad regime, because of its tyrannical ways, only strengthened
the jihadists who overthrew Assad.
The same holds for anti-imperialists who
who think it a good idea to support tyrannical figures like Assad
(or, before him, Saddam) because he is the enemy of our
imperialist enemy: To fight imperialism and win in the long run,
we must win the hearts and minds of people. And we cannot do
this by supporting tyrants, whom the people loathe, just because
they are enemies of our enemies. In short, anti-imperialism will
only succeed if anti-imperialists maintain some minimum
ethical standards. That’s our greatest weapon, not AK47s or
anti-aircraft missiles. […] there is nothing confusing about
condemning both Assad’s regime and the US-backed jihadists
that overthrew him. Not only is there no contradiction but it is
the only right and effective way to be anti-imperialist. Not only
is it not neutrality but it is the only right and effective way to
take the side of the many, not the few.8
While I basically agree with this stance, I think it should be
supplemented by two points. First, we should apply it consequently
to all sides – to China also. Second, when the US withdrew from
Afghanistan, Varoufakis “expressed relief that United States
imperialism was defeated and, simultaneously, horror at what the
women of Afghanistan were about to suffer in the hands of the

55
 ZERO POINT

jihadist Taliban.” I agree, but I think the relationship between the two
options (defeat of the US imperialism, new horrors for women) is
more intricate: it’s not that we get a good result which was,
unfortunately, accompanied by a bad result; the bad result (new
horrors for women) was the central item in the ideology which
mobilized the people to bring about the good result.
So we have to make a choice: which of the two aspects is more
important? The way Varoufakis formulates the situation, he
implicitly privileges Taliban victory and reduces women’s plight to
its unfortunate secondary effect. I doubt I would make this choice
because I think the US occupation of Afghanistan left the space
open for secular opposition. In the case of Russian aggression on
Ukraine, my choice is Ukraine: yes, Ukraine is making many
mistakes, but its struggle is fundamentally just, so any balancing act
is deeply problematic from ethical and political standpoint.
The struggle against women’s education is thus a new form of
what Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, called
‘reactionary (feudal) socialism,’ the rejection of the capitalist
modernity on behalf of traditional forms of communal life. From
the perspective of a traditional communal life, women’s education
is a key moment of the devastating effect of Western modernization;
it ‘liberates’ women from family ties and trains them for becoming
a part of the Third World cheap labor force. The extreme case is
here Boko Haram for whom the liberation of women appears as the
most visible feature of the destructive cultural impact of capitalist
modernization, so that Boko Haram (whose name can be roughly
and descriptively translated as ‘Western education is forbidden’,
specifically the education of women) can perceive and portray
itself as an agent fighting the destructive impact of modernization,
by way of imposing a hierarchic regulation of the relationship
between the sexes. The enigma is thus: why do Muslims, who have
undoubtedly been exposed to exploitation, domination, and other
destructive and humiliating aspects of colonialism, target in their
response what is (for us, at least) the best part of the Western legacy:
our egalitarianism and personal freedoms, inclusive of a healthy
dose of irony and a mocking of all authorities?
At the end of October 2024, the Taliban have implemented a
bizarre new edict that will further curb the voices of women who

56
 D E AT H C R A M P S

are already prohibited from speaking in public. ‘Even when an

adult female prays and another female passes by, she must not pray
loudly enough for them to hear . . . How could they be allowed to
sing if they aren’t even permitted to hear [each other’s] voices while
praying, let alone for anything else,’ Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, the
Taliban minister for the propagation of virtue and the prevention
of vice, declared. After banning women’s voices from public, the
Taliban’s ministry of vice and virtue thus banned women from
speaking to each other: a woman’s voice is considered awrah,
meaning that which must be covered, and shouldn’t be heard in
public, even by other women, the minister said.9
There are similar tendencies all around the world, not just in
Uganda and Indonesia but even in the US themselves – sexual
difference is more and more asserting itself as a crucial political
factor. The well-ordered hierarchic relationship between men and
women is considered the most basic constituent of the entire social
order. This is why the protests that exploded in Iran after the death
of Mahsa Amini and mobilized the entire population against the
oppressive regime were a single most important sign of authentic
feminism. China typically abstained of any critique of the Iranian
regime at that crucial moment of Iranian history.
This, of course, does not mean that we in the West should
criticize countries like Iran from a safe liberal-democratic position.
While we should fight against the oppression of women in the
Third World countries, we should include ourselves into this
critique. Without dismissing the threat of sexual attacks from
immigrants, one should nonetheless mention the fact that ‘home is
the most dangerous place for women, says global femicide report’10
– so let’s begin at home before we let ourselves go and engage in
fantasies of the immigrants who meander on our streets searching
for women to rape.
The most dangerous approach today is the pragmatic-realist one
advocated, among others, by Konstantin Kisin. Kisin’s debate with
Yanis Varoufakis is a perfect case of this stance11: while he makes
some pertinent observation here and there (like reminding us of
the extent of Black slaves in Arab countries were at least as
numerous as those kidnapped by White and brought to the
Americas), his basic line is simple: yes, no society is perfect, there

57
 ZERO POINT

are many horrors committed in the West; however, compared to

other civilizations, Western values of freedom, democracy and
human rights are nonetheless by far the best we have, and we
should fight for them whenever they are under threat. Even when
we criticize the West, we should bear in mind that we are doing it
on behalf of the Western values themselves … Again, there is a
moment of truth in this argument – the problem resides elsewhere.
Our world is a totality in which the ‘free’ West can only reproduce
itself not only through ruthlessly exploiting the Third World
countries’ natural resources but by keeping them in a ‘barbaric’
stage of brutal violence, as is clearly demonstrated by the
Democratic Republic of Congo, a failed state which remains failed
because in this way in it open to neocolonial exploitation by the
West. Congo’s humiliation is thus double: it is brutally exploited
and presented as primitive by those who keep it such.
The big question is: are Western values strong enough to be
effectively universalized, or do these values presuppose the
exploitation and subordination of those – outside and inside
the West – who remain outside their scope? In other words, is
the violation of human rights inscribed into their very notion
and not just an empirical case of their false actualization? To what
extent can we criticize Western countries on behalf of the Western
ideology itself? Is it not necessary to apply here Hegel’s insight that,
whenever a reality does not fit its ideal notion, there must be
something wrong in this notion itself? The danger is here not just
to stick to Western values as they are but to abandon them too
quickly.
Our global situation should be read as a hologram: there is no
longer one notion of progress dominating (even the economic
development is losing this role), we live in an era of the superposition
of different futures, of different universalities (universal visions of
progress). So the main options today are: remnants of the Fukuyama
dream, direct religious fundamentalism, and especially what I
cannot but call a moderately-authoritarian soft Fascism: market
capitalism combined with a strong state mobilizing nationalist
ideology to maintain social cohesion – think of Modi’s India and,
so it seems, of China. Xi Jinping recently lauded Chinese civilization
for its long and continuous history that stretches back to antiquity,

58
 D E AT H C R A M P S

saying that it has shaped the great Chinese nation; he emphasized

that it is imperative to comprehensively improve the protection
and utilization of cultural relics and better preserve and carry
forward cultural heritage.12 Xi is here following Wang Huning, the
chief ideologist of the Chinese Communist Party, who designated
himself as a neo-conservative – what does this mean? Wang sees
his task in imposing a new common ethical substance, and we
should not dismiss this as an excuse to impose the full control of
the Communist Party over social life; it is clearly an attempt of
conservative modernization (one of the appropriate definitions
of Fascism).
In Nazi Germany, ‘the money and banking mechanism was
compelled to relinquish the position it had occupied as the nerve
center of the traditional capitalist economy. The money and capital
market characteristic of that economy had all but disappeared long
before the actual outbreak of hostilities, and credit institutions had
been shorn of much of their power.’13 A prominent Nazi banker
wrote in 1938: ‘The banks can hardly decide on their own any
longer which services to render to the entire economy. Their
opportunities for service depend on the ever changing requests
which are made of them depending upon the general situation in
the economy.’14 Does all this not resemble how banks function in
China today?
This parallel, of course, doesn’t imply that today China is directly
a Fascist country – what it implies is that numerous debates about
“is China after Den’s reforms still a Communist country, is it still
based of Marxism?” are wrong debates. The true question is not “is
China still a country whose ideology is grounded in Marxist
principles?”, it is the question: what does the capitalist turn of China
mean for the Communist and Marxist tradition? Does the Chinese
path after Deng not compel us to rethink fundamentally the classic
notions of Marxism and Communist revolution? After Deng,
Marxism itself is no longer the Marxism generations knew and
fought for.
These and other similar facts about China (inclusive of the
tightening censorship in intellectual and artistic life) experiences
should make us wary of too much trust in China as the main anti-
imperialist power today. What we get today is the struggle between

59
 ZERO POINT

factions of global capital, and our duty is not to take sides in this
struggle but to ruthlessly exploit and manipulate one against the
other. So we should support the US in giving military help to
Ukraine, and we should support China in trying to break the US$
universal status – there is no contradiction here, the ‘contradiction’
is in the thing itself.

60
Part 2. When is the Right Time
to Speak

61
62
 Notes on Assemblage

On 17 October 2023, Slavoj Žižek spoke at the opening ceremony

of the 75th Frankfurt Book Fair. His speech, provisionally entitled
‘Prohibition to Analyse the Situation’, had been written in the
previous days after the director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Juergen
Boos, contacted him to ask that his speech mention the war in
Israel.
This request came after a press conference in which Boos
denounced the 7 October attacks by Hamas as ‘barbaric’ and
pledged ‘complete solidarity with the side of Israel’. In response,
several organizations from predominantly Muslim countries had
withdrawn from participation in the Fair. Additionally, on 13
October, Litprom announced the cancellation of the award
ceremony for the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, which had been due to take
place at the Frankfurt Book Fair; the prize had been won by
Palestinian author Adania Shibli for her novel Minor Detail (which
tells the true story of the 1949 rape and murder of a Palestiniani
Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers). An open letter with over 1,000
signatories including Annie Ernaux and Olga Tokarczuk was
subsequently published denouncing the postponement.
Žižek’s 22-minute speech (the full text of which can be
found in the Appendix), was interrupted by Uwe Becker,
Antisemitismusbeauftragter (commissioner responsible for
combating antisemitism in Hesse, the state in which Frankfurt is
located), more than once. Becker voiced accusations that Zizek was
relativizing Hamas’s crimes and left the hall before returning
accompanied by other local politicians; Zizek recounts that he later
learned that Becker was also accompanied by police officers. Boos

63
 ZERO POINT

took the stage to make an unscheduled address after Zizek’s speech,

concluding:
And it is important to me to understand that we all agree on
condemning inhumanity, in condemning terror. And I think
you are all with me on that. And I am glad that we can express it
this way here. I am also glad about somebody interrupting a
speech. This must be possible.
I am glad that we listened to the speech to the very end, even
if we may not like it. Even if we even condemn it, it is important
that we listen to each other.
The problem with this statement is that Žižek’s speech was not
interrupted by ‘somebody’ but by a high political functionary – to
celebrate this interruption as a moment of democracy evokes the
ghosts of the East Germany, the ‘German Democratic Republic’. In an
interview Žižek noted that he had suffered a similar interruption by a
state functionary in only one previous context: Communist Yugoslavia.
The text of this piece is assembled from essays written by Žižek
over the following few months. The editor has chosen to present
this material in (as much as possible) the order in which it was
written, in order to resist the imposition of a clarity only enabled by
hindsight and to show what it is like attempting to think your way
through events – tragic, senseless, enraging – as they outpace you.
We wanted to remain faithful to the experience of disorientation
and despair, which means to do something that is impossible but
necessary: ‘contain two pains at once’, in Tamer Nafar’s poignant
formulation, and recognise events in Gaza and on the West Bank
as, in addition to senseless and horrific, authentically tragic.

21 October 2023

My speech at the opening ceremony of the Frankfurt book fair

triggered an avalanche of attacks on me – why? I first wrote a totally
different speech, but a day or two after the Hamas attack I was
contacted by Juergen Boos, the director of the Frankfurt book fair,
who asked to mention in my talk also the war. I was probably
expected to just join the chorus of all those uttering unconditional

64
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

support for what the State of Israel is doing. The new speech was
sent in advance to Slovene organizers and to Frankfurt (Boos
included), and it was suggested to me to change some formulations
(which I did) . . . in short, there was no surprise in my speech: those
concerned were acquainted with it.
So why the attacks on me? It took me some time to get it: not
because I was too extreme but precisely because I was very balanced
and moderate – the fear was that such an approach might seduce
some who oscillate in their full support of Israel to see also the
Palestinian suffering. It is easy to condemn someone who chants
‘Death to Israel’ – much easier than someone who unconditionally
condemns the Hamas attack AND draws attention to its
background.1 From the opposite side, I got many messages from
West Bank Palestinians who are angry at me for not explicitly
stating that, with regard to what is now happening to Palestinians,
they should not just display their victimhood – don’t those in the
West Bank also have the right to rage?2 Here is a typical German
media reaction to my speech:
The popular Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj
Žižek caused a scandal during the opening ceremony. Žižek
condemned the terrorist attack by the Palestinian Islamist
movement HAMAS on Israel and emphasized the need to
‘listen to the Palestinians and consider their past.3
The madness of these lines speaks for itself: the scandal was that I
said we should also listen to Palestinians! The reproach was that, by
saying this, I was politicizing the book fair, a neutral apolitical event
. . . really? Five speakers who intervened before me all proclaimed
unconditional full solidarity with Israel – so this imposed full
solidarity with Israel was apolitical, and I politicized the event by
reacting to its brutal politicization by the organizers? To impose
one’s own political stance as apolitical is the most brutal ideological
operation one can imagine because it disqualifies in advance any
critique. Furthermore, the interventions of five speakers before me
amounted to an unconditional support of the present Israeli
government against the strong Israeli opposition to its politics.
Yes, there was a scandal, but was it really me who caused it? Was
the true scandal not the way my speech was brutally interrupted

65
 ZERO POINT

two times, the second time even by the intruder approaching me

on the stage, all this for doing what? For just stating the obvious,
what we can read every day in our media: that there is no solution
to the Middle East crisis without resolving the limbo status of the
Palestinians.
To get an idea of the despair of ordinary West Bank Palestinians,
suffice it to remember the wave of suicidal individual attacks on the
streets (mostly) of Jerusalem a decade or so ago: an ordinary
Palestinian approached a Jew, pulled out a knife and stabbed
(usually) him, knowing well that s/he will be instantly killed by
other people around her. While I condemn these acts, I have to note
that there was no message in them, no shouting of ‘Free Palestine!’;
there was no large organization behind them (even Israeli
authorities didn’t claim this), no large political project, just pure
despair. I was at that time in Jerusalem and my Jewish friends
warned me about this danger, advising me that, if I see it coming,
I should shout loudly ‘I am not a Jew!’ – and I remember clearly that
I was deeply ashamed of behaving like this, knowing well that I
wasn’t sure what I would really do in such a situation . . .

25 October 2023

The main candidate for the stupidity of the year is in my view the
title of a recent text in Die Zeit magazine: ‘The evil of Hamas has no
context.’4 What this means became clear in a claim I heard all the
time in Frankfurt: ‘There are no two sides here. There is only one
side.’ Ok, but we can assert this only if we look at all the ‘buts’ and
see how the ‘one’ side replies to them.
Analysing the context does not imply excuse or justification –
there are numerous analyses of how the Nazis took power, and they
do not in any way justify Hitler, they just describe the confused
situation exploited by Hitler to take power. Hitler didn’t emerge
from a vacuum: back in the 1920s and 1930s, he offered anti-
Semitism as a narrative explanation of the troubles experienced by
ordinary Germans: unemployment, moral decay, social unrest . . .
behind all this stood the Jew; evoking the ‘Jewish plot’ made
everything clear by way of providing a simple ‘cognitive mapping’.

66
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

Does today’s hatred of multiculturalism and of the immigrant

threat not function in a homologous way? Strange things are
happening, financial meltdowns occur which affect our daily lives,
but are experienced as totally opaque – and the rejection of
multiculturalism introduces a false clarity into the situation: it is
the foreign intruders who are disturbing our way of life . . .
The only comparison that I effectively evoke in my speech is the
strange similarity between Hamas and the radical stance of the last
Netanyahu government. I was reproached here for ignoring a
crucial fact: the Israeli government did not just say the same thing
in a more civilized way, the difference is also in content – they do
not demand (and do) an indistinct killing of the opponents. My
reply: true, but while Hamas and its allies proclaim throwing the
Jews out of the Israeli land, Israel is now effectively doing this,
gradually but inexorably depriving the West Bank Palestinians of
their land. Even the US voiced concern over the West Bank settlers’
attacks on Palestinians.5
While, as far as I know, nobody disputed any facts that I refer to
in my speech, the main counter-argument was that this moment
(when Jews are massively dying) is not the right one for a broader
analysis – I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard this argument: at
that moment (ten days after the Hamas attack) when many more
Palestinians were dying than Jews.
But why did I ignore the horrors taking place in Gaza? Recall
the very last lines of Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper: ‘Denn die einen sind
im Dunkeln / Und die andern sind im Licht. / Und man sieht nur die
im Lichte / Die im Dunkeln sieht man nicht.’ (And some are in the
darkness / And the others in the light / But you only see those in the
light / Those in the darkness you don’t see.)’6 This is (more than
ever, perhaps) our situation today, in the self-proclaimed age of
modern media: while the big media were until recently full of news
about the Ukraine war, the world’s deadliest wars went unreported.7
Now that the spotlight is on the Middle East, one cannot but note
that they are almost exclusively on Gaza and not on the West Bank
where perhaps something much more crucial is going on. To avoid
a misunderstanding here: I am of course appalled at how the IDF
bombing of Gaza causes more ‘collateral damage’ on civilians than
on the Hamas forces, but I think the true event is going on on the

67
 ZERO POINT

West Bank: the gradual ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the Palestinian

population. I cannot but agree with Judith Butler:
From systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary
detentions to military checkpoints, and enforced family
separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to
live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.8
After the new Netanyahu government, this multi-dimensional
pressure grew almost exponentially, from direct killings by settlers
to bureaucratic-administrative measures.9 Groups of settlers are
sending messages to Palestinian homes that they better leave their
dwelling in the next 24 hours – and if they don’t do this, they as a
rule really come and beat, or even kill, the Palestinian family.10 If
this is not a form of terror, then this word has no meaning at all.11
As long as the traditional secular Zionist settler-colonial
ideology predominated, the state (not so) discreetly privileged its
Jewish citizens over Palestinians; however, it made great efforts to
sustain the appearance of a neutral rule of law: from time to time,
it condemned Zionist extremists for their crimes against
Palestinians, it limited the illegal new settlements on the West
Bank, etc. The main agency playing this role was the Supreme
Court – no wonder the Netanyahu government which took over in
2022 pushed through a judicial reform which deprives the Supreme
Court of its autonomy. The large protests against judicial reform are
the last cry of the secular Zionism: with the new Netanyahu
government, the anti-Palestinian violence (the pogrom in Huwara,
the attacks on the Stella Maris Monastery in Haifa, etc.) is no longer
even formally condemned by the state.12 The State of Israel which
likes to present itself as the only democracy in the Middle East now
de facto morphed into a ‘halachic theocratic state (the equivalent to
Shari’a law)’.13 In Lacanian terms, the obscene violence is the
surplus-enjoyment which we gain as a reward for our subordination
to an ideological edifice, for the sacrifices and renunciations this
edifice demands from us. In today’s Israel this surplus-enjoyment
no longer dwells in the obscene underground, it is openly assumed:
the surplus-enjoyment (as killing Palestinians, burning their
homes, evicting them from their homes, confiscating their lands,

68
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

building settlements, destroying their olive trees, Judaizing Al-

Aqsa, etc.) becomes explicitly articulated. While these forms of
surplus enjoyment were previously viewed as an exception in
official Zionist discourse, they are now considered as the norm.14
In short, anti-Palestinian violence is no longer even formally
condemned by the state.15 In order to find a way out of this deadlock,
the first thing to do is not just to condemn Israel but to fully admit
that we are dealing with a true tragedy: there is no clear simple
solution except those advocated by Ben Gvir and Hamas: the
annihilation of the other side. My condemnation of the Hamas
attack is clear and unequivocal. How can I be accused of supporting
Hamas violence when the title of my interview for Die Zeit is ‘Die
Hamas muss vernichtet werden’16 (‘Hamas has to be annihilated’)?
The truly horrible thing is that the area east of Gaza where Hamas
went on a murderous spree was mostly populated by Jews who
advocated peaceful coexistence with Palestinians, some of them
even engaged in helping those who suffered in Gaza.
Yuval Harari is right to emphasize that the principal goal of the
Hamas attack was not just to kill Jews but to prevent any chance of
peace in the foreseeable future – it was a war started with the goal to
eternalize war itself. And Harari is right to add that Israel should
avoid this trap laid by Hamas since ’down the road peace will only
come if Palestinians can live dignified lives in their homeland’.17 It is
important to emphasize the last words – ‘in their homeland’ – since
Harari thereby accepts that the land occupied by Israel is also the
Palestinian homeland. To put it in consciously naïve terms: Israel
should treat its Palestinian citizens as its citizens. To the dismay of
many of my ‘Leftist’ critics, I agree with the central claim of a letter
co-signed by Harari with David Grosman and others: ‘There is no
contradiction between staunchly opposing the Israeli subjugation
and occupation of Palestinians and unequivocally condemning
brutal acts of violence against innocent civilians. In fact, every
consistent leftist must hold both positions simultaneously.’18 I found
a graffiti on a wall in Ljubljana, my home city: ‘If I were a Palestinian
from the West Bank, I would also be a Holocaust denier’. This,
exactly, is the logic one should avoid at any cost, if for no other
reason because it reproduces the Zionist argument:

69
 ZERO POINT

‘A Holocaust survivor has the right to ignore minor injustices the

State of Israel is committing against Palestinians.’
And on the opposite, pseudo-Leftist side there are already claims
that the attacks (of Russia, of Hamas) are both justified defensive
measures which exploded against long histories of oppression – in
short, Donetsk is the Russian West Bank . . . But why do I use the
term ‘pseudo-Leftists’? Because, in the old Marxist tradition, I claim
that the Left structurally cannot be anti-Semitic, since it knows that
anti-Semitism relies on the basic ideological operation of
transposing immanent social antagonisms onto an external agent
to be liquidated. (Which is also why populism tends to be anti-
Semitic: populism doesn’t question the antagonism inscribed into
the basic social order but focuses on ‘corruption’ and similar
things.) I am well aware that there definitely are anti-Semitic
tendencies in today’s Left, but as such they are reliable signals that
there is something deeply wrong with this Left, and this holds from
Stalin to Hugo Chavez (who was reminded by none other than
Fidel Castro to avoid anti-Semitism). In the early years after the
October Revolution, the Jewish presence at the top of the political
echelons was very strong; things turned around with Stalin’s ascent
to power. And the same holds for today’s Leftists who shout anti-
Semitic slogans . . . So, for the last time, back to my speech – here is
another typical report on it:
The Mayor of Frankfurt, Mike Josef, described Žižek’s speech as
disturbing. ‘Freedom of expression and culture of debate are
important. But when Žižek quoted the SS man, Reinhard
Heydrich, he crossed a line that goes beyond provocation,’ he
believes. Frankfurt’s Vice-Mayor Nargess Eskandari-Gruenberg
was particularly bothered by the fact that Slavoj Žižek’s speech
linked the current terror of Hamas to the unresolved conflict of
the Palestinians, thereby relativizing it. ‘I find this relativisation
intolerable and unpalatable.’ In her view, nothing can justify
terror.19
The second reproach is obviously ridiculous: of course there is a
link between the Hamas attack and the unresolved status of the
Palestinians in occupied territories – Hamas exploits the plight of
the Palestinians in the same way Hitler exploited the discontent of

70
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

ordinary Germans in the post-World-War-I crisis. As for the first

reproach (quoting Heydrich crosses a line that goes beyond
provocation), why did I mention Heydrich? I briefly evoked a line
of thought which I developed in my books and talks (also in Tel
Aviv, where it was accepted without problems) where I trace the
re-emergence of the phenomenon of Zionist anti-Semitism, as
exemplified by Donald Trump, who recognizes Jerusalem as the
capital of Israel and signed a controversial executive order on anti-
Semitism but many of whose supporters are anti-Semitic. It was in
this context that I mentioned Heydrich – the same Heydrich who a
couple of years later organized the Holocaust wrote in 1935 that
‘our good wishes and official goodwill’ go with Zionists, since they
voluntarily rejected assimilation in favour of emigration: ‘We must
separate the Jews into two categories, the Zionists and the partisans
of assimilation. The Zionists profess a strictly racial concept and,
through emigration to Palestine, they help to build their own
Jewish State. [. . .] our good wishes and our official goodwill go with
them.’20
What is then going on in Israel? Yuval Harari believes the biggest
threat to his country comes not from Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran,
but from the battle between Israelis for the ‘soul of the nation’:
‘Personally, I fear most for really the soul of my country, of my
nation in Israel at the moment. There is really a battle for the soul
of the Israeli nation between patriotism on the one side and ideals
of Jewish supremacy on the other side.’21 Here is what some Rabbis
teaching at the (state-financed) Eli Academy, an elite school where
many army officers are educated, are saying:
The Holocaust was not about killing the Jews. Nonsense. And
that it was systematic and ideological makes it more moral than
random murder. Humanism, secular culture – that is the
Holocaust. The real Holocaust is pluralism. To believe in man –
that is the holocaust. [. . .] The Nazi logic was internally
consistent. Hitler said that a certain group in society is the cause
of all the evil in the world and therefore it must be exterminated.
[. . .] For years, God has been screaming that the Diaspora is
over but Jews aren’t obeying. That is their disease that the
Holocaust must cure. [. . .] Hitler was the most righteous, Of

71
 ZERO POINT

course he was right in every word he said. His ideology was

correct. [. . .] Their [the Nazis] only error was who was on which
side.22
The continuity with Nazism is here directly asserted: Hitler
practiced a correct stance, his only error was that he chose Jews
(instead of Arabs) as the principal enemy to be annihilated. But
even the annihilation of European Jews played a positive role: it
was part of God’s plan to bring Jews back from Diaspora to their
land. The conclusion is terrifying: The Zionists who founded Israel
are the corrected Nazis, they continue the Nazi politics with the
only change that they apply it to a correct enemy . . . Although such
an extreme stance is, of course, explicitly advocated only by a
minority (but Smotrich spoke there and Netanyahu himself visited
the Eli Academy, as can be seen on the video report!), it brings out
the underlying premises that sustain what the State of Israel is now
doing on the West Bank. How could this happen? In a memorable
passage in Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, Ruth
Klüger describes a conversation with ‘some advanced PhD
candidates’ in Germany:

One reports how in Jerusalem he made the acquaintance of an

old Hungarian Jew who was a survivor of Auschwitz, and yet
this man cursed the Arabs and held them all in contempt. How
can someone who comes from Auschwitz talk like that? the
German asks. I get into the act and argue, perhaps more hotly
than need be. What did he expect? Auschwitz was no
instructional institution . . . You learned nothing there, and least
of all humanity and tolerance. Absolutely nothing good came
out of the concentration camps, I hear myself saying, with my
voice rising, and he expects catharsis, purgation, the sort of
thing you go to the theatre for? They were the most useless,
pointless establishments imaginable.23

In short, the extreme horror of Auschwitz did not make it into a

place that purified surviving victims into ethical non-egotistical
subjects. So, again, the lesson to be drawn here is a very sad one: we
have to abandon the idea that there is something emancipatory in
extreme experiences, that they enable us to clear the mess and open

72
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

our eyes to the ultimate truth of a situation. For the same reason, I
also think the entire debate about the Holocaust versus colonialism
that flourished a couple of years ago in Germany (which of the two
was worse?) should be rejected as something profoundly obscene.
The Holocaust was a uniquely terrifying mega-crime; colonialism
caused an unimaginable amount of death and suffering. The only
correct way to approach these two horrors is to see the fight against
anti-Semitism and against colonialism as two aspects of one and the
same struggle. Those who dismiss colonialism as a lesser evil are an
insult to the victims of the Holocaust themselves, reducing an
unheard-of horror into a bargaining chip for geopolitical games.
Those who relativize the uniqueness of the Holocaust are an insult
to the victims of colonization themselves. The Holocaust is not one
in a series of crimes, it was unique in its own way, in the same way
that modern colonization was a unique breath-taking horror done
on behalf of civilizing others. They are all incomparable monstrosities
that cannot and shouldn’t be reduced to mere examples to be
‘compared’ – each of them is in some sense ‘absolute’ in its evil.

4 November 2023

The predominant anti-Leftist reaction to the ongoing Gaza war is

encapsulated by a text in Frankfurther Allgemeine Zeitung:
The Israeli sociologist Natan Sznaider sees this day not only as a
caesura in the history of Israel but as ‘part of the global Jewish
destiny.’ It is not possible to simply go on after the events of
October 7 without – for a moment, at least – reflecting on the
meaning and essence of this crime. The unfortunately all too
often practiced form of public speech which in one sentence
mentions Israeli victims and condemns Hamas, only so that it
can immediately after that pass onto denunciating the Israeli
reaction and mourn the civil victims in Gaza – as it was done,
for example, by the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek at the book
fair in Frankfurt – negates this meaning of October 7.24
No, I didn’t pass onto how Israel reacted to the Hamas attack, I
passed onto what Israel was doing for decades on the West Bank – I

73
 ZERO POINT

only mention the ‘collective punishment of millions in Gaza’ at the

very end of my speech; I didn’t just ‘condemn’ Hamas, I gave Israel
the full right to destroy it; and I said more against Hamas later in
the text.25 However, what I do reject is the idea that the ‘meaning
and essence’ of the Gaza attack is that of an almost metaphysical
caesura, an absolute Crime which allows us to ignore its complex
historical background. My full solidarity is with the victims of the
attack as well as with Jews in whom the attack brought out
memories of anti-Semitism and confronted them with fresh anti-
Semitic threats, not with the actions of the State of Israel and its
present government.
One cannot but note how the critics of the Leftist reaction to the
Gaza war systematically simplify the position of those they attack,
dismissing clear and unambiguous condemnation of the attack,
reading it as a rhetorical device to justify it as a reaction to the
Israeli occupation – the position which is definitely not mine. Such
a critical stance is not just an effect of superficial reading: it is
necessary for the critics to make the point they want to make.
Along these lines Eva Illouz, in her text about the reactions of the
Left to the Hamas attack,26 falls into the same trap although she
tries to practice a more refined approach: she accuses me of
dismissing the horror of attacks with ‘obfuscating intellectual
strategies’27 – do I really do this? As it was often the case in the last
weeks, her basic reproach is that I relativize the Hamas attack by
way of contextualizing it, to which she opposes her stance:
I refuse to contextualize the pain of Palestinians at having lost
their land. In order to take full stock of their tragedy, I need to
suspend the context. Couldn’t the left have stood with us in our
shock and grief just a short while, as many Arabs around the
world and in Israel have done?
I find this reference to decontextualized shock and grief all too
easy. I pronounced the speech at the opening ceremony of the
Frankfurt Book Fair which caused an uproar on October 17, ten
days after the Hamas attack, when Israel had already been
bombarding Gaza for days and the Palestinian victims outnumbered
the Jewish victims – the war was raging, shock and grief giving way
to fateful (often problematic) political and military decisions and

74
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

actions, which means that sharp political analysis of the situation

was needed, not just shock and grief.
I agree with Illouz that ordinary people are

typically sensitive to the concreteness of their experience: in fact

both Palestinians and Israelis will be obstinately insistent that
their suffering is unique and not to be compared, that is, reduced
to another’s. [. . .] Jews are very attentive to the concrete details
of the pogrom of Oct. 7th, the smell of the burnt bodies, the
indiscriminate killing of children and elderly, the blood on the
streets, the floors and the walls. The concreteness of each group’s
memory refuses the facile language of parallels.

Palestinians and not only Muslims all around the world are
bombarded with images of destruction and death in Gaza, and
their rage is condensing and approaching a violent explosion. How
could one not be affected by the fact that in Gaza, parents are
writing their children's names on their children's bodies so their
corpses can be identified?28 At this level, there is no solution, just a
juxtaposition of different traumatic experiences.
Second, why is the effect (of the Hamas slaughter, of the bombing
of Gaza) so devastatingly traumatic? Much worse horrors happened
in the twentieth century.29 It is, precisely, context: the Hamas
slaughter of innocent Jewish civilians evokes the memory of the
shoah, while the bombing of Gaza is experienced by Palestinians as
a second nakhba.30 The reference to decontextualized shock and
grief is thus clearly limited – no wonder that, after evoking it, Illouz
moves from the plea to stand up with Israel in shock and grief to a
much more cold legal argumentation:
Collateral damage – a chillingly impersonal expression – is
morally and legally different from the decapitation of children
by combatants, because of the degree of intentionality and direct
responsibility. Denying this distinction would amount to
denying the basis of our legal system. Similarly, the category of
‘heinous crime’ refers to those crimes human communities
recognize as different from other crimes because of their
particularly evil character. Quantitative death count is never
enough to establish how morally repulsive an act of killing is

75
 ZERO POINT

because crimes are not equal in their intent, responsibility and

heinousness.

In short, even if the IDF killed more than 10,000 Palestinians in

Gaza, this is morally and legally different (less bad) from killing
1,200 Jews in the Hamas attack . . . (Incidentally, Illouz should be
more careful here: she mentions decapitated children, a fact that
was weeks ago clearly negated by IDF itself, making Joe Biden
seem ridiculous when he claimed that he has seen photos of
beheaded children.) I am sure if Hamas were to have more
sophisticated arms and planes, it would also prefer impersonal
bombing . . . But the crucial point here is that ‘collateral damage’ is
in itself a suspicious category: this ‘chillingly impersonal expression’
makes terrible suffering of thousands of children seem a
non-intended implication – being impersonal does not make it less
problematic, it is in a way even more horrible in its depersonalization
of the victim. Illouz’s notion of the difference between the Hamas
attack and the Israeli bombing of Gaza as the one between a clearly
intended brutality versus non-intended collateral damage has to be
further problematized. First, how much ‘collateral damage’ is still
tolerable (even if one – as I do – fully condemns the Hamas strategy
to use ordinary Palestinians as a shield)? ‘Far too many Palestinians
have been killed. Far too many have suffered these past weeks,’
Antony Blinken said.31 Second, even if the civilian deaths of Israeli
bombing are not intended (as a primary direct goal), they are fully
predictable: one knows what will happen if you bomb a densely
populated civil area.
There is a basic opposition between the gradual process of
ethnic cleansing on the West Bank and the sudden brutal Hamas
slaughter: it exemplifies the difference between the First and ‘Third’
Worlds. In the developed First World, attacks from the outside as a
rule assume the form of sudden shocking brutal events (9/11, the
November 2015 bombing of a Parisian concert hall, the Hamas
attack); after the attack, normality is quickly re-established and the
people are haunted by traumatic memories. In Third World
countries, horrors are as a rule long painful processes that can
stretch stretches over generations and become part of daily life (as
in Congo . . .), making the affected population desperate, preventing

76
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

even the prospect of a return to normal life. Is this not the case in
the West Bank where, for months if not years, the Palestinian
majority has been exposed to different forms of violence, from
bureaucratic hassle to outright killings? It is thus totally
inappropriate to classify the two sufferings (that of the slaughtered
Jews near Gaza and that of the West Bank Palestinians) as heinously
bad and less bad: long suffering that lasts for generations can drive
thousands to total despair.
But decontextualized shock and grief plus legal reasoning
together are not enough – there is a need for general (hi)story
which encompasses both. My general frame or story is not
colonization (in my Frankfurt speech I never used the term, being
well aware that Jewish immigration to Israel cannot be reduced to
colonialism). This story will not be a single narrative of colonization
or of terrorists’ refusal to accept the Jews returning to their
homeland but an authentically tragic story of conflicting claims in
which nobody is simply right. The solution is therefore not in
competing moral judgments but in a genuine political act of
creating new social reality. Maybe, instead of erasing the historical
traumas that haunt them, Jews and Palestinians should establish a
solidarity on the fact that they were (and are) both victims of
Western racism. Illouz is right to point out that it is ‘easy to say: I
am disgusted by the Oct. 7th massacres and I want Palestinians to
have their own state’ – yes, it is easy to say but it is the most difficult
thing to act upon since the task is necessary and impossible. To
simply choose one side is a total ethical and political catastrophe.

16 November 2023

On November 15 2023, Israel dropped leaflets into southern Gaza

telling Palestinian civilians to leave four towns on the eastern edge
of Khan Younis – to move where? An IDF representative said
cynically: ‘They know where to go.’ It can only mean: across the
border to Egypt . . .32 And, to add insult to injury, the corridor of
forced evacuation is called ‘the humanitarian corridor’! We now see
why Israel is so allergic to the slogan ‘From the river to the sea,
Palestine shall be free’ – as it is becoming more and more clear, it

77
 ZERO POINT

should really be ‘From the river to the sea, Israel shall be free (of
Palestinians)’. The really difficult question to be raised here is: what
if persons like Ben Gvir and Smotrich are not just marginal fanatics,
what if they just openly state the actual politics of the State of Israel
covered up by more ‘liberal’ mainstream?
The parallel between Ukraine and Palestine is tell-tale since one
of the catastrophic global effects of the ongoing war in the Middle
East is that some key distinctions are blurred: the pro-Israeli West
(the US especially) now present the defense of Ukraine against the
Russian aggression and the defense of Israel against Hamas as
moments of the same global war, as if Israel=Ukraine. On the
opposite pseudo-Leftist side there are already claims that the
attacks (of Russia, of Hamas) are both justified defensive measures
which exploded against long histories of oppression – in short,
Donetsk is the Russian West Bank . . . A new world order is thus
emerging, and the Gaza war is like a knot, a nodal point which
condenses the antagonisms that traverse our world, a place where
everything will be decided – ‘Palestine’ is today a strong symbol, an
image of concrete universality which brings together opposite
meanings: a stand-in for all European colonial sins (Jews colonized
Palestine), as well as the place where anti-Semitism is exploding.
The tragedy is that the State of Israel which resulted from the
European mega-guilt for the Holocaust, as a desperate attempt to
‘provide a safe place for Jews,’ is at the same time emerging as a
symbol of European oppression and colonization. The original sin
is that of Western European countries which tried to make
amendments for the Holocaust by giving to Jews a piece of land
mostly inhabited for centuries by other people.
The predictions about the final outcome of the Gaza war oscillate
between two extremes. The majority perceives the war as the
beginning of a global catastrophe: hopes for peace are now a thing
of the past, the only winner of this war will be war itself. Even Yuval
Harari, until now the voice of relative reason, said recently that, if
Israel will be also attacked by rockets from the North (by Hezbollah),
it ‘could defend itself with all the weapons it has, including nuclear
capabilities’.33 If the Gaza Palestinians were to possess nuclear arms,
would they also not have the same right to use them after the total
destruction of the Gaza strip?

78
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

There is, however, a minority which thinks that the ongoing

Gaza war opens a new prospect of peace: the war will make palpable
the failure of a purely military solution, so both sides will be
compelled to search an uneasy peace in whatever form available. In
the present situation, the first step in this direction will have to be
made by Israel: ceasing immediately the daily terror against the
West Bank Palestinians, offering wide humanitarian help to
civilians in Gaza, abandoning the exclusive claim to the West
Bank . . .
These two visions of the future are more than two tendencies,
they are two ‘superposed’ determinations of our future which, to
quote Jean-Pierre Dupuy, if it happens will appear as necessary. It is
not that we have two possibilities (catastrophe or recovery) – this
formula is all too easy. What we have are two superposed necessities.
It is necessary that the Gaza war will end in a global catastrophe,
our entire history moves towards it, AND it is necessary that a
solution will arise. In a collapse of these two superposed necessities,
only one of them will actualize itself, so that in any case our history
will (have) be(en) necessary:
There are no alternative possible futures since the future is
necessary. Instead of exclusive disjunction there is a superposition
of states. Both the escalation to extremes and the absence of one
are part of a fixed future: it is because the former figures in it that
deterrence has a chance to work; it is because the latter figures in
it that the adversaries are not bound to destroy each other. Only
the future, when it comes to pass, will tell.34
This is our predicament today: whichever the new order will be, it
will be retroactively posited as necessary. However, there is one
thing we can safely predict already now. From a global geopolitical
perspective, the greatest victim of the Gaza war will be Europe (or,
rather, more precisely, the EU). Europe missed the opportunity to
let its distinctive voice be heard, subordinating itself (with minor
reservations) to the US unconditional support of Israel. If Trump
wins the next US election, Europe will more or less disappear from
the global map of strong actors – it will be reduced to a minor
partner in the isolated West surrounded by much more than just
BRICS countries. Unconditional support for Israel which ignores

79
 ZERO POINT

Gaza and West Bank suffering is catastrophic: the West advocates

human rights etc., but how does it apply them? With what biases?
We live in a strange time where reminding Israel of international
law is considered a form of support of Hamas . . .
The situation will be even further weakened by the rise of the new
populist Right in the US: if Trump wins, he will take the direction
clearly indicated by the election of Mike Johnson as the new Speaker
of the House: religious fundamentalism in all its guises, with the
end of democracy as we knew it. Although Trump declares himself
as the partisan of the impoverished (white) working class, the
perversity is that
devastating the working class was actually part of the plan: now
that the American middle class has gone from over 60% of us
down to a mere 43% of us, Republicans are trying to harness the
outrage people are feeling and then use it to tear our society
apart. Out of the chaos, they believe they can rebuild a nation on
the foundations of hypermasculinity, racism, religious bigotry,
misogyny, homophobia, and threats of violence.35
In short, the US are caught in the same battle as Israel itself, the
struggle between new populist fundamentalists and the remaining
forces of secular democracy.
So when Illouz concludes her text with ‘One more time in recent
history Jews feel very lonely’, I cannot abstain from adding two
points. Yes, alone . . . with the big Western media and powers totally
on their side, dismissing every critical distance as anti-Semitism.
Plus, how lonely should the West Bank Palestinians feel then, with
no state power protecting them from attacks, with their territory
constantly shrinking?36 So yes, it is impossible to simply go on after
October 7 – but also for the West Bank and Gaza strip Palestinians.
How should they do their work of mourning when Israel prohibits
the very public use of the word nakba which names the trauma that
haunts them? This brings us to a small ray of hope that is appearing
in Israel itself: the slow rise of solidarity between the Palestinian
citizens of Israel and the Jews who oppose the all-destructive war.
The solution is therefore not in competing moral judgments but in
a genuine political act of creating new social reality. Maybe, instead
of erasing the historical traumas that haunt them, Jews and

80
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

Palestinians should establish a solidarity on the fact that they were

(and are) both victims of Western racism. A utopia? But the only
alternative is doom.

8 December 2023

When the German government solemnly proclaims that the safety

and existence of Israel is Germany’s Staatsräson, they mean more
than raison d’etat – they mean it is the reason for German state to
exist – as Christian Dürr put it, ‘geopolitically we do everything so
that Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, will be in future
politically successful’.37 This commitment to Israel ‘is not inscribed
in law, but it’s kind of paralegal in the sense that this is our self-
understanding as a nation’, said Sina Arnold; or, to quote Ben
Gidley, it’s a way Germany ‘as a national culture has dealt with its
Holocaust guilt’: ‘in order to pay back for the Holocaust, we need to
stand by Israel whenever’. As three Jewish writers said recently:
‘Germany’s reckoning with its history of atrocities began as an
undertaking by left-leaning German civil society. Today it has
become a highly bureaucratized lever of the state that increasingly
serves a reactionary agenda.’ The last step in this bureaucratization
is that the Bundestag is now ‘mulling a draft law to require people
seeking citizenship through naturalization or seeking to obtain
asylum and residency in Germany to pledge a commitment to
Israel’s right to exist’.38
This weird demand of a political stance towards another country
as a condition of citizenship is quite logical: if Israel is Germany’s
Staatsräson, then you cannot be a German citizen without
commitment to Israel . . . It is easy to smell something rotten in
such a full commitment based on the axiom that, in spite of all
possible excesses, Israel stands for the values of Western civilization
against the Muslim world which is much more constrained – OK,
in principle this may be true, but let’s then apply these same values
or standards to Israel itself, to what it does in Gaza or on the West
Bank! Now wonder that I am now in Germany not only heavily
censored but also attacked with breath-taking brutality, as by
Claudius Seidl recently when he opened his article on me with

81
 ZERO POINT

‘Slavoj Žižek didn’t become crazy, on the opposite: this is what is so

disgusting. Slavoj Žižek was crazy for decades.’ Just imagine the
reaction if I were to write like this in a public polemic!
But I don’t want to lose words on such trash – what I want to
note is that the reproaches addressed at me by Eva Illouz, although
their tone is much more civilized, ultimately amount to the same: I
speak from a cold cynical distance unable to emotionally identify
with what goes on; I treat Israel and Hamas as two partners in a
self-destructive dance where they are both equally guilty . . . Is this
so? Illouz claims that my argumentation circles around two core
claims. The first one:
I, Zizek, was expected to show massive support for Israel but I
did not to do it because I am moderate and hold a middle
position. I recognize the evil character of Hamas’ actions, but as
an intellectual, I argue we should investigate its causes which are
to be found in the Occupation.
The pompous style of this formulation is totally foreign to me – this
is not me speaking, this is Illouz projecting onto me the figure of a
pompous ‘Leftist’ intellectual. No, I was not expected to show
massive support for Israel – ‘Leftists’ expected from me an
‘understanding’ for Hamas and were appalled when I agreed that
Hamas has to be destroyed. Plus I definitely do not hold a moderate-
middle position – or, to quote what Illouz describes as my second
core claim:
Whatever horror the Hamas declared or committed, the Israelis
also declared and committed quite similar. The State of Israel can
no longer pretend to be the only democracy in the Middle East
and has now de facto morphed into a theocratic state equivalent
to Shari’a law. It is therefore futile to look for right and wrong,
heroes and villains. The only thing that remains is to hold a
mirror to both groups and show them they are in fact quite
similar to each other, which, I, Zizek, have the courage to say.
Simply false, again. I totally agree with Illouz when she writes: ‘As
Max Weber famously said, being in the middle is not a better
guarantee of truth than being on a clear side.’ I am not in the middle
in this sense of comfortable neutrality, I only insist that the situation

82
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

is inherently tragic, which is why one cannot choose one side

against the other. Hamas is terrifying, and Israel is not innocent – to
quote Illouz herself: ‘Israel bears a moral and political responsibility
to help resolve the statelessness of Palestinians. This responsibility is
all the more acute that Israel illegitimately and even criminally
occupies the territories it conquered in 1967.’39

Illouz totally misses my stance when she writes:

I would like to ask you, Slavoj Zizek, you and your armchair
leftist comrades: Why wasn’t there a place for such tact of the
heart? Why didn’t you express compassion for the unfathomable
shock and pain Jews have experienced? Why couldn’t the Left
grieve with us in silence for just one short week before resorting
to its pontifying analyses? Why do you and so many others seem
to take antisemitism so lightly, as if the hatred of Jews was the
natural default position of the world? We could have grieved for
three people together, the murdered Israelis, the Jews threatened
by antisemitism all over the world, and the innocent Palestinians
ravaged by Israeli bombs.
The last sentence describes also my position – with an addition.
Palestinians suffer not just from bombing in Gaza: the violence on
the West Bank is also exploding, and there are clear signs that Israel
is moving towards a full evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza. But
to claim that I am taking anti-Semitism lightly is too much: I wrote
pages and pages on it for decades, clearly defining it as the basic
form of ideology.
As for grieving, I must admit I have a problem with displays of
public grief – they all too often turns into a spectacle, especially
now in Germany where grief is bureaucratized. The style of Illouz’s
paragraph quoted above is for me already false, a fake. ‘Why couldn’t
the Left grieve with us in silence for just one short week before
resorting to its pontifying analyses?’ Because the choice between
grieving in silence and pontifying analyses is a false one: in that
‘short week’ after October 7, massive things were already taking
place, the bombing of Gaza began, so analysis was crucial to drew
attention to the catastrophe both for Palestinians and for the Jews
that lies ahead.

83
 ZERO POINT

I am as far as possible from pontifying for a simple reason: there

is no safe external place from which to do it. My pain is much worse
and more intense: in the ongoing horrors on both sides, it is obscene
to choose a side. I am disgusted when the Hamas attack is singled
out as a unique ‘crime against humanity’, while the devastation of
Gaza and violence on the West Bank are treated as secondary
excesses for which ultimately Palestinians themselves are
responsible. One should reject such simple solutions and persist in
the tragic hopelessness of the situation. Tamer Nafar, a Palestinian
rapper and Israeli citizen, wrote in a letter published by Haaretz: ‘If
our small eyes can see the huge scope of atrocity, can our big hearts
contain two pains at once?’ To contain two pains at once, this is my
stance.40
The latest revelations of what Hamas did to Jewish women on
October 7, the brutality of rapes, bears witness to something worse
than terror: terror was 9/11, a bomb or plane exploding and killing
many, while what Hamas did on October 7 was plain perverted
morbidity which was directed from the top, not an outburst of
spontaneous depravity.41 But one should ask the inevitable question:
why we were bombed by these disclosures now? This now is no
longer the now of pure grief and horror, the moment of ‘compassion
for the unfathomable shock and pain Jews have experienced’: it
comes in the midst of what Israel is doing in Gaza, so volens nolens
it functions as a justification for what Israel is doing now. To put it
brutally, it is Israel which manipulates the victims of Hamas here,
so that unfortunately grief and horror are somewhat overshadowed
by the question: what does Israel want to do now?
Niall Ferguson claims that Hamas intends ‘nothing less than a
second Holocaust’;42 however, in the case of Israel, we are not
dealing with mere intentions: what is actually happening is the less
and less hidden creation of Great Israel from the river to the sea. To
put it in other words, the image of eternal victim is used by Israel to
justify its strongest expansion ever. A true ‘desert of the real’ that we
see on the drone shots of ruined Gaza cities makes any choice
between the two horrors (which one is ‘less horrible’, the Hamas
attack or the Israeli bombing?) obscene. After seven days of the
ceasefire, Israel resumed the bombing of Gaza, adding to it a
‘humanitarian’ note which makes things just worse:

84
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

Israel’s military said it was dividing the entirety of Gaza into

dozens of numbered blocks as a prelude to demanding targeted
local evacuations in the crowded south of the strip before attacking
a highlighted area. It dropped leaflets on to Gaza with a QR code
to a website with a map of all the areas and geolocating people
within them. IDF map of the Gaza Strip split into 620 small
numbered zones, which it will use to order forced evacuations.’43

Does this humanitarian advice which obviously cannot be followed

in reality not add a cruel joke to the brutality of bombing? On top
of running from bombs, Palestinians in Gaza now have to play
what was called a ‘macabre game of Battleships’ to have a chance to
survive . . . No wonder that a Palestinian who left Gaza City for the
South and is now asked to move again, said: ‘What we wish now is
to be killed, to avoid going through all this feeling of threat all the
time and being in that distress.’44 Can one imagine the explosion of
anti-Semitism to which such scenes that circulate all around the
world will give birth?
Hamas and Israeli messianic hardliners are thus the two sides of
the same coin: the true choice is not between them but between
hardline fundamentalists who are not interested in serious peace
negotiations and those open to co-existence. I don’t equalize them,
but the Israeli messianic hardliners present a danger of Israel
becoming a fundamentalist state (a danger recognized by many
Jews, from Yuval Harari to Efraim Halevy).
To return to my starting point, the German unconditional
support of Israel amounts to the support of the present Israeli
government against the liberal opposition to it which advocates an
understanding for the plea of Palestinians – the German full
support of Israel thus de facto contributes to the growth of anti-
Semitism. The German support of Israel thus becomes visible in its
obscene truth: Germany is ready to pay for its past sins not by
insisting on justice but by covering up the sins of its principal
ex-victim. Today, a true friendship with Israel must include a severe
critique of the present Israeli government. Yes, it is difficult to be a
true friend of the Jewish people.
What is especially disgusting and morally reprehensible in this
situation is the way German politicians assume the power to select

85
 ZERO POINT

and condemn those (inclusive of many Jews) whom they view as

‘anti-Semites’ (where the critique of what Israel does in the occupied
territories is also denounced as anti-Semitism). They fight anti-
Semitism by way of supporting Israel even where Israel is wrong
and acts like an oppressive occupier – as if they will exculpate
themselves for their mega-crime by solidarity with their once-
victim which is now committing a smaller crime . . . To be brutal,
their critique of anti-Semitism is a continuation of anti-Semitism
with other means. Exaggeration? Deborah Feldman recently wrote
an excellent overview of how the Holocaust-guilt complexes of
Germans causes them to fetishize Jewishness to the point of
obsessive-compulsive embodiment:
Some of the hostages held by Hamas have German citizenship,
so when I asked a politician from Germany’s governing coalition
what the government’s position was on those people, I was
shocked when his response, in private, was: Das sind doch keine
reinen Deutschen, which translates to: well, those aren’t pure
Germans. He didn’t choose from a host of perfectly acceptable
terms to refer to Germans with dual citizenship, he didn’t even
use adjectives such as richtige or echte to refer to them not being
full or proper Germans – instead, he used the old Nazi term to
differentiate between Aryans and non-Aryans.45
As Freud taught us long ago, such slips of tongue reveal the
repressed truth of one’s stance.

14 December 2023

When Leftist critics of Israel characterize what Israel is doing in

Gaza as genocide, they are as a rule accused of inverting the true
relationship: Israel is just defending itself while Hamas plans an
actual genocide of the Jews . . . However, genocidal rhetoric is more
and more present in the public speeches of Israeli politicians
themselves. When the Defense Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a
‘complete siege’ of the Gaza Strip after the Hamas attack, he said: ‘I
have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no
electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting

86
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

human animals and we are acting accordingly.’46 ‘No electricity, no

food, no fuel, everything is closed’ relates to the entire Gaza strip, to
all Palestinians there.
In this mental space there is no place for peace treaties. In Left
Behind: Rise of the Antichrist (2023 movie version) the antichrist
Nicolae Carpathia takes over (depriving countries of their
sovereignty and installing a world government) when the peace
treaty is signed between Israel and the Arab world – a clear sign of
how, for the new radical Right, a peace between Israel and its Arab
neighbors is quite literally the work of the devil. Along the same
lines, Tsipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador to the UK, insisted (in
an interview for Sky News) that there is no humanitarian crisis in
Gaza: ‘Israel is in charge of the safety of Israelis, Hamas is in charge
of the safety of Palestinians.’47 Of course there is no humanitarian
crisis among the Palestinians since they are not fully human, just
human animals. No wonder, then, that, together with Netanyahu
and other leading Israeli politicians, Hotovely also resolutely rejects
the two-states-solution: ‘human animals’ don’t deserve a state.
Commenting on the three Jewish hostages which were
mistakenly shot by the IDF in Gaza, Netanyahu said in a recent
public appearance: ‘I say this in the face of great pain but also in
the face of international pressures. Nothing will stop us.’48 The
addressees of this message are not only the relatives of the
remaining hostages accusing the government of not doing enough
for their release; perhaps, the main addressees are foreign
governments, inclusive of the US government, which are exerting
pressure on Israel to show more constraint. Netanyahu’s ultimate
message is: even without the support of its Western allies, nothing
will stop Israel in achieving its goals (the total annihilation of
Hamas, the rejection of the two-state solution and, of course, of the
one big secular democratic state from the river to the sea, integration
of the West Bank into Israel, etc.). The problem with this radical
stance is that, as Hani al Masri pointed out correctly, in pursuing it,
Israel is ‘a prisoner of its own unreachable goals’.49 Why? Natan
Chofshi, the anarchist and pacifist President of the Palestine branch
of the War Resisters’ International, wrote back in 1946: ‘Without an
understanding with our Arab neighbors, we are building on a
volcano and our whole work is in jeopardy.’50

87
 ZERO POINT

The conclusion I draw from this is that peace will only emerge
when Palestinians will be allowed to organize themselves as a
strong independent political force, broadly democratic and
avoiding any form of religious fundamentalism – something Israel
was and is doing everything possible to prevent, up to supporting
Hamas. It is thus Israel which is pushing Palestinians to Hamas,
leaving them only one choice: to accept Hamas as the only voice
that is really fighting for them. No wonder that support for Hamas
is growing – the latest opinion polls show the anger over the war’s
toll boosting Palestinian support for Hamas, particularly in the
comparatively peaceful West Bank where Hamas does not have
control.51 This support suits Israel down to the ground since it
justifies the brutal oppression of the West Bank Palestinians. But
are we aware of the rage that is growing in Arab countries?
Hundreds of thousands are protesting against Israel, and tensions
are reaching a point of explosion. Some Leftists may see in such an
explosion a moment of truth when we will get rid of liberal-pacifist
illusions which just serve the oppressors – I see in it a catastrophe
not only for Jews and Palestinians but for a much wider world.
Netanyahu’s ‘nothing will stop us now’ echoes Putin’s statement
on December 14 2023 when he vowed to fight on in Ukraine until
Moscow secures the country’s ‘demilitarization’, ‘denazification’
and neutrality, unless Kyiv accepts a deal that achieves those goals:
‘There will be peace when we achieve our goals . . . As for
demilitarization, if they (the Ukrainians) don’t want to come to an
agreement – well, then we are forced to take other measures,
including military ones.’52 Putin couldn’t restrain himself from
cynically remarking that Russia is demilitarizing Ukraine by way of
destroying hundreds of its tanks and guns – war (destroying the
enemy) is thus presented as the ultimate act of demilitarization. But
did some Western heads of state not made a similar point when,
reacting to the desperate calls for ceasefire in the Gaza conflict,
they advocated a ‘sustainable ceasefire’? Although their idea was a
ceasefire which would lead to permanent peace, it ultimately
amounts to the claim that the only ‘sustainable’ peace is the peace
that follows our (military) victory.
The parallel between Palestinians and Ukraine is, of course,
imperfect: in the case of Palestine, a compromise between the two

88
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

peoples is the only way out, while Ukraine is a victim of brutal

aggression and has the full right to persevere until victory. Ukraine
is now paying the price for exclusively choosing the side of big
Western powers, ignoring the link of its struggle for independence
with the Third World decolonization processes, as well as oppressing
its own Left as suspect, somehow associated with Russia, as if Putin
stands for the Socialist tradition . . . Now that the big Western states
are getting more and more sceptical about their help to Ukraine,
Ukraine may find itself in a desperate position, and one can argue
that only a strong Leftist turn can offer a hope to it.
We have to engage here with a broader topic of decolonization.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang are right when they insist that
‘decolonization’ should not be used as a universal metaphor:
Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous
land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do
to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of
decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship,
evidenced by the increasing number of calls to ‘decolonize our
schools,’ or use ‘decolonizing methods,’ or, ‘decolonize student
thinking,’ turns decolonization into a metaphor.53
Such a metaphoric universalization blurs the concrete violence of
decolonization (as expected, Tuck and Young quote here Fanon).
‘Decolonizing thinking’ (done in a safe academic environment) is a
poor substitute of concrete and brutal struggle of the oppressed
against their masters where many human rights have to be violated.
What now – in December 2023 – lurks in the background of
this topic is the violence of Hamas which was perceived by many as
an attempt of actual decolonization. However, here things get much
more problematic. First, it is all too easy to dismiss the state of
Israel as a result of the colonization of the Palestinian territory – I
agree with people like Edward Said who think that both ethnic
group, Palestinians and Jews, have a right to live there, and that they
are condemned to live there together. This is why I reject the claim
of Hamas that Jews should be thrown out – Hamas definitely passes
over the line that separates a critique of Israel from anti-Semitism.
This is also why I reject Jamil Khader’s claim that ‘in trying to
navigate the genocidally charged environment of Germany and the

89
 ZERO POINT

rest of Europe, Žižek has inadvertently betrayed his radical leftist

aspirations’54 – I don’t consider Hamas’s stance ‘leftist’ in any
meaningful sense of the term, and I don’t envisage a military defeat
of Israel as a solution to the Middle East crisis. Khader goes on to
condemn my ‘lofty aspirational vision’ as ‘completely disconnected
from the realities on the ground’ – he finds ‘incomprehensible’ my
insistence on ‘some liberal politics of hope in this catastrophic
context,’ like when I see a possible change coming through ‘the slow
rise of solidarity between the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the
Jews opposing the all-destructive war.’55 OK, but which is then a
realist option? A big racial war against the Jews? As a pragmatic
realist, I am well aware that such a solidarity is difficult to imagine
today, that it is impossible – however, it is here that we should
resuscitate the famous motto from May ’68: ‘Soyons realistes,
demandons l’impossible.’ The true dangerous utopia is that the
solution of the Middle East crisis could be achieved by a military
victory.
Second point: the often miserable reality of actual decolonization
often IS a metaphor for another process. Just recall numerous
African countries from Angola to Zimbabwe in which
decolonization resulted in a corrupted social order in which the
gap between the new masters and the poor majority is greater than
it was before decolonization. ‘Decolonization’ was thus a metaphor
for (or one aspect of) the emergence of a new class society. South
Africa is today the country with the greatest gap between the poor
and the rich – no wonder that a very depressing thing happened to
me in July 2023 in London: at a public debate at BBK Summer
School, a Black woman from South Africa, an old ANC activist,
said that the predominant stance among the poor Black majority is
now more and more a nostalgia for apartheid – their standard of
living was, if anything, a little bit higher than now, and there were
safety and security (South Africa was a police state, after all), while
today poverty is supplemented by an explosion of violence and
insecurity.
If a white person were to say this, one would be, of course,
immediately accused of racism – but we should nonetheless think
about it. If we don’t do it, the new Right will do it for us (as they are
already doing it in South Africa, lambasting about the inability of

90
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

the Blacks to properly run a country). So, again, we should resist the
temptation to risk a brutal ‘decolonization’ irrespective of what will
follow, in the sense of ‘freedom comes with blood and suffering.’
Mao said: ‘Revolution is not a dinner party.’ But what if the reality
after the revolution is even less a dinner party? Back to Hamas, the
question we should raise is not just what will happen after it will
lose the war, it is also what would happen if Hamas were to survive
and continue to rule Gaza. What would be the reality there after the
waning of the enthusiasm of liberation? However, this insight in no
way changes a crucial point to be made here. Lately, many liberals
in principle support Israel and simultaneously advice caution or
even express concern at the numbers of the killed, especially
children, in Gaza . . . in short, there is a growing sympathy, love
even, for Palestinians as victims, but why should Palestinians be
just victims, why should they not resist Israel in justified rage?
Remember Thomas Jefferson’s words: ‘When injustice becomes law,
resistance becomes duty.’ So how should Palestinians resist,
REALLY resist, without becoming anti-Semites? The moment this
topic is approached, silence and embarrassment appear.

31 January 2024

Lenin observed (from a balcony overlooking the hall) the last

session of the Russian Constituent Assembly, on 5 January 1918.
Afterwards, the Assembly was de facto disbanded, never convoked
again – democracy (in the usual sense of the word, at least) was
over in Russia, since this Assembly was the last multiparty elected
body. Here is Lenin’s reaction which is worth a longer quote:
‘Friends, I have lost a day,’ says an old Latin tag. One cannot help
but recall it when one remembers how the fifth of January was
lost.
After real, lively, Soviet work among workers and peasants
engaged on real tasks, clearing the forest and uprooting the
stumps of landowner and capitalist exploitation, we were
suddenly transported to ‘another world’, to arrivals from another
world, from the camp of the bourgeoisie with its willing or

91
 ZERO POINT

unwilling, conscious or unconscious champions, with its

hangers-on, servants and advocates. Out of the world in which
the working people and their Soviet organization were
conducting the struggle against the exploiters we were
transported to the world of saccharine phrases, of slick, empty
declamations, of promises and more promises based, as before,
on conciliation with the capitalists.
It is as though history had accidentally, or by mistake, turned
its clock back, and January 1918 for a single day became May or
June 1917!
It was terrible! To be transported from the world of living
people into the company of corpses, to breathe the odor of the
dead, to hear those mummies with their empty ‘social’ Louis
Blanc phrases, was simply intolerable . . .56

It is, of course, easy to mock the quoted passage, seeing in it just the
first step towards the Stalinist dictatorship, and to strike back: what
about the meetings and debates within the Bolshevik party itself?
Did they not in a couple of years also turn into ‘the world of
saccharine phrases, of slick, empty declamations,’ a world of empty
rituals in which members also acted like zombies, and in which one
could also ‘breathe the odour of the dead’? But, on the other hand,
does Lenin’s brutally icy description not fit perfectly big meetings
about global warming like the Glasgow conference, which also
transport us ‘to the world of saccharine phrases . . . of promises and
more promises based, as before, on conciliation with the capitalists’?
Is it not that, if we are to confront seriously our challenges, from
ecological crises to immigrations, we will have to change our entire
political system along the lines suggested by Lenin?
So what would have been a Leninist gesture today? Without
false modesty, I think I accomplished it with my speech in Frankfurt.
No wonder that, as I learned after the speech, a couple of policemen
in the background of the stage were getting ready to drag me from
the stage. This is the ‘democratic’ reaction to saying something
which perturbs the imposed consensus which has been so
celebrated – it is like the famous statement by Rosa Luxembourg
turned around: ‘Freedom is always freedom for those who think
like us.’ This is how ‘democracy’ functions in our ‘advanced’ liberal

92
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

countries – it is Robespierre’s ‘no freedom to the enemies of

freedom’ brought to extreme, with people being ‘cancelled’, losing
their jobs even, for publicly expressing a sympathy for the terrible
fate of the millions of Palestinians. Only in such a ‘freedom’ can
Israel do something unheard of, in modern times at least:
performing genocidal acts publicly, in front of the cameras of all
the world.
Even more sad was what followed: at the concluding appearance
on stage of some members of the political and cultural
nomenklatura, an elder lady said that what she hates most is the
word ‘aber’ (but), an obvious stab at me.57 Leaving aside my disbelief
at the time, and the (I thought) indisputable consensus that ‘aber’ is
the civilized way to disagree with someone, when I think of that
incident now, I recall a specific feature of the late poetry of one of
the greatest German poets, Hoelderlin. Instead of first describing a
state of things and then mentioning the exception (‘but’), he often
begins a sentence or even a poem directly by ‘aber,’ without
indicating which is the ‘normal’ state disturbed by the exception,
as in the famous lines from his hymn Andenken: ‘Was bleibet
aber, stiften die Dichter.’ (‘But poets establish what remains.’) The
standard reading, of course, is that, after the events, poets are able
to perceive the situation from the mature standpoint, i.e. from
the safe distance when the historical meaning of the events become
clear. What if, however, there is nothing before the ‘but,’ just a
nameless chaos, and a world (concocted by a poet) emerges as a
‘but,’ as an act of disturbing a chaotic void? What if at the beginning
there is a ‘but,’ the first gesture of introducing some normative
order in this chaos?

9 May 2024

We definitely live in a crazy time – it is as if the disturbances in

nature (repeated torrential rain in Dubai, hundreds of thousands of
fishes dead in Vietnam because the sea close to the shore got too
warm . . .) reflects the mess in our social life. In such moments, it is
crucial to retain cold blood and closely analyse the weird
phenomena on all sides of our political spectrum, inclusive of the

93
 ZERO POINT

politicized Muslims. On 27 April 2024, over a thousand Muslims

demonstrated in Hamburg under the slogan ‘Kalifat ist die Lösung’
(‘Caliphate is the solution’). Yes, there are here and there true anti-
Semites among the student protesters (as well as there are genocidal
maniacs in Israel), but the very fact of the massive presence of Jews
among the protesters makes it clear that anti-Semites are
marginalized. So what do the protesters really want? The parallel
between today’s pro-Palestinian student protests and the 1968 anti-
Vietnam-war protests are often noted; however, Franco Berardi
also noted an important difference between the two. Rhetorically,
at least, the 1968 protesters identified with the anti-imperialist
resistance of the Vietcong and with a socialist project, but today’s
protesters very rarely identify with Hamas. What, then, do they
identify with? Berardi’s bitter hypothesis is that
students are identifying with despair. Despair is the psychological
and also cultural trait that explains the wide identification of
young people with the Palestinians. I think that the majority of
the students today are consciously or unconsciously expecting
the irreversible worsening of the conditions of life, irreversible
climate change, a long lasting period of war, and the looming
danger of a nuclear precipitation of the conflicts that are
underway in many points of the geopolitical map.58
It is difficult to put it better than Berardi – with one added twist.
What makes this despair the sign of a zero point is that it is not just
a despair at not reaching a specific goal but a despair at what this
goal should even be: in today’s mess, every formulation of a specific
goal we should strive for is immediately experienced as a utopian
fake. The first step towards hope is to fully admit our desperate
predicament in all its dimensions. And the obscenely-oppressive
reaction of the establishment to the protests does not express their
fear that the protests will give rise to a forceful new political
movement, but their panic, their refusal to confront the despair
that pervades our societies.
Signs of this panic are everywhere. Just two cases. On 7 May
2024, it was reported that twelve US Senators sent a letter to the
International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor, threatening to
impose sanctions and even invade the Hague if ICC issues arrest

94
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (The

Biden administration is also pressuring the ICC not to charge
Israeli officials over their war crimes in Gaza.)59 The very existence
of such threats signals nothing less than the end of the (hypocritical
as it may be) shared global values. On the same day, Ghassan
Abu-Sitta, a doctor who spent 43 days in Gaza helping treat those
wounded in Israel’s war, was denied entry to France where he was
scheduled to make a speech at the Senate.60 It is no longer a
rhetorical exaggeration to claim that our democracy is gradually
disappearing . . .
What goes on and on in Gaza is unacceptable – everybody is
saying this, but, as is usually the case, words are used to postpone
the task of actually intervening in the situation. The first thing to do
as a serious intervention is to publicly support the student protests.
Bernie Sanders said on April 28 that he supports protests against
Israel’s war in Gaza while stressing the need to ‘condemn, in every
form, antisemitism, Islamophobia and other forms of bigotry’:
‘What Netanyahu’s right-wing, extremist and racist government is
doing is unprecedented in the modern history of warfare. Right
now, we are looking at the possibility of mass starvation and famine
in Gaza. When you make those charges, that is not antisemitic. That
is a reality.’61
After the October 7 attacks, Israel emphasized the raw reality of
the attack: let just the images speak – the brutal killings and rapes
recorded by the perpetrators themselves tells it all, there is no need
for complex contextualization . . . Is now not the time to say the same
about the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza? Let just the images
and sounds speak – the endless drone shots of ruins, people starving
in packed improvised tents, children slowly dying under the rubble
. . . Back in 2003, Michael Ignatieff wrote about the US attack on Iraq:
‘For me the key issue is what would be the best result for the Iraqi
people – what is most likely to improve the human rights of 26
million Iraqis? What always drove me crazy about the opposition [to
war] was that it was never about Iraq. It was a referendum on
American power.’62 This definitely does not hold about today’s
anti-war protests: they are not a referendum on Palestinian, Israeli or
American power but precisely a desperate plea to improve the
human rights and suffering of the Gaza Palestinians.

95
 ZERO POINT

So what should the US do in an ideal scenario (apart from Biden

replacing Kamala Harris with Taylor Swift as his VP candidate . . .)?
Two things. First, the US should join the global initiative to
recognize Palestine as a state – far from being an obstacle to peace
in the Middle East, such a recognition is the only way to bring in
place serious negotiations between the two sides, and to compel
both sides to act as responsible political agents. Rejecting (or
endlessly postponing) the recognition of Palestine inevitably leads
to the conclusion that war is the only solution. Recently, in a
supreme act of civil courage, even a large group of Israeli Jewish
intellectuals called the EU states to recognize Palestine – here is
their message worth quoting in full:
Israeli public figures call on the remaining EU Member States,
the UK, and other states to recognize the State of Palestine
without delay (7 May 2024)
In the wake of the brutal Hamas massacre on 7 October and
Israel’s ensuing destruction of lives and infrastructure in the
Gaza Strip, we, Israelis committed to the democratic future of
the two peoples, are convinced that the international community
must take clear action toward the realization of the two-state
solution. Recognition of the State of Palestine as a full member
of the United Nations would be an important step along this
road. The recognition of a Palestinian state is a matter of
principle and historic justice. It is also a way to bring back a
chance for quiet in this war-torn region. Such a significant
diplomatic endeavor would remove the ambiguity that had
tainted the entire ‘peace process’ from its inception, put
diplomacy back on track, and force the parties to the conflict, as
well as the main international actors, to meet their responsibilities.
In this regard, we welcome reports that Spain, Ireland, Malta,
and Slovenia intend to soon announce their recognition of the
State of Palestine and to support its full membership in the
United Nations. We call on the remaining EU Member States,
the UK, and other states to follow suit as an important step
toward achieving the two-state solution. This war must not
become yet another chapter in the long history of violence
between Israelis and Palestinians. There is no better way to

96
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

restore faith in diplomacy than recognizing the State of Palestine

now.
These are the true heroes of our time, and it is no surprise that our
big media ignore this message. Second, as crazy as this may sound,
the fact that the US are no longer able to act as a global superpower
has also its bad aspects – history repeats itself, just recall the US
army’s premature withdrawal from north Syria to protect the
Kurds, as well as from Afghanistan. Ideally, the US should simply
invade Gaza from the sea, establish its own power zone there where
civilian refugees would be safe, and in this way constrain Israeli
power. But the one thing one can rely on is that the US regularly
miss the opportunity to use (whatever remains of) their global
imperialist power for a good cause.

24 May 2024

When is the right time to speak? I have written elsewhere63 about

the morass of false equivalences and empty gestures in which it is
all too easy to become fatally disoriented, and about the way in
which both Israel and Russia are escaping into violence and
destruction to avoid confronting the collapse of their fantasies. We
often hear people exclaim in frustration ‘Don’t just talk, take
action!’, but in this context, it is just as important if not more to
name things by their right names and to tell the truth - we cannot
‘just’ act, we have to say the right words.
To explain this key point, we have to explore a more philosophical
terrain: how does the right word differ from a factually true word?
For most of us, telling the truth means making a statement which
fits the facts – say, me saying ‘I am now on St Helena island
observing Napoleon’s residence’ is true if I am now really there
observing Napoleon’s residence. The so-called postmodernists
proceed in a different way: they reduce truth to a discursive ‘truth-
effect.’ For example, Michel Foucault’s notion of truth can be
summed up in the claim that truth/untruth is not a direct property
of our statements but that, in different historical conditions,

97
 ZERO POINT

different discourses produce each its own specific truth-effect, i.e.,

it implies its own criteria of what values as ‘true’:
The problem does not consist in drawing the line between that
in discourse which falls under the category of scientificity or
truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in
seeing historically how effects of truth are produced within
discourses which are neither true nor false.64
Science defines truth in its own terms: the truth of a proposition
(which should be formulated in clear explicit and preferably
formalized terms) is established by experimental procedures which
could be repeated by anyone. Religious discourse operates in a
different way: its ‘truth’ is established through complex rhetorical
ways which generate the experience of inhabiting a meaningful
world benevolently controlled by higher a higher power . . . Is there
a third way between the common view and the postmodern
historicist relativism?
Psychoanalysis provides it: while fully accepting the importance
of factual truth – or, in this case, not a physical fact but his
interpretation that explains the patient’s symptoms – a psychoanalyst
has to tell this to the patient at the right moment, when (based upon
his analytic experience) he is convinced that his statement will deeply
affect the patient’s subjectivity, pushing him towards accepting some
repressed truths about his subjectivity and desires. If the psychoanalyst
tells this to his patient too early, the patient will dismiss it as irrelevant.
For the truth to have an effect on those to whom it is told, it matters
when it is told to them – and, obviously, the same goes for political
statements, especially with regard to the ongoing Gaza war.
Soon after October 7 2023, we were bombarded by the photos of
the bodies of Jews burnt in the course of the Hamas attack – a
month or so later Mark Regev, senior adviser to Netanyahu,
admitted the bodies we saw were the bodies of Hamas attackers
burned by IDF: ‘We’ve made a mistake. They are actually bodies
which were so badly burned. In the end, apparently, they were
Hamas terrorists.’ There was another similar case: Israel had to
admit there are no photos of beheaded children. While one has to
praise Israel to admit its mistakes, a suspicion remains: when these
two ‘facts’ were first proclaimed, they circulated all around the

98
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

world, all big media mentioned them, but when the mistake was
admitted, it draw much less attention, so that the rumors about
burned bodies and beheaded children continue to circulate . . . In
short, Israel told a lie at the moment when this had a big world-
wide effect, and it then told the truth when it was clear that it will
be received as a minor correction with no great effect.
Something quite similar happened to me after the ‘scandal’ I’ve
caused with my speech at the Frankfurt book fair on October 17 2023,
where I drew attention also to the long history of Palestinian suffering.
Many Germans who publicly attacked me for my stance approached
me later in private, telling me that they agree with me, but that now it’s
not the moment to say this publicly. My interpretation of their act is:
yes, now it’s not the moment to say it publicly because doing this may
have some real effect – we will be allowed to say it when it will mean
nothing to do it. Freedom to say something problematic is given us
when it doesn’t matter: when the effect of saying something is null
and makes no difference, we are free to say it.65
Another aspect of such manipulations with truth is the
procedure often practiced by Israel: at some point, the official
spokepersons openly admit what they were planning for a long
time but nonetheless denying this is their goal. On January 18 2024
Netanyahu rejected the project of a Palestinian state and promised
that Israel will take over the entire region it currently occupies,
‘from the river to the sea’: ‘And therefore I clarify that in any other
arrangement, in the future, the state of Israel has to control the
entire area from the river to the sea.’ The use of the phrase ‘from the
river to the sea’ has come under particular scrutiny in the last three
months. When Palestinians, or anyone on the left, has used the
phrase to demand a free Palestine—as in the popular chant, ‘From
the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’—those on the right have
disingenuously argued that it is calling for the death of all Jewish
people in Israel. So the same phrase which was till now denounced
as genocidal is now used by Netanyahu . . .66 A month or so ago, I
wrote about how the formula ‘from the river to the sea’ is now de
facto appropriated by Israel. I still mentioned this as an accusation
of what Israel is actually doing and planning but would never admit
in public – now it is used by the Israeli PM himself, a clear case of
the public obscenity of our political discourse.

99
 ZERO POINT

However, to add a finishing touch to this dialectic of truth and

fiction, there are also moments when the most efficient sway to
undermine a lie is not to directly announce the truth but to accept
the lie and undermine it from within, bringing out its implications.
When asked about whose the West Bank is, many Jews (and one
should bear in mind that Jews are among the most atheist nations
in the world) resort to fetishist disavowal: I know well that God
doesn’t exist, but I still believe he gave us the land of Israel . . . The
right atheist reply to this claim is not its direct atheist rejection (if
there is no god, he cannot give you anything). It is much more
efficient to accept the (false) premise and undermine it from within:
OK, it says in the Old Testament that god gave you the land of
Israel – but how exactly did he do it? He ordered the Israelites to
wipe out the entire nation of Amalek who were living there, women
and children included . . .
When Netanyahu referred the Palestinian people in the besieged
Gaza Strip, he invoked the Amalek, a nation in the Hebrew Bible
that the Israelites were ordered to wipe out in an act of revenge:
‘You must remember what Amalek has done to you,’ he said in a
speech announcing the start of a ground invasion in Gaza, adding
that Israeli soldiers were part of a legacy that goes back 3,000
years.’67 Genocide justified by religious fundamentalism . . . This
direct genocidal thinking reached its lowest point when some
geneticists claimed that Palestinians are the descendants of the
Amalekites, plus some archeologists claimed there are proofs
Amalekites were really extraordinary cruel people sacrificing and
torturing children, etc. God save us from such scientists who search
for a truth in order to justify a lie.

21 October 2024

Nothing New On the Western Front (Westen nichts Neues) is the title
of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel about the everyday life on
the front which was twice made into a movie. What goes on now,
on the anniversary of the October 7 attack, around Israel could be
rendered perfectly by a paraphrase of this title: nothing new on the
Middle Eastern front. Although media talk about new and new

100
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

surprising twists (killing of Haniyeh and Nasrallah, Iranian rockets

targeting Israel, Israel invades south Lebanon . . .), it is just becoming
more and more clear what was at stake from the very beginning –
in philosophical terms, things are becoming what they always were,
actualizing their potentials present from the beginning. Recall a
proven but largely ignored fact: Israel was financing Hamas for
years to keep Palestinians divided and thus prevent a two-state
solution – it wants to expand its territory, plus it wants to drag Iran
and the US into war.
From this larger viewpoint we can see clearly how many critics
of Israel miss the point when they claim Israel is failing in its goal
to destroy Hamas, they are just killing Palestinians and ruining
Gaza . . . But what if this IS their true goal? Yes, Israel is just acting
in self-defense itself in Gaza, on the West Bank and in Lebanon –
the catch resides in how I define the ‘self ’ in self-defense. If I occupy
a part of a land that is not mine and proclaim it mine (like the West
Bank, or parts of Ukraine), and if, as expected, the land or the
people there resist, of course I can say that in trying to crush them
I am acting in self-defense . . .
When, at the beginning of the First World War, Germany
invaded Belgium, a Belgian minister said: ‘Whatever historians will
say later about this war, nobody will able to say that Belgium
attacked Germany.’ Today, after Russia brutally invaded Ukraine,
this respect for obvious facts no longer holds: Russia and its allies
effectively claim that Ukraine attacked Russia, and with Israel,
things are similar. When, on October 1 2024, IDF began what it
called a ‘limited ground operation,’68 it was not difficult to note the
verbal resemblance with Russian invasion of Ukraine which Russia
called ‘special military operation’ – not war but . . . in both cases, we
should use the old Groucho Marx quip: ‘It looks like war, it hurts
like war, but this shouldn’t deceive you, it is war.’
At the level of what one cannot but call the decay of public
morality, things are also becoming what they always were. In late
July 2024, a number of ministers and Members of Knesset, as well as
journalists and TV commentators, criticized a raid by the IDF’s
military police on the Sde Teiman base in the south of Israel, in
which it arrested a number of reservists accused of abusing
imprisoned Palestinians.69 These arrests, which also triggered large

101
 ZERO POINT

public protests in Israel, happened after, horrified at what

they saw, some Israeli reservists heroically rendered public that,
among other forms of abuse, the security personnel on the Sde
Teiman base was torturing Palestinian prisoners by pushing metal
sticks into their rectum, which made some of them bleed to death.
Peter Oborne has shown a clip from the following debate in Knesset:

This is insanity, someone in the prosecutor’s office thinks

it’s possible to arrest soldiers for things they do to Nukhba
(Hamas Elite Unit) terrorists. We can’t continue as usual . . .
(INTERJECTION: To insert a stick in a person’s rectum, is this
legitimate?) Shut up! Yes, if he is Nukhba, everything is legitimate
to do. Everything.70

And Oborne has also shown a clip from an Israeli TV debate:

‘Soldiers are suspected of raping a shackled prisoner – this
doesn’t concern you?’ ‘I don’t give a rat’s arse what they do to that
Hamas man. The only problem I see is that it’s not state policy to
abuse detainees. First, they deserve it and it’s a great form of
revenge. Secondly, maybe it will act as a deterrent.’71

This is the lowest point one can envisage – although maybe things
will go even further and we will get a live TV transmission of such
torture . . . (Public tortures were a common practice till the
nineteenth century!) However, just imagine the outcry if Hamas or
Hezbollah were publicly boasting of doing the same to some of the
remaining hostages in Gaza? Would they not be again accused of
being less than animals? This, then, is what we get from ‘the only
democracy in the Middle East’! Can one even imagine what our
reaction would have been if the same thing happened in Russia!
This brings us to the second point: the entire affair was downplayed,
almost ignored, in our big Western media – and this wilful
ignorance – the very opposite of simply not knowing it – resonates
more loudly than all cries, it rings the death knell to the Western
liberal democracy. Democracy will have to be reinvented – by
violence, if necessary.
Eva Illouz’s basic reproach to me is that I present the two sides
as mirror-reflections of each other, both co-responsible for the

102
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

events – she ironically condenses my stance into ‘it takes two to

tango.’ My reply is: yes, but the two caught in a tango embrace are
not Israel and Palestine but the two ultimate enemies bent on each
other’s annihilation, the present government of Israel and Hamas.
They are not the same, they are just in a tango embrace – how?
Crazy as it may sound, to account for what is going on we should
for a moment engage in a conspiracy theory – almost a year ago I
imagined a phone call between Hamas and Israeli hardliners: ‘Hi,
do you remember we discreetly supported you against PLO? Now
you own us a favour: why don’t you attack and slaughter some Jews
close to Gaza, they are in any case Arab friends, peaceniks, we don’t
need them. We have here two problems: civil protests against us,
and the slow ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. The world will be
shocked at your brutality, and we will be able to play a victim again,
get national unity and escalate ethnic cleansing in the West Bank
. . .!’ ‘OK, but we need a counter-favour: in revenge for our
slaughter, promise that you will bomb civilians in Gaza, killing
thousands, especially children – this will give a boost to anti-
Semitism all around the world, which is our true goal!’‘No problem,
we – Israel – also need anti-Semitism to continue to play the role of
a victim which legitimizes us to do what we want!’ ‘So let’s hope this
is the beginning of a new hatred!’
Such an obscene phone call is of course just imagined, but recall
Robert Harris’s The Ghost (filmed by Polanski) in which a
ghostwriter for Adam Lang, the former UK Prime Minister
modelled on Tony Blair, discovers that Lang was planted in the
Labour Party and manipulated all along by the CIA; the New York
Observer commented that the book’s ‘shock-horror revelation’ was
‘so shocking it simply can’t be true, though if it were it would
certainly explain pretty much everything about the recent history
of Great Britain.’ In the same way, the imagined phone call is a
disgusting fiction – but it brings out the objective logic of the
perverse tango going on: it can’t be true, though if it were it would
explain much everything about the recent war in Gaza. In Lacanian
terms, this phone call is not part of reality, but it is real. Since
victims are in principle allowed to strike back, the war gives Israel a
chance of ethnically cleansed Great Israel. Israel’s far-right finance
minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said the ‘voluntary migration’ of

103
 ZERO POINT

Palestinians in Gaza is the ‘right humanitarian solution’ for the

besieged enclave and for the region, a stance Palestinian officials
correctly likened to support of ‘ethnic cleansing’.72
Centuries ago the Dutch colonizers in the far East (probably
Indonesia) submitted a prisoner to a terrible water torture: they
tied him to a tree and then put a narrow tube out of which water
continuously flew into his mouth so that if he wanted to breathe he
had to swallow water. After two hours the prisoner’s belly was
overblown, but he wasn’t yet dead, and the people observing the
torture took this as a proof that he was evil, possessed by the devil
who gave him the unnatural strength to survive his ordeal – in
short, instead of some compassion with the tortured prisoner, his
unexpectedly prolonged survival in terrifying pain triggered hatred
and rage . . . Is this really something alien to our enlightened times?
Is something similar not going on now, in late 2024, in Gaza? The
more the Palestinians survive the genocidal violence of the IDF in
Gaza, the more their unexpected survival is taken as a proof of that
they are all Hamas supporters, while their torturers led by the war
criminal Benjamin Netanyahu fortify their status as warriors
against terror.
The true conflict is thus not between hardliners on both sides
who see war as the only solution and those who accept the other
(Palestinians and Jews) as equal inhabitants in the land between
the river and the sea. But the main danger I see is not that the war
will explode into a wider conflict. Far more dangerous is the
prospect that a new global narrative will emerge in which the
critique of gay and trans rights will be put in the same line as anti-
Semitism, both conceived as forms of the struggle against Western
neocolonialism. The original sin is that of Western European
countries which tried to make amendments for the Holocaust by
giving to Jews a piece of land mostly inhabited for centuries by
other people.
Something radically new happened with the establishment of
the State of Israel: in Reinhard Heydrich’s terms, Zionism won over
assimilationism. How did this shift affect anti-Semitism? The
traditional anti-Semitism which perceived Jews as deracinated/
rootless people was rendered problematic when Zionists themselves
begin to evoke the traditional anti-Semiotic cliché of roots, or, as

104
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

Alain Finkielkraut wrote in 2015 in a letter to le Monde: ‘The Jews,

they have today chosen the path of rooting.’73 It is easy to discern in
this claim an echo of Heidegger who, in his Spiegel interview,
claimed that all essential and great things can only emerge from
our having a homeland, from being rooted in a tradition. The irony
is that we are dealing here with a weird attempt to mobilize anti-
Semitic clichés in order to legitimize Zionism: anti-Semitism
reproaches the Jews for being rootless, and it is as if Zionism tries
to correct this failure by belatedly providing Jews with roots . . . No
wonder many conservative anti-Semites ferociously support the
expansion of the State of Israel.
The trouble with annex-West-Bank Jews today is, of course, that
they are now trying to get roots in a place which was for centuries
of years inhabited by other people. To put it in another way, we
encounter here the ambiguity of the traditional Jewish saying ‘next
year in Jerusalem’ pronounced at the end of Seder (Hebrew: ‘order,’
the religious meal served in Jewish homes on the 15th and 16th of
the month of Nisan to commence the festival of Passover):

Many Jews who believe strongly in the importance of a Jewish

state see ‘next year in Jerusalem’ as an expression of the need to
protect Jerusalem and Israel as they exist today. Others think of
the ‘Jerusalem’ mentioned in the Seder more of an ideal of what
Jerusalem and Israel could be — for them,‘next year in Jerusalem’
is a prayer that Israel will move closer to that ideal. Or ‘Jerusalem’
could just be a symbol of utopia more generally, and ‘next year
in Jerusalem’ could be a resolution to bring peace to Earth in the
coming year.74

There is also a third version which is the worst, a kind of ‘synthesis’

of the first two: now that we have Jerusalem, next year it will be
rebuilt with Palestinian buildings destroyed and a new big temple
constructed again on the site of Al Aksa mosque. The two main
versions reproduce the duality of the transcendental and the
empirical: ‘Jerusalem’ as a non-empirical spiritual site of deliverance
against the city in our material reality. The ‘transcendentalists’ who
reject the beatification of the actual city as a blasphemy and oppose
the State of Israel, are kindly viewed even by some Muslim

105
 ZERO POINT

fundamentalists: when a decade or so ago the Iranian then-

president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad organized a big conference for
the obliteration of the State of Israel in Tehran, and he received
very friendly there some ‘transcendentalist’ rabbis, personally
greeting them. Ahmadinejad was thus the opposite of Heydrich:
Jews in our midst are OK, but the Jewish state is inacceptable . . .
I see a great danger in the short-circuit between the
transcendental and the empirical notion of Jerusalem: it conceives
the struggle for Jerusalem as a sacred task, elevating it to a sacred
crime, a crime which doesn’t make us guilty because it founds the
new legitimate order – in short, it works like a new version of the
old joke ‘In our village there are no cannibals, we ate the last one
yesterday.’ Or, to put it even more brutally, Israel uses the status of
Jews as victims to justify its expansionist local-superpower politics
and is thus itself manipulating and exploiting the memory of the
Holocaust.
The circle is thus fully closed: the German unconditional
support of Israel amounts to the support of the present Israeli
government against the liberal opposition to it which advocates an
understanding for the plea of Palestinians – the German full
support for Israel thus de facto contributes to the growth of anti-
Semitism. Furthermore, the notion of importierter Antisemitismus
advocated now in some circles in Germany in some sense present
the hidden truth of the official anti-anti-Semitism: their claim is
that the new wave of anti-Semitism in Germany is not a German
phenomenon, it was imported there with the Muslim immigrants
– so Germans are clean, the way to fight anti-Semitism it is to limit
and control immigrants . . .
But why, then, are (some) anti-Semitic immigrants who refuse
any solidarity with Israel affecting many young Leftists in the West?
Why did Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ became so viral,
especially among the young, in October and November 2023, at the
time of the Gaza war? What nerve did it hit? One can safely presume
that many of its avid readers also participated in pro-Palestinian
demonstrations against the Israeli bombing of Gaza. However, it is
too fast to conclude that they sympathized with Hamas, considering
it a genuine anti-colonial movement. What attracted the readers
was more the portrait of the US (and of the developed West):

106
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

dominance of the big capital in conjunction with the state apparatus,

neglect of ecological concerns, growing poverty of the exploited
majority . . . Sometimes the line which separates the discontent
in capitalism with pseudo-‘anticapitalist’ populism is very thin –
Bin Laden also advocated open anti-Semitism and Muslim
fundamentalism.

10 November 2024

For a year we were listening to the mantra that Hamas is using

Palestinian civilians as a human shield on the battlefield (which is
why so many civilians were killed in Gaza). However, Israeli media
reported on 23 October 2024 that the IDF has forced Palestinians
to enter potentially booby-trapped houses and tunnels in Gaza to
avoid putting its troops in harm’s way – a soldier reported: ‘We told
them to enter the building before us. If there are any booby traps,
they will explode and not us.’ It was so common in the Israeli
military that it had a name: ‘mosquito protocol.’ When the same
soldier questioned the practice, one of his commanders told him,
‘It’s better that the Palestinian will explode and not our soldiers.’75
The latest obscenity took place on 7 November 2024 when
clashes between Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from Israel and
pro-Palestinian protesters exploded in Amsterdam after the
football match between Ajax and Maccabi. Media presented the
clashes as the attack of pro-Palestinian protesters against the Jews,
and the clashes were condemned by Dutch and Israel government
as a new dangerous outburst of anti-Semitism comparable to
October 7 Hamas attack and even qualified as a new Kristallnacht;
the mayor of Amsterdam advised Jewish citizens of Amsterdam to
stay at home for a couple of days. The full truth is now gradually
emerging:76 already before the match, hundreds of Maccabi Tel
Aviv fans circulated in the center of Amsterdam, tearing down
Palestinian flags from apartment windows, shouting obscene and
openly racist slogans like ‘Fuck the Arabs!’ or ‘There are no schools
open in Gaza because we killed all the children!’ At the beginning
of the match, the Maccabi fans in the tribunes interrupted the
minute of silence for Spanish flood victims (because Spain

107
 ZERO POINT

recognized a Palestinian state) with shouts like ‘Kill the Arabs!’ It is

not clear who started the physical clashes, but indices again point
towards the Maccabi fans. A video clip is circulating in the media as
a proof of the pro-Palestinians’ violence (a Jewish man running
away from a group of pro-Palestinian demonstrators pursuing
him) – however, the author of the clip responded pointing out that
his clip shows a Dutch person pursued by Maccabi mob . . . As
expected, police protected Maccabi mob and even accompanied
them to their hotels to guarantee their safety. However, the most
depressing thing in this affair is a simple comparison: tens of
thousands of dead children and women in Gaza are normalized,
just a small item in our news, while a clash with no deaths is a new
Kristallnacht.

10 December 2024

The fast collapse of the Assad regime in Syria surprised the winners
themselves, the main rebel group HTS led by Abu Mohammad
al-Jolani. Such an unexpected denouement, of course, indicates a
complex invisible background that offers a fertile soil to conspiracy
theories. Did HTS really cut its links with ISIS? Will the new
Islamic rule really be more tolerant towards women as well as other
religions and ethnic groups like the Kurds? The horrors of the
Assad dictatorship should not make us forget the fact that Syria
was till now the only secular state in that region. So will the Syrian
refugees from Europe and Turkey begin to return home or will the
HTS victory trigger a new wave of refugees trying to enter Europe?
And what role did Israel, Turkey, Russia and the US play in this
sudden reversal? Did Russia abstain from intervening more actively
to help Assad just because it cannot afford another military
operation due to the situation in Ukraine, or was there some kind a
deal behind the scene? Did the US again fall into the trap of
supporting Islamists against Russia, ignoring the big lesson from
the past that the winning Islamists will turn against the US, as it
happened in Afghanistan? What role did Israel – which always
favored ISIS against the Shiite Hezbollah – play in this game? What
the IDF is doing now in Gaza and on the West Bank is largely

108
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

ignored by the media, and Israel is already occupying territory in

the south of Syria.
I openly admit that, like most of the commentators, I simply
don’t know enough to risk a judgment on the ongoing events. This
is why I prefer to focus on a more general feature of these events
which we is often passed over in silence: in Syria – as in Afghanistan
after the US withdrawal and even in Iran when Khomeini won –
no big battle took place, the Assad regime supported by Russia – as
well as the Afghani regime kept in power by the US military
presence – just crumbled as a fragile house of cards which needed
just a soft push to fall down. Yes, the Assad regime was universally
despised, but this is not enough as an explanation. Why did the
secular resistance to Assad disappear, so that the Muslim
fundamentalists were the only ones who remained?
This brings us back to the mystery of what went on in
Afghanistan: at the Kabul airport, thousands were desperately
trying to leave the country, individuals hanging onto the planes
taking off and falling from them when the planes are in the air . . .
as if we witness the latest tragic example of the ironic supplement
to old anti-colonialist motto: ‘Yankee go home!’ – Yankee go home
. . . and take me with you! The true enigma resides here in what was
a surprise for the Taliban themselves: how quickly the army
resistance melted down. If thousands are now desperately trying to
catch a flight out of the country and are ready to risk their life to
escape, why didn’t they fight against the Taliban? Why they
obviously preferred dropping to death from a plane in the sky to
death in a battle? To simplify things to the utmost, the armed forces
of the old regime simply did not want to fight, although they were
more numerous and better armed than the insurgents.
It was this very fact that fascinated Michel Foucault who visited
Iran twice in 1979. What fascinated him there was not just the
stance of accepting martyrdom, of indifference with regard to
losing one’s own life – he was ‘engaged in a very specific telling of
the “history of truth”, emphasizing a partisan and agonistic form of
truth-telling, and transformation through struggle and ordeal, as
opposed to the pacifying, neutralizing, and normalizing forms of
modern Western power. Crucial for understanding this point is the
conception of truth at work in historico-political discourse, a

109
 ZERO POINT

conception of truth as partial, as reserved for partisans.’77 As

Foucault himself put it,
if this subject who speaks of right (or rather, rights) is speaking
the truth, that truth is no longer the universal truth of the
philosopher. It is true that this discourse about the general war,
this discourse that tries to interpret the war beneath peace, is
indeed an attempt to describe the battle as a whole and to
reconstruct the general course of the war. But that does not
make it a totalizing or neutral discourse; it is always a perspectival
discourse. It is interested in the totality only to the extent that it
can see it in one-sided terms, distort it and see it from its own
point of view. The truth is, in other words, a truth that can be
deployed only from its combat position, from the perspective of
the sought for victory and ultimately, so to speak, of the survival
of the speaking subject himself.78
Can such an engaged discourse be dismissed as a sign of premodern
‘primitive’ society which didn’t yet enter modern individualism?
And is its revival today to be dismissed as a sign of Fascist regression
(in the way I was a couple of times proclaimed a Left Fascist)?79 To
anyone minimally acquainted with Western Marxism, the answer is
clear: Georg Lukacs demonstrated how Marxism is ‘universally
true’ not in spite of its partiality but because it is ‘partial,’ accessible
only from a particular subjective position. Heidegger often repeated
a critique of Marx’s thesis 11: when we want to change the world,
this change has to be grounded in a new interpretation, and Marx
ignores this presupposition, although his work does exactly this –
offering a new historical-materialist interpretation of history as the
history of class struggles . . .80 Does this reproach hit the mark? One
can argue that Marx has in mind something different: an
interpretation to which the demand for change is immanent, i.e., an
interpretation which is not neutral or impartial since it is only
available to those who are already engaged in an effort to change
reality.
We may agree or disagree with this view, but the fact is that what
Foucault was looking for in far-away Iran – the agonistic (‘war’)
form of truth-telling – was already forcefully present in the Marxist
view that being caught in the class struggle is not an obstacle to

110
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

‘objective’ knowledge of history but its condition. The usual

positivist notion of knowledge as an ‘objective’ (non-partial)
approach to reality which is not distorted by a particular subjective
engagement – what Foucault characterized as ‘the pacifying,
neutralizing, and normalizing forms of modern Western power’ –
is ideology at its purest: the ideology of the ‘end of ideology.’ On the
one hand, we have non-ideological ‘objective’ expert-knowledge, on
the other hand, we have dispersed individuals each of whom is
focused on his/her idiosyncratic ‘care of the Self ’ (the term Foucault
used when he abandoned his Iranian experience), small things that
bring pleasure to his/her life. From this standpoint of liberal
individualism, and universal commitment, especially if it includes
risk of life, is suspicious and ‘irrational’ . . .
Here we encounter an interesting paradox: while it is doubtful if
traditional Marxism can provide a convincing account of the
success of the Taliban, it provided a perfect European example of
what Foucault was looking for in Iran (and of what fascinated us in
Afghanistan and should fascinate us now in Syria), an example
which did not involve any religious fundamentalism but just a
collective engagement for a better life. After the triumph of global
capitalism, this spirit of collective engagement was repressed, and
now this repressed stance seems to return in the guise of religious
fundamentalism. Such a situation is in itself an aspect of the zero
point at which even emancipatory politics coincides with its
opposite. Noam Chomsky often submitted me to a quite brutal
critique, but I must say that I fully subscribe to his statement of the
approaching end of organized society:
we are at a unique moment in human history. Decisions that
must be made right now will determine the course of future
history if there is to be any human history, which is very much
in doubt. There is a narrow window in which we must implement
measures to avert cataclysmic destruction of the environment,
measures that are quite feasible.81
Chomsky targets here our (well orchestrated) indifference towards
the threat to our environment, but I am ready to take the risk and
extend his point to our general unwillingness to fully engage in
political struggles: the ‘decisions that must be made right now’ are

111
 ZERO POINT

eminently political decisions. Europe is today simply not ready to

fight for a big common Cause – even the ‘peaceniks’ who want to end
the Russia-Ukraine war are ultimately defending their comfortable
lives, and they are ready to sacrifice Ukraine for that. Franco Berardi
is fully justified in talking about ‘the disintegration of the Western
world’82 – our very survival as a society depends of regaining the
capacity to mobilize for a cause rooted in European Enlightenment.

A Boring Recapitulation

Since the destructive cycle of violence in the Middle East just goes
on, I will do something that is deeply against my nature: instead of
providing new original twists and turns, I will recapitulate in a
condensed way what I was saying for over a year. Yes, the situation
is so desperate.
I often evoke Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that, if you are attacked for
the same text from both sides of a political divide, this is one of the
few reliable signs you are on the right path. What is happening to
me in the last decades with regard to the Middle East crisis perfectly
illustrates this claim: I was attacked (often on account of the same
text!) for anti-Semitism, up to advocating a new Holocaust, and for
perfidious Zionist propaganda. Now, on the first anniversary of the
October 7 attack, the story goes on. The Palestinian side are
accusing me of taking ‘a shocking moral position that included and
justified Israel’s right to defend itself by killing Gazan civilians.’
Their critical claim is that, together with Juergen Habermas, I

took positions in solidarity with Israel regarding the events of

October 7th, supporting Israel’s right to defend itself without
restrictions. They disagreed with describing Israel’s actions—
killing, starving, and displacing hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian civilians—as genocide. They rationalized that Israel
has the right to retaliate in any manner it deems fit.83

Anyone who followed my numerous comments on the Gaza war will

immediately realize the nonsense of the quoted lines. In my first
reaction, I approvingly quoted the US Secretary of State Antony

112
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

Blinken: ‘Israel has the right, indeed the obligation, to defend itself and
to ensure that this never happens again.’ But he added: ‘How Israel
does this matters. We democracies distinguish ourselves from
terrorists by striving for a different standard. That’s why it’s so
important to take every possible precaution to avoid harming
civilians.’84 So it’s NOT ‘in any manner it deems fit’, and I wrote more
than twenty comments analysing and condemning the acts of IDF
and Israel, which clearly put me on the opposite side to Habermas.
(When on 17 October 2023, I spoke at the opening of the Frankfurt
Book Fair, my focus on Palestinian suffering caused a scandal;
Habermas and three of his colleagues published a letter advocating
solidarity with Israel.85) No wonder, then, that I was even more
frequently attacked by Zionist fundamentalists – here is the last case,
a reaction to my comment on the anniversary of the October 7
attacks:
Slavoj Žižek, a Slovenian Marxist philosopher and director at
the University of London’s Birkbeck Institute, insinuated the
destruction of the Israeli state would result in peace in the
Middle East.86
Again, pure nonsense, so why lose time with what is happening to
me? Because the question that lurks behind is: wherefrom this
strange concord between mortal enemies? The concord occurs
precisely because, as mortal enemies, they share the same
presupposition: no negotiated peace is possible between the
Palestinians and the Jews, the conflict can only be resolved through
a violent victory of one side. There are opponents of Israel who
reduce it to a colonial intrusion into the Arab space and advocate
its complete annihilation, and there are fundamentalist
Zionists who are not realizing Israel from the river to the sea . . .
and more:
In a new documentary, Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich detailed
his desire to conquer not only all Palestinian territory to the
Jordan River but also the Syrian capital of Damascus and
territories extending as far as Iraq and Saudi Arabia: ‘Our great
religious elders used to say that the future of Jerusalem was to
extend as far as Damascus.’87

113
 ZERO POINT

The words of an extremist minority? Yes, not many in Israel talk

like this in public – however, their words render perfectly the logic
of what Israel as a state is doing now . . . What the two opposed sides
reject is the very idea that both ethnic-religious groups between the
river and the sea have a certain right to that land, so that a mode of
coexistence must be found. One of the surprising voice of reasons
comes here from the top of Israeli secret services – recall the words
of Efraim Halevy, the ex-chief of Mossad:
We don’t have the luxury to wait. We have to have a viable policy
which would deal with the presence in this area of the Jews and
the Palestinians. And we are doomed to live together. I don’t
want to say we are doomed to die together. And if our approach
is that we are doomed to live together, we can’t simply live
together with one part of the equation having the upper part
and ignoring the aspirations of the other side. There has to be
the beginning of a meeting of minds.88
Ami Ayalon, a former leader of Shin Bet, said on 14 January 2023
something quite similar: ‘We Israelis will have security only when
they, Palestinians, will have hope. This is the equation.’89 Israel will
not have security until Palestinians have their own state, and Israeli
authorities should release Marwan Barghouti, jailed leader of the
second intifada, to direct negotiations to create one:

Look into the Palestinian polls. He is the only leader who can
lead Palestinians to a state alongside Israel. First of all because
he believes in the concept of two states, and secondly because he
won his legitimacy by sitting in our jails.90

We can, of course, engage here in the game of suspicion and dismiss

such comments as a hypocritical publicity stunts (saying something
you know well there is no chance to realize it). However, to do this is
the greatest error because it ignores the basic lesson of Alcoholics
Anonymous: fake it till you make it. There is a chance we might get
caught into something we only pretend to do. But the basic tragedy is
that we all know mutual recognition is the only way to prevent a total
war, so mutual recognition is simultaneously impossible and necessary
– in Lacanian terms, it is the only Real in the destructive mess of reality.

114
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

To avoid a fatal misunderstanding: I am not saying both

sides are ultimately the same. Although there is a widespread
tendency among Palestinians and other Arabs to want to destroy
Israel, it is now Israel who wants a much wider war, and the
tragedy is that voices of common sense which state this publicly are
either ignored or dismissed as extreme. Ehud Olmert, the ex-Prime
Minister of Israel, wrote back in August 2024 than ‘while
Israel battles multiple fronts, its gravest threat is simmering from
within’ – from its new messianic Right which wants to get rid of
Palestinians:
We have to find a way to live in peace with those people, to let
them exercise their right for self-determination and establish
their own independent state alongside the State of Israel — and
not fight them and not persecute them and not lynch them, as
some of those hilltop youth are doing almost on a daily basis. Of
course we have to fight against our outside enemies. But the
danger that comes from within is a danger that we have to cope
with forcefully, without hesitation, to bring Israel back into the
basic values and fundamental principles upon which the State of
Israel was established.91
If, today, you say that the greatest danger is Israel itself in Germany
or France, you are immediately dismissed as anti-Semitic . . . The
true background of the 7 October 2023 attack remains to be
explored, especially the fact that for long years Israel financed
Hamas to keep Palestinians divided (a fact proven by direct
recording of the statements by Netanyahu and Smotrich). Bernard-
Henri Levy recently spoke about the ‘solitude of Israel’ which, from
1945 (even before it was established as a state), has to confront the
threat of being abandoned by the West92 . . . really? The stance of the
US and (most of) Western Europe is exactly the opposite one:
while rhetorically expressing reservations about how Israel acts in
Gaza and on the West Bank, at the level which really matters
(financial and military support of Israel) nothing is really changing.
Israel is thus alone only in the sense that it can act in whatever way
it wants, ignoring the critical recommendations or ‘worries’ of its
allies. It is true that on 15 October 2024 US gave Israel 30 days to
address the Gaza aid crisis, threatening to curb weapons supply if

115
 ZERO POINT

Israel doesn’t comply with this demand,93 but we are still far from
real pressure. The power and influence of Israel stand alone,
revealed in its nakedness.
When it became known that on 16 October 2024 Yahya Sinwar
was accidentally killed by an Israeli tank, media reported that
‘US officials have long looked to Sinwar’s eventual death as a
key opportunity to end the Israel-Hamas war.’94 My immediate
reaction was: Netanyahu’s eventual death would offer another
opportunity to end the war. In the same way I shed to tears for
Sinwar, I would also shed no tears for Netanyahu: two criminals
who should be buried together with a simple inscription on their
grave: ‘Some people are like clouds. When they disappear, it’s a
beautiful day.’ Or, to paraphrase the famous lines from Gilbert and
Sullivan’s Mikado, I’ve got both of them on my list, and none of
them will be missed!
There is no doubt that a deep desire for peace and reconciliation
lies dormant in Israel: when Sadat visited Jerusalem on 19
November 1977, thousands of Israelis waved their newly purchased
red-white-and-black Egyptian flags. However, in the last decades,
this desire for all practical purposes disappeared – ‘from the river
to the sea’ is now Israel’s official policy supported by a large majority
of Jewish population. Where are now those who years ago were
attacking anyone who used the slogan ‘from the river to the sea’
with the accusation that it implies the rejection of the two states
solution? They, of course, don’t protest now when Israel itself uses
this formula . . . During a video address directed at the people of
Lebanon on 8 October 2024, Netanyahu said:
You have an opportunity to save Lebanon before it falls into the
abyss of a long war that will lead to destruction and suffering
like we see in Gaza. I say to you, the people of Lebanon: Free
your country from Hezbollah so that this war can end.’95
Beneath these lines it is easy to discern a rather terrifying logic: if
you, the people of Lebanon, will not join us – Israel – in annihilating
Hezbollah, your country will be full of ruins and suffering like
Gaza is now . . . Try to imagine the silent majority of Lebanon,
traumatized and confused, regularly bombed by IDF – how could
they now actively join IDF in its efforts when Hezbollah ‘hands out

116
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

food, cash and medicines to people displaced in the conflict’: to

families which were displaced twice, ‘regular deliveries of meals,
food parcels and even cleaning supplies from organizations
connected to the group have kept them afloat.’96 The only way for
Israel to win the hearts of (some) Gazans and Shias from Lebanon
would be to do itself something similar, instead of destroying
hospitals and legitimizing starvation as a strategy.
The bias in how Western media report on the war is reaching
ridiculous dimensions. When an Israeli soldier shoots to death a
girl no more than three or four years old, the Sky report says:
‘it looks like accidentally a stray bullet found its way into the
van ahead and that killed a three- or four-year-old young lady.’
When a Hezbollah rocket hits a military facility in northern Israel
and kills four soldiers – a military target! - their names, photos and
age (19 years) are displayed, personalizing them to evoke
sympathy.97
On 14 October 2024, at least four people were killed after an
Israeli airstrike hit near the grounds of al-Aqsa hospital in the
central Gaza city of Deir al-Balah, causing a fire that engulfed
several tents housing displaced Palestinians. Footage showed
people desperately trying to extinguish the flames as explosions
could be heard within the camp, while we see children attached to
IV drips burning alive and desperately trying to escape fire.98 One
should remember how, days after the 7 October 2023 attack, there
were reports about charred and decapitated children left behind by
Hamas – weeks later, these reports were withdrawn by IDF itself
(making Joe Biden seem ridiculous when he claimed that he has
seen photos of beheaded children). Now, we see actual shots of
children burned by Israeli bombs, but this is, of course, just the
result of Israeli self-defence for which Hamas is responsible . . .
Such events explain a strange fact noted by many observers:
children in Gaza who are continuously exposed to brutal events
very rarely show signs of post-traumatic stress – why? Because they
live in a permanent traumatic situation: they don’t have time to
experience a traumatic event as a horror which occurred to them.
In order to survive, they have to just go on with their lives with
attention to dangers – a post-traumatic stress is already a form of
relaxation.

117
 ZERO POINT

In his speech to the US Congress Netanyahu said ‘Give us the

tools faster and we’ll finish the job faster,’ and this sentence was
greeted by a standing ovation – now we see how Israel is effectively
finishing its genocidal job faster. Western ‘critics’ who supply arms
to Israel often claim that Israel has no clear plan or defined goal it
is trying to achieve – this claim is again pure nonsense, Israel has a
very clear long-term plan: to sabotage negotiations in order to
expand its territory and create Great Israel.
We all know the saying that peace negotiations are needed with
enemies, not with friends. Netanyahu’s ‘choice’ is thus a total fake: as
in Gaza, its true aim is not the destruction of Hezbollah but the
Gaza-like destruction of a good part of Lebanon. Here is Bernard
Henri-Levy’s comment on Israel’s invasion into Lebanon:
Israel is not invading Lebanon, it is liberating it. This is a historic
moment, not only for the Israelis, but for the Lebanese, Arabs,
Kurds and Eastern Christians. To not understand this is to have
lost all moral and political compass.99
Yes, and this compass shows also that Israel in the same way
liberated Gaza and is liberating West Bank . . . The fact that Israel
proclaimed Antonio Guterres, the UN general secretary, persona
non grata is just the tip of the iceberg: IDF attacks peace-keeping
forces in Lebanon, it limits the activity of the UN personnel which
provides food and medicine in Gaza, plus it occasionally even
bombs it . . . in short, it treats UN at best as an irrelevant factor to be
ignored, mostly as an obstacle, and at worst as an enemy. While it is
easy to laugh at the irrelevance and impotence of the UN, the fact is
not only that its organs do important work in preventing famine
and providing minimal health care. Precisely because the UN are
perceived as a weak neutral network, they are (more or less)
tolerated by all sides to do some humanitarian work – a state doesn’t
risk its power if it allows UN bodies to operate in its territory.
When, in March 2024, the UN Special Rapporteur on the
situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
said there are ‘reasonable grounds’ to believe that Israel is
committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, as well as when
Netanyahu and Gallant were charged with crimes of extermination,
persecution and starvation in the situation in Palestine, these

118
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

statements were taken as symbolic acts with no prospect of being

really enforced – but they at least caused a certain public outcry.
Now such voices are simply ignored. The power of the UN
paradoxically resides in its very impotence: the UN is the only
remaining space of dialogue and negotiation, the only diplomatic
body in which all sides participate, the only organization offering a
legal space for negotiations – its power resides in its very impotent
neutrality. Without UN there is just wilderness where local
pragmatic alliances occur from time to time and where raw military
force ultimately decides.
As we have already seen, Israel now treats in a similar way even
its closest allies: it just ignores Biden’s or Macron’s ‘warnings.’ The
terrifying prospect of the near future is thus clearly visible: in its
‘self-defense,’ Israel will be ‘forced’ to transform into Gaza-like ruins
more and more of its neighboring land: West Bank, Lebanon (on
15 October 2024, Israel already ordered the evacuation of one
quarter of Lebanon territory) . . . and who knows which country
will follow. On the opposite side, hardline Arabs are not only ready
to accept such immense casualties but even solicit it, aware that the
daily images of the horrors committed by the IDF will give a new
boost to anti-Semitism. And, in yet another turn of the screw, the
new explosion of anti-Semitism will enable Israel to present itself
as a state whose very existence is under threat, and to entice the US
and some Western European countries to intervene on behalf of
Israel, all this leading to a global geopolitical catastrophe: Israel and
the developed West against the Third World ‘anti-imperialist’
majority including countries like North Korea and Afghanistan:
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said on October 4 2024 that a decision
to remove the Taliban from a list of terrorist organizations had
been ‘taken at the highest level.’ Putin said in July that Russia
considered Afghanistan’s the Taliban movement an ally in the
fight against terrorism.100
This step seems quite logical: if Russia considers North Korea
and Iran (which a couple of years ago crushed big feminist
demonstrations) its key allies, why not go to the end and include in
the list Afghanistan with its unheard-of oppression of women? At
the end of October 2024, the Taliban have implemented a bizarre

119
 ZERO POINT

new edict that will further curb the voices of women who are
already prohibited from speaking in public. ‘Even when an adult
female prays and another female passes by, she must not pray
loudly enough for them to hear . . . How could they be allowed to
sing if they aren’t even permitted to hear [each other’s] voices while
praying, let alone for anything else,’ Mohammad Khalid Hanafi, the
Taliban minister for the propagation of virtue and the prevention
of vice, declared. After banning women’s voices from public, the
Taliban’s ministry of vice and virtue thus banned women from
speaking to each other: a woman’s voice is considered awrah,
meaning that which must be covered, and shouldn’t be heard in
public, even by other women, the minister said.101 A truly great ally
in the struggle against terror!
The umbrella of anti-colonial struggle will thus cover the large
majority of countries which limit women’s rights and sexual
freedoms. Who now still remembers that a year before October 7
2023, the entire power structure of Iran was shattered by mass
protests after Iranian Revolutionary Guard murdered in prison
Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish girl who refused to cover her head
properly? In new conditions, feminist protests with authentic
revolutionary power will largely become a thing of the past, and we
will find ourselves in a world of unholy alliances between pro-Putin
‘Leftists’ and Muslim fundamentalists. We enter the era of violent
struggles along the false lines of distinction (where oppressing
women means anti-colonialism, where bombing big cities to ruins
means fight against terrorism), and we should entertain no illusions
here: false struggles are as a rule much more destructive than
struggles for an authentic emancipatory cause. So yes, it
unfortunately is true that ‘as North Korea, Iran and China support
Russia’s war, is a ‘new axis’ emerging,’ but this axis is, if anything,
worse and more dangerous than the old imperialist axis.
This is why we should unconditionally reject the parallel
between Israel and Ukraine, i.e., the claim that, in both cases, if the
West stops giving arms, the war will be soon over. This claim is true,
but its implications are totally different: in the case of Ukraine, it
means full Russian occupation with the obliteration of Ukrainians
as a nation, while in the case of Israel, it is the only way to stop
Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinian territories and to compel it

120
 W H E I S T H E R IG H T T I M E T O SP E A K

to engage in serious negotiations. To quote Henri-Levy, but in the

sense opposite to his intention: ‘To not understand this is to have
lost all moral and political compass.’
With regard to Ukraine, I fully agree with Etienne Balibar who
wrote: ‘I will say that the war of Ukrainians against the Russian
invasion is fair, in the strongest sense of that word. [. . .] I don’t feel
enthusiastic, but I make my choice: against Putin.’102 I also ‘don’t feel
enthusiastic’ in view of many political misjudgments and
inacceptable stances of Ukraine (suffice it to mention its full
support of Israel), but support for Ukraine, with arms also, should
go on.
So I don’t really fear that the Middle East war can explode into a
world-wide conflict: none of the engaged parties really wants it and
is ready to use nuclear arms. Plus one should always bear in mind
that many Arab states which ferociously criticize Israel pose no
threat whatsoever to Israel’s military expansion – Egypt, Emirates,
Saudi Arabia, Jordan, even Syria. The Jordan king’s rhetorical
explosions against Israel should not make us forget that Jordan
helped Israel in shooting Iranian missiles on their way across
Jordan to Israel.
Since Israel perceives Iran as the main instigator who pulls the
strings behind the scene and supplies arms to Hamas and Hezbollah,
no wonder that Netanyahu recently gave some hints that Israel
(together with whom?) is laying the ground for the change of
regime in Iran (for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic). However,
I still think that the new tensions provoked by Israel (Lebanon,
Iran) are ultimately meant to distract attention from Gaza and
especially West Bank where the ethnic cleansing is going on and
more and more ‘normalized,’ reported as an item of weather news.
One can easily imagine that, if Israel will not react too brutally to
Hezbollah and Iran, it will emerge out of all this being celebrated as
a force of peace which with its moderation prevented a global
catastrophe. The true catastrophe will be the described change in
international relations and the normalization of local wars.
But does this conclusion not sound all too cold and distant?
Horrible things are happening, so where are my shock and my
compassionate feeling of pain (or rage at least)? My brutal frank
answer: there is none. I consider the old phrase ‘I feel your pain’

121
 ZERO POINT

(propagated among others by Bill Clinton) the ultimate form of

hypocritical fake. There is a secret jouissance in every compassion,
in every sympathy for a victim: what I enjoy is that it is an other at
a safe distance from me with whom I sympathize, and my sympathy
and compassion are ultimately a means to keep this other at a safe
distance. That’s why the rich like to give money for charity – to
bribe those who suffer to stay where they are. I don’t want to give
charity, I want to fight with them so that they will not need my
charity, and I know well this can be a quite brutal struggle full of
blood and victims.
In this sense, let me finish with what, without any doubt, is a
crazy dream, an idea of what would have been a true act by Hamas:
to do what it did on October 7 2023 (violently break into Israel, an
act it has the full right to accomplish), but when reaching the
kibbutz to just greet the inhabitants, give them some flowers or
fruits, and then withdraw back to Gaza.

122
 Appendix: Frankfurt Speech
October 2023

17 October 2023

Speech delivered at the opening ceremony of the

Frankfurt Book Fair.
I am proud to be here, at a book fair because books are today
needed more than ever – without them, there is no solution to the
terrifying Gaza war – why? I unconditionally condemn the Hamas
attack on Israelis close to Gaza border, without any ifs and buts, and
I give Israel the right to defend itself and destroy the threat.
However, I noticed a strange thing: the moment one mentions the
need to analyse the background of the situation, one is as a rule
accused of supporting or justifying Hamas terrorism. Are we aware
how weird this prohibition to analyse is?
The title of a recent dialogue on anti-Semitism and BDS in Der
Spiegel was: ‘Wer Antisemit ist, bestimmt der Jude und nicht der
potenzielle Antisemit’ (‘Who is an anti-Semite determines the Jew
and not the potential anti-Semite’). OK, sounds logical, the victim
itself should decide if it is really a victim. But does not the same
also hold for Palestinians who should be able to determine who is
stealing their land and depriving them of their elementary rights?
However, by analysing the background I certainly don’t mean the
utter fatuity masquerading as a deep wisdom: ‘An enemy is someone
whose story you have not heard.’ Really? While insisting that the
Holocaust cannot be ‘understood’, Primo Levi introduced here a
key distinction between understanding and knowing: ‘We cannot
understand it, but we can and must understand from where it
springs. . . . If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative,
because what happened could happen again.’1
Here are the two main stories about Israel today. Ismail Haniyeh,
the leader of Hamas who lives comfortably in Dubai, said on the
123
 ZERO POINT

day of the attack: ‘We have only one thing to say to you: get out of
our land. Get out of our sight… This land is ours, al-Quds
[Jerusalem] is ours, everything [here] is ours… There is no place or
safety for you.’ Clear and disgusting - but did the Israeli government
not say something similar, although not in such a brutal way? Here
is the first of the official ‘basic principles’ of Israel’s present
government: ‘The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable
right to all parts of the Land of Israel. The government will promote
and develop the settlement of all parts of the Land of Israel — in
the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan and Judea and Samaria.’ Or, as
Netanyahu stated: ‘Israel is not a state of all its citizens’ but ‘of the
Jewish people - and only it.’ Does this ‘principle’ not exclude any
serious negotiations? Palestinians are strictly treated as a problem,
the State of Israel never offered them any hope, positively outlining
their role in the state they live in. Beneath all the polemics about
‘who is more of a terrorist’ lies as a heavy dark cloud the mass of
Palestinian Arabs who are for decades kept in a limbo, exposed to
daily harassment by settlers and by the Israeli state. Who are they,
which is the land they live in? Occupied territory, West Bank, Judea
and Samaria… or the State of Palestine which is currently
recognized by 139 of the 193 United Nations member states.2
The first generation of Israeli leaders (from Ben Gurion to
Moshe Dayan) spoke a totally different language: they openly
confessed that their claims to the land of Palestine cannot be
grounded in universal justice. On 29 April 1956, there was an
incident concerning Gaza: a group of Palestinians from Gaza that
had crossed the border to plunder the harvest in the Nahal Oz
kibbutz’s fields; Roi, a young Jewish member of the kibbutz who
patrolled the fields galloped toward them on his horse to chase
them away; he was seized by the Palestinians and when the UN
returned his body, his eyes had been plucked out. Moshe Dayan,
then the Chief of Staff, delivered the eulogy at his funeral the
following day:
‘Let us not cast blame on the murderers today. What claim do we
have against their mortal hatred of us? They have lived in the
refugee camps of Gaza for the past eight years, while right before
their eyes we have transformed the land and villages where they
and their ancestors once lived into our own inheritance.’

124
 A P P E N D I X : F R A N K F U RT SP E E C H O C T O B E R 2 0 2 3

Can one imagine a similar statement today? How far we are from
the situation a couple of decades ago when we were talking about a
‘land for peace’ agreement, about the two states solution, when even
today’s staunchest supporters of Israel were putting pressure on it not
to build settlements in the West Bank! In 1994, Israel built a wall
separating the West Bank from 1967 Israel, thereby recognizing the
West Bank as a special entity. All this has now vanished into thin air.
The emblem of today’s Israeli government is Itamar Ben-Gvir. He
entered politics by joining the youth movement of the Kach and
Kahane Chai party, which was designated as a terrorist organization
and outlawed by the Israeli government itself. When he came of age
for conscription into the Israel Defense Forces at 18, he was barred
from service due to his extreme-right political background. And such
a person condemned by Israel itself as a racist and terrorist is now the
Israeli Minister for National Security who should safeguard the rule
of law… Remember the great conflict that divided Israel in the last
months. Commenting on the measures proposed by the Netanyahu
government, Yuval Harari put it brutally: ‘This is definitely a coup.
Israel is on its way to becoming a dictatorship.’ Israel was split between
nationalist fundamentalists trying to abolish key features of the legal
state power, and the civil society members aware of this threat. With
the Hamas attack, the crisis is (temporarily, at least) over, the spirit of
national unity prevailed - in a classic political move, inner split is
overcome when both sides are united against an external enemy.
Perhaps, the first thing to do is to clearly recognize the massive
despair and confusion that can give birth to acts of evil – in short,
there will be no peace in the Middle East without resolving the
Palestinian question. The second thing is to accept that the solution
is NOT a compromise, a ‘right measure’ between the two extremes, in
the sense of ‘one can understand elements of anti-Semitism among
the Palestinians due to the situation in occupied territories’ or ‘one
can understand Israeli occupation due to their horrible experience
of anti-Semitic violence’… There is nothing to ‘understand’ here, one
should rather go to the end in BOTH directions, in the defence of the
Palestinian rights as well as in fighting anti-Semitism. The two fights
are two moments of the same fight - especially today when anti-
Semitic Zionists flourish – people who are anti-Semitic but support
Israel’s expansion, from - yes – Reinhard Heydrich to Breivik and the

125
 ZERO POINT

US religious fundamentalists. Those who think there is a

‘contradiction’ in this stance of mine suffer a total moral
disorientation.
Arthur Koestler voiced a bitter truth: ‘If power corrupts, the
reverse is also true; persecution corrupts the victims, though perhaps
in subtler and more tragic ways.’ This holds for both sides in the
ongoing war. My ultimate hero Marek Edelman saw this clearly.
Edelman took part in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and also in
the city-wide 1944 Warsaw Uprising. After the war, when his wife and
children emigrated in the wake of the growing anti-Semitic campaign
in 1968, he decided to stay in Poland, comparing himself to the stones
of the ruined buildings at the site of the Auschwitz camp: ‘Someone
had to stay here with all those who perished here, after all.’ From the
1970s, he collaborated with the Workers’ Defense Committee; as a
member of Solidarity, he took part in the Polish Round Table Talks of
1989. Towards the end of his life, Edelman publicly defended
Palestinian resistance, claiming that the Jewish self-defence for which
he had fought was in danger of crossing the line into oppression. In
August 2002, he wrote an open letter to the Palestinian resistance
leaders written ‘in a spirit of solidarity from a fellow resistance fighter,
as a former leader of a Jewish uprising not dissimilar in desperation
to the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories,’ although he, of
course, condemned violent attacks. To disqualify Edelman as a ‘self-
hating Jew’ would have been the ultimate obscenity.
Why am I saying this here in Frankfurt, at the Buchmesse?
Because only through reading books can we became aware of the
situation – literature is still the privileged medium to render
palpable the deep ambiguity and complexity of our predicament.
And that’s why I was shocked when I learned that the award
ceremony for the Palestinian author Adania Shibli was postponed
– a decision I consider scandalous. Terrorism against Israel
contradicts all the values of the Frankfurt Book -- yes, and so does
the collective punishment of millions in Gaza as well as the
cancellation of Adana Shibli. So I am not only proud to be here, I
am also ashamed. Try to imagine what Marek Edelman would say
if he were to be alive today!

126
 Notes

Zero Point

1. Quoted from www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/feb/x01.

htm.
2. The End of Organized Humanity Noam Chomsky.
3. The American Unconscious and the Disintegration of the Western
World | In the Moment.

Everything is Not Going to be OK

1. Private communication.
2. Private communication.
3. Private communication.
4. Private communication.
5. Private communication.
6. Private communication.
7. The Left has a post-truth problem too. It’s called comedy. – Los
Angeles Times.
8. I follow here Alenka Zupančič (private conversation).

All Words are Not Equal

1. See Salman Rushdie Says A Free Palestine Would Be A “Taliban-Like

State” (ndtv.com),
2. France backs ICC after arrest warrant for Israeli, Hamas leaders
(rfi.fr).

127
 NOTES

3. US threates ICC, warning ‘If they [prosecute] Israel, we’re next!’

(youtube.com).
4. OROŽJE ZA IZRAEL NA LADJI BORKUM? Ob 17. uri pred mestno
hišo v Kopru napovedan protest (regionalobala.si).
5. Quoted in Ian H. Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism, New York:
Berghahn Books, 2004, p. 166.

What Hysterics Only Dream About

1. Thanks to Mladen Dolar for his analysis on the link between shame
and ’68 events. (Private communication.)
2. Airdropped aid kills 3-year-old Palestinian boy in Gaza, family says |
CNN.
3. Israeli soldiers returning from Gaza war struggle with trauma and
suicide | CNN.
4. See ’10 November 2024’ in Part 2 of this book.
5. Book-17-Psychoanalysis-upside-down-the-reverse-side-of-
psychoanalysis.pdf.
6. Miller, J.-A. “On Shame, “Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of
Psychoanalysis, ed. Justin Clemens and Russel Grigg (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006).
7. For Shame – The Lacanian Review.
8. Storyline condensed from Juror No. 2 – Wikipedia.
9. Mazan rapes – Wikipedia.
10. ‘Her Story’: China’s answer to ‘Barbie’ becomes latest smash hit – but
some men are not amused | CNN.
11. Self Unhelped | Sydney Review of Books.

Worlds Blown Into Space

1. The government has approved a list of countries imposing alien

values on Russia — EADaily, September 21st, 2024 — Politics, Russia.
2. Medvedev raises spectre of Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine | Reuters.
3. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/10/europe/russia-putin-empire-
restoration-endgame-intl-cmd/index.html.

128
 NOTES

4. Putin reveals new rules on nuclear weapons in Russia’s latest threat

(cnbc.com).
5. Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, Delo (in Slovene), Ljubljana July 13 2024,
p. 11.
6. Governor of Russia’s Kaliningrad says German philosopher
Immanuel Kant ‘directly tied’ to war in Ukraine — Meduza.
7. Op.cit.
8. The Patriarch of Putin, on the nuclear danger: Christians should not
fear the end of the world (Video) – spotmedia.ro.
9. Quoted from Ecce Homo – Friedrich Nietzsche | Classicly.
10. See Alain Badiou, The Century, Cambridge: Polity Press 2007.
11. Quoted from The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Will to Power,
Book I and II, by Friedrich Nietzsche.
12. Clarice Lispector on Threads.

Heroes of the Metaverse

1. See the Wikipedia entry for ‘A.J. & Big Justice’ (https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/A.J._%26_Big_Justice, last accessed 27 January 2025).
2. ‘Scientists fear Trump will erase public research, here’s what they are
doing’, CNN report presented by René Marsh, 19 November 2024
(https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/19/science/video/internet-archives-
research-science-data-fears-trump-contd-digvid, last accessed 27
January 2025).
3. Robert Booth, ‘Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more
political content’, The Guardian, 7 January 2025 (https://www.
theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/07/meta-facebook-instagram-
threads-mark-zuckerberg-remove-fact-checkers-recommend-
political-content, last accessed 27 January 2025).
4. See Josh Marcus, ‘Vivek Ramaswamy blames 90s sitcom for tech
companies hiring immigrant workers in misspelled X post’, The
Independent, 27 December 2024 (https://www.independent.co.uk/
news/world/americas/us-politics/vivek-ramaswamy-trump-
musk-b2670277.html, last accessed 27 January 2025).
5. Quoted in Cihan Tuğal, ‘The Rise of the Leninist Right’, Verso Books
blog, 20 January 2018 (https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3577-the-
rise-of-the-leninist-right, last accessed 27 January 2025).

129
 NOTES

6. Mary Papenfuss, ‘ “We’re going to rip your face off ” in visa fight, Steve
Bannon warns Elon Musk’, The Independent, 2 January 2025 (https://
www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/elon-
musk-h1b-visa-steve-bannon-b2672621.html, last accessed 27
January 2025).
7. See the Wikipedia entry for ‘Hemedti’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Hemedti, last accessed 27 January 2025).
8. See ‘Inside Sudan’s civil war – Watch the full documentary’, PBS
NewsHour YouTube channel, 16 September 2024 (https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=aSU9u-GlRMs&ab_channel=PBSNewsHour,
last accessed 27 January 2025).
9. See Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
(London: Vintage, 2024).
10. Eoin McSweeney and Adam Pourahmadi, ‘2% of Elon Musk’s wealth
could solve world hunger, says director of UN food scarcity
organization’, CNN, 1 November 2021 (https://edition.cnn.
com/2021/10/26/economy/musk-world-hunger-wfp-intl/index.html,
last accessed 27 January 2025).
11. Jim Waterson and Dan Milmo, ‘Facebook whistleblower Frances
Haugen calls for urgent external regulation’, The Guardian, 25 October
2021 (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/25/
facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-calls-for-urgent-external-
regulation, last accessed 27 January 2025).
12. Douglas Rushkoff, ‘What Zuckerberg’s metaverse means to our
humanity’, CNN, 29 October 2021 (https://edition.cnn.
com/2021/10/28/opinions/zuckerberg-facebook-meta-rushkoff/
index.html, last accessed 27 January 2025).

Death Cramps

1. Quoted from http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2012/02/14/the-global-

minotaur-interviewed-by-naked-capitalism/#more-1753.
2. Trillion-Dollar Coin: Meaning, Examples, and Use Cases
(investopedia.com).
3. Personal communication.
4. Yanis Varoufakis, private communication.

130
 NOTES

5. Trump threatens 100% tariff on BRICS countries if they pursue

creating new currency | CNN Politics.
6. Edini sogovornik Xi Jinpinga je zahodni kapital – Delo (in Slovene).
7. Xi Jinping meets Bill Gates in China, calls him ‘an old friend’ |
Reuters.
8. Lessons from Syria: An imperialist’s enemy is not always an anti-
imperialist’s friend – Yanis Varoufakis.
9. Afghan women ‘banned from hearing each other’ in bizarre new
Taliban rule | The Independent.
10. Home is the most dangerous place for women, says global femicide
report | Femicide | The Guardian.
11. See DEBATE: The West, DEI & Slavery – Konstantin Kisin, Yanis
Varoufakis & Cynthia Miller-Idriss.
12. Xi’s article on cultural heritage, fine traditional Chinese culture to be
published-Xinhua (news.cn).
13. The Banking System in the Nazi Military and War Economy
(Youtube).
14. Op.cit.

Part 2. When is the Right Time to Speak

1. Plus what annoyed my critics is that I quoted (positively) exclusively

Jewish names (Amy Ayalon, Moshe Dayan, Simon Wiesenthal, Marek
Edelman . . .).
2. There are also numerous brutal disqualification – see, for example,
Fuck you, Slavoj Žižek!. So much for this ‘radical’ ‘Leftist’ . . . | by
Shaykh Socrates | Oct, 2023 | Medium.
3. The 75th Frankfurt Book Fair Comes to An End in Germany | The
Gaze. (As is often the case these days) the words between ‘ and ‘ are
NOT a quote from my text, although they are presented as a quote.)
4. Hamas-Terror: Das Böse der Hamas hat keinen Kontext | ZEIT
ONLINE.
5. On 28 June 2023, Reuters reported that the State Secretary Antony
Blinken ‘conveyed concern’ about it, and, as expected, he got principled
promises that Israel will look into it.# How will this be done with
Itamar Ben Gvir as the National Security Minister is not clear – Ben

131
 NOTES

Gvir announced on 10 October 2023 that his ministry is purchasing

10,000 rifles to arm civilian security teams, specifically those in towns
close to Israel’s borders around the country, as well as mixed Jewish-
Arab cities and West Bank settlements. Ben Gvir says 10,000 assault
rifles purchased for civilian security teams | The Times of Israel.
6. Quoted from Hildegard Knef Sings ‘Mackie Messer’ in German
(thoughtco.com).
7. See ‘World’s Deadliest Wars Go Unreported’: Journalist Anjan
Sundaram | Democracy Now!.
8. Judith Butler · The Compass of Mourning · LRB 13 October 2023.
9. Among dozens of video clips, let me mention just one, by far not the
most violent but, for me at least, the most depressing. It depicts a settler
harassing a group of Palestinian farmers working on their land,
humiliating and abusing them, claiming this land is not theirs, scattering
around their sacks with seed plus provocatively standing breast to breast
with some Palestinians and shouting at them things like ‘Why do you
not hit me? Are you a man?’ – all this with the silent presence of some
Israeli soldiers in the background who do nothing . . . Can we imagine
what would have happened if a Palestinian farmer were to do this to a
group of settlers? Israeli settlers stop Palestinian farmers from working
their land in front soldiers, Hebron district – YouTube.
10. 2 Palestinians killed after settlers said to ambush funeral in West
Bank – The Times of Israel. Here is one case: two Palestinians were
killed after Israeli settlers opened fire on a funeral procession near the
West Bank town of Qusra, south of Nablus. ‘Ambulances were
carrying the bodies of four Palestinians who were shot dead a day
earlier, reportedly also by Israeli settlers, when settlers arrived at the
scene and attempted to halt the funeral procession. One of the
ambulance drivers was quoted by Haaretz as saying that ‘the
settlers were waiting there. They blocked the gate, started firing
on us and other people who had come for the funeral.” The official
reaction? ‘The IDF said that a number of Palestinian casualties
were reported following clashes between settlers and Palestinians
in the village where the funeral was about to take place, and that
the incident is under investigation.’ A lone incident? ‘There have
been repeated incidents over the past year of young settlers
violently raiding villages in rampages that have led to a handful
of Palestinian deaths, scores injured and significant property damage.
The assailants are rarely arrested, let alone prosecuted for their
actions.’

132
 NOTES

11. One should note the weird similarity between the Palestinians to
whom the only place they ever knew as their homeland is denied and
the Jews themselves – this homology holds even for the term
‘terrorism’: in the years of the Jewish struggle against the British
military in Palestine, the very term ‘terrorist’ had a positive
connotation. In the late 1940s, American newspapers published an ad
with the headline ‘Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine,’ containing
these sentences: ‘My Brave Friends. You may not believe what I write
you, for there is a lot of fertilizer in the air at the moment. The
Palestinians of America are for you.’ This text was written by none
other than Ben Hecht, the celebrated Hollywood scriptwriter.
Resistance of an oppressed group against the legal power is by
definition perceived by those in power as terror . . .
12. The fate of Ben-Gvir is the clearest indicator of this shift. Before
entering politics, he was known to have a portrait in his living room
of Israeli-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994
massacred twenty-nine Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded
125 others in Hebron, in what became known as the Cave of the
Patriarchs massacre – and this person condemned by Israel itself as a
racist is now the Minister for National Security who should safeguard
the rule of law . . .
13. Jamil Khader, Huwwara and Stella Maris: The Truth about Judicial
Overhaul, Israeli Protests – Palestine Chronicle.
14. Jamil Khader, op.cit.
15. ‘Sorry Mohammad’: What’s behind Ben Gvir’s apartheid honesty?
(972mag.com). A direct proof? On a TV panel on August 25 2023,
Ben Gvir, the Minister for National Security, said: ‘My right, my wife’s
right, my kids’ right to move around freely on the roads of Judea and
Samaria [the West Bank] is more important than that of the Arabs.’
Then, turning to panelist Mohammad Magadli, the only Arab on the
panel, Ben Gvir said: ‘Sorry Mohammad, but this is the reality.’ And he
was right: yes, this IS the reality on the West Bank.
16. Slavoj Žižek: ‘Die Hamas muss vernichtet werden’ | ZEIT ONLINE.
17. Yuval Noah Harari & Rosemary Barton – Israel’s war with
Hamas – YouTube.
18. Yuval Noah Harari backs critique of leftist ‘indifference’ to Hamas
atrocities | Israel-Hamas war | The Guardian.
19. See Frankfurter Buchmesse: Weiter Irritationen um Rede von Slavoj
Zizek (faz.net).

133
 NOTES

20. Quoted from Heinz Hoehne, The Order of the Death’s Head. The Story
of Hitler’s SS, Harmondsworth: Penguin 2000, p. 315.
21. Yuval Noah Harari: ‘There is a battle for the soul of the Israeli nation’
(youtube.com).
22. The Miseducation of Israel – YouTube. See also a report in Embracing
racism, rabbis at pre-army yeshiva laud Hitler, urge enslaving Arabs |
The Times of Israel. As expected, the defense of the Rabbis was that
their statements were taken out of context: they wanted precisely to
show how to help Arabs . . .
23. Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, New York:
The Feminist Press 2003, p. 189.
24. Von der Unmöglichkeit, einfach weiterzumachen – taz.de.
25. See Slavoj Zizek — Statement on Israel, Hamas & Palestine
(17/10/2023) – YouTube.
26. The Global Left’s Reaction to October 7 Threatens the Fight Against
the Occupation – Opinion – Haaretz.com. All non-attributed quotes
that follow are from this text.
27. Although she cannot avoid occasional lapses into vulgarity, like
when she characterizes Judith Butler as “intellectual’ in quotation
marks – although I had many disputes with Butler, whatever they
are, they are an intellectual in the full sense of the term.
28. Palestinian PM breaks down in tears during cabinet meeting (msn.com).
29. See Unit 731 & Shirō Ishii Documentary – YouTube. – suffice it to
mention the horrifying experiments on thousands of Chinese
prisoners by Shiro Ishii in his infamous Unit 731 in Manchuria
during WWII. (Incidentally, Shiro finished his days in peaceful
retirement: the US was so interested in the results of his experiments
that he was given full immunity for giving the documents of his
‘research’ to the US.)
30. See Bombing of Hamburg in World War II – Wikipedia. The same
reference to context explains the reaction to the Allies‘ bombing of
Hamburg: the attack during the last week of July 1943, code named
Operation Gomorrah, created one of the largest firestorms raised by
the Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Forces in World War
II, killing an estimated 37,000 people in Hamburg (and wounding
180,000 more), and destroying 60% of the city’s houses. Survivors
were especially bitter because the Allies focused on destroying
working class suburbs, not the rich villas which they used after the
war when they occupied the city. Although this event also fully

134
 NOTES

deserves the decontextualized shock and grief, it caused none because

of its context: the Allies were fighting Nazis, the ultimate evil . . .
31. Blinken denounces civilian toll in Gaza, says ‘far too many
Palestinians have been killed’ | CNN Politics.
32. Israel drops leaflets warning people to flee southern Gaza towns |
Israel-Hamas war | The Guardian.
33. Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari says Israel could defend itself with
nuclear weapons – YouTube.
34. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The War That Must Not Occur, Redwood City:
Stanford University Press 2023 (quoted from the manuscript).
35. Republicans are fiddling with fascism while the shutdown is looming
| Opinion (msn.com).
36. Not to mention the redoubled loneliness of the Jews in Germany who
are also critical of Israel.
37. Israel: Die deutsche Schwierigkeit mit der Staatsräson – ZDFheute.
38. In Germany, debate rages over a state policy to support Israel, no
matter what | Courthouse News Service.
39. (Incidentally, this is why I also don‘t ‘view Oct. 7th as a variation on
the Occupation’ – I use the term ‘occupation’ only when it applies to
the post-67 expansion of Israel, i.e., in the sense in which Illouz
herself says that Israel ‘criminally occupies’ the territories it
conquered in 1967.)
40. If Our Eyes Can See the Huge Scope of Atrocity, Can Our Hearts
Contain Two Pains at Once? – Opinion – Haaretz.com. and this is
why I fully understand Tamer when he goes on:
‘When I face Israeli or Western media, it always feels more like an
interrogation than an interview. ‘Do you condemn Hamas?’ I’m
asked. Right now, in front of you, there is an entire generation of
bleeding children in Gaza; what is your message to them, beyond
telling them to ‘condemn Hamas?’ or asking ‘why did the
preceding generation vote for Hamas?’ or ‘you’re being used as
human shields.” Nafar is right to insist that ‘Do you support
Hamas?’ is a wrong question to be asked if you are a victim in
Gaza – the right answer of a victim is: ‘I try to resist the
temptation to support Hamas, although you are doing all possible
to push me in that direction!’
41. The only shadow of a doubt that remains is that, while I fully accept
the fact of horrors committed by Hamas, I cannot but remember that

135
 NOTES

Israel already had to withdraw two similar accusations (there are no

photos of beheaded children; the burned corpses were not corpses of
Jews but the corpses of Hamas fighters burned by IDF in its
counterattack).
42. Hamas ‘intending nothing less than a second Holocaust’: Niall
Ferguson – YouTube
43. Israel launches strikes on Gaza as fighting resumes after truce expires
| Israel-Hamas war | The Guardian.
44. ‘We now just wish to be killed’: the Palestinians under fire in southern
Gaza | Israel-Hamas war | The Guardian.
45. See Germany is a good place to be Jewish. Unless, like me, you’re a
Jew who criticises Israel | Deborah Feldman | The Guardian.
46. Defense minister announces ‘complete siege’ of Gaza: No power, food
or fuel | The Times of Israel.
47. EHL Mini Feb 23V2 (youtube.com).
48. Israel-Hamas war: Israel announces pause in Rafah operations – DW
– 12/14/2023
49. Quoted from Delo (in Slovene), Ljubljana, 16/12/2023, p. 23.
50. Natan Chofshi, ‘Into the Abyss,’ in Towards Union in Palestine: Essays
on Zionism and Jewish-Arab Cooperation, edited by M. Buber, J.L.
Magnes and E. Simon. Westport: Greenwood Press 1972, p. 38.
51. Israel-Hamas war: Israel announces pause in Rafah operations – DW
– 12/14/2023
52. Putin vows to fight on in Ukraine until Russia achieves its goals |
Reuters
53. Microsoft Word – Tuck Yang (final).docx (osu.edu).
54. Do you condemn Žižek? | Opinions | Al Jazeera.
55. Op.cit.
56. V.I. Lenin, ‘People From Another World,’ quoted from Declaration Of
The R.S.D.L.P. (Bolsheviks) Group At The Constituent Assembly
Meeting January 5 (18), 1918 (marxists.org).
57. See Opening Ceremony of Frankfurter Buchmesse 2023 – YouTube.
The concluding appearance is not included in this recording.
58. Sabotage and Self-Organization • Ill Will.
59. US politicians threaten to invade Int’l Criminal Court if Israel faces
war crimes charges (youtube.com).

136
 NOTES

60. Palestinian doctor Ghassan Abu-Sitta denied entry into France |

Israel War on Gaza News | Al Jazeera.
61. Nothing should distract us from the unprecedented humanitarian
disaster taking place in Gaza right now. | By U.S. Senator Bernie
Sanders Facebook | Facebook.
62. Quoted from International Herald Tribune, October 22 2003, p. 8.
63. See ‘All Words are not Equal’ in this volume.
64. Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power,’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and other Writings, New York: Random House 1980,
p. 118.
65. Ex-Shin Bet head says Israel should negotiate with jailed intifada
leader | Israel | The Guardian. The only problem with such retired-
truth-sayers is that they say this AFTER they retired: they are free to
say it because their words just cause a small bubble without serious
impact. I was told by an Israeli friend that there was a case of some
who told the bitter truth after his retirement, but then he was called
back to serve and was again doing exactly the same thing he criticized
in his retirement . . .
66. Benjamin Netanyahu Just Said ‘From the River to the Sea’ | The New
Republic.
67. Netanyahu declares holy war against Gaza, citing the Bible – Middle
East Monitor.
68. Israeli troops have launched a ground offensive in southern Lebanon.
Here’s what we know | CNN.
69. For a report sympathetic to these protests, see Ministers, MKs
enraged by arrests of soldiers suspect of prison abuse – Israel
News – The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com)
70. The SHOCKING Truth Israel Hides from World (youtube.com).
71. Op.cit.
72. Israeli minister supports ‘voluntary migration’ of Palestinians in Gaza
| Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera.
73. C’est reparti comme en 50 (lemonde.fr).
74. Why are you supposed to say ‘next year in Jerusalem’? – Vox. (There is
also a third version which is the worst, a kind of ‘synthesis’ of the first
two: now that we have Jerusalem, next year it will be rebuilt with
Palestinian buildings destroyed and a new big temple constructed
again on the site of Al Aksa mosque.)

137
 NOTES

75. Gaza: The Israeli military has used Palestinians as human shields,
soldier and former detainees say | CNN.
76. See Owen Jones, ‘Racist Israeli Football Thugs RAMPAGE In
Amsterdam – And Media LIES’ (Youtube).
77. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0191453718794751#.
78. Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended,’ in Lectures at the Collège
de France 1975–1976, New York: Picador 2003, p. 52. .
79. See https://jacobinmag.com/2011/07/the-power-of-nonsense.
80. Among others, in an interview available on Martin Heidegger – Ein
Interview 1/2 – YouTube.
81. The End of Organized Humanity Noam Chomsky.
82. The American Unconscious and the Disintegration of the Western
World | In the Moment.
83. Frantz Fanon’s theory of liberation and its relevance to the Palestinian
cause – Muslim Mirror.
84. US urges restraint on Israel amid fears of regional war | Financial
Times (ft.com).
85. See Principles of solidarity. A statement – Jews, Europe, the XXIst
century (k-larevue.com).
86. Prominent Philosopher Criticizes Israeli State in Soros-funded Media
Op-Ed (newsbusters.org).
87. Ragıp Soylu on X: ‘Israeli finance minister Smotrich openly says
Damascus will be ‘bit by bit’ part of Israel in the future https://t.co/
zvdtTLuIgF’ / X.
88. Exclusive Insights From Former Head of Mossad – YouTube.
89. Ex-Shin Bet head says Israel should negotiate with jailed intifada
leader | Israel | The Guardian.
90. Op.cit.
91. Interview: Ehud Olmert on the threats facing Israel — from within.
92. Bernard-Henri Levy, La solitude d’Israel, Paris: Grasset 2024.
93. See US gives Israel 30 days to address Gaza aid crisis, threatens to
curb weapons supply | The Times of Israel.
94. Live updates: Israel confirms Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is dead |
CNN.
95. Netanyahu warns Lebanon of ‘destruction like Gaza’ (bbc.com).

138
 NOTES

96. ‘They are taking incredible care of us’: Lebanon’s Shia put their faith
in Hezbollah | Hezbollah | The Guardian.
97. Sky News Causes OUTRAGE Over Gaza Coverage – They’re Not
Even Pretending (youtube.com).
98. Op.cit.
99. Bernard-Henri Lévy | Israel is not invading Lebanon, it is liberating
it. This is a historic moment, not only for the Israelis, but for the
Lebanese, Arabs . . . | Instagram.
100. Russia has decided ‘at highest level’ to remove Taliban from terrorist
list, TASS reports | Reuters.
101. Afghan women ‘banned from hearing each other’ in bizarre new
Taliban rule | The Independent.
102. In the War: Nationalism, Imperialism, Cosmopolitics | Спільне
(commons.com.ua).

Appendix: Frankfurt Speech October 2023

1. Primo Levi, If This Is a Man * The Truce, London: Abacus 1987, p. 396.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_the_
State_of_Palestine

139
140
 Index

aber (but) 93 Berardi, Franco 94, 115

affluence 52 Bernanke, Paul 51
Afghanistan 15, 55, 112 Biden, Joe 7, 8
aid 19–20 Black people 20
al-Burhan, General 45 Blinken, Antony 76, 116
Alikhanov, Anton 35 bluffing 38
alliances 42 Boko Haram 56
Americans 7, 8 Boos, Juergen 64
Amini, Mahsa 57 Borkum 17, 99
Amsterdam 111 BRICS countries 12–13, 53–4, 79
annihilation 38, 69 brutality 21
anti-Semitism 70–1, 83, 85, 86, 108 Buden, Boris 6
arms 17 see also nuclear weapons buffoonery 22
(threats)
Arnold, Sina 81 capitalism 6, 22, 46, 47, 58
arrogance 28 global 7, 46, 51
attention spans 39 capital storming, USA 8
augmented reality 48 carnivals 8, 9
authenticity 12 censorship 40, 59
avatars 48 Century, The 37
awakening, womanhood 27 chauvinism 27
awrah 57 children 19, 76, 91, 122
Ayalon, Ami 117–18 China 27, 49, 53–5, 57–9
Ayyad, Sami 19–20 Chinese Communist Party 59
Chomsky, Noam 3–4, 115
Badenoch, Kemi 5 Christian conservatives 10
Badiou, Alain 37 Christians 36
Bakhtin, Michail 9 citizenship, birth 41
Baković, Zorana 54 civilians 69
Balibar, Etienne 124 civil war 44
banks 59 climate change 38, 40
Bannon, Steve 41–2 coalitions 13, 41, 42
Befumo, Andrew and Eric Justice 39 Cold War 33
Belarus 33 collateral damage 75–6

141
 INDEX

colonialism (colonies) 32, 56, 73, 78 discontent, social 27, 43

communal life 56 disputes 7
communication 39 distraction 34
Communism 6 division 26
Communist Manifesto, The 56 domination 56
competition 49 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre 79
compromise 32, 42, 44 Dürr, Christian 81
conflicts 7, 35, 36, 41
consensus 92 Ecco Homo 37
contexts 66, 75 see also economic cycles 50
decontextualization economy, world 50
control financial 53 education, women’s 56
corporations 40, 54 End of History, The 7
digital tech 46 energy, green 40
Costco Guys 39 Engels, Friedrich 56
Covid-19 20 engineers 41
crimes 16, 21, 28 enjoyment 8
crises 19–20 Enlightenment, European 38
cultural diversity 51 Environment Data and Governance
cultures 36 Initiative 40
currency 53, 54 see also US dollars equality 51
customs 14 eradication 18
essays
Dagalo, Mohamed Hamdan 4 November 2023 73–7
(Hemedti) 45, 48 8 December 2023 81–6
data 26, 40 9 May 2024 93–7
death 32, 38 10 December 2024 111–15
deaths 22, 73, 75, 103, 113, 120 see also 10 November 2024 110–11
killings 14 December 2023 86–91
debts 51, 52 16 November 2023 77–81
deception 34 21 October 2023 64–6
declarations 18 21 October 2024 104–10
decolonization 89, 90–1 24 May 2024 97–104
decontextualization 74–5, 77 25 October 2023 66–73
deficits 50 31 January 2024 91–3
democracy 14, 44–6, 57, 91, 95 ethics 6, 29
Democratic Republic of Congo ethnic cleansing 68
(Congo) 45–6, 58 ethnic identities 37
demonstrations, civil 44 Europe 12, 79
deportations 41 European Union (EU) 49, 96
desires 23 exaptation 27
digital media 27, 40, 52 excess, money 52
digital payment systems 53 exploitation 66, 109
digital spaces 26 contradiction 42, 47
dignity 19–20, 21, 23, 25, 28, 29 death camps 51–2, 54, 56, 58

142
 INDEX

extinction 33 gold standard 50

Gould, Stephen Jay 27
factcheckers 40 Graham, Lindsey 16, 98–9
factual inaccuracies 10 green energy 40
fakes 53 Grosman, Daviod 69
faking 38 guilt 21
fantasies 18, 30, 36, 100–1
Fascism 6, 40 Halevy, Efraim 117
soft 58 Hamas 15, 16, 22, 65, 69
Federal Reserve 51 Hanafi, Mohammad Khalid 57, 123
Feldman, Deborah 86 Harati, Yuval 69, 71, 78
feminism 27, 57 Harris, Kamala 5–6, 11
Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, The (Star Hegel, G. W. F. 13–14, 23, 32, 52, 58
Trek) 52 Heidegger, Martin 108, 114
Ferguson, Niall 84 heroes 44, 48
feudalism 48, 54 Her Story 27
Few Good Men, A 18, 100 historical necessity 13
financial control 53 Holocaust 69–70, 71, 73, 78, 109
financial crashes, global 51 homes 57
financial transactions 49 Hotovely, Tsipi 87
Finkielkraut, Alain 108 Hukuyama, Francis 7
First World War 35 humanitarian aid 44
Five Star 41 humanitarian crisis 19, 87
foreign interventions 98 humanitarian rights (work) 84–5, 122
Foucault, Michel 101, 113, 114 human rights 16, 80, 89, 95, 99, 122
Frankfurther Allgemeine Zeitung 73 contradiction 49
freedom 32, 35, 40, 56, 57 death camps 58
free trade 49 humiliation 19–20, 28
Freud, Sigmund 8, 9, 23 humor (jokes) 28
fun 27 hypocrisy 10, 15, 16

Gabrijelčič, Luka Lisjak 34 identification 11

Gallant, Yoav 86 identities, ethnic 37
Gates, Bill 47 ideology 8
Gaza 18, 20, 34 Ignatieff, Michael 95
Gelder, Christian R. 29–30 Illouz, Eva 74–5, 76, 77, 80, 82–3, 106
gender norms 27 images 95
genocide 37, 86, 104, 122 immigrants 5, 42–3, 57, 67
Germany 59, 65, 81, 85, 86, 110 immigrations 41
Ghost, The 107 imperialism 55
Gidley, Ben 81 import limitations 49
Global Minotaur 50 imports 51
global warming 40 industries, Chinese 49
Goldman, David 7 inflation 7, 8
gold reserves 45 information 40

143
 INDEX

International Court of Justice 99–100 make America great again (MAGA)

International Criminal Court (ICC) 12–13, 41, 42
16, 17, 98 manipulation 40, 109
interventions, foreign 16 Marche, Stephen 11
investments 51 martyrdom 113
Iran 27, 57 Marxism 59, 70, 114
irony 19, 27, 36, 38, 40, 44 Marx, Karl 56, 114
Israel 16, 18, 33–5 mass media, digital 40, 43
essay 21 October 2023 65 Master figures 28
essay 25 October 2023 67, 69, 71 masters 32, 40, 42, 43, 44
masters, feudal 54
Jefferson, Thomas 91 McGowan, Todd 5, 8
Jewish plot 66 media 6, 10, 39, 44, 67, 119–20
jobs 42 digital 27
Johnston, Adrian 9 essay 9 May 2024 97
jokes 29 see also humor (jokes) essay 21 October 2023 65–6
Juror #2 24 essay 21 October 2024 106, 110
justice 23–4, 25, 28, 30 essay 24 May 2024 102, 104
medical crisis 20
Kant, Immanuel 35 Medvedev, Dmitry 32, 33
Khader, Jamil 89–90 memories 29
Khartoum massacre 45 Meta 40
killings 21, 37, 67–8, 75–7, 116 see also metaphysical spaces 48
Holocaust death camps 54 Metaverse 47–8
essay 9 May 2024 95 Microsoft 47
essay 21 Oct 2024 104, 106 mistreatment 25
Kirill, Vladimir Mikhailovich Mizrahi, Eliran 21
Gundyayev, Patriarch of modernization 56
Moscow 35 modernization, European 36
Kisin, Konstantin 57 money printing 51, 52
Klüger, Ruth 72 morality 10, 20, 77, 105
knowledge 8 mourning 29
Kristallnacht 9 multiculturalism 67
multitasking 39
Lacan, Jacques 19, 22–3, 30, 107 Musk, Elon 40, 41, 42, 47
LA Times 11 Muslims 15, 56
Left Behind: Rise of the Antichrist 87 mutual recognition 118
Lenin, Vladimir I. 41, 91–2 Myanmar 54
Levy, Bernard-Henri 119, 122, 124 mystification 9, 21
liberalism 6, 35
Libya 46 Nafar, Tamer 84
lies 11, 17–18, 35, 100, 102, 103 nakba 80
Lispector, Clarice 38 nationalism 37
Lukacs, Georg 114 natural resource 45
Luxembourg, Rosa 92 natural resources 58

144
 INDEX

Nazism 72 produsers 40, 44, 52

necessity, historical 13 profiteering 6
negotiation 34 prohibition 23
neutrality 122 propaganda 31, 34
Nietzsche, Friedrich W. 37 protesters 16, 19, 45, 98
North Atlantic Treaty Organization protest movements 9
(NATO) 32, 34 protest organizations 17
Northern League 41 protests 20, 54, 57, 94, 95
Nothing New On the Western Front psychoanalysis 19, 21, 29, 101
104 public grief 83
nuclear weapons (threats) 33, 34, 35 publicity 39, 52
public spaces 47
Oborne, Peter 105 public statements 10
obscenity 9–12, 28, 84, 103, 111 Putin, Vladimir V. 13, 17, 31, 32, 33, 36
oil crisis 50 see also Russia
oligarchy 51
Olmert, Ehud 118 racism 42
opium 49 Ramaswamy, Vivek 41
oppression 26, 49, 57, 70, 78 Rapid Support Forces (RSF) 45, 46
Other 26, 40, 97 see also Freud, rationalism 35
Sigmund reality 18
recognition 32
Palestine 15, 16, 35, 65–6 recognition, mutual 118
patronize 11 reconciliation 119
peace 34, 119 recordings, amateur 39
peace negotiations 85, 122 red lines 33, 34
peace treaties 87, 88 refugees 45
Pelicot, Dominique 25–7 Regev, Mark 102
Pelicot, Gisele 25, 28 regulation 40, 48
permissiveness 22–3 religion 6, 7, 33, 35
perversion 9, 23, 26 religious fundamentalism 58
Peter the Great 36 Remarque, Erich Maria 104
Phenomenology 32 repetition 13
photos 19 repression 23
platforms 47 resistance, subversive 8
politics 7, 33 resources, natural 45
popular appeal 11 rights, citizens’ 7
populism 6, 12, 23, 41, 42 rules 14, 16, 17
post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Rushdie, Salman 15, 97–8
21–2 Russia 18, 31–5, 38, 54, 56
poverty 7, 45, 52, 90
power 27, 34, 53 sadism 25
state 54 Said, Edward 89
privatization 47 Sanders, Bernie 95
producers 40 Sarajevo 28

145
 INDEX

Sartre, Jean-Paul 17–18, 100, 115 superego, paradox of 15

Sbriglia, Russel 8 surplus-enjoyment 68
Schuster, Adam 8 surpluses 50
Sde Teiman base 105 Syria 111–12
Seidl, Claudius 81
self-defense 31, 34 Taliban 15, 56, 98
self-reflection 23 talk shows 11
servants 32 tariff 49
sexual difference 57 tech industry (companies) 41, 46
shame 28, 30 tensions 44
shamelessness 19, 21, 22 terror 68
shaming 23 theft of enjoyment 8
Sierakowski, Slawomir 42 Third World countries (states) 45,
Sittlichkeit 14 54–5
Sloterdijk, Peter 21 TikTok 39
Smotrich, Bezalel 107 tolerance 35
social cohesion 58 tortures 105–7
social discontent 27 trade, negative 50
Socialism 6, 7 trauma 21
social oppression 9 traumas 77, 80
societies, Western 32 tricks 31, 34
society 7 trillion-dollar coin 52
disintegration of 6 Trump, Donald 5–6, 8–10, 12–14, 71, 80
solidarity 28, 65, 80, 90 see also United States of America
sovereignty 28, 32, 33 (US) contradiction 40–3
spaces death camps 50–2, 54
digital 26, 39 trust 40, 51, 59
metaphysical 48 truth 17–18, 73, 100–2, 113, 114
public 47 Tuck, Eve 89
virtual 48
spirituality 34 Ukraine 13, 17–18, 31–2
Russian 36 contradiction 34–5
Srebrenica 28 death camps 54, 56, 60
stagflation 50 United Kingdom 5
Stalin, Joseph 36 United Nations (UN) 122–3
Starmer, Keir 5 United States of America (US) 14,
statements, public 10 50–1, 54–5, 60, 80, 97
state power 54 universality 17, 20, 51, 58, 99
state restrictions 43 US dollars 49, 60
Stewart, Jon 12 user-consumers 40
Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood
Remembered 72 values 9
subordination 58 market 52
subversion 8, 43 traditional 31, 38
Sudan 44, 46 Western 35, 37, 57–8
suffering 22, 77 Varoufakis, Yanis 46, 49, 55–6, 57

146
 INDEX

videos 39 websites, government 40

violence 33, 45, 68, 69, 77 West Bank (Lebanon) 33, 34, 67–8
virtual currency 53 Will to Power, The 37
virtual spaces 48 women 27, 54, 56, 57, 123
voters 42 words 18
workers 42
Wang, Huning 59
war crimes 16 Xi, Jinping 54, 58–9 see also China
war criminals 44
warlords 46 Yang, K. Wayne 89
war on terror 51
wars 13, 33, 36, 37 Zaken, Guy 21
wars, civil 44 Zambia 54
wealth 47 Zeit, Die 66
weapons, nuclear 33 Zuckerberg, Mark 47
Weber, Max 22, 82 Zupančič, Alenka 9, 11

147
148
149
150