The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also – even more, perhaps – the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims.
My big fear is that if I act the way I am, people will notice that there is nothing to see. So I have to be active all the time, covering up.
For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic tensions and antagonisms of social orders.
You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological.
The force of universalism is in you Basques, not in the Spanish state.
In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.
True universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity, but those who engage in a passionate struggle for the assertion of the Truth which compels them.
Liberal democracy – as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today’s left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.
Ideology today is unfreedom which you sincerely personally experience as freedom.
The problem for me is not that Schwarzenegger is governor, but the extent to which even politicians who are not actors are functioning like actors.
My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.
In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being.
I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist. For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good!
But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, you are also responsible for deciding what is your duty.
I may still be a kind of a Marxist but I’m very realistic, I don’t have these dreams of revolutionists around the corner.
Fascism is relatively easy to explain. It is a reactionary phenomenon. Nazism was some bad guys having some bad ideas and unfortunately succeeding in realizing them.
The horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things – they always do. It’s that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.
The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes.
I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.
Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.