Demanding the Impossible by Slavoj Žižek Read Free Book Online Page B

racist explanation.
    The other thing that interests me is the fact that, even with all its problems, South Korea now has a relatively stable democracy and has already become a successful developed country. South Korea is nothing special, I mean, in a good sense. The point is what critical intellectuals like you can make out of this predicament in which we find ourselves.
    Again, here, we should not follow the path of Japan or China. Their models are pretty much the same: to combine traditional wisdom with modernity. I think we need more. The soft fascist solution, which for me is the Chinese solution, simply will not work. My hope is that we will find a new model, not just to retain capitalism and have control through some harmonious corporate means, but to confront the deadlock of modernity in a more intelligent way.

14
The Subversive Use of Theory
    Under the so-called Bologna Process, the link between the humanities and theoretical thinking has been questioned, and the colonization of the logic of the market and of capitalist values over the educational field is now crucial. How do you see your educational commitment?
    SŽ: This may surprise you: I don’t have students. I work all the time as a researcher. This is why I’m eternally grateful to communist oppression. When I finished my studies in the early 1970s, it was during the final moments of hardline communism. So they didn’t allow me to teach. I was unemployed for five years, then I got a job at a small research institute. I’m still there. Because it is perfect. I don’t have any obligations. Well, I teach here and there a little bit, but I hate students more and more. I like universities without students, seriously.
    Well, this is – as I would put it – a difficult question. Because it’s too easy to say, “Don’t think about your career and do whatever you want to do.” But, my God, the majority of people have to survive. I think what we should offer them is a way to have some kind of career. Still, the problem for me is how to combine a career with a purpose in life. I mean, you can be a researcher or scientist or whatever, but how can you do something good there?
    What I want to tell you is that I don’t want a society where we are divided into a majority, who are just stupid workers looking for career, and then a minority, who play the morally elevated role. I don’t know how it is in your country, but here in Slovenia, Germany, France, or England, what is happening now with education – the so-called Bologna reform of higher education – is just horrible.
    What they really want is simply the “ private use of reason ,” as I call it, following Kant, so that universities basically produce experts who will solve problems – problems, defined by society, of state and corporate business. But, for me, this is not thinking . What is “true” thinking? Thinking is not solving problems. The first step in thinking is to ask these sorts of questions: “Is this really a problem?” “Is this the right way to formulate the problem?” “How did we arrive at this?” This is the ability we need in thinking.
    Let’s look at the problem with the ideas of those in power. You have, for example, a car-burning incident in the suburbs of Paris. So you call up a psychologist and a sociologist who will tell you, according to their analysis, what to do and how to contain it. No! Thinking is much more than that. It is about asking fundamental questions. And this is disappearing. They really want to make universities into schools for experts. It’s actually already happening – they’ve even said it openly – and I’m horrified.
    A couple of months ago, the [then] Minister of State for Universities and Science in the UK, David Willetts, openly said that, from then on, “the arts, humanities and social sciences” taught in universities should have nothing to do with the state, meaning that it should be a matter between the university and the individual