Slavoj Zizek — What I Learned in the Army About Power

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]If there is an era that I remember is a pure paradise, it was my military service.

[00:00:05]>> [snorts] >> No, I'm not crazy.

[00:00:08]No, precisely I was shocked, disappointed. In my psychological structure, I'm kind of a fascist, probably. I like discipline and order.

[00:00:18]And what shocked me in the army was how it's not really like that, at least Yugoslav army. Beneath the discipline and order, there is an obscure domain of obscene jokes, perversions, and so on.

[00:00:33]And it took me a long time to guess how there is nothing subversive in these jokes. They are absolutely crucial for the military discipline to reproduce itself.

[00:00:46]You know, and then more and more I'm convinced that every institution has something like this. For example, in United States, the top colleges, you know, you have all these fraternities, sororities with their obscene rituals, and so on. In Yugoslav military, uh another thing fascinated me.

[00:01:07]This is what my gay friends don't like to hear.

[00:01:12]Officially, officially, publicly, the army was extremely, brutally homophobic.

[00:01:19]And it really meant it. If a soldier was discovered to be gay, he was every night Nobody dared to talk to him. He was usually every night beaten, you know, this standard ritual.

[00:01:31]Somebody pulls puts a pillow on your head, and others beat you with their belts, and so on.

[00:01:39]Okay, you will say, "Okay." Uh, it's not so simple. Because at the same time, the entire army life was penetrated by homosexual innuendos, and so on. I remember, for example, in my unit, uh when you met your friend in the morning, you didn't say good morning, you say you say smoke mine. This was an euphemism for a fellatio, you know?

[00:02:04]Like it was every I could give you dozens of So, you know what fascinates me so much that no power structure can reproduce it's you you need what I call inherent transgression, apparent dirty transgressions, which may appear even subversive, but they are uh part of the game. They are crucial for the reproduction of power structure. So, why is this so important today? Because I think that today >> [snorts] >> uh the official public structure is [snorts] more and more egalitarian. Yes, but relations of domination survive at this implicit obscene unspoken level. You know, this secret Like, when do you really admit something? When do you really belong to a community? From the nation to a family.

[00:03:03]It's not enough just to follow the explicit rules.

[00:03:08]It's also to know how and when to violate these rules. I think uh community is never defined, any communal body, just by the explicit rules.

[00:03:21]You not only have This is why people who to learn manners go, but nobody cares about it today. You know, when I was still young, you had these uh uh uh people who taught you good manners so that you know how to behave in high-class society, and it always fails.

[00:03:38]Why? Because they taught you the rules, but they didn't teach you how to violate the rules. You are really a member of a community if you know all these implicit rules of which rules are you to take seriously, Which rules you have to violate? How? For example, there are rules which are meant to be transgressed. Especially in sexuality. When for example, in traditional patriarchal sexuality, when father tells you not to mix with girls, it's really a call to eat discreetly and so on and so on. Uh There are many rules like this which just, you know, this is the Saint Paul Paul Bible dimension of you need prohibition to generate your desire and so on. But much more interesting for me is the opposite example.

[00:04:27]Not when something is prohibited, but the message of the law is to do it, but when something you are permitted, even solicited to do it.

[00:04:37]You know, that you are given a freedom on condition that you don't use it. So if I may conclude with a story from my youth, I wasn't a big dissident. I was kind of a half dissident. And I remember when I was young, I was in a student journal and we were there were elections. Now, in ex-Yugoslavia elections were not as bad as in Soviet Union. The party didn't get 99.7.

[00:05:02]They had enough, about 80, 85%. But we knew it, no, how it would So we at the journal asked ourselves, what should we do?

[00:05:14]Some radical idiots proposed, why don't we simply openly do a heroic gesture?

[00:05:20]Let's publish an issue of this journal where we claim these were not free elections, these were a fake and so on.

[00:05:27]Okay.

[00:05:28]We said, but everybody knows this. What would be the point? We would just appear idiots, you know. So then one of us, not me, had an ingenious idea which worked.

[00:05:38]We said, they are claiming that these are real democratic elections.

[00:05:44]So let's just treat them like that. And on the evening of elections, we published an extraordinary issue of the journal with big titles, latest election results. It looks that communists will remain in power, you know, like And it was such a wonderful act because they were so furious at us at the central committee. Not really, we didn't risk being correct. And they called us there and they voice, don't [snorts] do this. You provoke us. Then we just naively said, "Listen, these were free elections and we felt the duty to inform people of the result."

[00:06:25]And it was so tragic, this party bureaucrat, because she couldn't have told us, "No, they were not free elections." She just said, "Boys, don't with me. You know very well what I mean." We asked him, "But what do you mean?" "Don't mess with me."

[00:06:40]You know, like I almost felt the sympathy for that guy.