Philosophy, for me, is a way of relearning to look at the world, a world that is familiar to us, that we know, that is shared by all human beings and also by nonhuman beings.

Philosophy teaches us to look at the world again. It brings out at a theoretical level what all plain, common, ordinary people, in a sense, know already.

The influence of being in New York, made me realize a lot of the ethical and political ideas I want to push or promote are best articulated within an anarchist program.

Here we observe the basic obsessive fantasy of Žižek's position: do nothing, sit still, prefer not to, like Melville's Bartleby, and silently dream of a ruthless violence, a consolidation of state power into one man's hands, an act of brutal physical force of which you are the object or the subject or both at once.

Poetry is difficult, I mean interesting poetry, not confessional babble or emotive propaganda. Reading a new poet is discovering an entire world, what Stevens called a 'mundo' and it takes a lot of time to orientate oneself in such a world. What we have to learn to do then, as teachers and militants of a poetic insurgency, is to encourage people to learn to love the difficulty of poetry. I simply do not understand much of the poetry that I love.

The culture of irony is the culture of postmodernism, which I would furiously want to denounce. We have to act ethically and politically. Irony is a defensive position, against reality. It always knows what to think about reality. The idea of commitment and engagement is central to me, which is not ironic.

In relation to the question of hope, I think the only hope we have is hope against hope. We hope for a better world. But of course we can do better than just hope.