Slavoj Zizek Quotes

The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other

When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!

Q- What makes you depressed? Seeing stupid people happy.

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.

True power does not need arrogance, a long beard and a barking voice. True power strangles you with silk ribbons, charm, and intelligence

Do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not, "Main Street, not Wall Street," but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other. --Slavoj Zizek

And so on, and so on...

What is the Absolute? Something that appears to us in fleeting experiences--say, through the gentle smile of a beautiful woman, or even through the warm caring smile of a person who may otherwise seem ugly and rude. In such miraculous but extremely fragile moments, another dimension transpires through our reality. As such, the Absolute is easily corroded;it slips all too easily through our fingers and must be handled as carefully as a butterfly

The light that you discover in your life is proportionate to the amount of the darkness you are willing to forthrightly confront (from the debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek)

There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the whole human history to date: from prehistoric societies it took primitivism; from the Ancient world it took slavery; from medieval society brutal domination; from capitalism exploitation; and from socialism the name..

I couldn't help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure ... Like, why did Paris Commune go wrong? Trotskyites. Why did the October Revolution go wrong? And so on ... OK, we screwed it up, but we can give the best theory why it had to happen.

Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.

There is a contradiction between market liberalism and political liberalism. The market liberals (e.g., social conservatives) of today want family values, less government, and maintain the traditions of society (at least in America's case). However, we must face the cultural contradiction of capitalism: the progress of capitalism, which necessitates a consumer culture, undermines the values which render capitalism possible

On the 'Celestial Seasonings' green tea packet there is a short explanation of its benefits: 'Green tea is a natural source of antioxidants, which neutralize harmful molecules in the body known as free radicals. By taming free radicals, antioxidants help the body maintain its natural health.' Mutatis mutandis, is not the notion of totalitarianism one of the main ideological antioxidants, whose function throughout its career was to tame free radicals, and thus to help the social body to maintain its politico-ideological good health?

In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is most likely the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction.

On the information sheet in a New York hotel, I recently read: "Dear guest! To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is totally smoke-free. For any infringement of this regulation, you will be charged $200:' The beauty of this formulation, taken literally, is that you are to be punished for refusing to fully enjoy your stay . . . The superego imperative to enjoy thus functions as the reversal of Kant's "Du kannst, denn du soUstf" (You can, because you must ! ) ; it relies on a "You must, because you can ! " That is to say, the superego aspect of today's "nonrepressive" hedonism (the constant provocation we are exposed to, enjoining us to go right to the end and explore all modes of jouissance) resides in the way permitted jouissance necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance.

من هیچ گونه آمادگی جسمانی ندارم. من ورزش را دوست ندارم. در کشور من اسکی محبوب است. من مزخرفات آن را پیدا می کنم. شما از کوه بالا می روید و به پایین سُر میخورید. چرا در پایین نمی مانید و یک کتاب خوب می خوانید؟

Not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology, of its 'practical efficiency'.

If he had stayed in Slovenia, and Slovenia had stayed Communist, Žižek would not have been the nuisance he has since become. Indeed, if there were no greater reason to regret the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the release of Žižek on to the world of Western scholarship would perhaps already be a sufficient one.

There is a class division in Europe as well as in the Middle East , and the key question is : how do these different class dynamics interact?

the true choice is between losing it all and creating what we are about to lose: only this could eventually save us, in a profound sense . . . The possible awakening of the bomb is not simply 'let's do all in our power to prevent it before it's too late', but rather 'let's first build this totality (unity, community, freedom) that we are about to lose through the bomb.

The Jacobins were the standard bearers of the left. Liberals are not on the left. They are in the center, and often trending right with their hatred of the State and any possibility of State social engineering on the grand scale. It has been rightly observed that the hallmark of liberalism is wanting the “thing without the thing”, as Slavoj Zizek famously put it. The liberals want war without war, revolution without revolution, drugs without any of the downside of drugs, coffee without caffeine. They want a situation that inevitably leads to violence, without the violence. They immediately condemn the violence even though violence was implicit in the entire project from the get-go.

Als Präsident Obama den Aufstand als legitime Meinungsäußerung begrüßte, die von der Regierung anerkannt werden müsse, war die Verwirrung komplett. Die Massen in Kairo und Alexandria wollten keine Anerkennung ihrer Forderungen durch die Regierung, deren Rechtmäßigkeit sie rundweg ablehnten. Sie wünschten sich das Mubarak-Regime nicht als Gesprächspartner, sie wollten, dass Mubarak verschwand. Ihr Ziel war nicht nur eine neue Regierung, die ihre Meinung anhören würde, sondern eine Umgestaltung des gesamten Staates. Sie hatten keine »Meinungen «; sie waren die Wahrheit der Situation in Ägypten. (S. 55)

In it, Shelley does something that a conservative would never have done. In the central part of her book, she allows the monster to speak for himself, to tell the story from his own perspective...Mary Shelley moves inside his mind and asks what it is like to be labelled, defined, oppressed, excommunicated, even physically distorted, by society.

Could even imagine the opposite case, an upper-class white woman's torso displayed when the accused is a black or indigenous man?

Perpetrators were designated vaguely as 'Asians', while claims were made that the abuse was not about ethnicity and religion but about domination of man over woman;and anyway, who are we, with our Church paedophilia and sexual abuse scandals - that of the media personality Jimmy Saville being a case in point - to adopt the moral high ground over a victimised minority?......In both cases , we are dealing with organised - ritualised even - collective activity. In the case of Rotherham, another parallel may be even more pertinent. One of the terrifying effects of the non-contemporaneity of different levels of social life- behaviour that somehow seems out of sync with the age in which we live - is the rise of the violence against women.

And the crucial feature in all these cases is that these acts of criminal violence are not spontaneous outbursts of raw brutal energy that breaks the chains of civilised customs, but something learned , externally imposed ritualised: part of the collective symbolic substance of a community. What is repressed for the 'innocent' public gaze is not the cruel brutality of the act, but precisely its 'cultural', ritualistic character of a symbolic custom... One can well imagine a non-paedophiliac priest who, after years of service, gets involved in paedophilia because the very logic of the institution seduces him into it.

Why would photographs of the wound not be enough? Does such a display not rely on the long tradition of treating indigenous people's bodies as specimens?

believes that something urgently needs to be done about the ecological crisis. In Žižek’s opinion, politicians are not able to accomplish this task effectively.

Traditionally, advertising had an imaginary and symbolic dimension.

Žižek

suspicious of the equation that is made between happiness and self-realization

a special effect which outdid all others?

only in so far as the subject is prepared to relinquish altogether their attachment to any kind of ideal and to confront the fact that the symbolic order through which

Žižek has drawn up an ecological manifesto boldly synthesizing into four points

Even in the few cases that would vaguely fit the definition of the ‘clash of civilizations’ (Bosnia and Kosovo, southern Sudan), the shadow of other interests is easily discernible.

Freud and the super-ego The big Other is the Law underlying the symbolic order.

Cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore

psychoanalysis claims that reality outside myself definitely exists.

this void is perpetually filled in by the fiction of language.

similar tendency to seek a sense of meaningfulness

universe is a void but a positively charged one. Particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed.

sees happening in reality post-9/11 is a reassertion of “America’s traditional ideological commitments and rejection of feelings of responsibility and guilt towards the Third World”.

fundamental rule or law: meaning is dependent upon the symbolic system, itself.

the big Other is just as much a fiction as the symbolic order.

our inability to articulate and be fully conscious of our dependency upon the symbolic order.

T.S. Eliot’s line from his verse drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935): ‘the highest form of treason: to do the right thing for the wrong reason

transgression – imagined or real forms of enjoyment that seem to contradict the dominant ideas or laws

The Church needs sinners who repent their sins.

without some artificial system of symbolic order by which to organize “reality”, the individual ceases to exist.

However, this cannot be achieved through direct perception. In other words, direct access to the void that is both language and the void that lies “behind” language is impossible.

universe: humanity does not – and never did have – a ground or a natural balance to return to. For Žižek, our existence is utterly contingent and beyond our control.

large-scale collective decisions

Žižek’s intention is to offset sentimental ideas of a balanced world that humanity has disturbed but to which it might somehow return.

altruistic gestures simply preserve the status quo and prevent the radical reconstruction of society by which poverty may be alleviated altogether.

Žižek’s conclusion is that the phenomenon of the Taliban should not be seen simply as a reversion to traditional, feudal values but more as a way of countering Western ideology and American imperialism.

new dimension

centres upon the experience to be gained

progressive causes today.

way in which the strike on the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11 was perceived.

By recognizing the fictional nature of unitary identity, the dominating presence of the super-ego is overthrown.

Žižek’s answer

identity is maintained is ultimately a fiction.

transgresses our horizon. We must recognize that we cannot gain full power over our biosphere even though it is in our power to de-rail it and disturb its balance.

Nature is actually composed from vast amounts of destruction

theory of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin (1809–82) was wrong:

oil and the energy we rely upon is composed from a previous natural disaster of unimaginable dimensions.

what we call creation is a cosmic catastrophe, a cosmic mistake

While we may be familiar with the grammatical and social rules governing language and communication, we cannot be conscious of all of them in the act of participating in communication.

built into all societies.

According to today’s ideology, the key to achieving happiness is through self-realization and by making one’s life more “meaningful”.

Virtual Reality

provides reality itself deprived of its substance; just as decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like real coffee without being real coffee, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being so.

given the ubiquitous presence of the super-ego, or the big Other, can its repressive authority be overcome?

media. It is especially owing to the media today in its role as a social conscience of global affairs that the liberal class has developed a keen awareness about poverty,

defended by the ideology: “We are the victims now and so we have every right to retaliate!

does not believe that political opposition to capitalism can arise solely through an understanding of economics. For him, political and social repression, however manifested, is ultimately caused by ideology.

Žižek declares: “Ecology is the new opium of the masses, replacing religion.

When we obey the Law, we do it as part of a desperate strategy to fight against our desire to transgress

Žižek’s thesis, therefore, is that the super-ego, itself, is an obscene agency active within every subject.

Nevertheless, Žižek holds open the possibility of the subject recognizing their own fictional status within reality. This is the ultimate purpose of treatment in psychoanalysis.

psychoanalysis is the exact opposite of subjectivist solipsism

focuses upon how and in what ways the product renders one’s life meaningful.

Zizek's thesis is that 'an epistemological shift in the subject's point of view always reflects an ontological shift in the object itself.' I believe that Graham Harman is correct to assert that this is most likely the core contribution to philosophy for which Slavoj will be remembered.

...the only way to keep a classical work alive, is to treat it as 'open' pointing towards the future, or, to use the metaphor evoked by Walter Benjamin, to act as if the classical work is a film for which the appropriate chemical liquids to develop it was invented only later, so that it is only today that we can get the full picture.

The contemporary era constantly proclaims itself as post-ideological, but this denial of ideology only provides the ultimate proof that we are more than ever embedded in ideology. Ideology is always a field of struggle - among other things, the struggle for appropriating past traditions.

However, in giving up the idea of transcendence, Foucault also gives up the hope of ever uncovering the roots of power. This is why Joan Copjec sees Foucault’s refusal of transcendence as the fundamental stumbling block within his thought. Foucault aims at conceiving how power arises, but his studies consistently stop short of arriving at this. Copjec claims, “despite the fact that [Foucault] realizes the necessity of conceiving the mode of a regime of power’s institution, he cannot avail himself of the means of doing so and thus, by default, ends up limiting that regime to the relations that obtain within it.” This limitation stems from his refusal of any notion of transcendence, “his disallowance of any reference to a principle or a subject that ‘transcends’ the regime of power he analyzes.” Without the moment of transcendence, one cannot grasp the regime of power in its incipience, and hence Foucault necessarily posits the regime of power as always already existing, which makes any attempt to counter it fundamentally impossible. The result of this rejection of transcendence is Foucault’s historicism—a mode of analysis that eschews the search for truth in favor of uncovering the presuppositions of regimes of truth, in favor of “pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.” This type of uncovering of historical presuppositions is one of Foucault’s chief legacies today, and it indicates the extent to which any idea of transcendence has become an anathema. In the wake of Foucault, contemporary cultural criticism has largely taken up this contextualizing mode. Today, the predominant response to any articulation of truth claims is a demand for the historicization of these claims: one must reveal the cultural context out of which they emerge. This has become the fundamental operation of contemporary cultural studies. In The Ticklish Subject, Slavoj Zizek describes this intellectual situation: “the basic feature of cultural studies is that they are no longer able or ready to confront religious, scientific or philosophical works in terms of their own inherent Truth, but reduce them to a product of historical circumstances, to an object of anthropologico-psychoanalytic interpretation.” This reduction of every truth claim to the circumstances of its enunciation represents the ultimate rejection of transcendence: nothing escapes the immanence of history itself. According to this prevailing historicism, no truth claim ever touches the Real; instead, the very pretension to truth is itself imaginary. The popularity of this kind of historicism today indicates the extent to which transcendence has become theoretically untenable. It also highlights the link between contemporary theory and the command to enjoy: the operations of both work to reduce what appears as transcendence to conditions of immanence.

(...) ni siquiera el ocio, el sexo o la amistad son espacios libres de obsesión por la medición y la productividad: hay que aprovechar el tiempo de relax y no hacerlo es una especie de inmoralidad, un desperdicio imperdonable que se paga con culpa y angustia. Ninguno de estos dominios, además, aparece como un espacio para la disrupción: el sexo es salud, dormir la siesta es salud, tener una pareja feliz es salud. ¿Y hay algo en la vida mejor que la salud? ¿Vos no querés ser más feliz de lo que sos? (...) Es el imperativo del goce del que habla el filósofo Slavoj Zizek, la idea de que ser feliz hoy tiene que ver más con la obligación que con el deseo. (...)¿Se puede querer otra cosa que ser cada vez más y más feliz?

The first step to freedom is not just to change reality to fit your dreams. It’s to change the way you dream.

Language generates lack. Lack in turn generates desire. While it is common to assume that desire is what is most “natural” about our lives, Lacan reveals the exact opposite, namely that desire is a product of culture—a function of the ways in which the signifiers of the social order cut into the child’s biological constitution. Indeed, a great deal has been made of the fact that, in Lacanian terms, desire emerges through the mortification and subordination of the body and its unmediated enjoyment. The signifier violates—mutilates and dismembers—the body as a “thing,” as a spontaneous nexus of drives that struggles for viability and fullness of being beyond the symbolic system into which it is inserted. As Slavoj Zizek explains: “Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence—by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present—but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word ‘quarters’ the thing.” The signifier thus carves out the body in specific ways in order to give rise to a particular form of subjectivity and desire. It is in this sense that the subject is vulnerable to what Lacan famously calls the “agency of the signifier.” The course of individuation initiated by the signifier may be necessary for the subject’s ability to orient itself in the world, but it simultaneously colonizes the presymbolic body in ways that evacuate the body of its enjoyment.

¿No ocurre lo mismo con la guerra? Lejos de dar comienzo a la guerra del siglo XXI, el ataque al World Trade Center en septiembre de 2001 fue más bien el último acto espectacular de la guerra del siglo XX. Lo que nos espera es algo mucho más siniestro: el espectro de una guerra «inmaterial» en la que los ataques son invisibles (virus, venenos, etcétera, que pueden estar en cualquier sitio y en ninguno). En el nivel de la realidad material visible, nada ocurre, no hay grandes explosiones, e igualmente el universo conocido comienza a colapsar y la vida se desintegra. Estamos entrando en una nueva era de guerra paranoide en la que la mayor tarea será la de identificar al enemigo y sus armas. Solo con esta completa «desmaterialización» es cuando la famosa tesis de Marx del Manifiesto comunista (que en el capitalismo «todo lo sólido se desvanece en el aire»), adquiere un sentido mucho más literal de lo que él pretendía. La tesis se cumple literalmente cuando nuestra realidad social material no está solo dominada por el movimiento especulativo o espectral del Capital, sino que ella misma se ve progresivamente «espectralizada» (el «Yo proteico» reemplaza al antiguo sujeto autoidéntico, la elusiva fluidez de sus experiencias reemplaza la estabilidad de los objetos que se poseen). En resumen, cuando la relación habitual entre los objetos materiales sólidos y las ideas fluidas se invierte (los objetos son progresivamente disueltos en experiencias fluidas, mientras que las únicas cosas estables son obligaciones simbólicas virtuales), solo entonces se hace plenamente real lo que Derrida llamaba el aspecto espectral del capitalismo.

Con Juan nos conocimos el año 2011 en Barcelona. Los dos estudiábamos guión, queríamos escribir películas, series, teleseries, algo que alguien viera en una pantalla. Habíamos crecido en los años noventa, con Los Venegas, las teleseries de Thalía, las series de animación japonesa de Chilevisión, el Chavo siendo expulsado de la vecindad. Nuestros gustos no eran tan sofisticados como los de nuestros compañeros europeosm quienes sabían más sobre cine francés, habían visto la filmografía completa de Agnes Varda, comentaban libros de Slavoj Zizek, nombres que nosotros nunca antes habíamos escuchado-