Zizek Famous Quotes

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.

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.