Zizek Philosophy Quotes

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.

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

Modernity could be identified with the gradual disappearance of ritual, of those kind of communal bonds founded upon a symbolically shared sense of guilt.

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

[P]rogress is the inner development of a system, the gradual actualization of its potentials, so it all depends on which system serves as a point of reference.

I have to conclude, after fifteen years of philosophical inquiry, soaking up the finest minds in history, from Aristotle to Plato to Nietzsche to Zizek, after months spent pondering the most vexing conundrums ever devised by humankind, I have to conclude, that in the final analysis, life ain’t nuttin but money an’ fuck a bitch.

Given that Žižek in Less Than Nothing describes “the key question” of philosophy as that of “how thought is possible in a universe of matter,” so that we should focus our efforts on “the very rise of representation or appearing out of the flat stupidity of being” if we are to avoid “the very rise of representation or appearing out of the flat stupidity of being” if we are to avoid “a regression to a 'naive' ontology of spheres or levels,” the issue of whether this project is most radically accomplished by Schelling or Hegel is more than a matter of intra-textual consistency or classico-philological accuracy, but touches the very heart of what Žižek takes to be the program of speculative philosophy.

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 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.

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

[P]rogress is the inner development of a system, the gradual actualization of its potentials, so it all depends on which system serves as a point of reference.

In short, a true progress also aims at retroactively redeeming all the squashed birds of the past progresses - not redeeming them in reality (the bio-cosmist dream), but redeeming the potentiality that was present in them.

Early in Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige", a magician performs a trick with a small bird which disappears in a cage flattened on the table. A small boy in the audience starts to cry, distraught that the bird was killed. The magician approaches him and finishes the trick, gently producing a live bird out of his hand - but the boy is not convinced, insisting that this must be another bird, the dead bird's brother. After the show, we see the magician alone, putting a dead bird squashed into the trash where many other dead birds lie. The boy was right. The trick could not be performed without violence and death, but it relies for its effectiveness upon concealing the squalid, broken residue of what has been sacrificed, disposing of it where no one who matters will see. Therein resides the basic premise of a dialectical notion of progress: when a newer higher stage arrives, there must be a squished bird somewhere.

The opposition between false limitless desires which only bring suffering and the authentic spiritual desire for well-being thus appears problematic: sensual desires are in themselves moderate, constrained to their direct goals; they become infinite and self-destructive only when they are infected by a spiritual dimension. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling knew that spirituality is self-destructive in its longing for infinity, which is why evil is much more spiritual than our sensual reality. In other words, the root of evil is not our egotism but, on the contrary, a perverted self-destructed spirituality which can prompt unnecessary personal self-sacrifice.