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.

Capitalist ideology in general, Zizek maintains, consists precisely in the overvaluing of belief - in the sense of inner subjective attitude - at the expense of the beliefs we exhibit and externalize in our behavior. So long as we believe (in our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue to participate in capitalist exchange. According to Zizek, capitalism in general relies on this structure of disavowal. We believe that money is only a meaningless token of no intrinsic worth, yet we act as if it has a holy value. Moreover, this behavior precisely depends upon the prior disavowal - we are able to fetishize money in our actions only because we have already taken an ironic distance towards money in our heads.

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

The ideological blackmail that has been in place since the original Live Aid concerts in 1985 has insisted that ‘caring individuals’ could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganization. It is necessary to act straight away, we were told; politics has to be suspended in the name of ethical immediacy. Bono’s Product Red brand wanted to dispense even with the philanthropic intermediary. ‘Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands’, Bono proclaimed. ‘Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce’. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism - on the contrary, Product Red’s ‘punk rock’ or ‘hip hop’ character consisted in its ‘realistic’ acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.

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?

Žižek seems to have got Hitchcock out of his system, if not out of his unconscious—one never does that.

Pure sex is masturbation with a real partner who functions as a prop for our indulging in fantasies, while it is only through love that we can reach the … Other.

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؟

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

[I]t is a mistake to rush to impose the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects. This is the temptation of the ethical which, as Zizek has argued, the capitalist system is using in order to protect itself in the wake of the credit crisis - the blame will be put on supposedly pathological individuals, those’ abusing the system’, rather than on the system itself. But the evasion is actually a two step procedure - since structure will often be invoked (either implicitly or openly) precisely at the point when there is the possibility of individuals who belong to the corporate structure being punished. At this point, suddenly, the causes of abuse or atrocity are so systemic, so diffuse, that no individual can be held responsible… But this impasse - it is only individuals that can be held ethically responsible for actions, and yet the cause of these abuses and errors is corporate, systemic - is not only a dissimulation: it precisely indicates what is lacking in capitalism. What agencies are capable of regulating and controlling impersonal structures? How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals - but the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-asubject: Capital.

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.

In essence, Zizek’s procedure here is no different in principle from that of Husserl, who wrote and rewrote voluminous drafts and was continually “introducing” the project of transcendental phenomenology. The one thing that has changed is that Zizek is publishing his drafts as he goes.

Both Zizek and early Hegelians hint at some sort of state that is both beyond and within reality, both an escape and a hyper-examination that allows for some sort of becoming that does not escape ideology, but at least to some degree has a self that knows the game which the mind is playing and is not fooling itself.

... Kısacası fantezi bize şunu söyletir: "Ah şu Yahudiler (Kürtler, Ecnebiler, Batılılar vs) olmasaydı!" Bu durumda fanteziye dair akılcı bir eleştiriyle yetinmeyip onu katetmeye çalışmak şu anlama gelir: Yarılmanın, antagonizmanın mesulünün Yahudiler (ya da Kürtler vs.) olmadığını göstermekle yetinmeyip, antagonizmanın bünyeviliğini göstermek, antagonizmaya mesul aramanın mekanizmalarını açığa çıkarmak. Zizek'in sözleriyle devam edersek "toplumun tam kimliğe ulaşmasını engelleyen Yahudiler değildir: Bunu engelleyen kendi doğası, kendi içkin blokajıdır ve bu iç negatifliği 'Yahudi' figürünü yansıtmaktadır. Başka bir deyişle simgeselden dışlanan şey, Gerçek'te paranoid bir Yahudi kurgusu olarak geri döner." Dolayısıyla, "antisemitizme verilecek yanıt, 'Yahudiler aslında böyle değildir' değil, 'antisemitik Yahudi anlayışının Yahudilerle hiçbir ilgisi yoktur, ideolojik Yahudi figürü Bizim kendi ideolojik sistemimizin tutarsızlığını yamamanın bir yoludur' olmalıdır.

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.

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?

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

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.

Chapter 4,‘Organised abuse and the pleasures of disbelief’, uses Zizek’s (1991) insights into cite political role of enjoyment to analyse the hyperbole and scorn that has characterised the sceptical account of organised and ritualistic abuse. The central argument of this chapter is that organised abuse has come to public attention primarily as a subject of ridicule within the highly partisan writings of journalists, academics and activists aligned with advocacy groups for people accused of sexual abuse. Whilst highlighting the pervasive misrepresentations that characterise these accounts, the chapter also implicates media consumers in the production of ignorance and disdain in relation to organised abuse and women’s and children’s accounts of sexual abuse more generally.

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)

At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, '...what would we gain by helping the french destroy Germany?' he replied: 'what we would gain would be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be'.

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.

According to Žižek’s dialectical materialism, there is no “how things really are.” It is not just our knowledge of reality that is incomplete; reality itself is incomplete. Moreover, my existence as a subject is characterized by the difference between how things seem to me, as opposed to how things really seem to me. Again, Žižek’s philosophical elaboration of Lacan shows why I can never access the way things really seem to me: I have no access to my most intimate subjective experience. I can never consciously experience the fundamental fantasy that forms and sustains the core of my existence.

All this bullshit like, “Somalian children are starving....” No! Somalian children are not starving because you have a good time here. There are others who are much more guilty. Rather, use the opportunity. Society will need more and more intellectual work. It’s this topic of intellectuals being privileged—this is typical petty-bourgeois manipulation to make you feel guilty. You know who told me the best story? The British Marxist, Terry Eagleton. He told me that 20 or 30 years ago he saw a big British Marxist figure, Eric Hobsbawm, the historian, giving a talk to ordinary workers in a factory. Hobsbawm wanted to appear popular, not elitist, so he started by saying to the workers, “Listen, I’m not here to teach you. I am here to exchange experiences. I will probably learn more from you than you will from me.” Then he got the answer of a lifetime. One ordinary worker interrupted him and said, “Fuck off! You are privileged to study, to know. You are here to teach us! Yes, we should learn from you! Don’t give us this bullshit, ‘We all know the same.’ You are elite in the sense that you were privileged to learn and to know a lot. So of course we should learn from you. Don’t play this false egalitarianism.

Again, in liberal-democratic ideology, universality is conceived as a neutral medium for compromise, and for the expression of self-interest or group identity. Against this, Žižek argues that this sterile notion of universality serves the interests of global capitalism. But how can leftists oppose nationalism without sliding into the vacuous, liberal-democratic notion of universality as a neutral framework for compromise? Žižek answers by reviving the Hegelian notion of “concrete universality,” a form of universality that is realized only through the partisan, properly political act of taking sides. Žižek argues that at this juncture in history, what is called for is the identification with the disenfranchised “excremental remainder” of society. The universal truth of an event or situation is not revealed in the big Other, the intersubjective, sociosymbolic network. On the contrary, the truth of a situation is accessible only to those who occupy the position of the abject, excluded other. Any ideology excludes and makes abject some Other, some particular group, and if this exclusion is symptomatic of a wider problem, the excluded ones experience the pathology of the entire society. This is why Žižek argues that the universal (partisan) truth of the entire social field is disclosed only through the experiences of those who are disenfranchised by the hegemonic ideology.

rethinking Lenin. W here Negri and Badiou reject the Party and the State, Zizek retains a certain fidelity to Lenin. "The key 'Leninist' lesson today," he writes, is that "politics without the organizational form of the Party is politics without politics

Zizek is raccoon who lived in a dumpster behind a university's library who was transformed into a human by a witch.

But against proponents of identity politics and multiculturalism, Žižek argues that there is a kind of universality that is negative. The universal is not an ideal as some positive content that is always implicit to any “system” of thought. On the contrary the universal is a kind of traumatic antagonism around which ever-changing, thoroughly contingent, historical constellations of thought circle and revolve. Along these lines, according to Žižek’s reading of Hegel, the dialectic is a process without a subject, a process which revolves around a void or negativity. No agent (no God, humanity, or class as a collective subject) controls and directs the dialectical process.

Consequently, postmodernist claims that we live in a post-ideological condition are not only false but dangerously misguided. On the contrary, as Žižek’s substantial analyses of contemporary culture demonstrate, if anything, we postmodern subjects today believe more than ever; however, our belief takes the form of imagining that someone else believes. Our cynicism still involves the belief that someone else believes; there is some Other who desires and is envious of our unfathomable X (Freedom, Democracy, etc.). Thus the anti-Enlightenment, Nietzschean tendencies of postmodernism (cynicism, indirections and distantiations, idiosyncratic and mutually exclusive interpretations of the same text) are in fact symptomatic of the contemporary subject’s inability to overcome alienation. These postmodernist gestures are modes of reproducing late capitalist symbolic reality; they are ways of domesticating the Real by inscribing it into the intersubjective symbolic network. Postmodernism is not “radical” at all; on the contrary, it exemplifies the elementary operation of ideology. In spite of our postmodern cynicism, today subjects believe more than ever. Again, the key point is that our belief is externalized: we believe that there is some Other who believes. Even though we in the USA all know that our so-called “democracy” is dysfunctional, somewhere there is someone who still believes in our democracy. In sum, today’s postmodern cynicism does not distance us from ideology; on the contrary, it allows us to be immersed in ideological fantasy today more than ever.

Žižek’s critique of global liberal capitalism – and its ideological supplement, pluralist “democracy” – hinges on the fact that the possibility of true democracy has long since been foreclosed by global capital. Thus, whereas today’s right-wingers blatantly violate constitutional law in order to further the interests of an elite few, today’s liberal pseudo-leftists reduce the space of politics proper to a question of cultural diversity, and simply promote “identity politics.” The left today implicitly assumes that global capitalism is here to stay, in spite of the fact that the upheavals and crises of late capitalism are in the process of making religious fundamentalism and populist nationalism global phenomena. Today’s leftists mistakenly equate class struggle with any other political struggle. But against democratic, populist, or nationalist accommodations with capitalism, Žižek’s For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor opens up the space for a radical political act which breaks free from vulgar, egotistic bourgeois life.

It is not reality that subjects fail to recognize, but the fantasy that is constitutive of their reality. Ideological fantasy is constitutive of social reality; ideology structures the symbolic reproduction of reality by providing a fantasy that masks the negativity of social antagonism.

But in spite of our alleged freedoms today, we cynical, postmodern subjects – finding ourselves overwhelmed by the injunction to transgress and the burden of choosing every aspect of our very existence – compensate for the decline in symbolic efficacy by voluntarily subjecting ourselves to ever new forms of constraint: in short, we demand that the Other act on our behalf. Instead of recognizing that Capital itself is the ultimate power of deterritorialization, we blame the disintegration of symbolic order on some (religious, racial, ethnic) Other. This “postmodern racism” is inherent to the multiculturalist and (allegedly) tolerant reduction of the sphere of politics proper to the clash of cultures. When all conflicts are presupposed to arise from cultural or ethnic differences, we not only miss the true causes of the conflict. More seriously, the pre- supposition functions so as to depoliticize all problems: the result is a cynical subject. This is why the resigned, postmodern subject of late capitalism views anyone with political principles as a dangerous fanatic. Moreover, as Žižek has argued in more recent writings, “the opposition between rightist populism and liberal tolerance is a false one.” In other words, democratic openness is based on exclusion, and right-wing populism and liberal tolerance are two sides of the same coin. This explains why there are forms of racism that involve a rejection of Muslims, for example, with the false claim that all Muslims are racist. This implicit moment of racism in liberal “tolerance” is also manifested in the way that the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy has led to the development of a new ideological formation, the universalization of the fantasy image of the helpless victim: “So the much-advertised liberal-democratic “right to difference” and anti-Eurocentrism appear in their true light: the Third World other is recognized as a victim – that is to say, in so far as he is a victim. The true object of anxiety is the other no longer prepared to play the role of victim – such another is promptly denounced as a “terrorist,” a “fundamentalist,” and so on. The Somalis, for example, undergo a true Kleinian splitting into a “good” and a “bad” object – on the one hand the good object: passive victims, suffering starving children and women; on the other the bad object: fanatical warlords who care more for their power or their ideological goals than for the welfare of their own people. The good other dwells in the anonymous passive universality of a victim – the moment we encounter an actual/active other, there is always something with which to reproach him: being patriarchal, fanatical, intolerant … (Metastases, p. 215) All of this supports Žižek’s initial, provocative claim, which at first seemed so outrageous, that unconscious enjoyment was the cause of the West’s indecision during the Bosnian war. It is the enjoyment provided by ideological formations – such as the fantasy image of the victim – that explains the failure of Western intervention in the Bosnian conflict.

The Ticklish Subject shows how today, in spite of the decline of the paternal metaphor and the inefficacy of ethical-political principles, global capitalist relations of production actually structure an ever more prohibitive and homogenized social reality: The true horror lies not in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital but, rather, in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course; that there is in fact no particular Secret Agent animating it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism (the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds) which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as global world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of today’s world. (Ticklish, p. 218) Multiculturalism – as well as postmodern efforts to reduce truth to “narratives” or “solidarity of belief” – simply further the interests of global capital. Žižek notes wryly that liberal pseudo-leftists really know all of this, but the problem is that they want to maintain their relatively comfortable lifestyles (bought at the expense of suffering in the Third World), and meanwhile to maintain the pose of revolutionary “beautiful souls.” Postmodern “post-politics” replaces the recognition of global ideological divisions with an emphasis on the collaboration of enlightened experts, technocrats, and specialists who negotiate to reach compromises. Such pragmatic “administration of social matters” accepts in advance the very global capitalist framework that determines the profitability of the compromise (Ticklish, p. 199). This suspension of the space for authentic politics leads to what Žižek calls “postmodern racism,” which ignores the universal rights of the political subject, proliferates divisions along cultural lines, and prevents the working class from politicizing its predicament. Even more seriously, according to Žižek, post-politics no longer merely represses the political, but forecloses it. Thus instead of violence as the neurotic “return of the repressed,” we see signs of a new kind of irrational and excessive violence. This new manifestation of violence results from the (psychotic) foreclosure of the Name of the Father that leads to a “return in the Real.” This violence is thus akin to the psychotic passage a l’acte: “a cruelty whose manifestations range from ‘fundamentalist’ racist and/or religious slaughter to the ‘senseless’ outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reason” (Ticklish, p. 198). Where then, is the power to combat such foreclosure? The Ticklish Subject shows that the subversive power of subjectivity arises only when the subject annuls himself as subject: the acknowledgment of the integral division or gap in subjectivity allows the move from subjection to subjective destitution. Insofar as the subject concedes to the inherent failure of symbolic practices, he no longer presupposes himself as a unified subject. He acknowledges the nonexistence of the symbolic big Other and the monstrosity of the Real. Such acceptance involves the full assertion – rather than the effacement – of the gap between the Real and its symbolization. In contrast to the artificial object character of the imaginary capitalist ego, The Ticklish Subject discloses the “empty place” of the subject as a purely structural function, and shows that this functioning emerges only as the withdrawal from one’s substantial identity, as the disintegration of the “self” that is situated and defined within a communal universe of meaning.

Put simply, Žižek calls us to be ever more critical of our struggle to maintain our self-deceptions, and of the ideological props that sustain our relatively comfortable numbness. All it takes to break free from the manipulations of ideology is the courage to remain true to our symbolic desire. Žižek’s analysis of the symbolic subject as radical negativity opens up the space for a true act which ignores the false dilemma of a forced choice and redefines the very parameters of meaning.

Transcendental idealism is—or better, must be said to always already spectrally refer to—transcendental materialism, the difference between them being only that of a parallax shift: the two are negatively linked to one another by an impossible in-between, a disjunctive “and,” the very name of which is.. subject, so that an idealism must convert itself into a materialism and vice versa if subjectivity is to be fully explained.

The key insight gained by contemporary physics is that material reality in itself does not present us with a dense field of fully constituted realities that form the ultimate building blocks of the universe, but rather with irreducibly indeterminate states lacking any substantial being and from which “hard” reality can only emerge if there is a collapse of the wave function. In this sense, the micro-universe of quantum particles is strangely “less” than that of the macro-universe that constructs itself from its vicissitudes, in a way that is remarkably similar to how the Kantian subject can only construct a unified, coherent world of appearances from the inconsistent fragments of sensation. In a strange logical short circuit, it would appear that not only is there no bottom-up causality at the level of experience (transcendental constitution is more real than what Kant calls “a rhapsody of perception”), but even the most fundamental level of the universe is metaphysically more chaotic than the ordered macro-level physical world that science classically described. It is as if all reality is transcendentally constitutive, so that the only way to break free of the correlationist circle is to push “this transcendental correlation into the Thing itself:” “[i]t is against this background that one can make out the contours of what can perhaps only be designated by the oxymoron 'transcendental materialism' (proposed by Adrian Johnston).

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.

The object of psychoanalysis and by consequence the human subject are not antiphysical because images and words are an infinite Other to nature, an external alterity that arises ex-nihilo only to penetrate into its secret chamber like a vandal and deface its sacred inviolability. The incommensurability lies elsewhere: images and language cannot be the cause of the denaturalization of the human subject; there must be something in nature itself that immanently moves it toward denaturalization. In short, nature itself is antiphusis, self-sabotaging, self-lacerating.

If the emergence of the Symbolic out of the Real—the passage from nature to culture enacted by the founding gesture of subjectivity—is the advent of a completely self-enclosed, selfsustaining structural system, then not only must its founding gesture withdraw from the scene in the very act of instituting the Symbolic, but further, even to explain this act we must posit the absolute as a fragile not-all wrought by negativity and antagonism. Or.. as a series of less than nothings whose essence constitutes an ontologically incomplete field.

the middle class is against politicization—they just want to sustain their way of life, to be left to work and lead their life in peace (which is why they tend to support the authoritarian coups which promise to put an end to the crazy political mobilization of society, so that everybody can return to his or her proper work)

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