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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

...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.

¿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.

When, in Being and Time,Heidegger insists that death is the onlyevent which cannot be taken over by another subject for me—an-other cannot die for me, in my place—the obvious counterexampleis Christ himself: did he not, in the extreme gesture of interpassiv-ity, take over for us the ultimate passive experience of dying? Christdies so that we are given a chance to live forever....The problemhere is not only that, obviously, we don’tlive forever (the answer tothis is that it is the Holy Spirit, the community of believers, whichlives forever), but the subjective status of Christ: when he was dyingon the Cross, did he know about his Resurrection-to-come? If he didthen it was all a game, the supreme divine comedy, since Christ knewhis suffering was just a spectacle with a guaranteed good outcome—in short, Christ was faking despair in his “Father, why hast thou for-saken me?” If he didn’t, then in what precise sense was Christ (also)divine? Did God the Father limit the scope of knowledge of Christ’smind to that of a common human consciousness, so that Christ ac-tually thought he was dying abandoned by his father? Was Christ, ineffect, occupying the position of the son in the wonderful joke aboutthe rabbi who turns in despair to God, asking Him what he shoulddo with his bad son, who has deeply disappointed him; God calmlyanswers: “Do the same as I did: write a new testament!”What is crucial here is the radical ambiguity of the term “the faithof Jesus Christ,” which can be read as subjective or objectivegenitive: it can be either “the faith ofChrist” or “the faith / of us, be-lievers / inChrist.” Either we are redeemed because of Christ’s purefaith, or we are redeemed by our faith in Christ, if and insofar as webelieve in him. Perhaps there is a way to read the two meanings to-gether: what we are called to believe in is not Christ’s divinity as suchbut, rather, his faith, his sinless purity. What Christianity proposes isthe figure of Christ as our subject supposed to believe:in our ordinary lives,we never truly believe, but we can at least have the consolation thatthere is One who truly believes (the function of what Lacan, in hisseminar Encore,called y’a de l’un).The final twist here, however, is thaton the Cross, Christ himself has to suspend his belief momentarily.So maybe, at a deeper level, Christ is, rather, our (believers’) subject supposed NOTto believe: it is not our belief we transpose onto others, but,rather, our disbelief itself. Instead of doubting, mocking, and ques-tioning things while believing through the Other, we can also trans-pose onto the Other the nagging doubt, thus regaining the abilityto believe. (And is there not, in exactly the same way, also the func-tion of the subject supposed not to know? Ta ke little children who are sup-posed not to know the “facts of life,” and whose blessed ignorancewe, knowing adults, are supposed to protect by shielding them frombrutal reality; or the wife who is supposed not to know about herhusband’s secret affair, and willingly plays this role even if she re-ally knows all about it, like the young wife in The Age of Innocence;or, inacademia, the role we assume when we ask someone: “OK, I’ll pre-tend I don’t know anything about this topic—try to explain it to mefrom scratch!”) And, perhaps, the true communion with Christ, thetrue imitatio Christi,is to participate in Christ’s doubt and disbelief.There are two main interpretations of how Christ’s death dealswith sin: sacrificial and participatory.4In the first one, we humansare guilty of sin, the consequence of which is death; however, Godpresented Christ, the sinless one, as a sacrifice to die in our place—through the shedding of his blood, we may be forgiven and freedfrom condemnation. In the second one, human beings lived “inAdam,” in the sphere of sinful humanity, under the reign of sin anddeath. Christ became a human being, sharing the fate of those “inAdam” to the end (dying on the Cross), but...

That is the ultimate alternative: is the opposition between Loveand Law to be reduced to its “truth,” the opposition, internal to theLaw itself, between the determinate positive Law and the excessivesuperego injunction, the Law beyond every measure—that is to say,is the excess of Love with regard to the Law the form of appearanceof a superego Law, of a Law beyond any determinate law; or is theexcessive superego Law the way the dimension beyond the Law ap-pears withinthe domain of the Law, so that the crucial step to be ac-complished is the step (comparable to Nietzsche’s “High Noon”)from the excessive Law to Love, from the way Love appears withinthe domain of the Law to Love beyond the Law? Lacan himselfstruggled continuously with this same deeply Pauline problem: isthere love beyond Law? Paradoxically (in view of the fact that thenotion as unsurpassable Law is usually perceived as Jewish), in thevery last page of Four Fundamental Concepts,he identifies this stance oflove beyond Law as that of Spinoza, opposing it to the Kantian no-tion of moral Law as the ultimate horizon of our experience. InEthics of Psychoanalysis,Lacan deals extensively with the Pauline di-alectic of the Law and its transgression13—perhaps what we shoulddo, therefore, is read this Pauline dialectic together with its corol-lary, Saint Paul’s other paradigmatic passage, the one on love from 1Corinthians 13. Crucial here is the clearly paradoxical place of Love with regard to All(to the completed series of knowledge or prophecies): first, SaintPaul claims that love is here even if we possess all of knowledge—then, in the second quoted paragraph, he claims that love is hereonly for incomplete beings, that is, beings who possess incompleteknowledge.When I “know fully . . . as I have been fully known,” willthere still be love? Although, in contrast to knowledge, “love neverends,” it is clearly only “now” (while I am still incomplete) that“faith, hope, and love abide.” The only way out of this deadlock isto read the two inconsistent claims according to Lacan’s feminineformulas of sexuation:14even when it is “all” (complete, with no ex-ception), the field of knowledge remains, in a way, non-all, incom-plete—love is not an exception to the All of knowledge, but preciselythat “nothing” which makes incomplete even the complete series/field of knowledge. In other words, the point of the claim that, evenif I were to possess all knowledge, without love, I would be nothing,is not simply that withlove, I am “something”—in love, I am also noth-ing,but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing par-adoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack.Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimatemystery of love, therefore, is that incompleteness is, in a way, higherthan completion. On the one hand, only an imperfect, lacking beingloves: we love because we do notknow all. On the other hand, evenif we were to know everything, love would, inexplicably, still behigher than completed knowledge. Perhaps the true achievement ofChristian is to elevate a loving (imperfect) Being to the place ofGod, that is, of ultimate perfection. That is the kernel of the Chris-tian experience. In the previous pagan attitude, imperfect earthlyphenomena can serve as signs of the unattainable divine perfection.In Christianity, on the contrary, it is physical (or mental) perfectionitself that is the sign of the imperfection (finitude, vulnerability, un-certainty) of you as the absolute person. becomes a sign of this spiritual dimension—not the sign of your“higher” spiritual perfection, but the sign of youas a finite, vulner-able person. Only in this way do we really break out of idolatry. Forthis reason, the properly Christian relationship between sex and loveis not the one between body and soul, but almost the opposite...

When Jews “unplug,” and maintaina distance toward the society in which they live, they do not do it forthe sake of their own different substantial identity—in a way, anti-Semitism is right here: the Jews are, in effect, “rootless,” their Law is“abstract,” it “extrapolates” them from the social Substance.And there we have the radical gap that separates the Christian sus-pension of the Law, the passage from Law to love, from the pagan sus-pension of the social law: the highest (or, rather, deepest) point ofevery pagan Wisdom is, of course, also a radical “unplugging” (ei-ther the carnivalesque orgy, or direct immersion in the abyss of theprimordial Void, in which all articulated differences are suspended);what is suspended here, however, is the “pagan” immanent law ofthe social, not the Jewish Law that already unplugs us from the so-cial. When Christian mystics get too close to the pagan mystical ex-perience, they bypass the Jewish experience of the Law—no wonderthey often become ferocious anti-Semites. Christian anti-Semitismis, in effect, a clear sign of the Christian position’s regression into pa-ganism: it gets rid of the “rootless,” universalist stance of Christian-ity proper by transposing it onto the Jewish Other; consequently,when Christianity loses the mediation of the Jewish Law, it loses thespecific Christian dimension of Love itself, reducing Love to the pa-gan “cosmic feeling” of oneness with the universe. It is only refer-ence to the Jewish Law that sustains the specific Christian notion of Love that needs a distance, that thrives on differences, that has noth-ing to do with any kind of erasure of borders and immersion inOneness. (And within the Jewish experience, love remains on thispagan level—that is to say, the Jewish experience is a unique combi-nation of the new Law with pagan love, which accounts for its innertension.)The trap to be avoided here is the opposition of the “external” so-cial law (legal regulations, “mere legality”) and the higher “inter-nal” moral law, where the external social law may strike us ascontingent and irrational, while the internal law is fully assumed as“our own”: we should radically abandon the notion that external so-cial institutions betray the authentic inner experience of the true we should radically abandon the notion that external so-cial institutions betray the authentic inner experience of the trueTranscendence of Otherness (in the guise, for example, of the oppo-sition between the authentic “inner” experience of the divine and its“external” reification into a religious institution in which the reli-gious experience proper degenerates into an ideology legitimizingpower relations). If there is a lesson to be learned from Kafka, it isthat, in the opposition between internal and external, the divine di-mension is on the side of the external. What can be more “divine”than the traumatic encounter with the bureaucracy at its craziest—when, say, a bureaucrat tells us that, legally, we don’t exist? It is insuch encounters that we catch a glimpse of another order beyondmere earthly everyday reality. There is no experience of the divinewithout such a suspension of the Ethical. And far from being simplyexternal, this very externality (to sense, to symbolic integration)holds us from within: Kafka’s topic is precisely the obscene jouissancethrough which bureaucracy addresses the subject on the level of thedisavowed innermost (“ex-timate,” as Lacan would have put it) realkernel of his being.

According to Rosenzweig, the difference between Jewish andChristian believers is not that the latter experience no anxiety, but thatthe focus of anxiety is displaced: Christians experience anxiety in theintimacy of their contact with God (like Abraham?), while for Jews,anxiety arises at the level of the Jews as a collective entity without aproper land, its very existence threatened.6And perhaps we should es-tablish a link here with the weak point of Heidegger’s Being and Time(the “illegitimate” passage from individual being-toward-death, and as-suming one’s contingent fate, to the historicity of a collective): it is onlyin the case of the Jewish people that such a passage from individual tocollective level would have been “legitimate.

And no amount of “deconstruction” helps here: the ultimate formof idolatry is the deconstructive purifying of this Other, so that all thatremains of the Other is its place, the pure form of Otherness as theMessianic Promise. It is here that we encounter the limit of decon-struction: as Derrida himself has realized in the last two decades, themore radical a deconstruction is, the more it has to rely on its inher-ent undeconstructible condition of deconstruction, the messianicpromise of Justice.This promise is the true Derridean object of belief,and Derrida’s ultimate ethical axiom is that this belief is irreducible,“undeconstructible.” Thus Derrida can indulge in all kinds of para-doxes, claiming, among other things, that it is only atheists who trulypray—precisely by refusing to address God as a positive entity, theysilently address the pure Messianic Otherness. Here one should em-phasize the gap which separates Derrida from the Hegelian tradition:It would be too easy to show that, measured by the failure to establishliberal democracy, the gap between fact and ideal essence does notshow up only in . . . so-called primitive forms of government, theoc-racy and military dictatorship....But this failure and this gap alsocharacterize,a prioriand by definition,all democracies, including theoldest and most stable of so-called Western democracies. At stake hereis the very concept of democracy as concept of a promise that can onlyarise in such a diastema(failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjust-ment, being “out of joint”).That is why we always propose to speak ofa democracy to come,not of a futuredemocracy in the future present, noteven of a regulating idea, in the Kantian sense, or of a utopia—at leastto the extent that their inaccessibility would still retain the temporalform of a future present,of a future modality of the living present.15Here we have the difference between Hegel and Derrida at its purest:Derrida accepts Hegel’s fundamental lesson that one cannot assert theinnocent ideal against its distorted realization.This holds not only fordemocracy, but also for religion—the gap which separates the idealconcept from its actualization is already inherent to the concept itself:just as Derrida claims that “God already contradicts Himself,” that anypositive conceptual determination of the divine as a pure messianicpromise already betrays it, one should also say that “democracy already139 contradicts itself.” It is also against this background that Derrida elab-orates the mutual implication of religion and radical evil:16radical evil(politically: “totalitarianism”) emerges when religious faith or reason(or democracy itself) is posited in the mode of future present. Against Hegel, however, Derrida insists on the irreducible excess inthe ideal concept which cannot be reduced to the dialectic betweenthe ideal and its actualization: the messianic structure of “to come,”the excess of an abyss which can never be actualized in its determinatecontent. Hegel’s own position here is more intricate than it may ap-pear: his point is not that, through gradual dialectical progress, onecan master the gap between the concept and its actualization, andachieve the concept’s full self-transparency (“Absolute Knowing”).Rather, to put it in speculative terms, his point is to assert a “pure”contradiction which is no longer the contradiction between theundeconstructible pure Otherness and its failed actualizations/determinations, but the thoroughly immanent “contradiction” whichprecedes any Otherness.

Sartre threw away the entire content of thebourgeois subject, maintaining only its pure form, and the next stepwas to throw away this form itself—is it not that,mutatis mutandis,Der-rida threw away all the positive ontological content of messianism, re-taining nothing but the pure form of the messianic promise, and thenext step is to throw away this form itself? And, again, is this not alsothe passage from Judaism to Christianity? Judaism reduces the prom-ise of Another Life to a pure Otherness, a messianic promise whichwill never become fully present and actualized (the Messiah is always “to come”); while Christianity, far from claiming full realization ofthe promise, accomplishes something far more uncanny: the Messiahis here, he has arrived, the final Event has already taken place,yet the gap(the gap which sustained the messianic promise) remains....Here I am tempted to suggest a return to the earlier Derrida ofdifférance:what if (as Ernesto Laclau, among others, has already ar-gued17) Derrida’s turn to “postsecular” messianism is not a necessaryoutcome of his initial “deconstructionist” impetus? What if the ideaof infinite messianic Justice which operates in an indefinite suspen-sion, always to come, as the undeconstructible horizon of decon-struction, already obfuscates “pure”différance,the pure gap whichseparates an entity from itself? Is it not possible to think this pure in-between priorto any notion of messianic justice? Derrida acts as ifthe choice is between positive onto-ethics, the gesture of transcend-ing the existing order toward another higher positive Order, andthe pure promise of spectral Otherness—what, however, if we dropthis reference to Otherness altogether? What then remains is eitherSpinoza—the pure positivity of Being—or Lacan—the minimal con-tortion of drive, the minimal “empty” (self-)difference which is op-erative when a thing starts to function as a substitute for itself. As Freud observed, the very acts that are forbidden by religion arepracticed in the name of religion. In such cases—as, for instance, mur-der in the name of religion—religion also can do entirely withoutminiaturization.Those adamantly militant advocates of human life, forexample, who oppose abortion, will not stop short of actually mur-dering clinic personnel. Radical right-wing opponents of male homo-sexuality in the USA act in a similar way.They organize so-called “gaybashings” in the course of which they beat up and finally rape gays. What we have here, yet again, is the Hegelian “oppositional determi-nation”: in the figure of the gay-basher raping a gay, the gay encoun-ters himself in its oppositional determination; that is to say, tautology(self-identity) appears as the highest contradiction.This threshold canalso function as the foreign gaze itself: for example, when a disen-chanted Western subject perceives Tibet as a solution to his crisis, Ti-bet loses its immediate self-identity, and turns into a sign of itself,its own “oppositional determination.

And this paradox brings us to the relationship between man andChrist: the tautology “man is man” is to be read as a Hegelian infinitejudgment, as the encounter of “man” with its oppositional determi-nation, with its counterpart on the other side of the Möbius strip. Justas, in our everyday understanding, “law is law” means its opposite, thecoincidence of the law with arbitrary violence (“What can you do?Even if it is unjust and arbitrary, the law is the law, you have to obeyit!”), “man is man” indicates the noncoincidence of man with man,the properly inhumanexcess which disturbs its self-identity—andwhat, ultimately, is Christ but the name of this excess inherent in man,man’s ex-timate kernel, the monstrous surplus which, following theunfortunate Pontius Pilate, one of the few ethical heroes of the Bible(the other being Judas, of course), can be designated only as “Eccehomo”?

The philosophical consequences of this Kantian parallax are fully explored in thenotion of ontological difference, the focus of Heidegger’s entire thought, which canbe properly grasped only against the background of the theme of finitude. There is adouble doxaon Heidegger’s ontological difference: it is a difference between the What-ness, the essence of beings, and the mere That-ness of their being—it liberates beingsfrom subordination to any ground/arche/goal; furthermore, it is a difference notmerely between (different levels of) beings, of reality, but between the All of realityand something else which, with regard to reality, cannot but appear as “Nothing.”. . .This doxais deeply misleading.With regard to the notion of ontological difference as the difference between whatthings are and the fact that they are, the doxasays that the mistake of metaphysics is tosubordinate being to some presupposed essence (sense, goal,arche...) embodied inthe highest entity, while ontological difference “de-essentializes” beings, setting them free from their enslavement to Essence, letting-them-be in their an-archic freedom—prior to any “what-for? why?”, and so on, things simply are,they just occur....If,how-ever, this were Heidegger’s thesis, then Sartre, in Nausea,would also outline ontologicaldifference at its most radical—does he not describe there the experience of the stupidand meaningless inertia of being at its most disgusting, indifferent to all our (human)meanings and projects? For Heidegger, in contrast to Sartre, “ontological difference”is, rather, the difference between the entities’ stupid being-there, their senseless real-ity, and their horizon of meaning.

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.

Therapy turns an analysand into a docile body, and [Zizek's] methodology is that of 'hysteria' insofar as it does not make sense to domesticate anxiety over political problems that require anxiety as an authentic response (e.g., global warming, class conflict, etc.). Those issues won't be resolved through talk therapy.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Nature is actually composed from vast amounts of destruction

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

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.

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

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

Traditionally, advertising had an imaginary and symbolic dimension.

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

progressive causes today.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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”.

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

a special effect which outdid all others?

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

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

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

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

psychoanalysis claims that reality outside myself definitely exists.

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

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

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.

And so his royal Duffleleupagus is seized with the megalomaniacal conceit that he is the contemporary Jesus, the man wandering through the lives of these forlorn people, beaten and broken down by the unbearable thirst of relative deprivation--unless it was all of capitalism, or terrorism, or loneliness, or time. Of course, to compare oneself to Jesus is at least ridiculous, and yet not uninspired extreme narcissism, and although he cannot remember reading it symptomatic of a particularly overt form of latent homosexuality, he could not say for sure he had not read that either. On a cereal box top or as fortune cookie filler? Svevo or Zizek? Soft-core porn spam or in freshman composition?

When I heard Zizek’s statement, I have to admit that I reacted strongly against it. For the first twenty-five years of my adult life, I had worked in politics and trade unionism trying to build a better world and, as I saw it, to rid us of the suffering caused by capitalism.