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Slavoj Zizek Quotes & Sayings

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Famous Quotes By Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1009620

The same rightists who decades ago were shouting, 'Better dead than red!' are now often heard mumbling, 'Better red than eating hamburgers. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1788626

Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1591056

When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.77 — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2123777

We need useless theory more than ever today. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 267773

What makes Berlusconi so interesting as a political phenomenon is the fact that he, as the most powerful politician in his country, acts more and more shamelessly: he not only ignores or neutralizes any legal investigation into the criminal activity that has allegedly supported his private business interests, he also systematically undermines the basic dignity associated with being the head of state. The dignity of classical politics is grounded in its elevation above the — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1119151

... I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 105880

if Substance is Life, is the Subject not Death? Insofar as, for Hegel, the basic feature of pre-subjective Life is the "spurious infinity" of the eternal reproduction of the life substance through the incessant movement of the generation and corruption of its elements - that is, the "spurious infinity" of a repetition without progress - the ultimate irony we encounter here is that Freud, who called this excess of death over life the "death drive," conceived it precisely as repetition, as a compulsion to repeat. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2051592

The only way to survive such shitty times, if you ask me, is to write and read big, fat books, you know? And I'm writing now another book on Hegelian dialectics, subjectivity, ontology, quantum physics and so on. That's the only way to survive. Like Lenin. I will use his example. You know what Lenin did, in 1915, when World War I exploded? He went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1979861

the act is by definition partial, it involves guilt, but the judging consciousness does not admit that its judging is also an act, it refuses to include itself in what it judges. It ignores the fact that the true evil lies in the neutral gaze which sees evil everywhere around itself, so that it is no less tainted than the acting consciousness. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 494039

The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also - even more, perhaps - the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1270252

The proper way for the woman to test the man's love is thus to "betray" him at a crucial moment in his career — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1188505

Was 9/11 not the 20th congress of the American Dream? — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1562209

Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God's grace might prove to be all too free on this side, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might some day prove to be empty! — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2140101

The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1048161

What if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity? — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 250867

An entity is free when it can deploy its immanent potential without being impeded by any external obstacle. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 584849

[P]olitical freedom can easily provide the legal frame for economic slavery, with the underprivileged 'freely' selling themselves into servitude. We are thus brought to demand more than just political democracy: we need democratization of social and economic life. In short, we have to admit that what we first took as the failure fully to realize the noble principle of democratic freedom is a failure inherent to this principle itself. Learning how the distortion of a notion, its incomplete realization, is grounded in the distortion immanent to this notion is a big step in political education. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 905482

Itself as the "natural" advocate of democracy and human rights against the threat of totalitarianism - as if it were not the case that the Church accepted democracy only at the end of the nineteenth century, and even then with clenched teeth, as a desperate compromise, making it clear that it preferred monarchy, — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1284549

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

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1641899

What if eternity is a sterile, impotent, lifeless domain of pure potentialities, which, in order fully to actualize itself, has to pass through temporal existence? — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 794922

Ideology today is unfreedom which you sincerely personally experience as freedom. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 478700

There is a multitude of forms of this appearing of un-freedom in the guise of its opposite: in being deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are being given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious job every couple of years, we are told that we are being given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover our creative potential; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we are now able to become "entrepreneurs of the self," acting like a capitalist freely choosing how to invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed). In education, health, travel we are constantly bombarded by imposed "free choices"; forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not qualified (or do not possess enough information), we increasingly experience our freedom as a burden that causes unbearable anxiety. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 207001

In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2191762

When do I actually encounter the Other 'beyond the wall of language', in the rel of his or her being? Not when I am able to describe her, not even when I learn her values, dreams, and so on, but only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance: when I discern in her a tiny detail (a compulsive gesture, a facial expression, a tic) which signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. This encounter with the real is always traumatic; there is something at least minimally obscene about it; I cannot simply integrate it into my universe, there is always a gulf separating me from it. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 893101

One does not wait for the "ripe" objective circumstances to make a revolution, circumstances become "ripe" through the political struggle itself. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 174195

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

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1035969

Thus 2t Grams confronts us with the same interpretive dilemma as the one in The Wings of the Dove: is the suicidal sacrificial gesture a true ethical act or not? In contrast to Wings, the answer here is yes: there is no narcissistic staging of one's death at work when Paul shoots himself, no manipulative strategy of using one's death as a gift destined to secretly sabotage what it appears to make possible. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1596005

For Lacan, language is a gift as dangerous to humanity as the horse was to the Trojans: it offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1355122

True universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity, but those who engage in a passionate struggle for the assertion of the Truth which compels them. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 247353

Love is what makes sex more than masturbation. If there is no love even if you are really with a partner you masturbate with a partner. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1902609

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? — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1505154

Communism will win. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1871800

The socioeconomic impact of such a minor outburst is due to our technological development (air travel) - a century ago, such an eruption would have passed unnoticed. Technological development makes us more independent from nature. At the same time, at a different level, it makes us more dependent on nature's whims. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1620325

Fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists' conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1601286

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. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1471483

Friends told me that the latest trend, at least in Europe, is public sex. They showed me some clips, and they're terrifying. A couple enters a streetcar, half-full, simply takes a seat, undresses, and starts to do it. You can see from surprised faces that it's not staged. It's pure working-class suburb. But what's fascinating is that the people all look, and then they politely ignore it. The message is that even if you're together in public with people, it still counts as private space. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1593477

Are we all not, when we sit in the cinema, in the position of humans in The Matrix, tied to chairs, immersed in the spectacle run by a machine? However, a more appropriate allegory is that of the viewer himself: beneath the illusion that we "just look" at the perceived objects from a safe distance, freely sliding along them, there is the reality of the innumerable ties that bind us to what we perceive. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1509613

The moment we think in the terms of 'Yes, the WTC collapse was a tragedy, but we should not fully solidarize with the victims, since this would mean supporting US imperialism', the ethical catastrophe is already here: the only appropriate stance is unconditional solidarity with all victims. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1524101

We're not dreamers. We're awaking from a dream turning into a nightmare. We're not destroying anything. We're watching the system destroy itself. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1553351

It is the reign of contemporary global capitalism which is the true Lord of Misrule. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2117039

There is a wonderful expression in Persian, war nam nihadan, which means to murder somebody, bury his body, then grow flowers over the body to conceal it — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2261571

We usually speak of the Jewish-Christian civilization perhaps, the time has come, especially with regard to the Middle East conflict, to talk about the Jewish-Muslim civilization as an axis opposed to Christianity. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2255535

Confucius was not so much a philsopher as a proto-ideologist: what interested him was not metaphysical Truths but rather a harmonious social order within which individuals could lead happy and ethical lives. He was the first to outline clearly what one is tempted to call the elementary scene of ideology, its zero-level, which consists in asserting the (nameless) authority of some substantial Tradition. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2243742

Alain Badiou was once seated amongst the public in a room where I was delivering a talk, when his cellphone (which, to add insult to injury, was mine
I had lent it to him) all of a sudden started to ring. Instead of turning it off, he gently interrupted me and asked me if I could talk more softly, so that he could hear his interlocutor more clearly ... If this was not an act of true friendship, I do not know what friendship is. So, this book is dedicated to Alain Badiou. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2243671

With the million or more words contained in the English language, one notorious word has been able to stand out and hold its title as the most physically demanding. Violence; a word commonly bestowed upon embellished acts of crude conflict, and physical contact. The word has never brought good feelings, or good thoughts, but rather emotions of unpleasant behavior due to the severity of its nature. Over the years, violence has evolved from a basic skirmish, to an array of things. Violence in modern day time is now being used to install fear, and to persuade innocent individuals into doing whatever the perpetrator desires, such as: personal gain, rape, and advancement of power. Every day another innocent person is being robbed, and demeaned by violent characters lurking the dark streets. Not only has violence been an ongoing epidemic, but it's only getting worse as the years go on. We see horrendously violent acts being committed every day. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2215685

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. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2210940

Populism is ultimately sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry I don't know what's going on, but I've just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop! — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2141322

It is as if, in today's permissive society, transgressive violations are allowed only in a "privatized" form, as a personal idiosyncrasy deprived of any public, spectacular, or ritualistic dimension. We can thus publicly confess all our weird private practices, but they remain simply private idiosyncrasies. Perhaps we should also invert here the standard formula of fetishistic disavowal: "I know very well (that I should obey the rules), but nonetheless ... (I occasionally violate them, since this too is part of the rules)." In contemporary society, the predominant stance is rather: "I believe (that repeated hedonistic transgressions are what make life worth living), but nonetheless ... (I know very well that these transgressions are not really transgressive, but are just artificial coloring serving to re-emphasize the grayness of social reality). — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2138091

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. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2122413

In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers' uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1729146

You cannot change people but you can change the system so that people are not pushed into doing evil things. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 2019626

We live in weird times in which we are compelled to behave as if we are free, so that the unsayable is not our freedom but the very fact of our servitude. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1999728

But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, You are also responsible for deciding what is your duty. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1958468

When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1955585

In a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king
but a king in a constitutional democracy, a monarch who decides only formally, whose function is merely to sign off on measures proposed by an executive administration. This is why the problem with democratic rituals is homologous to the great problem of constitutional monarchy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively makes decisions, when we all know this not to be true? — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1195365

In this way the world market is, with regard to its immanent dynamic, 'a space in which everyone has once been a productive labourer, and in which labour has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system'. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1859462

European civilisation finds it easier to tolerate differ-
ent ways of life precisely on account of what its critics
usually denounce as its weakness and failure, namely
the alienation of social life. One of the things alienation
means is that distance is woven into the very social texture of everyday life. Even if I live side by side with others, in my normal state I ignore them. I am allowed not to get too close to others. I move in a social space where I interact with others obeying certain external "mechanical" rules, without sharing their inner world. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that sometimes a dose of alienation is indispensable for peaceful coexistence. Sometimes alienation is not a problem but a solution. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1834133

Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space - in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be 'harassed', that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1770384

I affirm myself to be a Lacanian, for fear of being convienced by others that I am not a Lacanian — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1767502

By what right can we call this a system of "corrections"? Is it not, rather, the rubric for a slavishly obedient, oppressed, and humiliated existence? — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 452344

The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 530630

What is "true" thinking? Thinking is not solving problems. The first step in thinking is to ask these sorts of questions: "Is this really a problem?" "Is this the right way to formulate the problem?" "How did we arrive at this?" This is the ability we need in thinking. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 530473

Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, or even armed struggle? — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 529187

We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 527352

Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 526695

In short, the ultimate source of Evil is compasion itself — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 522955

[T]aking the Third into account does not bring us into the position of pragmatic consideration, of comparing different Others; the task is rather to learn to distinguish between "false" conflicts and the "true" conflict. For example, today's conflict between Western liberalism and religious fundamentalism is a "false" one, since it is based on the exclusion of the third term which is its "truth": the Leftist emancipatory position. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 516091

The duty of a politician for me is to be a representative: a politician is not an expert, experts are experts, hired for their expertise. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 515017

The minimum necessary structuring ingredient of every ideology is to distance itself from another ideology, to denounce its other as ideology. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 486443

There is an irreducible scandal, something traumatic and unexpected, in the encounter with another subject, in the fact that the subject (a self-consciousness) encounters outside itself, in front of it, another living being there in the world, among things, which also claims to be a subject (a self-consciousness). As a subject, I am by definition alone, a singularity opposed to the entire world of things, a punctuality to which all the world appears, and all the phenomenological descriptions of my being always "together-with" others cannot ultimately cover up the scandal of there being another such singularity. In the guise of a living being in front of me which also claims to be a self-consciousness, infinity assumes a determinate form"- Hegel, — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 570252

No wonder that tantra is so popular today in the West: it offers the ultimate "spiritual logic of late capitalism" uniting spirituality and earthly pleasures, transcendence and material benefits, divine experience and unlimited shopping. It propagates the permanent transgression of all rules, the violation of all taboos, instant gratification as the path to enlightenment; it overcomes old-fashioned "binary" thought, the dualism of mind and body, in claiming that the body at its most material (the site of sex and lust) is the royal path to spiritual awakening. Bliss comes from "saying yes" to all bodily needs, not from denying them: spiritual perfection comes from the insight that we already are divine and perfect, not that we have to achieve this through effort and discipline. The body is not something to be cultivated or crafted into an expression of spiritual truths, rather it is immediately the "temple for expressing divinity. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 423751

In order effectively to liberate oneself from the grip of existing social reality, one should first renounce the transgressive fantasmatic supplement that attaches us to it. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 382636

Here is an old phrase I like: "The only way to the universal good is that we all become strangers to ourselves." You imagine looking at yourself with a foreign gaze, through foreign eyes. I think this is something that could be the greatest thing in humanity. You are never really limited just to your own perspective. I don't like the false identity politics of multiculturalism which says that "you are enclosed in your culture." No, we have all this amazing capacity to be surprised, not by others, but by ourselves seeing how what we are doing is strange. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 361851

The great mistake in dealing with this opposition is to search for a proper measure between two extremes. What one should do instead is to bring out what both extremes share: the fantasy of a peaceful world where the agonistic tension of sexual difference disappears, either in a clear and stable hierarchic distinction of sexes or in the happy fluidity of a desexualized universe. And it is not difficult to discern in this fantasy of a peaceful world the fantasy of a society without social antagonisms, in short, without class struggle. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 328175

We don't really want to get what we think that we want.
I am married to a wife and relationship with her are cold and I have a mistress. And all the time I dream oh my god if my wife were to disappear - I'm not a murderer but let us say- that it will open up a new life with the mistress.Then, for some reason, the wife goes away, you lose the mistress.
You thought this is all I want, when you have it there, you turn out it was a much more complex situation.
It was not to live with the mistress, but to keep her as a distance as on object of desire about which you dream.
This is not an excessive example, I claim this is how things function. We don't really want what we think we desire — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 238471

How do we account for this paradox that the absence of Law universalizes prohibition ... The psychoanalytic name for this obscene injunction for this obscene call, ENJOY, is superego. The problem today is not how to get rid of your inhibitions and to be able to spontaneously enjoy. The problem is how to get rid of this injunction to enjoy. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 172084

It is more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to overcome their victim status and perhaps become even more succesfull than ourselves — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 166508

I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern, secular, nonreligious man, state bureaucracy is the only remaining contact with the dimension of the divine; the impenetrable omnipotence of bureaucracy harbors is divine enjoyment. It is the performance of its very purposelessness that generates an intense enjoyment, ready to reproduce itself forever. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 150317

In contrast to modern art, which causes displeasure-modern art, by definition, hurts. In this precise sense, modern art is sublime: it causes pleasure-in-pain, it produces its effect through its own failure, insofar as it refers to the impossible Things. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 95673

Come on. I don't have any problem violating my own insights in practice. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 960225

Does everything that exists have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or are there things that somehow happen out of nowhere? — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1367627

So when the ruling ideology enjoins us to enjoy sex, not to feel guilty about it, since we are not bound by any prohibitions whose violations should make us feel guilty, the price we pay for this absence of guilt is anxiety. — Slavoj Zizek

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The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland - a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth - can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth. — Slavoj Zizek

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You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1270297

Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1211645

The ultimate goal of radical politics is gradually to displace the limit of social exclusions, empowering the excluded agents (sexual and ethnic minorities) by creating marginal spaces in which they can articulate and question their identity. Radical politics thus becomes an endless mocking parody and provocation, a gradual process of reidentification in which there are not final victories and ultimate demarcations — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1201070

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. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 81333

We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 996881

The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn't know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies. What we have today is a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, but whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions - what is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. "If God doesn't exist, then everything is prohibited" means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 984341

Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its potential. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 1470759

IDEOLOGY IS A CERTAIN UNIQUE EXPERIENCE OF THE UNIVERSE AND YOUR PLACE IN IT, TO PUT IT IN STANDARD TERMS, WHICH SERVES THE PRODUCTION OF THE EXISTING POWER RELATIONS AND BLAH BLAH BLAH. — Slavoj Zizek

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Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction. — Slavoj Zizek

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What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 880259

In Kant's description, ethical duty functions like a foreign traumatic intruder that from the outside disturbs the subject's homeostatic balance, its unbearable pressure forcing the subject to act "beyond the pleasure principle," ignoring the pursuit of pleasures. For Lacan, exactly the same description holds for desire, which is why enjoyment is not something that comes naturally to the subject, as a realization of her inner potential, but is the content of a traumatic superego injunction. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 829573

as in Heinrich Heine's (a contemporary of Kierkegaard's) well-known saying that one should value above everything else 'freedom, equality and crab soup'. 'Crab soup' stands here for all the small pleasures in the absence of which we become (mental, if not real) terrorists, — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 738470

I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of "what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis," and so on. It really is a most arrogant position. I think that the only way to be honest and expose yourself to criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a position. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 728973

Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 725977

This, then, is the truth of the discourse of universal human rights: the Wall separating those covered by the umbrella of Human Rights and those excluded from its protective cover. Any reference to universal human rights as an 'unfinished project' to be gradually extended to all people is here a vain ideological chimera - and, faced with this prospect, do we, in the West, have any right to condemn the excluded when they use any means, inclusive of terror, to fight their exclusion? — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 597943

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire. — Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek Quotes 585865

I may still be a kind of a Marxist but I'm very realistic, I don't have these dreams of revolutionists around the corner. — Slavoj Zizek