Slovenian Marxist philosopher (1949- )
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!"
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Living in the End Times
Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence -- by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present -- but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word "quarters" the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed self-sufficient being.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
Fantasy is a means for an ideology to take its own failure into account in advance.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The Sublime Object of Ideology
Of course, I think that the Holocaust was horrific (my god, it is gross to even have to say that), but for me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. For example, there is a basic difference between Stalinist and Nazi victim status, from a simple phenomenological approach. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. You are guilty for who you are, you are a Jew, you are killed, that's it. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. Nonetheless, there is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
interview, The Believer Magazine, Jul. 2004
The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Opera's Second Death
Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
"Slavoj Zizek: I am not the world's hippest philosopher!", Salon, Dec. 29, 2012
As the experience of our post-political liberal-permissive society amply demonstrates, human Rights are ultimately, at their core, simply Rights to violate the Ten Commandments. "The right to privacy" -- the right to adultery, in secret, where no one sees me or has the right to probe my life. "The right to pursue happiness and to possess private property" -- the right to steal (to exploit others). "Freedom of the press and of the expression of opinion" -- the right to lie. "The right of free citizens to possess weapons" -- the right to kill. And, ultimately, "freedom of religious belief" -- the right to worship false gods.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
When authority is backed up by an immediate physical compulsion, what we are dealing with is not authority proper (i.e. symbolic authority), but simply an agency of brute force.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
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.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing -- I cannot tell you how much. The moment I am at the end of one project I have the idea that I didn't really succeed in telling what I wanted to tell, that I need a new project -- it's an absolute nightmare. But my whole economy of writing is in fact based on an obsessional ritual to avoid the actual act of writing.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Conversations with Zizek
My big fear is that if I act the way I am, people will notice that there is nothing to see. So I have to be active all the time, covering up.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
"Slavoj Zizek: I am not the world's hippest philosopher!", Salon, Dec. 29, 2012
This proletarianization of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is accompanied by an excess in the opposite direction: the irrationally high pay of top managers and bankers, a level of remuneration that is economically irrational since, as investigations in the US have demonstrated, it tends to be inversely proportional to the company's success.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The Year of Dreaming Dangerously
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
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
In Defense of Lost Causes
Obama has already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to change the limits of what one can say publicly. His greatest achievement up to now is that, in his refined non-provocative way, he has introduced into public speech topics which had hitherto been de facto unsayable: the continuing importance of race in politics, the positive role of atheists in public life, the necessity to talk with "enemies" like Iran or Hamas, and so on. This is just what US politics needs today more than anything, if it is to break out of its gridlock: new words which will change the way we think and act.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
I planted some jokes in my wedding. Like, the organizers asked me to select music. So when I approached wife at the ceremony, they played the second movement from Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, which is usually known as the "portrait of Stalin." And then when we embraced, the music that they played was Schubert's "Death and the Maiden." I enjoyed this in a childish way! But marriage was all a nightmare and so on and so on.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
"Slavoj Zizek: I am not the world's hippest philosopher!", Salon, Dec. 29, 2012
The way we, everyday people are addressed by social authority, whatever we call it -- it's no longer telling us "sacrifice your life" for British empire, for socialism, whatever. It’s not. It's some kind of permissive bullsh*t basically. Society is telling us, like, be true to yourself, authentic, develop your potential, be kind to others. It's kind of what I ironically call a slightly enlightened Buddhist hedonism.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
interview, New Statesman, Oct. 8, 2013
Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
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
The Fragile Absolute: Or, why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
Marx described the mad, self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of parthenogenesis reaches its apogee in today's meta-reflexive speculations on futures. It is far too simplistic to claim that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction and that behind this abstraction there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources capital's circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this "abstraction" is not only in our financial speculators' misperception of social reality, but that it is "real" in the precise sense of determining the structure of the material social processes: the fate of whole strata of the population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the "solipsistic" speculative dance of capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in blessed indifference to how its movement will affect social reality.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Violence: Six Sideways Reflections