Slavoj Žižek: Use

“Everything pales into insignificance compared to our passionate attachment. In this sense, falling in love is like the blinding light that hit Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus: a kind of religious suspension of the Ethical, to use Kerkegaard's terms.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

Source: The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), p.33, Idea's Appearing

Love , Sense , Light , Passion

“The Real is therefore simultaneously both the hard impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency. To use Kripkean terminology, the Real is the rock upon which every attempt at symbolization stumbles, the hard core which remains the same in all possible worlds (symbolic universes); but at the same time its status is thoroughly precarious; it is something that persists only as failed, missed, in a shadow, and dissolves itself as soon as we try to grasp it in its positive nature… like a traumatic event constructed backwards.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

190
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

World , Nature , Universe , Time

“Let us take social struggle at its most violent: war. What interests Hegel is not struggle as such, but the way the "truth"of the engaged positions emerges through it, namely how the warring parties are "reconciled"through their mutual destruction. The true (spiritual) meaning of war is not honor, victory, defense, etc., but the emergence of absolute negativity (death_ as the absolute Master which reminds us of the false stability of our organized finite lives. War serves to elevate individuals to their "truth" by making them renounce their particular self interested identify with the State's universality”

Slavoj Žižek

Source: Less Than Nothing (2012), Chapter Two, The Thing Itself: Hegel, pp. 200

War , Truth , Way , Universe

“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 Žižek

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009)

Beauty , Reading

“Darcy wants to present himself to Elizabeth as a proud gentleman, and he gets from her the message 'your pride is nothing but contemptible arrogance.' After the break in their relationship each discovers, through a series of accidents, the true nature of the other - she the sensitive and tender nature of Darcy, he her real dignity and wit - and the novel ends as it should, with their marriage. The theoretical interest of this story lies in the fact that the failure of their first encounter, the double misrecognition concerning the real nature of the other, functions as a positive condition of the final outcome: we cannot say 'if, from the very beginning, she had recognized his real nature and he hers, their story could have ended at once with their marriage.' Let us take a comical hypothesis that the first encounter of the future lovers was a success - that Elizabeth had accepted Darcy's first proposal. What would happen? Instead of being bound together in true love they would become a vulgar everyday couple, a liaison of an arrogant, rich man and a pretentious, every-minded young girl… If we want to spare ourselves the painful roundabout route through the misrecognition, we miss the truth itself: only the working-through of the misrecognition allows us to accede to the true nature of the other and at the same time to overcome our own deficiency - for Darcy, to free himself of his false pride; for Elizabeth, to get rid of her prejudices.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

67
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Love , Pain , Marriage , Truth

“When we observe a thing, we see too much in it, we fall under the spell of the wealth of empirical detail which prevents us from clearly perceiving the notional determination which forms the core of the thing. The problem is thus not that of how to grasp the multiplicity of determinations, but rather to abstract from them, how to constrain our gaze and teach it to grasp only the notional determinism.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

xi
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Problem , Wealth

“Canned laughter: After some supposedly funny or witty remark you can hear the laughter and applause included in the soundtrack of the show itself - here we have the exact counterpart of the Chorus in classical tragedy; it is here that we have to look for 'living Antiquity.' That is to say, why this laughter? The first possible answer - that it serves to remind us when to laugh - is interesting enough, because it implies the paradox that laughter is a matter of duty and not of some spontaneous feeling; but this answer is not sufficient because we do not usually laugh. The only correct answer would be that the Other - embodied in the television set - is relieving us even of our duty to laugh - is instead laughing for us. So even if, tired from a hard days stupid work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television screen, we can say afterwards that objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

33
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Stupidity , Feeling , Laughter , Time

“The protracted struggle which dragged on in Egypt was not a conflict of visions, but the conflict between a vision of freedom, the "eternal" Platonic Idea of Freedom, and a blind clinging to power ready to use all means possible- terror, food deprivation, exhaustion, bribery- to crush the will to freedom.”

Slavoj Žižek

Source: Less Than Nothing (2012), Chapter One (The Drink Before), Vacillating The Semblances

Food , Idea , Freedom

“…Tibetan prayer wheels: you write a prayer on a paper, put the rolled paper on a wheel, and turn it automatically, without thinking. In this way, the wheel itself is praying for me, instead of me - or more precisely, I myself am praying through the medium of the wheel. The beauty of it all is that in my psychological inferiority I can think about whatever I want, I can yield to the most dirty and obscene fantasies, and it does not matter because - to use a good old Stalinist expression - 'whatever I am thinking, objectively I am praying.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

32
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Beauty , Way , Thinking

“The usual Marxist line of argument runs: 'only successful socialist revolution will render possible the abolition of women's repression, the end of the destructive exploitation of nature, relief from the threat of nuclear destruction…' My thesis is that of Saul Kripke's antidescriptivism offers us the conceptual tools to solve this problem.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

97
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Women , Nature , Problem , Success

“The Medium here is not the message, quite the opposite: the very medium that we use- the universal intersubjectivity of language-undermines the message.”

Slavoj Žižek

Source: Less Than Nothing (2012), Chapter One (The Drink Before), Vacillating The Semblances

Universe

“Here we could use the distinction elaborated by Kovel's White Racism - between dominative and aversive racism. In Nazi ideology, all human races form a hierarchical, harmonious, whole (the 'destiny' of the Aryans at the top is to rule, while the Blacks, Chinese and others have to serve) a all races except the Jews: they have no proper place; their very identity is fake, it consists in trespassing the frontiers, in introducing unrest, antagonism, in destabilizing the social fabric. As such, Jews plot with other races and prevent them from putting up with their proper place - they function as a hidden Master aiming at world domination: they are a counter-image of the Aryans themselves, a kind of negative, perverted double; their is why they must be exterminated, while other races have only to occupy their proper place.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

143
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

World

“In his seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis, Lacan speaks of the role of the Chorus in classical tragedy: we, the spectators, came to the theatre worried, full of everyday problems, unable to adjust without reserve to the problems of the play, that is to feel the required fears and compassions - but not problem, there is a chorus, who feels the sorrow and the compassion instead of us - or, more precisely, we feel the required emotions through the medium of the chorus: 'You are then relieved of all worries, even if you do not feel anything, the Chorus will do so in your place.”

Slavoj Žižek book The Sublime Object of Ideology

32; quote from Lacan's Le séminaire, livre VII : L'éthique de la psychanalyse, 295
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

Fear , Feeling , Problem