Slavoj Žižek citations (99 citations, Page 3)

Slavoj Žižek: 99 citations0 J'aime

Slavoj Žižek: Citations en anglais

“The symbolic order is striving for a homeostatic balance, but there is in its Kernel, at its very centre, some strange traumatic order - the Thing. Lacan coined a neologism for it: l'extimité - external intimacy, which served as a title for one of Jacques-Alain Miller's Seminars. And what, at this level, is the death drive? Exactly the opposite of the symbolic orderL the possibility of the second death,' the radical annihilation of the symbolic texture through which so-called reality is constructed. They very existence of the symbolic order implies a possibility of its radical effacement, of symbolic death”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

the the death of the so-called real object in its symbol, but the obliteration of the signifying network itself.
147
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“If the West has its military-industrial complex, we in the ex-Yugoslavia had a poetic military complex: the post-Yugoslav was was triggered by a mixture of poetic and military components.”

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Slavoj Žižek

Vacillating the Semblances
Less Than Nothing (2012)

“I may still be a kind of a Marxist but I'm very realistic, I don't have these dreams of revolutions around the corner.”

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Slavoj Žižek

Interview http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7d-m3ko_eg&feature=feedrec_grec_index

“[A]t the beginning of November 2001, there was a series of meetings between White House advisers and senior Hollywood executives with the aim of co-ordinating the war effort and establishing how Hollywood could help in the "war against terrorism" by getting the right ideological message across not only to Americans, but also to the Hollywood public around the globe — the ultimate empirical proof that Hollywood does in fact function as an "ideological state apparatus."”

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Slavoj Žižek livre Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002, ISBN 1-859-84421-9), p. 16

“All the proper balances of our daily life are disturbed, everything we do is colored by the underlying thought of "that."”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

33
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“A woman is not complimentary to a man, but she embodies his lack (which is why Lacan can say that a beautiful woman is a perfect incarnation of man's castration).”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

194
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

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

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Slavoj Žižek

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

“The criticism of ideology must therefore invert the linking of causality as perceived by the totalitarian gaze: far from being the positive cause of social antagonism, the Jew is just an embodiment of a certain blockage - of the impossibility which prevents the society from achieving its full identity as a closed, homogenous totality. Far from being the positive cause of social negativity, the Jew is a point at which social negativity as such assumes another formula of the basic procedure of the criticism of ideology, supplementing the one given above: to detect, in a given ideological edifice, the element which represents within it its own impossibility. Society is not prevented from achieving its full identity because of Jews: it is prevented by its own antagonistic nature, by its own immanent blockage, and it projects this internal negativity into the figure of the Jew. In other words, what is excluded from the Symbolic (from the frame of the corporalist socio-symbolic order) returns in the Real as a paranoid construction of the Jew.”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

143
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“Those who claim a natural link between capitalism and democracy are cheating with the facts in the same way the Catholic Church cheats when it presents 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, and that it was making a reluctant concession to new times.”

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Slavoj Žižek

Source: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009), Chapter One, Human, All Too Human

“As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy.”

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Slavoj Žižek

Last remark in an interview for the CN8 show Nitebeat (2003) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjEtmZZvGZA

“In the Critique of Cynical Reasoning, a great bestseller in Germany (Sloterdijk, 1983), Peter Sloterdijk puts forward the thesis that ideology's dominant mode of functioning is cynical which renders impossible - or, more precisely, vain - the classical critical-ideological procedure. The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

Source: The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), pp.29, "Cynicism as a Form of Ideology"

“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.”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

143
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“On Another Country "You are not a Communist because you understand Marx, you understand Marx because you are a Communist!" - that is to say, Judd understands Marx because he presupposes in advance, that Marx is the bearer of knowledge enabling access to the truth of history, like the Christian believer who does not believe in Christ because he has been convinced by theological arguments but, on the contrary, is susceptible to theological arguments because he is already illuminated by the grace of belief.”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

41
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“Precisely as an enigma, the symptom, so to speak, announces its dissolution through interpretation: the aim of psychoanalysis is to re-establish the broken network of communication by allowing the patient to verbalize the meaning of his symptom: through this verbalization the symptom is automatically dissolved. This, then is the basic point: in its very construction, the symptom implies the field of the big Other as consistent, complete, because its very function is an appeal to the Other which contains its meaning.”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

79
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“Symptoms are meaningless traces, their meaning is not discovered, excavated from the hidden depth of the past, but constructed retroactively - the analysis produces the truth; that is, the signifying frame which gives their symptoms their symbolic place and meaning. As soon as we enter the symbolic order, the past is always present in the form of historical tradition and the meaning of these traces is not given; it changes continually with the transformations of the signifier's network. Every historical rupture, every advent of a new master-signifier, changers retroactively the meaning of all tradition, restructures the narration of the past, and makes it readable in another, new way.”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

58
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“The analysis achieves its end when the patient is able to recognize, in the Real of his symptom, the only support of his being. That is how we must read Frued's 'wo we war, soll ich werden:' you, the subject, must identify yourself with the place where your symptom already was; in its pathological particularity you must recognize the element which gives consistency to your being.”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

81
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“If we merely wait for the appropriate moment we will never live to see it, because this [appropriate moment] cannot arrive without the subjective conditions of the maturity of the revolutionary force being fulfilled - it can only arrive after a series of failed attempts.”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

62
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“Subject - (1) a person subject to political rule; (2) a free agent, instigator of its activity - subjects can realize themselves as free agents only by means of redoubling themselves as, only in so far as they project, transpose the pure form of their freedom into the very heart of the substance opposed to them; into the person of the subject-monarch as head of state.”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

261
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“In this precise sense, Kant was "the inventor of the philosophical history of philosophy": there are necessary stages in the development of philosophy, that is, one cannot directly get at the truth, one cannot begin wit it, philosophy necessarily began with metaphysical illusions. The path from illusion to its critical denunciation is the very core of philosophy, which means that successful ("true") philosophy is no longer defined by its truthful explanation of the totality of being, but by successfully accounting for the illusions, that is, by explaining not only why illusions are illusions, but also why they are structurally necessary, unavoidable, and not just accidents.”

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Slavoj Žižek

Introduction
Less Than Nothing (2012)

“Dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. it is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming - the explanation of its peculiar nature.”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

7
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“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.”

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Slavoj Žižek

Žižek! (2005); as Žižek notes on p. 1 of Mapping Ideology (1994), the observation that it is easier to imagine the end of the earth than the end of capitalism was originally made by Fredric Jameson.

“[A] paradox arises at the level of the subject's relationship to the community to which he belongs: the situation of the forced choice consists in the fact that the subject must freely choose the community to which he already belongs, independent of his choice - he must choose what is already given to him… The subject who thinks he can avoid this paradox and really have a free choice is a psychotic subject, one who retains a kind of distance from the symbolic order - who is not really caught in the signifying network. The totalitarian subject is closer to this psychotic position: the proof would be the status of the enemy in totalitarian distance (the Jew in Fascism, the traitor in Stalinism) - precisely the subject supposed to have made a free choice and to have freely chosen the wrong side. This is also the basic paradox of love: not only of one's country, but also of a woman or a man. If I am directly ordered to love a woman, it is clear that this does not work: in a way, love must be free. But on the other hand, if I proceed as if I really have a free choice, if I start to look around and say to myself 'Let's choose which of these women I will fall in love with,' it is clear that this also does not work, that it is not real love. The paradox of love is that it is a free choice, but a choice which never arrives in the present - it is always already made …I can only state retroactively that I've already chosen … [Stated by Kant], 'Wickedness does not simply depend upon circumstances but is an integral part of his eternal nature.”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

In other words, wickedness appears to be something which is irreducibly given: the person in question can never change it, outgrow it via his ultimate moral development.
186-187
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“This is probably the fundamental dimension of 'ideology': ideology is not simply a 'false consciousness', an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as 'ideological' - 'ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence -that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals 'do not know what they are doing'. 'Ideological is not the false consciousness of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by "false consciousness"'. Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be 'a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject': the subject can 'enjoy his symptom' only in so far as its logic escapes him - the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution.”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“The source of totalitarianism is a dogmatic attachment to the official word: the lack of laughter, of ironic detachment. An excessive commitment to Good may in itself become the greatest Evil: real Evil is any kind of fanatical dogmatism, especially exerted in the name of supreme Good… Consider only Mozart's Don Giovanni at the end of the opera, when he is confronted with the following choice: if he confesses his sins, he can still achieve salvation; if he persists, he will be damned forever. From this viewpoint of the pleasure principle, the proper thing to do would be to renounce his past, but he does not, he persists in his Evil, although he knows that by persisting he will be damned forever. Paradoxically, with his final choice of Evil, he acquires the status of an ethical hero - that is, of someone who is guided by fundamental principles beyond the pleasure principle and not just by the search for pleasure or material gain.”

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Slavoj Žižek livre The Sublime Object of Ideology

23
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

“The present book is thus neither The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hegel, nor is it yet another university textbook on Hegel (which is for morons, of course) it is something like The Imbecile's Guide to Hegel-Hegel for those whose IQ is somewhere close to their bodily temperature (in Celsius), as the insult goes.”

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Slavoj Žižek

Introduction
Less Than Nothing (2012)