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Slavoj Žižek
117 quotes
“A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London/New York: Verso, 1999), p. 1.
“In the electoral campaign, President Bush named as the most important person in his life Jesus. Now he has a unique chance to prove that he meant it seriously: for him, as for all Americans today, "Love thy neighbor!" means "Love the Muslims!" OR IT MEANS NOTHING AT ALL.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2001 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reflections on WTC: Third Version", Free Speech (7 October 2001)
“[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.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002, ), p. 16
“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2002 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Introduction: The Missing Ink", in Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (2002), p. 2
“As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2003 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Last remark in an interview for the CN8 show Nitebeat (2003)
“I found there, on the central square (Václavské náměstí), a café that miraculously worked through this emergency. I remember they had wonderful strawberry cakes, and I was sitting there eating strawberry cakes and watching Russian tanks against demonstrators. It was perfect.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Anecdote about the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, quoted in The New Yorker (5 May 2003), p. 39
“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 Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conversations with Žižek by Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 42
“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 Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conversations with Žižek by Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 45
“Daly: In a sense, would you say that the age of biogenetics/cyberspace is the age of philosophy? Žižek: Yes, and the age of philosophy in the sense again that we are confronted more and more often with philosophical problems at an everyday level. It is not that you withdraw from daily life into a world of philosophical contemplation. On the contrary, you cannot find your way around daily life itself without answering certain philosophical questions. It is a unique time when everyone is, in a way, forced to be some kind of philosopher.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conversations with Žižek by Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 54
“With Lenin it was always a substantial commitment. I always have a certain admiration for people who are aware that somebody has to do the job. What I hate about these liberal, pseudo-left, beautiful soul academics is that they are doing what they are doing fully aware that somebody else will do the job for them.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2004 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Conversations with Žižek by Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 50
“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 Žižek (born 1949) first seen 1994 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 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.
“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 Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Glance into the Archives of Islam", Lacan dot com (2006)
“See you, either in Hell, or in Communism.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Parting remark in "The Culture Show" (2010)
“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 Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in HARDtalk, BBC World Service (12 January 2010)
“The force of universalism is in you Basques, not in the Spanish state”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Interview in ARGIA (27 June 2010)
“I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012)
“My relationship towards tulips is inherently Lynchian: I think they are disgusting. Just imagine, aren't these some kind of--how do you call it? Vagina dentatas--dental vaginas, threatening to swallow you. I think that- that flowers are something inherently disgusting. I mean, are people aware what a horrible thing these flowers are? I mean, basically, it's an open invitation to all- to all- to- to all the insects and bees, "Come and screw me." You know? I mean, it's-- I think that flowers should be forbidden to children.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2006 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (2006)
“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.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The prospect of Neuralink is not to be dismissed as yet another “ontic” scientific research project of no authentic philosophical interest, since it offers something effectively new and unheard-of that challenges our status of being-human: the prospect of the actual (empirical) overcoming of our finitude/sexuality/embeddedness-in-the-symbolic. Entering this other dimension of Singularity becomes a simple positive fact, not a matter of sublime inner experience.""The Fall That Makes Us Like God, Part I”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) first seen 2019 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Fall That Makes Us Like God, Part I". The Philosophical Salon (2019-09-23).
“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 (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...there are always three elements [of psychoanalysis] at work: the manifest dream-text, the latent dream-content or thought and the unconscious desire articulated in the dream. This desire attaches itself to the dream, it interlaces itself in the interspace between the latent thought and the manifest text; it is therefore not 'more concealed, deeper' in relation to the latent thought, it is decidedly more 'on the surface,' consisting entirely of the signifier's mechanisms, of the treatment to which the latent content is submitted.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence - that is, social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals 'do not know what they are doing.'”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As Bertolt Brecht puts in his Threepenny Opera: What is the robbery of a bank compared to the foundation of a new bank?'”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarian force of laughter, of ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of the underlying premise of Eco's novel: in contemporary socities, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Perhaps the greatest danger for totalitarianism is people who take ideology seriously.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...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 (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A well-known joke - a fool who thought he was a grain of corn. After some time in a mental hospital he was cured; now he knew that he was not a grain, but a man. So they let him out; but soon after he came running back saying, 'I met a hen and I was afraid she would try to eat me.' The doctors tried to calm him down. 'What are you afraid of? You know you are not a grain, but a man.' The fool answered: 'Yes of course I know that, but does the hen know?'”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the proper balances of our daily life are disturbed, everything we do is colored by the underlying thought of "that".”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“First, [the bourgeoisie] must recognize his own impotence, his incapacity to believe in a sense of history, even if his reason leans towards the truth, the passions and prejudices produced by his class position, prevent him from accepting it. So he should not exert himself with proving the truth of the historical mission of the working class; rather, he should learn to subdue his petty bourgeois passions and prejudices. He should take lessions from those who were once as important as he is now, but are ready to risk all for the revolutionary Cause.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lacan's definition of human deception: We deceive the Other by means of the truth itself; in a universe in which all are looking for the true face beneath the mask, the best way to lead them astray is to wear the mask of truth itself.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ideology is not a dreamlike illusion that we build to escape insupportable; in its basic dimension, it is a fantasy-construction which serves as a support for our reality itself; an illusion which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Zhuang Zi, who dreamt of being a butterfly, and after his awakening posed himself a question: how does he know that he is not now a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuang Zi?”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The wreck of the Titanic functions as a sublime object: a positive, material object elevated to the status of the impossible Thing. And perhaps all the effort to articulate the metaphysical meaning of the Titanic is nothing but an attempt to escape this terrifying impact of the Thing, an attempt to domesticate the Ting by reducing it to its symbolic status, by providing it with a meaning. We usually say that the fascinating presence of a Thing obscures its meaning; here, the opposite is true: the meaning obscures the terrifying impact of its presence.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The general reference of the philosophical discussion is usually the triangle world: world-language-subject, the relation of the subject to the world of objects, mediated through language.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The symptom is not only a cyphered message, it is at the same time a way for the subject to organize his enjoyment - that is why, even after the completed interpretation, the subject is not prepared to renounce his symptom.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is at stake here is precisely the problem of the fulfillment of desire: when we encounter in reality an object which has all the properties of the fantasized object of desire, we are nevertheless necessarily somewhat disappointed; we experience a certain this is not it; it becomes evident that the finally found real object is not the reference of desire even though it possesses all the required properties.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The idea of the saint is the exact opposite of the priest in service of the Holy. The priest is a functionary of the Holy;' there is no Holy without its officials, without the bureaucratic machinery supporting it, organizing its ritual, from the Aztecs' official of human sacrifice to the modern sacred state or army rituals. The saint on the contrary, occupies the object petit a , of pure object, of somebody undergoing radical subjective destitution. He... enacts no ritual, he conjures nothing, he just persists in his inert presence.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Symbolic castration - the final moment of analysis is reached when the subject is ready to accept this fundamental loss, to consent to symbolic castration as a price to be paid for access to his desire.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Memento mori should be read: don't forget to die.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Actual history occurs, so the speak, on credit; only subsequent development will decide retroactively if the current revolutionary violence will be forgiven, legitimated, or if it will continue to exert a pressure on the shoulders of the present generation as its guilt, as its unsettled debt.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”
Slavoj Žižek (born 1949) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source