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Conversations with Žižek QUOTES

Conversations with Žižek QUOTES

1 " In order to function, ideology shouldn't take itself too seriously. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

2 " The core of our subjectivity is a void filled in by appearances. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

3 " Life is not merely life. Life is always accompanied by a certain excess; something for which one can put at stake life itself. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

4 " It's not that fantasy is a potent abyss of seduction that threatens to swallow you but quite the opposite: that fantasy is ultimately sterile. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

5 " So what we have is a total prohibition of any particular kind of identification, which means precisely that you must read the Other as an abstraction, as if they were already dead. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

6 " What we need more is a certain violence against ourselves. In order to break out of an ideological, double-bind predicament, you need a kind of violent outburst. It is something shattering. Even if it is not physical violence, it is extreme symbolic violence, and we have to accept it. At this level I think that in order to really change the existing society, this will not come about in the terms of this liberal tolerance. It will explode as a more shattering experience. And this is, I think, what is needed today: this awareness that true changes are painful. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

7 " We should not accept this kind of respect for the Other's ideological-religious fantasy as the ultimate horizon of ethics. The ultimate horizon of ethics is not to respect Other's illusions. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

8 " 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 answer certain philosophical questions. It is a unique time when everyone is, in a way, forced to be some kind of philosopher. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

9 " When I understood that this is not to do with megalomania, in the sense of the standard counter-attack of naive scientists, namely, 'we are dealing with hard facts, with rational hypotheses, but you philosophers you are just dreaming about the structure of everything,' I then realized that philosophy is in a way more critical, more cautious even, than science. Philosophy asks even more elementary questions. For example, when a scientist approaches a certain question, the point of philosophy is not 'What is the structure of all?' but 'What are the concepts the scientist already as to presuppose in order to formulate the question?' It is simply asking about what is already there: what conceptual, and other, presuppositions already have to be there so that you can say what you are saying, so that you understand what you understand, so that you know that you are doing what you are doing. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

10 " That is what philosophy is about, not 'I philosopher believe in a certain structure of the universe etc.', but an exploration of what is presupposed in daily activity. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

11 " The point being that what you see is the result of your judgment - you literally see judgments. There is no zero-level sensory perception of reality which is then later coordinated into judgments. What you always already see are judgments. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

12 " What is missing is precisely a theory of - as Kant already put it in his Critique of Pure Reason - why human beings are destined to ask themselves questions which they cannot answer. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

13 " Nazism, on the contrary, is the ultimate perversion of the logic of supreme good. Nazism is not about the ultimate idiosyncratic assertion of autonomy. Nazism means that everything, even the worst crimes, should be undertaken for the good of the nation. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

14 " So again, I think that if we read my life from an eschatological perspective, a theological hidden hand of God, I almost think that everything which appeared originally to be a misfortune turned out to be a blessing in disguise. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

15 " Basically, consciousness is not something which enables us to function better. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

16 " You will not arrive at the dimension of Nazi evil by doing some sort of psychological analysis or looking for some kind of innate monster. It was anonymous objectivized evil. And that is the horror of it. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

17 " The moment you scientifically objectivize such phenomena, this at least deeply affects the way it is symbolized. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

18 " The elaborate bureaucracies and rituals of power were all part of this obscene economy of enjoyment. The Nazis were in this sense playing bureaucratic roles in order to enhance their pleasure. Secretly they knew that the rituals of duty were a pretence to disguise the enjoyment derived from doing something horrible - even the guilt feelings generated here served to enhance their pleasure. So it was a kind of perverted game. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

19 " In German idealism it is absolute self-relating negativity; in psychoanalysis it is the death drive. This is at the very centre of what I am doing generally. My basic thesis is that the central feature of subjectivity in German idealism - this desubstantialized notion of subjectivity as a gap in the order of being - is consonant with the notion of the 'object small a' which, as we all know, for Lacan is a failure. It's not that we fail to encounter the object, but that the object itself is just a trace of a certain failure. What I am asserting here is that this notion of self-relating negativity, as it has been articulated from Kant to Hegel, means philosophically the same as Freud's notion of death drive - this is my fundamental perspective. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek

20 " The symmetrical inversion of an ideological proposition is no less ideological. "

― Slavoj Žižek , Conversations with Žižek