Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek (born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian sociologist, philosopher and cultural critic. Zizek is a known for his controversial public personality, use of "dirty humor", and complex philosophy that synthesizes the philosophies of Karl Marx, Hegel, and Jacques Lacan.

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.

Quotes

• A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.
  • The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London/New York: Verso, 1999), p. 1.

• It is also crucial to bear in mind the interconnection between the Decalogue... and its modern obverse, the celebrated 'human Rights'. 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.
  • The Fragile Absolute: or, why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?

• There is a somewhat analogous situation with regard to the heterosexual seduction procedure in our Politically Correct times: the two sets, the set of PC behaviour and the set of seduction, do not actually intersect anywhere; that is, there is no seduction which is not in a way an "incorrect" intrusion or harassment — at some point, one has to expose oneself and "make a pass." So does this mean that every seduction is incorrect harassment through and through? No, and that is the catch: when you make a pass, you expose yourself to the Other (the potential partner), and she decides retroactively, by her reaction, whether what you have just done was harassment or a successful act of seduction — and there is no way to tell in advance what her reaction will be. This is why assertive women often despise "weak" men — because they fear to expose themselves, to take the necessary risk. And perhaps this is even more true in our PC times: are not PC prohibitions rules which, in one way or another, are to be violated in the seduction process? Is not the seducer’s art to accomplish this violation properly — so that afterwards, by its acceptance, its harassing aspect will be retroactively cancelled?
  • The Fragile Absolute: or, why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? (London: Verso, 2000, ISBN 1-85984-326-3), p. 111.

• 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.
  • "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."
  • 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

• We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.
  • "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.
  • Last remark in an interview for the CN8 show Nitebeat (2003) [1]

• 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Conversations with Žižek by Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 50

• They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?
  • Interview in The Believer magazine, (July 2004)

• 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.
  • 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.
  • "A Glance into the Archives of Islam", Lacan dot com (2006)

• I claim that jihadis are really motivated neither by religion nor by a Leftist sense of justice, but by resentment, which in no way puts them on the Left, neither “objectively” nor “subjectively.” I simply never wrote that Islamic fundamentalists are in any sense on the Left—the whole point of my writing on this topic is that the “antagonism” between liberal tolerance and ethnic or religious fundamentalism is inherent to the universe of global capitalism: in their very opposition, they are the two faces of the same system. The true Left starts with the insight into this complicity. A good example of how religious fundamentalism is to be located “in the context of the antagonisms of global capitalism” is Afghanistan. Today, when Afghanistan is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers that, 30 years ago, it was a country with strong secular tradition, up to a strong Communist party which first took power there independently of the Soviet Union? Afghanistan became fundamentalist when it was drawn into global politics (first through the Soviet intervention).
  • "Disputations: Who Are You Calling Anti-Semitic?" in The New Republic (7 January 2009)

• One should oppose the fascination with Hitler according to which Hitler was, of course, a bad guy, responsible for the death of millions — but he definitely had balls, he pursued with iron will what he wanted. … This point is not only ethically repulsive, but simply wrong: no, Hitler did not ‘have the balls’ to really change things; he did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, i.e., he acted so that nothing would really change, he stages a big spectacle of Revolution so that the capitalist order could survive.”
  In this precise sense of violence, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler: Gandhi’s movement effectively endeavored to interrupt the basic functioning of the British colonial state.
  • "Disputations: Who Are You Calling Anti-Semitic?" in The New Republic (7 January 2009); Žižek is here quoting a statement he made in a prior essay to distinguish what he had actually said with such assertions as he was portrayed as having made. He asserts that Hitler for all his bluster and brutality was a promoter of established economies and less boldly revolutionary in his ideas and actions than Gandhi.

• See you, either in Hell, or in Communism.
  • 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.

• 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.
  • Interview in HARDtalk, BBC World Service (12 January 2010)

• The force of universalism is in you Basques, not in the Spanish state
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Interview [2]

• 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.
  • Lecture "Year of Distraction" [3], at 1:07.

• “I hate students,” [Zizek] said, “they are (as all people) mostly stupid and boring.
  In a recent interview at this year’s Zizek Conference in Ohio, Zizek talked about his personal life before delving into his thoughts on teaching.
  “I hate giving classes,” Zizek said, citing office hours and grading papers as his two biggest peeves.
  “I did teach a class here [at the University of Cincinnati] and all of the grading was pure bluff,” he continues. “I even told students at the New School for example… if you don’t give me any of your shitty papers, you get an A. If you give me a paper I may read it and not like it and you can get a lower grade.” He received no papers that semester.
  But it’s office hours that are the main reason he does not want to teach.
  “I can’t imagine a worse experience than some idiot comes there and starts to ask you questions, which is still tolerable. The problem is that here in the United States students tend to be so open that sooner or later, if you’re kind to them, they even start to ask you personal questions [about] private problems… What should I tell them?”
  “I don’t care,” he continued. “Kill yourself. It’s not my problem,”
  • As quoted by Eugene Wolters, "Professor of the Year: 'If You Don't Give Me Any of Your Shitty Papers You Get an A'", Critical-Theory.com, May 26 2014; square brackets and lack of accent marks as in orginal
• "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"
  • "The Fall That Makes Us Like God, Part I". The Philosophical Salon (2019-09-23).

• Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, I think, it’s a basically, I’m not kidding, optimistic film, even as we know at the end the planet Melancholia hits the earth, we all die. But I find something beautifully poetical in the attitude of the main person, Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, no, this inner peace, how she accepts this. I claim that we should not read this as kind of a pessimism. “Oh, we all die. Who cares?” No, if you really want to do something good for society, if you want to avoid all totalitarian threats and so on, you basically should go . . . we should all go to this, let me call it--although I’m a total materialist--fundamentally spiritual experience of accepting that at some day everything will finish, that at any point the end may be near. I think that, quite on the contrary of what may appear, this can be a deep experience which pushes you to strengthen ethical activity. The result of this experience is not, “Oh, the end may be near, so let’s kill, let’s just enjoy,” and so on. No, it’s the opposite. Again, paradoxically, I claim it’s not a superficially but profoundly optimistic film.
  • On Lars von Trier's film Melancholia (2011) in an interview for Big Think.

The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989)

• 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.
  • xi
• ...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.
  • 6
• 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.
  • 7

• '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.'
  • 15
• 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.
• 16
• 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.
  • 23
• In the more sophisticated versions of the critics of ideology - that developed by the Frankfurt School, for example - it is not just a question of seeing things (that is, social reality) as they 'really are," of throwing away the distorting spectacles of ideology; the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystification. The mask is not simply hiding the real state of things; the ideological distortion is written into its very essence... the moment we see it 'as it really is,' this being dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality. That is why we must avoid simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality.
  • 24-25
• As Bertolt Brecht puts in his Threepenny Opera: ''What is the robbery of a bank compared to the foundation of a new bank?'
  • 26

• What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarain 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.
  • pp.27, "Totalitarian Laughter"

• 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
  • pp.29, "Cynicism as a Form of Ideology"
• ...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.'
  • 32
• 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.'
  • 32; quote from Lacan's Le séminaire, livre VII : L'éthique de la psychanalyse, 295
• 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.
  • 33
• 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?'
  • 33
• All the proper balances of our daily life are disturbed, everything we do is colored by the underlying thought of "that".
  • 33
• 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.
  • p.33, Idea's Appearing
• 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.
  • 38
• 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.
  • 41
• 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.
  • 41
• 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.
  • 45
• 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?
  • 45
• 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.
  • 58
• 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.
  • 62
• 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.
  • 67
• 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.
  • 77
• 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.
  • 77
• 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.
  • 79
• 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.
  • 80
• 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.
  • 81
• 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.
  • 97
• 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.
  • 106
• 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.
  • 130
• 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.
  • 143
• 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.
  • 143
• 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 - the the death of the so-called real object in its symbol, but the obliteration of the signifying network itself.
  • 147
• 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.
  • 147
• The big Other, the symbolic order, with a traumatic element at its very heart; and in Lacanian theory the fantasy is a construction allowing the subject to come to terms with this traumatic kernel. At this level the final moment of the analysis is defined as going through the fantasy [la traversée du fantasme]: not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, is merely filling out a lack, a void in the Other. There is nothing behind the fantasy; the fantasy is a construction whose function is to hide this void, this nothing - that is, the lack in the Other.
  • 148
• Memento mori should be read: don't forget to die.
  • 148
• Lacan conceives the difference between the two deaths as the difference being real (biological) death and its symbolization, the settling of accounts the accomplishment of symbolic destiny (deathbed confession in Catholicism, for example). This gap can be filled in various ways; it can contain either sublime beauty or fearsome monsters: in Antigone's case, her symbolic death, her exclusion from the symbolic community of the city, precedes her actual death and imbues her character with sublime beauty, whereas the ghost of Hamlet's father represents the opposite case, - actual death unaccompanied by symbolic death, without a settling of accounts - which is why he returns as a frightful apparition until his debt has been repaid. This place between the two deaths, a place of sublime beauty as well as terrifying monsters, is the site of das Ding, of the real-traumatic Kernel in the midst of symbolic order.
  • 150
• 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.
  • 159
• Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.
  • 161
• 'Nobody can rule innocently,' as Saint-Just puts it. And in totalitarianism, the Party becomes again the very subject who, being the immediate embodiment of the People can rule innocently. It is not by accident that the real-socialist countries call themselves 'people's democracies.'
  • 165
• The famous MacGuffin , the Hitchockian object, the pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion but which is in itself nothing at all - the only significance of the MacGuffin lies in the fact that it has some significance for the characters - that it must seem to be of vital importance to them... - that's a MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is non the less efficient... what Lacan calls object petit a: a pure void which functions as the object cause of desire.
  • 183
• [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.' 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 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.
  • 190
• 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).
  • 194
• 'Father, why is the sky blue?' - the child is not really interested in the sky as such; the real stake of the question is to expose father's impotence, his helplessness in the face of the hard fact, to present the whole chain of reasons leading to it. The blue of the sky thus becomes not only the father's problem, but in a way even his fault. The sky is blue, and you're just staring at it like an idiot incapable of doing anything about it!
  • 203
• Man as such is nature sick unto death, derailed, run off the rails through a fascination with a lethal Thing.
  • 204
• Kantian definition of the Sublime: 'The sublime may be described in this way: It is an object (of nature) the representation of which determines the mind to regard the elevation of nature beyond our reach as equivalent to a presentation of ideas...' The feeling of the Sublime is, therefore, at once a feeling of displeasure, arising from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain, to its estimation by reason, and a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgement of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason, so far as the effort to attain to these is for us a law.
  • 229
• From St. Augustine's De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia: 'Original sin lies in man's arrogance and pride; it was committed when Adam ate from the Tree of Knowledge, wanting to elevate himself to the divine heights and to become himself master of all creation.' God punished man - Adam by implanted in him a certain drive - the sexual drive - which cannot be mastered, tamed, like hunger/thirst. Someone with a strong enough will can starve to death in the middle of a room full of delicious food, but if a naked virgin passes his way, the erection of his phallus is in no way dependent in the strength of his will.
  • 253-254
• 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.
  • 261

The Plague of Fantasies (1997)

• What we are thus arguing is not simply that ideology also permeates the alleged extraideological strata of everyday life, but that this materialization of ideology in external materiality reveals inherent antagonisms which the explicit formulation of ideology cannot afford to acknowledged.
  • Chapter One: The Seven Veils of Fantasy
• The original question of desire is not directly 'What do I want?', but 'What do others want from me? What do they see in me? What am I to others?'
  • Chapter One: The Seven Veils of Fantasy, p.9

The Parallax View (2006)

• In a crisis, the underlying belief, disavowed and just practiced, in this thus directly asserted. it is crucial how, in this elevation of momney to the status of the only true commoodity ("the capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews"), Marx resorts to the precise Pauline definition of Christians as "inwardly circumcised Jews": Christians do not need external actual circumcision (that is, the abandonment of ordinary commodities with use-values, dealing only with money), since they know that each of these ordinary commodities is already "inwardly circumcised," that its true substance is money.
  • p. 59

In Defense of Lost Causes (2008)

• Heidegger is 'great' not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement...

• ...crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not 'essential' enough...

• ...there is never a "right moment" for the revolutionary act - the act is always, by definition, "premature".

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009)

• 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.

• Populism is ultimately sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry "I don't know what's going on, but I've just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!"

• Although the "ruling class"disagrees with the populists' moral agenda it tolerates the "moral war"as a means of keeping the lower classes in check, that is, it enables the latter to articulate their fury without disturbing the economic status quo.
  • Chapter One, The Structure of Enemy Propaganda
• The contemporary era constantly proclaims itself as post-ideological, but this denial of ideology only provides the ultimate proof that we are more than ever embedded in ideology. Ideology is always a field of struggle - among other things, the struggle for appropriating past traditions.
  • Chapter One, Human, All Too Human
• 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.
  • Chapter One, Human, All Too Human

Living in the End Times (2010)

• Confucius was not so much a philosopher as a proto-ideologist: what interested him was not metaphysical Truths but rather a harmonious social order within which individuals could lead happy and ethical lives. He was the first to outline clearly what could lead happy and ethical lives. He was the first to outline clearly what one is tempted to call the elementary scene of ideology, its zero-level, which consists in asserting the (nameless) authority of some substantial Tradition.
  • Chapter One: Denial: The Liberal Utopia
• There should be no compromise here: anti-Semitism is not just one-among ideologies; it is ideology as such kat'exohen. It embodies the zero-level (or the purest form) of ideology, providing its elementary coordinates: social antagonist ("class struggle") is mystified and displaced so that its cause is projected onto the external intruder.
  • Reverberations 2. Reverberations of the Crisis in a Multi-Centric World
• “It is more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to overcome their victim status and perhaps become even more successful than ourselves”

Less Than Nothing (2012)

• There is nothing in Lacan which is not stupid, no exceptions to stupidity, so that what makes him not totally stupid is only the very inconsistency of his stupidity.
• 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.
  • Introduction
• 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.
  • Introduction
• The horror of the Holocaust cannot be represented; but this excess of represented content over its aesthetic representation has to infect the aesthetic form itself.What cannot be described should be inscribed into the artistic form as its uncanny distortion.
  • Chapter One (The Drink Before), Vacillating The Semblances
• The Medium here is not the message, quite the opposite: the very medium that we use- the universal intersubjectivity of language-undermines the message.
  • Chapter One (The Drink Before), Vacillating The Semblances
• 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.
  • Vacillating the Semblances
• 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.
  • Chapter One (The Drink Before), Vacillating The Semblances
• The implicit lesson of Plato is not that everything is appearance, that it is not possible to draw a clear line of separation between appearance and reality (that would have meant the victory of Sophism), but that essence is "appearance as appearance,"that essence appears in contrast to appearance within appearance; that the distinction between appearance and essence has to be inscribed into appearance itself. Insofar as the gap between essence and appearance is inherent to appearance, in other words, infsofar as essence is nothing but appearance reflected into itself, appearance is appearance against the background of nothing - everything appears ultimately out of nothing.
  • Chapter One (The Drink Before), Vacillating The Semblances

• 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
  • Chapter Two, The Thing Itself: Hegel, pp. 200

• It becomes superfluous when people no longer need the external force of the tyrant to make them renounce their particular interests, but when they become "universal citizens" by directly identifying the core of their being with this universality - in short, people no longer need the external master when they are educated into doing the job of discipline and subordination themselves.
  • Chapter Two, The Thing Itself: Hegel, pp. 198

Lenin 2017 (2017)

• Khrushchev’s wager was that his (limited) confession would strengthen the communist movement – and in the short term he was right. One should always remember that the Khrushchev era was the last period of authentic communist enthusiasm, of belief in the communist project. When, during his visit to the United States in 1959, Khrushchev made his famous defiant statement to the American public that ‘your grandchildren will be communists’, he effectively spelled out the conviction of the entire Soviet nomenklatura. After his fall in 1964, a resigned cynicism prevailed, up until Gorbachev’s attempt at a more radical confrontation with the past (the rehabilitations then included Bukharin, but – for Gorbachev at least – Lenin remained the untouchable point of reference, and Trotsky continued to be a non-person).
  • Introduction
• Let's face it: today, Lenin and his legacy are perceived as hopelessly dated, belonging to a defunct 'paradigm'. Not only was Lenin understandably blind to many of the problems that are now central to contemporary life (ecology, struggle for emancipated sexuality,etc). but also his brutal political practice is totally out of sync with current democratic sensitivities, his vision of the new society as a centralised industrial system run by the state is simply irrelevant, etc. Instead of desperately attempting to salvage the authentic Leninist core from the Stalinist alluvium, would it not be more advisable to forget Lenin and return to Marx, searching in his work for the roots of what went wrong in the twentieth-century communist movements?
  • Introduction
• The shock of 1914 was – to put it in Alain Badiou’s terms – a désastre, a catastrophe in which an entire world disappeared: not only the idyllic bourgeois faith in progress, but also the socialist movement that accompanied it. Even Lenin himself lost his footing – there is, in his desperate reaction in What Is to Be Done?, no satisfaction, no ‘I told you so!’ This moment of Verzweiflung, this catastrophe, opened up the site for the Leninist event, for breaking with the evolutionary historicism of the Second International – and Lenin was the only one at the level of this opening, the only one to articulate the Truth of the catastrophe. Born in this moment of despair was the Lenin who, via the detour of a close reading of Hegel’s Logic, was able to discern the unique chance for revolution. Today, the left is in a situation that uncannily resembles the one that gave birth to Leninism, and its task is to repeat Lenin. This does not mean a return to Lenin. To repeat Lenin is to accept that ‘Lenin is dead’, that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously. To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin actually did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, to acknowledge the tension in Lenin between his actions and another dimension, what was ‘in Lenin more than Lenin himself’. To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin did, but what he failed to do, his missed opportunities.
  • Introduction
• The walls which are now being thrown up all around the world are not of the same nature as the Berlin Wall, the icon of the Cold War. Today's walls appear not to belong to the same notion, since the same well often serves multiple functions: as a defence against terrorism, illegal immigrants or smuggling, as a cover for colonial land-grabbing, etc.
  • pp. XXX
• Lenin is best remembered for his famous retort,'Freedom- yes, but for WHOM? To do WHAT?'
  • pp.xxxiii

Trotsky: Communism and Terrorism (2007)

• The true question is thus not who directly holds power, a coalition of political agents or the 'dictatorship' of one sole agent, but how the very field in which the total political process takes place is structured: is it the process of parliamentary representation with parties 'reflecting' the voters' opinions, or a more direct self-organization of the working classes, which relies on a much more active role of the participants in the political process? Trotsky's basic reproach to parliamentary democracy is not that it gives too much power to uneducated masses, but, paradoxically, that it passivizes the masses too much, leaving the initiative to the apparatus of state power (in contrast to the 'soviets' in which the working classes directly mobilize themselves and exert their power).
• The entire history of the Soviet Union can be comprehended as homologous with Freud's famous image of Rome, a city whose history is deposited in its present in the guise of the different layers of the archaeological remainders, each new level covering up the preceding one, like (another model) the seven layers of Troy, so that history, in its regression towards ever older epochs, proceeds like the archaeologist, discovering new layers by probing deeper and deeper into the ground.
• he reference to psychoanalysis is crucial and very precise: in a radical revolution, people not only realize their old (emancipatory, etc.) dreams; rather, they have to reinvent their very modes of dreaming. It is here that the link between the October Revolution and the artistic vanguard acquires all its weight: what they shared was the idea of building a new man, of literally reconstructing it
• The dead Lenin who does not know that he is dead thus stands for our own obstinate refusal to renounce the grandiose utopian projects and accept the limitations of our situation: there is no big Other, Lenin was mortal and made errors like all others, so it is time for us to let him die, to put to rest this obscene ghost which haunts our political imaginary, and to approach our problems in a non-ideological and pragmatic way. But there is another sense in which Lenin is still alive: he is alive in so far as he embodies what Badiou calls the 'eternal Idea' of universal emancipation, the immortal striving for justice that no insults and catastrophes manage to kill.
• This difference is the ultimate distinction between Stalin and Trotsky. In Stalin, 'Lenin lives for ever' as an obscene spirit which 'does not know it is dead', artificially kept alive as an instrument of power. In Trotsky, the dead Lenin continues to live like Joe Hill he lives wherever there are people who still struggle for the same Idea

Robespierre: Virtue and Terror (2007)

• In short, what the sensitive liberals want is a thus try to deprive the French Revolution of its status as the founding event of modern democracy, relegating it to a historical anomaly: there was a historical necessity to assert the modern principles of personal freedom, etc.
• ...one should also not allow our opponents to determine the field and topic of the struggle.
• for Robespierre, revolutionary terror is the very opposite of war: Robespierre was a pacifist, not out of hypocrisy or humanitarian sensitivity, but because he was well aware that war among nations as a rule serves as the means to obfuscate revolutionary struggle within each nation. Robespierre’s speech ‘On the War’ is of special importance today: it shows him as a true pacifist who forcefully denounces the patriotic call to war, even if the war is formulated as the defence of the Revolution, as the attempt of those who want ‘revolution without a revolution’ to divert the radicalization of the revolutionary process. His stance is thus the exact opposite of those who need war to militarize social life and take dictatorial control over it.
• 'Dictatorship' does not mean the opposite of democracy, but democracy's own underlying mode of functioning - from the very beginning, the thesis on the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' involved the presupposition that it was the opposite of other form(s) of dictatorships, since the entire field of state power is that of dictatorship.

About Žižek

• Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek.
  • John Gray, "The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek". The Guardian, July 12, 2012

• What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying.
  • Noam Chomsky, in "Virtual Town Hall" Interview with Noam Chomsky from December 2012

• ...the works of Slavoj Žižek can advance the field of emotional geographies, as well as our understandings of emotion, space, and society. Žižek provides a rich social theoretical vocabulary that can help explain cultural discontent, how emotional worlds bond and fall apart, why there is no guaranteed harmony in love with our partner, and how emotional worlds are organized in ways so that people can hold onto something that resembles ‘subjectivity’ and ‘reality’.
  • Paul Kingsbury, "Did somebody say jouissance? On Slavoj Žižek, consumption, and nationalism", Emotion, Space and Society, Volume 1, Issue 1, October 2008, Pages 48–55

• I suppose Zizek is rightly described as a performer. He has this element of provocation that is very characteristic and does help to interest people, but I'm not certain that people who are reading Zizek are actually drawn very much nearer rethinking the problems of the left.
  • Eric Hobsbawm, in Eric Hobsbawm: a conversation about Marx, student riots, the new Left, and the Milibands

• The curious thing about the Žižek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror—especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose "lost causes" Žižek takes up in another new book, In Defense of Lost Causes—the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult.
  • Adam Kirsch, "The Deadly Jester", The New Republic, December 2, 2008

• Maybe, many years ago, Zizek made a bet with some of his Slovenian colleagues about how much post-modern sounding gibberish he could get contemporary academics to swallow-keep in mind that, recently, he's been trying to persuade people to embrace as unproblematic the juxtaposition of Stalinist dialectical materialism and Christian theology.
  • Adrian Johnston, "Review - The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and Post-Theory'' by Slavoj Zizek. Metapschology (2001)

• The shortage of public intellectuals (in the English-speaking world) goes back to the decline of the written media: the first TV intellectual was Foucault, who was at home in both media, but his successors and imitators know only the camera. This forces sound bites upon even the most complex material: see Schama, Ferguson e tutti quanti. Also, and paradoxically: public intellectuals are best when they are grounded in a particular language, culture, debate. Thus Camus was French, Habermas is German, Sen is Bengali, Orwell was deep English. This made their cross-frontier ventures plausible, in the same way that Havel or Michnik today have street cred because they started out as courageous dissidents in a very particular time and place. The opposite is the ridiculous Slavoj Zizek: a “global”’ public intellectual who is therefore of no particular interest in any one place or on any one subject. If he is the future of public intellectuals, then they have no future.
  • Tony Judt, in Tony Judt: the last interview (2010)

• [I]t needs to be recognized that instead of being an “interdisciplinary philosopher” or “playfully Hegelian,” Žižek elevates the most un-Hegelian idea of all, arbitrariness, to be his guiding method. Throughout a long book [i.e., Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?] he brings up dozens of topics without providing any coherent explanation of why he chooses to discuss one topic rather than another. Thus, even someone sympathetic to a specific opinion can never be entirely sure whether Žižek will stand by his own case, or will simply drop it as he flits to another topic. In addition, though he quotes and makes allusions and references to a wide variety of well-known authors and canonical works, he does not provide reasons for his views of the cited texts. Rather, he makes highly tendentious assertions and expects his readers to submit to what are supposed to be apodictic statements. Should they be skeptical, they can be told that Žižek is above “standard” treatments and that he is following a dialectic.
  • David Pickus, "Did Somebody Evade Totalitarianism? On the Intellectual Escapism of Slavoj Žižek", Humanitas Vol 21, Nos. 1 & 2, 2008

• To summarize Žižek's position is not easy: he slips between philosophical and psychoanalytical ways of arguing, and is spell-bound by Lacan's gnomic utterances. He is a lover of paradox, and believes strongly in what Hegel called 'the labour of the negative' though taking the idea, as always, one stage further towards the brick wall of paradox.
  • Roger Scruton, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (2015), p. 256