rules are disintegrating today: What was a couple of decades ago simply unsayable in a public debate can now be pronounced with impunity.

http://ift.tt/1T4dhFe

The need for PC rules arises when unwritten mores are no longer able to regulate effectively everyday interactions. ..It may appear that this disintegration is counteracted by the growth of political correctness, which prescribes exactly what cannot be said; however, a closer look immediately makes it clear how the “politically correct” regulation participates in the same process of the disintegration of the ethical substance.

http://ift.tt/1SahlTi

An everyday experience with a child confirms it: if we put on a mask in its presence, it is horrified, although it knows that beneath, there is just our familiar face—as if some unspeakable evil pertains to the mask itself. The status of a mask is thus neither imaginary nor symbolic (denoting a symbolic role we are supposed to play), it is strictly real—if, of course, we conceive the real as a “grimace” of reality.

http://ift.tt/21q7Ept

the fixed grimace of a smile on Joker’s face in Batman: Joker is, so to speak, a slave of his own mask, condemned to obey its blind compulsion—the death drive resides in this surface deformation, not in what is beneath it. The real horror is a stupid laughing mask, not the distorted, suffering face it conceals.

http://ift.tt/1VJ65w8

“The status of the subject as such is hysterical,“ Zizek writes.

twitter.com/extimacy http://ift.tt/1Qp68yF

‘The hysteric is the subject as such, she is lost about what she is for the Other, wondering about the Other’s desire’, Zizek writes.

twitter.com/extimacy http://ift.tt/1osiZUb

Is religion not in its very core a “form of subjectivisation” of people’s predicament?’ Zizek asks

twitter.com/extimacy http://ift.tt/1Q4zGjd

‘When we confront the miracle of freedom,’ often 'we conceive this universe of’ freedom 'into another Geisterwelt, as an endeavour to gentrify the act of freedom, to cope with its traumatic impact. - Spectre is the positivization of the abyss of freedom, a void that assumes the form of quasi-being.

http://ift.tt/20GJdP6

Being loved makes the beloved beautiful.

(via slavoj–zizek) http://ift.tt/1oMctbq

‘far from enabling us to really confront and accept the Real of the woman as the desiring Other, i.e. the traumatic impact of encountering the Other’s desire, the mediation of the symbolic Law functions as a protective shield/filter which domesticates/gentrifies its traumatic impact,’ SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK writes.

(via alterities) http://ift.tt/1oqj4bJ

these oppressed origins are simultaneously the very origins of the oppression of women. Oppression does not just oppress the origins; oppression has to oppress its own origins. The key element of the genealogy of Islam is this passage from the woman as the only one who can verify Truth, to the woman who by her nature lacks reason and faith, cheats and lies, provokes men, interposing herself between them and God as a disturbing presence, and who therefore has to be rendered invisible. Woman, in other words, as an ontological scandal, whose public exposure is an affront to God. … if, following Nietzsche’s equation of truth and woman, we transpose the feminine veil into the veil which conceals the ultimate Truth, the true stakes of the Muslim veil become even clearer. Woman is a threat because she stands for the “undecidability” of truth, for a succession of veils beneath which there is no hidden core

http://ift.tt/1KW3M87

For Freud, hysteria is not..denial of life power; the hysterical subject is rather a..symptom of the Master—what he renders palpable is the primordial deadlock that pertains to the dimension of subjectivity as such and which is concealed by the posture of the Master.

Slavoj Zizek: “Freud’s name for this deadlock, for this authentic kernel of the hysterical theater that eludes Nietzsche’s grasp and undermines from within vita activa, is death drive.” - S.Zizek, Gaze & Voice As Love Objects (via alterities) http://ift.tt/1QjahEm

by veiling her, we create the illusion that there is, beneath the veil, the feminine Truth - the horrible truth of lie and deception, of course. … Therein resides the concealed scandal of Islam: only a woman, the very embodiment of the indiscernability of truth and falsehood, can guarantee Truth.

http://ift.tt/1OcKWVa

As Hegel puts it, what dies on the cross is not son but father himself. I think itʼs correct speculative reading. Otherwise we are in some pagan stupidity where you have God up there, God sends a messenger, “oh,sorry,crucified this time, it failed, comeback my son, weʼll try it later two thousand years,” or whatever. This is obscenity. The whole point is that itʼs not that if we do this we are back at this boring pagan topic of phoenix—you know, you die, but out of the ashes you, like that stupid bird, whatever, you come back. No no no, what comes after crucifixion is not Christ back to Daddy. Itʼs Holy Ghost. What is Holy Ghost? Read it literally. When Christ is asked by his followers, “How will we know that you come?” You know this famous passage, “Whenever there is love between two of you I will be there.” I take this absolutely literally. Holy Ghost is what remains of God, and itʼs our freedom. There is no higher guarantee and so on. Letʼs be frank. Itʼs no longer Christianity, even if itʼs called Christianity. Itʼs some kind of a—I like to call it a spiritualized pseudo-Western Buddhist hedonism, you know, realize yourself, a little bit of spiritual exercise and so on and so on and even Christianity is secretly if you look at it reformulated in these terms. This is why with all my appreciation of Dalai Lama, read his books. I checked in a bookstore. Three of the first page they always begin in the same way, “All living beings want to avoid pain and live happily, enjoy it,” and basically the message is a little bit of meditation will help you, even better sex, and so on. I think that first this is blatantly false, if there is anything to learn from psychoanalysis is that itʼs at least one human being, sorry, at least one living being, humans, who puts all its energy to screw things up for itself as far as possible—as much as possible. This is what Freud called “deathdrive” and so on. We are not hedonist animals and especially I think this is important. I wonder if you would agree with me. The pope, Ratzinger, said as usual something pretty stupid, that, you know, that “greed, utilitarian greed and so on, we have to overcome it,” in his apparent anticapitalism. Totally wrong. Capitalism as Benjamin knew, has a much more religious structure, a true capitalist is not a utilitarian hedonist. You are willing to starve, to risk everything, just so that capital reproduces itself and so on. You are even ready, ready to do whatever, to endanger the earth, whatever, just so that it goes on. Capitalism, again, is not the structure of personal egotism and greed. Every intelligent ideologist knows this.

Zizek at NYPL (via zizekianrevolution) http://ift.tt/20Vxaml

the ongoing disorder should be treated as the true face of the New World Order

zizek (via zizekianrevolution) http://ift.tt/1U1Rddx

If capitalism collapses, Isis will be dead the next day

zizek (via zizekianrevolution) http://ift.tt/1SOJIrn

‘To be self-conscious, you must be void, you must not be accessible to yourself as what you are.’ 'self-consciousness’ 'has nothing to do with consciousness in the sense that you are aware of it.’

http://ift.tt/1KOKhOF

You can arrive at self-consciousness, but it is outside of you, external to you as an object. As a symptom, for example.

http://ift.tt/2431pHa

‘You are always split between what you are as subject–empty and decentered–and the external place where the truth about you is inscribed.’

http://ift.tt/1Xq2dBj

The mistake of this solipsistic view, that we can never be sure that we communicate with the other, is that we presuppose that we can communicate with ourselves.

http://ift.tt/1TYwtDB

We communicate with the others precisely because we cannot communicate with ourselves, precisely because we are always split.

http://ift.tt/241EGv6

The way we are split connects us with others; we look for the missing part in the other. The other fills our own gap.

http://ift.tt/1PrGVQD

I’m telling myself, “No, I’m not yet writing. I’m just putting down ideas.” Then, at a certain point, I tell myself, “Everything is already there. Now I just have to edit it.”

slavoj zizek http://ift.tt/1Xnxd4O

“God is unconscious”. … To be an atheist, it is no longer sufficient to declare that one “doesn’t believe (in God)”, since the true site of my beliefs is not my conscious acts, but the unconscious. This, of course, does not mean the psychological claptrap that “even if I try to deny God, deep in myself I continue to believe” - the unconscious is not “deep in me”, it is out there, in my … interactions.

Zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/1QZ3lJx

Maybe my effort to erase traces of myself from my writing is part of my obsessional nature. I don’t want to be present in the events that I participate in. I try to become invisible. For example, when I stay at a hotel and I must leave the room for a couple of hours, I try to make the room as if I hadn’t. been there. This has more to do, maybe, with psychoanalytic questions such as whether I perceive myself as someone who shouldn’t exist

slavoj zizek http://ift.tt/1PPCIb1

what if the attacking side counts on the fact that, even after its first strike, the opponent continues to act as a rational agent? His choice is now: with his country mostly destroyed, he can either strike back, thus causing total catastrophy, the end of humanity, or NOT STRIKE BACK, thus enabling the survival of humanity and thereby at least the possibility of a later revibal of his own country? A rational agent would chose the second option. ..What makes the strategy efficient is the very fact that we cannot ever be sure that it will work perfectly: what if a situation spirals out of control for a variety of easily imaginable reasons (from the »irrational« aggressivity of the one part to simple technological failures or miscommunications)? It is because of this permanent threat that both sides do not want to come even too close to the prospect of MAD, so they avoid even conventional war: if the strategy were perfect, it would, on the opposite, endorse the attitude »Let’s fight a full conventional war, since we both know that no side will risk the fateful step towards a nuclear strike!«

SLAVOJ IZZEK http://ift.tt/1Q9yb5c

The only way to get rid of the stupid superego..of enjoyment is to embrace the death drive in its disruptive dimension of traversing the fantasy. ..One can beat the death drive only by the death drive itself

http://ift.tt/1QVQQyl

indeterminate ‘guilt’ confronts me with an impenetrable call that prevents recognition of my symbolic mandate.

http://ift.tt/1SHUOOS

You want ‘the fantasmatic image of me, so I’ll thwart your desire by directly gratifying it’. 'You’ll get me, but deprived of the fantasmatic support-background that made me an object of fascination’

http://ift.tt/1ooMl61

hysterical impossible demand..grounds its existence in complaints: ”I am insofar as I make the Other..guilty for my misery”

http://ift.tt/20lEli7

the symptom implies..the..Other as consistent..,..its very formation is an appeal to the Other. Through.. verbalization, the symptom is automatically dissolved.

http://ift.tt/1Q48jRQ

Woman is ‘symptom of man insofar as the man is confronted with his Other Thing,..which ‘‘reads’’ his deepest dreams and returns them to him as his symptom, as his own message, which he is not ready to acknowledge’.

http://ift.tt/1NZYlzO

ethics is not something you should stick to against temptation. The ethical, as such, is the temptation.

On ethics as religion’s very lure http://ift.tt/1SDOEPA

in Kafka’s novels …the … subject is … desperately seeking a trait with which to identify, he does not understand the meaning of the call of the Other.

http://ift.tt/1PfYnaJ

in Kafka’s novels… a mysterious bureaucratic entity (Law, Castle) … does not offer us a Cause with which to identify.

http://ift.tt/1K6BUOr

the enemy is..overidentification. The fundamental move is that of assuming distance. ..You have to..experience the void behind fantasy.

http://ift.tt/1UVeOux

this authentic kernel of the hysterical theater.. is death drive. ..The hysterical subject..renders palpable..the primordial deadlock

http://ift.tt/1K5BJTu

The pervert’s dream is to transform sexual activity into…purpose-oriented activity…executed according to…plan. .. His…illusion is that he possesses a …knowledge which enables him to regulate his access to jouissance.

http://ift.tt/1NWPZsD

Fantasy constructs the scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other

http://ift.tt/20zayIe

The pervert claims direct access to some figure of the big Other, so that […] he is able to act directly as the instrument of the big Other’s will.

http://ift.tt/1QLA3Oz

Anything within her grasp cannot function as an object of desire.

http://ift.tt/1L3l5Pl

Instead of being bothered of what I am for the others, I fully assume the uttermost contingency of my being.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK (via lacanians) http://ift.tt/1R970pW

Perversion can be seen as a defense against the motif of ‘death and sexuality’

zizek (via alterities) http://ift.tt/1o9WUtz

instead of being bothered of what I am for the others, I fully assume the contingency of my being … no longer looking for a guarantee ..in another’s desire.

http://ift.tt/1NRM93S

The reassuring lesson of fantasy is that “I was brought about with a special purpose”. At the end of treatment, instead of being bothered of what I am for the others, I fully assume the uttermost contingency of my being. The subject becomes ‘cause of itself’ no longer looking for a guarantee of his or her existence in another’s desire.

http://ift.tt/1kNuZLI (via alterities) http://ift.tt/1TEHYzV

The collective orgy..is totally aseptic. ..The deeper you go into fantasies the more fatuous and empty they appear

http://ift.tt/1S0Asj7

What causes anxiety is the lack of the prohibition that would sustain desire. This lack throws us into..suffocating proximity..: we lack the breathing space provided by the prohibition

http://ift.tt/1KWICS3

Documentaries intrude into the personal reality of the protagonists, fiction intrudes into dreams themselves, secret fantasies,..the unavowed kernel of our lives

when we film ‘reallife’ scenes in a documentary way, we get people playing themselves the only way to depict people beneath their protective mask of playing is,paradoxically, to make them directly play a role, i.e. to move into fiction. ..We cannot ever comprehend the whole of reality that we encounter: if we are to be able to endure our encounter with reality, some part of it has to be ‘derealised’, experienced as a spectral apparition Slavoj Zizek http://ift.tt/1mbtfyP

The desired ‘object is nothing but the positivization of a void/lack’, Zizek says

http://ift.tt/1PPBuIq

What we never possessed can also never be lost. ..Melancholy obfuscates..that the object is lacking from the very beginning

http://ift.tt/205kDai

I am..hyperactive all the time, just to fascinate people enough so that they don’t notice..that if..I stopped talking, the whole spectacular appearance would disintegrate. People would think there is nobody and nothing there. This is my fear.

http://ift.tt/1Pbla5q

False idolizing..projects its own phantasmagorical constructions; while true love accepts the beloved the way she or he is

http://ift.tt/1Pa9PSW

The excess in the beloved..is s the place of the..inscription of my own desire..into the beloved

SLAVOJ ZIZEK ON WHAT IN MY BELOVED ‘ELUDES MY GRASP’ http://ift.tt/1PsUgJN