What we must do is move beyond the cliché of refugees as proletarians with “nothing to lose but their chains” invading bourgeois Europe: There are class divisions in Europe as well as in the Middle East, and the key question is how these different class dynamics interact.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2drAEtw

Many of the refugees want to have a cake and eat it: They basically expect the best of the Western welfare-state while retaining their specific way of life, though in some of its key features their way of life is incompatible with the ideological foundations of the Western welfare-state. Germany likes to emphasize the need to integrate the refugees culturally and socially. However—and here is another taboo to be broken—how many of the refugees really want to be integrated? What if the obstacle to integration is not simply Western racism?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dxJ93v

The ISIS terrorists…are the Islamo-Fascist counterpart of the European anti-immigrant racists.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dxmkBJ

The greatness of the Jacobins was to keep the screen empty, to resist filling it in with ideological projections.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dhV0UI

it’s too easy to play this moralistic game - state power is corrupted, so let’s withdraw into this role of ethical critic of power

http://ift.tt/2dq9ks7

I hate the position of “beautiful soul”, which is: “"I remain outside, in a safe place; I don’t want to dirty my hands.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dpviLL

Back to the…veil in Islam: what if the true scandal this veil endeavors to obfuscate is not the feminine body hidden by it, but the INEXISTENCE of the feminine? What if…the…function of the veil is …to sustain the illusion that there IS something, the substantial Thing, behind the veil? …The “undecidability” of truth, for a succession of veils beneath which there is no ultimate hidden core,“ is a threat in Islam, writes Zizek.

http://ift.tt/2dAUWys

We have to move the underground, and sometimes this is much more important than changing the explicit rules. This is what Udi tries to do; he is moving the underground, changing those unwritten obscene rules, like one of his protagonists, the muselmann, who calls himself a “mole.” And this is exactly what Hegel called the work of the mole: this underground work, which is the magic of revolutions. As Hegel put it, all the glitter of the display of power can stay there, but they’re not even aware of how the mole works via the underground. And then, at a certain point, you just have to touch them and say, “hey, look down, you are there,” and all collapses.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dAAE8j

Films dealing with war…often forge an image of the soldier not as a righteous superhero, but rather as a sensitive individual who acquiesces to his own moral weaknesses. In a dialectic way, because he reveals his moral failure, the soldier then receives moral sympathy from the audience. Not only is a liberal audience ready to forgive him for his war crimes, but the fact that these crimes make him so human is the very impetus for us to embrace him as an errant child. Take, for example, the protagonist (who also happens to be the director) of the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir. The director took part in the massacre of Sabra and Shatila, only to, years later, make a documentary about his posttraumatic state journey, the end of which includes a scene where he is redeemed by his shrink, who, in so many words, tells him, “You are good person. It’s true you made a mistake, but don’t ever forget: you are not a killer.”

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2d7nggk

I am especially suspicious of this immediate readiness to feel guilty, to be responsible: we Europeans screwed it up, everything is the fault of our neocolonialism. This is not what I mean by probing into the background. This response to the migrant crisis is a problem because it puts refugees in the totally passive position of victims. It’s as if we turned the old racist slogan of white man’s burden into white man’s guilt, as if we are the only active ones. This is, I think, our basic racist view. And when the refugees become too active, they are dismissed as terrorists.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dqAkg5

Fascism emerged as an attempt to master capitalism’s excesses, to build a kind of capitalism without capitalism.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2d1Jdd8

The ‘real’ universality of today’s globalization through the global market involves its own fiction (or even ideal) of multiculturalist tolerance, respect and protection of human rights, democracy and so forth; it involves its own pseudo-Hegelian 'concrete universality’ of a world order whose universal features of the world market, human rights and democracy allow each specific 'lifestyle’ to flourish in its particularity. So a tension inevitably emerges between this postmodern, post-Nation-State, 'concrete universality’ and the earlier 'concrete universality’ of the Nation-State. Hegel was the first to elaborate the properly modern paradox of individualization through secondary identification.21 At the beginning, the subject is immersed in the particular life-form into which he was born (family, local community); the only way for him to tear himself away from his primordial 'organic’ community, to cut his links with it and to assert himself as an 'autonomous individual’, is to shift his fundamental allegiance, to recognize the substance of his being in another, secondary…community that is universal and, simultaneously, 'artificial’, no longer 'spontaneous’ but 'mediated’, sustained by the activity of independent free subjects - nation versus local community; a profession in the modern sense (a job in a large anonymous company) versus the 'personalized’ relationship between an apprentice and his Masterartisan; the academic community of knowledge versus the traditional wisdom passed from generation to generation. In this shift from primary to secondary identification, primary identifications undergo a kind of transubstantiation: they start to function as the form of appearance of the universal secondary identification - say, precisely by being a good member of my family, I thereby contribute to the proper functioning of my Nation-State. The universal secondary identification remains 'abstract’ in so far as it is directly opposed to the particular forms of primary identification, that is, in so far as it compels the subject to renounce his primary identifications; it becomes 'concrete’ when it reintegrates primary identifications, transforming them into the modes of appearance of the secondary identification.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dpI3uP

Today’s neofascism is more and more ‘postmodern’, civilized, playful, involving ironic self-distance, and yet for all that no less fascist.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2cxy3tQ

‘postmodern’ racism is the symptom of multiculturalist late-capitalism, bringing to light the inherent contradiction of the liberal-democratic ideological project. Liberal 'tolerance’ condones the folklorist Other deprived of its substance - like the multitude of 'ethnic cuisines’ in a contemporary megalopolis; however, any 'real’ Other is instantly denounced for its 'fundamentalism’, because the kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of its jouissance: the 'real Other’ is by definition 'patriarchal’, 'violent’, never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming customs. One is tempted to reactualize here the old Marcusean notion of 'repressive tolerance’, reconceiving of it as the tolerance of the Other in its aseptic, benign form, which forecloses the dimension of the Real of the Other’s jouissance.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2duCt6I

A retreat from active engagement in civil society to passive and apolitical consumerism…characterize contemporary capitalism.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2du8hbT

Antigone…goes to the limit,…‘doesn’t give way on her desire’ and becomes, in this persistence in the 'death drive’,…exempted from the circle of everyday feelings and consid­erations, passions and fears.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2dkJR42

black liberation should be the work of black people themselves, not something bestowed on them as a gift by the good white liberals, and only if they fully accept this fact can they do something to help the blacks. And herein resides Nafar’s point as well: Palestinians do not need the patronizing help of Western liberals; even less do they need the silence about “honor killing” as part of the Western leftist’s “respect” for Palestinian ways of life

http://ift.tt/2diuyNc

Capitalism - the more it is rotting, the more it thrives.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/759015017295470592 http://ift.tt/2d1IJ6h

To have an intense and fulfilling…relationship is not…to look into each other’s eyes, forgetting about the world around them, but, while holding hands, to look together outside, at…the Cause for which both are fighting

http://ift.tt/2d1sZ2T

The only way…out of the constraints of ‘alienated’ commodification is to invent a new collectivity.

http://ift.tt/2dqhstK

easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system.

http://ift.tt/2cRwoSB

“The people offered the top reward…did worst of all: higher incentives led to worse performance,”…Daniel Pink … suggests that … incentives might be useful in getting people to accomplish boring routine work; but with more intellectually demanding tasks,…success…depends on being nimble and innovative, so there is more and more need for people to find intrinsic value in their work. Pink identifies…elements underlying…intrinsic motivation:…the ability to choose…how tasks are completed;…becoming adept at an activity; and…the desire to improve the world

http://ift.tt/2df62MY

Wendy Brown reads moralizing politics “as a symptom of a broken historical narrative to which we have not yet forged alternatives”

Zizek citing Wendy Brown http://ift.tt/2csPFac

If you want to explain what today is going on with Marx’s theory of exploitation, what goes on today with poverty and so on, you can no longer account for it in the Marxist terms of exploitation. Because the Marxist term of exploitation, it’s a very precise term based on his labour theory of value.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2cYrgLI

Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation. In a superego blackmail..the developed countries ‘help’ the undeveloped with aid, credit and so on, and thereby avoid..their complicity in..the miserable situation

(Zizek, ‘Violence’, p19) http://ift.tt/2dqssdC

As Highsmith herself put it in an interview: “Ripley could be called psychotic, but I would not call him insane because his actions are rational. /…/ I consider him a rather civilized person who kills when he absolutely has to.” Ripley is thus not any kind of the “American psycho”: his criminal acts are not frenetic passages a l'acte, outbursts of violence in which he releases the energy hindered by the frustrations of the yuppie daily life. His crimes are calculated with simple pragmatic reasoning: he does what is necessary to attain his goal, the wealthy quiet life in the exclusive suburbs of Paris. What is so disturbing about him, of course, is that he somehow seems to lack the elementary ethical sense: in the daily life, he is mostly friendly and considerate (although with a touch of coldness), and when he commits a murder, he does it with regret, quickly, as painlessly as possible, in the same way one performs an unpleasant but necessary task. He is the ultimate psychotic, the best exemplification of what Lacan had in mind when he claimed that normality is the special form of psychosis - of not being traumatically caught in the symbolic cobweb

http://ift.tt/2cXS7I7

Dalai-Lama is much more appropriate for our postmodern permissive times: he presents us with a vague feel-good spiritualism without any SPECIFIC obligations: anyone, even the most decadent Hollywood star, can follow him

http://ift.tt/2d6lvhg

“The true enigma of Ripley is why he persists in this shuddering coldness,” https://t.co/cR6J8GmJfU

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740022080092176384 http://ift.tt/2d8lQ46

“The true enigma of Ripley is why he persists in this shuddering coldness,” https://t.co/cR6J8GmJfU

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740022080092176384 http://ift.tt/2d8lQ46

“coldness characterizes a certain radical lesbian stance,” https://t.co/vBYoFkKZdB

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/740021880531357696 http://ift.tt/2cVvZ0Y

there was a BBC show on..the most hated politician. Tony Blair came first. One week later he won the elections. #Trump #overidentification

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/739503977042223104 http://ift.tt/2deqM8l

“I can be stupid but I’m still at the top”. There is something appealing in this, I think. [#zizek on voters identifying with vices] #trump

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/739502735813451776 http://ift.tt/2dcH3pM

“growing disenchantment of our ac- tual social world accounts for the fascination exerted by cyber- space:” https://t.co/98hwHOPxvk

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/738078154875666433 http://ift.tt/2d14epD

To enjoy is not a matter of following one’s spontaneous tendencies; it is rather something we do as a kind of weird and twisted ethical duty

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/738070116127154177 http://ift.tt/2cn7Qho

Our fixation on electronic games & stories is in part an enactment of a denial of death. They offer the chance to erase memory, to startover

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/737399743337369600 http://ift.tt/2d0mRIP

Christianity involves the distinction between external rules and inner belief (so the question is always: do you REALLY, in the innermost of your heart, believe, or are you just following the dead letter of the law?), while in Judaism, the “external” rules and practices DIRECTLY ARE the religious belief in its material existence

http://ift.tt/2cRQl9z

this ‘making oneself seen’ that characterizes the circularity, the constitutive loop, of the drive, is in no way to be confused with the narcissistic ‘looking at oneself through the other’, that is, through the eyes of the big Other, from the point of the Ego-Ideal in the Other, in the form in which I appear to myself worthy of love: what is lost when I Took at myself through the other’ is the radical heterogeneity of the object qua gaze to whom I expose myself in ‘making oneself seen’.

http://ift.tt/2cWTfO7

‘pure life’ beyond death, this longing that reaches beyond the circuit of generation and corruption, is it not the product of symbolization, so that symbolization itself engenders the surplus that escapes it? … the Symbolic itself opens up the wound it professes to heal. … the libido, qua pure life instinc [is] immortal life,…irrepressible life

http://ift.tt/2cZQUDh

the passion of Tristan and Isolde expresses the longing for the ‘eternal peace’ of death. … The trap to be avoided here, however, is that of conceiving this pure life drive as a substantial entity subsisting prior to its being captured in the Symbolic network … it is the very mediation of the Symbolic order that transforms the organic ‘instinct’ into an unquenchable longing that can find solace only in death.

http://ift.tt/2d3rH6K

The ‘death drive’ means that life itself rebels against the ego: the true representative of death is Ego itself, as the petrified imago that interrupts the flow of life.

http://ift.tt/2d6wSr5

What re-emerges in the ‘death drive’ is ultimately life itself and the fact that the ego perceives this return as a death threat precisely confirms its perverted ‘repressive’ character.

http://ift.tt/2cptOnk

Interpret the death drive…as the return of the life force, of the part of it excluded by the imposition of the petrified mask of the ego.

http://ift.tt/2cB0da1

there is nothing…“constraining” about the fact that our innermost strivings are (pre)determined … when we feel thwarted in our freedom by the pressure of external reality, there must be something in us, some desire or striving, which is thus thwarted, but where do such strivings come from if not this same reality? … Our “free will” does not in some mysterious way “disturb the natural course of things;’ it is part and parcel of this course.

http://ift.tt/2cRsRF4

The “truth” of the struggle emerges only in and through defeat. … to pass from alienation to reconciliation, we do not have to change reality, but rather the way we perceive and relate to it. … reconciliation works-not as a positive gesture of resolving or overcoming the conflict, but as a retroactive insight into how there never really was a serious conflict, how the two opponents were always on the same side … in spite of the fact that Revolutionary Terror was a historical deadlock, we have to pass through it in order to arrive at the modern rational State. Here also, then, one has to do something (offer an apology, enact a reign of Terror) in order to see how it is superfluous. … It only becomes possible to" “see how the Terror is superfluous and destructive after one has gone through it. … For us to be "truly” and “radically” free would entail that there be no positive content involved in our free act-if we want nothing “external” and particular or given to determine our behavior, then “this would involve being free of every part of ourselves”. … When a determinist claims that our free choice is “determined,” this does not mean that our free will is somehow constrained, that we are forced to act against our will. … What is “determined” is the very thing that we want to do “freely,” that is, without being thwarted by external obstacles.

http://ift.tt/2dbtqKA

The ideological subject is unable to grasp how his entire identity hinges on what he perceives as the disturbing obstacle. This notion of ideology is not just an abstract mental exercise: it fits perfectly with fascist anti-Semitism as the most elementary form o f ideology-one is even tempted to say: as ideology as such. ‘The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew, the foreign intruder who disturbs and corrupts the harmony of the social order, is ultimately a fetishistic objectivization, a stand-in, for the “inconsistency” of the social order itself, for the immanent antagonism (“class struggle”) which generates the dynamic of its instability. Hegel’s interest in the “conflict of the opposites” is thus that of the neutral dialectical observer who discerns the “Cunning of Reason” at work in struggle: a subject engages in struggle, is defeated (as a rule, in his very victory), and this defeat brings him to his truth.

http://ift.tt/2cgkMpf

objet petit a is the primordial foreign body that “sticks in the throat” of the subject, to the object-cause of desire that splits it up: Fichte himself defines… the non-assimilable foreign body that causes the subject division into the empty absolute subject and the finite determinate subject,… the moment of the “run-in”, the hazardous knock, the encounter of the Real in the midst of the ideality of the absolute I

http://ift.tt/2cvhJuc

Fichte was the first philosopher to focus on the uncanny contingency in the very heart of subjectivity: the Fichtean subject is not the overblown Ego as the absolute Origin of all reality, but a finite subject thrown, caught, in a contingent social situation forever eluding mastery.

http://ift.tt/2cFXBH6

the encounter of a woman stands for the encounter of the real of the other.’ ‘The abyssal fantasmatic Real of the Feminine which threatens to devour the male subject, is, in its very horror, a DEFENSE, an escape from the Real of the Other’s (woman’s) desire

http://ift.tt/2cf1twz

the ultimate victim of the atheist theoretical and practical rejection of religion is not religion (which, unperturbed, continues its life), but freedom itself, allegedly threatened by it. The radical atheist universe, deprived of religious reference, is the grey universe of egalitarian terror and tyranny

http://ift.tt/2cyC2Ju

An encounter of the Other’s desire…can be an experience of utter alienation (I am obsessed with the inaccessible obscure impenetrable divine Desire which plays games with me). …Let us return to our fundamentalist:…he loses his sensitivity for the enigma of the Other’s desire.

http://ift.tt/2d73gbS

finding oneself in the position of the beloved is so violent, traumatic even: being loved makes me feel directly the gap between what I am as a determinate being and the unfathomable X in me which causes love. …The excess of the beloved, what, in the beloved, eludes my grasp, is the very place of the inscription of my own desire into the beloved object - transcendence is the form of appearance of immanence. As the melodramatic wisdom puts it, it is love itself, the fact of being loved, that ultimately makes the beloved beautiful.

http://ift.tt/2ckdOmr

To believe “directly,” without the externalizing mediation of a ritual, is a heavy…burden; …through exerting a ritual, one has a chance of transferring this burdon onto an Other

Slavoj Zizek http://ift.tt/2cDhsbG

what if one kneels down and prays not so much to regain one’s own belief but, on the opposite, to GET RID of one’s belief, of its over-proximity, to acquire a breathing space of a minimal distance towards it? … In the “normal” cynical functioning of ideology…the true logic is: “Kneel down and you will thereby MAKE SOMEONE ELSE BELIEVE!” … “act as if you believe, and YOU WILL GET RID OF YOUR BELIEF - you will no longer have to believe yourself, your belief will already ex-sist objectified in your act of praying!”

Slavoj Zizek http://ift.tt/2cPbK5n

Kneel down and you will believe!” has to be understood as involving a kind of self-referential causality: "Kneel down and you will believe that you knelt down because you believed!

http://ift.tt/2czGRBg

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity": even the best are no longer able to sustain their symbolic innocence,…while “the worst”…engage in (racist, religious, sexist…) fanaticism? Is this…not a good description of today’s …tolerant but anemic liberals, and the fundamentalists full of “passionate intensity”?

SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2cMYIoJ

a desperate “sickness unto death” [is] the attitude of knowing one’s eternal duty but avoiding it; acedia is thus the tristitia mortifera, not simple laziness but desperate resignation—I want the object, but not the way to reach it, I accept the gap between desire and its object. In this precise sense, acedia is the opposite of zeal. One is even tempted to historicize this last sin: before modernity, it was melancholy (resisting pursuit of the Good); with capitalism, it was reinterpreted as simple laziness (resisting the work ethic); today, in our “post-”society, it is depression (resisting the enjoyment of life, or happiness in consumption).

Slavoj Zizek http://ift.tt/2cAmFks

Unconstrained assertion of sexuality deprived of the last vestiges of spiritual transcendence turns sex itself into a mechanical exercise.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/756116512805621760 http://ift.tt/2czZk2l

What if we are ‘really alive’ only if we commit ourselves with an excessive intensity which puts us beyond 'mere life’?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/756081682281820160 http://ift.tt/2cxZKWZ

The danger the West is courting in its ‘war on terrorism’: …they start by denouncing religion as the force of oppression which threatens human freedom; in fighting religion, however, they are compelled to forsake freedom itself

http://ift.tt/2co5zst

can we summon up the courage to formulate a Leftist alternative to democracy in order to break the vicious cycle of democratic corruption and the Rightist campaigns?

http://ift.tt/2cnGZYM

We should…reject the standard liberal wisdom according to which Islam still needs to accomplish the Protestant revolution which would open it up to modernity: this Protestant revolution was already accomplished more than two centuries ago, in the guise of the Wahhabi movement which emerged in (what is today) Saudi Arabia. Its basic tenet, the exercise of ijtihad (the right to reinterpret Islam on the basis of changing conditions), is the precise counterpart to Luther’s reading of the Bible. …The Wahhabis were extremely ‘purist’ and 'dogmatic’, opposed to any kind of cheap accommodation to new trends of Western modernity; and, simultaneously, they advocated the ruthless abandonment of old superstitious organic mores - the very formula of the 'Protestant’ return to origins against the corrupting inertia of tradition.

http://ift.tt/2crHKwL

As if what causes resentment against the USA is not its excess of power, but its lack of it.

http://ift.tt/2cYadfb

What broke down was their ‘objective’ illusion, the figure of the 'big Other’ against the background of which they could exert their ruthless drive for power: the Other on to which they transposed their belief, the Other which, as it were, believed on their behalf, their subject-supposed-to-believe, disintegrated. And did not something analogous happen in the aftermath of September 11?

http://ift.tt/2clTAGg

Saudi Arabia and Kuwait…are fully integrated into Western capitalism. Here, the USA has a very precise and simple interest: in order that these countries can be counted on for their oil reserves, they have to remain undemocratic (the underlying notion, of course, is that any democratic awakening could give rise to anti-American attitudes).

SLAVOJ ZIZEK on how the words “clash of civilization” are misleading http://ift.tt/2cufdaH

The pervert proclaims direct access to some big Other.

http://ift.tt/2cVcNQs

A specific “way of life” is not just composed of a set of abstract – Christian, Muslim – “values”: …it all of a sudden strikes us how stupidly meaningless and arbitrary our customs and rituals are – there is nothing natural in the way we embrace and kiss, in the way we wash ourselves, in the way we behave while eating… The point is thus not to recognise ourselves in strangers, but to recognise a stranger in ourselves – therein resides the innermost dimension of European modernity. The recognition that we are all, each in our own way, weird lunatics, provides the only hope for a tolerable co-existence of different ways of life.

http://ift.tt/2cmNGWE

What lies beyond this closed circle of ourselves – or, rather, the projections of our “repressed” evil side onto the other” – what we believe we encounter as the “authentic” other when we truly open ourselves up to them, the good, innocent other, is also our ideological fantasy.

http://ift.tt/2cUMKvn

the cause of problems which are immanent to today’s global capitalism are projected onto an external intruder. A suspicious gaze always finds what it is looking for: “proof” is everywhere, even if half of it is soon proven to be fake.

http://ift.tt/2cEcEBo

even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans; they seduce German girls – which they were not, of course) their anti-Semitism would still be pathological, since it represses the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position.

http://ift.tt/2clJypS

the left also deeply disappointed me. Falling back into this safe pacifist attitude - violence never stops violence, give peace a chance

ZIZEK on the left not fully entering into the debate where the left is too absorbed by feeling moraööy superior and thus less able to prevent the wars since 9/11 http://ift.tt/2c8A56M

The reality that emerges from the Panama Papers leak is of class division, and it’s as simple as that. The papers demonstrate how wealthy people live in a separate world in which different rules apply, in which legal system and police authority are heavily twisted and not only protect the rich, but are even ready to systematically bend the rule of law to accommodate them.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c45OHA

This is our situation today: We are facing the shameless cynicism of the existing global order, whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights, etc.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2ck1qCw

What he can­not accept is the rad­ical gap that forever sep­ar­ates his “real” qual­it­ies from his sym­bolic status (in the eyes of the oth­ers): all of a sud­den, he is no longer a nobody avoided by respect­able pub­lic but a fam­ous author invited by the pil­lars of soci­ety, with even the beloved woman now throw­ing her­self at his feet – but he is fully aware that noth­ing changed in him in real­ity, he is now the same per­son as he was, and even all his works were already writ­ten when he was ignored and des­pised. What Mar­tin can­not accept is this rad­ical de-cen­ter­ing of the very core of his per­son­al­ity which “resides in the minds of oth­ers”: he is noth­ing in him­self, just a con­cen­trated pro­jec­tion of oth­ers’ dreams. This per­cep­tion that his agalma, what now makes him desired by oth­ers, is some­thing that is out­side of him, not only ruins his nar­ciss­ism, but also kills his desire: “Some­thing has gone out of me. I have always been unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being sated with life. Life has so filled me that I am empty of any desire for any­thing.” It is this “con­clu­sion that he was nobody, noth­ing,” which drove him to sui­cide.

ZIZEK on Jack London’s novel Martin Eden (via alterities) http://ift.tt/2cw31qf

sex is “something impossible in the sense that we cannot make sense of it,” Zizek writes.

(via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/2cO5DS8

The ideal love-object lives on the brink of death, her life itself is overshadowed by imminent death'”she is marked by some hidden curse or suicidal madness … It is only when the poet loses his lady that he finally and truly acquires her, it is precisely through this loss that she gains her place in the fantasy space that regulates the subject’s desire.

http://ift.tt/2c9CDo3

Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist, he doesn’t oppose to the Other the particular values of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality … multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority.

ZIZEK (via slavoj—-zizek) http://ift.tt/2cOD85n

Inso­far as sym­bolic cas­tra­tion is also one of the names of the gap between my imme­di­ate stu­pid being and my sym­bolic title (recall the pro­ver­bial dis­ap­point­ment of an adoles­cent: is that miser­able cow­ard really my father?), and since a sym­bolic author­ity can only func­tion inso­far as, in a kind of ille­git­im­ate short-cir­cuit, this gap is obfus­cated and my sym­bolic author­ity appears as an imme­di­ate prop­erty or qual­ity of me as a per­son, each author­ity has to pro­tect itself from situ­ations in which this gap becomes palp­able. For example, polit­ical lead­ers know very well how to avoid situ­ations in which their impot­ence would have been revealed; a father knows how to hide from the gaze of his son his humi­li­at­ing moments (when his boss shouts at him, etc.). What is pro­tec­ted by such strategies of “sav­ing one’s face” is appear­ance: although I know very well my father is ulti­mately impot­ent, I refuse to believe it, which is why the effect of wit­ness­ing the open dis­play of his impot­ence can be so shat­ter­ing. Such humi­li­at­ing moments fully deserve to be called “cas­trat­ing exper­i­ences,” not because father is shown cas­trated-impot­ent, but because the gap between his miser­able real­ity and his sym­bolic author­ity is rendered palp­able and can no longer be ignored

http://ift.tt/2cCyXGF

the court power is lost when the door keeper tells him that this entrance was, from the very start, meant only for him. In other words, he tells the man from the country that the thing that fascinated him was, in a way, gazing back at him all along, addressing him. That is, the man’s desire was from the very start ‘part of the game.’ The whole spectacle of the Door of the Law and the secret beyond it was staged only to capture his desire.

ZIZEK ON THE TRIAL BY KAFKA http://ift.tt/2cMnCrO

the abyss of the depth of another personality is its utter impenetrability

http://ift.tt/2cJEc7X

The moment you define the death of Christ on the cross as this kind of commercial deal, God paid the price, first every good theologist will tell you you get immediately caught up in nonsense. God paid the price for our sins. Ok, fuck it. To whom did he pay the price? No wonder that in the first century of Christianity, the most popular theory was the dualistic theory, where they claimed that the death of Christ is a deal between God and the Devil. Here on Earth we are in the hands of the Devil, God told the Devil “I want to make a deal with you, I pay the highest price, my son, if you give me back humanity.” Which is again nonsense, we are in pagan dualism etc

http://ift.tt/2c6g972

to terrorize my left liberal friends, I’m one of the few people who is for death penalty. The true ethical act is always founded on the decision that has no guarantee. Well, but what is the role of the cultural historical circumstances? Absolutely. It’s always an act within circumstances. No, no, it’s not some kind of divine act.

http://ift.tt/2cjHrVj

Ideology is telling you: “be faithful to yourself”, “realize your true potential”, “try all..options”, “don’t fixate yourself”, Zizek writes

via http://twitter.com/AndreVantino (via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/2cqLBek

I always defended Plato against Aristotle. It’s very fashionable to say bad Plato, protototalitarian, versus more open, democratic Aristotle. Ha. Read Plato’s Republic and be careful just about two things: there is at least something that you don’t find in Plato. First, do you notice he doesn’t need slaves for his republic. Secondly, Plato explicitly says in his Republic that women and men are equal. It is totally contingent now that men have more authority but in his ideal state women are equal to men. One should stop with this story bad Plato, original European metaphysics and so on. If anything we can learn today that Plato’s critique of democracy which is a very precise critique, a very Jacobin critique, which says that even, if I simplify it, if democracy is not empirically corrupted, there is corruption, in the very basic idea of democracy, which means there is no common good, that state politics should be determined by pragmatic negotiations between your interest, my interest, the highest social pact could be about the compromise between private interests as it were. Insofar as we understand democracy in this way one should criticize democracy, there is a kind of a priori corruption in democracy as such, independent of empirical democracy.

http://ift.tt/2bXN78s

we should rethink the notion of communism in the sense of how to define this domain of the commons.

http://ift.tt/2c9tHe3

Reconciliation is when we see how, when we fight each other, this very fight already links us.

http://ift.tt/2c9bk96

..In this empty place in the very heart of the Other, we must locate the problematic of the death drive.

http://ift.tt/2c8QKG1

the message of Christ’s sacrifice is not “now I take it for you, you can screw it up again." No, it just opens the space for our struggle, and this is the paradox I like. This is what I like in what maybe is the best chapter of this book, the fifth one (of Puppet). To put it in very simple terms, Christ’s redemption doesn’t mean that, OK, now we can go watch hard-core movies because we are redeemed each time. No, it’s done, the Messiah is here, it’s done, means that the space is now open for struggle. It’s this nice paradox that the fact that the big thing happened does not mean it’s over. It precisely opens the space for struggle. This is what I find again so incredible.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2cHghK5

this idea that in Christianity everything happened whereas in Judaism the Messiah is always postponed, always to-come, and so on. No, I like here this crazy radicality of Christianity which is that, no, it happened, it already happened. But precisely that doesn’t mean everything is already decided.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c8gdhH

All advertising addresses this fantasmatic space (“If you drink X, you will experience not just a drink, but also…”)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743858305102127104 http://ift.tt/2cl4vDJ

Reconciliation is when we see how, when we fight each other, this very fight already links us.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c8z5MS

when I ironically refer to myself as a Leninist, when people ask me “What kind of Leninist?” I always say the Lenin of 1915. When, with the fiasco of the First World War, everything shattered for Lenin. And what did he do? He went to Switzerland and started to read Hegel. That’s the Lenin that I like. To admit fully the disaster. The first task of a Marxist today is to be radically self-critical. To admit that it’s not just, you know, like the social democratic left betrayed a more radical legacy. No no no, the whole leftist project has to be radically re-thought.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2cmJCGF

communism is a capitalist fantasy. Yes. But doesn’t it mean that capitalism is ultimately the only game in town? First, what I mean is that we should be more radical.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c5zT5u

we should rethink the notion of communism in the sense of how to define this domain of the commons.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2caWSPM

I always defended Plato against Aristotle. It’s very fashionable to say bad Plato, protototalitarian, versus more open, democratic Aristotle. Ha. Read Plato’s Republic and be careful just about two things: there is at least something that you don’t find in Plato. First, do you notice he doesn’t need slaves for his republic. Secondly, Plato explicitly says in his Republic that women and men are equal. It is totally contingent now that men have more authority but in his ideal state women are equal to men. One should stop with this story bad Plato, original European metaphysics and so on. If anything we can learn today that Plato’s critique of democracy which is a very precise critique, a very Jacobin critique, which says that even, if I simplify it, if democracy is not empirically corrupted, there is corruption, in the very basic idea of democracy, which means there is no common good, that state politics should be determined by pragmatic negotiations between your interest, my interest, the highest social pact could be about the compromise between private interests as it were. Insofar as we understand democracy in this way one should criticize democracy, there is a kind of a priori corruption in democracy as such, independent of empirical democracy.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c4o6nH

to terrorize my left liberal friends, I’m one of the few people who is for death penalty. The true ethical act is always founded on the decision that has no guarantee. Well, but what is the role of the cultural historical circumstances? Absolutely. It’s always an act within circumstances. No, no, it’s not some kind of divine act.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c3kzqi

The moment you define the death of Christ on the cross as this kind of commercial deal, God paid the price, first every good theologist will tell you you get immediately caught up in nonsense. God paid the price for our sins. Ok, fuck it. To whom did he pay the price? No wonder that in the first century of Christianity, the most popular theory was the dualistic theory, where they claimed that the death of Christ is a deal between God and the Devil. Here on Earth we are in the hands of the Devil, God told the Devil “I want to make a deal with you, I pay the highest price, my son, if you give me back humanity.” Which is again nonsense, we are in pagan dualism etc

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2c7V1uI

multiculturalist whites retain a “position as the privileged” https://t.co/Zoy1XL27x2

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743740420211933184 http://ift.tt/2bOHft8

death drive is this idea of “self-sabotaging,” https://t.co/sSKE86zu13

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743739003380260865 http://ift.tt/2cu2DZy

if u do jokes “in the wrong context, in the wrong way, I’m well aware that this is racism.” https://t.co/T5p8KiPiTg

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743738514945114112 http://ift.tt/2c9IKIb

no era “did more to undermine so-called family and community values than the Reagan era,” https://t.co/04t4J5G4Km

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743737829226754048 http://ift.tt/2c77GzI

disenchantment of our “social world accounts for the fascination exerted by cyber- space:” https://t.co/dXXWSv9TBR

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743736295839522816 http://ift.tt/2bPo8FE

it is “as if the screen of the interface is today’s version of the blank, of the unknown region” https://t.co/ajyUlTM4jZ

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743736022752628737 http://ift.tt/2criMz1

“cyber- space is not spectral enough.” https://t.co/6VW6dF1yBl

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743735523072565248 http://ift.tt/2bX2cTs

Kafka’s universe is a world where God – who up to this point has held himself at an assured distance – got t… https://t.co/KLuswhH7uG

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743734617593679872 http://ift.tt/2cqQFQA

“the formula of the ‘absent God’ in Kafka does not work at all:” https://t.co/ITazMnH1kL

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/743733858336595968 http://ift.tt/2cdXh2r

somehow you can return to the worst starting point, racist jokes and so on, but they function no longer as racist, but as a kind of obscene solidarity. To give you an extremely vulgar example, I met a big, black guy, and when we became friends, I went into it like, [assuming a naive, awe-filled whisper] ‘Is it true that you have, you know [makes gesture signifying a gigantic penis]?’ and (this is a racist myth I heard in Europe) 'Is it true that you blacks can control your muscles so that when you walk with a half erection and there is a fly here you can BAM! [slaps thigh] snap it with your penis?†We became terribly close friends! Now, I’m well aware of how risky these waters are, because if you do it in the wrong context, in the wrong way, I’m well aware that this is racism.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2caG2kg

Did you see that wonderful melodrama, Stella Dallas, with Barbara Stanwyck? She has a daughter who wants to marry into the upper class, but she is an embarrassment to her daughter. So, the mother - on purpose - plays an extremely vulgar, promiscuous mother in front of her daughter’s lover, so that the daughter can drop her without guilt. The daughter can be furious with her and marry the rich guy. That’s a more difficult sacrifice. It’s not, “I will make a big sacrifice and remain deep in their heart.†No, in making the sacrifice, you risk your reputation itself. Is this an extreme case? No, I think every good parent should do this.

ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2coXAcP

Far from being pre-political, “universal Human Rights” designate the precise space of politicization proper: what they amount to is the right to universality as such, the right of a political agent to assert its radical non-coincidence with itself (in its particular identity), to posit itself – precisely insofar as it is the “surnumerary” one, the “part with no part,” the one without a proper place in the social edifice – as an agent of universality of the Social as such. The paradox is thus a very precise one, and symmetrical to the paradox of universal human rights as the rights of those reduced to inhumanity: at the very moment when we try to conceive political rights of citizens without the reference to universal “meta-political” Human Rights, we lose politics itself, i.e., we reduce politics to a “post-political” play of negotiation of particular interests. - What, then, happens to Human Rights when they are reduced to the rights of homo sacer, of those excluded from the political community, reduced to “bare life” – i.e., when they become of no use, since they are the rights of those who, precisely, have no rights, are treated as inhuman?

http://ift.tt/2ciAP7c

the moment Human Rights are thus depoliticized, the discourse dealing with them has to change to ethics: reference to the pre-political opposition of Good and Evil has to be mobilized. Today’s “new reign of ethics”, thus relies on a violent gesture of depoliticization, of denying to the victimized other political subjectivization. No wonder, then, that the advocates of such humanitarianism like to refer to the notion of a transpolitical radical Evil.

http://ift.tt/2bKoozm

when one speaks today of the decline of paternal authority, it is THIS father, the father of the uncompromising “No!”, who seems effectively to be in retreat; in his absence, in the absence of his prohibitory “No!”, new forms of the fantasmatic harmony between the symbolic order and jouissance can thrive again. This is what the so-called New Age “holistic” attitude ultimately is about, this renewal of the harmony between Reason and Life substance (Earth or macrocosm itself as a living entity) at the expense of the prohibitory “real father”. - These deadlocks indicate that today, in a sense, “the big Other no longer exists” however, in WHAT sense? The big Other is somewhat the same as God according to Lacan (God is not dead today He was dead from the very beginning, except He didn’t know it…): it never existed in the first place, i.e., the “big Other’s” inexistence is ultimately equivalent to Its being the symbolic order, the order of symbolic fictions which operate at a level different from direct material causality. … the “inexistence of the big Other” is strictly correlative to the notion of belief, of symbolic trust, of credence, of taking what other’s say “at their word’s value.”

http://ift.tt/2bKb6sK

It may appear that disintegration of the ethical substance is counteracted by the growth of political correctness, …however, …the ‘politically correct’ regulation participates in the same process of the disintegration of the ethical substance

http://ift.tt/2bJUku6

The obsessional neurotic: on the ‘constituted’, imaginary, phenomenal level he is of course caught in the masochistic logic of his compulsive acts, he is humiliating himself, preventing his success, organizing his failure, and so on

http://ift.tt/2c15gjR

analysis has to discover who - which subject - embodies for her the Other. Behind an extremely ‘feminine’ imaginary figure, we can thus generally discover some kind of masculine, paternal identification: she is enacting fragile femininity, but on the symbolic level she is in fact identified with the paternal gaze, to which she wants to appear likeable.

http://ift.tt/2ckuCbp

the dialectic of semblance and Real cannot be reduced to the rather elementary fact that the virtualization of our daily lives, the experience that we are living more and more in an artificially constructed universe, gives rise to an irresistible urge to ‘return to the Real’, to regain firm ground in some 'real reality’. … we should abandon the standard metaphorics of the Real as the terrifying Thing that is impossible to confront face to face, as the ultimate Real concealed beneath the layers of imaginary and/ or symbolic Veils: the very idea that, beneath the deceptive appearances, there lies hidden some ultimate Real Thing. … is the ultimate appearance - this Real Thing is a fantasmatic spectre whose presence guarantees the consistency of our symbolic edifice, thus enabling us to avoid confronting its constitutive inconsistency ('antagonism’). … does not the same go for the figure of Woman-Thing inaccessible to the male grasp? Is she also not the ultimate Spectre enabling men to avoid the constitutive deadlock of the sexual relationship?

http://ift.tt/2caOj61

‘Woman is … a subject at its most fundamental, while man is a ridiculous fake, a false pretender. One can reach “maturity” — but not by adopting the position of the Master’, Zizek says.

(via andre-vantino) http://ift.tt/2chG6wf

I can well imagine that, in a particular situation, confronted with the proverbial ‘prisoner who knows’, whose words can save thousands, I might decide in favour of torture; however, even (or, rather, precisely) in a case such as this, it is absolutely crucial that one does not elevate this desperate choice into a universal principle: given the unavoidable and brutal urgency of the moment, one should simply do it. Only in this way, in the very prohibition against elevating what we have done into a universal principle, do we retain a sense of guilt, an awareness of the inadmissibility of what we have done. In short, every authentic liberal should see these debates, these calls to 'keep an open mind’, as a sign that the terrorists are winning. And, in a way, essays like Alter’s, which do not openly advocate torture, but just introduce it as a legitimate topic of debate, are even more dangerous than explicit endorsements. At this moment at least, explicitly endorsing it would be rejected as too shocking, but the mere introduction of torture as a legitimate topic allows us to court the idea while retaining a clear conscience

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people laugh at me saying “oh, you want Leninism.” But no, sorry, I am not totally crazy.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/741309073916874752 http://ift.tt/2bHFWiU

Palestine today presents us with the “opportunity” of Ash’s subtitle because all of the standard “pragmatic” solutions to the “Middle East crisis” have repeatedly failed, which suggests that a utopian invention of a radical new space may be the only “realistic” choice.

http://ift.tt/2bU4a7e

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” Here, of course, I claim we are not dealing with a simple brutal hatred demanded by a cruel and jealous god. Family relations stand here metaphorically for the entire social network, for any particular ethnic substance that determines my place in the global order of things. The hatred enjoined by Christ is therefore not any kind of dialectical opposite of love, but the direct expression of love. It is love itself that enjoins me to unplug, as it were, from my organic community into which I was born, or, as St. Paul put it, “There are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks.

http://ift.tt/2bGSEyD