Slavoj Žižek Quotes - Page 4

Obama has already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to change the limits of what one can say publicly. His greatest achievement up to now is that, in his refined non-provocative way, he has introduced into public speech topics which had hitherto been de facto unsayable: the continuing importance of race in politics, the positive role of atheists in public life, the necessity to talk with "enemies" like Iran or Hamas, and so on. This is just what US politics needs today more than anything, if it is to break out of its gridlock: new words which will change the way we think and act.

Are we all not, when we sit in the cinema, in the position of humans in The Matrix, tied to chairs, immersed in the spectacle run by a machine? However, a more appropriate allegory is that of the viewer himself: beneath the illusion that we "just look" at the perceived objects from a safe distance, freely sliding along them, there is the reality of the innumerable ties that bind us to what we perceive.

There is an initial modesty in Liberalism. Liberalism was not originally a doctrine of "man is the king." No, it was a very modest attempt to build a space where people could live together without slaughtering one another.

The force of universalism is in you Basques, not in the Spanish state.

But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, You are also responsible for deciding what is your duty.

Confucius was not so much a philsopher 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 one is tempted to call the elementary scene of ideology, its zero-level, which consists in asserting the (nameless) authority of some substantial Tradition.

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.

You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological.

The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth.

The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.

For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic tensions and antagonisms of social orders.

Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.

The liberal idea of tolerance is more and more a kind of intolerance. What it means is 'Leave me alone; don't harass me; I'm intolerant towards your over-proximity.

The duty of a politician for me is to be a representative: a politician is not an expert, experts are experts, hired for their expertise and so on.

I - and I still consider myself, I'm sorry to tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn't help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure.

In a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king--but a king in a constitutional democracy, a monarch who decides only formally, whose function is merely to sign off on measures proposed by an executive administration. This is why the problem with democratic rituals is homologous to the great problem of constitutional monarchy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively makes decisions, when we all know this not to be true?

Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.

In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.

Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch

The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes.

Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its potential.

In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers' uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong.

This proletarianization of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is accompanied by an excess in the opposite direction: the irrationally high pay of top managers and bankers, a level of remuneration that is economically irrational since, as investigations in the US have demonstrated, it tends to be inversely proportional to the company's success.

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.

My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.