Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

See you, either in Hell, or in Communism.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

'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.'

— Slavoj Zizek

As Bertolt Brecht puts in his Threepenny Opera: What is the robbery of a bank compared to the foundation of a new bank?'

— Slavoj Zizek

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?'

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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?

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

Memento mori should be read: don't forget to die.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.

— Slavoj Zizek

'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.'

— Slavoj Zizek

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).

— Slavoj Zizek

'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!

— Slavoj Zizek

Man as such is nature sick unto death, derailed, run off the rails through a fascination with a lethal Thing.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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

— Slavoj Zizek

...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...

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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!"

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

“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”

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek

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.

— Slavoj Zizek