188 Quotes by Slavoj Zizek

In Kant’s description, ethical duty functions like a foreign traumatic intruder that from the outside disturbs the subject’s homeostatic balance, its unbearable pressure forcing the subject to act “beyond the pleasure principle,” ignoring the pursuit of pleasures. For Lacan, exactly the same description holds for desire, which is why enjoyment is not something that comes naturally to the subject, as a realization of her inner potential, but is the content of a traumatic superego injunction.

as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.

…event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it. Such a frame can sometimes be directly presented as a fiction which nonetheless enables us to tell the truth in an indirect way.

…the proper moment of subjective transformation occurs at the moment of declaration, not at the moment of the act. In other words, the truly New emerges through narrative, the apparently purely reproductive retelling of what happened – it is this retelling that opens up the space (the possibility) of acting in a new way.

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.

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 succesfull than ourselves

Conservatives are therefore fully justified in legitimizing their opposition to radical knowledge in terms of happiness: ultimately, knowledge makes us unhappy.

This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power.

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