Rafael Munia

“if Western universal values are false, is it enough to oppose them with a particular way of life like China’s Confucian ‘mainstream ideology’? Don’t we need a different universalism, a different project of universal emancipation? The ultimate irony here is that ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ effectively means socialism with a market economy (with capitalist characteristics), i.e., a socialism that fully integrates China into the global market. The universality of global capitalism is left intact – it is silently accepted as the only possible frame, and the project of Confucian harmony is mobilized only in order to keep under control the antagonisms that come from global capitalist dynamics.”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously

“The negativity of otherness or foreignness is de-interiorized and transformed into the positivity of communicable and consumable difference: ‘diversity’.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

“Maybe that’s what religion is: a god ersatz rather than his affirmation.”
― Marcus Steinweg, Inconsistencies

“Neoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics –in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to ‘deliver’. In the process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are consumers or customers.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power