Freedom Quotes

“the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than the direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions, but purely “objective,” systemic, anonymous.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“Roger Penrose tried to conceive the unconscious as the space of superposition of thoughts, and the passage to consciousness as the collapse of wave oscillations into a single reality: “Could thoughts exist in some sort of quantum superposition on an unconscious level only to become conscious when there is a specific selection”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“Hegel was paradoxically not idealist enough to imagine the reign of abstraction in art. That is to say, in the same way that, in the domain of economy, he wasn’t able to discern the self-mediating Notion which structures the economic reality of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption, he wasn’t able to discern the Notional content of a painting which mediates and regulates its form (shapes, colours) at a level which is more basic than the content represented (pictured) by a painting—“abstract painting” mediates/reflects sensuality at a non-representational level.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“For Kant, freedom hurts, it involves a painful renunciation to our spontaneous tendencies on behalf of duty, while at the same time, the deepest freedom is experienced as an inner necessity (“I have to do it, I just cannot not do it!”). Schelling further deployed this coincidence of opposites in his philosophy of art: in the process of creation, an artist is free in the deepest sense, while he just follows his inner drive which tells him what to do.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“the wave function of the particle will not let you predict what you measure; you can only predict the probability of what you measure.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“Not only must you do it, you must also choose to do it, actively desire to do it. You must not only obey, you must love obeying and publicly demonstrate this, prove it. /…/ Like the example of the postmodern permissive parent who manipulates the child not only to visit grandma, but to also want to visit grandma. The message is: “you have to do this, and you have to enjoy doing it too!”4”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“even to act against one’s own substantial nature in an explosion of “radical negativity,”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“Free decisions are only possible within a structure which is in itself subjectivized through an immanent inconsistency.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“Alain Badiou opens up his True Life with the provocative claim that, from Socrates onward, the function of philosophy is to “corrupt the youth,” to alienate them from the predominant ideologico-political order.5 Such “corruption” is needed today especially in the liberal-permissive West where most people are even not aware of the way the establishment controls them precisely when they appear to be free—the most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom that we experience as freedom. None other than Goethe already knew this: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“a social space is not just the space of what is permitted but also the space of what is repressed, excluded from public space, and simultaneously necessary for this public space to reproduce itself. This is what “acheronta movebo” (move the underground) as a practice of the critique of ideology means: not directly changing the explicit text of the Law, but, rather, intervening into its obscene virtual supplement.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“The melancholic is not primarily the subject fixated on the lost object, unable to perform the work of mourning on it, but rather the subject who possesses the object and has lost its desire for it, because the cause which made it desire this object lost its efficiency.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“This inability to act means that today’s permissive liberal capitalism is melancholic: we are losing the desire for what we know it has to be done.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“What Freud calls “symptoms” are ways to deal with a traumatic cut, while “fantasy” is a formation destined to cover up this cut.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“True freedom occurs when we are forced to choose something that will determine the rest of our life, our Fate.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“The cynical reasoning is: “I know very well what I am doing, so you cannot reproach me that I don’t know what I am doing.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“after traversing the fantasy and assuming that there is no big Other, the only way to avoid cynicism is to heroically pass to the position of a new Master.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“There is no big Other” means that, in a maximum of subjective engagement, I have to identify myself as the hole in the big Other, as the crack in its edifice.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“the cynical position “resides in saying that enjoyment is the only thing that is true,” while in the case evoked by Arendt, the fiction is more true than reality, we are ready to risk our life for it precisely because it is a fiction—we are here back at Lacan’s “the truth has the structure of a fiction.” “There is no big Other” doesn’t mean that if there is no God then everything is permitted—as Lacan knew, it means the exact opposite, that everything is prohibited, and to break out of this prohibition I have to act counterfactually.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“This is why we are not dealing here with the usual fetishist disavowal but with a courageous act of taking a risk and ignoring my limitations, along the lines of Kant’s Du kannst, denn du sollst!—I know I am too weak to do it, but I’ll nonetheless do it—a gesture which is the very opposite of cynicism.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“it is that the subject, although fully aware of his/her incompetence to exert authority, assumes it not with a cynical distance but with full sincerity, ready even to sacrifice his/her life for it if needed.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“with full sincerity, ready even to sacrifice his/her life for it if needed.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“the ethical lesson is that parents should pretend (to know what to do and how the world works), for there is no way out of the problem of authority other than to assume it, in its very fictionality, with all the difficulties and discontents this entails.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“How to read together the fact that the big Other doesn’t exist and the utter self-sacrificial reliance on the figure of an Other?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“The master is the one who helps the individual to become subject. That is to say, if one admits that the subject emerges in the tension between the individual and the universality, then it is obvious that the individual needs a mediation, and thereby an authority, in order to progress on this path. The crisis of the master is a logical consequence of the crisis of the subject, and psychoanalysis did not escape it. One has to renew the position of the master, it is not true that one can do without it, even and especially in the perspective of emancipation.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“order for the individuals to “reach beyond themselves,” to break out of their passivity and engage themselves as direct political agents, the reference to a Leader is necessary, a Leader who allows them to pull themselves out of the swamp like Baron Munchhausen.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“today’s post-patriarchal narcissistic subject as a subject practicing voluntary servitude:48 When I focus on my Ego, its potentials, interests and needs, I am far from being free, I remain enslaved to the socio-symbolic space within which my Ego was shaped.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“When I focus on my Ego, its potentials, interests and needs, I am far from being free, I remain enslaved to the socio-symbolic space within which my Ego was shaped.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“the more we act freely the more we get enslaved into the system, we need to be “awakened” from this “dogmatic slumber” of fake freedom from outside, by the push of a Master figure.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“Consequently, the usual oppositions (alienation versus disalienation, unconditional state power versus a state power limited to providing public services) have to be left behind: we do not overcome alienation by desalienation, we do not overcome master by eliminating him, we do not overcome public power by limiting it to useful public services. The non-alienated autonomous liberal individual is itself a product of alienation in capitalist society; a master effectively serving the people, taking care of them, is a fetish created to prevent the possibility that individuals will themselves take care of themselves; the idea of power serving society justifies power and thus obfuscates its constitutive excess.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“So yes, popular mobilization outside party politics and state apparatuses is needed—but communities evoked by anarchists rely on a thick texture of “alienated” institutional mechanisms:”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure