Freedom Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“According to the standard view, the past is fixed, what happened has happened, it cannot be undone, and the future is open, it depends on unpredictable contingencies. What we should propose here is a reversal of this standard view: the past is open to retroactive reinterpretations, while the future is closed since we live in a determinist universe. This doesn’t mean that we cannot change the future; it just means that, in order to change our future we should first (not “understand” but) change our past, reinterpret it in such a way that opens up towards a different future from the one implied by the predominant vision of the past. This is why radical acts of freedom are possible only under the condition of predestination: in predestination, we know we are predestined, but we don’t know how we are predestined, i.e., which of our choices is predetermined, and this terrifying situation where we have to decide what to do, knowing that our decision is decided in advance, is perhaps the only case of real freedom, of the unbearable burden of a really free choice—we know that what we will do is predestined, but we still have to take a risk and subjectively choose what is predestined.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“we should accept the meaningless stupidity of nature.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“appreciating the weed working its way through a crack in the concrete, and then appreciating the concrete.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“If, in the confrontation of the two self-consciousnesses engaged in the struggle for life and death, each side is ready to go to the end in risking its life, then there is no winner—one dies, the other survives but without another to recognize it. The whole history of freedom and recognition—in short, the whole of history, the whole of human culture—can take place only with an original compromise: in the eye-to-eye confrontation, one side (the future servant) “averts its eyes,” it is not ready to go to the end.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“Shame is thus simply not a reliable indicator that something is wrong.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“how all the emphasis on plasticity, choice and diversity ends up in what one cannot but call a new apartheid, a network of fixed identities. This is why the Woke stance provides the supreme case of how permissiveness turns into universal prohibition: in a Politically Correct regime,”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“Plus, is the chaotic digital space of “fake news” nonetheless not a new form of big Other, a chaotic public space in which influencers fight for numbers of clicks?”
― 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

“when a progressive idea like equality and democracy is expanded into a Third World, it involves a radical dislocation and is no longer European, but “bad” capitalism remains a foreign (European) intruder … This mistake is serious because it misses the key fact that capitalism is actually universal, trans-cultural, indifferent towards particular cultures: it is not dislocated from one culture and then appropriated by another; rather, it stands for a universal dislocation from cultural space as such.”
― 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

“(This repression of repression which occurs in perverse subjectivity is correlative to the prohibition of prohibition: it may appear that in perversion “everything is permitted,” all repressed dirty fantasies can be brought out without impediments; however, what is rendered invisible in this space of the free flow of “perversities” is the very trauma, the Real of a basic impossibility, the gap which this flow tries to obfuscate.)”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“evil is thinking as such: It is cognition that first posits the antithesis in which evil is to be found. Animals, stones and plants are not evil, evil first occurs within the sphere of rupture or cleavage; it is the consciousness of being-myself in opposition to an external nature. […] It is through this separation that I exist for myself for the first time, and that is where the evil lies. […] So it is not the case that [rational] consideration has an external relationship to evil: it is itself what is evil.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“as a living organism, I am not just myself in my flat presence, I simultaneously APPEAR TO MYSELF in a certain mode (of hunger, of a drive to mate …) This is why the Absolute is not the true In-itself beyond objective reality—to arrive at the Absolute, what one has to add to the objective order is its appearance itself: one has to grasp how the subjective appearances and illusions of a thing that blur and misrepresent its “objective reality” are a moment of this thing itself, its necessary moment. We arrive at the absolute standpoint when we grasp how, if we subtract from a thing its illusory appearance, if we try to grasp a thing as it “really is in itself,” this thing itself disintegrates.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“Desire is hell—heaven simply means a universe without desire. “Hell” is not another reality full of horrors, “hell” is the reality we live in, the reality of our lives structured by the inconsistency of our desires, the reality in which we desire what we do not want and do not even know what we desire. Lacan’s formula “do not compromise your desire” means precisely this: remain faithful to your hellish desire to the end, accept that god himself is hellish, that he also does not dwell in perfect happiness.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“I know I am predetermined, but I put my wager against this and act as free.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“what we get in the “unconscious” is not a complete, uninterrupted, causal link, but the repercussions, the after-shocks, of a traumatic interruption.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“if free will is not real, human thought has no access to truth.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“Since desire is hysteric and metonymic, since it targets the gap beyond or between demands, what “not giving up on one’s desire” amounts to is precisely the readiness to give up (“betray”) any specific object, to pass from one to another object because no determinate object is “that”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure

“Why am I what you are saying that I am?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure