Less Than Nothing Quotes

“Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“one cannot look “objectively” at oneself and locate oneself in reality; and the task is to think this impossibility itself as an ontological fact, not only as an epistemological limitation. In other words, the task is to think this impossibility not as a limit, but as a positive fact—and this, perhaps, is what at his most radical Hegel does.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“an entity is free when it can deploy its immanent potential without being impeded by any external obstacle.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“a truly radical change is self-relating: it changes the very coordinates by means of which we measure change. In other words, a true change sets its own standards: it can only be measured by criteria that result from it.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“the act is by definition partial, it involves guilt, but the judging consciousness does not admit that its judging is also an act, it refuses to include itself in what it judges. It ignores the fact that the true evil lies in the neutral gaze which sees evil everywhere around itself, so that it is no less tainted than the acting consciousness.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“Als Präsident Obama den Aufstand als legitime Meinungsäußerung begrüßte, die von der Regierung anerkannt werden müsse, war die Verwirrung komplett. Die Massen in Kairo und Alexandria wollten keine Anerkennung ihrer Forderungen durch die Regierung, deren Rechtmäßigkeit sie rundweg ablehnten. Sie wünschten sich das Mubarak-Regime nicht als Gesprächspartner, sie wollten, dass Mubarak verschwand. Ihr Ziel war nicht nur eine neue Regierung, die ihre Meinung anhören würde, sondern eine Umgestaltung des gesamten Staates. Sie hatten keine »Meinungen «; sie waren die Wahrheit der Situation in Ägypten. (S. 55)”
― Slavoj Žižek, Weniger als nichts - Hegel und der Schatten des dialektischen Materialismus

“¿No ocurre lo mismo con la guerra? Lejos de dar comienzo a la guerra del siglo XXI, el ataque al World Trade Center en septiembre de 2001 fue más bien el último acto espectacular de la guerra del siglo XX. Lo que nos espera es algo mucho más siniestro: el espectro de una guerra «inmaterial» en la que los ataques son invisibles (virus, venenos, etcétera, que pueden estar en cualquier sitio y en ninguno). En el nivel de la realidad material visible, nada ocurre, no hay grandes explosiones, e igualmente el universo conocido comienza a colapsar y la vida se desintegra. Estamos entrando en una nueva era de guerra paranoide en la que la mayor tarea será la de identificar al enemigo y sus armas. Solo con esta completa «desmaterialización» es cuando la famosa tesis de Marx del Manifiesto comunista (que en el capitalismo «todo lo sólido se desvanece en el aire»), adquiere un sentido mucho más literal de lo que él pretendía. La tesis se cumple literalmente cuando nuestra realidad social material no está solo dominada por el movimiento especulativo o espectral del Capital, sino que ella misma se ve progresivamente «espectralizada» (el «Yo proteico» reemplaza al antiguo sujeto autoidéntico, la elusiva fluidez de sus experiencias reemplaza la estabilidad de los objetos que se poseen). En resumen, cuando la relación habitual entre los objetos materiales sólidos y las ideas fluidas se invierte (los objetos son
progresivamente disueltos en experiencias fluidas, mientras que las únicas cosas estables son obligaciones simbólicas virtuales), solo entonces se hace plenamente real lo que Derrida llamaba el aspecto espectral del capitalismo.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“A Woman Throwing a Stone, a lesser known painting by Picasso from his surrealist period in the 1920s, offers itself easily to a Platonist reading: the distorted fragments of a woman on a beach throwing a stone are, of course, a grotesque misrepresentation, if measured by the standard of realist reproduction; however, in their very plastic distortion, they immediately/ intuitively render the Idea of a “woman throwing a stone,” the “inner form” of such a figure. This painting makes clear the true dimension of Plato’s philosophical revolution, so radical that it was misinterpreted by Plato himself: the assertion of the gap between the spatio-temporal order of reality in its eternal movement of generation and corruption, and the “eternal” order of Ideas—the notion that empirical reality can “participate” in an eternal Idea, that an eternal Idea can shine through it, appear in it. Where Plato got it wrong is in his ontologization of Ideas (strictly homologous to Descartes’s ontologization of the cogito), as if Ideas form another, even more substantial and stable order of “true” reality. What Plato was not ready (or, rather, able) to accept was the thoroughly virtual, “immaterial” (or, rather, “insubstantial”) status of Ideas: like sense-events in Deleuze’s ontology, Ideas have no causality of their own; they are virtual entities generated by spatio-temporal material processes.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“There is a problem to be clarified here: no matter how intrusively one touches a dog or a cat, the intrusion will never be interpreted by it as an “enigmatic signifier”; which means that something, some radical change, must have already happened in a living being for it to experience something as an intrusion. It seems obvious that a violation is always a violation with regard to some presupposed norm. Should one then say that, in order for something to be experienced by the body as intrusion, a kind of primordial Ego already has to be constituted, implying a line of division between the Inside and the Outside?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“Symptoms are never just secondary failures or distortions of the basically sound System—they are indicators that there is something “rotten” (antagonistic, inconsistent) in the very heart of the System.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“if Substance is Life, is the Subject not Death? Insofar as, for Hegel, the basic feature of pre-subjective Life is the “spurious infinity” of the eternal reproduction of the life substance through the incessant movement of the generation and corruption of its elements—that is, the “spurious infinity” of a repetition without progress—the ultimate irony we encounter here is that Freud, who called this excess of death over life the “death drive,” conceived it precisely as repetition, as a compulsion to repeat.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“The root of these shifts in the meaning of big Other is that, in the subject’s relation to it, we are effectively dealing with a closed loop best rendered by Escher’s famous image of two hands drawing each other. The big Other is a virtual order which exists only through subjects “believing” in it; if, however, a subject were to suspend its belief in the big Other, the subject itself, its “reality,” would disappear. The paradox is that symbolic fiction is constitutive of reality: if we take away the fiction, we lose reality itself. This loop is what Hegel called “positing the presuppositions.” This big Other should not be reduced to an anonymous symbolic field—there are many interesting cases where an individual stands for the big Other. One should think not primarily of leader-figures who directly embody their communities (king, president, master), but rather of the more mysterious protectors of appearances—such as otherwise corrupted parents who desperately try to keep their child ignorant of their depraved lives, or, if it is a leader, then one for whom Potemkin villages are built.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“When Zeno the Cynic was confronted with Eleatic proofs of the non-existence of movement, he simply raised and moved his middle finger, or so the story goes …”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God’s grace might prove to be all too free on this side, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might some day prove to be empty!”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism