Conversations with Žižek Quotes

“The core of our subjectivity is a void filled in by appearances.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“Life is not merely life. Life is always accompanied by a certain excess; something for which one can put at stake life itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“The problem of materialism is not 'does reality exist outside?' The problem is 'does our mind exist?' How does my mind exist and how is it inherent to reality?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“The elementary political position is one that affirms this contingency and this means that you don't have any guarantee in any norms whatsoever. You have to risk and to decide. Do not compromise your desire. You must risk the act without guarantee.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“And the moment you accept suffering as something that doesn't have a deeper meaning, it means we can change it; fight against it.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“Some social psychologists even think that there is a psychic limit, in the sense that capitalism today - and this is not such a ridiculous position as it may seem - is literally driving us crazy even in a clinical sense.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“The problem here is that the starting point for narrative pluralization is not the right to truth (as I would have put it in more Leninist terms) but the right to narrative. The ultimate ethical dimension is to construct a space in which each group/individual would have the right to narrate their fiction, their version of events. So the dimension of truth is suspended here.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“The symmetrical inversion of an ideological proposition is no less ideological.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“The elaborate bureaucracies and rituals of power were all part of this obscene economy of enjoyment. The Nazis were in this sense playing bureaucratic roles in order to enhance their pleasure. Secretly they knew that the rituals of duty were a pretence to disguise the enjoyment derived from doing something horrible - even the guilt feelings generated here served to enhance their pleasure. So it was a kind of perverted game.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“You will not arrive at the dimension of Nazi evil by doing some sort of psychological analysis or looking for some kind of innate monster. It was anonymous objectivized evil. And that is the horror of it.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“Nazism, on the contrary, is the ultimate perversion of the logic of supreme good. Nazism is not about the ultimate idiosyncratic assertion of autonomy. Nazism means that everything, even the worst crimes, should be undertaken for the good of the nation.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“We should not accept this kind of respect for the Other's ideological-religious fantasy as the ultimate horizon of ethics. The ultimate horizon of ethics is not to respect Other's illusions.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“What we need more is a certain violence against ourselves. In order to break out of an ideological, double-bind predicament, you need a kind of violent outburst. It is something shattering. Even if it is not physical violence, it is extreme symbolic violence, and we have to accept it. At this level I think that in order to really change the existing society, this will not come about in the terms of this liberal tolerance. It will explode as a more shattering experience. And this is, I think, what is needed today: this awareness that true changes are painful.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“So what we have is a total prohibition of any particular kind of identification, which means precisely that you must read the Other as an abstraction, as if they were already dead.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“It's not that fantasy is a potent abyss of seduction that threatens to swallow you but quite the opposite: that fantasy is ultimately sterile.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“What we need more is a certain violence against ourselves. In order to break out of an ideological, double-bind predicament, you need a king of violent outburst. It is something shattering. Even if it is not physical violence, it is extreme symbolic violence, and we have to accept it. At this level I think that in order to really change the existing society, this will not come about in the terms of this liberal tolerance. It will explode as a more shattering experience. And this is, I think, what is needed today: this awareness that true changes are painful.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“Tolerance means: leave me alone, I don't want to be disturbed too much by you.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“Enjoyment is beyond the pleasure principle. Whereas pleasure exists along the lines of balance and satisfaction, enjoyment is destabilizing, traumatic, and excessive - the Freudian pleasure in pain and so on.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“The paradox is that if you posit pleasure directly as a goal, then you are obliged to submit to a number of conditions - for example, fitness regimes in order to remain sexually attractive - so your immediate pleasure is again ruined.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“The point is not that there is no reality outside our mind, the point is rather that there is no mind outside reality. The distortion of reality occurs precisely because our mind is part of reality. So when Lenin claims that we can only arrive at objective reality in an endless asymptotic process of approximation, what he overlooks is that our distortions of reality occur precisely because we are part of reality and therefore do not have a neutral view of it: our perception distorts reality because the observer is part of the observed. It is this universalized perspectivism which, I think, contains a radically materialist position.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“Reality itself is the result of a certain distorting perspective.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“If I manipulate your genetic inheritance, you are not free, but once you are aware of the mere possibility of my manipulating your genes, you also already lose your freedom - why should you be more free if you are aware that it is the pure stupid natural contingency which determines what you are? The moment the prospect of biogenetic manipulation is here, freedom in the standard classical sense is lost.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“The whole dialectical point is to historicize these so-called 'eternal questions,' not in the sense of reducing them to some historical phenomenon but to introduce historicity into the absolute itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“Dialectic proper means that concrete historical struggles are at the same time struggles for the absolute itself; that each specific epoch, as it were, has its own ontology.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“There is always an ideological short circuit.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“I would say that this is also why humanitarian causes are so popular. They are not simply an expression of love for your neighbour, they are exactly the opposite. That is to say, the function of money in giving to humanitarian causes is the same as the function of money as isolated by Lacan in psychoanalysis: money means I pay you so that we don't get involved.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“This, in a way, is the big obsession of my entire work: this mutual reading of the Freudian notion of death drive with what in German idealism is rendered thematic as self-relating negativity.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“In German idealism it is absolute self-relating negativity; in psychoanalysis it is the death drive. This is at the very centre of what I am doing generally. My basic thesis is that the central feature of subjectivity in German idealism - this desubstantialized notion of subjectivity as a gap in the order of being - is consonant with the notion of the 'object small a' which, as we all know, for Lacan is a failure. It's not that we fail to encounter the object, but that the object itself is just a trace of a certain failure. What I am asserting here is that this notion of self-relating negativity, as it has been articulated from Kant to Hegel, means philosophically the same as Freud's notion of death drive - this is my fundamental perspective.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“The moment you scientifically objectivize such phenomena, this at least deeply affects the way it is symbolized.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek

“Basically, consciousness is not something which enables us to function better.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek