Event Quotes

“Does everything that exists have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or are there things that somehow happen out of nowhere?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event: Philosophy in Transit

“as in Heinrich Heine’s (a contemporary of Kierkegaard’s) well-known saying that one should value above everything else ‘freedom, equality and crab soup’. ‘Crab soup’ stands here for all the small pleasures in the absence of which we become (mental, if not real) terrorists,”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event: Philosophy in Transit

“God’s recounting of the wonders of nature can be seen in one of two ways. One possibility is that the immensity of the natural world, in its merciless indifference, has nothing to do with the concerns of human beings. The desert does not care if you pray, and the rushing cataract will not pause for pity. Nature shows its blank, grand face to us, and we are nothing. Indeed Job recants of his protest, proclaiming ‘for I am but dust and ashes.’ … But gradually we see that each image, from the cell to the cosmos, is not only grand, it is beautiful. The second half of the quote from Job, how the morning stars sing, reminds us that the appreciation of wonder and beauty is also possible. We may lose our ego in nature’s indifference, but we may also lose it in nature’s magnificence. Do we see the world as heartless or as sublime? The drama of our life and death is fleeting, but it is played out on a stage of unparalleled wonder.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event: A Philosophical Journey Through A Concept

“For Lacan, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are the three fundamental dimensions in which a human being dwells.” – “The Imaginary dimension is our direct lived experience of reality, but also of our dreams and nightmares – the domain of appearing, of how things appear to us. The Symbolic dimension is what Lacan calls the ‘big Other’, the invisible order that structures our experience of reality, the complex network of rules and meanings which makes us see what we see the easy we see it (and what we don’t see the way we don’t see it). The Real, however, is not simply external reality; it is rather, as Lacan put it, ‘impossible’: something which can neither be directly experienced nor symbolised […] As such, the Real can only be discerned in its traces, effects or aftershocks.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“We all know the classic scene in the cartoons: the cat reaches the precipice but goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under hits fee; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“Maybe we can use this Shakespearean triad of lunacy, lover and poet as a tool to propose a classification of events based on the Lacanian train of imaginary, Symbolic and Real: a lunatic dwells in the imaginary dimension, confusing reality and imagination; a lover identifies the beloved person with the absolute Thing in a symbolic short-circuit between signifier and signified which nonetheless maintains the gap that for ever separates them (the lover knows very well that, in reality, his or her beloved is an ordinary person with all his or her failures and weaknesses); a poet makes a phenomenon emerge against the background of the void of the Real.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“It would be interesting to compare Tarkovsky’s work with the Hollywood commercial rewritings of novels which have served as bases for movies: Tarkovsky does exactly the same as the lowest Hollywood producer, re-inscribing the enigmatic encounter with Otherness, the Thing, into the framework of the production of the couple.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event: Philosophy in Transit

“Philosophy often appears to its common-sense opponents as a kind of Sigmaringen of ideas, churning out its irrelevant fictions and pretending that it offers the public insights on which the fate of humanity depends, while real life goes on somewhere else, indifferent to philosophical gigantomachias. Is philosophy really a mere theatre of shadows? A pseudo-event impotently mimicking real events? What if its power resides in its very withdrawal from direct engagement? What if, in its Sigmaringen-distance from the immediate reality of events, it can see a much more profound dimension of these same events, so that the only way to orient ourselves in the multiplicity of events is through the lens of philosophy?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“When Jesus was about to try the same shot again, the apostle told him that it was a very difficult one – only someone like Tiger Woods could do it. Jesus replied, ‘What the hell, I am the son of God, I can do what Tiger Woods can do!’ and took another swing.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“The sad lesson here is that there is no incompatibility between brutal terror and authentic poetic spirit - they can go together.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“A truth needs time to make a journey through illusions to form itself. One should put Hegel back into the series of Plato-Descartes-Hegel, corresponding to the triad of Objective-Subjective-Absolute: Plato’s Ideas are objective, Truth embodied; the Cartesian subject stands from the unconditional certainty of my subjective self-awareness. And Hegel, what does he add? If ‘subjective’ is what is relative to our subjective limitation, and if ‘objective’ is the very way things really are, what does (106>107)’absolute’ add to it? Hegel’s answer: the ‘absolute’ does not add some deeper, more substantial, dimension – it includes (subjective) illusion into (objective) truth itself. The ‘absolute’ standpoint makes us see how reality includes fiction (or fantasy), how the right choice only emerges after the wrong one.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“…the event of the shattering encounter of an idea in Plato; the emergence of a purely eventful cogito, a crack in the great chain of being, in Descartes; and the Absolute itself – the totality that encompasses everything that exists – as an eventual self-deployment, as the result of its own activity.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“[Subjectivity] is irreducible: we cannot get rid of it; it continues to haunt every attempt to overcome it.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“Things simply move too fast; before one can accustom oneself to an invention, it is already supplanted by a new one, so that one more and more lacks the most elementary ‘cognitive mapping’ needed to grasp these developments.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“…event is not something that occurs within the world, but is a change of the very frame through which we perceive the world and engage in it. Such a frame can sometimes be directly presented as a fiction which nonetheless enables us to tell the truth in an indirect way.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“At first approach, an event is the effect that seems to exceed its causes – and the space of an event is that which opens up by the gap that separates an effect from its causes.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“This is an event at its purest and most minimal: something shocking, out of joint, that appears to happen all of a sudden and interrupts the usual flow of things; something that emerges seemingly out of nowhere, without discernible causes, an appearance without solid being as its foundation.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“This brings us to the specific temporality of the symbolic event: the abrupt reversal of ‘not yet’ into ‘always-already.’ There is always a gap between formal and material change: things gradually change at the material level, and this change is subterranean, like a secret spreading of a deadly infection; when the struggle erupts into the open, the mole has already finished its work and the battle is de facto over – all one has to do is to remind those in power to look down and perceive how there is no longer any ground under their feet, and the whole edifice collapses like a house of cards.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“…the proper moment of subjective transformation occurs at the moment of declaration, not at the moment of the act. In other words, the truly New emerges through narrative, the apparently purely reproductive retelling of what happened – it is this retelling that opens up the space (the possibility) of acting in a new way.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“There are pieces of classical music which, in our culture, become so deeply associated with their later use in some product of commercial popular culture that it is almost impossible to dissociate them from this use.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“In an Event, things not only change: what changes is the very parameter by which we measure the facts of change, i.e., a turning point changes the entire field within which facts appear. This is crucial to bear in mind today when things change all the time, at an unheard-of frantic speed. However, beneath all this constant change, it is not difficult to discern a rather dull sameness, as if things change so that everything can remain the same. [... A true Event] would have been to transform the very principle of change.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“Overal ter wereld wordt geprotesteerd en komen mensen in opstand. Wat echter opvallend achterwege blijft, is een consistent links antwoord hierop. Er wordt geen poging ondernomen om deze eilandjes van chaotisch verzet om te zette in een positief programma voor sociale verandering. De woede die in vandaag de dag overal in Europa tot uitbarsting komt, is een machteloze en onbeduidende, aangezien bewustzijn en gecoördineerde acties voor de huidige samenleving geen haalbare kaart meer lijken te zijn. Nog nooit eerder hebben we te maken gehad met een situatie die zoveel gelegenheid bood voor een revolutie. En nog nooit in ons leven hebben we er zo machteloos bijgestaan. Nog nooit zijn de intellectuelen en de militanten zo stil geweest.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“De treurige les is hier dan ook dat wrede terreur en authentieke poëtische geest niet incompatibel zijn - ze laten zich uitstekend verenigen.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“De meditatieve koers van het 'westerse boeddhisme' is waarschijnlijk de effectiefste manier waarop we kunnen deelnemen aan de kapitalistische dynamiek en toch nog enigszins de indruk kunnen wekken bij ons verstand te zijn.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“Het werkelijke overspel is niet de geslachtsgemeenschap buiten het huwelijk, maar de geslachtsgemeenschap binnen het liefdeloze huwelijk; eenvoudig overspel schendt de wet van buitenaf, terwijl een liefdeloos huwelijk haar van binnenuit vernietigt en de letter van de wet zich tegen de geest van de wet keert.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“Als waanzin constitutief is, dan is elk betekenissysteem toch minstens paranoïde, waanzinnig. Denk maar eens terug aan Brechts kreet: wat is het inbreken bij een bank al, vergeleken bij het stichten van een nieuwe bank? Op een vergelijkbare manier zouden we ook kunnen stellen: wat is de simpele waanzin die het gevolg is van verlies van de rede al, vergeleken bij de waanzin van de rede zelf?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“Volgens Hegel is subjectieve kennis meer dan alleen de mogelijkheid om te kiezen tussen goed en kwaad, 'het is de overweging, het kennen, dat mensen kwaadaardig maakt, zodat het overwegen en het kennen zelf datgene zijn wat het kwaad is, en dergelijk kennen dus is wat niet zou moeten bestaan, omdat het de bron is van het kwaad.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“De Grieken raakten dus in moreel opzicht uit koers, juist omdat ze geloofden in de spontane en fundamentele rechtschapenheid van menselijke wezens en daarom de 'afwijking' in de richting van het kwaad negeerden die in de diepste kern van het menselijk wezen te vinden is: het werkelijk goede komt niet naar boven wanneer we onze natuur volgen maar wanneer we ons ertegen verzetten.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event

“the ‘magic cave’ enables us to joyously accept the End. There is nothing morbid in it; such an acceptance is, on the contrary, the necessary background of concrete social engagement.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event: Philosophy in Transit