Trouble in Paradise Quotes

“Authentic emancipatory events always involve ignoring particular identities as irrelevant.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

“Fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

“Fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

“Under this law, many government officials must ‘consent’ to being observed in the most intrusive way (phones tapped, homes bugged, emails read) for up to two full months each year, except that they won’t know which 60 days they are under surveillance. Perhaps they will imagine they are under surveillance all of the time. Perhaps that is the point. More than twenty years after Hungary left the world captured in George Orwell’s novel 1984, the surveillance state is back.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

“debt is an instrument with which to control and regulate the debtor, and, as such, it strives for its own expanded reproduction.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

“Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheard-of productivity it unleashed; it was just that he insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms”
― Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

“True fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. The passionate intensity of a fundamentalist mob bears witness to the lack of true conviction; deep in themselves, terrorist fundamentalists also lack true conviction - their violent outbursts are proof of it.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

“A Master is a vanishing mediator who gives you back to yourself, who delivers you to the abyss of your freedom: when we listen to a true leader, we discover what we want (or, rather, what we always-already wanted without knowing it). A Master is needed because we cannot accede to our freedom directly—in order to gain this access we have to be pushed from outside, since our ‘natural state’ is one of inert hedonism, of what Badiou calls the ‘human animal’.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

“All these consequences are implied in the statement that the worker is related to the product of labour as to an alien object. For on this premise it is clear that the more the worker spends himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself—his inner world—becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

“After the overthrow of an authoritarian regime, the last vestiges of patriarchal care for the poor can fall away, so that the newly gained freedom is de facto reduced to the freedom to choose the preferred form of one’s misery—the majority not only remain poor, but, to add insult to injury, they are told that, since they are now free, poverty is their own responsibility.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

“In more primitive social groups, debts to others were limited and could be discharged, while with the coming of empires and monotheisms, one’s social or divine debt becomes effectively unpayable. Christianity perfected this mechanism: its all-powerful God meant a debt that was infinite; at the same time, one’s guilt for non-payment was internalized. The only way one could possibly repay in any way was through obedience: to the will of God, to the church. Debt, with its grip on past and future behaviours and with its moral reach, was a formidable governmental tool. All that remained was for it to be secularized.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

“Slovenia may be a small marginal country, but the decision of its Constitutional Court was the symptom of a global tendency towards the limitation of democracy. The idea is that, in a complex economic situation like today’s, the majority of the people are not qualified to decide—they just want to keep their privileges intact, unaware of the catastrophic consequences which would ensue if their demands were to be met. This line of argument is not new. In a TV interview a decade ago, the theorist Ralf Dahrendorf linked the growing distrust in democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a ‘valley of tears’.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

“First —we should restrain our anti-colonialist joy here— the question to be raised is: if Europe is in gradual decay, what is replacing its hegemony? The answer is: 'capitalism with Asian values' (which, of course, has nothing to do with Asian people and everything to do with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism as such to suspend democracy). From Marx on, the truly radical Left was never simply 'progressist'. It was always obsessed by the question: what is the price of progress? Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheard-of productivity it unleashed; it was just that he insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms. And we should do the same with the progress of global capitalism today: keep in view its dark underside, which is fomenting revolts.

What all this implies is that today's conservatives are not really conservative. While fully endorsing capitalism's continuous self-revolutionizing, they just want to make it more efficient by supplementing it with some traditional institutions (religion, for instance) to constrain its destructive consequences for social life and to maintain social cohesion. Today, a true conservative is the one who fully admits the antagonisms and deadlocks of global capitalisms, the one who rejects simple progressivism, and who is attentive to the dark obverse of progress. In this sense, only a radical Leftist can be today a true conservative.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism