Against the Double Blackmail Quotes

“In short, the truly courageous stance is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is most probably the headlight of a train approaching us from the opposite direction.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours

“The primary vice of a bad person is precisely that he is more preoccupied with others than himself. Rousseau is describing a precise libidinal mechanism: the inversion which generates the shift of the libidinal investment from the object to the obstacle itself. This could well be applied to fundamentalist violence - be it Oklahoma City Federal Building, the Twin Towers - was what really mattered, not achieving the noble goal of a truly Christian or Muslim society.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours

“Poverty does not simply mean to have little or no money; it is not reducible to the description of one's miserable circumstances”
― Slavoj Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours

“Universality is a universality of 'strangers', of individuals reduces to the abyss of impenetrability in relation not only to others but also to themselves. [...] That's why the privileged way to reach a Neighbor is not that of empathy, of trying to understand them, but a disrespectful laughter which makes fun of them and us in our mutual lack of (self-)understanding (inclusive of 'racist' jokes)”
― Slavoj Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours

“Here was a tangible example of the inevitable exclusivity of globalization, as the construction and expansion of a world interior whose invisible boundaries are nevertheless virtually insurmountable from without, and which, now, is inhabited by the one and a half billion ‘winners’ of globalization; three times this number are left standing outside the door.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours

“The Leftist counterpoint to this confusion is an idea circulating in the underground of many disappointed radical Leftists, a softer repetition of the decision for terror in the aftermath of the 1968 movement: the crazy idea that only a radical catastrophe (preferably an ecological one) can awaken the large crowds and in doing so give a new impetus to radical emancipation.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours

“Universality is a universality of ‘strangers’, of individuals reduced to the abyss of impenetrability in relation not only to others but also to themselves.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours

“Badiou makes it clear that what the media call the 'radicalization of Muslims is Fascistization pure and simple:

"this Fascism is the obverse of the frustrated desire for the West which is organized in a more or less military way following the flexible model of a mafia gang and with variable ideological colorizations where the place occupied by religion is purely formal.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours