Incontinence of the Void Quotes

“Perhaps, however, we should turn the big question around: why is there (also) nothing and not (just) something? More precisely: how could nothing arise out of something? Insofar as “something” stands for the brute Real, and “nothing” for negativity at the core of subject, the negativity proper to the symbolic order (as Lacan repeats again and again, negativity is introduced into the Real only through the rise of the symbolic order), the question is thus, in Hegelese: how can subject arise out of substance? Here we encounter the first paradox: while subject arises through the symbolization of the Real (subject is by definition subject of the signifier), it is strictly correlative to the failure of symbolization: subject’s objectal counterpart is a remainder of the Real that resists symbolization. In other words, complete symbolization would have realized a structure without subject, a structure that would no longer be symbolic. The key to this paradox is that symbolization is as such, in its very notion, incomplete, non-all, failed; it is a structure of its own failure. And here things get really interesting.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels

“The true art of politics is thus not to avoid mistakes and to make the right choice, but to make the right mistake, to select the right (appropriate) wrong choice.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels

“The paradox is that, although (human) subjectivity is obviously not the origin of all reality, although it is a contingent local event in the universe, the path to universal truth does not lead through abstraction from it…to some “gray” objective structure—such a vision of a “subjectless” world is by definition just a negative image of subjectivity itself, its own vision of the world in its absence. Since we are subjects, constrained to the horizon of subjectivity, we should instead focus on what the fact of subjectivity implies for the universe and its structure: the event of the subject derails the balance, it throws the world out of joint, but such a derailment is the universal truth of the world. And, insofar as the subject is in its very core sexed, the only access to the Real for us is through the impasse of sexuation—through the impasses of sexuation, which have nothing whatsoever to do with traditional sexualized cosmologies (the universe as the eternal struggle between masculine and feminine principles). What this also implies is that the access to “reality in itself” does not demand from us that we overcome our “partiality” and arrive at a neutral vision elevated above our particular struggles—we are “universal beings” only in our full partial engagements. This contrast is clearly discernible in the case of love: against the Buddhist love of All, or any other notion of harmony with the cosmos, we should assert the radically exclusive love for the singular One, a love which throws out of joint the smooth flow of our lives.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels