Like A Thief In Broad Daylight Quotes

“There is no point in waiting for the right moment when a smooth change might be possible; this moment will never arrive, history will never provide us with such an opportunity. One has to take the risk and intervene, even if reaching the goal appears (and is, in some sense) impossible - only by doing this can one change the situation so that the impossible becomes possible, in a way that can never be predicted.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“To really change things, one should accept that nothing can really be changed within the existing system.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“If I remain totally unaware that my 'spontaneous' behaviour is steered from outside, can we really go on pretending that this has no consequences for our notion of free will?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“Either we take the threat of environmental catastrophe seriously and decide today to do things that, if the catastrophe doesn't occur, will appear ridiculous, or we do nothing and lose everything it it does happen.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“Ideology is not a conceptual frame externally imposed on the wealth of reality, it is our experience of reality itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“Jefferson was a different kind of man from Robert E. Lee, and the inconsistencies in his position just demonstrate how the American revolution is an unfinished project (as Habermas would have put it). In some sense, its true conclusion, its second act, was the Civil War; in another sense, it was over only in 1960, with the realization of the black right to vote; and in another sense, as the persistence of the Confederacy myth demonstrates, it is not yet over today.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“The lesson of the last decades is that neither massive grass-roots protests (as we have seen in Spain and Greece) nor well-organized political movements (parties with elaborated political visions) are enough - we also need a narrow, striking force of dedicated 'engineers' (hackers, whistle-blowers...) organized as a disciplined conspiratorial group. Its task will be to 'take over' the digital grid, to rip it out of the hands of the corporations and state agencies that now de facto control it.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“Trotsky thus targeted the material (technical) grid of power (railways, electricity, water supply, post, etc.), the grid without which state power hands in the void and becomes inoperative.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“The first thing to note here is how the rise of posthuman agents and the anthropocene epoch are two aspects of the same phenomenon: at exactly the time when humanity becomes the main geological factor threatening the entire balance of the life of Earth, it begins to lose its basic features and transforms itself into posthumanity.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“The function of philosophy is to corrupt the youth, to alienate (or, rather, 'extraneate' in the sense of Brecht's verfremden) them from the predominant ideologico-political order, to sow radical doubts and enable them to think autonomously.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“[I]n contrast to identity politics, which focuses on how each (ethnic, religious, sexual) group should be able fully to assert its particular identity, the much more difficult and radical task is to enable each group to access full universality. This access to universality does not mean a recognition that one is also part of the universal human genus, or the assertion some ideological values that are considered universal. Rather, it means recognizing one's own universality, the way it is at work in the fractures of one's particular identity, as the 'work of the negative' that undermines every such identity.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“there was a department of the secret police whose function was not to collect but to invent and circulate political jokes against the regime and its representatives, as they were aware of jokes’ positive stabilizing function:”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“Although Immanuel Kant's views are racist, he nonetheless contributed to the process which led to contemporary emancipatory struggles - to put it bluntly, there is no Marxism and no socialism without Kant.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“The confused reaction to the arrival of refugees failed to take into account the basic difference between immigrants and refugees: immigrants come to Europe in search for work, to meet demand for a workforce in developed European countries, while refugees don't primarily come to work but simply to look for a safe place to survive - they often don't even like the new country in which they find themselves.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“Something similar often happens, and happened, in (mostly Leftist) politics. I am not sure what position I should take in a particular political struggle, but when I learn the position of my enemy, I automatically assume the opposite one. One should add that Lenin provided a scathing critique of this stance (ironically, his target was Rosa Luxemburg).”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“Public mention of the use of nuclear weapons should be treated as a criminal offence, and leaders who openly display their readiness to imperil millions of innocent lives in order to protect their own power should be treated as the worst criminals.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“The threat of the total destruction of humanity makes us aware of the totality of humanity - humanity appears as one entity only against the background of its (self-)destruction, it was not visible as such before.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“A new feminine figure is thus emerging: a cold, competitive agent of power, seductive and manipulative, attesting to the paradox that 'in the conditions of capitalism women can do better than men' (Badiou): contemporary capitalism has invented its own ideal image of woman.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“Class struggle is less and less directly transposed into the struggle between political parties, and increasingly takes place within each big political party. In the US, class struggle cuts across the Republican Party (the Party establishment versus Bannon-like populists) and across the Democratic Party (the Clinton wing versus the Sanders movement).”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“When Sanders emphasizes economic problems, he is accused of 'vulgar' class reductionism, while nobody is bothered when leaders of big corporations support LGBT+.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“The obscenity of the situation is breathtaking: global capitalism is now presenting itself as the last protection against fascism; and if you try to point out some of Macron's serious limitations you are accused of - yes, of complicity with fascism, since, as we are told repeatedly by the big (and not so big) media, the extreme Left and extreme Right are not coming together; both are anti-Semitic, nationalist-isolationist, anti-globalist, etc. This is the point of the whole operation: to make the Left - which means any true alternative - disappear.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“Alienation points toward the 'performative' character of democratic choice: people do not vote for what they want (they know that in advance) - it is through such choice that they discover what they want. A true leader does not just follow the wishes of the majority; she or he makes the people aware of what they want. This is why democracy retains its meaning even if the choice it gives is between very similar programmes - such empty choice makes it clear that there is no predestined bearer of power.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“The basic problem is this: how to move beyond multi-party democracy without falling into the trap of direct democracy? In other words: how to invent a different mode of passivity of the majority, how to cope with the unavoidable alienation of political life?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“Concrete universality' means that there is no abstract universality of rules, there are no 'typical' situations, all we are dealing with is exceptions; however, a concrete totality is the totality that regulates the concrete context of exceptions.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“There is no point in waiting for the right moment when a smooth change might be possible; this moment will never arrive, history will never provide us with such an opportunity. One has to take the risk and intervene, even if reaching the goal appears (and is, in some sense) impossible.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“El problema es que hoy en día la simple oposición se complica: nuestra realidad global-capitalista, impregnada como está de la ciencias, ya nos «incita a pensar», pues desafía nuestros supuestos más íntimos de una manera mucho más violenta que especulaciones filosóficas más descabelladas, con lo que la tarea del filósofo ya no es socavar el edificio simbólico jerárquico que sustenta la estabilidad social, sino -regresando a Badiou- conseguir que los jóvenes perciban los peligros del creciente orden nihilista que se presenta como el dominio de las nuevas libertades. Vivimos una época extraordinaria en la que no existe ninguna tradición en la que podamos basar nuestra identidad, ningún marco de universo significativo que nos permita llevar una vida que vaya más allá de la reproducción hedonista. El nihilismo actual -el reino del oportunismo cínico acompañado de una permanente ansiedad- se legitima como la liberación de las viejas represiones: disponemos de libertad para reivindicar constantemente nuestra identidad sexual, para cambiar no solo de trabajo o de trayectoria profesional, sino incluso nuestros rasgos subjetivos más íntimos, como nuestra orientación sexual. Sin embargo, el alcance de estas libertades queda estrictamente prescrito tanto por las coordinadas del sistema existente como por la manera en que funciona de hecho la libertad consumista: la posibilidad de escoger y consumir se convierte de manera imperceptible en una obligación de elegir del superego. La dimensión nihilista de este espacio de libertades sólo puede funcionar de una manera permanentemente acelerada: en cuanto frena, somos conscientes de la falta de sentido de todo el movimiento”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“La verdadera vida, de Alain Badiou, se abre con la provocativa afirmación de que, de Sócrates en adelante, la función de la filosofía consiste en corromper a la juventud, en alienarla (o mejor dicho, en «extrañarla» en el sentido de verfremden de Brecht) del orden ideológico-político imperante, a fin de sembrar dudas radicales y permitirle pensar de manera autónoma. Los jóvenes se someten al proceso educativo con la finalidades de quedar integrados en el orden social hegemónico, motivo por el cual la educación juega un papel fundamental en la reproducción de una ideología dominante. No es de extrañar que Sócrates, el «primer filósofo», fuera también su primera víctima y tuviera que ingerir veneno de su propia mano por orden del tribunal democrático de Atenas. ¿Y acaso esta incitación a pensar no es sinónimo del mal, entendiendo por mal la alteración del modo de vida establecido?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“The secret of identity politics is that, in it, a white/male/hetero position remains a universal standard, everyone understands it and knows what it means, which is why it is the blind spot of identity politics, the one identity that is prohibited to assert.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“Value production can only thrive if it incorporates its inherent negation, the creative work that generates no market value; it is by definition parasitic on it. So instead of commodifying exceptions and including them in the process of valorization, one should leave them outside and destroy the frame that makes their status inferior. The problem with fictitious capital is not that it is outside valorization but that it remains parasitic on the fiction of a valorization to come.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“But the price of this improvement has been the desertification of daily life, the hyper-acceleration of rhythms, the extreme individualization of biographies, and work precariousness which also means unbridled competition . .”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism