Sex and the Failed Absolute Quotes

“Especially important are the political implications of the idea that the new possibilities opened by a certain act are part of its content - this is the reason why, to the consternation of many of my friends (who, of course, are no longer my friends), I claimed apropos the US 2016 presidential elections that Trump's victory would be better than Clinton's for the future of progressive forces. Trump is highly dubious, of course, but his election may open possibilities and move the liberal-Left pole to a new more radical position. I was surprised to learn that David Lynch adopted the same position: in an interview in June 2018, Lynch (who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary) said that Trump 'could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much. No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way.' While Trump may not be doing a good job himself, Lynch thinks, he is opening up a space where other outsiders might. 'Our so-called leaders can't take the country forward, can't get anything done. Like children, they are. Trump has shown all this.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“a complication enters. This transcendental genesis of plurality as the filling-in of the lack of the binary signifier is supplemented by the opposite genesis in which the starting point is the plurality (series) of signifiers and the Master-Signifier appears as the reflexive signifier that fills in the gaps in the series of signifiers. Spinoza’s own supreme example of “god” is here crucial: when conceived as a mighty person, god merely embodies our ignorance of true causality.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“Trump's twisted 'greatness' is that he effectively acts - he is not afraid to break the unwritten (and written) rules to impose his decisions. As we learned (not only) from Hegel, our life is regulated by a thick web of written and unwritten rules, rules which teach us how to practice the explicit (written) rules. While Trump (more or less) sticks to explicit legal regulations, he tends to ignore the unwritten silent pacts which determine how we should practice these rules - the way he dealt with Kavanaugh was just one example of it. Instead of just blaming Trump, the Left should learn from him and do the same. When a situation demands it, we should shamelessly do the impossible and break the unwritten rules. Unfortunately, today's Left is in advance terrified of any radical acts - even when it is in power, it worries all the time:'If we do this, how will the worlds react? Will our acts cause panic?' Ultimately, this fear means: 'Will our enemies be mad and react?' In order to act in politics, one has to overcome this fear and assume the risk, make a step into the unknown.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“The circle is thus (almost) closed: humanitarian charity participates in the universe which creates victims; eco-sustainability reproduces the very ecological problems it claims to resolve; reforms of capitalism make it more efficient … The circle is ALMOST closed: it is impossible to break out of it, which means one can do it by means of a real-impossible act.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“This is the art of abstraction, of reduction to form, at its most radical, brought to the self-referential extreme:”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“The modern uneasiness, unfreedom in the very form of formal freedom, servitude in the very form of autonomy, and, more fundamentally, anxiety and perplexity caused by that very autonomy, reaches so deep into the very ontological foundations of our being that it can be expressed only in an art form which destabilizes and denaturalizes the most elementary coordinates of our sense of reality.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“The material of experience is not the material of expression.” The “material of experience” is historical data, social events; the “material of expression” is the universe depicted in Beckett’s world; and the passage from one to the other is abstraction.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“The material of experience is not the material of expression.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“the exception is the only way to universal truth.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“The “fullness of a person,” its “inner wealth,” is what Lacan calls the fantasmatic “stuff of the I,” imaginary formations which fill in the void that “is” subject.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“The superficial “playfulness” of some of Prokofiev’s works (like his popular first symphony) merely signals, in a negative way, the fact that Prokofiev is the ultimate anti-Mozart,”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“What we have here is the effect of sublime at its purest: the momentary suspension of meaning which transposes the subject into another dimension in which the prison terror has no hold over him.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“In the Soviet Union, Prokofiev was first a shill for Stalin and then his victim, but underneath, there was always the “perfect emptiness” of an “absolute” musician “who just wrote music, or rather, who wrote ‘just music.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“Wittgenstein who, at exactly the same time, entertained the idea of moving to the Soviet Union not to do his philosophical work there but to become a manual worker or a medic—the very austerity of a life was what attracted him.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“it evokes what it tries to escape from?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“the only truth is a dissonance which reflexively admits its own failure.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“speech does not simply express/articulate psychic turmoil; at a certain key point, psychic turmoil itself is a reaction to the trauma of dwelling in the “torture-house of language.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“In the light of the Freudian experience, man is a subject caught in and tortured by language.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“(the identity and meaning of a signifier depends on its difference from other signifiers, not on its resemblance to its signified).”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“it is this distance which makes the ritual authentic, not part of some ridiculous “immersion into a native culture.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“The wound is healed when it is no longer experienced as a threat, and blood is freely flowing out of it. Wound is our immortality, it is what prevents us from dying—we are not animals because of the wound. The wound is excessive life itself, “immortality” brutally inscribed into our biological body, and it is experienced as a wound only insofar as our standpoint is that of the biological body. Human life is never “just life,” it is always sustained by an excess of life which, phenomenally, appears as the paradoxical wound that makes us “undead,” that prevents us from dying: when this wound is healed, the hero can die in peace.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“refers to the wound as that which makes me immortal, condemned to eternal suffering. It’s not the wound of mortality but the wound of immortality.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“not only is Christianity (in its core disavowed by its institutional practice) the only truly consequent atheism, it is also that atheists are the only true believers.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“True arrogance is thus the very opposite of the acceptance of the hubris of subjectivity: it resides in false humility, i.e., it emerges when the subject pretends to speak and act on behalf of the Global Cosmic Order, posing as its humble instrument.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“The ultimate choice is thus: Is god the big Other, a guarantor of meaning (accessible to us or beyond our reach), or a crack of the Real that tears up the texture of reality? With regard to the topic of theology and revolution, this choice means: Is god a transcendent point of reference that legitimizes our instrumentalization (enabling us to claim that we act on his behalf), or is he the guarantor of ontological opening which, precisely, prevents such instrumentalization? In Badiou’s terms, is the reference to god in political theology sustained by the logic of purification (a nihilist destruction of all that seems to contradict the divine message), or by the logic of separation—separation which means not only our separation from god on account of which god remains impenetrable to us believers, but primarily a separation in the heart of god himself? Incarnation is the separation of god from himself, and for us humans, being abandoned by god, abandoned to the abyss of our freedom, without his protective care, is when we are one with god, the god separated from itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“This is also how we should read Hegel’s formula of reconciliation—I (the subject) should achieve reconciliation by way of “recognizing myself in my Otherness” (in the alienated substance which determines me). This formula is profoundly ambiguous: it can be read in the standard subjectivist way (I should recognize this Otherness as my own product, not as something strange) or, more subtly, as a claim that I should recognize myself, the core of my being, in this very Otherness, i.e., I should realize that the Otherness of the substantial content is constitutive of my Self: I am only insofar as I am confronted by an eluding Otherness which is decentered also with regard to itself. Ibi Rhodus ibi saltus means: overcome your alienation in the Other by way of recognizing that that Other itself does not possess what you are lacking.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“the belief in the Other (in the modern form of believing that the Other does not know) is precisely what helps to maintain the same state of things, regardless of all subjective mutations and permutations.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present, and to find delight in it, is a rational insight which implies reconciliation with reality.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute