Sex and the Failed Absolute Quotes

“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

“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

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

“the exception is the only way to universal truth.”
― 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

“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

“Language never “fits” reality, it is the mark of a radical imbalance which forever prevents the subject from locating itself within reality.12”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“humanity is “reconciled” with nature when it realizes that its own antagonisms, its own estrangement from nature and its processes, are “natural,” that they continue in a higher potency the antagonisms and imbalances that define nature itself—in short, man is united with nature precisely in what appears as its estrangement from nature, its disturbance of natural order.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“our disengagement which enables us to perceive reality as it were viewed from outside.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“insofar as objet a is the object of fantasy, sexual attraction is regulated by fantasies and true love is a form of traversing the fantasy …”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“heterosexual norm(ality) itself is also to be treated as a symptom, as a desperate attempt to enable a human being to find some kind of balance in the contradictory mess of its sexuality.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“before modernity, it was melancholy (resisting the proper pursuit of Good); with capitalism, it was reinterpreted as simple laziness (resisting the work ethic); today, in our “post-” society, it is depression (resisting enjoyment of life, to be happy in consumption).”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“Sloth is not the simple (anti)capitalist laziness, but a desperate “illness towards death,” the attitude of knowing one’s eternal duty but avoiding it; acedia is thus the tristitia mortifera, not simple laziness, but desperate resignation—I want the object, not the way to reach it, so I resign to the gap between the desire and its object. In this precise sense, acedia is the opposite of Zeal.1 What acedia ultimately betrays is thus desire itself—acedia is unethical in Lacan’s sense of a compromise on desire, of céder sur son désir.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“the Unconscious is the inaccessible phenomenon, not the objective mechanism that regulates my phenomenal experience.”
― 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

“consciousness is searching for some hidden substantial essence behind the veil of appearances, and it passes to self-consciousness when it realizes that there is nothing behind the veil of appearances, nothing except what the subject itself puts there.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“Yes, I can “see” the difference, but what I see is mediated by my symbolic universe.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“the Other’s mystery is the mystery for the Other itself, our failure to grasp the Other echoes the Other’s failure to grasp itself. The universality that unites us with the Other does not reside in some shared positive features but in the failure itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“it is the ordinary reality that is hard, inert, stupidly there, and it is the Absolute that is thoroughly fragile and fleeting.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“Truth is not balanced and objective, it is subjective, “one-sided.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute

“In the domain of telling stories, a gesture homologous to translation would be a change in the plot of the original narrative which makes us think 'it is only now that we really understand what the story is about.' This is how we should approach numerous recent attempts to stage some classical opera by not only transposing its action into a different (most often contemporary) era, but also by changing some basic facts of the narrative itself. There is no a priori abstract criterion which would allow us to judge its success of failure: each such intervention is a risky act and must be judged by its own immanent standards. Such experiments often ridiculously misfire - however, not always, and there is no way to tell in advance, so one has to take the risk. Only one thing is certain: the only way to be faithful to a classic work is to take such as risk - avoiding it, sticking to the the traditional letter, is the safest way to betray the spirit of the classic. In other words, the only way to keep a classical work alive is to treat it as 'open', pointing towards the future, or, to use the metaphor evoked by Walter Benjamin, to act as if the classic work is a film for which the appropriate chemical liquid to develop was invented only later, so that it is only today that we can get the full picture. In both these cases, that of translation and that of (re)telling stories, the result is thus the same: instead of the original and its translation (or re-telling), both versions are conceived as fragmentary variations of an impossible Idea which can only be discerned by way of bringing out all its variations.”
― 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

“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 “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