Virtue and Terror Quotes

“Unless you do everything for liberty, you have done nothing. There are no two ways of being free: one must be entirely free, or become a slave once more.”
― Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror

“The people asks only for what is necessary, it only wants justice and tranquility, the rich aspire to everything, they want to invade and dominate everything. Abuses are the work and the domain of the rich, they are the scourges of the people: the interest of the people is the general interest, that of the rich is a particular interest.”
― Maximilien Robespierre, Virtue and Terror

“Happy we who live under cynical public-opinion manipulators, not under the sincere Muslim fundamentalists ready to fully commit themselves to their projects...”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“Dictatorship' does not mean the opposite of democracy, but democracy's own underlying mode of functioning - from the very beginning, the thesis on the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' involved the presupposition that it was the opposite of other form(s) of dictatorship, since the entire field of state power is that of dictatorship. When Lenin designated liberal democracy as a form of bourgeois dictatorship, he did not imply a simplistic notion about how democracy is really manipulated, a mere facade, or how some secret clique is really in power and controls things, and that, if threatened with losing power in democratic elections, it would show its true face and assume direct control. What he meant is that the very form of the bourgeois-democratic state, the sovereignty of its power in its ideologico-political presuppositions, embodies a 'bourgeois' logic.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“The state in its institutional aspect is a massive presence which cannot be accounted for in the terms of the representation of interests - the democratic illusion is that it can.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“As Lenin repeatedly puts it, it is as if, before the revolutionary agent risks the seizure of the state power, it should get permission from some figure of the big Other (organize a referendum which will ascertain that the majority supports the revolution). With Lenin, as with Lacan, the revolution ne s'autorise que d'elle-meme: one should assume the revolutionary act not covered by the big Other - the fear of taking power 'prematurely', the search for a guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“I am fully responsible not only for doing my duty, but no less for determining what my duty is.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“The very reference to duty as the excuse to do my duty should be rejected as hypocritical.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“Law does not tell me what my duty is, it merely tells me that I should accomplish my duty, and so leaves the space open for empty voluntarism (whatever I decide to be my duty is my duty). However, far from being a limitation, this very feature brings us to the core of Kantian ethical autonomy: it is not possible to derive the concrete norms I have to follow in my specific situation from the moral Law itself - which means that the subject herself has to assume responsibility of translating the abstract injunction of the moral Law into a series of concrete obligations. The full acceptance of this paradox compels us to reject any reference to duty as an excuse: 'I know this is heavy and can be painful, but what can I do, this is my duty...'

Kant's ethics of unconditional duty is often taken as justifying such an attitude - no wonder Adolf Eichmann himself referred to Kantian ethics when he tried to justify his role in planning and executing the Holocaust: he was just doing his duty and obeying the Fuhrer's orders. However, the aim of Kant's emphasis on the subject's full moral autonomy and responsibility is precisely to prevent any such manoeuvre of displacing the blame onto some figure of the big Other.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“If - accidentally - an event takes place, it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable: this, not the commonplaces on how the underlying necessity expresses itself in and through the accidental play of appearances, is in nuce the Hegelian dialectics of contingency and necessity.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“John Brown is the key political figure in the history of the U.S.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“Every authentic revolutionary has to assume this attitude of thoroughly abstracting from, despising even, the imbecilic particularity of one's immediate existence, or, as Saint-Just formulated in an unsurpassable way this indifference towards what Benjamin called 'bare life': 'I despise the dust that forms me and speaks to you.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“There are no innocent bystanders in the crucial moments of revolutionary decision, because, in such moments, innocence itself - exempting oneself from the decision, going on as if the struggle I am witnessing does not really concern me - is the highest treason.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“In his Le siecle, Alain Badiou argues that the shift from 'humanism AND terror' that occurred towards the end of the twentieth century was a sign of political regression. In 1946, Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote Humanism and Terror, his defence of Soviet Communism as involving a kind of Pascalean wager that announces the topic of what Bernard Williams later developed as the notion of 'moral luck': the present terror will be retroactively justified if the society that emerges from it proves to be truly human; today, such a conjunction of terror and humanism is properly unthinkable, the predominant liberal view replaces AND with OR: either humanism or terror.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“Robespierre was a pacifist, not out of hypocrisy or humanitarian sensitivity, but because he was well aware that war among nations as a rule serves as the means to obfuscate revolutionary struggle within each nation.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“As Saint-Just put it succinctly: 'That which produces the general good is always terrible.' These words should not be interpreted as a warning against the temptation to impose violently the general good onto a society, but, on the contrary, as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“The only alternative to the half-hearted defensive position of feeling guilty in front of our liberal or Rightist critics is: we have to do the critical job better than our opponents.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“Radicals are, on the contrary, possessed by what Alain Badiou called the 'passion of the Real': if you say A - equality, human rights and freedoms - you should not shirk from its consequences but muster the courage to say B - the terror needed to really defend and assert the A.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror

“In short, what the sensitive liberals want is a decaffeinated revolution, a revolution which doesn't smell of revolution. [They try to] deprive the French Revolution of its status as the founding event of modern democracy.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Robespierre. Virtud y terror