Heaven in Disorder Quotes

“Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that if you are attacked for the same text by both sides in a political conflict, this is one of the few reliable signs that you are on the right path.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“One often hears that today’s cultural war is fought between traditionalists who believe in a firm set of values and postmodern relativists who consider ethical rules, sexual identities, and so on as a result of contingent power games. But is this really the case? The ultimate postmodernists today are conservatives themselves. Once traditional authority loses its substantial power, it is not possible to return to it—all such returns today are a postmodern fake. Does Trump enact traditional values? No, his conservativism is a postmodern performance, a gigantic ego trip. Playing with “traditional values,” mixing references to tradition with open obscenities, Trump is the ultimate postmodern president, while Sanders is an old-fashioned moralist.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“One of Mao Zedong’s best-known sayings is: “There is great disorder under heaven; the situation is excellent.” It is easy to understand what Mao meant here: when the existing social order is disintegrating, the ensuing chaos offers revolutionary forces a great chance to act decisively and take political power.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“in today’s market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol . . . And the list goes on: virtual sex as sex without sex, the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its disturbing Otherness. Los Prisonieros add another key figure from our cultural space to this series: the decaffeinated protester. This is a protester who says (or sings) all the right things, but somehow deprives them of their critical edge. He is horrified by global warming, he fights sexism and racism, he demands radical social change, and everyone is invited to join in the big sentiment of global solidarity—but all of this only adds up to mean that he is not required to change his life (maybe just to give to charity here and there). He goes on with his career, he is ruthlessly competitive, but he is on the right side.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“in today’s market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol . . . And the list goes on: virtual sex as sex without sex, the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its disturbing Otherness.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“For this reason alone, Parasite (Korea 2019, Bong Joon-ho) is well worth seeing. What the film avoids is any moralizing idealization of the underdogs in the Frank Capra style. We should oppose here content and form: at the level of content, the upper-class Parks are without any doubt morally superior; they are considerate, sympathetic, and helpful, while the underdogs effectively act like parasites, intruding, manipulating, exploiting . . . However, at the level of form, the Parks are the privileged ones who can afford to be caring and helpful, while the underdogs are pushed by their material circumstances into not very gracious acts. The same holds for the common anti-feminist complaint made by men: “I treat women in a kind, unpatronizing way, but they are so aggressive toward me . . .”—of course they are, since for them this is often the only way to counteract their formal submission. As a rule, it is only those at the top who can afford kindness and sympathy.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“In our quest for entertainment and instant gratification, we have become detached from the real world and its problems, contributing to the erosion of social bonds and political engagement.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Apocalypse has already begun, but it seems that we still prefer to die than to allow the apocalyptic threat to scare us to death.”175 Moments of doom and resigned expectation of the end are interchanged with pseudo-courageous endurance (“we’ll somehow get through it, just don’t lose your nerve and fall into panic”).”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Apocalypse has already begun, but it seems that we still prefer to die than to allow the apocalyptic threat to scare us to death.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“it was the populist new Right which succeeded in capturing this deeper discontent with capitalist modernity.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Today’s populist Right participates in a long tradition of popular protests that were predominantly leftist.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“We have to renounce the dream or hope that, at some point, feminism, anti-racism, LGBT+ struggles, protection of minorities, worker’s struggles, freedom of expression struggles, hate-speech opponents, freedom of information efforts, etc., will join into one big Movement in which trans-feminists will march together with Muslim women, in which students who feel their intellectual freedom is constrained protest with workers whose wages don’t allow them to survive.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Byung-Chul Han is right when he points out that Covid fatigue is much greater in developed Western societies because citizens there, more than elsewhere, live under the pressure of the compulsion to achieve:”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Orwell’s point is that radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitious token that really works to achieve the opposite; i.e.,prevents the change from really occurring.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“To act on a global scale that is not focused on Europe—for instance in helping India and others with vaccines, mobilizing internationally against global warming, and organizing global health care—is the only way to be a true European today.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“before we die we are not just (obviously) alive, we have to live.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Pessimism in theory, optimism in practice.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“the centralization and verticality of power relations in the ‘party,’” in order to become an autonomous political subject, women have to invent a radical democracy.127 New horizontal, non-hierarchical relations can provide a basis for a collective awareness specific to women. “The concept and practice of ‘representation’ and delegation are absent, since the problem is not the seizure, nor the management of power.”128 Women should do away with “the promises of emancipation through work and through the struggle for power, which are considered as values of the patriarchal culture (and of the workers’ movement). The feminist movement doesn’t demand any participation in power, but, quite the opposite, a placing into discussion of the concept of power and seizure of power.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Today’s populists can only function in the indefinite postponement of achieving their goal since they can only function as opposing the “deep state” of the liberal establishment. “The new right does not, at least not at this stage, seek to establish a supreme value— for instance, the nation, or the leader—that would fully express the will of the people and thereby allow and perhaps even require the abolition of the mechanisms of representation.” What this means is that the true victims of Trump are his ordinary supporters who take seriously his babble against liberal corporate elites and big banks.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“If we want to have any future, we must not put our differences aside but do precisely the opposite. We must focus on the divisions and antagonisms which traverse US society—not the “uncivil war” between the liberal establishment and Trump followers, but the actual class antagonism and all its implications (racism, sexism, and the ecological crisis).”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Traditionally, in resisting those in power, one of the strategies of the “lower classes” has regularly been to use terrifying displays of brutality to disturb the middle-class sense of decency”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Without you I cannot live, with you I am alone”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“promises global capitalism with a human face, while behind the face the same reality will remain. In education, this “human face” assumes the form of an obsession with “well-being,” according to which students should live in bubbles that shelter them from the horrors of external reality, protected by politically correct rules. Education is no longer intended to have a sobering effect that allows us to confront social reality.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“the face is at its most basic a lie, the ultimate mask, and the analyst only accedes to the abyss of the Other by not seeing its face.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“The solution, then, is not to play the humanitarian game but rather to change the situation that demands humanitarianism in the first place. As Oscar Wilde put it in the opening lines of his “The Soul of Man under Socialism”: [People] find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim.41”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“In order to really love one’s neighbors in distress, it is not enough to generously give them the crumbs from one’s rich table; one should abolish the very circumstances which are causing their distress.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Manfred (who has chosen the West) says to his love, Rita, when they meet for the last time: “But even if our land is divided, we still share the same heaven.” Rita (who has chosen to remain in the East) bitterly replies: “No, they first divided the heaven.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“China today is becoming the model of what Henry Farrell called “networked authoritarianism.” The idea is that if a state spies on people enough and allows machine-learning systems to incorporate their behavior and respond to it, it is possible to create “a more efficient competitor that can beat democracy at its home game”—providing for everyone’s needs better than a democracy could. China is a good example of this: both its proponents and its detractors say that with machine learning and ubiquitous surveillance, China is creating a sustainable autocracy, capable of solving the “basic authoritarian dilemma”: “gathering and collating information and being sufficiently responsive to its citizens’ needs to remain stable.” But Farrell speculates that this isn’t actually what’s happening—China is actually incredibly unstable (wildcat strikes, unstoppable pro-democracy movements, concentration camps, debt bubbles, manufacturing collapse, routine kidnappings, massive corruption, etc.).”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, as an unlimited government power that protects them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the smallholding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power subordinating society to itself.166 And was it not the same in Egypt when the Arab Spring protests, with their demand for adequate political representation, overthrew the Mubarak regime and brought in democracy? But with democracy, those unrepresented went to vote and brought to power the Muslim Brotherhood, while the participants in the popular protests, mostly the educated middle-class youth, with their agenda of freedom, were marginalized.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder