Heaven in Disorder Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Without you I cannot live, with you I am alone”
― 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

“Yes, the January activities of the WSB participants were nihilist, but this nihilism is immanent to the stock exchange itself; it is already at work in Wall Street. To overcome this nihilism, we will have to somehow move out of the stock-exchange game. The moment of socialism is lurking in the background, waiting to be seized, as cracks appear in the very center of global capitalism. Will this happen? Almost certainly not, but what should concern us is that the WSB crisis is another unexpected threat to a system already under attack from multiple sides (the pandemic, global warming, social protests . . . ), and this threat comes from the very heart of the system, not from outside. An explosive mixture is in the making, and the longer the explosion is postponed, the more devastating it could be.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“The fact that Bernie stole the show at Biden’s inauguration, and that the image of him just sitting there instantly became an icon, indicates that the true world spirit of our time was there, in his lone figure, embodying skepticism about the fake normalization staged in the ceremony. The celebration of his image expressed that there is still hope for our cause; people are aware that radical change is needed.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Except that Trump is not crippled by narcissism and cognitive decline—these two features are at the very roots of his success. His followers’ basic stance is that of a “cognitive decline”: of denying the true impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, of global warming, of racism and sexism in the United States; of believing that if there are any serious threats to the American way of life, they must be the result of a conspiracy. Out of this decline emerged a substantial radical-Right movement, whose class base is (as in Fascism) a combination of lower middle-class white workers afraid of losing their privileges and their discreet billionaire enablers.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“A poll taken the day after the assault on the Capitol revealed that 45 percent of Republicans approve of the action and believe Trump must be imposed as president by force, while 43 percent oppose or least do not support the use of violence to achieve this end. The Far Right has thus created a base of about 30 million people, an increasing number of whom explicitly reject the principle of democracy and are ready to accept authoritarian rule. We are lucky that the object of their veneration is crippled by narcissism and cognitive decline. It is only a matter of time, however, before a new Trump emerges, less delusional and more competent; the pathway to the installation of an authoritarian regime against the will of the majority of the electorate is now well established.92”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“workers don’t protest when they live in poverty; they protest when they experience their poverty as an injustice for which the ruling class as well as the state are responsible.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Today, the situation is not one in which heaven is divided into two spheres, as was the case in the Cold War period when two global worldviews confronted each other. The divisions of heaven today appear increasingly drawn within each particular country. In the United States, for instance, there is an ideological and political civil war between the alt-Right and the liberal-democratic establishment, while in the United Kingdom there are similarly deep divisions, as were recently expressed in the opposition between Brexiteers and anti-Brexiteers . . . Spaces for common ground are ever diminishing, mirroring the ongoing enclosure of physical public space, and this is happening at a time when multiple intersecting crises mean that global solidarity and international cooperation are more needed than ever.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“This is why Lacan was deeply skeptical about the notion of distributive justice: it remains at the level of the distribution of goods and cannot deal even with a relatively simple paradox of envy - what if I prefer to get less if my neighbour gets even less than me (and this awareness that my neighbour is even more deprived gives me a surplus-enjoyment)? This is why egalitarianism itself should ever be accepted at its face value. The notion (and practice) of egalitarian justice, insofar as it is sustained by envy, relies on an inversion of the standard renunciation accomplished to benefit others: 'I am ready to renounce it, so that others will (also) not (be able to) have it!' Far from being opposed to the spirit of sacrifice, Evil here emerges as the very spirit of sacrifice - a readiness to ignore my own well-being if, through my sacrifice, I can deprive the Other of its enjoyment ...
This, however, does not work as a general argument against all projects of egalitarian emancipation but only against those which focus on redistribution.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Y”
― Slavoj Žižek, El cielo en desorden

“Así funciona la ideología en nuestra era de la posverdad. Hoy en día”
― Slavoj Žižek, El cielo en desorden

“Debemos reunir el valor necesario para ponerle nombre a los males que nos acosan.”
― Slavoj Žižek, El cielo en desorden

“Aunque Mao Zedong no comprendía realmente la dialéctica de Hegel (véase su ridícula polémica contra la negación de la negación)”
― Slavoj Žižek, El cielo en desorden