Heaven in Disorder Quotes

“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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Consumer culture has turned us into slaves to commodities, leading to a loss of authenticity and meaning in our lives.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“The radical Left should not seek to get involved in dark plots for how to take power in a moment of crisis (as the Communists were doing in the twentieth century); it should work precisely to prevent panic and confusion when the crisis arrives. One axiom should lead us: the true “utopia” is not the prospect of radical change, but the state of things as they are continuing indefinitely. The true “revolutionary” who undermines the foundations of our societies is not external terrorists or fundamentalists but the dynamics of global capitalism itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“History is not an objective development but a dialectical process in which what “really goes on” is inextricably mediated by its ideological symbolization. This is why, as Walter Benjamin repeatedly pointed out, history changes the past, i.e., it changes how this past is present today, as part of our historical memory.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“The mechanism of democratic representation is not really neutral. As Alain Badiou writes, “If democracy is a representation, it first of all represents the general system which sustains its form. In other words, the electoral democracy is only representative insofar as it is first the consensual representation of capitalism, which is today renamed ‘market economy.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Other choices offered to us (like the “great reset” advocated by big corporations) are just ways to change something so that nothing will really change.”
― 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

“the ultimate proof that the ecological apocalypse has already happened is that it has already been renormalized.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“There is a formal feature that remains the same in both versions of “the end”: the sense of an infinite dragging-on. Fukuyama’s world is one in which nothing great or new happens, life just goes on with local ameliorations (the world described decades ago by Kojeve as the world of snobbery); and the apocalypse, too, is always almost here, as we drag on in a kind of endless limbo, the end of time experienced as the impossibility of end(ing). We are used to such a situation in art (which has been dying for over a century) and philosophy (which has from Hegel onward been renouncing itself, overcoming itself). In both cases, death leads to extraordinary productivity and the proliferation of new forms, as if the truth of death is a weird immortality.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“only a thin line separates accurate perceptions of real dangers from fantasy-scenarios of the global catastrophe that awaits us.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Maybe we should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation—how to achieve the smooth functioning of the “alienated” (invisible) social mechanisms that sustain the space of “non-alienated” communities? This is what makes the welfare state so attractive: I don’t have to help the poor myself, the anonymous state apparatus does it for me, allowing me to avoid confronting the excluded and underprivileged face to face.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Today’s practices of “direct democracy,” from favelas to the “postindustrial” digital culture, have to rely on a state apparatus. Their survival relies on a thick texture of “alienated” institutional mechanisms:”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“Who will be most salient in the articulation of this discontent? Will it be left to nationalist populists to exploit it? Therein resides the big task of the Left: to translate the brewing discontent into a viable program of change.”
― 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

“the socialism repressed in the dissident imaginary returned in the guise of Right populism.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“why people also rebel in liberal democracies: they don’t rebel against freedom, they rebel against what their daily experience tells them—that networked democracy is in some sense even more oppressive than networked authoritarianism.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Heaven in Disorder

“where the chaotic popular substance brews, the well-organized subject should impose order and direction. But today we should add another spin to this formula and move from subject back to substance—to a different substance created by the subject, to a new social order in which we can dwell with trust and pursue our lives.”
― 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