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.”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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Carlo Ginzburg proposed the notion that shame for one’s country, not love of it, may be the true mark of belonging to it.154 A supreme example of such shame occurred back in 2014 when hundreds of Holocaust survivors and descendants of survivors bought an ad in the New York Times condemning what they referred to as “the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza and the ongoing occupation and colonization of historic Palestine.”155 The statement read: “We are alarmed by the extreme, racist dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli society, which has reached a fever-pitch.” Hopefully today, more Israelis will gather the courage to feel shame apropos the politics enacted by leaders such as Netanyahu and Trump on their behalf—not, of course, shame for being Jewish but, on the contrary, shame for what Israel’s policies in the West Bank are doing to the most precious legacy of Judaism itself.”
― 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

“In the domain of cinema, the latest example of such “classism” is Nomadland (Chloe Zhao, 2020) which portrays the daily lives of our “nomadic proletarians,” workers without a permanent home who live in trailers and wander around from one temporary job to another. They are shown as decent people, full of spontaneous goodness and solidarity with each other, inhabiting their own world of small customs and rituals, enjoying their modest happiness (even the occasional work in an Amazon packaging center goes quite well . . . ). That’s how our hegemonic ideology likes to see workers—no wonder the movie was the big winner of the last Oscars. Although the lives depicted are rather miserable, we are bribed into enjoying the movie with the charming details of the workers’ specific way of life, the underlying message being: enjoy being a nomadic proletarian!”
― 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