Surplus-Enjoyment Quotes

“Although not a factual necessity, madness is a formal possibility constitutive of the human mind: it is something whose threat has to be overcome if we are to emerge as “normal” subjects, which means that “normality” can only arise as the overcoming of this threat.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Crime and insanity are extremes which the human mind in general has to overcome in the course of its development.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“In a destructive explosion, we contract into ourselves by way of destroying our environment; in nirvana, we just withdraw into ourselves leaving reality the way it is. In mystical experience, we disengage from reality by immersing ourselves in divinity; in revolutionary destitution, we renounce our Self by engaging in the historical process of revolutionary change.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Beyond death there is poetry which makes death in all its meaninglessness a noble event.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the Other demands of you, the guiltier you are.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Trump is not a relic of old moral-majority conservatism, he is to a much greater degree the caricatural inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms and inner limitations”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Hysteria is a subjective stance of questioning (what do I really desire? what does my Other see or desire in me, i.e., what am I for the Other?), while a pervert knows, he is not haunted by questions. Today’s consumerist is a cynical pervert who knows—in this way, desire is neutralized, nothing happens when we achieve the object of desire, no event of a true encounter, when we love there is no FALLING in love.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“the best thing that can happen to us is not being born in the first place, then our being born is already a kind of failure,”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“our central preoccupation is to own our time, getting as much of it as possible disposable for the free development of our creative capacities in all their diversity. This, however, by definition cannot happen in capitalism where, in order to survive, we have to spend most of our time working for a wage, “losing time” for things we intrinsically don’t care about.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“The opposite of oppression is not freedom to do what one wants but depression, the loss of desire itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“a fast post-modernization: an explosion of consumerist hedonism, superficial sexual permissiveness, competitive individualism, etc. Those in power realized that such atomized social space is much more effective than direct state oppression against radical Leftist projects which rely on social solidarity: classes continue to exist “in themselves” but not “for themselves,” I see others from my class more as competitors than as members of a same group with solidary interests. Direct state oppression tends to unite opposition and promote organized forms of resistance, while in “postmodern” societies even extreme dissatisfaction assumes the form of chaotic revolts (from Occupy Wall Street to the gilets jaunes) which soon run out of steam, unable to reach the “Leninist” stage of an organized force with a clear program.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“But we still recognize each other because the mask I am wearing for others (the mask embodying what others think of me) and the mask the other is wearing for me (embodying what I think of him) are in some senses more truthful than what is behind the mask.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“What complicates things is that each of us IS also what others think/dream he/she is.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“And, maybe, erotic love itself is something the world is not waiting for, something which makes noise only for the lovers and doesn’t resonate in social reality. The illusion of love is that all reality should resonate with it—that the world returns the gaze and looks back at happy lovers; however, social reality goes on and remains grey, unaffected by the colors of love.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Sexuality is not just traversed by antagonisms, it is in itself the name of an antagonism, of a non-relationship. There is a basic discontent/unease in sexuality, and the passage from traditional patriarchal order to today’s multiple gender identities is ultimately just a passage from one to another mode of obfuscating this discontent. Traditional patriarchy elevates sexual difference into a stable natural order and attempts to obliterate its antagonistic nature by dismissing tensions as deviations from the natural order: in itself. Sexual difference is the creative tension between the two poles, masculine and feminine, which supplement each other and form a harmonious Whole; when one of the poles oversteps the boundaries of its proper role (say, when a woman behaves like an aggressive man), catastrophe occurs. Gender theory locates antagonism and violence in sexual difference as such and endeavors to create a space of identities outside this difference. What multiple gender identities exclude is not sexual difference as a stable hierarchical order but the antagonism, unease, impossibility, that define this difference. Traditional heterosexual binary order admits the potential aggressiveness and tension that pertains to sexual difference, and it tries to contain it through the ideological notion of a harmonious relationship between the two sexes. Sexual antagonism is here repressed, but it remains as a potential threat. In the space of multiple gender identities, what is repressed returns with a vengeance, all sexual perversions, all violations of heterosexual normativity, are not only permitted but even solicited. However, the paradox is that repression gets much stronger in this return of the repressed: what is much more repressed than before (in traditional heterosexuality) is the immanent antagonism of sexuality.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“To seek one’s life in a spirit of furious indifference to it—this is how subjective destitution works.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“the paradox of courage: A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.94”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“One should avoid the trap of placing them in some hierarchic order like a pseudo-Hegelian triad that seems to offer itself: in the misery of peaceful times, we have recourse to nirvana or mystical experience; when crisis arises, we explode in self-destructive violence; finally, we transform nihilism into revolutionary practice focused on a positive project …”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Will Joker not turn out to be just another proof that today’s sphere of culture and entertainment can easily integrate even the most “subversive” anti-capitalist messages and practices?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“this symbol of meaningless expenditure of labor which plays no role in the struggle for survival or for better life—not a spectacular monument to death-drive as a social category?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“the central and eastern European revolutions were just “rectifying” or “catch-up” (nachholende) revolutions, their aim being to enable those societies to gain what the western Europeans already possessed; in other words, to rejoin the West European normality.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“In Europe, the Socialism repressed in the dissident imaginary returned in the guise of Right populism.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Vanishing mediator” designates a specific feature in the process of a passage from the old order to a new order:”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Sama Naami’s”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“we are not all Jokers in reality, but the position of Joker is something the human mind in general has to overcome in the course of its development. The”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“we do not all have to be mad in reality, but madness is the reality of our psychic lives, a point to which our psychic lives necessarily refer in order to assert themselves as “normal.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Hegel for whom madness is not an accidental lapse, distortion, “illness” of human spirit, but something which is inscribed into individual spirit’s basic ontological constitution: to be a human means to be potentially mad:”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“The citizen of a developed country who wants fewer immigrants and is ready to do something so that they will not have to come to this place which they mostly don’t even like is much better than a humanitarian who preaches openness to immigrants while silently participating in the economic and political practices which brought the countries where immigrants are from to ruin.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“The Gates’ charity implies the formula: respect all cultures, your own and others. The Rightist nationalist formula is: respect your own culture and despise others which are inferior to it. The Politically Correct formula is: respect other cultures, but despise your own which is racist and colonialist (that’s why Politically Correct woke culture is always anti-Eurocentric). The correct Leftist stance is: bring out the hidden antagonisms of your own culture, link it to the antagonisms of other cultures, and then engage in a common struggle of those who fight here against the oppression and domination at work in our culture and those who do the same in other cultures.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed