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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Drive is compulsively-repetitive, in it, we are caught in the loop of turning again and again around the same point, while desire enacts a cut; it opens up a new dimension.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“our multicultural globalized societies are societies whose spirit is tired (as Nietzsche put it), unable to engage in a large-scale passionate project which may demand from us that we even risk our lives.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“We should learn to trust science: it is only with the help of science that we can overcome our problems (caused, among other things, by science in the service of power). We should learn to trust public authority: only such an authority makes it possible to confront dangers such as pandemics and environmental catastrophes by way of imposing necessary measures. We should learn to trust the big Other, the shared space of basic values: without it, solidarity is not possible. We don’t need the freedom to be different, we need the freedom to choose how to be the same in a new way. And, perhaps most difficult, we should be ready to abandon many of the common-sense beliefs and practices that form our way of life. To be truly conservative today, to fight for what is worth saving in our traditions, means to engage in a radical change. The old conservative motto “some things have to change so that everything remains the same” has acquired a new weight today: many things will have to change radically for us to remain human.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“you are always guilty/responsible for your enjoyment, even when what brings you to enjoy is externally imposed on you.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“after the complete psychotic breakdown, the paranoiac construct is an attempt of the subject to reestablish a kind of order in his universe, a frame of reference enabling him to acquire a “cognitive mapping.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploited Germans, they seduced German girls…)—which they were not, of course—their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) a pathological phenomenon because it repressed the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. In the Nazi vision, their society was an organic Whole of harmonious collaboration, so an external intruder was needed to account for divisions and antagonisms.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“No, it was not neocons who boosted Islamic fundamentalism; this fundamentalism grew in a reaction to the influence of Western liberal secularism and individualism.”
― 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

“we should live with utmost intensity.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“The same goes for Christianity where the only way to experience unity with god is to identify with Christ suffering on the cross, i.e., with the point at which god is divided from himself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Heidegger completely misses the way the Freudian “unconscious” is grounded in the traumatic encounter of an Otherness whose intrusion precisely breaks, interrupts, the continuity of the causal link: what we get in the “unconscious” is not a complete, uninterrupted, causal link, but the repercussions, the after-shocks, of traumatic interruptions. What Freud calls “symptoms” are ways to deal with a traumatic cut, while “fantasy” is a formation destined to cover up this cut. That’s why for Heidegger a finite human being a priori cannot reach the inner peace and calm of Buddhist Enlightenment (nirvana).”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“A world is disclosed to us against the background of an ontological catastrophe: “man is the only catastrophe in the midst of beings.”
― 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

“In contrast to other modes of production, capitalism does not try to contain its structural instability, it puts to use the surplus that destabilizes other social formations: it thrives on surplus, counting it … However, sooner or later a second-level excess is produced, a surplus that cannot be included in capital’s reproduction (workers’ dissatisfaction with the system), and Rightist populism is an attempt to re-configure this excess that threatens to destabilize the smooth running of capitalist reproduction in the guise of racist enjoyment, working class resentment, anti-intellectualism…”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever comes into in his head, insulting others and violating all rules of good manners…) tells a lot about our predicament: what world do we live in in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect us from the triumph of the society in which everything is permitted and old values go down the drain—as Alenka Zupančič put it, 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

“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

“capitalism can only thrive through its own constant self-undermining and revolutionizing. The paradox is that, because we desire the surplus that eludes every object, our very orientation towards pleasure and satisfaction compels us to permanently sacrifice available satisfactions on behalf of satisfactions to come—in capitalism, hedonism and asceticism coincide.”
― 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

“if there is no god then reason itself disappears.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“permissiveness kills desire.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed