Surplus-Enjoyment Quotes

“since there is no unchangeable human nature, our very intimate fear of death is already politically overdetermined, for it arises in an individualist and egotistical society with little sense of communal solidarity;”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Ancient past: Buddhist revolutionary self.40 The void (of destitution) “as the ‘path,’ the rupture/opening to a ‘new world’ can be found in the Buddha’s nibbana. Nibbana is often known as Awakening or Enlightenment, but actually nibbana is, in the first instance, extinction, the blowing out, the vanishing” (14).”
― 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 state of exception (if this term still applies) in the case of this ‘novel’ virus is not the exercise of power over life as bare life but, on the contrary, an extreme (exceptional) self-defensive measure and immune reaction by the political body to an invading life form that is not even properly alive.”27”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“The state of exception (if this term still applies) in the case of this ‘novel’ virus is not the exercise of power over life as bare life but, on the contrary, an extreme (exceptional) self-defensive measure and immune reaction by the political body to an invading life form that is not even properly alive.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“one of falling further and further into a state of ruin but, crucially, having to keep on living—this is death-drive at its purest, not death itself but the fact that we have to LIVE till we die, this endless dragging of life, this endless compulsion to repeat.”
― 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

“we have to draw the only consequent conclusion: every image or construction of “objective reality,” of the way it is in itself, “independently of us,” is one of the ways being is disclosed to us, and is as such already in some basic sense “anthropocentric,” grounded in (and at the same time obfuscating) the catastrophe that constitutes us.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“The paradox is that what unites us with the Real “in itself” is the very gap that we experience as our separation from it.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“if we assume the impossible point of view of looking at the universe from a safe distance, we see a universal texture of beings just not deranged by catastrophes (since man is a catastrophe only from his own standpoint, as the exception that grounds his access to beings)? In this case, we are back at the Kantian position: reality “in itself,” outside the Clearing within which it appears to us, is unknowable, we can only speculate about it the way Heidegger himself does when he plays with the idea that there is a kind of ontological pain in nature itself. Or should we take Heidegger’s speculation seriously, so that the catastrophe is not only man but already nature in itself, and in man as the being-of-speech this catastrophe that grounds reality in itself only comes to word?”
― 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

“if the disclosure of the entire domain of entities is rooted in a singular entity, then something “deranged” is taking place: a particular entity is the exclusive site at which all entities appear, acquire their Being”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“because man, rooted in his body, cannot look at entities from outside, every disclosure of Being, every Clearance, has to be grounded in untruth (concealment/hiddenness). The ultimate cause of the de-rangement that pertains to Da-Sein thus resides in the fact that Dasein is by definition embodied,”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“what has to be constitutively excluded (primordially repressed) from our notion of reality? In short, what if the transcendental dimension is the “return of the repressed” of our notion of reality?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“with the new disclosure of being that characterizes modernity, the very criteria of what is “true” or “false” changed”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“however, the circle of including ourselves in reality cannot ever be fully closed since every explanation of our place in reality already relies on a certain horizon of meaning”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“when our process of thinking can directly interact with a digital machine, it effectively becomes an object in reality; it is no longer “our” inner thought as opposed to external reality.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“our self-perception as free and responsible agents is not just a necessary illusion, but the transcendental a priori of every scientific knowledge.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“how we in our actual lives accept something as really existing. “Transcendental” is the philosopher’s technical term for such a frame which defines the coordinates of reality;”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Transcendental” is the philosopher’s technical term for such a frame which defines the coordinates of reality;”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Evan’s mistake is that he focuses his life on happiness, on how to avoid suffering—he sacrifices even his love only so that he and others will not suffer. However, to use Badiou’s terms, happiness is a category of the “human animal,” of our ordinary life whose horizons are pleasure and satisfaction in all their guises, perverted as they are—this life is effectively just a postponed suicidal despair. If we are to overcome this despair, we have to enter another dimension of existence, what Badiou calls the Event in its four modes: science (philosophy included), art, politics (including politicized economy), and love. To live in fidelity to an Event does not entail happiness but a life of struggle, of risks and tensions, of the creative engagement for a Cause which surpasses our existence.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“In the heterosexual masculine case, the division is external, it is penis versus vagina, while in the feminine case it is internal, it is vaginal hole versus clitoris. Here we can see clearly how “woman” stands for choosing while “man” stands for an accomplished choice (of phallus). Or, at a more abstract ontological level, “woman” stands for abyssal freedom while “man” stands for Predestination.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“sexual difference is ultimately the one between becoming and being, and this is how one can also read Lacan’s claim that the woman doesn’t exist: man exists, woman is becoming. Which also means: man is object, woman is subject.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“sexual difference is ultimately the one between becoming and being,”
― 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

“this awareness of our utter impotence is the act of freedom, it changes everything. It is because of our freedom that the experience of our impotence drives us to despair: without freedom, we would simply accept that we are an unfree cog in the divine machinery.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Lazzarato’s notion of “indebted man” provides a general structure of such subjectivity for which the superego-pressure of being indebted is constitutive—to paraphrase Descartes, I am in debt, therefore I exist as a subject integrated into the social order.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“freedom” IS today, as Ruda puts it, a term of disorientation, a term which, instead of enabling us to draw the line of crucial distinction, blurs this line.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed