Surplus-Enjoyment Quotes

“this impossibility of the big Other to integrate me IS myself”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“in the case of a subject, its existence is correlated to being-thought, but being-thought incompletely.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“as an inconsistent, non-All, symbolic structure articulated around a constitutive void/impossibility.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“reality is not simply external to thought/speech, to the symbolic space. Reality thwarts this space from within, making it incomplete and inconsistent—the limit that separates the real from the symbolic is simultaneously external and internal to the symbolic.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“The psychoanalytic notion of symptom designates such a reality which subsists only insofar as something remains unsaid, insofar as its truth is not articulated in the symbolic order”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“such a reality which subsists only insofar as something remains unsaid, insofar as its truth is not articulated in the symbolic order”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“one sacrifices oneself to prevent the Other from knowing.”
― 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

“what if existence as such implies a certain non-knowledge? This paradoxical relation between being and knowing introduces a third term in the standard opposition between ordinary materialism for which things exist independently of our knowledge of them, and subjectivist idealism with its esse = percipi (things exist only insofar as they are known or perceived by a mind): things that only exist insofar as they are NOT known.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“the authentic position is that of a changeling who becomes aware that it only materializes another’s fantasy, that it only exists insofar as an another fantasizes about it. Can one imagine a more anxiety-provoking existential situation than that of being aware that my being has no substantial support, that I exist only insofar as I am part of another’s dream—as Deleuze wrote decades ago, if you are caught in another’s dream, you are fucked.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“the gap between me and my symbolic identity is not external to me—this means that I am symbolically castrated.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“the paradox is that the more the woman is denigrated, reduced to an inconsistent and insubstantial composite of semblances around a Void, the more she threatens the firm male substantial self-identity (Otto Weininger’s entire work centers on this paradox); and, on the other hand, the more the woman is a firm, self-enclosed Substance, the more she supports male identity.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“for Lacan, there is an ultimate antagonism between Woman and Mother: in contrast to woman who “n’existe pas,” mother definitely does exist.)”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“the woman who takes refuge from the void in the very heart of her subjectivity, from the “not-having-it” which marks her being, in the phony certitude of “having it” (of serving as the stable support of family life, of rearing children, her true possession, etc.)”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Solaris is a machine that generates/materializes in reality itself my ultimate fantasmatic objectal supplement/partner that I would never be ready to accept in reality, although my entire psychic life turns around it.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“the traumatic Real, the point at which symbolic distance collapses, the point at which there is no need for speech, for signs, since, in it, thought directly intervenes in the Real?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“as Lacan insists, “there is no big Other,” which means not only that the big Other is virtual, with no substantial reality of its own, but that it is in itself inconsistent/incomplete, perforated by gaps. These gaps are filled by another version of the big Other: a fantasmatic apparition of the big Other as a real Thing in the guise of the so-called Id-machine, a mechanism that directly materializes our unacknowledged fantasies”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“The big Other is as such a purely virtual identity: it doesn’t contain any deeper truth of mine, its truth is its form itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“This form, which contains its own truth prior to and independent of the content transmitted by it, is what Lacan called the “big Other”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“they are both located beyond the pleasure principle and its supplement, the reality principle, i.e., neither can be accounted for in terms of a pursuit of political or social goals of power and domination.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“everything is not sexual(ized), there is a space for a-sexual universal causes—where we should read “asexual” with Lacan: what stands outside the sexual domain is a, the object-cause of desire that sustains our cause.”
― 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

“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

“our disengagement from reality”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“seeing a revolution just as a series of actual events, without taking note of the sublime Idea that sustains it (or, as Badiou would have put it, of its dimension of an Event), means this revolution becomes just a “noisy crime” that destroys another crime:”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Later, revolutionaries should become pragmatic, of course, but they have to begin with crazy simple acts.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“that agony is our triumph.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“the passage through the zero-point counts as the new beginning only if the subject effectively assumes its excremental status—the triumph takes place later as a kind of “collateral damage.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“It is meaningless to deplore the fact that revolutionaries were not pragmatic enough—this, precisely, was the point of their acts once they took over, namely to violate the existing “pragmatic rules.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Am I made man in the hour when I cease to be?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed