Surplus-Enjoyment Quotes

“in contrast to all of us, Oedipus is the only one without an Oedipus complex. In the usual Oedipal scenario, we compromise our desire by submitting ourselves to the symbolic Law, renouncing the true (incestuous) object of desire. Oedipus at Colonus, on the contrary, remains stubborn to the end, fully faithful to his desire, il n’a pas cede sur son desir: Paradoxically, Oedipus at Colonus is a subject at ease with himself: he is not a wise old man who learns the vanity of desire, he only here accedes to it fully.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“in contrast to all of us, Oedipus is the only one without an Oedipus complex. In the usual Oedipal scenario, we compromise our desire by submitting ourselves to the symbolic Law, renouncing the true (incestuous) object of desire. Oedipus at Colonus, on the contrary, remains stubborn to the end, fully faithful to his desire,”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“philosophy explores this relation between seen and unseen/excluded of a field (for example, it shows what modern science has to ignore in order to see what it sees).”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“the Real has no substantial reality in itself since it is an immanent self-impediment of the Symbolic itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“In Hegelian terms, this means that we are dealing with two In-itself: the way things are really (independently of us) in itself, and the way they appear to us to be in-itself—every appearance implies (or, rather, creates) its own in-itself, it conceals-and-indicates a dimension of substantial reality behind its veil, and, for Hegel, we pass from substance to subject when we realize that there is nothing behind the veil, just what we (the observing subjects) put (or, rather, projected) there. “Object-oriented-ontology” ignores this duality, it identifies these two in-itself; its “transcendence” (reality in itself) is therefore immanent, transcendentally constituted, i.e., what it conceives as the In-itself is subjectively constituted, it emerges within a given horizon of meaning.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“This is how mystery functions in a symbolic space: there is no mystery behind the veil, the only “mystery” to be explained is how to convincingly paint a veil that creates the illusion of a content hidden behind.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“We do something much more radical: the “impossibility” disappears because the entire field in which it operated is no longer here.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“From this perspective, a new answer offers itself to the basic metaphysical question: why is there something instead of nothing? There is something only insofar as the universe is unbalanced, out-of-joint … in short: queer.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“pushed us into evil so that we would discover our freedom. There is no freedom without evil since, as Hegel knew very well, to be able to choose between good and evil one already has to be in evil.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“the true regulating power of the law does not reside in its direct prohibitions, in the division of our acts into permitted and prohibited, but in regulating the very violations of prohibitions: the law silently accepts that the basic prohibitions are violated (or even discreetly solicits us to violate them), and then, once we find ourselves in this position of guilt, it tells us how to reconcile the violation with the law by way of violating the prohibition in a regulated way … The whole point of law is to regulate its violations: without violations, there would be no need for the law.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“what appears as “norm” is the ultimate self-sublated perversion. We encounter here what Hegel called “absolute recoil”: as deviations from the Norm, perversions presuppose the norm, the pleasure they generate resides in the transgression of the Norm; however, this Norm itself arises through deviations, as the ultimate deviation. In other words, the very process of deviation retroactively constructs what it deviates from, or, as Hegel would have put it, perversion is an act which posits its own presupposition, it is an effect which retroactively posits its cause.37”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“The usual view is that of a balanced universe which is temporarily derailed by some excess, but then balance is reestablished when the excess is brought back to measure. From a queer viewpoint, the excess is constitutive of reality, so that the abolition of the excess entails the abolition of the very balanced state with regard to which excess is excess.”
― 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

“The true “tyranny” is today the tyranny of permanent re-discovery of new identities, so that it is a passionate love link which is the true transgression,”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“But love is something else: love is in its very notion exclusive. When I am really in love, the limitation to One (the beloved) is experienced as its opposite—as a true liberation. When I fall in love, it is not because the beloved is the one who best satisfies my needs—the fall into love redefines who I am, it redefines my needs and potentials. In this sense, love is beyond transferential repetition:”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“But what I want to argue for here is something more radical: the notion of an individual that wishes to realize its potentials ultimately excludes LOVE—the true target of the polemics against the tyranny of coupledom is simply love in its radical character.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Lukacs: Marxism is “universally true” not in spite of its partiality but because it is “partial,” accessible only from a particular subjective position”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“We see now clearly that Hegel is not a historicist relativist just describing different truth-discourses: there is a crucial difference between Hegel and a historicist relativist like Michel Foucault. For Hegel, each discourse implies its own notion of truth, but each discourse is inconsistent, caught in immanent antagonisms, and the dialectical movement deploys how, through its immanent “contradictions,” a discourse passes into another discourse. For Foucault, however, different discourses just co-exist in mutual indifference. Foucault’s notion of truth can be summed up in the claim that truth/untruth is not a direct property of our statements but that, in different historical conditions, different discourses each produce their own specific truth-effect, i.e., they imply their own criteria of what values are “true”:”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“This is why we shouldn’t dismiss as ridiculous Fukuyama’s talk about the end of history in 1990: after the victory of global capitalism, the sense of history changed. And, in some properly metaphysical sense, our total immersion in the global digital network which makes our entire tradition instantly accessible, signals the end of historical experience as we knew it. We already “feel” how, in some sense, cyberspace is “more real”—more real than external physical reality: it is a complex version of the Platonic realm of Ideas where all that has happened and that happens now is inscribed into an atemporal synchronous order. In our physical reality that we relate to through our senses, things always change, everything is set to disappear, reality comes to fully exist only when it is registered in cyberspace.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Hegel is a radical historicist: for him, with every historical epoch, the universal notion of history also changes. Such an approach thus allows for no exception to historicity and is for this reason “non-all”: there is no single universal notion of historicity since this notion is itself caught in the process of historical change. Historicism is not radical enough because it does not take into account how each historical break is not simply a break within history but changes the very notion of history.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Or, to put it in more conventional terms, is the very idea of a substantial Woman that eludes the masculine symbolic grasp not part and parcel of masculine ideology?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“The “real” is here not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of some social antagonism which distorts the tribe members’ view of the actual arrangement of the houses in their village.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“true infinity is not a transcendent outside with regard to the finite, it is nothing but the immanent self-mediation/self-mediation of the finite itself.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“can differentiate between the real of psychic space and the external real, their difference is the basic feature of “structural dialectics”:”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Lacan’s refusal to ontologize the Unconscious into a substantial base of the subject’s psychic life. Here we encounter a “proof by impotence” at its most trenchant: the inaccessibility of the Unconscious is not just a sign of our epistemological limitation, of our inability to reach another site where the Unconscious “fully exists”—the Unconscious “in itself” does not fully exist, since it dwells in the domain of neither-being-nor-not-being.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“in a second approach, one should merely talk not of how this radical antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the Thing ALREADY IS THE THING ITSELF—the fundamental feature of today’s society IS the irreconciliable antagonism between Totality and the individual. What this means is that, ultimately, the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, non-substantial: it has no substantial density in itself; it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other. The parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as that which “always returns at its place,” i.e., as that which remains the same in all possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is rather that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real—it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“we only touch the real through the failure of our attempts to grasp it,”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Hegelian motif of the problem/deadlock as its own solution.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“Out of fear of regressing into a naïve realism of a presupposed external reality that our symbolic frame cannot ever fully capture, Lacan thus proposes his own version of Wittgenstein’s motto “the limits of our language are the limits of our reality”: the fact that our symbolic space circulates around an elusive point impossible to grasp should not be reduced merely to a sign of our cognitive limitation, this impossibility must also hold for reality itself. The real is not just impossible for us to grasp, it is impossible in itself, it fully coincides in its own impossibility,”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed

“The logic of the signifier, the ultimate frame of our access to reality, is, of course, not a homogeneous logical frame, it is self-reflectively twisted, thwarted, structured around its immanent impossibility; however, since it provides a kind of transcendental frame to our access to reality, what eludes it cannot be conceptualized in itself as another reality but can only appear as a limit-phenomenon, an elusive virtual point of reference ultimately defined only by our failure to reach it.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed