Slavoj Zizek

[Gilly]

A famous Slovenian philosopher. Known for political stances on Socialism and attempts at running for office in Slovenia. His teachings on French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, materialism vs idealism, and numerous other subjects have made him a "celebrity" of sorts in the European intellectual community, and his influence is beginning to bleed into mainstream American academia as he tours college campuses (mine included ).

I'm pretty sure of his type. Any thoughts?

 

Slavoj quotes:

"When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks." — Slavoj Zizek

"You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed." — Slavoj Zizek

"Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots." — Slavoj Zizek

"In contrast to the situation in 1945, the world does not need the US; it is the US that needs the rest of the world." — Slavoj Zizek

"Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do." — Slavoj Zizek

"We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom."

"As soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency."

"I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality."

"Do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not, "Main Street, not Wall Street," but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street."

"Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things — they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great."

"We're not dreamers. We're awaking from a dream turning into a nightmare. We're not destroying anything. We're watching the system destroy itself."

"Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its potential."

"I’m not a good father. There is something ridiculous in asserting my dignity which I resist automatically. My teenage son identifies with this undermining of my own authority. When he was 14, I was mad at him and used a vulgar expression in Slovenian: “Let the dog fuck your mother.” He replied: “That already happened 15 years ago. That’s how I was born."

"I’m unable to have one-night stands. In my city, Ljubljana, you can tell exactly which women I’ve slept with, because I married them."

"When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: "Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!"

"The liberal idea of tolerance is more and more a kind of intolerance. What it means is 'Leave me alone; don't harass me; I'm intolerant towards your over-proximity."

"The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire."

"If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them. ... Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures."

"In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology."