Slavoj Žižek
What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?Collection: What If
We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.Collection: Language
If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.Collection: If You Love Someone
The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.Collection: Pseudo
Think about the strangeness of today's situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is, that it's much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.Collection: Thinking
Humanity is OK, but 99% of people are boring idiots.Collection: People
Thinking begins when you ask really difficult questions.Collection: Thinking
Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.Collection: Matter
Often, the worst way to become prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. Because it is precisely this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system.Collection: Dream
Love is what makes sex more than masturbation. If there is no love even if you are really with a partner you masturbate with a partner.Collection: Sex
Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.Collection: Reality
I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating.Collection: Names
The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.Collection: Desire
Atheism is not the denial of the existence of God, but having doubts as to whether God is conscious.Collection: Doubt
A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist «chaos» of the painting, asked Picasso: «Did you do this?» Picasso calmly replied: «No, you did this!»Collection: War
Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.Collection: Small Pleasures
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.Collection: Thinking
I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.Collection: Philosophy
Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, or even armed struggle?Collection: Struggle
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!Collection: Children
It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.Collection: Controlled
The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.Collection: Dream
What if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?Collection: What If
I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.Collection: People
We should not oppose something just because it was appropriated by the wrong guys; rather, we should think about how to reappropriate it.Collection: Thinking
Obama has already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to change the limits of what one can say publicly. His greatest achievement up to now is that, in his refined non-provocative way, he has introduced into public speech topics which had hitherto been de facto unsayable: the continuing importance of race in politics, the positive role of atheists in public life, the necessity to talk with "enemies" like Iran or Hamas, and so on. This is just what US politics needs today more than anything, if it is to break out of its gridlock: new words which will change the way we think and act.Collection: Atheist
There is an initial modesty in Liberalism. Liberalism was not originally a doctrine of "man is the king." No, it was a very modest attempt to build a space where people could live together without slaughtering one another.Collection: Kings
But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, You are also responsible for deciding what is your duty.Collection: Atheist
Confucius was not so much a philsopher as a proto-ideologist: what interested him was not metaphysical Truths but rather a harmonious social order within which individuals could lead happy and ethical lives. He was the first to outline clearly what one is tempted to call the elementary scene of ideology, its zero-level, which consists in asserting the (nameless) authority of some substantial Tradition.Collection: Zero
I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of "what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis," and so on. It really is a most arrogant position. I think that the only way to be honest and expose yourself to criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a position.Collection: Believe
You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological.Collection: Thinking
The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth.Collection: Clouds
The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.Collection: Dream
For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic tensions and antagonisms of social orders.Collection: Meaningful
Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.Collection: Beautiful
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.Collection: Mean
The duty of a politician for me is to be a representative: a politician is not an expert, experts are experts, hired for their expertise and so on.Collection: Experts
Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.Collection: Stupid
The force of universalism is in you Basques, not in the Spanish state.Collection: States
We Slovenians are even better misers than you Scottish. You know how Scotland began? One of us Slovenians was spending too much money, so we put him on a boat and he landed in Scotland.Collection: Scotland
In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.Collection: Way
Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitschCollection: Kitsch
The more opera is dead, the more it flourishes.Collection: Opera
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.Collection: Spiritual
In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers' uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong.Collection: Uprising
This proletarianization of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is accompanied by an excess in the opposite direction: the irrationally high pay of top managers and bankers, a level of remuneration that is economically irrational since, as investigations in the US have demonstrated, it tends to be inversely proportional to the company's success.Collection: Opposites
In a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king--but a king in a constitutional democracy, a monarch who decides only formally, whose function is merely to sign off on measures proposed by an executive administration. This is why the problem with democratic rituals is homologous to the great problem of constitutional monarchy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively makes decisions, when we all know this not to be true?Collection: Kings
On the information sheet in a New York hotel, I recently read: 'Dear guest! To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is totally smoke-free. For any infringement of this regulation, you will be charged $200.' The beauty of this formulation, taken literally, is that you are to be punished for refusing to fully enjoy your stay.Collection: New York
My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.Collection: Mean
When authority is backed up by an immediate physical compulsion, what we are dealing with is not authority proper (i.e. symbolic authority), but simply an agency of brute force.Collection: Agency