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“Q- What makes you depressed?

Seeing stupid people happy.”
― Slavoj Ž��ž���

“The ideological blackmail that has been in place since the original Live Aid concerts in 1985 has insisted that ‘caring individuals�� could end famine directly, without the need for any kind of political solution or systemic reorganization. It is necessary to act straight away, we were told; politics has to be suspended in the name of ethical immediacy. Bono’s Product Red brand wanted to dispense even with the philanthropic intermediary. ‘Philanthropy is like hippy music, holding hands��, Bono proclaimed. ‘Red is more like punk rock, hip hop, this should feel like hard commerce��. The point was not to offer an alternative to capitalism - on the contrary, Product Red’s ‘punk rock�� or ‘hip hop�� character consisted in its ‘realistic�� acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town. No, the aim was only to ensure that some of the proceeds of particular transactions went to good causes. The fantasy being that western consumerism, far from being intrinsically implicated in systemic global inequalities, could itself solve them. All we have to do is buy the right products.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“Ž��ž��� seems to have got Hitchcock out of his system, if not out of his unconscious—one never does that.”
― Fredric Jameson

“Pure sex is masturbation with a real partner who functions as a prop for our indulging in fantasies, while it is only through love that we can reach the �� Other.”
― Zizek

“the true choice is between losing it all and creating what we are about to lose: only this could eventually save us, in a profound sense . . . The possible awakening of the bomb is not simply 'let's do all in our power to prevent it before it's too late', but rather 'let's first build this totality (unity, community, freedom) that we are about to lose through the bomb.”
― Alenka Zupančič

“Not all is ideology, beneath the ideological mask, I am also a human person' is the very form of ideology, of its 'practical efficiency'.”
― Slavoj Ž��ž���, The Plague of Fantasies

“Als Präsident Obama den Aufstand als legitime Meinungsäußerung begrüßte, die von der Regierung anerkannt werden müsse, war die Verwirrung komplett. Die Massen in Kairo und Alexandria wollten keine Anerkennung ihrer Forderungen durch die Regierung, deren Rechtmäßigkeit sie rundweg ablehnten. Sie wünschten sich das Mubarak-Regime nicht als Gesprächspartner, sie wollten, dass Mubarak verschwand. Ihr Ziel war nicht nur eine neue Regierung, die ihre Meinung anhören würde, sondern eine Umgestaltung des gesamten Staates. Sie hatten keine »Meinungen ��; sie waren die Wahrheit der Situation in Ägypten. (S. 55)”
― Slavoj Ž��ž���, Weniger als nichts - Hegel und der Schatten des dialektischen Materialismus

“Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.”
― Zizek

“Both Zizek and early Hegelians hint at some sort of state that is both beyond and within reality, both an escape and a hyper-examination that allows for some sort of becoming that does not escape ideology, but at least to some degree has a self that knows the game which the mind is playing and is not fooling itself.”
― Eliot Rosenstock, Ž��ž��� in the Clinic: A Revolutionary Proposal for a New Endgame in Psychotherapy

“At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, '...what would we gain by helping the french destroy Germany?' he replied: 'what we would gain would be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be'.”
― Henry Kissinger

“[P]rogress is the inner development of a system, the gradual actualization of its potentials, so it all depends on which system serves as a point of reference.”
― Slavoj Ž��ž���, Against Progress

“...the only way to keep a classical work alive, is to treat it as 'open' pointing towards the future, or, to use the metaphor evoked by Walter Benjamin, to act as if the classical work is a film for which the appropriate chemical liquids to develop it was invented only later, so that it is only today that we can get the full picture.”
― Ž��ž���, Slavoj

“¿No ocurre lo mismo con la guerra? Lejos de dar comienzo a la guerra del siglo XXI, el ataque al World Trade Center en septiembre de 2001 fue más bien el último acto espectacular de la guerra del siglo XX. Lo que nos espera es algo mucho más siniestro: el espectro de una guerra «inmaterial» en la que los ataques son invisibles (virus, venenos, etcétera, que pueden estar en cualquier sitio y en ninguno). En el nivel de la realidad material visible, nada ocurre, no hay grandes explosiones, e igualmente el universo conocido comienza a colapsar y la vida se desintegra. Estamos entrando en una nueva era de guerra paranoide en la que la mayor tarea será la de identificar al enemigo y sus armas. Solo con esta completa «desmaterialización» es cuando la famosa tesis de Marx del Manifiesto comunista (que en el capitalismo «todo lo sólido se desvanece en el aire»), adquiere un sentido mucho más literal de lo que él pretendía. La tesis se cumple literalmente cuando nuestra realidad social material no está solo dominada por el movimiento especulativo o espectral del Capital, sino que ella misma se ve progresivamente «espectralizada» (el «Yo proteico» reemplaza al antiguo sujeto autoidéntico, la elusiva fluidez de sus experiencias reemplaza la estabilidad de los objetos que se poseen). En resumen, cuando la relación habitual entre los objetos materiales sólidos y las ideas fluidas se invierte (los objetos son
progresivamente disueltos en experiencias fluidas, mientras que las únicas cosas estables son obligaciones simbólicas virtuales), solo entonces se hace plenamente real lo que Derrida llamaba el aspecto espectral del capitalismo.”
― Slavoj Ž��ž���, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

“[P]rogress is the inner development of a system, the gradual actualization of its potentials, so it all depends on which system serves as a point of reference.”
― Ž��ž���, Slavoj

“True progress occurs in two steps: first, we make a step towards actualizing what we consider progress, and when we become aware of the squished bird that was the victim of this progress, we then accordingly redefine our notion of progress. It is in this sense that I define myself as a moderately-conservative communist: in order to survive we need a radical re-arrangement of our entire way of life towards some form of global solidarity and cooperation, but the urgent need to achieve this goal brings new dangers, so we should act with urgency and care.”
― Ž��ž���, Slavoj

“In short, a true progress also aims at retroactively redeeming all the squashed birds of the past progresses - not redeeming them in reality (the bio-cosmist dream), but redeeming the potentiality that was present in them.”
― Slavoj Ž��ž���, Against Progress

“Early in Christopher Nolan's "The Prestige", a magician performs a trick with a small bird which disappears in a cage flattened on the table. A small boy in the audience starts to cry, distraught that the bird was killed. The magician approaches him and finishes the trick, gently producing a live bird out of his hand - but the boy is not convinced, insisting that this must be another bird, the dead bird's brother. After the show, we see the magician alone, putting a dead bird squashed into the trash where many other dead birds lie. The boy was right. The trick could not be performed without violence and death, but it relies for its effectiveness upon concealing the squalid, broken residue of what has been sacrificed, disposing of it where no one who matters will see. Therein resides the basic premise of a dialectical notion of progress: when a newer higher stage arrives, there must be a squished bird somewhere.”
― Slavoj Ž��ž���, Against Progress

“The opposition between false limitless desires which only bring suffering and the authentic spiritual desire for well-being thus appears problematic: sensual desires are in themselves moderate, constrained to their direct goals; they become infinite and self-destructive only when they are infected by a spiritual dimension. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling knew that spirituality is self-destructive in its longing for infinity, which is why evil is much more spiritual than our sensual reality. In other words, the root of evil is not our egotism but, on the contrary, a perverted self-destructed spirituality which can prompt unnecessary personal self-sacrifice.”
― Slavoj Ž��ž���, Against Progress