Christopher Kul-Want > Quotes

“The experience of freedom is shattering, always preceded and bounded by pain (and dependent upon pain). Yet this affirms the subject’s uniqueness to experience freedom. Pain is the sense of a division or a difference between the subject and the infinite (between life and death), an experience of Nature’s utter in-difference. Such an absolute experience of Nature’s implacability is an experience of desire for that which is beyond experience (the Other). This is to experience desire absolutely, since the Other is absolutely absent: sacrifice as desire, desire as sacrifice.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Kant: A Graphic Guide

“If we remain relatively stable and unchanging in terms of our thinking, then the very power of life for change and creation will become exhausted.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Continental Philosophy: A Graphic Guide

“Heidegger is excited by Kant’s suggestion that the “thing in itself” is not different from the appearance, but merely the same thing viewed under a different light.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Kant: A Graphic Guide

“way in which the strike on the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11 was perceived.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“By recognizing the fictional nature of unitary identity, the dominating presence of the super-ego is overthrown.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“However, this cannot be achieved through direct perception. In other words, direct access to the void that is both language and the void that lies “behind” language is impossible.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“altruistic gestures simply preserve the status quo and prevent the radical reconstruction of society by which poverty may be alleviated altogether.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“transgression – imagined or real forms of enjoyment that seem to contradict the dominant ideas or laws”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“defended by the ideology: “We are the victims now and so we have every right to retaliate!”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“given the ubiquitous presence of the super-ego, or the big Other, can its repressive authority be overcome?”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“our inability to articulate and be fully conscious of our dependency upon the symbolic order.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“focuses upon how and in what ways the product renders one’s life meaningful.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“When we obey the Law, we do it as part of a desperate strategy to fight against our desire to transgress”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“I maintain that this revolution has aroused in the hearts and desires of all spectators who are not themselves caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm . . . It cannot therefore have been caused by anything other than a moral disposition within the human race.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Kant: A Graphic Guide

“Working in Moscow from 1933 until 1945, the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács (1885–1971) developed a theory of “Critical Realism” with respect to literature. Lukács admired narrative novelists such as Cervantes (1547–1616), Balzac (1799–1850), Dickens (1812–70), Gorky (1868–1936), Tolstoy (1828–1910) and Thomas Mann (1875–1955).”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide

“Žižek has drawn up an ecological manifesto boldly synthesizing into four points”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“Nevertheless, Žižek holds open the possibility of the subject recognizing their own fictional status within reality. This is the ultimate purpose of treatment in psychoanalysis.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“Nature is actually composed from vast amounts of destruction”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“what we call creation is a cosmic catastrophe, a cosmic mistake”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“transgresses our horizon. We must recognize that we cannot gain full power over our biosphere even though it is in our power to de-rail it and disturb its balance.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“T.S. Eliot’s line from his verse drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935): ‘the highest form of treason: to do the right thing for the wrong reason”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“Submitting to the rules that govern language and the forms of social interaction is not a natural process, although we all do it.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Continental Philosophy: A Graphic Guide

“According to today’s ideology, the key to achieving happiness is through self-realization and by making one’s life more “meaningful”.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“progressive causes today.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“without some artificial system of symbolic order by which to organize “reality”, the individual ceases to exist.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“universe: humanity does not – and never did have – a ground or a natural balance to return to. For Žižek, our existence is utterly contingent and beyond our control.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“Parrhassios contradicts this notion by revealing that deception is the truth, and vice versa. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was particularly fond of this story, and quoted it in his seminars during the 1960s and 70s. Aristotle’s Poetics The Poetics (c.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide

“On account of their dangerous influence, Plato in The Republic (c. 375 BC) banned artists and poets from his ideal state.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Aesthetics: A Graphic Guide

“oil and the energy we rely upon is composed from a previous natural disaster of unimaginable dimensions.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Slavoj Zizek: A Graphic Guide

“for Continental philosophy, the idea of consciousness and of an independent self-agency is ultimately a useless fantasy that boils down to an impossible desire for self-control – because it is impossible for us to know all that goes on in the mind at any one time.”
― Christopher Kul-Want, Introducing Continental Philosophy: A Graphic Guide