ZIZEK > Quotes

“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

“All this bullshit like, “Somalian children are starving....” No! Somalian children are not starving because you have a good time here. There are others who are much more guilty. Rather, use the opportunity. Society will need more and more intellectual work. It’s this topic of intellectuals being privileged—this is typical petty-bourgeois manipulation to make you feel guilty. You know who told me the best story? The British Marxist, Terry Eagleton. He told me that 20 or 30 years ago he saw a big British Marxist figure, Eric Hobsbawm, the historian, giving a talk to ordinary workers in a factory. Hobsbawm wanted to appear popular, not elitist, so he started by saying to the workers, “Listen, I’m not here to teach you. I am here to exchange experiences. I will probably learn more from you than you will from me.” Then he got the answer of a lifetime. One ordinary worker interrupted him and said, “Fuck off! You are privileged to study, to know. You are here to teach us! Yes, we should learn from you! Don’t give us this bullshit, ‘We all know the same.’ You are elite in the sense that you were privileged to learn and to know a lot. So of course we should learn from you. Don’t play this false egalitarianism.”
― Zizek

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

“According to Rosenzweig, the difference between Jewish andChristian believers is not that the latter experience no anxiety, but thatthe focus of anxiety is displaced: Christians experience anxiety in theintimacy of their contact with God (like Abraham?), while for Jews,anxiety arises at the level of the Jews as a collective entity without aproper land, its very existence threatened.6And perhaps we should es-tablish a link here with the weak point of Heidegger’s Being and Time(the
“illegitimate” passage from individual being-toward-death, and as-suming one’s contingent fate, to the historicity of a collective): it is onlyin the case of the Jewish people that such a passage from individual tocollective level would have been “legitimate.”
― zizek

“When, in Being and Time,Heidegger insists that death is the onlyevent which cannot be taken over by another subject for me—an-other cannot die for me, in my place—the obvious counterexampleis Christ himself: did he not, in the extreme gesture of interpassiv-ity, take over for us the ultimate passive experience of dying? Christdies so that we are given a chance to live forever....The problemhere is not only that, obviously, we don’tlive forever (the answer tothis is that it is the Holy Spirit, the community of believers, whichlives forever), but the subjective status of Christ: when he was dyingon the Cross, did he know about his Resurrection-to-come? If he didthen it was all a game, the supreme divine comedy, since Christ knewhis suffering was just a spectacle with a guaranteed good outcome—in short, Christ was faking despair in his “Father, why hast thou for-saken me?” If he didn’t, then in what precise sense was Christ (also)divine? Did God the Father limit the scope of knowledge of Christ’smind to that of a common human consciousness, so that Christ ac-tually thought he was dying abandoned by his father? Was Christ, ineffect, occupying the position of the son in the wonderful joke aboutthe rabbi who turns in despair to God, asking Him what he shoulddo with his bad son, who has deeply disappointed him; God calmlyanswers: “Do the same as I did: write a new testament!”What is crucial here is the radical ambiguity of the term “the faithof Jesus Christ,” which can be read as subjective or objectivegenitive: it can be either “the faith ofChrist” or “the faith / of us, be-lievers / inChrist.” Either we are redeemed because of Christ’s purefaith, or we are redeemed by our faith in Christ, if and insofar as webelieve in him. Perhaps there is a way to read the two meanings to-gether: what we are called to believe in is not Christ’s divinity as suchbut, rather, his faith, his sinless purity. What Christianity proposes isthe figure of Christ as our subject supposed to believe:in our ordinary lives,we never truly believe, but we can at least have the consolation thatthere is One who truly believes (the function of what Lacan, in hisseminar Encore,called y’a de l’un).The final twist here, however, is thaton the Cross, Christ himself has to suspend his belief momentarily.So maybe, at a deeper level, Christ is, rather, our (believers’) subject supposed NOTto believe: it is not our belief we transpose onto others, but,rather, our disbelief itself. Instead of doubting, mocking, and ques-tioning things while believing through the Other, we can also trans-pose onto the Other the nagging doubt, thus regaining the abilityto believe. (And is there not, in exactly the same way, also the func-tion of the subject supposed not to know? Ta ke little children who are sup-posed not to know the “facts of life,” and whose blessed ignorancewe, knowing adults, are supposed to protect by shielding them frombrutal reality; or the wife who is supposed not to know about herhusband’s secret affair, and willingly plays this role even if she re-ally knows all about it, like the young wife in The Age of Innocence;or, inacademia, the role we assume when we ask someone: “OK, I’ll pre-tend I don’t know anything about this topic—try to explain it to mefrom scratch!”) And, perhaps, the true communion with Christ, thetrue imitatio Christi,is to participate in Christ’s doubt and disbelief.There are two main interpretations of how Christ’s death dealswith sin: sacrificial and participatory.4In the first one, we humansare guilty of sin, the consequence of which is death; however, Godpresented Christ, the sinless one, as a sacrifice to die in our place—through the shedding of his blood, we may be forgiven and freedfrom condemnation. In the second one, human beings lived “inAdam,” in the sphere of sinful humanity, under the reign of sin anddeath. Christ became a human being, sharing the fate of those “inAdam” to the end (dying on the Cross), but...”
― Zizek

“And no amount of “deconstruction” helps here: the ultimate formof idolatry is the deconstructive purifying of this Other, so that all thatremains of the Other is its place, the pure form of Otherness as theMessianic Promise. It is here that we encounter the limit of decon-struction: as Derrida himself has realized in the last two decades, themore radical a deconstruction is, the more it has to rely on its inher-ent undeconstructible condition of deconstruction, the messianicpromise of Justice.This promise is the true Derridean object of belief,and Derrida’s ultimate ethical axiom is that this belief is irreducible,“undeconstructible.” Thus Derrida can indulge in all kinds of para-doxes, claiming, among other things, that it is only atheists who trulypray—precisely by refusing to address God as a positive entity, theysilently address the pure Messianic Otherness. Here one should em-phasize the gap which separates Derrida from the Hegelian tradition:It would be too easy to show that, measured by the failure to establishliberal democracy, the gap between fact and ideal essence does notshow up only in . . . so-called primitive forms of government, theoc-racy and military dictatorship....But this failure and this gap alsocharacterize,a prioriand by definition,all democracies, including theoldest and most stable of so-called Western democracies. At stake hereis the very concept of democracy as concept of a promise that can onlyarise in such a diastema(failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjust-ment, being “out of joint”).That is why we always propose to speak ofa democracy to come,not of a futuredemocracy in the future present, noteven of a regulating idea, in the Kantian sense, or of a utopia—at leastto the extent that their inaccessibility would still retain the temporalform of a future present,of a future modality of the living present.15Here we have the difference between Hegel and Derrida at its purest:Derrida accepts Hegel’s fundamental lesson that one cannot assert theinnocent ideal against its distorted realization.This holds not only fordemocracy, but also for religion—the gap which separates the idealconcept from its actualization is already inherent to the concept itself:just as Derrida claims that “God already contradicts Himself,” that anypositive conceptual determination of the divine as a pure messianicpromise already betrays it, one should also say that “democracy already139 contradicts itself.” It is also against this background that Derrida elab-orates the mutual implication of religion and radical evil:16radical evil(politically: “totalitarianism”) emerges when religious faith or reason(or democracy itself) is posited in the mode of future present.
Against Hegel, however, Derrida insists on the irreducible excess inthe ideal concept which cannot be reduced to the dialectic betweenthe ideal and its actualization: the messianic structure of “to come,”the excess of an abyss which can never be actualized in its determinatecontent. Hegel’s own position here is more intricate than it may ap-pear: his point is not that, through gradual dialectical progress, onecan master the gap between the concept and its actualization, andachieve the concept’s full self-transparency (“Absolute Knowing”).Rather, to put it in speculative terms, his point is to assert a “pure”contradiction which is no longer the contradiction between theundeconstructible pure Otherness and its failed actualizations/determinations, but the thoroughly immanent “contradiction” whichprecedes any Otherness.”
― Zizek

“And this paradox brings us to the relationship between man andChrist: the tautology “man is man” is to be read as a Hegelian infinitejudgment, as the encounter of “man” with its oppositional determi-nation, with its counterpart on the other side of the Möbius strip. Justas, in our everyday understanding, “law is law” means its opposite, thecoincidence of the law with arbitrary violence (“What can you do?Even if it is unjust and arbitrary, the law is the law, you have to obeyit!”), “man is man” indicates the noncoincidence of man with man,the properly inhumanexcess which disturbs its self-identity—andwhat, ultimately, is Christ but the name of this excess inherent in man,man’s ex-timate kernel, the monstrous surplus which, following theunfortunate Pontius Pilate, one of the few ethical heroes of the Bible(the other being Judas, of course), can be designated only as “Eccehomo”?”
― zizek

“That is the ultimate alternative: is the opposition between Loveand Law to be reduced to its “truth,” the opposition, internal to theLaw itself, between the determinate positive Law and the excessivesuperego injunction, the Law beyond every measure—that is to say,is the excess of Love with regard to the Law the form of appearanceof a superego Law, of a Law beyond any determinate law; or is theexcessive superego Law the way the dimension beyond the Law ap-pears withinthe domain of the Law, so that the crucial step to be ac-complished is the step (comparable to Nietzsche’s “High Noon”)from the excessive Law to Love, from the way Love appears withinthe domain of the Law to Love beyond the Law? Lacan himselfstruggled continuously with this same deeply Pauline problem: isthere love beyond Law? Paradoxically (in view of the fact that thenotion as unsurpassable Law is usually perceived as Jewish), in thevery last page of Four Fundamental Concepts,he identifies this stance oflove beyond Law as that of Spinoza, opposing it to the Kantian no-tion of moral Law as the ultimate horizon of our experience. InEthics of Psychoanalysis,Lacan deals extensively with the Pauline di-alectic of the Law and its transgression13—perhaps what we shoulddo, therefore, is read this Pauline dialectic together with its corol-lary, Saint Paul’s other paradigmatic passage, the one on love from 1Corinthians 13.
Crucial here is the clearly paradoxical place of Love with regard to All(to the completed series of knowledge or prophecies): first, SaintPaul claims that love is here even if we possess all of knowledge—then, in the second quoted paragraph, he claims that love is hereonly for incomplete beings, that is, beings who possess incompleteknowledge.When I “know fully . . . as I have been fully known,” willthere still be love? Although, in contrast to knowledge, “love neverends,” it is clearly only “now” (while I am still incomplete) that“faith, hope, and love abide.”

The only way out of this deadlock isto read the two inconsistent claims according to Lacan’s feminineformulas of sexuation:14even when it is “all” (complete, with no ex-ception), the field of knowledge remains, in a way, non-all, incom-plete—love is not an exception to the All of knowledge, but preciselythat “nothing” which makes incomplete even the complete series/field of knowledge. In other words, the point of the claim that, evenif I were to possess all knowledge, without love, I would be nothing,is not simply that withlove, I am “something”—in love, I am also noth-ing,but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing par-adoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack.Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimatemystery of love, therefore, is that incompleteness is, in a way, higherthan completion. On the one hand, only an imperfect, lacking beingloves: we love because we do notknow all. On the other hand, evenif we were to know everything, love would, inexplicably, still behigher than completed knowledge. Perhaps the true achievement ofChristian is to elevate a loving (imperfect) Being to the place ofGod, that is, of ultimate perfection. That is the kernel of the Chris-tian experience. In the previous pagan attitude, imperfect earthlyphenomena can serve as signs of the unattainable divine perfection.In Christianity, on the contrary, it is physical (or mental) perfectionitself that is the sign of the imperfection (finitude, vulnerability, un-certainty) of you as the absolute person. becomes a sign of this spiritual dimension—not the sign of your“higher” spiritual perfection, but the sign of youas a finite, vulner-able person. Only in this way do we really break out of idolatry. Forthis reason, the properly Christian relationship between sex and loveis not the one between body and soul, but almost the opposite...”
― Zizek

“When Jews “unplug,” and maintaina distance toward the society in which they live, they do not do it forthe sake of their own different substantial identity—in a way, anti-Semitism is right here: the Jews are, in effect, “rootless,” their Law is“abstract,” it “extrapolates” them from the social Substance.And there we have the radical gap that separates the Christian sus-pension of the Law, the passage from Law to love, from the pagan sus-pension of the social law: the highest (or, rather, deepest) point ofevery pagan Wisdom is, of course, also a radical “unplugging” (ei-ther the carnivalesque orgy, or direct immersion in the abyss of theprimordial Void, in which all articulated differences are suspended);what is suspended here, however, is the “pagan” immanent law ofthe social, not the Jewish Law that already unplugs us from the so-cial. When Christian mystics get too close to the pagan mystical ex-perience, they bypass the Jewish experience of the Law—no wonderthey often become ferocious anti-Semites. Christian anti-Semitismis, in effect, a clear sign of the Christian position’s regression into pa-ganism: it gets rid of the “rootless,” universalist stance of Christian-ity proper by transposing it onto the Jewish Other; consequently,when Christianity loses the mediation of the Jewish Law, it loses thespecific Christian dimension of Love itself, reducing Love to the pa-gan “cosmic feeling” of oneness with the universe. It is only refer-ence to the Jewish Law that sustains the specific Christian notion of Love that needs a distance, that thrives on differences, that has noth-ing to do with any kind of erasure of borders and immersion inOneness. (And within the Jewish experience, love remains on thispagan level—that is to say, the Jewish experience is a unique combi-nation of the new Law with pagan love, which accounts for its innertension.)The trap to be avoided here is the opposition of the “external” so-cial law (legal regulations, “mere legality”) and the higher “inter-nal” moral law, where the external social law may strike us ascontingent and irrational, while the internal law is fully assumed as“our own”: we should radically abandon the notion that external so-cial institutions betray the authentic inner experience of the true we should radically abandon the notion that external so-cial institutions betray the authentic inner experience of the trueTranscendence of Otherness (in the guise, for example, of the oppo-sition between the authentic “inner” experience of the divine and its“external” reification into a religious institution in which the reli-gious experience proper degenerates into an ideology legitimizingpower relations). If there is a lesson to be learned from Kafka, it isthat, in the opposition between internal and external, the divine di-mension is on the side of the external. What can be more “divine”than the traumatic encounter with the bureaucracy at its craziest—when, say, a bureaucrat tells us that, legally, we don’t exist? It is insuch encounters that we catch a glimpse of another order beyondmere earthly everyday reality. There is no experience of the divinewithout such a suspension of the Ethical. And far from being simplyexternal, this very externality (to sense, to symbolic integration)holds us from within: Kafka’s topic is precisely the obscene jouissancethrough which bureaucracy addresses the subject on the level of thedisavowed innermost (“ex-timate,” as Lacan would have put it) realkernel of his being.”
― zizek

“The philosophical consequences of this Kantian parallax are fully explored in thenotion of ontological difference, the focus of Heidegger’s entire thought, which canbe properly grasped only against the background of the theme of finitude. There is adouble doxaon Heidegger’s ontological difference: it is a difference between the What-ness, the essence of beings, and the mere That-ness of their being—it liberates beingsfrom subordination to any ground/arche/goal; furthermore, it is a difference notmerely between (different levels of) beings, of reality, but between the All of realityand something else which, with regard to reality, cannot but appear as “Nothing.”. . .This doxais deeply misleading.With regard to the notion of ontological difference as the difference between whatthings are and the fact that they are, the doxasays that the mistake of metaphysics is tosubordinate being to some presupposed essence (sense, goal,arche...) embodied inthe highest entity, while ontological difference “de-essentializes” beings, setting them free from their enslavement to Essence, letting-them-be in their an-archic freedom—prior to any “what-for? why?”, and so on, things simply are,they just occur....If,how-ever, this were Heidegger’s thesis, then Sartre, in Nausea,would also outline ontologicaldifference at its most radical—does he not describe there the experience of the stupidand meaningless inertia of being at its most disgusting, indifferent to all our (human)meanings and projects? For Heidegger, in contrast to Sartre, “ontological difference”is, rather, the difference between the entities’ stupid being-there, their senseless real-ity, and their horizon of meaning.”
― zizek

“Sartre threw away the entire content of thebourgeois subject, maintaining only its pure form, and the next stepwas to throw away this form itself—is it not that,mutatis mutandis,Der-rida threw away all the positive ontological content of messianism, re-taining nothing but the pure form of the messianic promise, and thenext step is to throw away this form itself? And, again, is this not alsothe passage from Judaism to Christianity? Judaism reduces the prom-ise of Another Life to a pure Otherness, a messianic promise whichwill never become fully present and actualized (the Messiah is always
“to come”); while Christianity, far from claiming full realization ofthe promise, accomplishes something far more uncanny: the Messiahis here, he has arrived, the final Event has already taken place,yet the gap(the gap which sustained the messianic promise) remains....Here I am tempted to suggest a return to the earlier Derrida ofdifférance:what if (as Ernesto Laclau, among others, has already ar-gued17) Derrida’s turn to “postsecular” messianism is not a necessaryoutcome of his initial “deconstructionist” impetus? What if the ideaof infinite messianic Justice which operates in an indefinite suspen-sion, always to come, as the undeconstructible horizon of decon-struction, already obfuscates “pure”différance,the pure gap whichseparates an entity from itself? Is it not possible to think this pure in-between priorto any notion of messianic justice? Derrida acts as ifthe choice is between positive onto-ethics, the gesture of transcend-ing the existing order toward another higher positive Order, andthe pure promise of spectral Otherness—what, however, if we dropthis reference to Otherness altogether? What then remains is eitherSpinoza—the pure positivity of Being—or Lacan—the minimal con-tortion of drive, the minimal “empty” (self-)difference which is op-erative when a thing starts to function as a substitute for itself.
As Freud observed, the very acts that are forbidden by religion arepracticed in the name of religion. In such cases—as, for instance, mur-der in the name of religion—religion also can do entirely withoutminiaturization.Those adamantly militant advocates of human life, forexample, who oppose abortion, will not stop short of actually mur-dering clinic personnel. Radical right-wing opponents of male homo-sexuality in the USA act in a similar way.They organize so-called “gaybashings” in the course of which they beat up and finally rape gays.
What we have here, yet again, is the Hegelian “oppositional determi-nation”: in the figure of the gay-basher raping a gay, the gay encoun-ters himself in its oppositional determination; that is to say, tautology(self-identity) appears as the highest contradiction.This threshold canalso function as the foreign gaze itself: for example, when a disen-chanted Western subject perceives Tibet as a solution to his crisis, Ti-bet loses its immediate self-identity, and turns into a sign of itself,its own “oppositional determination.”
― zizek