Brooke

“[I]n contrast to identity politics, which focuses on how each (ethnic, religious, sexual) group should be able fully to assert its particular identity, the much more difficult and radical task is to enable each group to access full universality. This access to universality does not mean a recognition that one is also part of the universal human genus, or the assertion some ideological values that are considered universal. Rather, it means recognizing one's own universality, the way it is at work in the fractures of one's particular identity, as the 'work of the negative' that undermines every such identity.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Like A Thief In Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism

“As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task.”
― Diogenes of Sinope

“The softening of thought began with open-heart ideology: the New Philosophers. It continued with the New Romantics. Then the revival of philosophy in general. Then the euphoria of new enterprise and new business. The social 'naturalism' of neoliberalism. Everywhere face-lifted values have reinstalled themselves, a touching dynamism, a puerile religiosity, in which love resurfaces blithely. A way for the horde to close ranks at the time of the greatest dispersion of the species.

Zinoviev doesn't give a damn about the Western intelligentsia, with its subtlety and sophistication. He knows that the massive unintelligible reality on the other side of the iron curtain is more interesting than our dialectical, interactive processes. He draws the power of his irony from the power of stupidity. The gist of what he is saying is that if we have not conquered this stupidity, you are not going to overcome it. And he is only too damned right. Or he is saying this: you are behind us in absolute terms, because we have been through the worst, whereas you still have it to go through. You cannot argue with that. Dissidents? In the case of Sakharov, says Zinoviev, the Western world and the Eastern bloc derive equal benefit from this lamentable situation and are equally responsible for it. You have no hope of converting us for we are a more advanced form, the post-catastrophe social form, the form of survival. You are still in the realm of life, but we are already in the realm of afterlife - survival. In any case, your society is artificial: it goes to any lengths to sustain illusions from which we have already drawn all the possible consequences. Do not hope for communism to evolve, for it is you who quite peaceably will take the same path as we have. You are already a lot like us.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“The rhetoric of feminism with its emphasis on resistance, rebellion, and revolution created an illusion of militancy and radicalism that masked the fact that feminism was in no way a challenge or a threat to capitalist patriarchy.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism