Slavoj Zizek
Slavoj Zizek
Slavoj Žižek; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher, cultural critic, and Hegelian Marxist. He is a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London. His work is located at the intersection of a range of subjects, including continental philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, film criticism, and...
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth21 March 1949
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.
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.
The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.
What if the way we perceive a problem is already part of the problem?
Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all 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.
Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.