Slavoj Zizek Quotes on Knowledge
Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), The Ticklish Subject (1999), and the long sequence of subsequent books gave contemporary continental philosophy its most prolific synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis with the Hegelian dialectic and the Marxist analysis of ideology. The central project, developed across the prodigious oeuvre, is the demonstration that ideological knowledge functions through the disavowed identification with a sublime object that supplies the fantasmatic kernel of social reality — the standard Marxist theory of ideology as false consciousness must be supplemented by the Lacanian analysis of how ideology persists precisely through the cynical recognition of its falsity. The framework, drawing on Lacan, Hegel, Marx, Schelling, and a relentlessly broad popular-cultural archive, shaped contemporary continental engagement with ideology, subjectivity, and the politics of late capitalism through the Slovenian Lacanian school and a wide international audience.
Quotes
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“A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.”
The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London/New York: Verso, 1999), p. 1. -
“The Fragile Absolute: or, why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?”
It is also crucial to bear in mind the interconnection between the Decalogue... and its modern obverse, the celebrated 'human Rights'. As the experience of our post-political liberal-permissive society amply demonstrates, human Rights are ultimately, at their core, simply Rights to violate the Ten Commandments. 'The right to privacy' — the right to adultery, in secret, where no one sees me or has -
“There is a somewhat analogous situation with regard to the heterosexual seduction procedure in our Politically Correct times: the two sets, the set of PC behaviour and the set of seduction, do not actually intersect anywhere; that is, there is no seduction which is not in a way an "incorrect" intrusion or harassment — at some point, one has to expose oneself and "make a pass." So does this mean th”
The Fragile Absolute: or, why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? (London: Verso, 2000, ISBN 1-85984-326-3 ), p. 111. -
“[A]t the beginning of November 2001, there was a series of meetings between White House advisers and senior Hollywood executives with the aim of co-ordinating the war effort and establishing how Hollywood could help in the " war against terrorism " by getting the right ideological message across not only to Americans, but also to the Hollywood public around the globe — the ultimate empirical proof”
Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London: Verso, 2002, ISBN 1-859-84421-9 ), p. 16 -
“As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy.”
Last remark in an interview for the CN8 show Nitebeat (2003)