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A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist «chaos» of the painting, asked Picasso: «Did you do this?» Picasso calmly replied: «No, you did this!»

Slavoj Žižek

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Slavoj Žižek
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: March 21
Cultural Critic
Cultural Studies Scholar
Essayist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Politician
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Sociologist
Theologian
Ljubljana
Slovenia
Slavoj Zizek
World
Paris
Picasso
Studios
Officer
Chaos
Visited
Saws
Replied
Asked
Shocked
Painting
Officers
Guernica
Second
German
Modernist
War
Studio
Calmly

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The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.
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The problem for us is not are our desires satisfied or not. The problem is how do we know what we desire.
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In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers' uprising the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong.
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Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
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The duty of a politician for me is to be a representative: a politician is not an expert, experts are experts, hired for their expertise and so on.
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With Lenin it was always a substantial commitment. I always have a certain admiration for people who are aware that somebody has to do the job. What I hate about these liberal, pseudo-left, beautiful soul academics is that they are doing what they are doing fully aware that somebody else will do the job for them.
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But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, You are also responsible for deciding what is your duty.
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While just looking, we are always hunting among objects, looking for what we desire or fear, endeavoring to recognize some pattern on the other hand, objects themselves always stare back, vie for our attention, throw at us their lures and endeavor to entrap us.
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Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.
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I may still be a kind of a Marxist but I'm very realistic, I don't have these dreams of revolutionists around the corner.
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You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological.
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The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland—a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on the Earth—can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth.
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Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.
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I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.
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Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah.
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The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also - even more, perhaps - the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims.
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A typical guy who buys organic food doesn't really buy it in order to be healthy he buys it to regain a kind of solidarity as the one who really cares about nature. He buys a certain ideological stance.
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There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the whole human history to date: from prehistoric societies it took primitivism from the Ancient world it took slavery from medieval society brutal domination from capitalism exploitation and from socialism the name.
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Words are never 'only words' they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.
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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.
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