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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.

Slavoj Žižek

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Slavoj Žižek
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: March 21
Cultural Critic
Cultural Studies Scholar
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Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Politician
Psychoanalyst
Psychologist
Sociologist
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Ljubljana
Slovenia
Slavoj Zizek
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More quotes by Slavoj Žižek

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When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: Don't think, don't politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money, so that you will not have to think!
Slavoj Žižek
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I - and I still consider myself, I'm sorry to tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn't help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure.
Slavoj Žižek
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We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom.
Slavoj Žižek
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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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True universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity, but those who engage in a passionate struggle for the assertion of the Truth which compels them.
Slavoj Žižek
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For the multiculturalist, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants are prohibited, Italians and Irish get a little respect, blacks are good, native Americans are even better. The further away we go, the more they deserve respect. This is a kind of inverted, patronising respect that puts everyone at a distance.
Slavoj Žižek
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We should not oppose something just because it was appropriated by the wrong guys rather, we should think about how to reappropriate it.
Slavoj Žižek
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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.
Slavoj Žižek
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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.
Slavoj Žižek
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Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.
Slavoj Žižek
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What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.
Slavoj Žižek
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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.
Slavoj Žižek
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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.
Slavoj Žižek
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We Slovenians are even better misers than you Scottish. You know how Scotland began? One of us Slovenians was spending too much money, so we put him on a boat and he landed in Scotland.
Slavoj Žižek
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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.
Slavoj Žižek
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Postcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals.
Slavoj Žižek
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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.
Slavoj Žižek
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My big fear is that if I act the way I am, people will notice that there is nothing to see. So I have to be active all the time, covering up.
Slavoj Žižek
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If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
Slavoj Žižek
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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.
Slavoj Žižek