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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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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
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Medieval
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It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.
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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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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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It is more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to overcome their victim status and perhaps become even more succesfull than ourselves
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If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
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A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.
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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!»
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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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In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being.
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The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to be active, to participate, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on.
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What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.
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Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.
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