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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.

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
Urge
Urges
Mask
Active
Threat
Passivity
Activity
Pseudo
Goes
Participate
Today
Nothingness

More quotes by Slavoj Žižek

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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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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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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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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.
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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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Words are never 'only words' they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.
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If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.
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We usually speak of the Jewish-Christian civilization - perhaps, the time has come, especially with regard to the Middle East conflict, to talk about the Jewish-Muslim civilization as an axis opposed to Christianity.
Slavoj Žižek
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I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist. For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good!
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In the electoral campaign, President Bush named as the most important person in his life Jesus . Now he has a unique chance to prove that he meant it seriously: for him, as for all Americans today, Love thy neighbor! means Love the Muslims! OR IT MEANS NOTHING AT ALL.
Slavoj Žižek
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The ultimate lesson of The Interpretation of Dreams: reality is for those who cannot sustain the dream.
Slavoj Žižek
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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.
Slavoj Žižek
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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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What we philosophers can do is just correct the questions.
Slavoj Žižek
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It's bad if we are controlled, but if we're not, it can be even worse.
Slavoj Žižek
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A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject.
Slavoj Žižek
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I almost stopped teaching entirely. The worst thing for me is contact with students. I like universities without students. And I especially hate American students. They think you owe them something. They come to you ... Office hours!
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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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.
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