by
Slavoj Žižek
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[...] what happens to democracy when the majority is inclined to vote for, say, racist and sexist laws? I am not afraid to draw the conclusion that emancipatory politics should not be bound a priori by formal-democratic procedures of legitimization. No, people quite often do not know what they want, or do not want what they know, or they simply want the wrong thing. There is no short-cut here.
[...] culture is no longer just an exception, a kind of fragile superstructure rising above the 'real' economic infrastructure, but, more and more, a central ingredient of our mainstream 'real' economy. More than a decade ago, Jeremy Rifkin designated this new stage in our economy 'cultural capitalism'. The defining feature of 'postmodern' capitalism is the direct commodification of our experience itself. Less and less are we buying products (material objects) that we want to own; increasingly, we buy life experiences, experiences of sex, eating, communicating, cultural consumption. In doing so, we are participating in a lifestyle--or, as Mark Slouka puts it succinctly, 'we become the consumers of our own lives'. [...]
[...] the cruel irony of anti-Eurocentrism is that, on behalf of anti-colonialism, one criticizes the West at the very historical moment when global capitalism no longer needs Western cultural values in order to function smoothly, and is doing quite well with the 'alternative modernity'--the non-democratic form of capitalist modernization--to be found in Asian capitalism. In short, critics of Eurocentrism are rejecting Western cultural values at the very moment when, critically reinterpreted, many of them--egalitarianism, fundamental human rights, the welfare state, to name a few--can serve as a weapon against capitalist globalisation. Have we already forgotten, in fact, that the entire idea of Communist emancipation as envisaged by Marx is a thoroughly 'Eurocentric' one?
[...] there is nothing noble or sublime about what Benjamin called divine violence--it is 'divine' precisely on account of its excessively destructive character. Second, we have to abandon the idea that there is something emancipatory in extreme experiences, that they enable us to open our eyes to the ultimate truth of a situation. There is a memorable passage in Ruth Klüger's Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, in which she describes a conversation with some advanced PhD candidates in Germany:
Auschwitz was no instructional institution ... You learned nothing there, and least of all humanity and tolerance. Absolutely nothing good came out of the concentration camps, I hear myself saying, with my voice rising, and he expects catharsis, purgation, the sort of thing you go to the theatre for? They were the most useless, pointless establishments imaginable.
This, perhaps, is the most depressing lesson of horror and suffering: there is nothing to be learned from it. The only way out of the vicious circle of this depression is to change the terrain toward concrete social and economic analysis.
[...] the hard lesson for the refugees is that 'there is no Norway', even in Norway. They will have to learn to censor their dreams: instead of chasing them in reality, they should focus on changing reality.
I love that sort of conclusion but I also feel like this sentiment is kinda hopeless ... how are the refugees supposed to do that
[...] the way individuals experience their situation: there is no way for them to step out of their world and somehow see, from 'outside', how things 'really are'? Ideology does not reside primarily in stories invented (by those in power) to deceive others, it resides in stories invented by subjects to deceive themselves. [...]
[...] 1730s Paris, to the so-called 'Great Cat Massacre', described by Robert Darnton, when a group of printing apprentices tortured and ritually killed all the cats they could find, including the pet of their master's wife. [...]
basically they were treated worse than cats. never heard of this before, pretty fascinating
[...] It is not enough to remain faithful to the Communist Idea: one has to locate in historical reality the antagonisms that make this Idea a practical urgency. The only true question today is this: do we endorse the predominant acceptance of capitalism as a fact of (human) nature, or does today's global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms to prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are in fact four such antagonisms: the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the more and more palpable failure of private property to integrate into its functioning so-called 'intellectual property'; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, as has been mentioned above, new forms of apartheid, new walls and slums. [...]
[...] Waiting for another to do the job for us is a way of rationalizing our inactivity. However, the trap to be avoided here is the one of perverse self-instrumentalization: 'We are the ones we are waiting for' does not mean that we have to discover how we are the agent predestined by fate (historical necessity) to do the task. It means, on the contrary, that there is no big Other to rely on. In contrast to classical Marxism, in which 'history is on our side' (the proletariat fulfils a predestined task of universal emancipation), in today's constellation, the big Other is against us: left to itself, the inner thrust of our historical development leads to catastrophe, to apocalypse. Here, the only thing that can prevent catastrophe is pure voluntarism, i.e. our free decision to act against historical necessity. [...]
kinda similar to note 1553 but different enough to warrant a new note I guess
[...] The Berlin Wall [...] signified that capitalism was not the only option, that an alternative to it, although a failed one, existed. By contrast, the walls that we see rising today [...] don't stand for the division between capitalism and communism but for a division that is strictly immanent to the global capitalist order. [...]
in the next sentence he describes it as "a nice Hegelian move" which is the most Zizek thing ever