Tag: Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek Quote About the Suffering of Others

Quote by Slavoj Žižek from “Margaret Atwood’s Work Illustrates Our Need to Enjoy Other People’s Pain”:

“In his Summa Theologica, philosopher Thomas Aquinas concludes that the blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned in order that their bliss be more delightful for them. Aquinas, of course, takes care to avoid the obscene implication that good souls in heaven can find pleasure in observing the terrible suffering of other souls, because good Christians should feel pity when they see suffering. So, will the blessed in heaven also feel pity for the torments of the damned? Aquinas’s answer is no: not because they directly enjoy seeing suffering, but because they enjoy the exercise of divine justice.

“But what if enjoying divine justice is the rationalisation, the moral cover-up, for sadistically enjoying the neighbour’s eternal suffering? What makes Aquinas’s formulation suspicious is the surplus enjoyment watching the pain of others secretly introduces: as if the simple pleasure of living in the bliss of heaven is not enough, and has to be supplemented by the enjoyment of being allowed to take a look at another’s suffering – only in this way, the blessed souls ‘may enjoy their beatitude more thoroughly’.

***

“In short, the sight of the other’s suffering is the obscure cause of desire which sustains our own happiness (bliss in heaven) – if we take it away, our bliss appears in all its sterile stupidity.”

Julian Paul Merrill – The Fresh Prince of Wakanda

Link to an article by Julian Paul Merrill:

“The Fresh Prince of Wakanda – a Žižekian Analysis of Black America and Identity Politics”

 

This is a great analysis of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air!

 

Bonus links: “Quasi Duo Fantasias: A Straussian Reading of ‘Black Panther'” and Review of Black Panther

Slavoj Žižek Quote About Domination

“In short, a master can exert domination only if he ‘bribes’ the servant by way of throwing him some crumbs of enjoyment. This enjoyment has two opposed main forms: I directly enjoy the very subordination to the Master whom I serve and this subordination provides a kind of security and meaning to my life; or, the Master who controls me discreetly allows me to violate his prohibitions when I am out of his view, knowing that such small transgressions will keep me satisfied . . . .”

Slavoj Žižek, “The Libidinal Economy of Singularity”

 

See also:

“To work, the ruling ideology has to incorporate a series of features in which the exploited majority will be able to recognize its authentic longings. In other words, each hegemonic universality has to incorporate at least two particular contents, the authentic popular content as well as its distortion by the relations of domination and exploitation.”

Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism”

 

Bonus links: Read My Desire (Chapter 6) and Le deuxieme sexe [The Second Sex] (“To decline to be the Other, to refuse to be a party to the deal—this would be for women to renounce all the advantages conferred upon them by their alliance with the superior caste.  Man-the-sovereign will provide women-the-liege with material protection and will undertake the moral justification of her existence; thus she can evade at once both economic risk and metaphysical risk of a liberty in which ends and aims must be contrived without assistance.”) and “The Appeal and Limits of Andrea Dworkin” (“Offering close readings of now-forgotten but influential memoirs by right-wing women with titles like The Gift of Inner Healing and The Total Woman, Dworkin demonstrated how the religious right provided women what seemed like a workable set of rules through which to navigate male power and the threat of male violence: ‘For women, the world is a very dangerous place . . .  The Right acknowledges the reality of danger, the validity of fear. The promise is that if a woman is obedient, harm will not befall her.'”) and “Brazilian ‘Interdependence’ and Imperialist Integration” (“sub-imperialism” involves peripheral economies collaborating actively with the imperialist expansion of core economies like the United States, assuming in that expansion the position of a key nation) and “Malcolm Describes the Difference Between the ‘House Negro’ and the ‘Field Negro.'”; and on the other hand T.A.Z. the Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism and transgression

Slavoj Žižek’s Influences

What follows is a brief list of major influences on the work of philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

The Big Three:

The Second Tier:

Others:

From the arts:

 

Fellow travelers (not influences as such): Alenka Zupancic, Mladen Dolar, Jodi Dean, Joan Copjec, Rex Butler

See also bibliography of overview books and “Slavoj Zizek – Key Ideas” and Žižek’s Ontology

Slavoj Žižek – Ibi Rhodus, Ibi Saltus! Quote

“True freedom is not a freedom of choice made from a safe distance, like choosing between a strawberry cake or a chocolate cake; true freedom overlaps with necessity. One makes a truly free choice when one’s choice puts at stake one’s very existence—one does it because one simply ‘cannot do otherwise.’ When one’s country is under a foreign occupation and one is called by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, the reason given is not ‘you are free to choose,’ but: ‘Can’t you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?’

***

“[Martin] Luther saw clearly how the (Catholic) idea that our redemption depends on our acts introduces a dimension of bargaining into ethics: good deeds are not done out of duty but in order to gain salvation. If, however, my salvation is predestined, this means that my fate is already decided and my doing good deeds does not serve anything—so if I do them, it is out of pure duty, a really altruistic act . . . .

***

“What Protestantism prohibits is the very thought that a believer can, as it were, take a position outside/above itself and look upon itself as a small particle in the vast reality.”

***

“What this also implies is that the access to ‘reality in itself’ does not demand from us that we overcome our ‘partiality’ and arrive at a neutral vision elevated above our particular struggles—we are ‘universal beings’ only in our full partial engagements. *** [W]e should assert the radically exclusive love for the singular One, a love which throws out of joint the smooth flow of our lives.

***

“the true ethical universality never resides in the quasi-neutral distance that tries to do justice to all concerned factions. So, if, against fundamentalisms which ground ethical commitment in one’s particular ethnic or religious identity, excluding others, one should insist on ethical universalism, one should also unconditionally insist on how every authentic ethical position by definition paradoxically combines universalism with taking sides in the ongoing struggle.  Today, more than ever, one should emphasize that a true ethical position combines the assertion of Universalism with a militant, divisive position of one engaged in a struggle: true universalists are not those who preach global tolerance of differences and all-encompassing unity, but those who engage in a passionate fight for the assertion of the Truth that engages them.”

Slavoj Žižek,“Ibi Rhodus, Ibi Saltus!” PROBLEMI INTERNATIONAL, vol. 2, no. 2, 2018

See also Sex and the Failed Absolute and Less Than Nothing (“every ethical and/or moral edifice has to be grounded in an abyssal act which is, in the most radical sense imaginable, political, . . . [as] the very space in which, without any external guarantee, ethical decisions are made and negotiated”) and “Ágota Kristóf’s The Notebook Awoke in Me a Cold and Cruel Passion” and The Fragile Absolute and Critique of Cynical Reason

For the exact opposite view, based on a program of depoliticalization/disavowal, see Milton Friedman Capitalism and Freedom (“each man can vote for the color of tie he wants and get it; he does not have to see what color the majority wants and then, if he is in the minority, submit.”) — for that matter, Friedman’s view is completely at odds with the understanding of desire and fantasy that psychoanalysis has established, by neglecting to consider that the color of tie a given man wants is an effort to take on the identity of the sort of man who likes a certain color of tie in order to fulfill the desire of a social group (~majority) for such an identity.  See also “Panel #6 – Todd McGowan – Capitalist Subjectivity and Unconscious Freedom”