Aphorists

"Take warning by the misfortunes of others, that others may not take example from you."

"He—in whose nature, is the ugly disposition Sees not the peacock,—only his ugly foot."

"Have patience! All things are difficult before they become easy."

"He who is a slave to his stomach seldom worships God."

"To give pleasure to a single heart by a single kind act is better than a thousand head-bowings in prayer."

"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."

"[A]t the beginning of November 2001, there was a series of meetings between White House advisers and senior Hollywood executives with the aim of co-ordinating the war effort and establishing how Hollywood could help in the "war against terrorism" by getting the right ideological message across not only to Americans, but also to the Hollywood public around the globe — the ultimate empirical proof that Hollywood does in fact function as an "ideological state apparatus.""

"We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom."

"There is a somewhat analogous situation with regard to the heterosexual seduction procedure in our Politically Correct times: the two sets, the set of PC behaviour and the set of seduction, do not actually intersect anywhere; that is, there is no seduction which is not in a way an "incorrect" intrusion or harassment — at some point, one has to expose oneself and "make a pass." So does this mean that every seduction is incorrect harassment through and through? No, and that is the catch: when you make a pass, you expose yourself to the Other (the potential partner), and she decides retroactively, by her reaction, whether what you have just done was harassment or a successful act of seduction — and there is no way to tell in advance what her reaction will be. This is why assertive women often despise "weak" men — because they fear to expose themselves, to take the necessary risk. And perhaps this is even more true in our PC times: are not PC prohibitions rules which, in one way or another, are to be violated in the seduction process? Is not the seducer’s art to accomplish this violation properly — so that afterwards, by its acceptance, its harassing aspect will be retroactively cancelled?"

"A spectre is haunting Western academia (...), the spectre of the Cartesian subject."

"As a Marxist, let me add: if anyone tells you Lacan is difficult, this is class propaganda by the enemy."

"It is also crucial to bear in mind the interconnection between the Decalogue... and its modern obverse, the celebrated 'human Rights'. As the experience of our post-political liberal-permissive society amply demonstrates, human Rights are ultimately, at their core, simply Rights to violate the Ten Commandments. 'The right to privacy' — the right to adultery, in secret, where no one sees me or has the right to probe my life. 'The right to pursue happiness and to possess private property' -- the right to steal (to exploit others). 'Freedom of the press and of the expression of opinion' -- the right to lie. 'The right of free citizens to possess weapons' -- the right to kill. And, ultimately, 'freedom of religious belief' — the right to worship false gods."

"I found there, on the central square (Václavské náměstí), a café that miraculously worked through this emergency. I remember they had wonderful strawberry cakes, and I was sitting there eating strawberry cakes and watching Russian tanks against demonstrators. It was perfect."

"I hate writing. I so intensely hate writing — I cannot tell you how much. The moment I am at the end of one project I have the idea that I didn’t really succeed in telling what I wanted to tell, that I need a new project — it’s an absolute nightmare. But my whole economy of writing is in fact based on an obsessional ritual to avoid the actual act of writing."

"I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of "what I am saying now is not unconditional, it is just a hypothesis," and so on. It really is a most arrogant position. I think that the only way to be honest and expose yourself to criticism is to state clearly and dogmatically where you are. You must take the risk and have a position."

"Daly: In a sense, would you say that the age of biogenetics/cyberspace is the age of philosophy? Žižek: Yes, and the age of philosophy in the sense again that we are confronted more and more often with philosophical problems at an everyday level. It is not that you withdraw from daily life into a world of philosophical contemplation. On the contrary, you cannot find your way around daily life itself without answering certain philosophical questions. It is a unique time when everyone is, in a way, forced to be some kind of philosopher."

"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."

"The shortage of public intellectuals (in the English-speaking world) goes back to the decline of the written media: the first TV intellectual was Foucault, who was at home in both media, but his successors and imitators know only the camera. This forces sound bites upon even the most complex material: see Schama, Ferguson e tutti quanti. Also, and paradoxically: public intellectuals are best when they are grounded in a particular language, culture, debate. Thus Camus was French, Habermas is German, Sen is Bengali, Orwell was deep English. This made their cross-frontier ventures plausible, in the same way that Havel or Michnik today have street cred because they started out as courageous dissidents in a very particular time and place. The opposite is the ridiculous Slavoj Zizek: a “global”’ public intellectual who is therefore of no particular interest in any one place or on any one subject. If he is the future of public intellectuals, then they have no future."

"[I]t needs to be recognized that instead of being an “interdisciplinary philosopher” or “playfully Hegelian,” Žižek elevates the most un-Hegelian idea of all, arbitrariness, to be his guiding method. Throughout a long book [i.e., Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?] he brings up dozens of topics without providing any coherent explanation of why he chooses to discuss one topic rather than another. Thus, even someone sympathetic to a specific opinion can never be entirely sure whether Žižek will stand by his own case, or will simply drop it as he flits to another topic. In addition, though he quotes and makes allusions and references to a wide variety of well-known authors and canonical works, he does not provide reasons for his views of the cited texts. Rather, he makes highly tendentious assertions and expects his readers to submit to what are supposed to be apodictic statements. Should they be skeptical, they can be told that Žižek is above “standard” treatments and that he is following a dialectic."

"To summarize Žižek's position is not easy: he slips between philosophical and psychoanalytical ways of arguing, and is spell-bound by Lacan's gnomic utterances. He is a lover of paradox, and believes strongly in what Hegel called 'the labour of the negative' though taking the idea, as always, one stage further towards the brick wall of paradox."

"Maybe, many years ago, Zizek made a bet with some of his Slovenian colleagues about how much post-modern sounding gibberish he could get contemporary academics to swallow-keep in mind that, recently, he's been trying to persuade people to embrace as unproblematic the juxtaposition of Stalinist dialectical materialism and Christian theology."

"...the works of Slavoj Žižek can advance the field of emotional geographies, as well as our understandings of emotion, space, and society. Žižek provides a rich social theoretical vocabulary that can help explain cultural discontent, how emotional worlds bond and fall apart, why there is no guaranteed harmony in love with our partner, and how emotional worlds are organized in ways so that people can hold onto something that resembles ‘subjectivity’ and ‘reality’."

"I suppose Zizek is rightly described as a performer. He has this element of provocation that is very characteristic and does help to interest people, but I'm not certain that people who are reading Zizek are actually drawn very much nearer rethinking the problems of the left."

"The curious thing about the Žižek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror—especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose "lost causes" Žižek takes up in another new book, In Defense of Lost Causes—the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult."

"for Robespierre, revolutionary terror is the very opposite of war: Robespierre was a pacifist, not out of hypocrisy or humanitarian sensitivity, but because he was well aware that war among nations as a rule serves as the means to obfuscate revolutionary struggle within each nation. Robespierre’s speech ‘On the War’ is of special importance today: it shows him as a true pacifist who forcefully denounces the patriotic call to war, even if the war is formulated as the defence of the Revolution, as the attempt of those who want ‘revolution without a revolution’ to divert the radicalization of the revolutionary process. His stance is thus the exact opposite of those who need war to militarize social life and take dictatorial control over it."

"'Dictatorship' does not mean the opposite of democracy, but democracy's own underlying mode of functioning - from the very beginning, the thesis on the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' involved the presupposition that it was the opposite of other form(s) of dictatorships, since the entire field of state power is that of dictatorship."

"Few thinkers illustrate the contradictions of contemporary capitalism better than the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek."

"...one should also not allow our opponents to determine the field and topic of the struggle."

"This difference is the ultimate distinction between Stalin and Trotsky. In Stalin, 'Lenin lives for ever' as an obscene spirit which 'does not know it is dead', artificially kept alive as an instrument of power. In Trotsky, the dead Lenin continues to live like Joe Hill he lives wherever there are people who still struggle for the same Idea"

"In short, what the sensitive liberals want is a thus try to deprive the French Revolution of its status as the founding event of modern democracy, relegating it to a historical anomaly: there was a historical necessity to assert the modern principles of personal freedom, etc."

"What you’re referring to is what’s called “theory.” And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing–using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying."

"Lenin is best remembered for his famous retort, 'Freedom – yes, but for WHOM? To do WHAT?'"

"The true question is thus not who directly holds power, a coalition of political agents or the 'dictatorship' of one sole agent, but how the very field in which the total political process takes place is structured: is it the process of parliamentary representation with parties 'reflecting' the voters' opinions, or a more direct self-organization of the working classes, which relies on a much more active role of the participants in the political process? Trotsky's basic reproach to parliamentary democracy is not that it gives too much power to uneducated masses, but, paradoxically, that it passivizes the masses too much, leaving the initiative to the apparatus of state power (in contrast to the 'soviets' in which the working classes directly mobilize themselves and exert their power)."

"The entire history of the Soviet Union can be comprehended as homologous with Freud's famous image of Rome, a city whose history is deposited in its present in the guise of the different layers of the archaeological remainders, each new level covering up the preceding one, like (another model) the seven layers of Troy, so that history, in its regression towards ever older epochs, proceeds like the archaeologist, discovering new layers by probing deeper and deeper into the ground."

"The walls which are now being thrown up all around the world are not of the same nature as the Berlin Wall, the icon of the Cold War. Today's walls appear not to belong to the same notion, since the same well often serves multiple functions: as a defence against terrorism, illegal immigrants or smuggling, as a cover for colonial land-grabbing, etc."

"Khrushchev’s wager was that his (limited) confession would strengthen the communist movement – and in the short term he was right. One should always remember that the Khrushchev era was the last period of authentic communist enthusiasm, of belief in the communist project. When, during his visit to the United States in 1959, Khrushchev made his famous defiant statement to the American public that ‘your grandchildren will be communists’, he effectively spelled out the conviction of the entire Soviet nomenklatura. After his fall in 1964, a resigned cynicism prevailed, up until Gorbachev's attempt at a more radical confrontation with the past (the rehabilitations then included Bukharin, but – for Gorbachev at least – Lenin remained the untouchable point of reference, and Trotsky continued to be a non-person)."

"Let's face it: today, Lenin and his legacy are perceived as hopelessly dated, belonging to a defunct 'paradigm'. Not only was Lenin understandably blind to many of the problems that are now central to contemporary life (ecology, struggle for emancipated sexuality,etc). but also his brutal political practice is totally out of sync with current democratic sensitivities, his vision of the new society as a centralised industrial system run by the state is simply irrelevant, etc. Instead of desperately attempting to salvage the authentic Leninist core from the Stalinist alluvium, would it not be more advisable to forget Lenin and return to Marx, searching in his work for the roots of what went wrong in the twentieth-century communist movements?"

"The shock of 1914 was – to put it in Alain Badiou’s terms – a désastre, a catastrophe in which an entire world disappeared: not only the idyllic bourgeois faith in progress, but also the socialist movement that accompanied it. Even Lenin himself lost his footing – there is, in his desperate reaction in What Is to Be Done?, no satisfaction, no ‘I told you so!’ This moment of Verzweiflung, this catastrophe, opened up the site for the Leninist event, for breaking with the evolutionary historicism of the Second International – and Lenin was the only one at the level of this opening, the only one to articulate the Truth of the catastrophe. Born in this moment of despair was the Lenin who, via the detour of a close reading of Hegel’s Logic, was able to discern the unique chance for revolution. Today, the left is in a situation that uncannily resembles the one that gave birth to Leninism, and its task is to repeat Lenin. This does not mean a return to Lenin. To repeat Lenin is to accept that ‘Lenin is dead’, that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously. To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin actually did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, to acknowledge the tension in Lenin between his actions and another dimension, what was 'in Lenin more than Lenin himself'. To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin did, but what he failed to do, his missed opportunities."

"he reference to psychoanalysis is crucial and very precise: in a radical revolution, people not only realize their old (emancipatory, etc.) dreams; rather, they have to reinvent their very modes of dreaming. It is here that the link between the October Revolution and the artistic vanguard acquires all its weight: what they shared was the idea of building a new man, of literally reconstructing it"

"The protracted struggle which dragged on in Egypt was not a conflict of visions, but the conflict between a vision of freedom, the "eternal" Platonic Idea of Freedom, and a blind clinging to power ready to use all means possible—terror, food deprivation, exhaustion, bribery—to crush the will to freedom."

"The implicit lesson of Plato is not that everything is appearance, that it is not possible to draw a clear line of separation between appearance and reality (that would have meant the victory of sophism), but that essence is "appearance as appearance," that essence appears in contrast to appearance within appearance; that the distinction between appearance and essence has to be inscribed into appearance itself. Insofar as the gap between essence and appearance is inherent to appearance, in other words, insofar as essence is nothing but appearance reflected into itself, appearance is appearance against the background of nothing—everything appears ultimately out of nothing …"

"[Tyranny] becomes superfluous when people no longer need the external force of the tyrant to make them renounce their particular interests, but when they become "universal citizens" by directly identifying the core of their being with this universality - in short, people no longer need the external master when they are educated into doing the job of discipline and subordination themselves."

"Let us take social struggle at its most violent: war. What interests Hegel is not struggle as such, but the way the "truth" of the engaged positions emerges through it, namely how the warring parties are "reconciled" through their mutual destruction. The true (spiritual) meaning of war is not honor, victory, defense, etc., but the emergence of absolute negativity (death) as the absolute Master which reminds us of the false stability of our organized, finite lives. War serves to elevate individuals to their "truth" by making them renounce their particular self-interests and identify with the State's universality."

"If the West has its military-industrial complex, we in the ex-Yugoslavia had a poetic-military complex: the post-Yugoslav was was triggered by a mixture of poetic and military components."

"The dead Lenin who does not know that he is dead thus stands for our own obstinate refusal to renounce the grandiose utopian projects and accept the limitations of our situation: there is no big Other, Lenin was mortal and made errors like all others, so it is time for us to let him die, to put to rest this obscene ghost which haunts our political imaginary, and to approach our problems in a non-ideological and pragmatic way. But there is another sense in which Lenin is still alive: he is alive in so far as he embodies what Badiou calls the 'eternal Idea' of universal emancipation, the immortal striving for justice that no insults and catastrophes manage to kill."

"The horror of the Holocaust cannot be represented; but this excess of represented content over its aesthetic representation has to infect the aesthetic form itself. What cannot be described should be inscribed into the artistic form as its uncanny distortion."

"“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 successful than ourselves”"

"There is nothing in Lacan which is not stupid, no exceptions to stupidity, so that what makes him not totally stupid is only the very inconsistency of his stupidity."

"The present book is thus neither The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hegel, nor is it yet another university textbook on Hegel (which would be for morons, of course); it is something like The Imbecile's Guide to Hegel—Hegel for those whose IQ is somewhere close to their bodily temperature (in Celsius), as the insult goes."

"There should be no compromise here: anti-Semitism is not just one-among ideologies; it is ideology as such kat'exohen. It embodies the zero-level (or the purest form) of ideology, providing its elementary coordinates: social antagonist ("class struggle") is mystified and displaced so that its cause is projected onto the external intruder."