Heaven in Disorder
Slavoj Žižek
Top 10 Best Quotes
“One often hears that today’s cultural war is fought between traditionalists who believe in a firm set of values and postmodern relativists who consider ethical rules, sexual identities, and so on as a result of contingent power games. But is this really the case? The ultimate postmodernists today are conservatives themselves. Once traditional authority loses its substantial power, it is not possible to return to it—all such returns today are a postmodern fake. Does Trump enact traditional values? No, his conservativism is a postmodern performance, a gigantic ego trip. Playing with “traditional values,” mixing references to tradition with open obscenities, Trump is the ultimate postmodern president, while Sanders is an old-fashioned moralist.”
“Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that if you are attacked for the same text by both sides in a political conflict, this is one of the few reliable signs that you are on the right path.”
“workers’ struggle and feminist struggle obey different logics.”
“workers don’t protest when they live in poverty; they protest when they experience their poverty as an injustice for which the ruling class as well as the state are responsible.”
“why target “rigid forms of individuality”? Is the problem today not the opposite one: the prevalence of over-flexible forms of individuality ready to accommodate to ever new situations, living under permanent pressure to “reinvent” themselves again and again, experiencing every stable form as “oppressive”? Plus is it not that the pandemic is so traumatic precisely because it deprives us of fixed and reliable daily rituals?”
“why people also rebel in liberal democracies: they don’t rebel against freedom, they rebel against what their daily experience tells them—that networked democracy is in some sense even more oppressive than networked authoritarianism.”
“where the chaotic popular substance brews, the well-organized subject should impose order and direction. But today we should add another spin to this formula and move from subject back to substance—to a different substance created by the subject, to a new social order in which we can dwell with trust and pursue our lives.”
“we should engage in the difficult and painful process of constructing a new normality. This construction is not a medical or economic problem, it is a profoundly political one: we are compelled to invent anew our entire social life.”
“this not-knowing not only concerns the pandemic itself, but even more its economic, social, and psychic consequences. It is not simply that we don’t know what is going on, but that we know that we don’t know, and this not-knowing is itself a social fact, inscribed into the ways our institutions act.”
“the ultimate proof that the ecological apocalypse has already happened is that it has already been renormalized.”
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