chapter two: reappropriations

all quotes from welcome to the desert of the real by slavoj zizek


"it is the awareness that we live in an insulated artificial universe which generates the notion that some ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total destruction."

"money fetishism will culminate with the passage to its electronic form. . . the debt is inscribed somewhere in virtual digital space. . . does not the same also hold for warfare?"

"we are entering a new age of paranoiac warfare in which the greatest task will be to identify the enemy and his weapons. . . and is not the obverse of this paranoiac omnipresence of the invisible war its desubstantialization?"

"a war experienced by its participants as a video game. . . we, ordinary citizens, are totally dependent on the authorities for information about what is going on: we see and hear nothing; all we know comes from the official media."

"is not the obverse of this surprise the rather sad fact that we, in first world countries, find it more and more difficult even to imagine a public or universal cause for which we would be ready to sacrifice our life?"

"if we look more closely, what is this 'clash of civilizations' actually about?  are not all real-life 'clashes' clearly related to global capitalism?"

"this 'perverted' position of the truly 'fundamentalist' conservative arab regimes is the key to the (often comical) conundrums of american politics in the middle east: they stand for the point at which the usa is forced explicitly to acknowledge the primacy of economy over democracy"

"the fact that global capitalism is a totality means that it is the dialectical unity of itself and of its other, off the forces which resist it on 'fundamentalist' ideological grounds."

"'i do not believe that anyone is politically guiltless.' [-jaques derrida] this self-relating, this inclusion of oneself in the picture, is the only true 'infinite justice'."