really alive

from welcome to the desert of the real by slavoj zizek

"when we try to preserve the authentic intimate sphere of privacy against the onslaught of instrumental/objectivized 'alienated' public exchange, it is privacy itself which becomes a totally objectivized 'commodified' sphere."

"today, the only way of breaking out of the constraints of 'alienated' commodification is to invent a new collectivity."

"how authentic zen differs from its western appropriation which reinscribes it into the matrix of 'discovery of one's true Self'. . . the logic of an 'inner journey', brought to the end, confronts us with the void of subjectivity and thus compels the subject to assume his or her full desubjectivization; the paradoxical pascalian conclusion of this radical version of zen is that, since there is no inner substance to religion, the essence of faith is proper decorum, obedience to the ritual as such.  what western buddhism is not ready to accept is thus that the ultimate victim of the 'journey into one's Self' is this Self itself."

"what if we are 'really alive' only if we commit ourselves with an excessive intensity which puts us beyond 'mere life'?  what if, when we focus on mere survival, even if it is qualified as 'having a good time', what we ultimately lose is life itself?"

"what if a hysteric is truly alive in his or her permanent excessive questioning of his or her existence, while an obsessional is the very model of choosing a 'life in death'?  that is to say, is not the ultimate aim of his or her compulsive rituals to prevent the 'thing' from happening - this 'thing' being the excess of life itself?  is not the catastrophe he or she fears the fact that, finally, something will really happen to him or her?"

"what makes life 'worth living' is the very excess of life: the awareness that there is something for which one is ready to risk one's life (we may call this excess 'freedom', 'honor', 'dignity', 'autonomy', etc.).  only when we are ready to take this risk are we really alive."

passions of the real, passions of the semblance

from welcome to the desert of the real by slavoj zizek

"we 'feel free' because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. . . our 'freedoms' themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom."

"this underlying logic, of course, is again that of the forced choice: you're free to decide, on condition that you make the right choice."

"the ultimate and defining moment of the twentieth century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to everyday social reality - the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers of reality."

"on today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant properties: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. . . and the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the colin powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration, that is, as politics without politics, up to today's liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while practices like wife beating remain out of sight. . .)?  Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the hard resistant kernel of the Real - just as decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like real coffee without being real coffee, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being so.  what happens at the end of this process of virtualization, however, is that we begin to experience 'real reality' itself as a virtual entity."

"the same 'derealization' of the horror went on after the WTC collapse: while the number of victims - 3,000 - is repeated all the time, it is surprising how little of the actual carnage we see - no dismembered bodies, no blood, no desperate faces of dying people. . . in clear contrast to reporting on third world catastrophes, where the whole point is to produce a scoop of some gruesome detail: somalis dying of hunger, raped bosnian womyn, men with their throats cut out. these shots are always accompanied by an advance warning that 'some of the images you will see are extremely graphic and may upset children' - a warning which we never heard in the reports on the WTC collapse.  is this not yet further proof of how, even in this tragic moment, the distance which separates Us from Them, from their reality, is maintained: the real horror happens there, not here?"

"the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian despiritualized universe is the dematerialization of 'real life' itself, its reversal into a spectral show."

"when we hear how the attacks were a totally unexpected shock,how the unimaginable Impossible happened, we should recall the other defining catastrophe from  the beginning of the twentieth century, the sinking of the titanic: this, also, was a shock, but the space for it had already been prepared in ideological fantasizing, since the titanic was the symbol of the might of nineteenth-century industrial civilization.  does not the same hold also for these attacks?  not only were the media bombarding us all the time with talk about the terrorist threat; this threat was also obviously libidinally invested - just remember the series of movies from escape from new york to independence day.  that is the rationale of the often-mentioned association of the attacks with hollywood disaster movies: the unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, america got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise."

"there was a series of meeting between white house advisers and senior hollywood executives with the aim of. . . getting the right ideological message across. . . - the ultimate empirical proof that hollywood does in fact function as an 'ideological state apparatus'."

"it is easy to account for the fact that poor people around the world dream about becoming americans - so what do the well-to-do americans, immobolized in their well-being, dream about?  about a global catastrophe that would shatter their lives - why?  this is what psychoanalysis is about: to explain why, in the midst of well-being, we are haunted by nightmarish visions of catastrophes.  this paradox also indicates how we should grasp lacan's notion of 'transversing the fantasy' as the concluding moment of the psychoanalytic treatment.  this notion may seem to fit perfectly the common-sense idea of what psychoanalysis should do: of course it should liberate us from the hold of idiosyncratic fantasies, and enable us to confront reality as it really is!  however, this, precisely, is what lacan does not have in mind - what he aims at is almost the exact opposite.  in our daily existence, we are immersed in 'reality' (structured and supported by the fantasy), and this immersion is disturbed by symptoms which bear witness to the fact that another, repressed, level of our psyche resists this immersion.  to 'traverse the fantasy' therefore, paradoxically, means fully identifying oneself with the fantasy - namely, with the fantasy which structures the excess that resists our immersion in daily reality; or, to quote a succinct formulation by richard boothby: 'traversing the phantasy' thus does not mean that the subject somehow abandons its involvement with fanciful caprices and accommodates itself to a pragmatic 'reality,' but precisely the opposite: the subject is submitted to that effect of the symbolic lack that reveals the limit of everyday reality.  to traverse the phantasy in the lacanian sense is to be more profoundly claimed by the phantasy than ever, in the sense of being brought into an ever more intimate relation with that real core of the phantasy that transcends imaging.  boothby is right to emphasize the janus-like structure of a fantasy: a fantasy is simultaneously pacifying, disarming (providing an imaginary scenario which enables us to endure the abyss of the Other's desire) and shattering, disturbing, inassimilable into our reality."

"precisely because it is real, that is, on account of its traumatic/excessive character, we are unable to integrate it into (what we experience as) our reality, and are therefore compelled to experience it as a nightmarish apparition."

"usually we say that we should not mistake fiction for reality - remember the postmodern doxa according to which 'reality' is a discursive product, a symbolic fiction which we misperceive as a substantial autonomous entity.  the lesson of psychoanalysis here is the opposite one: we should not mistake reality for fiction - we should be able to discern, in what we experience as fiction, the hard kernel of the Real which we are able to sustain only if we fictionalize it.  in short, we should discern which part of reality is 'transfunctionalized' through fantasy, so that, although it is part of reality, it is perceived in a fictional mode.  much more difficult than to denounce/unmask (what appears as) reality as fiction is to recognize the part of fiction in 'real' reality.  (this, of course, brings us back to the old lacanian notion that, while animals can deceive by presenting what is false as true, only humans (entities inhabiting the symbolic space) can deceive by presenting what is true as false.)"

"for lacan, the true object of anxiety is precisely the (over)proximity of the Other's desire."

"traumas we are not ready or able to remember haunt us all the more forcefully.  we should therefore accept the paradox that, in order really to forget an event, we must first summon up the strength to remember it properly. . . that which does not exist, continues to insist, striving towards existence."

"when i miss a crucial ethical opportunity, and fail to make a move that would 'change everything', the very nonexistence of what i should have done will haunt me for ever: although what i did not do does not exist, its spectre continues to insist."

"we should not be afraid to draw a parallel with individual psychic life: just as the awareness of a missed 'private' opportunity (say, the opportunity of engaging in a fulfilling love relationship) often leaves its traces in the guise of 'irrational' anxieties, headaches, and fits of rage, the void of the missed revolutionary chance can explode in 'irrational' fits of destructive rage."

"Power generates its own excess, which it has to annihilate in an operation that has to imitate what it fights."

on our luck

from happiness after september 11 by slavoj zizek in the book welcome to the desert of the real

"happiness is thus- to put it in alain badiou's terms- not a category of truth, but a category of mere being, and as such, confused, indeterminate, inconsistent."

"in a strict lacanian sense of the term, we should thus posit that 'happiness' relies on the subject's inability or unreadiness fully to confront the consequences of its desire: the price of happiness is that the subject remains stuck in the inconsistency of its desire."

"for example, when 'radical' academics demand full rights for immigrants and opening of the borders, are they aware that the direct implementation of this demand would, for obvious reasons, inundate developed western countries with millions of newcomers, thus provoking a violent working-class racist backlash which would then endanger the privileged position of these very academics?  of course they are, but they count on the fact that their demand will not be met - in this way, they can hypocritically retain their clear radical conscience while continuing to enjoy their privileged position."

"the gesture is that of calling the other's bluff, counting on the fact that what the other really fears is that one will full comply with his or her demand."

"knowledge ultimately makes us unhappy. . . jacques lacan claims that the spontaneous attitude of a human being is that of 'i don't want to know about it' - a fundamental resistance against knowing too much."

"that is the enigma of knowledge: how is it possible that the whole psychic economy of a situation changes radically not when the hero directly learns something (some long repressed secret), but when he gets to know that the other (whom he thought ignorant) also knew it all the time, and just pretended not to know in order to keep up appearances."

"what the emphasis on multitude and diversity masks is, of course, the underlying monotony of today's global life. . . what occludes (and thereby sustains) this monotony is the multiplicity of resignifications and displacements to which the basic ideological texture is submitted."

"it is difficult, properly traumatic, for a human animal to accept that his or her life is not just a stupid process of reproduction and pleasure-seeking, but that it is in the service of a truth.  and this is how ideology seems to work today, in our self-proclaimed postideological universe: we perform our symbolic mandates without assuming them and 'taking them seriously'."

"through all these displacements, the same old story is being told.  in short, the true function of these displacements and subversions is precisely to make the traditional story relevant to our 'postmodern' age - and thus to prevent us from replacing it with a new narrative. . . we make fun of our beliefs, while continuing to practice them, that is, to rely on them as the underlying structure of our daily practices. . . when we think we are making fun of the ruling ideology, we are merely strengthening its hold over us."

"spontaneity and the 'let it go' attitude of indulging in excessive freedoms belong to those who have the means to afford it - those who have nothing have only their discipline.  the 'bad' physical discipline, if there is one, is not collective training but, rather, jogging and body-building as part of the subjective economy of the realization of the self's inner potentials - no wonder an obsession with one's body is an almost obligatory part of ex-leftist radicals' passage into the 'maturity' of pragmatic politics."

"the apparently modest relativization of one's own position is the mode of appearance of its very opposite, of privileging one's own position of enunciation.  compare the struggle and pain of the 'fundamentalist' with the serene peace of the liberal democrat who, from his safe subjective position, ironically dismisses every full-fledged engagement, every 'dogmatic' taking sides."

". . .in the unique [russian] expression awos or na awos, which means something like 'on our luck'; it articulates the hope that things will turn out all right when one makes a risky radical gesture without being able to discern all its possible consequences. . . the interesting feature of this expression is that it combines voluntarism, an active attitude of taking risks, with a more fundamental fatalism: one acts, makes a leap, and then one hopes that things will turn out all right."

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'."