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ff3f145
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We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.
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language
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Slavoj Žižek |
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1aa33a8
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Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things -- they always do. It's that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.
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totalitarianism
stalinism
society
communism
evil
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Slavoj Žižek |
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96611a5
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A German officer visited Picasso in his Paris studio during the Second World War. There he saw Guernica and, shocked at the modernist <> of the painting, asked Picasso: <> Picasso calmly replied: <>
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Slavoj Žižek |
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c7764f6
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Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space--in short, that ..
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freedom
the-other
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Slavoj Žižek |
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9528123
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as soon as we renounce fiction and illusion, we lose reality itself; the moment we subtract fictions from reality, reality itself loses its discursive-logical consistency.
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fiction
philosophy
imaginary
symbolic
real
ideology
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Slavoj Žižek |
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1ad1cf7
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What about animals slaughtered for our consumption? who among us would be able to continue eating pork chops after visiting a factory farm in which pigs are half-blind and cannot even properly walk, but are just fattened to be killed? And what about, say, torture and suffering of millions we know about, but choose to ignore? Imagine the effect of having to watch a snuff movie portraying what goes on thousands of times a day around the world..
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Slavoj Žižek |
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2a92e89
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In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is ful..
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philosophy
toilets
ideology
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Slavoj Žižek |
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df3af0b
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Beyond the fiction of reality, there is the reality of the fiction.
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reality
philosophy
psychology
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Slavoj Žižek |
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29bcdd0
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On the information sheet in a New York hotel, I recently read: 'Dear guest! To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is totally smoke-free. For any infringement of this regulation, you will be charged $200.' The beauty of this formulation, taken literally, is that you are to be punished for refusing to fully enjoy your stay.
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Slavoj Žižek |
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19c9776
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Word is murder of a thing, not only in the elementary sense of implying its absence - by naming a thing, we treat it as absent, as dead, although it is still present - but above all in the sense of its radical dissection: the word 'quarters' the thing, it tears it out of the embedment in its concrete context, it treats its component parts as entities with an autonomous existence: we speak about color, form, shape, etc., as if they possessed..
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Slavoj Žižek |
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9fd53a5
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Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly. The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active", to "participate", to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, "doing something"; academics participate in meaningless "debates," etc.; but the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from it all. Those in ..
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Slavoj Žižek |
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e6622cd
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Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology... we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.
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freedom
language
ideology
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Slavoj Žižek |
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8f7b995
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Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its potential.
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Slavoj Žižek |
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df81322
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Alain Badiou was once seated amongst the public in a room where I was delivering a talk, when his cellphone (which, to add insult to injury, was mine -- I had lent it to him) all of a sudden started to ring. Instead of turning it off, he gently interrupted me and asked me if I could talk more softly, so that he could hear his interlocutor more clearly . . . If this was not an act of true friendship, I do not know what friendship is. So, thi..
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Slavoj Žižek |
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007ee3d
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An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.
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Slavoj Žižek |
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e2c2c7a
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In other words, who dares to strike today,when having the security of a permanent job is itself becoming a privilege?
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Slavoj Žižek |
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f1daa5c
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There is a wonderful expression in Persian, war nam nihadan, which means "to murder somebody, bury his body, then grow flowers over the body to conceal it"
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Slavoj Žižek |
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a00b111
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Ultimately,we hear things because we cannot see everything.
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hear
see
voice
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Slavoj Žižek |
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f431051
|
There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he rolls in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards can find nothing. It is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves...
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Slavoj Žižek |
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ff9ccf7
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The "pursuit of happiness" is such a key element of the "American (ideological) dream" that one tends to forget the contingent origin of this phrase: "We holds these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Where did the somewhat awkward "pursuit of happiness" come from in this famous op..
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slavery
happiness
property
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Slavoj Žižek |
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cbd75df
|
There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the whole human history to date: from prehistoric societies it took primitivism; from the Ancient world it took slavery; from medieval society brutal domination; from capitalism exploitation; and from socialism the name..
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Slavoj Žižek |
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3d9005f
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In contrast to the situation in 1945, the world does not need the US; it is the US that needs the rest of the world
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Slavoj Žižek |
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188c24d
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Populism is ultimately sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry "I don't know what's going on, but I've just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!"
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Slavoj Žižek |
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6bf2e61
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William Butler Yeats's "Second Coming" seems perfectly to render our present predicament: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." This is an excellent description of the current split between anaemic liberals and impassioned fundamentalists. "The best" are no longer able to fully engage, while "the worst" engage in racist, religious, sexist fanaticism. However, are the terrorist fundamentalists, b..
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Slavoj Žižek |
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042ea83
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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 succesfull than ourselves
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philosophy
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Slavoj Žižek |
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6719665
|
A critical analysis of the present global constellation-one which offers no clear solution, no "practical" advice on what to do, and provides no light at the end of the tunnel, since one is well aware that this light might belong to a train crashing towards us-usually meets with reproach: "Do you mean we should do nothing? Just sit and wait?" One should gather the courage to answer: "YES, precisely that!" There are situations when the only ..
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Slavoj Žižek |
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f260c01
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One does not wait for the "ripe" objective circumstances to make a revolution, circumstances become "ripe" through the political struggle itself."
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Slavoj Žižek |
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7b4bad8
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The same philantropists who give millions for AIDS or education in tolerance have ruined the lives of thousands through financial speculation and thus created the conditions for the rise of the very intolerance that is being fought. In the 1960s and '70s it was possible to buy soft-porn postcards of a girl clad in a bikini or wearing an evening gown; however, when one moved the postcard a little bit or looked at it from a slightly different..
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Slavoj Žižek |
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c60fae6
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The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn't know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies. What we have today is a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, but whose unconscious is th..
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Slavoj Žižek |
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194dde1
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The proper way for the woman to test the man's love is thus to "betray" him at a crucial moment in his career"
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Slavoj Žižek |
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23f60ad
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What we are dealing with here is another version of the Lacanian ' ...': if, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship, then, for Marxism proper, there is no 'meta-language' enabling us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint, although--or, rather, --these two levels are inextricably intertwined.
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sex
politics
lacan
marxism
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Slavoj Žižek |
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c70494e
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A friend has to be outside my reach, beyond my grasp. And there can be no friendship with someone whom I am not ready to betray: a friend is someone I can betray with love.
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Slavoj Žižek |
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9d4a325
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We don't really want to get what we think that we want. I am married to a wife and relationship with her are cold and I have a mistress. And all the time I dream oh my god if my wife were to disappear - I'm not a murderer but let us say- that it will open up a new life with the mistress.Then, for some reason, the wife goes away, you lose the mistress. You thought this is all I want, when you have it there, you turn out it was a much more co..
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marriage
people
philosophy
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Slavoj Žižek |
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708c34d
|
L]iberals insist that children should be given the right to remain part of their particular community, but on condition that they are given a choice. But for, say, Amish children to really have a free choice of which way of life to choose, either their parents' life or that of the "English," they would have to be properly informed on all the options, educated in them, and the only way to do what would be to extract them from their embeddedn..
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Slavoj Žižek |
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a85a085
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For Lacan, language is a gift as dangerous to humanity as the horse was to the Trojans: it offers itself to our use free of charge, but once we accept it, it colonizes us.
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Slavoj Žižek |
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d84d415
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O]ne cannot separate violence from the very exist ence of the state (as the apparatus of class domination): from the standpoint of the'subordinated and oppressed, the very existence of a state is a fact of violence (in the same sense in which, for example, Robespierre said, in his justification of the regicide, that one does not have to prove that the king committed any specific crimes, since the very existence of the king is a crime, an of..
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revolution
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Slavoj Žižek |
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cc08796
|
We do not get to vote on who owns what, or on relations in factory and so on, for all this is deemed beyond the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one can actually change things by "extending" democracy to ple's control. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of legal "rights", etcetera: no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, unless this is understood, the solution sought will involve ap..
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political
politics
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Slavoj Žižek |
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c63cad4
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What one should add here is that self-consciousness is itself unconscious: we are not aware of the point of our self-consciousness. If ever there was a critic of the fetishizing effect of fascinating and dazzling "leitmotifs", it is Adorno: in his devastating analysis of Wagner, he tries to demonstrate how Wagnerian leitmotifs serve as fetishized elements of easy recognition and thus constitute a kind of inner-structural commodification of ..
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self-consciousness
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Slavoj Žižek |
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764f294
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human Reason cannot be reduced to the result of evolutionary adaptation; art is not just a heightened procedure of providing sensual pleasures, but a medium of Truth;
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Slavoj Žižek |
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43f5aa5
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Does everything that exists have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or are there things that somehow happen out of nowhere?
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Slavoj Žižek |
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5549b53
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witness the surprise of the average American: 'How is it possible that these people display and practise such a disregard for their own lives?' 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?
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Slavoj Žižek |
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ef5572e
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The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie - the truth lies outside, in what we do.8
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Slavoj Žižek |
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fd397dc
|
when do I actually encounter the Other 'beyond the wall of language', in the rel of his or her being? Not when I am able to describe her, not even when I learn her values, dreams, and so on, but only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance: when I discern in her a tiny detail (a compulsive gesture, a facial expression, a tic) which signals the intensity of the real of jouissance. This encounter with the real is always traumat..
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the-real
lacan
the-other
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Slavoj Žižek |
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4c9c285
|
A dispassionate conceptual development of the typology of violence must by definition ignore its traumatic impact. Yet there is a sense in which a cold analysis of violence somehow reproduces and participates in its horror. A distinction needs to be made, as well, between (factual) truth and truthfulness: what renders a report of a raped woman (or any other narrative of a trauma) truthful is its very factual unreliability, its confusion, it..
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Slavoj Žižek |