Zizek on death drive:

Every attainable object is already a displacement of the impossible-real object of desire which is constitutively lost. … No wonder the Wagnerian heroes want so desperately to die: they want to get rid of this obscene immortal supplement which stands for libido as an organ, for drive at its most radical, i. e. , death drive.

(art by tony dummet)

Zizek on man’s attempts to recreate fantasy in Eyes Wide Shut:

Only a woman can fully fantasise, while a man is condemned to the ultimately futile ‘fantasising about fantasy’. Recall Eyes Wide Shut : it is only Nicole Kidman’s fantasy that truly is a fantasy, while Tom Cruise’s fantasy is a reflexive fake, a desperate attempt to artificially recreate/reach the fantasy, firstly the fantasy of being the object of the passionate love interest of his patient’s daughter; then the fantasy of encountering a kind prostitute who doesn’t even want money from him; then the encounter with the weird owner of the mask rental store who is also a pimp for his juvenile daughter; finally, the big orgy in the suburban villa. This accounts for the strangely subdued, statuesque, ‘impotent’ even, character of the scene of the orgy in which his adventure finds its culmination. 

(art by brodsky)

Zizek on desire as a state of dwelling in mystery:

The Other does not exist as the Guarantor of Truth, as the Other of the Other. … It is in this hole within the substantial Other that the subject must recognize its place: the subject is interior to the substantial Other insofar as it is identified with an obstruction in the Other, with the impossibility of achieving its identity by means of self-closure. The ‘abolition of the object’, in turn, represents the flip-side: it is not a fusion of the subject and the object into a subject-object, but rather a radical shift in the status of the object itself - the object here neither conceals nor fills the hole in the Other. Such is the post-fantasmatic relationship with the object: the object is ‘abolished’, ‘suppressed’, it loses its fascinating aura. That which at first dazzles us with its charm is exposed as a sticky and disgusting remainder 

(picture py vivian maier)

Zizek on difference and gender:

A woman is not complementary to a man but rather embodies his lack (that’s why Lacan can say that a beautiful woman is a perfect incarnation of the man’s castration). The real is defined as a point of the immediate coincidence of the opposite poles. … The real is … the rock upon which every formalization stumbles. … The real cannot be inscribed, but we can inscribe this impossibility itself. We can locate its place: a traumatic place which causes a series of failures. … It is nothing at all, just a void, an emptiness in a symbolic structure, marking some central impossibility. It is in this sense that … the subject as an “answer of the real” is to be understood: we can inscribe, encircle the void place of the subject through the failure of its symbolization, because the subject is nothing but the point of failure of the process of its symbolic representation.

Zizek on the neo-noir femme fatale:

Her strategy is the one of deceiving him by openly telling the truth. The male partner is unable to accept this, and so, he desperately clings to the conviction that, behind the cold manipulative surface, there must be a heart of gold to be saved, a person of warm human feeling, and that her cold manipulative approach is just a kind of defensive strategy.

Zizek on fantasy as a guessing-game about what the Other might want:

The desire staged in fantasy, in my fantasy, is precisely not my own, not mine, but the desire of the Other. Fantasy is a way for the subject to answer the question of what object they are for the Other, in the eyes of the Other, for the Other’s desire. (art by todd williams)

Zizek on what is wrong with Buddhism: 

The Buddhist endeavor to get rid of the illusion (of craving, of phenomenal reality) is, in effect, the endeavor to get rid of the Real of this illusion, the kernel of the Real that accounts for our “stubborn attachment” to the illusion.

Zizek on the illusion of a fully realized sexual relationship where Man and Woman are forming a harmonious whole:

A given element doesn’t fill in the lack of the other. It isn’t complementary to the other, but on the contrary takes the place of the lack of the other, embodies what is lacking to the other. Its positive presence is nothing but the positivation of a lack of its opposite element. The opposites, the poles of the symbolic relation, thus in a way return each to the other its own lack. They are united on the basis of their common lack. A woman is not complementary to a man but rather embodies his lack (that’s why Lacan can say that a beautiful woman is a perfect incarnation of the man’s castration). The real is defined as a point of the immediate coincidence of the opposite poles: each of the poles passes immediately into its opposite; each is already in itself its own opposite. Being in itself, when we try to grasp it “as it is,” in its pure abstraction and indeterminateness, without further specification, reveals itself to be Nothingness.

(art by mona kuhn)

Zizek on being the symptom of someone:

We can consider women as symptoms wandering around in search of something to attach themselves to as symptoms – or even just being satisfied with their role as empty symptoms? One can effectively claim that a woman who withdraws from sexual contact with men is a symptom at its purest, a zero-level symptom – a nun, for example, who, rejecting to be the symptom of a particular man (her sexual partner), posits herself as the symptom of Christ, THE man (ecce homo). … This is what “woman as a symptom of man” means, not that man merely uses a woman to articulate his message – on the contrary, woman is the determining factor: man orients himself towards his symptom, he clings on it to give consistency to his life. 

Zizek on the necessary illusion of being free in choosing who we love:

If I’m directly ordered to love a woman, it is clear that it doesn’t work: in a way love must be free. But if I’m proceeding as if I really have a free choice, if I start to look around and say to myself, “Let’s choose which of these women I will fall in love with,” it’s clear that this also doesn’t work, that it isn’t “real love.” The paradox of love is that it is a free choice, but a choice which never happens in the present, i.e., which is always already done – at a certain moment, I can only state retroactively that I’ve already chosen. Sometimes we feel guilty even for things for which rationally, on the level of our conscious decisions and aims, we are not responsible. His answer is a radical distinction between freedom and consciousness: the basic character of each human being – good or evil – is the result of a choice which was always already made although it never took place in temporary, ordinary, everyday reality. Such a free unconscious choice must be presupposed to account for the sentiment that we are guilty even for things which don’t depend upon our conscious decision.

(art by malcolmson)

Zizek on lost loves:

The passage to “for itself,” to the Notion, involves the loss of existence. Nowhere is this failed encounter more obvious than in a passionate love affair: its “in itself” occurs when I simply yield to the passion, unaware of what is happening to me; afterwards, when the affair is over, it becomes “for itself”, I retroactively become aware of what I had, of what I lost. This awareness of what I lost gives birth to the fantasy of the impossible conjunction of being and knowledge (“if only I could have known how happy I was…”). It is an illusion that, in the past, I actually was happy without knowing it. Happiness by definition comes to be retroactively, by means of the experience of its loss.

(art by louis janmot)

Zizek on the Buddhist claim that reality is just false appearance & doesn’t matter:

Bodhisattva, having reached nirvana, out of compassion (for the sake of the common Good) goes back to the living to teach them achieve nirvana: to arrive at the act proper, one should erase any reference to the Good, and do the act just for the sake of it. But how did nirvana “regress” into getting caught in the wheel of craving in the first place? The only consistent answer is: Bodhisattva’s compassion is correlative to the notion that the “pleasure principle” regulates us when we are caught in the wheel of Illusion. We all strive toward the Good, and misperceive the true nature of the Good: To quote the Dalai Lama, the beginning of wisdom is “to realize that all living beings are equal in not wanting unhappiness and suffering and equal in the right to rid themselves of suffering.” The Freudian drive, however, designates the paradox of “wanting unhappiness,” of finding excessive pleasure in suffering itself. The Buddhist ethical horizon is therefore still that of the Good. Buddhism is a negative of the ethics of the Good: aware that every positive Good is a lure, it fully assumes the Void as the only true Good.

(art by louis janmot)

Zizek on fetish:

Better a periodic visit to a brothel than divorce. The fetish fills out the void of the missing maternal phallus; as the signifier of pure possibility, the phallus is never fully actualized (i. e., it is the empty signifier which, although devoid of any determinate, positive meaning, stands for the potentiality of any possible future meaning), whereas a fetish always claims an actual status. Fetish is an element that fills in the lack of (the maternal) phallus. Phallus qua “signifier of castration” gives body to its own lack of objet a: a pure void which functions as the object­ cause of desire. Objet a is a cause which in itself does not exist. If the Real is the impossible, it is precisely this impossibility which is to be grasped through its effects. It is only to be constructed retroactively, from its effects, as the traumatic point which escapes them.

(art shows steve martin)

Zizek on postmodern fuzziness:

When one directly asks an intellectual: “OK, let’s cut the crap and get down to basics: do you believe in some form of the divine or not?,” the first answer is an embarrassed withdrawal, as if the question is too intimate, too probing; this withdrawal is then usually explained in more “theoretical” terms: “That is the wrong question to ask! It is not simply a matter of believing or not, but, rather, a matter of certain radical experience, of the ability to open oneself to a certain unheard-of dimension, of the way our openness to radical Otherness allows us to adopt a specific ethical stance, to experience a shattering form of enjoyment… .” What  we  are getting today is a kind of “suspended” belief, a belief that can thrive only as not fully (publicly) admitted, as a private obscene secret. Against this attitude, one should insist even more emphatically that the “vulgar” question “Do you really believe or not?” matters—more than ever, perhaps.