200 definitions
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Slavoj Zizek: top 200 quotes
200 definitions
Hermeneutics (n.) asks not 'what is x' but 'what does it mean when you use the word x'; that asks not what is truth, but what does it mean when you use the word truth.
Hermeneutics (n.) is a temptation (which should be avoided) to make meaning out of everything, even the holocaust.
Love (n.) is whatever you can still betray.
Love (n.) is a way to come to terms with the traumatic drive and to gentrify it.
Love (n.) is giving something one doesn't have to someone who doesn't want it. Being loved is having thrown in one's face the gap between what I am and that unfathomable thing in me that is loved, and which I have no control over.
to Love (n.) is to privilege a finite temporal object over everything else.
Being (n.) is incomplete. It is never all but always non-all. Reality contains a blind-spot which indicates my inclusion in it.
The Philosopher (n.) asks not 'what is x' but 'what does it mean when you use the word x'. . Not what is truth, but what does it mean when you use the word truth.
The Philosopher (n.) is appreciated to the extent that a reader recognizes that philosopher's concepts all around in one's daily experience.
The Philosopher (n.) seeks to discern the hidden political process that sustains all these 'non' or 'pre'-political relationship.
The Philosopher (n.) seeks to make one aware of the disturbing thing he knew all along.
The Philosopher's (n.) measure of love is seen in seeing his concepts recognized all around by people in their daily experience.
Reading (n.) is an act whereby one can only betray an author by remaining faithful to him.
The Subject (n.) is he who is not able to assume the very core of his or her inner experience.
The Subject (n.) is a basic constitutive void that drives subjectivation but which cannot ultimately be filled out by it. It is simultaneously the lack and the leftover in all forms of subjectivation.
The Subject (n.) is a legal fiction whose function is to create an agent who can be blamed for unacceptable acts.
The Subject (n.) is a paradoxical entity which exist only as ex-sisting, as standing outside itself in ontological openness.
The Subject (n.) is, for the deconstructionist, a legal fiction whose function is to create an agent who can be blamed for unacceptable acts thus obfuscating the need for a closer analysis of the concrete social circumstances that give rise to phenomena perceived as deplorable.
The Subject (n.) is, in a de-fetishized reality, a gap or darkness without the fantasmatic content of 'inner life' that we suppose to shine through it. The difficult thing is to see reality in its pre-ontological status, as not fully constituted, to see the nothing where there is nothing to see.
A Subject (n.) is literally a hole, gap, spot of unfinished reality in the positive order of being and we in fact de-subjectivize people, falsely filling in the void, rendering them whole as a 'person' by way of projecting onto the darkness the imaginary wealth of personality.
The Subject (n.) is not simply an effect but also the remainder, which eludes knowledge-power, the excess that resist inclusion.
The Subject (n.) is not, pace foucault, simply the result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power. It is what the discourse itself produces as the foreign body in its very heart.
The Subject (n.) is that which, in modernism took shape against a limit that impeded the subject's self expression. In postmodernism, the very limit is the subject.
The Subject (n.) is, under the standard view, that of phenomenal experience, that is, the idea that 'no matter what unknown mechanisms govern my acts, perceptions or thoughts, nobody can take away from me the fact that I feel here and now.
Structuralism (n.) is wrongheaded in that, while its basic gesture is to reduce the imaginary richness to a formal network of symbolic relations, it misses the fact that this formal structure is itself tied by an umbilical cord to some radical contingent material element which, in its pure particularity, 'is' the structure, embodies it.
Climate change (n.) is not undermining capitalism. Far from it. The forthcoming ecological disasters will serve as its greatest boost.
Alienation (n.) is a necessity as the very condition of the symbolic order.
Biopolitics (n.) is expert knowledge which deals not with subjects, but with individuals reduced to bare life.