I've never heard a single person, since your death, tell your life story starting at the beginning. Your suicide has become the foundational act...
You don't make me sad, but solemn . . . I take advantage on your behalf of things you can no longer experience. Dead, you make me more alive...
You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm . . . As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you.
You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void... Your suicide was the most important thing you ever said.
Thus ends the novice's first day. The following days will be spent thus. To begin with he does not grasp. Novices a little more senior than he sometimes try to explain, to tell him what goes on, how things work, what he must do and what he mustn't do. But usually they can't do it. How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something he can rid his mind of. How can you explain that this is life, real life, this is what there'll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it's pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else, that it's not even worth your time trying to hide it, or to cloak it, it's not even worth your time pretending to believe there must be something behind it, or beneath it, or above it? That's what there is, and that's all... wherever you turn your eyes, that's what you will see, you will not see anything else, and that is the only thing that will turn out to be true.
There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim, let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquillity of the evening or at the feast at midnight when he is now filled with wine. Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut off from the living but shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.
However peremptory one may be in one’s admiration, one must remain modest in denigration. We must not make virtue of ignorance, in other words, or misunderstanding, or the inability to be charmed or to love (now there was a thought that did me proud, I told myself, hurrying past all that crap as fast as I could).
Whether or not Marx’s vision of communism is “the inherent capitalist fantasy,” Žižek’s vision—which apart from rejecting earlier conceptions lacks any definite content—is well adapted to an economy based on the continuous production of novel commodities and experiences, each supposed to be different from any that has gone before. With the prevailing capitalist order aware that it is in trouble but unable to conceive of practicable alternatives, Žižek’s formless radicalism is ideally suited to a culture transfixed by the spectacle of its own fragility. That there should be this isomorphism between Žižek’s thinking and contemporary capitalism is not surprising. After all, it is only an economy of the kind that exists today that could produce a thinker such as Žižek. The role of global public intellectual Žižek performs has emerged along with a media apparatus and a culture of celebrity that are integral to the current model of capitalist expansion.
In a stupendous feat of intellectual overproduction Žižek has created a fantasmatic critique of the present order, a critique that claims to repudiate practically everything that currently exists and in some sense actually does, but that at the same time reproduces the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he perceives in the operations of capitalism. Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek’s work—nicely illustrating the principles of paraconsistent logic—amounts in the end to less than nothing.
Like every obstacle in the way of possessing something... poverty, more generous than opulence, gives women far more than the clothes they cannot afford to buy: the desire for those clothes, which creates a genuine, detailed, thorough knowledge of them.
We walked up and down the streets of this little square of the city, which didn't lack charm, even importance. Glum, hands in pockets, he dragged his feet alongside of me through streets lined with hundred-year-old cypresses, a grumpy, morose expression on his face at all times... His disinterest, it seemed, could only be rivalled by my own indifference.
