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.
Tags: symbolic, real, philosophy, imaginary, ideology, fiction, discourse

Other Quotes by "Slavoj Žižek"

Conservatives are therefore fully justified in legitimizing their opposition to radical knowledge in terms of happiness: ultimately, knowledge makes us unhappy.
Tags: unhappiness, knowledge, happiness, conservativism
Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it. Happiness is for opportunists. So I think that the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle, especially struggle with oneself. If you want to remain happy, just remain stupid. Authentic masters are never happy; happiness is a category of slaves.
Tags: struggle, ourselves, happiness
How do we account for this paradox that the absence of Law universalizes prohibition ... The psychoanalytic name for this obscene injunction for this obscene call, ENJOY, is superego. The problem today is not how to get rid of your inhibitions and to be able to spontaneously enjoy. The problem is how to get rid of this injunction to enjoy.
Tags: psychology, philosophy
€7,500, first-class, everything—and all that for 40 minutes selling them some old stuff.
Tags: public-speaking, philosophy, fortune, fame
This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything. One of the first measures taken by the new Bolshevik government in 1918 was to make public the entire corpus of tsarist secret diplomacy, all the secret agreements, the secret clauses of public agreements etc. There too the target was the entire functioning of the state apparatuses of power.
Tags: wikileaks, political-science, philosophy, paradoxes
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