Slavoj Zizek — "I'm a pessimist, but I'm an optimistic pessimist. I believe things will go wrong…"
I'm a pessimist, but I'm an optimistic pessimist. I believe things will go wrong, but I'm happy about it.
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More from Slavoj Zizek
"My big fear is that if I act the way I am, people will notice that there is nothing to see. So I have to be active all the time, covering up."
"I hate nature. I am a product of culture."
"The greatest illusion is that we can escape our own history."
"I am a dialectical materialist, which means I believe in contradictions."
"The most dangerous illusion is that we are free."
About Slavoj Zizek (born 1949)
Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist whose Lacanian readings of ideology, film, and pop culture (The Sublime Object of Ideology, 1989) made him the most-cited continental philosopher of the 21st century. Closely associated with Alain Badiou (French Marxist philosophical contemporary) and Judith Butler (post-structuralist peer in gender theory). For an intellectual contrast, see Jordan Peterson, Canadian psychologist and 12 Rules for Life author — The 2019 Žižek-Peterson Toronto debate — billed 'Happiness: Capitalism vs Marxism' — sold out a 3,000-seat hall. The canonical contemporary 'continental Marxist vs Anglo-conservative-psychologist' clash, with diametrically opposed views on the political function of meaning-making.
The standard scholarly entry points to Slavoj Zizek's work: Tony Myers (Edinburgh, cultural theory) — Slavoj Žižek (2003); Glyn Daly (Northampton, political theory) — Conversations with Žižek (2004, with Žižek). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Slavoj Zizek.