Slavoj Zizek Quote
Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly. The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to be active, to participate, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, doing something; academics participate in meaningless debates, etc.; but the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from it all. Those in power often prefer even critical participation or a critical dialogue to silence, since to engage us in such a dialogue ensures that our ominous passivity is broken. The Bartlebian act I propose is violent precisely insofar as it entails ceasing this obsessive activity-in it, violence and non-violence overlap (non-violence appears as the highest violence), likewise activity and inactivity (the most radical thing is to do nothing).
Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly. The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to be active, to participate, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, doing something; academics participate in meaningless debates, etc.; but the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from it all. Those in power often prefer even critical participation or a critical dialogue to silence, since to engage us in such a dialogue ensures that our ominous passivity is broken. The Bartlebian act I propose is violent precisely insofar as it entails ceasing this obsessive activity-in it, violence and non-violence overlap (non-violence appears as the highest violence), likewise activity and inactivity (the most radical thing is to do nothing).
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About Slavoj Zizek
He is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, visiting professor at New York University and a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Department of Philosophy. He primarily works on continental philosophy (particularly Hegelianism, psychoanalysis and Marxism) and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.
Žižek is the most famous associate of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, a group of Slovenian academics working on German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology critique, and media criticism. His breakthrough work was 1989's The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first book in English, which was decisive in the introduction of the Ljubljana School's thought to English-speaking audiences. He has written over 50 books in multiple languages and speaks Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, English, German, and French. The idiosyncratic style of his public appearances, frequent magazine op-eds, and academic works, characterised by the use of obscene jokes and pop cultural examples, as well as politically incorrect provocations, have gained him fame, controversy and criticism both in and outside academia.