Slavoj Zizek Quote
[E]galitarian political 'extremism' or 'excessive radicalism' should always be read as a phenomenon of ideologico-political displacement: as an index of its opposite, of a limitation, of a refusal actually to 'go to the end.' What was the Jacobins' recourse to radical 'terror' if not a kind of hysterical acting-out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the very fundamentals of economic order (private property, and so on)? And does the same not go even for the so-called 'excesses' of Political Correctness? Do they also not display a retreat from disturbing the systemic (economic, etc.) causes of racism and sexism?
Slavoj Zizek
[E]galitarian political 'extremism' or 'excessive radicalism' should always be read as a phenomenon of ideologico-political displacement: as an index of its opposite, of a limitation, of a refusal actually to 'go to the end.' What was the Jacobins' recourse to radical 'terror' if not a kind of hysterical acting-out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the very fundamentals of economic order (private property, and so on)? And does the same not go even for the so-called 'excesses' of Political Correctness? Do they also not display a retreat from disturbing the systemic (economic, etc.) causes of racism and sexism?
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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.