Slavoj Zizek Quote
If Substance is Life, is the Subject not Death? Insofar as, for Hegel, the basic feature of pre-subjective Life is the spurious infinity of the eternal reproduction of the life substance through the incessant movement of the generation and corruption of its elements—that is, the spurious infinity of a repetition without progress—the ultimate irony we encounter here is that Freud, who called this excess of death over life the death drive, conceived it precisely as repetition, as a compulsion to repeat.
Slavoj Zizek
If Substance is Life, is the Subject not Death? Insofar as, for Hegel, the basic feature of pre-subjective Life is the spurious infinity of the eternal reproduction of the life substance through the incessant movement of the generation and corruption of its elements—that is, the spurious infinity of a repetition without progress—the ultimate irony we encounter here is that Freud, who called this excess of death over life the death drive, conceived it precisely as repetition, as a compulsion to repeat.
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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.