First as Tragedy, Then as Farce - Zizek Quotes

On the problem of trying to fix capitalism within the model itself:

“… those who preach the need for a return from financial speculation to the “real economy” of producing goods to satisfy real people’s needs, miss the very point of capitalism: self-propelling and self-augmenting financial circulation is its only dimension of the real, in contrast to the reality of production. This ambiguity was made clear in the recent meltdown when we were simultaneously bombarded by calls for a return to the “real economy” and by reminders that financial circulation, a sound financial system, is the lifeblood of our economies. What strange lifeblood is this which is not part of the “real economy”? Is the “real economy” in itself like a bloodless corpse? The populist slogan “Save Main Street, not Wall Street!” is this totally misleading, a form of ideology at its purest: it overlooks the fact that what keeps Main Street going under capitalism is Wall Street!” - p. 14-15

______________

Comparison between treatment for General Motors and the banks:

“An exemplary case of the way the economic collapse is already being used in the ideologico-political struggle concerns the conflict over what to do with General Motors - should the state allows its bankruptcy or not? Since GM is one of those institutions which embodies the American dream, its bakruptcy was long considered unthinkable… (Zizek talks a bit about nyt article and sums it up in next sentence:) In other words, bankruptcy should be used to break the backbone of one of the last strong unions in the United States, leaving thousands with lower wages and thousands of others with lower retirement incomes. Note again the contrast with the urgent need to save the big banks: in the case of GM, where the survival of tens of thousands of active and retired workers is at stake, there is, of course, no emergency, but on the contrary, an opportunity to allow the free market to operate with brutal force…. This is how the impossible becomes possible: what was hitherto considered unthinkable within the horizon of the established standards of decent working conditions now becomes acceptable.” - p. 20-21

______________

An important paradox that I wish more people would come to realize:

“…What Miller ignores is how the very state regulations he so ferociously opposes are enacted on behalf of the protection of individuals’ autonomy and freedom: he is thus fighting the consequences of the very ideology on which he relies. The paradox is that, in today’s digitalized society where not only the state but also big companies are able to penetrate and control individual lives to an unheard-of extent, state regulation is needed in order to maintain the very autonomy it is supposed to endanger.” p. 32

______________

The importance of thinking through the problem instead of being reactive:

“Immanuel Kant countered the conservative motto “Don’t think, obey!” not with the injunction “Don’t obey, think!” but rather “Obey, but think!” When we are transfixed by events such as the bail-out plan, we should bear in mind that since this is actually a form of blackmail we must resist the populist temptation to act out our anger and thus wound ourselves. Instead of such impotent acting-out, we should control our fury and transform it into an icy determination to think - to think things through in a really radical way, and to ask what kind of a society it is that renders such blackmail possible.” p. 17


----


“Over the last several months, public figures from the Pope downwards have bombarded us with injunctions to fight against the culture of excessive greed and consumption. This disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation if there ever was one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated into the matter of personal sin, a private psychological propensity.” - p. 37

—--

“The first lesson of psychoanalysis here is that this “richness of inner life” is fundamentally fake: it is a screen, a false distance, whose function is, as it were, to save my appearance, to render palpable (accessible to my imaginary narcissism) my true social-symbolic identity. One of the ways to practice the critique of ideology is therefore to invent stategies for unmasking this hypocrisy of the “inner life” and its “sincere” emotions. The experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is thus a lie - the truth lies rather outside, in what we do.” - p. 40