Top 14 Quotes & Sayings by Renata Salecl

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a philosopher Renata Salecl.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Renata Salecl is a Slovene philosopher, sociologist and legal theorist. She is a senior researcher at the Institute of Criminology, Faculty of Law at the University of Ljubljana, and holds a professorship at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has been a visiting professor at London School of Economics, lecturing on the topic of emotions and law. Every year she lectures at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, on Psychoanalysis and Law, and she has also been teaching courses on neuroscience and law. Since 2012 she has been visiting professor at the Department of Social Science, Heath and Medicine at King's College London. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages. In 2017, she was elected as a member of the Slovene Academy of Science.

Philosopher | Born: 1962

Source: Wikipedia

We aren't really the victims. After all, we created the system ourselves and as long as we keep consuming, it will continue to exist. Ultimately, capitalism only mirrors human nature.

Renata Salecl

A friend, who's a psychologist, told me about a patient once: a woman who was well educated, had a good job, a house and a loving husband. "I did everything right in my life," said the woman. "But I'm still not happy." She never did what she herself wanted, but what she believed society expected from her.

Renata Salecl

One of the greatest gains of capitalism is that even the proletarian slave feels like a master. He believes he has the power to change his life. We are propelled by the ideology of the self-made man: we work more, we consume more and in the end we consume ourselves. The consequences are burnout, bulimia and other lifestyle diseases.

Renata Salecl

When I speak about the "tyranny of choice," I mean an ideology that originates in the era of post-industrial capitalism. It began with the American Dream - the idea of the self-made man, who works his way up from rags to riches. By and by, this career concept developed into a universal life philosophy. Today we believe we should be able to choose everything: the way we live, the way we look, even when it comes to the coffee we buy, we constantly need to weigh our decision. That is extremely unhealthy.

Renata Salecl

I do have the power. I can decide for myself what I want, even if the thought stresses me out.

Renata Salecl

We constantly feel stressed, overwhelmed and guilty.It's our own fault if we're unhappy. It means we made a bad decision.

Renata Salecl

Every time we decide for something, we lose something else. Buying a car is a great example. A lot of people not only read ratings before they buy their car but they continue afterwards - to make sure they really made the right choice.

Renata Salecl

The position of the hysterical subject is that he or she always guesses what is behind the curtain, that is why such a subject usually ends up [...] giving up on love.

Renata Salecl

I don't criticize political or electoral freedom, but capitalism's perversion of the concept: the illusion that I hold the power over my own life.

Renata Salecl

Sigmund Freud already discovered that suffering gives us pleasure - in a strange masochistic way. The tyranny of choice exploits that weakness. Consumer culture exhausts us. We suffer. We destroy ourselves. And we just can't stop.

Renata Salecl

Freud also said we choose our own neuroses. Capitalism is the neurosis of humanity.

Renata Salecl

We still can't control the consequences our choices will bring. Not only do we want freedom of choice, but we also want a guarantee that whatever we choose will be exactly as we envisioned it.

Renata Salecl

We can live a more relaxed life. We can accept that our decisions aren't rational, that we are always conditioned by society; that we lose something every time we choose something else, and that we can't truly control the consequences of our decisions.

Renata Salecl

Love emerges at the point of a lacking word, and one offers one's being to fill the lack.

Renata Salecl

Top 14 Quotes & Sayings by Renata Salecl

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