A Quote by Slavoj Žižek
In Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.
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Criticism in the universities, I'll have to admit, has entered a phase where I am totally out of sympathy with 95% of what goes on. It's Stalinism without Stalin.
Being a victim doesn't take much. There are built-in excuses for failure. Built-in excuses for being miserable. Built-in excuses for being angry all the time. No reason to trying to be happy; it's not possible. You're a victim. Victim of what? Well, you're a victim of derision. Well, you're a victim of America. You're a victim of America's past, or you're a victim of religion. You're a victim of bigotry, of homophobia, whatever. You're a victim of something. The Democrats got one for you. If you want to be a victim, call 'em up.
Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying 'victim,' especially when you're not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you're not one.
French intellectual life has, in my opinion, been turned into something cheap and meretricious by the 'star' system. It is like Hollywood. Thus we go from one absurdity to another - Stalinism, existentialism. Lacan, Derrida - some of them obscene ( Stalinism), some simply infantile and ridiculous ( Lacan, Derrida). What is striking, however, is the pomposity and self-importance, at each stage.
It's not the possibility of Stalinism in the U.S. that's worrying me, it's the fact that the Stalinist C.P. seems doomed to fail and to bring down with it all the humanitarian tendencies I personally believe in--all the while acting as a mould on which its obverse the fascist mentality is made--and this recent massacre is certainly a sign of Stalinism's weakness not of its strength. None of that has anything to do with Marx's work--but it certainly does influence one's attitude towards a given political party.
The problem is that everybody thinks I play the way I've always played, and that's totally wrong.
The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.
A victim is a victim is a victim. We should stop setting up standards that say we will have one standard of law enforcement for one group of victims but not for another.
For pride, which is the inordinate attribution of goods and values and glories to one's own contingent self, cannot exist where there is no contingent self to which anything can be attributed.
When you're a victim, you automatically have a built-in excuse for failure. When you are a victim, it's always somebody else's fault. When you're a victim, success is not possible. When you are a victim of something, you are acknowledging that you are as far as you're gonna get, and you can't get any further, because there are more powerful forces arrayed against you than the force of yourself against it.
When killings of black by policeman happen, there's the victim, there's the family, there are the police, there are the politicians, and there is the community. Everybody is affected. Everybody has a point of view. We really wanted to dig into that and get to know all these different people that are changed by it.
I love everybody at TNT, and they were totally behind 'Trust Me.' I totally loved that show. I feel like it should have had more life.
For me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. There is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.
When it comes to how neuroscience could help the wider public, the worst thing is when we make advances in, say, mindfulness, and then decide that everybody can potentially think their way to curing themselves or develop their own psycho-neuro-immune mechanisms for boosting cancer defenses.
Everybody potentially can make the claim that we should all be treated fairly.
I think all comedy has victims, really. Even if it's not a victim that appears on camera, usually there's a victim. If it's political comedy, if you're talking about the president or whoever, there's a victim there.
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