Articles by Slavoj Žižek

We found 33 results.


Slavoj Zizek: It’s Naive to Think Bitcoin & NFT Give Us Freedom
Slavoj Žižek | RT - TRANSCEND Media Service, 10 Jan 2022

8 Jan 2022 – In a world where digital control and manipulation have become a norm, many believe that cryptocurrency and Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, enable freedom. But this is not exactly true.

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Vaccinated or Not, We Are ALL Controlled and Manipulated
Slavoj Žižek | RT - TRANSCEND Media Service, 8 Nov 2021

2 Nov 2021 – Those who accept Covid vaccines and those who reject them think of each other as lambs willingly going to the slaughter. Perhaps both are right. But those who buy fake jab certificates are paying the butcher.

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Slavoj Žižek: The True Enemy for Islamists Is Not the West’s Neocolonialism or Military Aggression, but Our ‘Immoral’ Culture
Slavoj Žižek | RT - TRANSCEND Media Service, 23 Aug 2021

20 Aug 2021 – Ayatollah Khomeini once wrote: “We’re not afraid of sanctions. We’re not afraid of military invasion. What frightens us is the invasion of Western immorality.” And it is this fear that fuels the Taliban.

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Assange Turns 50 in Jail–A Reminder of a Western Democracy Paradox He Exposed: Non-Freedom Gives a Sense of Freedom
Slavoj Žižek | RT - TRANSCEND Media Service, 5 Jul 2021

3 Jul 2021 – Today, WikiLeaks co-founder Assange is celebrating his 50th birthday, being held at the Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London as Washington seeks his extradition to the US, where he could be jailed for up to 175 years if found guilty. That reminds us of the dark aspects of the ‘Land of the Free’ and most of Western democracies.

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The Difference between ‘Woke’ and a True Awakening
Slavoj Žižek | RT – TRANSCEND Media Service, 14 Jun 2021

10 Jun 2021 – The supposedly liberal ‘wokeness’ and cancel culture have little to do with awakening to what’s going on in the world and trying to change it – it’s just noise for the sake of noise, while the status-quo is carefully preserved.

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‘We Have to Live till We Die’ Is the Covid-Era Inspiration We All Need
Slavoj Žižek feat. Rammstein | RT – TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 Feb 2021

14 Feb 2021 – Is there a more sobering lesson than being humiliated and reduced to near-impotence by a virus, a primitive self-reproductive mechanism which some biologists don’t even count as a form of life? No wonder that calls for a new ethic of modesty and global solidarity abound. But is this the true lesson to be learned here? What if the problem with living in the shadow of a pandemic is exactly the opposite: not death but life, a strange life that drags on, allowing us neither to live in peace nor to quickly die?

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Slavoj Žižek: The Trouble Is Not with the Jews, but with My Accusers
Slavoj Žižek - RT, 16 Dec 2019

11 Dec 2019 – My latest article for the Independent provoked a wide campaign against me all around the world; over 50 responses, mostly brutal attacks on me, so I wrote a reply. The paper rejected its publication. I am grateful to RT for their readiness to make my reply available to the public. I remain faithful to the title of my comment: I am against anti-Semitism and FOR THIS REASON I express solidarity with Palestinians.

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Today’s Protests Indicate the Scale of Troubles in Our Paradise
Slavoj Zizek - RT, 4 Nov 2019

28 Oct 2019 – Anti-establishment protests are popping up all over the world, in countries with different political systems, and various levels of wealth. We may be entering an era of widespread civil unrest. It is all too easy to claim that these outbursts – Hong Kong, Catalonia, Chile, Ecuador, Lebanon, not to mention the Yellow Vests – cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

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Žižek: Labeling BDS ‘Anti-Semitic’ Desecrates the Holocaust in Order to Legitimize Apartheid
Slavoj Žižek – RT, 27 May 2019

26 May 2019 – Israeli criticism of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign is somewhat justified, but those who won’t equally blast the apartheid politics of the state of Israel have no moral high ground from which to preach.

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Slavoj Žižek: Until the Rich World Thinks ‘One World,’ Migration Will Intensify
Slavoj Žižek - RT, 29 Oct 2018

28 Oct 2018 – Migration is, once again, headline news. Columns of migrants from Honduras are approaching the US border through Mexico; African migrants broke through barriers and entered the small Spanish exclave on the northern tip of Africa; Middle East migrants are trying to enter Croatia. The “rich” world urgently needs to address the reasons behind mass migration, rather than its symptoms. And understand we live in one world.

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Who Has the Right to Bring the Public Bad News?
Slavoj Žižek – RT, 27 Aug 2018

23 Aug 2018 – The web is our most important commons today, and the struggle for its control is THE struggle of our time. And the enemy is the combination of privatized and state-controlled entities, corporations (such as Google and Facebook) and state security agencies (for example, the NSA). WikiLeaks was just the beginning, and our motto here should be a Maoist one: Let a hundred WikiLeaks blossom.

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Assange Works for the People – Now We Need to Save Him
Slavoj Žižek – RT, 16 Apr 2018

2 Apr 2018 – Julian Assange has been silenced again, and the timing is most suspicious. With the Cambridge Analytica story dominating the news, it seems some powerful people have reasons to keep the brave WikiLeaks boss quiet right now.

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As Trump, Bannon, Assange & Oprah Make Headlines: The Empire Strikes Back
Slavoj Žižek - RT, 29 Jan 2018

22 Jan 2018 – The global elite will use any means necessary to prevent the economic radicalization of the left. So “MeToo” and smears distract while tax evasion has become legitimate.

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Ordinary People Left Behind by God & the Free Market
Slavoj Žižek – Russia Today, 18 Sep 2017

16 Sep 2017 – The automatization of production creates a challenge for humanity: what to do with those “left behind” by progress? And this superfluousness also has broader implications across society.

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(Italiano) Ecco Perche’ il TTIP E’ un Assalto Selvaggio alla Democrazie Europee
Slavoj Žižek – La Repubblica, 26 Oct 2015

La caratteristica peculiare del capitalismo “ postmoderno” è la mercificazione delle nostre stesse esperienze: acquistiamo sempre meno oggetti materiali e sempre più esperienze di vita, di sesso, di cibo, di comunicazione, di consumi culturali, di partecipazione a uno stile di vita, ossia, per usare la sintetica definizione di Mark Slouka, «diventiamo consumatori delle nostre stesse vite». Non acquistiamo più oggetti: in definitiva compriamo (il tempo della) la nostra stessa vita.

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Slavoj Žižek: We Can’t Address the EU Refugee Crisis without Confronting Global Capitalism
Slavoj Žižek – In These Times, 21 Sep 2015

The refugees won’t all make it to Norway. Nor does the Norway they seek exist. The hard lesson for the refugees is that ‘there is no Norway,’ even in Norway. They will have to learn to censor their dreams: Instead of chasing them in reality, they should focus on changing reality.

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Slavoj Žižek on Greece: The Courage of Hopelessness
Slavoj Zizek – New Statesman, 27 Jul 2015

The people of Greece are not being asked to swallow many bitter pills in exchange for a realistic plan of economic revival: they are asked to suffer so that others in the European Union can go on dreaming their dream undisturbed.

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Slavoj Žižek on Greece: This Is a Chance for Europe to Awaken
Slavoj Žižek – New Statesman, 13 Jul 2015

The Greeks are correct: Brussels’ denial that this is an ideological question is ideology at its purest – and symptomatic of our whole political process.

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Slavoj Žižek: Whither Zionism?
Slavoj Žižek – In These Times, 9 Mar 2015

In order to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we should not dwell in ancient past—we should forget it. The constitution of the State of Israel was, from Europe’s standpoint, effectively the realized “final solution” of the Jewish problem (getting rid of the Jews) entertained by the Nazis themselves.

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Slavoj Žižek: A Note on Syriza – Indebted Yes, but Not Guilty!
Slavoj Žižek, Potemkin – TRANSCEND Media Service, 2 Mar 2015

The idea one gets from our media is that the Syriza government in Greece is composed of a bunch of populist extremists who advocate “irrational” and “irresponsible” populist measures. It is, on the contrary, EU politics which have been, and continue to be, obviously irrational.

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Slavoj Žižek: The Urgent Necessity of a Syriza Victory in Greece
Slavoj Žižek – In These Times, 26 Jan 2015

Debt is an instrument to control and regulate the debtor, and, as such, it strives for its own expanded reproduction. Only a split from the European Union by Greece can save what is worth saving in the European legacy: democracy, trust in people and egalitarian solidarity.

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Slavoj Žižek on the Charlie Hebdo Massacre: Are the Worst Really Full of Passionate Intensity?
Slavoj Žižek – New Statesman, 19 Jan 2015

How fragile the belief of an Islamist must be if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a weekly satirical newspaper, says the Slovenian philosopher… Those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.

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Leaving Democracy to the Experts
Slavoj Žižek – In These Times, 8 Sep 2014

TISA’s secret trade negotiations quietly restructure our global economy. The key decisions concerning our economy are negotiated in secrecy, out of our sight, with no public debate. And such decisions set the coordinates for the unencumbered rule of capital.

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(Português) Žižek: A contradição principal da nova ordem mundial
Slavoj Žižek – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 May 2014

Conhecer uma sociedade não é apenas saber suas regras explícitas. É também compreender como funciona sua aplicação: saber quando usar e quando violar as normas, saber quando recusar uma escolha oferecida e saber quando fingir que está se fazendo algo por livre escolha quando trata-se efetivamente de uma obrigação.

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(Português) Žižek: O Desejo e o Fascismo Contemporâneos
Slavoj Žižek, Outras Palavras – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Mar 2014

Assange se auto designa um “espião para o povo”: “espiar para o povo” não é uma negação direta da espionagem (o que seria antes agir como um agente duplo, vendendo nossos segredos para o inimigo) mas sua auto-negação, isto é, ele mina o próprio princípio universal da espionagem, o principio do sigilo, já que seu objetivo é tornar públicos os segredos. Funciona portanto de forma semelhante à forma pela qual a “ditadura do proletariado” marxiana deveria ter funcionado (mas raramente o fez, é claro).

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(Português) Zizek: Há mais do que fúria na Bósnia
Slavoj Žižek – The Guardian, 24 Feb 2014

O que as explosões na Bósnia confirmam é que ninguém jamais conseguirá superar paixões étnicas impondo a elas uma agenda liberal: o que uniu os manifestantes foi uma mesma radical exigência de justiça. O passo seguinte e mais difícil será organizar os protestos num novo movimento social que ignore as divisões étnicas; e organizar novos protestos.

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(Português) Problemas no Paraíso
Slavoj Žižek, Boitempo – TRANSCEND Media Service, 15 Jul 2013

Problemas no Inferno parecem compreensíveis – sabemos por que as pessoas estão protestando na Grécia ou na Espanha, mas por que é que há problemas no Paraíso, em países prósperos ou que, ao menos, passam por um período de rápido desenvolvimento, como a Turquia, a Suécia e o Brasil?

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Why the Free Market Fundamentalists Think 2013 Will Be the Best Year Ever
Slavoj Žižek – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Mar 2013

As communists once did, today’s capitalists blame any failures on their system being ‘impurely’ applied. This is how today’s apologists for the market, in an unheard-of ideological kidnapping, explain the crisis of 2008: it was not the failure of the free market that caused it, but the excessive state regulation; the fact that our market economy was not a true one, but was instead in the clutches of the welfare state.

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(Português) Por Que os Fundamentalistas de Livre Mercado Acreditam Que 2013 Será o Melhor Ano de Todos
Slavoj Žižek – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Mar 2013

É assim que os atuais apologistas do mercado, em um sequestro ideológico sem precedentes, explicam a crise de 2008: não foi o fracasso do livre mercado que a provocou, mas sim a excessiva regulação estatal; o fato de que nossa economia de mercado não foi um verdadeiro Estado de bem-estar social, mas esteve, em vez disso, nas garras desse Estado.

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Save Us from the Saviours
Slavoj Žižek, London Review of Books – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Jun 2012

Europe and the Greeks – In his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is between heresy and non-belief – i.e., when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split. This is the position in Europe today. Only a new ‘heresy’ – represented at this moment by Syriza – can save what is worth saving of the European legacy.

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(Portuguese) Democracia, o Novo Fantasma dos Mercados
Slavoj Žižek, London Review of Books – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Jun 2012

Num artigo publicado na London Review of Books, o filósofo esloveno sustenta que “só uma nova ‘heresia’ – representada hoje pela Syriza – pode salvar o que valha a pena do legado europeu: a democracia, a confiança nas pessoas, a solidariedade igualitária”. Recordamos que o Manifesto de Solidariedade com a Grécia continua a receber adesões.

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The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie
Slavoj Žižek – London Review of Books, 20 Feb 2012

The category of the unemployed also includes, as Jameson notes, ‘those populations who have, as it were, “dropped out of history”: so-called failed states (Congo, Somalia), victims of famine or ecological disaster, those trapped by pseudo-archaic ‘ethnic hatreds’, objects of philanthropy and NGOs or targets of the war on terror. The category of the unemployed has thus expanded to encompass vast ranges of people, from the temporarily unemployed, the no longer employable and permanently unemployed, to the inhabitants of ghettos and slums, and finally to the whole populations and states excluded from the global capitalist process, like the blank spaces on ancient maps.

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Occupy first. Demands come later.
Slavoj Žižek – The Guardian, 7 Nov 2011

Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

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