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Book: The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously
Quotes of Book: The Courage of Hopelessness:
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  1. Slavoj Žižek _ The Courage of Hopelessness:

    if Western universal values are false, is it enough to oppose them with a particular way of life like China's Confucian 'mainstream ideology'? Don't we need a different universalism, a different project of universal emancipation? The ultimate irony here is that 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' effectively means socialism with a market economy {with capitalist characteristics}, i.e., a socialism that fully integrates China into the global market. The universality of global capitalism is left intact – it is silently accepted as the only possible frame, and the project of Confucian harmony is mobilized only in order to keep under control the antagonisms that come from global capitalist dynamics.
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  2. Slavoj Žižek _ The Courage of Hopelessness:

    there is nothing arrogant about mentioning ordinary people's material concerns: the poor have the right to do it, and to talk about a readiness for great sacrifices, or suffering 'whatever the price', is as a rule the ideology of the privileged, who are quite content to let the people suffer for them.
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  3. Slavoj Žižek _ The Courage of Hopelessness:

    the immigrants who secure rights thanks to the anti-racist anti-colonial struggle might be securing the right to free capitalist enterprise, refusing to see, refusing to 'open your eyes', as the angry black yelled at the post-colonial immigrant. This right to free enterprise is another way to capital accumulation powered by the post-colonial entrepreneur: it produces 'unfree labour' and racialized class relations in the name of challenging the colonial rule of difference {…} There is a closet Ayn Randian class position underpinning the anti-racism of hyperbolic anti-colonialists – it is then not difficult to see that the non-modern, radical alterity upon which the anti-colonial is premised now stands for the capitalist universal.
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  4. Slavoj Žižek _ The Courage of Hopelessness:

    The space of difference became now something exclusively cultural. In order for us to perceive political differences and divisions and to recognize them as such, they should first be translated into the language of culture and declare themselves as cultural identities {…} Culture thus became the ultimate horizon of historical experience.
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  5. Slavoj Žižek _ The Courage of Hopelessness:

    Two mutually exclusive readings of IoT impose themselves: IoT as the domain of radical emancipation, a unique chance to combine freedom and collaboration in which, to paraphrase Juliet's definition of love from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, 'The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite,' versus IoT as a complete submersion into the divine digital Other, where I am deprived of my freedom of agency.
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  6. Slavoj Žižek _ The Courage of Hopelessness:

    capitalism is for Karatani not a 'pure' reign of B, but a triad {or, rather, a Borromean knot} of nation–state–capital: nation as the form of communal solidarity, state as the form of direct domination, and capital as the form of economic exchange; all three of them are necessary for the reproduction of the capitalist society.
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  7. Slavoj Žižek _ The Courage of Hopelessness:

    What this means is that we should reject not only all manifestations of 'alternative modernity' {which amount to a 'capitalism without capitalism', without its destructive aspect}, but also all attempts to rely on particular traditional life-worlds {local cultures} as potential 'sites of resistance' against global capitalism. The only path to freedom leads through the zero-point of the brutal loss of roots, i.e., the bringing to an end the disintegration of traditional ties set in motion by capitalism. When capitalism relies on traditional cultural roots it tries to contain its own destructive force."
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  8. Slavoj Žižek _ The Courage of Hopelessness:

    Another blatant case of regress as part of the capitalist progress is the enormous rise of precarious work. Precarious work deprives workers of a whole series of rights that, till recently, were taken as self-evident in any country which perceived itself as a welfare state: precarious workers have to take care themselves of their health insurance and retirement options; there is no paid leave; the future becomes much more uncertain. Precarious work also generates an antagonism within the working class, between permanently employed and precarious workers {trade unions tend to privilege permanent workers; it is very difficult for precarious workers even to organize themselves into a union or to establish other forms of collective self-organization}. One would have expected that this increasing exploitation would also strengthen workers' resistance, but it renders resistance even more difficult, and the main reason for this is ideological: precarious work is presented {and up to a point even effectively experienced} as a new form of freedom – I am no longer just a cog in a complex enterprise but an entrepreneur-of-the-self, I am a boss of myself who freely manages my employment, free to choose new options, to explore different aspects of my creative potential, to choose my priorities"
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