Slavoj Žižek on Art

"Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire."

"A spectre is haunting Western academia , the spectre of the Cartesian subject."

"Although the "ruling class"disagrees with the populists' moral agenda it tolerates the "moral war"as a means of keeping the lower classes in check, that is, it enables the latter to articulate their fury without disturbing the economic status quo."

"The horror of the Holocaust cannot be represented; but this excess of represented content over its aesthetic representation has to infect the aesthetic form itself.What cannot be described should be inscribed into the artistic form as its uncanny distortion."

"What is really disturbing about The Name of the Rose, however, is the underlying belief in the liberating, anti-totalitarain force of laughter, of ironic distance. Our thesis here is almost the exact opposite of the underlying premise of Eco's novel: in contemporary socities, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Perhaps the greatest danger for totalitarianism is people who take ideology seriously."

"he reference to psychoanalysis is crucial and very precise: in a radical revolution, people not only realize their old dreams; rather, they have to reinvent their very modes of dreaming. It is here that the link between the October Revolution and the artistic vanguard acquires all its weight: what they shared was the idea of building a new man, of literally reconstructing it"