Quotes from Alenka Zupan?i?

Negativity, lack, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, are perceived more and more as moral faults-worse, as a corruption at the level of our very being or bare life.

Following Nietzsche's arguments concerning the genealogy of the word "good"(and "evil"), one could also say that the main difference between "masters"and the "herd" (as the new masters) is that masters are the ones who "give names" (and can thus say "this is so-and-so") whereas the "herd" fights for the -interpretation- of these names ("this -means- so-and-so"). Yet this interpretation is itself a form of mastery, and is often much more tyrannical than the act of "giving names".

the true choice is between losing it all and creating what we are about to lose: only this could eventually save us, in a profound sense . . . The possible awakening of the bomb is not simply 'let's do all in our power to prevent it before it's too late', but rather 'let's first build this totality (unity, community, freedom) that we are about to lose through the bomb.

If a love encounter is like a good joke, then what is love in its duration and temporality-what is, as we say, a love that lasts?

Jupiter promises us infallible happiness, fortune, a thousand blessings, and a brave son. Isn't this what everybody wants?

Sexuality and sexual difference are absolutely, and irreducibly, linked to the signifying order, yet this does not mean that sexual difference is a symbolic construction. Sex is real because it marks an irreducible limit (contradiction) of the signifying order (and not something beyond or outside this order).

Minus one/plus enjoyment—this is the necessarily distorted structural topology where the subject of the unconscious dwells. This subject is never neuter; it is sexed, since sex(uality) is nothing but a configuring of the signifying minus and of the surplus-enjoyment: a configuring which cannot escape contradiction, the latter being the logical consequence of the one (the Other) that is not there.

The unconscious desire is not the content of the hidden message, it is the active designer of the form that latent thoughts get in a dream. This is why the key in psychoanalysis is not a key to a hidden meaning, but the key that "unlocks" this form itself (makes what has been associated to compose the hidden meaning dissociate). And this is what "the right word" does.

One of the great merits of Meillassoux's book is that it has (re)opened not so much the question of the relationship between philosophy and science as the question of whether they are speaking about the same world.

In short: the common ground shared by psychoanalysis and science is nothing other than the Real in its absolute dimension, but they have different ways of pursuing this Real.

There is no natural need that is absolutely pure, that is to say, devoid of this surplus element which splits it from within. Drive can neither be completely separated from biological, organic needs and functions (since it originates within their realm, it starts off by inhabiting them), nor simply reduced to them.

one of the primary tasks of psychoanalysis is to slowly but thoroughly deactive the path of this satisfaction, to render it useless. To produce sex as absolutely and intrinsically meaningsless, not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning. That is to say: to restore sex in its dimension of the Real.

It is this short circuit that constitutes the peak of comedy: not simply the fact that Big Jim erroneously sees a chicken when he looks at Charlie, but also the fact that, for all his error, he is somehow right-Charlie does look like a chicken.

The death drive names a kind of fundamental or ontological fatigue of life as such. It is the steady undercurrent of life in all its colorful and exuberant forms. It is not the opposite of these forms, but it is present in all of them.

There is no struggle here: life is a circuitous route to death, and conservative instincts are the pavement of this route, they are one with it, indistinguishable from it. They don't "want" anything, they don't "struggle" with death, they simply do their job of making this particular circuitous path to the inanimate operative. Strictly speaking, they work at maintaining this path, and not simply at "maintaining life.

it is not enough that we know how things really stand; in a certain sense, things themselves have to realize how they stand.

It is perhaps not enough to say that there is no essence of femininity; one could go a step further and say that the essence of femininity is to pretend to be a woman. One is a woman if one carries castration as a mask.

comedy and comic satisfaction thrive on things that do not exactly add up. They thrive on these discrepancies as a source of pleasure rather than pain. Yet this by no means implies that comedy is distinguished from tragedy by what one would call today a "positive attitude," "positive thinking," the ability to find something positive and satisfactory even in the worst situations.

The thing (as one) no longer throws its shadow upon another thing; instead, it throws its shadow upon itself, thus becoming, at the same time, the thing and its shadow. When the sun is at its zenith, things are not simply exposed ("naked", as it were); they are, so to speak, dressed in their own shadows.

Antigone emerges as a figure of pure desire precisely because, with her words and actions, she incites in others this tenacious question: What does she want? She states what she wants from the outset, yet there is no one in the play who is not baffled at one point or another by this question: OK, she wants to bury Polyneices, but what does she actually want?

It is not about recentering the subject (via the effect of recognition), but about decentering her radically, producing a subjective split in its purest form. The temporal dimension comes into play at this very juncture.

one of the primary tasks of psychoanalysis is to slowly but thoroughly deactive the path of this satisfaction, to render it useless. To produce sex as absolutely and intrinsically meaningless, not as the ultimate horizon of all humanly produced meaning. That is to say: to restore sex in its dimension of the Real.

The lesson and the imperative of psychoanalysis is not "Let us devote all our attention to the sexual (meaning) as our ultimate horizon"; it is instead a reduction of sex and the sexual (which, in fact, has always been overloaded with meanings and interpretations) to the point of ontological inconsistency, which, as such, is irreducible.