Posted on: April 19th, 2007 zizek: documentary
Slajov Zizek is at his best when he comments on late capitalism and the perverse and socially constructed nature of our desires.
"How do we account for the paradox that the absence of Law universalizes prohibition? There is only one possible explanation: enjoyment itself, which we experience as "transgression," is in its innermost status something imposed, ordered. When we enjoy, we never do it spontaneously; we always follow a certain injunction." — from "For they Know Not What they Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor."
Commenting on this universal prohibition (beer without alchohol, dessert with no fat, coffee with no caffeine, etc.) he reverses Dostoevski: "If God exists, 
then all things are prohibited." — from the documentary Zizek!
"… if Freud in his theory, in its traditional configuration, was appropriate to explain the standard capitalism which relied on some kind of traditional ethic of sexual control, etc., then Lacan is perfect to explain the paradoxes of permissive late capitalism." — from the documentary Zizek!
“… capitalism, which can survive only by incessanlty revolutionizing its own material conditions, ceases to exist if it stays the same, if it achieves an internal balance. This, then, is the homology between surplus-value: the “cause which sets in motion the capitalist process of production, and surplus-enjoyment, the object-cause of desire.” –from The Sublime Object of Ideology
