Slavoj Zizek

Liberal democracy – as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today’s left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not.

What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I’m a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets – it’s a very sad lesson – by their intervention, saved the myth.

I – and I still consider myself, I’m sorry to tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn’t help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.

I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist. For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good!

Communism will win.

I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born – but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it.

When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.

Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana.

I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.