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Famous Alenka Zupančič Quotes

“In relation to [ethics as a pursuit of desire], we should mention yet another version of this 'path of passivity', which consists in trying to extort from the Other the 'right answer' . Here, the subject wants the Other to choose for him. For such a subject, the Other always appears in the form of some other person. One could say that this subject aims at elevating some small other to the rank of the (big) Other. The subject spends his life imposing choices upon others, reminding them that they are free individuals who must know what they really want. To take an example: in the case of a love affair that does not suit him any more, such a subject will never break it up, he will delegate this decision to the other. He will play the honest one, he will admit that he is cheating, that he is indeed weak and that apparently he is not up to a real relationship. He will tell the other: 'There, these are the facts, this is how I am, I'm laying myself bare before you - what more can I do? - and now it's your turn to make a decision, to make your choice. ' And if this other decides to leave, she leaves precisely as the (big) Other. We might even say that all the activity of such a subject is leading towards this scene of a miraculous metamorphosis of the other into the Other (who knows what she wants or does not want, and acts accordingly).”

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Book:Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan
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“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?”

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Book:Let Them Rot: Antigone's Parallax
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“The other concept of truth in Lacan situates the truth, so to speak, in the midst of reality. Here, the discontinuities, ruptures, standstills, and crises of reality are places or points of its truth. The truth is not some impossible and lethal Beyond that can be reached only by transgressing the limits of the Symbolic and the Imaginary –Lacan comes to present it as something that speaks between the lines, detectable in changes of discursivity, in the disturbances, interruptions, and slips of the discourse...”

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Book:The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two
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“An important part of Nietzsche's philosophy is thus shaped by this conviction that it is wrong to identify truth with the Symbolic, that truth should be related to the Real. This is precisely why truth can be dangerous to life: the Symbolic is the shelter of life, whereas the Real is its exposure and vulnerability. This is also what places truth in the field of ethics, as is clear in the second of the passages quoted above (where truth is considered not as an epistemological category, but as a matter of courage — "error is not blindness, error is cowardice...")”

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Author:Alenka Zupančič
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