From Zizek’s Trouble in Paradise, pg 174-175:
The threat today is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to ‘be active’, to ‘participate’, to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, ‘do something’, while academics participate in meaningless ‘debates’, and so on, and the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from all this. Those in power often prefer even a ‘critical’ participation, an exchange of whatever kind, to silence –just in order to engage us in a ‘dialogue’, to make sure our ominous passivity is broken.
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If only Žižek could apply this insight to his own work on occasion!
yes!