We must believe, but we can't believe. Perhaps this is the tragedy that some of us see in Obama: a change we can believe in and the crushing realisation that nothing will change.

That is to say, politics is essentially about the management of fear, an economy of fear, continually adjusting the level of fear to produce the right level of affect in the citizenry.

It is so ridiculous to limit oneself to one version of the truth.

Genuinely great humour recognises the world it's describing and yet we are also called into question by it. That's what great art should do. That's what great philosophy should do. The one thing about humour is that this is an everyday practice that does this.

If the denial of death is self-hatred, as it is to deny our freedom and live in fear of death (which is to say, to live in a form of bondage), then the acceptance and affirmation of death is indeed a form of self-love. But I'd want to make a distinction between a form of self-love which is essential to what it means to be human, and a narcissism of self-regard, like Rousseau's distinction between amour de soi and amour propre, self-love and pride.

Here we observe the basic obsessive fantasy of Žižek's position: do nothing, sit still, prefer not to, like Melville's Bartleby, and silently dream of a ruthless violence, a consolidation of state power into one man's hands, an act of brutal physical force of which you are the object or the subject or both at once.

For me, philosophy is an activity of thought that is common to human beings. Human beings at their best.