I believe in clear-cut positions. I think that the most arrogant position is this apparent, multidisciplinary modesty of "what I am saying now is not… - Slavoj Žižek

The source of totalitarianism is a dogmatic attachment to the official word: the lack of laughter, of ironic detachment. An excessive commitment to Good may in itself become the greatest Evil: real Evil is any kind of fanatical dogmatism, especially exerted in the name of supreme Good... Consider only Mozart's Don Giovanni at the end of the opera, when he is confronted with the following choice: if he confesses his sins, he can still achieve salvation; if he persists, he will be damned forever. From this viewpoint of the pleasure principle, the proper thing to do would be to renounce his past, but he does not, he persists in his Evil, although he knows that by persisting he will be damned forever. Paradoxically, with his final choice of Evil, he acquires the status of an ethical hero - that is, of someone who is guided by fundamental principles beyond the pleasure principle and not just by the search for pleasure or material gain.

This difference is the ultimate distinction between Stalin and Trotsky. In Stalin, 'Lenin lives for ever' as an obscene spirit which 'does not know it is dead', artificially kept alive as an instrument of power. In Trotsky, the dead Lenin continues to live like Joe Hill he lives wherever there are people who still struggle for the same Idea

A woman is not complimentary to a man, but she embodies his lack (which is why Lacan can say that a beautiful woman is a perfect incarnation of man's castration).