On the information sheet in a New York hotel, I recently read: 'Dear guest! To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is t… - Slavoj Žižek

The implicit lesson of Plato is not that everything is appearance, that it is not possible to draw a clear line of separation between appearance and reality (that would have meant the victory of Sophism), but that essence is "appearance as appearance,"that essence appears in contrast to appearance within appearance; that the distinction between appearance and essence has to be inscribed into appearance itself. Insofar as the gap between essence and appearance is inherent to appearance, in other words, infsofar as essence is nothing but appearance reflected into itself, appearance is appearance against the background of nothing - everything appears ultimately out of nothing.

Ideological' is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence - that is, social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals 'do not know what they are doing.

'Dictatorship' does not mean the opposite of democracy, but democracy's own underlying mode of functioning - from the very beginning, the thesis on the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' involved the presupposition that it was the opposite of other form(s) of dictatorships, since the entire field of state power is that of dictatorship.