# Quote — Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing

> In this precise sense, Kant was "the inventor of the philosophical history of philosophy": there are necessary stages in the development of philosophy, that is, one cannot directly get at the truth, one cannot begin wit it, philosophy necessarily began with metaphysical illusions. The path from illusion to its critical denunciation is the very core of philosophy, which means that successful ("true") philosophy is no longer defined by its truthful explanation of the totality of being, but by successfully accounting for the illusions, that is, by explaining not only why illusions are illusions, but also why they are structurally necessary, unavoidable, and not just accidents.

- Author: [Slavoj Žižek](https://www.leafyquotes.com/slavoj-zizek.md)
- Book: [Less Than Nothing](https://www.leafyquotes.com/slavoj-zizek/less-than-nothing.md)
- Page: 10
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek#Less_Than_Nothing_(2012)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/slavoj-zizek/less-than-nothing/in-this-precise

## More from this book

> The horror of the Holocaust cannot be represented; but this excess of represented content over its aesthetic representation has to infect the aesthetic form itself. What cannot be described should be inscribed into the artistic form as its uncanny distortion.

p. 25 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/slavoj-zizek/less-than-nothing/the-horror-of-the.md)

> The protracted struggle which dragged on in Egypt was not a conflict of visions, but the conflict between a vision of freedom, the "eternal" Platonic Idea of Freedom, and a blind clinging to power ready to use all means possible—terror, food deprivation, exhaustion, bribery—to crush the will to freedom.

p. 35 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/slavoj-zizek/less-than-nothing/the-protracted-struggle.md)

> [Tyranny] becomes superfluous when people no longer need the external force of the tyrant to make them renounce their particular interests, but when they become "universal citizens" by directly identifying the core of their being with this universality - in short, people no longer need the external master when they are educated into doing the job of discipline and subordination themselves.

p. 198 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/slavoj-zizek/less-than-nothing/tyranny-becomes-superfluous.md)