The Germ of Life in the Seed of Man

"The old dreams were good dreams; they didn’t work out, but I’m glad I had them."

- Robert James Waller, "The Bridges of Madison County"

The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating. It’s not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology.

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We should draw a line of distinction within the very field of our dreams. Between those who are the right dreams pointing towards a dimension effectively beyond our existing society and the wrong dreams: the dreams which are just an idealised consumerist reflection, mirror image of our society.

We are not simply submitted to our dreams they just come from some unfathomable depths and we can’t do anything about it. This is the basic lesson of psychoanalysis and fiction cinema.

We are responsible for our dreams. Our dreams stage our desires and our desires are not objective facts. We created them, we sustained them, we are responsible for them.

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The first step to freedom isn’t just to change reality to fit your dreams it’s to change the way you dream and again this hurts because all satisfactions we have come from our dreams.

The great supreme commander Mao issued a world shaking… you should pay attention to state affairs and carry the great proletarian Cultural Revolution through to the end.

One of the big problems of all great revolutionary movements of the 20th century such as Russia, Cuba or China, is that they did change the social body but the egalitarian communist society was never realised.

The dreams remained the old dreams and they turned into the ultimate nightmare. Now what remains for the radical left waits for a magical event when the true revolutionary agent will finally awaken.

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It depends on us, on our will. In revolutionary upheavals some energy or rather some utopian dreams take place, they explode, and even if the actual result of a social upheaval is just a commercialised every day life, this excess of energy, what gets lost in the result, persists not in reality but as a dream haunting us waiting to be redeemed.

In this sense, whenever we are engaged in radical emancipatory politics, we should never forget as Walter Benjamin put it almost a century ago that every revolution, if it is an authentic revolution, is not only directed towards the futures but it redeems also the past failed revolutions.

-Slavoj Zizek, "The Perverts Guide to ideology"