The Optimism of Melancholia

“I claim that we should not read this as kind of a pessimism.  “Oh, we all die.  Who cares?”  No, if you really want to do something good for society, if you want to avoid all totalitarian threats and so on, you basically should go . . . we should all go to this, let me call it–although I’m a total materialist–fundamentally spiritual experience of accepting that at some day everything will finish, that at any point the end may be near.  I think that, quite on the contrary of what may appear, this can be a deep experience which pushes you to strengthen ethical activity…”

Slavoj Zizek