The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.

Original, with literal English translation (from p. 276 of Selections from the Prison Notebooks) | La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati. | The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. | Žižek's version may be an English translation of one of various similar loose French translations that had appeared earlier. For example, here is one from Gustave Massiah, followed by strict English with cognate terms and glosses | Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres | The old world is dying, the new world is slow to appear and in this chiaroscuro (light-dark) surge (emerge) monsters. | “Mongo Beti, une conscience noire, africaine, universelle”, Gustave Massiah, CEDETIM, août 2002 (archive, 2016-03-04) | “Mongo Beti, a Black, African, Universal Conscience”, Gustave Massiah, CEDETIM, August 2002 | Collected in: Remember Mongo Beti, Ambroise Kom, 2003, p. 149. | This article in the Guardian notes that French translations mentioning "monstres" were in circulation prior to Gustave Massiah's piece, for example in a 1996 article from Le Monde which attributed to Gramsci the quote « L'ancien se meurt, le nouveau ne parvient pas à voir le jour : dans cet interrègne surgissent les monstres ». Google translate renders this as "The old is dying, the new cannot be born: in this interregnum, monsters emerge." | Similar sentiments are widespread in revolutionary rhetoric; see: No, Žižek did not attribute a Goebbels quote to Gramsci, Ross Wolfe, 2015-07-03