Zizek against Democracy

Abstract

In the face of the demise of socialism in Eastern Europe, the welfare state in Western Europe and the UK, and confidence in state or public approaches to social and economic problems in the USA, is democracy the primary signifier of the potential of emancipatory political struggle? And, if so, does this indicate a diminishment in political dreams, the loss, perhaps, of hopes for equity and social justice? This article takes up Slavoj Zizek's critical interrogation of democracy, defending Zizek's position as an alternative left politics, indeed, as that position most attuned to the loss of the political today. Whereas liberal and pragmatic approaches to politics and political theory accept the diminishment of political aspirations as realistic accommodation to the complexities of late capitalist societies as well as preferable to the dangers of totalitarianism accompanying Marxist and revolutionary theories, Zizek's psychoanalytic philosophy confronts directly the trap involved in acquiescence to a diminished political field, that is to say, to a political field constituted through the exclusion of the economy: within the ideological matrix of liberal democracy, any move against nationalism, fundamentalism, or ethnic violence ends up reinforcing Capital and guaranteeing democracy's failure. Arguing that formal democracy is irrevocably and necessarily ‘stained’ by a particular content that conditions and limits its universalizability, he challenges his readers to relinquish our attachment to democracy. I argue that critical Left theory should take up this challenge.