Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek is heading towards the European technocratic mainstream—and further away from the European people he once identified with.
In a rare recent interview, the famous left-wing thinker expressed some of the key prejudices of our age. When his diagnosis of present-day problems appears to be correct, he still puts himself on the wrong side. On other issues, he appears to have learned nothing and churns out the usual cliches.
For instance, Žižek notes “how the new populist right is adopting pseudo-revolutionary language, while the left seems to have become the guardian of law and order.” If this is read as meaning the people’s national-conservative revolt against regulation-obsessed Biden and Brussels, where the “new populist right is the one carrying out a revolution,” he’s got a point. Yet ultimately this leads him to side against the people, favouring ‘effectiveness’ over ‘democracy’ (inspired by the official response to 2020/21’s global pandemic):
Democracy—and on this point, I am very pessimistic—is losing its effectiveness. What I am saying is very problematic, but times are coming when we need faster and more effective decisions.
Such technocratic support for ‘effectiveness’—which, in practice, the schloerotic European Union can but dream of—comes at the expense of the people, the ‘demos’ in democracy. Yet according to Žižek, “since 2010, most of humanity has become increasingly stupid—literally.” With this in mind, the self-declared Marxist chooses ‘effectiveness’ over democracy, bringing to mind the totalitarian apologetics about a Communist being a liberal in a hurry.
Encouragingly, he speaks out against cancel culture, whose supporters’ “official goal is supposedly to promote diversity and inclusion. But what they’re actually doing is excluding those who don’t accept their definition of inclusion, and so on. If you look at woke culture in detail, it’s upper-middle-class people targeting lower-class people.” Too bad he’s already written off lower-class people as increasingly stupid.
Elsewhere, Žižek’s analysis involves some increasingly predictable Left positions, such as accusing Israel of acting
the same way as ISIS; it justifies its political decisions by referring to its sacred texts. And then its government goes and says it’s doing all this to protect the Palestinians.
By equating Islamic State and the Jewish State, the Slovenian philosopher reveals a more sinister side to the “flair, colour, and irreverent comedy” that continues to sustain him as a minor global celebrity. His other recent comments show how limited and bureaucratic his response to Europe’s populist revolt is.
