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Zizek against Democracy
Draft prepared for 2003 APSA
Do not cite without permission
Jodi Dean
Scoundrel Time
In For They Know Not What They Do, his first book written after the collapse of “actually
existing socialism,” Slavoj Zizek asks: “Is today’s Left therefore condemned to pledge all its
forces to the victory of democracy?” (270). Impressed upon his “today” is late capitalism, the
“apparent worldwide triumph of liberal-capitalist ideology,” and the political victory of liberal
democracy over its communist adversary. “Today,” for Zizek marks the time “when the cracks
in the façade of the worldwide greening of democracy render more and more visible its grey
flesh of capital; when—exemplarily the former GDR—democratic enthusiasm proves to be
nothing more than a prelude to the integration of a new territory into the flux of capital, this
effective force of deterritorialization which undermines all fixed local identities, this veritable
rhizome of our time” (271). “Today,” capitalism appears as democracy and democracy as and
through capitalism. In the initial days of communism’s disintegration in Eastern Europe, the
democratic project breathed with new life: as Zizek explains in the introduction to For They
Know Not What They Do, the book consists of lectures he gave in Ljubljana during the heady
days of the winter of 1989-1990, days of “intense political ferment” weeks before the new
elections (3). What emerged after the communists were gone, in the new “scoundrel time,” was
capitalism and nationalist fundamentalism (3). Is this what the Left is therefore condemned to
defend?
This essay takes up Zizek’s critical interrogation of democracy. Given the vehemence of
this critique in his most recent work on Christianity, Lenin, and September 11
th
, Zizek seems to
some to be playing the role of the intellectual bad boy and trying to out radicalize those he
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