2
dismisses as deconstructionists, multiculturalists, and Leftist scoundrels and dwarves. Ernesto
Laclau, in the dialogue with Zizek and Judith Butler, refers scornfully to the “naïve self-
complacence” of one of Zizek’s “r-r-revolutionary” passages: “Zizek had told us that he wanted
to overthrow capitalism; now we are served notice that he also wants to do away with liberal
democratic regimes” (CHU, 289). But, Zizek’s skepticism toward democracy is nothing new.
He has long criticized liberal democracy, manifesting a sense of blackmail or betrayal at the bait
and switch occurring in Eastern Europe when they “went for” democracy and got capitalism and
nationalism instead. An emphasis on the enjoyment “staining” the democratic form, on the
constitutive non-universalizability of liberal democracy, morever, has been one of Zizek’s basic
theoretical points. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, written before the collapse of
communism, Zizek refers to the universal notion of democracy as a “necessary fiction.”
Adopting Hegel’s insight that the Universal “can realize itself only in impure, deformed,
corrupted forms,” he emphasizes the impossibility of grasping the Universal as an intact purity
(148).
1
In all his work thereafter, Zizek struggles with the relation between democracy and
universality, concerned with the way the stain overcomes the form, that is, with the way that
contemporary adherence to democracy prevents universalization. Zizek’s question, “the only
question which confronts political philosophy today,” is genuine: “is liberal democracy the
ultimate horizon of our political practice?” (Tarrying, 221).
2
He doesn’t know the answer, so he
asks it repeatedly, drawing from psychoanalysis and Marxism to explain our inability to think
something new.
In his recent work, Zizek suggests the phrase “democratic fundamentalism” as a name for
the limit to current thinking (“Georg Lukacs as the philosopher of Leninism,” 176).
3
I read the
term in two ways. First, democratic fundamentalism refers to the way liberal democracy and
Convention