3
ethnic/religious fundamentalism are not two opposing forces in an ideological battle. Rather,
they are both elements in the post-political ideological totality of global capitalism. As Zizek
writes, “The fact that global capitalism is a totality means that it is the dialectical unity of itself
and of its other, of the forces which resist it on ‘fundamentalist’ ideological grounds,” (Welcome
to the Desert of the Real, 51). Each word, “democratic” and “fundamentalism,” names an
element of the current politico-ideological formation. Linked together, they refer to this matrix.
So, fundamentalism is not the preservation of authentic traditions against forces of
modernization. Rather, it is the postmodern appropriation of cultural forms in the context of
global capital. Likewise, liberal democracy is not simply an alternative to fundamentalism. It
sets up the false choice: the alternative “fundamentalism or democracy” is premised on the
hegemony of democracy. Indeed, the false choice is one of the ways that liberal democracy
attempts to ensure that “nothing will really happen in politics,” that everything (global capital)
will go as before (Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 151). Thus, the second way to read
“democratic fundamentalism” is in terms of this hegemony: “the ontologization of democracy
into a depoliticized universal framework which is not itself to be renegotiated” (Lukacs, 176).
Democracy today is not the living breathing, activity of politics. The apparent suspension of
social hierarchy in elections is the form of its opposite: it’s a disavowal of the antagonisms
rupturing the social (Welcome to the Desert of the Real, 78).
4
In this way, democratic
fundamentalism attempts to ensure that nothing will happen. It precludes politics, if by politics
we have in mind something like major change. This second sense of democratic fundamentalism
refers to the way democracy conditions and binds our thinking—anything that is not democratic
is necessarily horrible, totalitarian, unacceptable to any rational person.
Convention