For a thorough discussion of Žižek’s critique of democracy, see Jodi Dean, Žižek’s Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006).
I am drawing here from Ernesto Laclau’s discussion of universalization under conditions of uneven power relations; see Laclau, “Stucture, history, and the political,”182-212; and Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, Universality (London: Verso, 2000). Laclau argues that when power relations are uneven, universality depends on particularity, on the possibility of a particular element coming to stand for something other than itself. The supposition of democracy disavows the incommensurability necessary for universality as it presumes itself to be the solution to its problems—the answer to any problem with democracy is more democracy. For elaboration of this point, see Jodi Dean, “Secrecy Since September 11th,” Interventions 6, 3 (2004) 362-380.
Hubertus Buchstein and Dirk Jörke, “Redescribing Democracy,” Redescriptions 11 (2007) 178-201.
Jürgen Habermas, “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,” in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990) 66.
See, for example, Simone Chambers, Reasonable Democracy: Jurgen Habermas and the Politics of Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
This point applies to theories of radical democracy such as Laclau’s and Mouffe’s as well.
See, for example, “Remarks by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy,” (November 2003), at →.
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) 7.
Ibid., 2-3.
See →, 2/28/05.
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 2.
Ibid., 2.
For the sake of clarity, I’ve omitted the specific Lacanian formulae for each of these discourses. A thorough elaboration appears in Žižek’s Politics.
Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, (London: Verso, 2004,) 133-145.
Diane Rubenstein also reads Bush’s relation to law as perverse. See This Is Not A President (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 193-196.
Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
Text of address available here →
“Bush: ‘I’m the decider’ on Rumsfeld,” (April 18, 2006). Available at →.
In Joan Copjec’s words, “The pervert is a pure, pathos-less instrument of the Other’s will,” Imagine There’s No Woman (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002) 229.
See Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993) 122-124.
Ibid,, 122.
Ibid., 122.
For a more thorough argument on this point see Jodi Dean, “Enemies Imagined and Symbolic,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 31, 4 (June 2005), 499-509.
Originally written in 2009, this essay is excerpted from Jodi Dean’s book Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, published by Duke University Press.