In a 2009 lecture Slavoj Žižek developed a loosely connected but internally consistent set of claims about democratic legitimacy, the affective mechanics of populism, and the changing styles of political authority under contemporary capitalism. Speaking in a polemical yet diagnostic register, he framed his argument as a warning against the temptation to treat “the people” as either a transparent source of truth or an essentially innocent victim of manipulation. What mattered, he suggested, was not whether popular energies existed—he took that as given—but how they were symbolically organized, displaced, and exploited.
Žižek opened with an observation about the self-image of the Western European left. He noted a recurrent impulse among “decadent” European progressives to locate authentic revolutionary energy elsewhere—preferably at a geographical and cultural distance that protected the admirer from real exposure to risk and contradiction. In this romantic optic, Latin America became a privileged screen for projections of political purity: a place “out there,” ideally separated by an ocean, where the revolution was always supposedly happening in a more authentic form than in Europe. He treated this attitude as a symptom: it revealed a need for externalized faith rather than an immanent analysis of political conditions.
From there he turned, by way of provocation, to Hugo Chávez. He refused the standard liberal critique that read Chávez’s cultural and educational interventions as inherently “totalitarian.” He cited, for example, the controversy around distributing a list of books to schoolchildren: in his view, every state already promoted a canon, even when it disguised this as neutral education. The relevant question was not whether a canon existed, but which canon, and under what political logic it was instituted. Žižek then made a deliberately paradoxical point: rather than condemning canons as such, the left should have been prepared to contest them openly, including by proposing its own. He treated the pretense that education could proceed without any canon—through exclusively marginal or “subversive” materials—as a kind of ideological hypocrisy.
To clarify how democratic authority could function without substantive knowledge, Žižek introduced an anecdote from nineteenth-century military history. During a battle between Prussian and Austrian forces, he recounted, the Prussian king watched what appeared to be chaos on the field and could not tell whether victory was possible. Beside him stood the strategist Helmuth von Moltke, who calmly congratulated the king in advance on a “brilliant victory.” Žižek read the story as an illustration of the gap between the master signifier—the formal locus of authority—and the practical knowledge that actually produced outcomes. The king “won” as the symbolic bearer of victory, even while remaining ignorant of the strategic content that made victory real.
He then proposed that something structurally similar operated in electoral democracy. The people, as the formal sovereign, were periodically “informed” by the electoral outcome that they had achieved a decisive victory—even when the substantive meaning of what had been decided was obscure, contradictory, or determined by forces not readily available to public understanding. His intent was not to insult voters, but to describe a constitutive feature of democratic symbolism: sovereignty was formally located in a subject that could not, in ordinary conditions, possess the knowledge required to govern the complex systems that organized collective life. The democratic problem, in this rendering, was not simply corruption in the everyday sense, but the recurring conversion of political agency into a ritual of authorization.
This critique was extended through a discussion of avant-garde culture. Žižek attacked what he called the arrogance of a certain market-integrated “transgression,” where provocation was automatically treated as radical critique. He recalled defenses of artists such as Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, where offensive or disgust-inducing content was justified as a profound interrogation of bodily norms, purification, or the matter–spirit distinction. Žižek’s point was not that such interpretations were impossible, but that they were too easily available: they functioned as a universal solvent that could aestheticize any gesture, no matter how crude, into a moral or spiritual lesson. He dramatized this by describing a hypothetical obscene performance that could, by the same critical logic, be defended as a courageous exploration of disgust and transcendence. When justification became mechanically reproducible, he suggested, it stopped functioning as critique and became a protective language for a cultural economy of shock.
From cultural provocation he moved to political populism. Here he positioned himself explicitly against Ernesto Laclau’s more affirmative reconstruction of populist reason. He acknowledged the theoretical sophistication of Laclau’s model, but argued that “populism” became an empty or misleading term if it was extended to figures such as Tito or Mao without remainder. For Žižek, populism had a minimal formal structure: it externalized social antagonism by imagining an organic community disrupted by an intruder—an enemy who came from outside and explained “the mess.” Whether the intruder was cast as immigrants, Jews, imperial powers, or corrupt elites, the essential move was displacement: conflict immanent to the social order was transposed into a moralized narrative of invasion, contamination, or theft.
He insisted that populism is sustained not merely by ignorance but by a willful refusal to know. It is animated by a frustrated cry—I do not know what is going on, but I have had enough, it must stop—which substitutes an agent of blame for an analysis of systemic complexity. Žižek used psychoanalytic language to describe this as a fetishistic structure: the fetish does not simply provide an object onto which desire is transferred, but embodies a disavowal of knowledge. The subject, he suggests, often knows more than it admits, yet chooses a convenient narrative that permits it to avoid assuming the burden of understanding. In this sense, populism appears less as an active political project than as a reactive strategy: a way of managing anxiety produced by complexity, contradiction, and perceived loss of control.
Žižek then connected this refusal-to-know to what he called the contemporary “society of choice.” He surveyed multiple ideological investments in the concept of choice: neuroscientific claims that freedom was illusory; market-liberal claims that consumer choice was a continuous form of democratic voting; existentialist ideals of authentic choice as a decision that defined being; and Marxist critiques that market abundance concealed the absence of structural alternatives. He added an overlooked dimension: the injunction to choose under conditions where the cognitive coordinates for choosing were absent. In modern life, individuals were repeatedly compelled to decide about matters that profoundly affected them—work, debt, health, technology, family forms—without the knowledge required to evaluate long-term consequences. This produced a characteristic scenario: the subject was “free” to choose, but only on the condition that it chose correctly, which often meant performing the empty gesture of endorsing what expert systems had already prescribed.
He then tied this to psychoanalytic accounts of desire. The deepest problem is not merely that individuals do not know what they want, but that desire itself is structured by the question of what others want from them—what object they are for the Other. Under these conditions, even mundane consumer questionnaires (soft or hard pillows, this or that option) can carry an implicit demand: tell me who you are; tell me what kind of object you want to be. For Žižek, the pressure to choose is thus not only a market inconvenience but a form of subjectivation that can feel coercive, producing guilt and chronic inauthenticity. He linked this to critiques of postmodern identity ethics: the command to constantly reinvent oneself, once formulated as an anti-essentialist liberation, can be directly mobilized by consumer capitalism as an endless engine of self-recreation through commodities, brands, and lifestyles.
Against this background he approached democracy more explicitly. He adopted a distinction between empirical corruption—bribery, illegality, patronage—and a deeper, formal corruption that pertained to democracy’s structure: politics reduced to negotiation among private interests within a system whose basic coordinates were already fixed. Drawing on the language of constituted versus constituent power, he suggested that democratic forms could reproduce a constitutive corruption even when individual politicians were personally honest. The system could remain “clean” in procedural terms while continuing to represent, at a more fundamental level, a settled consensus about the social order—above all, the primacy of capitalism or “market economy.”
He did not conclude from this that elections should be despised. Rather, he argued that elections were not, in themselves, a medium of truth. As a rule, they registered the prevailing doxa shaped by hegemonic ideology. Exceptional elections could function as events—moments when a majority temporarily broke with cynical inertia and voted against what appeared ideologically foreclosed. But their exceptional status confirmed the rule: democratic procedures did not automatically track emancipatory truth. To sharpen this point, he offered historical examples meant to show that “the will of the majority” could, in certain conjunctures, align with authoritarian outcomes. Conversely, a politically truthful stance could appear initially as a minority position without democratic authorization. The question was not whether democracy was worthless, but how its procedures related to moments of genuine political rupture.
Žižek then shifted to events in Iran in 2009, reading mass protests and the post-election crisis as an instance of a potentially emancipatory rupture that the West, including parts of the left, misrecognized. He stressed a particular phenomenology of revolutionary transition: the decisive moment was often not the empirical collapse of power but the psychological break when fear dissolved—when people suddenly discovered they were no longer afraid. He illustrated this through a reported episode from the late Pahlavi period, where a policeman’s command was met with silence and refusal, and the story rapidly circulated as a sign that the regime’s authority had already cracked. In his telling, the crucial political fact was not merely crowds in streets, but the transformation of the symbolic field in which power was perceived as already “over,” even before it had formally ended.
From this angle, he challenged a common Western framing of Iran as a simple clash between secular, Western-oriented liberals and a religious, rural or working-class Islamist base. He argued that the protest movement—associated in Western media with “green” symbolism—could not be reduced to an upper-middle-class secularization project. Instead, he portrayed it as mobilizing an emancipatory dimension internal to Islam itself: public piety and Islamic symbols functioned not merely as manipulation but as resources for collective self-organization and resistance. In this reading, the movement’s claim was not simply “more Western freedom,” but a demand to reclaim the unfulfilled emancipatory promise of the 1979 revolution against its later authoritarian capture. Žižek treated this as precisely what disturbed multiple audiences at once: hardline Islamists, Western liberals who preferred a secular script, and even leftists who interpreted anti-Western rhetoric as sufficient proof of progressive politics.
He criticized commentary that depicted the incumbent leadership as a case of an authentically pro-poor populism, suggesting instead that such populism was intertwined with corruption, coercive apparatuses, and powerful economic interests. He also pointed to the role of institutions such as the Revolutionary Guard not as a mere moral police but as a major economic actor, thereby complicating narratives of “state piety” versus “civil society.” Whether or not every empirical claim in this section was verifiable from his sources, the conceptual function was clear: Žižek wanted to prevent the left from equating anti-Western posture with emancipatory politics, and to prevent liberalism from treating religiosity as inherently reactionary.
From Iran he widened the lens to what he called “authoritarian capitalism,” offering Russia and Italy as emblematic sites where formal democracy persisted while public life was hollowed out. In Russia, he suggested, political performance could be strategically calibrated to popular expectations of brutality and masculine vulgarity, including carefully staged outbursts that signaled power rather than undermined it. In Italy, he treated Silvio Berlusconi as a crucial figure because he fused permissive, market-friendly technocratic governance with populist spectacle and moralistic posturing. Berlusconi, in Žižek’s depiction, was not merely a corrupt leader with private scandals; he represented a structural mutation in which the dignity of public office was systematically dismantled and the state was run as a reality show. The leader no longer “rose above” private life; the public sphere itself became privatized, and politics became an arena of collective voyeurism, cynicism, and managed demoralization.
Žižek linked this to a broader cultural shift: it is not simply that private life becomes public; rather, the public becomes private, turning into a shared space of confessional intimacy and emotional display that substitutes for political argument. When leaders justify decisions through personal trauma, sincerity performances, or televisual authenticity, politics risks being recoded as psychology, and public reason as spectacle. In such a condition, he argued, liberal ridicule of leaders’ vulgarity can be politically ineffective, because vulgarity is precisely part of the offer of identification: I am like you; I cheat, I desire, I am imperfect; therefore I am real. The danger is not a lack of information, but a normalization of shamelessness that disables the very idea of accountable public dignity.
He closed by suggesting that the left should not cling to an inherited model of subversion in which obscenity or transgression automatically destabilized power. In his view, contemporary right-wing populists and oligarchic leaders could outbid the cultural left in shamelessness and spectacle; they were already playing the game of provocative scandal. The left, he argued, should not fear defending minimal decency and public dignity, even if this sounded like “morality.” He treated this not as a conservative retreat but as a strategic reorientation: if the self-styled “moral majority” was structurally obscene—publicly moralizing while privately corrupt—then a left politics capable of contesting power had to be able to appropriate moral language without piety, and decency without naïveté. The task, as he framed it, was to reconnect democratic procedures to moments of genuine collective courage and truth, while resisting populism’s fetishistic refusal of complexity and capitalism’s conversion of freedom into a coercive injunction to choose.
Simon Gros 
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