Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian-born academic and prominent representative of postmodernism, psychoanalytic philosophy and pseudo-left politics, has endorsed Donald Trump for US president.
Declaring, “Hillary is the true danger” because she built an “impossible all-inclusive coalition,” Zizek told the UK’s Channel 4 News, “If Trump wins, both big parties, Republicans and Democrats, would have to return to basics, rethink themselves.”
This, he added, would result in a “kind of big awakening.” In defense of his endorsement, Žižek declared that Trump will “not introduce fascism.”
Žižek, the darling of the academic milieu that forms a major social base of pseudo-left politics, has been described by fellow “left” literary critic Terry Eagleton as the “most formidably brilliant” European philosopher. One reviewer called him the “Elvis of cultural theory.”
In fact, Žižek is an intellectual charlatan of the worst sort, cranking out books on subjects from scatology to theology and everything in between, full of pompous verbiage and empty of intellectual content.
He typifies the academic imposters who are paraded about in Pabloite and state capitalist circles. The International Socialist Organization has called him “the prominent voice of the new left.”
Žižek is a staple of pseudo-left publications such as the New Left Review, to which he has contributed ten articles. Verso books, a publishing arm associated with anti-Trotskyist Pabloite political tendencies, has published over a dozen books either authored or edited by him.
Žižek’s endorsement of Trump is in keeping with his lurch to the right in recent years. This philosopher of the “New Left” has endorsed attacks on refugees, the militarization of society and an essentially racialist approach to politics.
Responding to the right-wing hysteria whipped up following the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, Žižek argued on November 2015 that refugees from the Middle East are intent on destroying Western culture. Rejecting the notion of “tolerance as a solution,” Žižek declared that “fundamentalist Muslims find it impossible to bear our blasphemous images and reckless humor, which we consider a part of our freedoms.”
Earlier this year, Žižek declared in the New Statesman that alleged incidents of sexual assault by refugees in the German city of Cologne, later shown to have been trumped up, demonstrated that “attempts to enlighten immigrants… are examples of breathtaking stupidity.”
In the 2015 column mentioned above, Žižek suggested that the solution to the “deadlock [of] global capitalism” is the “militarization” of society. He declared: “Democratically motivated grassroots movements are seemingly doomed to failure, so perhaps it’s best to break global capitalism’s vicious cycle through ‘militarization,’ which means suspending the power of self-regulating economies.”
In the same article, he rejected democracy, stating, “Emancipatory politics should not be bound a priori by formal democratic procedures of legitimization. No, people quite often do NOT know what they want, or do not want what they know, or they simply want the wrong thing.”
These themes were taken up in a volume edited by Žižek and published earlier this year, titled An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, which declares, “Social democracy is in our time irretrievably bankrupt, and communism seems dead,” leaving only the militarization of society and the creation of a “universal army” as a viable strategy for the “left.”
Žižek's ever-more open embrace of right-wing politics parallels that of the affluent pseudo-left academic milieu to which he belongs. These elements dominate the field of cultural studies and are widespread throughout the humanities. Their “research” consists of obscurantist phrase-mongering intended, to a greater or lesser extent, to conceal their right-wing ideas and politics. This social layer is unprincipled and corrupt.
It forms the sociological core of the affluent upper-middle class, whose members have embraced identity and pseudo-left politics in pursuit of their own personal enrichment. They have abandoned the opposition to imperialism they proclaimed in the 1960s, becoming strident proponents of military intervention.
Žižek has shown, in his own particularly disgusting way, where this type of politics and ideology leads: directly into the gutter.