ABSTRACT
Zizek wants his works to be read as proffering a political theory. In the service of his political aspiration, he turns to ontology. On the surface of things, Zizek devotes all of his energy to generating a viable theory of what might be political in today's age of the so-called 'post-political consensus'. The imputed inability to conceive of anything more than soft left reformism at the level of concrete practice is the cause of his dissatisfaction with Habermas, Derrida, Rorty and 'multiculturalism'. Zizek himself deplores the current turn to ethics in philosophy, from Habermas to Derrida. Zizek oscillates between two positions. The first is an advocation of redemocratising political activities, undertaken by unspecified social agents. The second is a quasi-Lukacsian search for the proletariat, which sees him implausibly valorising all excluded peoples as potentially revolutionary agents, by virtue of nothing more than their socio-political exclusion.
