ABSTRACT
Badiou's influence focuses in a way that Zizek continues to take up the idea of communism in his recent writings, at the end of first as tragedy, then as farce. Moving closer to democracy by late 1980s, running as candidate for the Liberal Democratic Party during the first post-communist elections in Slovenia in 1990, Zizek's politics have shifted over time from the "radical democracy" of Laclau and Mouffe: the influence of which is noticeable in his earliest English books, towards a renewed interest in Lenin in the late 1990s and Zizek has started identifying himself not only as a Marxist, but also as a communist. The difference between democracy and communism has to do with the attempt to include the excluded into the existing order, rather than transforming society around the interests, primarily, of the excluded. Conceiving communism as an eternal idea or ideal implies as well that the problems that give rise to this Idea are no less eternal.
