ABSTRACT
Slavoj Žižek’s “The Eternal Return of the Same Class Struggle” begins with the contradictions of emancipation in practical circumstances. Struggles for emancipation are inverted when conservatives use the same relativizing strategies as multiculturalists. Such contradictions lead postmodernists to reject universalism altogether. The consequent post-politics rearticulates struggles like feminism into neoliberal feminism. Similarly, populist rage breaks with class-conscious struggle. Based on Hegelian and Lacanian notions of contradiction and incompleteness, class struggle is presented as the overdetermination of a fundamental antagonism. Since any politics that is based on identity is self-defeating and therefore emerges as a substitute for radicalism, Žižek argues that postmodern indeterminacy is one of the factors pushing people towards identitarian populism, as in the case of attacks on whiteness, toxic masculinity and cisgender normativity. Since all ways of life are inscribed in the universality of global capitalism, Žižek concludes that interference in the cultures of others can only take place in the name of those who struggle from within and against their local oppressors.
