A Theatre of Shadows: Saving, Critiquing, Psychoanalyzing Žižek

In recent years, criticism of Slavoj Žižek has intensified at a frantic pace, to the extent that he has all but been erased from the public sphere. Alongside his exclusion from dominant media-platforms such as The Guardian and the The New York Times, the denunciation of his work by the academic community has reached an excessive level, with thinkers such as Noam Chomsky seeking to undermine the empirical validity of his thought in a surprisingly personalized manner. This situation appears all the more perplexing when one considers just how relevant Žižek’s ideas actually are to contemporary concerns. It is hard to deny that a number of his more radical predictions now appear strikingly prescient: the warnings of a “strong man” leadership emerging to
oversee a type of capitalism with Asian values; the critique of multi-cultural tolerance for producing a xenophobic underbelly as its necessary perverse supplement. One might even argue that the sequential eruption of traumatic events over the past number of years (the election of Donald Trump as US President, the UK Brexit vote, the emergence of ISIS, the refugee crisis) directly demonstrates the central tenants of Žižek’s work. In the midst of this so-called “return of ideology,” it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the basic thesis elaborated in his first book The Sublime Object of Ideology: the notion of a “post-ideological condition” is an illusion; in reality, we have never been more entrenched in ideology (Žižek 2008a: xxxi).