Against the populist temptation

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 32, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 551-574

  Žižek, Slavoj ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 41049099837     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/505378     Document Type: Review

References (12)

1. See Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London, 2005); hereafter abbreviated OPR.
2. This distinction is homologous to that deployed by Michael Walzer, between "thin" and "thick" morality; see Michael Walzer, Thick and Thin (Notre Dame, Ind. , 1994). He gives the example of the big demonstration in the streets of Prague in 1989 that toppled the Communist regime; most of the banners read simply "Truth," "Justice," or "Freedom," general slogans even the ruling Communists had to agree with; the catch was, of course, in the underlying web of "thick" (specific, determinate) demands (freedom of the press, multiparty elections, and so on) that indicated what the people meant by the simple general slogans. In short, the struggle was not simply for freedom and justice but for the meaning of these words.
3. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 18:100.
4. See, especially, Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London, 2000).
5. George Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant (New York, 2004), p. 55.
6. Lakoff, Don't Think of an Elephant, pp. 93-94.
7. Quoted in Mary Zournazi, Hope (London, 2002), p. 145.
8. Laclau, "Las manos en la masa," Radar, 5 June 2005, p. 20.
9. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis, 1998), p. 23.
10. See Nicholas Cook, Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (Cambridge, Mass. , 2003); hereafter abbreviated B.
11. Some critics even compare the "absurd grunts" of the bassoons and bass drum that accompany the beginning of the marcia Turca to farts; see B, p. 103.
12. Everyone who is minimally acquainted with Heidegger's thought will, of course, easily recognize in this paragraph an ironic paraphrase of the well-known passage from Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried (New Haven, Conn. , 2000), pp. 28-29.