Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge. 2006. Print.
🙂 Why do we all have such a hard on for democracy?
Žižek’s answer is
democracy is the form our attachment to Capital takes; it is the way we organize our enjoyment. He writes, “what prevents the radical question of ‘capitalism’ itself is precisely belief in the democratic form of the struggle against capitalism.” Faithful to democracy, we eschew the demanding task of politicizing the economy and envisioning a different political order. (102)
With respect to the moral law, the stain of enjoyment does not involve any pathological content or empirical object. Rather, the wiping out of all pathological objects produces a new kind of nonpathological object — objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. (108)
Thus, the crucial link between Kant and the Jacobins, between the categorical imperative and democratic invention, involves objet petit a: just as superego stains the moral law, so does it appear as a stain on the empty place of democracy. … This stain onthe empty place of democracy takes the form of the sublime, pure, body of the People, that is, of the Nation. … In this way, formal democracy is tied to a contingent, material contnet, to some sort of nation or ethnicity, to a fantasy point that resists universalization (109).
… democracy is ultimately inseparable from nationalist violence. It is linked to the fantasy point of a people that calls it into being (113).
Once cultural politics morphed into capitalist culture, identity politics lost its radical edge (116).