Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. New York: Verso. 2009. Print.
[I]nstead of asking the obvious question “Is the idea of communism still pertinent today, can it still be used as a tool of analysis and political practise ? ” one should ask the opposite question: “How does our predicament today look from the perspective of the communist idea?” Therein resides the dialectic of the Old and the New: it is those who propose the constant creation of new terms (“postmodern society:’ “risk society:’ “informational society:’ “postindustrial society:”etc. ) in order to grasp what is going on today who miss the contours of what is actually New. The only way to grasp the true novelty of the New is to analyze the world through the lenses of what was “eternal” in the Old. If communism really is an “eternal” Idea, then it works as a Hegelian “concrete universality”: it is eternal not in the sense of a series of abstract-universal features that may be applied everywhere, but in the sense that it has to be re-invented in each new historical situation.
Our Thesis 11 should be: in our societies, critical Leftists have hitherto only succeeded in soiling those in power, whereas the real point is to castrate them … (7)