Abstract

An abiding concern in Žižek’s writings is with a central taboo of the modern age: the taboo of terror. We disavow terror only at the cost of accepting implicitly the violence and terror contained in the global capitalist logics and the fantasmatic structures that support them. The ongoing ideological attempts to neutralize the status of the capitalist economy, Žižek argues, are simultaneously accompanied by increasingly violent and authoritarian measures taken for its reproduction. Moreover, by failing to politicize the economy and its constitutive violence, Western democracy is being reduced steadily to technocratic forms of administration. Focusing on recent work – and, in particular, The Defense of Lost Causes – this paper seeks to address Žižek’s cultivation of a new type of politico-philosophical engagement that does not shrink from the dimension of terror.