Enjoy Yourself! That's an ORDER!

The problem of Left political thought, then, is trying to theorize a politics that includes everything and everyone. But this isn’t politics. Politics involves division, saying “yes” to some options and “no” to others. A willingness to take responsibility for the divisions inseparable from politics seems to have been lost, or relegated to small, local, struggles. Particularly odd in radical pluralists’ and deliberative democrats’ focus on fundamentalism is its alliance with the central tenets of the bad guys themselves. Neoconservatives and neoliberals agree that fundamentalism is the most important political problem. Fundamentalism, they chorus, opposes the unfolding of freedom in the world.

Žižek’s political theory both demonstrates this willingness and shows why it is necessary today. His central concept is enjoyment (jouissance). With this concept, Žižek breaks with the dominant consensus regarding the central challenge of contemporary politics, namely, the problem of dogmatism. His emphasis on enjoyment shifts the problem from fundamentalism to capitalism: precisely because the present unfolding of freedom in the world is tied to the expansions of global capital, it relies on enjoyment and thus reintroduces sites and objects of fixity. The central political problem, then, is how we are to relate to enjoyment, how we can escape (“traverse”) the fantasies that provide it, even as we acknowledge enjoyment as an irreducible component of what it is to be human.

In what follows, I highlight three themes in Žižek’s political thought that demonstrate the importance of his work for confronting the traps of the current political impasse —his account of fantasy (particularly as it explains ethic nationalism), his account of the fixity of the subject (particularly as it explains the relation of capitalism to unfreedom) and his account of the society of enjoyment (particularly in its relation to the decline of symbolic efficiency).

- Jodi Dean, "Why Zizek for Political Theory"