© Radical Philosophy Review Online First: August 11, 2015DOI: 10.5840/radphilrev20158740

Political Philosophy and the Vestiges of Colonialism:

A Critical Analysis of Žižek’s Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism

Dan Wood

Abstract: In this essay I argue that Slavoj Žižek’s “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism’” betrays, in an exceptionally telling way, the existence and persistence of dimensions of modern colonialism within contemporary continental philosophy. After offering a general characterization of the way in which the idea of the “West” is used to justify (neo)colonialist patterns of thinking, I provide a thorough criticism of each of Žižek’s central premises.

In a recent set of debates on and off Al Jazeera, there has been a resur-gence of provocative arguments concerning the politics of Eurocentrism. Notably, the polemics gravitate around philosophy, on who counts as

philosophers, and on who bears mentioning as exemplars of thinking philo-sophically.1 In this article, I am not primarily concerned with picking win-ners in these debates, but in analyzing some of the reasons why so-called continental philosophy, as a form of cultural expression and as a tradition of thinking, tends to produce such stark rifts between theorists who appar-ently share anti-imperialist political aims. This indirect intervention does not have as its end the postulation of an ultimate, final-word geopolitical program in regard to anti-imperialism, nor does it attempt to reconcile the debated positions. Instead, I analyze a text which foregrounds continental philosophy’s specifically colonial dimensions in order to highlight why such

1. See Zabala, “Slavoj Zizek and the Role of the Philosopher”; Dabashi, “Can Non-Europeans Think?”; Mignolo, “Yes, We Can”; and Žižek, The Impasses of Today’s Radical Politics.

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debates arise in the first place, and to suggest that philosophy’s colonial ves-tiges should be decolonized. To these ends, one should first call into ques-tion a communicatively debilitating double self-evidency in regard to many debates concerning Eurocentrism: on the one hand, the self-evidency that naming X “Eurocentric” proves sufficient for the effective comprehension or contestation of X, and on the other hand, the self-evidency that a trans-historical entity such as the “West” exists, and that grasping the diffusion of this entity through and beyond Europe provides a skeleton key for address-ing global political problems.

Having bracketed these supposedly evident presuppositions, we can analyze a text that brings the divisive politics of Eurocentrism to the fore quite strikingly, and to which Walter Mignolo alludes in the Al Jazeera de-bate: Slavoj Žižek’s “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism.’” In what follows, I argue that this text betrays the existence and persistence of dimensions of modern colonialism within contemporary philosophy in a quite telling and symptomatic way. Each of the historical and philosophical premises on which Žižek’s essay are based are not only caught up in a quintessentially neocolonialist view of the world, but are also inconsistent, false, and/or im-plausible for varying reasons. I engage this essay alone (and only its key tenets that ground the apology for Eurocentrism) and not Žižek’s entire cor-pus because a critique of this one argument will take up quite some space. While Ella Shohat and Souleymane Bachir Diagne have correctly pinpoint-ed a number of this text’s overarching flaws,2 I expand on their warranted criticisms in directions heretofore unconsidered. To begin, I offer a general characterization of the way in which the idea of the “West” is used to justify (neo)colonialist patterns of thinking. I then move from this general frame-work to a detailed criticism of the premises of Žižek’s argument, periodi-cally recontextualizing its shortcomings within the contemporary debates mentioned above. Finally, I suggest that Žižekian Eurocentrism mirrors that of continental philosophy in general.

Homeward UnboundTo invoke the notion of the “West”—however subtly or indirectly—can be best understood as making use of that same socio-political magic that ac-companies all performative utterances. In a performative utterance, given that the proper conditions of context and authoritative relations are in place, an act of speech brings about a novel social situation. If an authority that is socially recognized as possessing the capacity—within some implicit or explicit jurisdictional terrain—to declare, “The meeting is now in session,”

2. Shohat and Stam, Race in Translation, 125–27; Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 366–67; and Diagne, “On the Postcolonial and the Universal?,” 13–14.

Political Philosophy and the Vestiges of Colonialism

then at that moment the meeting really is in session. And the emergence of this new social situation provides a revalidating indicator to most that the speaking authority in fact possesses a legitimate and real discursive power. In the most banal of collective relations, then, authoritative speech and the recognition of speech as authoritative produce certain social-ontological changes. In an analogous but immensely more complex fashion, the idea of the “West” arises first and foremost in discourse, subsequently producing real effects within the social world. Those who invoke this notion situate themselves within a context socially recognized as valid (for instance, a cod-ified historiographic tradition, a selective philosophical canon, a religious narrative, an intercultural polemic, etc.) that is inseparable from the author-itative relations and practices that guarantee the felicitousness of subse-quent, relevant discursive production. In other words, when those who are recognized as authorities speak of the “West,” a distinct social situation su-pervenes in which some of the listeners understand themselves to be “in the West” not unlike one might find oneself in a meeting that is really in session. The significant difference in regard to the discursive production of the West, however—to put the analogy in somewhat Kafkan terms—lies in the fact that the meeting does not constitute a momentary gathering, but extends to innumerable aspects of private and public life, whose social (i.e., “West-ern”) boundaries are then negotiated by further authoritative interventions. Those authorities that speak of the West and the participants that legitimate this milieu-altering discourse come to see this emergent self-organization as both self-evident and as defining normal historical and social encounters. The invocation of the West in discourse creates a social world in which it is thought that the West indeed exists in a mind-independent sense, so much so that some social identities and practices themselves become codified as intrinsically Western. And the effects of Occidental discourse—for instance, the setting of boundaries to standardized course syllabi, the establishment of new institutions, or the legitimation of imperialist politics—serve as so-cial indicators that in turn give authorities on Western identity the appear-ance of having real discursive and explanatory power. In this way, even the deceased figures, languages, and texts that have become ossified within and as the Western tradition delegate the capacity and jurisdiction of later fig-ures, languages, and texts to make valid performative invocations.

The foregoing likely sounds somewhat necromantic. This is not far off. But the socio-political power of traditional regimes to repetitively summon a mind-independent reality known as the “West” might be better described as mytho-liturgical. I call the applied ontological commitment to the mind-independent existence of something called the “West” mytho-liturgical and not, for instance, ideological, because such a commitment 1) synthesizes simplistic meta-narratives that often pertain to idealized origins, grandi-ose conflicts, and pleas for restoration; 2) often remains hostile to and/or

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ignorant of debilitating, empirical counter-examples; 3) requires the hypos-tatization of a mysterious Other or set of Others; and 4) garners existence and legitimacy only by virtue of the social practices repeatedly performed by—and discourses habitually, solemnly revived by—traditional authorities within insular communities.3

We can here distinguish two closely related but distinct senses of the West. “The geographical concept of the West can be traced back for millen-nia. The idea of a westward movement of empires achieved prominence in the Middle Ages as the theory of transitio imperii, which held that power would be repeatedly transferred from east to west.”4 This form of victor-his-torical representation has been described by James Blaut as “tunnel history,” which is intimately bound up with different but equally implausible forms of Euro-essentialist diffusionism.5 On the other hand, the cultural-commu-nal category constitutive of the mytho-liturgical performance of Western identity emerges and crystallizes during the era of European imperialism and racial colonialism, which become particularly intense during the nine-teenth century.6 That is, the discursive construction and mytho-liturgical legitimation of the idea of the West in a cultural-communal sense calcified at a time when white male elites of the North Atlantic capitalist world-sys-tem needed to justify colonial domination of racialized others. The Confer-ence of Berlin in 1884–1885 in which European powers met to lay down rules for colonial imperialism (the “scramble for Africa”) provides but one example of nineteenth-century imperialist collaboration.7 This modern ra-cial colonial domination also occurred and continues to occur through: a fundamental and gross misrepresentation of other cultures and their his-tories (including, but not limited to, Orientalist discourse); reliance on and

3. This does not imply that the production of Western identity has not been implicated in various linkages between colonialism and modern sciences—on the contrary. But what I call the mytho-liturgical production of Western identity not only has traces within various sciences, but also exceeds the bounds of such discourses and forms of knowledge, shaping everyday patterns of thought, artistic production, mores, foreign policies, philosophical systems, etc.

4. Trautsch, “The Invention of the ‘West,’” 90. 5. See Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World, and Wood, Descolonizando las

Historias Biopolíticas con Amílcar Cabral.6. See Trautsch, “The Invention of the ‘West,’” 91, and Said, Orientalism. 7. Chazan, Politics and Society in Contemporary Africa, 26. While this initial section

is only meant to provide a brief philosophical and conceptual characterization of some of the more typical elements of the construction of the West, more detailed genealogies of the use of this construct can be found in Trautsch, “The Invention of the ‘West’”; Demoule, Mais Où sont passés les Indo-Européens?; Federici, Enduring Western Civilization; Hammond, The Balkans and the West; Balzaretti, “The Creation of Europe”; and Williams, Savage Anxieties.

Political Philosophy and the Vestiges of Colonialism

remobilization of mythologies of Christendom; and occlusion of the world-altering power of the histories of imperial and/or (neo)colonial violence. Occidental discourse and its concomitant practices can be named “neoco-lonial” to the extent that their reciprocal causal relation persists in identifi-able continuity with past forms of imperialism and racial colonialism. While “neocolonialism” often referred, for instance, to the replacement of former colonial elites by native elites during and after struggles for national libera-tion, in this context it denotes the repetition of racial colonial practices and patterns of thought in contemporary transnational politics.

On the Untenability of Žižek’s Eurocentric Political Theory Žižek’s essay, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” which is not only a plea, but also an argument and a story, can be best understood as a neocolonial call to enactively re-appropriate what he (among many others) considers to be quintessentially European forms of political thought and practice. We should analyze this essay not only insofar as it sheds light on the contempo-rary politics of Eurocentrism, but also insofar as it might symptomatically relate to broader issues within his work and to other segments of continen-tal philosophy as well. The essay begins with a pseudo-provocation:

When one says Eurocentrism, every self-respecting postmodern leftist in-tellectual has as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture—to reach for a gun, hurling accusations of protofascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism. However, is it possible to imagine a leftist appropriation of the European political legacy?8

Now this question is quite odd. The most interesting and relevant query actually seems to be the inverse of this question, namely, “Is it possible to imagine a postmodern leftist appropriation of a political legacy that is anything but that which has been construed as European?” This question is much more difficult to answer precisely because most postmodern left-ist intellectuals situate themselves within—even if by critical appropriation of—what counts as the European political legacy. In this sense, the simplest

8. Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” 988. Compare Žižek’s connection of Goebbels to politics to that of the revolutionary Amílcar Cabral, “When Goebbels, the brain behind Nazi propaganda, heard the world ‘culture,’ he reached for his pistol. This shows that the Nazis—who were and are the most tragic expression of imperialism and of its thirst for domination—even if they were all degenerates like Hitler, had a clear idea of the value of culture as a factor of resistance to foreign domination.” Cited in Cabral, Unity and Struggle, 139. Here, one can begin to see some of the divergences between anticolonial thought and that of continental philosophy. And Cabral’s understanding of the role of culture in revolutionary decolonization, it should be remembered, was quite opposed to any return to pre-colonial origins. See Cabral, “Le rôle de la culture.”

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reply to Žižek is “Yes,” and then one might point to the well-known and of-ten thought-provoking work of Levinas, Nancy, Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Derrida, Vattimo, Habermas, Negri, Balibar, Badiou, et. al.—at which point the supposedly radical nature of the question only betrays itself as mak-ing explicit the norm among a white, male tradition. In other words, Žižek proposes as radical and new precisely that which constitutes the status quo within continental-philosophical discursive production. But this particular essay stands out as exceptionally neocolonial to the extent that it 1) invokes the tunnel-historical and geographical borders typical of most transitio im-perii victor histories of the West; 2) delimits Western (often as European) exceptionalism through an Orientalist strategy, thereby characterizing the non-West as inherently apolitical (or only political by virtue of having been assimilated); 3) dehistoricizes the sources, causes, and effects of modern white supremacist violence by recourse to reductive-psychoanalytic expla-nations, thereby occluding white supremacism’s more proximate causes, namely, historical processes of imperialism, fascism, and racial colonialism; and 5) intimates the need to restore properly European claims to universal Truth. In what follows I will show how each of these aspects informs Žižek’s premises, and moreover why the essay’s premises are false, inconsistent, and/or implausible.

To the extent that his plea presents an argument, it can be reconstruct-ed as follows:

1. That which appears for the first time in ancient Greece is something specifically European.9

2. Politics proper—i.e., any instance in which a subordinated group “presents itself as the immediate embodiment of society as such, in its universality, against the particular power interests of aristocracy or oligarchy”—appeared for the first time in ancient Greece.10

3. Furthermore, “politics and democracy are synonymous.”11

4. Therefore, both politics proper and democracy are specifically European.

5. Even if a particular history consists entirely of the disavowal of its specific provenance, this provenance can nevertheless be restored (i.e., enactively re-appropriated).

6. Now “the entire history of European political thought is ultimately nothing but a series of disavowals of the political moment,”12 which is to say a series of disavowals of the enactment of politics proper.13

9. Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” 991. 10. Ibid., 988–89.11. Ibid., 989.12. Ibid., 991.13. Ibid., 988–89.

Political Philosophy and the Vestiges of Colonialism

7. But in our current postpolitical situation, one must choose between cynical free market capitalism, foolish liberal multiculturalism, or an enactive re-appropriation of politics proper.14

8. One must not opt for either cynical free market capitalism or foolish liberal multiculturalism.

9. Therefore, even if the particular history of European political thought consists entirely of the disavowal of its specific provenance—name-ly, politics proper and democracy—one can and must nevertheless restore this provenance by the enactive re-appropriation of politics proper, that is, by presenting one’s group “as the immediate embodi-ment of society as such, in its universality, against the particular pow-er interests of aristocracy or oligarchy.”

Here one can see that, distilled to its basic tenets, Žižek’s conservative plea for enacting a re-appropriation of Eurocentric thought and politics is in many ways based on an equally conservative view of history. In what fol-lows I disarticulate and criticize these premises as well as their concomitant sub-arguments.

1) That which appears for the first time in ancient Greece is something specifically European.15 It is important to note that the copula here ex-presses a cultural-communal “possession” over time, and not merely a past geographical “occurrence within”—otherwise the subsequent plea for Eu-rocentrism would immediately collapse. This first premise, while not ex-plicitly postulated by Žižek, constitutes one of the core assumptions upon which his entire argument rests. His other premises and conclusions have no bearing unless this general statement is taken as given. In this initial and commonplace linkage between the originality of an ancient Greek phenom-enon and contemporary Europe in general, he outlines the classical and cultural-communal space of Western history. But this premise is really quite dubious. Why, for instance, should one accept that something that appears in ancient Greece currently belongs to Europe in general—whether really or virtually? And who ultimately legitimates these claims to such property rights? Again, why should something originating in ancient Greece not be-long only to contemporary Greeks, or to Mediterranean port cities, or to hu-man beings in general, or in fact to no one? The official codification of the march of Western history covers over these questions, concealing contin-gent decisions made regarding origins, trajectories, and units of historical analysis. These decisions regarding the representation of Western history then give rise to officially recognized cultural-communal and mytho-liturgi-cal forms of Occidental self-perception. Yet, since we have bracketed belief

14. Ibid., 1004–09.15. Ibid., 991.

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in a unifying reality called the “West,” we cannot assume the legitimacy of this historical-proprietary claim.

2) Politics proper appeared for the first time in ancient Greece. It is worth quoting Žižek’s reasons for advancing this claim at some length:

Let us begin with a question, What is politics proper? It is a phenomenon that appeared for the first time in ancient Greece when the members of the demos (those with no firmly determined place in the hierarchical social edifice) presented themselves as the representatives, the stand-ins, for the whole of society, for the true universality (“we—the ‘nothing,’ not counted in the order—are the people, we are all, against others who stand only for their particular privileged interest”). Political conflict proper thus involves the tension between the structured social body, where each part has its place, and the part of no-part. . . . This singulier universel is a group that, although without any fixed place in the social edifice (or, at best, occupying a subordinated place), not only demands to be heard on equal footing with the ruling oligarchy or aristocracy (that is, to be recognized as a partner in political dialogue and the exercise of power) but, even more, presents itself as the immediate embodiment of society as such, in its universality, against the particular power interests of aristocracy or oligarchy.16

Here Žižek presents his readers with 1) a definition of and story about poli-tics proper and 2) a characterization of ancient Greek democracy. But there are no good reasons for accepting the bases of this brief origin story, and in what follows I will analyze their inadequacy because his subsequent argu-ment depends entirely upon them.

For the sake of the argument, let us accept for a moment Žižek’s defini-tion of politics proper as any instance in which a subordinated group “pres-ents itself as the immediate embodiment of society as such, in its universal-ity, against the particular power interests of aristocracy or oligarchy.”17 Even given this definition of politics proper, it is nevertheless false that such a process or phenomenon appears for the first time in ancient Greece. For example, since in most places in the ancient world politics was inseparable from religion (which is very often still the case today); and since religions make varying universal truth claims (one of which we can easily imagine to be the self-presentation of a politico-religious group as the embodiment of society as such against a ruling class); then we can consider those regime changes or political struggles in the ancient world in which a group mobi-lizes such universal pretensions against a ruling class, considering itself to embody society as such, as fitting into Žižek’s definition of politics proper. In fact, it is not unlikely that such examples of politico-religious struggle be-tween ruling and subordinate groups over the claim to stand-in for society

16. Ibid., 988–89. In this passage and elsewhere, Žižek draws from Rancière’s Disagreement.

17. Ibid., 989.

Political Philosophy and the Vestiges of Colonialism

at the least extend to early relations among sufficiently complex and size-able groups of Homo sapiens sapiens. Yet even known historical examples might be invoked here. Would it be unreasonable to conjecture, for instance, that the Tian clan of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE, which surrounded itself with fugitives and refugees and garnered support of Qi’s populace through philanthropic activities—tactics that “proved decisive in its victories over rival noble lines”—might have presented themselves as the embodiment of society as such?18 Or again, can we not surmise that the uprisings of families and urban elites (whose prestige relied highly on income garnered through temple rituals) against Xerxes in 484 BCE could fit Žižek’s definition of poli-tics proper?19 A group’s mobilization against the particular power interests of aristocracy or oligarchy and its self-presentation as the embodiment of society as such can include myriad world-historical depositions, revolts, and polyarchical struggles, as one finds in the political histories of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.20 So, it would be outlandish to limit politics proper, even accepting Žižek’s definition, to one geographical region and time period rel-atively late in the history of organized interaction between human groups.

At one level, politics involves making demands, and while those de-mands may and often do entail beliefs about universality, such demands need not only be formulated as universals (or in self-referentially universal terms) in order to be considered political. When a colonized people demand that their oppressors leave or face the consequences, this may entail, for example, beliefs that all human beings in no case deserve to be exploited, tortured, enslaved, oppressed, etc. But these political actors do not neces-sarily need to claim to embody some form of universality or all of society for their demands to be considered truly political. Nor, for instance, does an an-ticolonial party, movement, or front need to make a claim about adequately speaking for all peoples and cultures. In fact, many do not precisely because they have grasped the hypocrisy of such pretensions in every dimension of their former political struggles.21 Much more than a political demand’s uni-versality or particularity must be taken into account to forge and evaluate political struggles. And while the detailed evaluation of political struggle in terms of content, context, historical situatedness, intention, feasibility, and so forth requires, as Žižek suggests elsewhere, a great deal of phronesis, this

18. Loewe and Shaughnessy, The Cambridge History of Ancient China, 598–99. 19. Jursa, “The Transition of Babylonia from the Neo-Babylonian Empire to

Achaemenid Rule,” 90–91. See also Waerzeggers, “The Babylonian Revolts against Xerxes and the ‘End of the Archives,’” 150–73. My understanding of the relation of history, politics, and religion should be distinguished from that found in Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Žižek responds to this postcolonial theory of religion, history, and politics in Living in the End Times, 280–86.

20. See Schemeil, “Democracy before Democracy?”21. Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 43.

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virtue involves deliberation about general goods, and so cannot in principle be reduced to a dialectical stalemate between a politics of universality and a politics of particularity.22

But not only should one not accept that the origin of politics proper as broadly defined by Žižek can be circumscribed by ancient Greece, but one should not accept his characterization of Greek democracy either. While the claim that democracy itself originates in 5th century Greece is a contentious claim,23 the arguments in favor of this account tend to garner more trac-tion when either 1) the various possible referents of popular self-rule are constricted by a mode of historical representation that conflates such pos-sible referents and their dates with the etymology and subsequent linguistic lineage of the Greek term dēmokratia, or 2) the implicit or explicit charac-terization of what counts as truly democratic so closely resembles ancient Greek democracy as to be nearly circular. But my aim does not consist in entering into these debates which, as Arlene Saxonhouse points out, tend more to reflect one’s own understanding of democracy from the vantage of a given socio-historical milieu than to grasp the real complexity of ancient Greek practices and modes of thought.24 Instead, I only want to demonstrate that one should not accept Žižek’s account of politics proper or its linkage to a peculiar characterization of Greek democracy.

First, Žižek describes the demos as the people who have no determined place (or only a subordinated place) within the ancient Greek social hier-archy. But this claim is patently false. Those who could be considered part of the demos existed within a privileged stratum of the social hierarchy above slaves. In proportion to the population, the number of slaves in an-cient Greece was “possibly greater than in China, Israel, or other ancient societies.”25 Those of the demos were male, autochthonous (or, at times nat-uralized) citizens who were situated above metics in the social hierarchy. Again, the demos also in principle excluded women, an exclusion which is often only passingly mentioned by scholars as though it were not debilitat-ing for a form of governance to be considered rule by a people. Only about

22. Žižek and Park, Demanding the Impossible, 13. See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, VI: 5.

23. See Isakhan, “Engaging ‘Primitive Democracy’”; Isakhan and Stockwell, The Secret History of Democracy; Fleming, Democracy’s Ancient Ancestors; Graeber, “There was Never a West”; Manglapus, Will of the People; Van de Mieroop, “Democracy and the Rule of Law”; and Glassman, Democracy and Despotism in Primitive Societies.

24. Saxonhouse, “Athenian Democracy,” 489. 25. Black, A World History of Ancient Political Thought, 141. Lenin’s remark also

comes to mind here: “Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave owners.” McLellan, Marxism, 166.

Political Philosophy and the Vestiges of Colonialism

16 percent of the population could be considered citizens (i.e., part of the demos), and actual assembly attendance consisted of only about 2.4 per-cent of the population.26 And combinations of relatively low life-expectancy, requirements of military service, and age restrictions even for those po-tential citizens wanting to be jurors, magistrates, or part of the assembly further reduced de jure and de facto participation.27 Secondly, the demos was not only made up of those who acted as self-effacing resistors to those with particular agendas to push. “Men became conspicuous in Athenian po-litical life through the reputation of their families and the social circles to which they belonged, from their associating with and influence on mem-bers of the Council of Five Hundred, and from their ability to win favor in the assembly.”28 In other words, it is highly misleading to substitute what in practice “was a very aristocratic version of democracy”29 for an idealized anti-aristocratic political community.

3) Furthermore, “politics and democracy are synonymous.”30 Žižek errs in claiming that “politics proper” and “democracy” are synonymous. Politics proper is defined so broadly that it can include veritably anti-democratic struggles. When a singular, subordinated group lays claim to embody so-ciety as such against an aristocracy or oligarchy, nothing necessitates that this representative pretension actually does embody society. For example, even if the ancient Greek demos were to profess itself as the embodiment of society as such, all slaves, women, and metics would be reasonable to doubt and/or challenge this pretension. And again, nothing necessitates that these latter groups would need to pretend to stand in for society as such for their demands to be considered political. Even if, for the sake of the argument, we accept that politics and democracy are indeed synonymous, nevertheless—given the realities of ancient Greek democracy just highlighted—it remains unclear why this past, non-egalitarian patriarchy should harbor an ideal for the present and future. From the foregoing, then, one can see that the con-clusion to Žižek’s first argument, i.e., 4) Therefore, both politics proper and democracy are specifically European, is neither consistent nor plausible.31

26. Black, A World History of Ancient Political Thought, 141.27. Hansen, The Athenian Democracy, 88–90. 28. Fine, The Ancient Greeks, 385. As Fine mentions, one cannot understand ancient

Greek society divorced from its imperialism. In this sense, Žižek’s Western history occludes ancient imperialism and, as we will see, modern forms of imperialism as well.

29. Schemeil, “Democracy before Democracy?” 116.30. Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” 989. 31. While one might object that the false universality of the demos allowed for

significant political advances, one should not therefore dispense with an empirically based ruthless critique of such qualified advances and their frequent romanticization. Nor should one harbor any hope that an instance of false

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5) Even if a particular history consists entirely of the disavowal of its specific provenance, this provenance can nevertheless be restored (i.e., enac-tively re-appropriated). As with the first premise, this general claim func-tions as an assumption needed to found Žižek’s overtly Eurocentric politics. We have already demurred that the provenance of a particular history is straightforward or obvious: what counts as a particular tradition’s histori-cal provenance, while often dealing with real data, arranges such givens by selecting desirable texts, events, traditions, figures, etc., leaving aside other possible and plausible forms of historical representation. But aside from social, political, and epistemic issues arising from a tradition’s selective self-delimitation within history, even a tradition’s claim to the capacity to restore or reclaim its provenance would seem to be quite limited. A more recent passage concerning India and Europe from Žižek’s Absolute Recoil similarly problematizes the notion of origins:

In reality, however, there were no origins that were subsequently lost, for the origins are constituted through the very experience of their loss and the striving to return to them. (Maybe Foucault has a point here: the dis-covery of what went on before the loss is a topic for genealogy, which, pre-cisely, has nothing to do with the historicist topic of origins.) This holds for every return to origins.32

All origins, then, are constituted ex post facto. Yet, time and again, Žižekian political theory tends to construct the origin and qualities of the West as di-alectically (and thus somewhat painfully) unfolding for the eventual benefit of the non-West. The colonial diffusion of Western Ideas dialectially actual-ize their liberating truth, (potentially) allowing non-Europeans to “become more European than the Europeans themselves.”33 It thus remains unclear how one might enactively re-appropriate the originary politics proper of ancient Greece while simultaneously recognizing that one constitutes this origin in the very act of striving to restore it.

6) Now “the entire history of European political thought is ultimately nothing but a series of disavowals of the political moment,” or the enactment of politics proper.34 This premise functions as an opening line to Žižek’s nar-rative of Europe’s disavowal of its true, political-philosophical inheritance. He writes,

Something emerged in ancient Greece under the name of the demos de-manding its rights, and, from the very beginning (that is, from Plato’s Republic on) to the recent revival of liberal political philosophy, political

universality will inevitably or necessarily become caught up in a progressive dialectical movement.

32. Žižek, Absolute Recoil, 136.33. Ibid., 150 and 347. See also Žižek, Living in the End Times, 286n15.34. Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” 988–91.

Political Philosophy and the Vestiges of Colonialism

philosophy itself was an attempt to suspend the destabilizing potential of the political, to disavow and/or regulate it in one way or another: by bring-ing about a return to a prepolitical social body, by fixing the rules of politi-cal competition, and so forth.35

This quotation and the text’s longer section on postpolitics amount to an-other conservative lament concerning the loss of, and plea for the resump-tion of, European exceptionalism akin to those touted by Husserl and Heidegger, among others.36 The West no sooner emerges than its earliest members, such as Plato, gravely err, thus giving rise to post-lapsarian vio-lent relations that come to characterize all of subsequent history.37 But one should reject this premise for a number of reasons. First, even if we assume that politics proper could be the rightful provenance of Europe or the West (it is not); and even if we assume that the history of Western (post)politics and political philosophy could be summarized by virtue of the suspension of the destabilizing aspect of a group’s self-presentation as the embodiment of society as such (they cannot be); then we are still left with yet another conundrum constitutive of Western essentialism. That is, how could one identify the history of something, for instance, a two-millennia-old histori-cal trajectory, if precisely what constitutes the perdurance of said historical trajectory has always-already been concealed, forgotten, or dormant? The shortest answer is that one cannot clearly identify such perduring, occult formations because they do not exist beyond modern mytho-liturgical pro-ductions of Occidental identity.

Secondly, and in archetypically neocolonialist fashion, Žižek guards the postulation of a European essence by means of a strategy of crude Oriental-ism. After providing a personal anecdote concerning his participation in the “Committee for the Protection of the Human Rights of the Four Accused” in 1988 (politics proper), he contrasts a Japanese novelist’s experience of caste differences between a ruler and the lowest class, the burakumin (apo-litical). In this experience, the novelist Sue Sumii notices that a member of the burakumin caste salvages some of the emperor’s excrement in an appar-ently symbolic act “in which the king’s body stands for the social body as such.”38 From this, Žižek draws the following conclusion:

35. Ibid., 992.36. Among other places, see Husserl, “Vienna Lecture,” and Heidegger, Introduction

to Metaphysics, 30. 37. This basic structure closely mirrors some classical Christian theological

readings of Genesis 1–4. This article cannot explore the other elements of Christian myth at work in Žižek’s argument, such as the language of grace and his claims about St. Paul. For more on this topic, see Hart, “Slavoj Žižek and the Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion.”

38. Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” 990–91.

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However, the crucial point and the proof of the non-political, corporate functioning of Japanese society is the fact that, although voices like that of Sumii are heard on their behalf, the burakumin did not actively politicize their destiny, did not constitute their position as that of singulier universel, claiming that, precisely as the part of no-part, they stand for the true uni-versality of Japanese society.39

Here, Žižek’s Orientalism relies on a methodological racism, namely, the as-sumption that the experience of one Japanese novelist can serve as an ad-equate lens through which to understand all of Japanese society, culture, history, and politics. By means of an ironic and revealing contradiction, he substitutes a singulier universel (a quite random anecdote) for all of Japa-nese society. But this irrational methodological choice—and not anything inherent to the burakumin—in fact depoliticizes this group. In this brief in-stance, the burakumin are depoliticized from without by means of an Ori-entalist caricaturization that naturalizes this caste as helplessly passive. In this essay,40 Žižek’s Orientalist depoliticization of the burakumin is meant to serve as a monadic instance of the non-political character of the non-West in general. But, of course, there exist various empirical examples of situations in which the burakumin have indeed mobilized politically. In the 1950s, bur-akumin and the Committee for Buraku Liberation collectively forced mas-sive land reforms, demanded to not be sensationally caricaturized in novels, forced resignations through strikes and boycotts, and served as “the active core of leftist demonstrations against American military bases.”41 Much of the (burakumin and other) grassroots organizing and new sources of pro-test in 1970s Japan involved forms of activism that were “quite capable of becoming universal in terms of the principles enunciated.”42 And in 1974 burakumin members of the Buraku Liberation League protested against and violently clashed with teachers over discriminatory pedagogical poli-cies.43 Thus, the Orientalist strategy deployed by Žižek does not guarantee Europe’s (or the “West’s”) purportedly unique provenance; instead, it only repeats modern racial colonialist discursive power by depoliticizing other groups and/or civilizations.

7) But in our current postpolitical situation, one must choose between cynical free market capitalism, foolish liberal multiculturalism, or an enactive

39. Ibid., 991. In this brief narrative we find another mytho-liturgical affirmation of “Oriental despotism.”

40. In contrast to this essay, Žižek criticizes Orientalism in the essay that he links with this plea. See “Multiculturalism,” 38.

41. De Vos and Wagatsuma, Japan’s Invisible Race, 73–80. See also Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes, 303–05; Wagatsuma, “Political Problems of a Minority Group in Japan”; and Yoshino and Murakoshi, “Current Liberation Activities.”

42. Krauss, Rohlen, and Steinhoff, Conflict in Japan, 392. 43. Pharr, “Burakumin Protests.”

Political Philosophy and the Vestiges of Colonialism

re-appropriation of politics proper.44 The first two options within this triad are, for Žižek, the culminating elements of the long march of postpolitics that begins with Plato’s Republic after the fall of politics proper as exhib-ited by Greek democracy. Žižek’s narrative of postpolitics claims to describe the continued disavowal of politics proper, the repeated forgetfulness that true politics involves a group’s claim to stand in for the universal. Cynical free market capitalists depoliticize struggle by naturalizing economic com-petition, championing globalization without allowing for true universals to emerge. Liberal multiculturalists similarly depoliticize contemporary strug-gles by reducing all strife to mere negotiated inclusivity, never questioning the relation of nonchalant dialogical openness to the strengthening of glo-balized capital. We need not accept either of these options, however. Not only, as Žižek himself avows,45 have we been presented with a false dilemma between multiculturalism and free market capitalism all along. But, since the foundations of Žižek’s argument for Eurocentric exceptionalism prove implausible, false, or inconsistent—as shown above—we are also presented with a second false dilemma: between, on the one hand, the foolish left and cynical right, and on the other, the reclamation of Eurocentric politics as an antidote for a supposedly postpolitical world. This doubly false dilemma only holds if one accepts the confines previously imposed by Žižek on poli-tics itself—namely, the cultural-communal and geo-historical boundaries of Western identity.

8) One must not opt for either cynical free market capitalism or foolish lib-eral multiculturalism. While one might easily agree with the content of this premise outside the context of the current argument, one might also accept it for the more general reason that, given that one need not choose between two undesirable alternatives, then one should not do so. But it is nonetheless crucial to analyze the specific dimensions of neocolonialism that support the rejection of this false dilemma within the Eurocentric political framework provided. For Žižek, both of these postpolitical options produce excessive, explosive violence. For instance, he argues that one should not understand the violence of skinheads as a result of selfishness, ideology, or talk about Western values, but as the manifestation of id-evil. One can account for skin-head violence, in other words, by analyzing the id within a postpolitical con-text. But Žižek’s updated psychoanalysis of white supremacist violence in this section bears functional resemblances to the colonialist psychology of Octave Mannoni and others.46 That is, the reductive-psychoanalytic account of id-evil within an allegedly postpolitical environment largely occludes the

44. Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” 1004–09. 45. Ibid., 1008.46. See “The So-Called Dependency Complex of the Colonized,” in Fanon, Black

Skin, White Masks.

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multiple social, historical, economic, cultural, and political causes of sub-jectivation that occur amid contexts of white supremacist, imperialist, and racial-colonialist relations and practices. In an apology for Eurocentrism in relation to global matters, why make the move to psychoanalytic explana-tion, and why here and now—especially since Žižek provides alternative social, cultural, and political accounts of similar phenomena elsewhere?47 The argument takes such a turn because this shift of register allows him to avoid reminding his reader of a more plausible etiological account of the social, cultural, and political sources and causes of white supremacist skinhead violence within the geographical and cultural-communal spaces traditionally delimited as Western. By reducing skinhead violence to the id within a postpolitical environment, Žižek dehistoricizes the sources and effects of the peculiar forms of racism that accompany, fuel, and out-last Europe’s twentieth-century colonial and fascist regimes. But white su-premacist violence is not the effect of postpolitical relations, but structur-ally part and parcel of the mytho-liturgical politics of the “West.” Skinhead violence is indeed political, as evidenced in the GDR in the mid-1980s when skinhead cliques and “groups increasingly preferred names that evoked National Socialism or its racist nationalist (völkisch) precursors”—groups that both organized anti-Semitic attacks and even political parties such as the National Alternative.48 While a considerable ideological, strategic, and religious diversity exists under the umbrella term “skinhead,” some forms of skinhead organization—whether by means of leaders, alliances, or hori-zontal association via the Internet—do conspiratorially mobilize civic and religious discourses of universality against a supposedly existent cabal of Jewish political elites.49 One should not understand all forms of skinhead organization, then, as manifesting “excessive, irrational violence with no ideologico-political foundation.”50 In sum, it is a bit misleading to codify the “good” politics of the demos as properly European while disavowing the evil violence of skinheads as postpolitical and, therefore, as not really qualifying as part of the West’s proper heritage.

9) Therefore, even if the particular history of European political thought consists entirely of the disavowal of its specific provenance—namely, politics proper and democracy—one can and must nevertheless restore this prov-enance by the enactive re-appropriation of politics proper, that is, by pre-senting one’s group “as the immediate embodiment of society as such, in its

47. Elsewhere, for example, Žižek links the brutality of Nazi anti-semitism to global capitalism’s production of various local forms of meaninglessness. See Žižek, Violence, 79.

48. Botsch, “From Skinhead-Subculture to Radical Right Movement,” 558–60.49. See Blazak, “The Racist Skinhead Movement.”50. Žižek, “A Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,’” 1001.

Political Philosophy and the Vestiges of Colonialism

universality, against the particular power interests of aristocracy or oligar-chy.” Žižek’s plea to enactively re-appropriate the universal politics that al-legedly—and paradoxically—both belongs to and evades Europe evinces a perduring double standard that typifies debates regarding the politics of Eurocentrism. We can come to understand the dynamics of this double stan-dard by highlighting the way in which Žižek responds to his critics in The Impasses of Today’s Radical Politics. In response to Mignolo, for example, Žižek cites a lengthy passage from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, partially quoted here:

I am a man, and I have to rework the world’s past from the very beginning. I am not just responsible for the slave revolt in Saint Domingue. . . . I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future. . . . I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors. . . . And it is by going beyond the historical and instrumental given that I initiate my cycle of freedom.51

Žižek interprets Fanon as arguing that global capitalist relations “cannot be problematized from the standpoint of pre-capitalist cultures.”52 I un-derstand Žižek to mean that one cannot effectively problematize globalized capitalist relations by wanting to return to pre-capitalist traditions, since this is his predominant criticism of more romantic strains of postcolonial theory. And many anticolonial thinkers would agree, including but not lim-ited to Mariátegui, Nkrumah, Cabral, Sankara, and so forth. In the ensuing portions of the text, Žižek then criticizes a variety of non-European theo-rists who allegedly seek to return to pre-colonial origins. But the same criti-cism does not seem to apply to the enactive re-appropriation of the politi-cal legacy “proper” to Europe conceived as a cultural community. And this double standard, which marks not a few debates in the politics of Eurocen-trism and which constitutes a true vestige of European colonialism, likely undergirds the frustrations of Dabashi, Mignolo, and others. Against this la-tent double standard, Fanon does not only reject the pressures of traditions (for instance, excessively romantic or Sartrean strains of negritude)53 con-cerning norms for historical reconstruction. He also calls into question any dominant economic, cultural, or political group’s claims to extract moments, inventions, or processes of history, so that one might rework the world’s past for the present and future. Fanon desires to rework a global past for a global present and future. He is really saying something more profound than

51. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 201–05. In “Yes, We Can,” Mignolo suggests that self-respecting decolonial intellectuals reach for Fanon rather than concern themselves with European philosophical debates, and it is to this claim that Žižek responds.

52. Žižek, The Impasses, 10–11.53. See Rabaka, The Negritude Movement.

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usually realized, namely, that the temporality of humanity is itself part of the commons. In other words and in relation to the present critique, Fanonian anticolonial thought suggests that a group’s claim to “politics proper” actu-ally functions less as a straightforward historical fact than as a proprietary claim that problematically fabricates an apolitical and dispossessed exterior.

The conclusion to Žižek’s argument also involves a massive and virtu-ally ignored shift of historical-geographical context: we have moved from the supposed claim to embody society as such by some autochthonous men in the ancient Athenian polis to Žižek’s call to make new universal claims to embody society as such in the context of globalized international rela-tions. But the call to re-appropriate European forms of universality in the context of contemporary geopolitics amounts to the attempt to reinstate a fundamentally neocolonialist political project. And the argument’s recur-rent remobilization of various colonialist tropes only emphasizes this fact all the more. But our counter-arguments have not only demonstrated that one or two of Žižek’s premises are dubious, but have rather shown that all of the main premises are false, inconsistent, and/or implausible. Thus, Žižek’s argument for Eurocentrism proves to be untenable, and since “Faulty and inadequate analytic frames engender ineffective political action and strat-egizing for social transformation,”54 one should reject his descriptive and prescriptive plea.

Continental Philosophy and the Neocolonial Persistence of EurocentrismDoes the foregoing critique suggest that Žižek’s entire corpus amounts to neocolonialist political theory? No, certainly not. Here we might recall Fanon’s important insight during the Algerian Revolution: “It was once all so simple with the bad on one side and the good on the other.”55 Geopoliti-cal—and hence also academic—relations often manifest the same structur-al Manichaeism that Fanon, Memmi, and others so vehemently criticized;56 and anyone who contests forms of colonization will take unjust racial, eco-nomic, political, gendered, and spatial bifurcations within and between societies as strategic reference points to be undermined. But this in no way means that the various tactics internal to processes of decolonization should always obey an a priori either/or structure, and Fanon’s caution ad-vises against labeling Žižek’s entire oeuvre (neo)colonialist tout court. In fact, there are a number of things in Žižek’s work that might be taken up by anticolonial theorists. For instance, decolonial and postcolonial thinkers

54. Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 236. 55. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 94.56. See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, and Memmi, Portrait du colonisé: précédé

de Portrait du colonisateur, 146.

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should not just scoff at a theorist who vehemently criticizes the US invasion of Iraq, attempts to rethink ideology and exploitation, and generally encour-ages anti-racist struggles. Žižek also helpfully theorizes contemporary colo-nization as driven not primarily by nation-states, but by corporations, and he highlights important, often overlooked neocolonial relations:

We talk about America being an economic neocolonialist state, but what about Chinese neocolonialism? [I]t is obvious that China is now a mega economic power in Africa. They are doing some better things than the West, but not all. For example, take Sudan or Zimbabwe where they are ruthlessly creating factories run by local tyrants. Or take Myanmar. It is absolutely clear how the General survived the great protest led by the Bud-dhist monks a couple of years ago: the military regime was saved with the discreet help of Chinese security advisors. Myanmar is effectively a Chinese economic colony, with China playing the standard postcolonial strategy of supporting the corrupt military regime in exchange for the freedom to ex-ploit the vast natural resources.57

This quotation brings into relief one of Žižek’s main theses, namely, that transnational and transcultural forms of indirect rule coexist perfectly well with contemporary capitalism. And this is why any strategy along the lines of a return to pre-colonial times cannot work. A more expansive immanent critique of Žižek’s political theory thus remains possible, but far beyond the scope of this article.

Nevertheless, the main issue as it pertains to the debates on Al Jazeera and elsewhere is not that Žižek says things throughout his oeuvre that in some ways balance the inconsistencies of his leftist plea for Eurocentrism. Rather, the frustration of Dabashi, Mignolo, and others—as it appears to me—arises from the neocolonial double standards that typically subtend contemporary continental-philosophical theories and practices. The double standard in its Žižekian guise amounts to the plea for both European and non-European peoples to enactively re-appropriate the West’s “politics proper” while simul-taneously relegating alternate cultural-communal pasts, such as that of India, to the status of a mere meontological and “heterogeneous mess.”58 And this spectral double standard does not constitute a contradiction awaiting a sub-lated, predictable resolution, but rather evinces a general theoretical incon-gruity to be decolonized. We can even immanently criticize this double stan-dard in the Kantian terms that Žižek develops elsewhere: if the privateness of the “communal-institutional order of one’s particular identification” proves insufficient to ground truth claims that are significantly public and rational, then this principle would not only have to apply to non-European spaces, but

57. Žižek and Park, Demanding the Impossible, 18–19. See also Žižek, Iraq; Žižek, The Impasses, 43–44; and Žižek, Trouble in Paradise, 22–23.

58. Žižek, Absolute Recoil, 136.

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also to those cultural-communal and institutional formations codified as Eu-ropean.59 The principle does not typically cut both ways, however, because that which is interpreted as quintessentially Western is assumed to be al-ways-already universal in a seminal and latently diffusionist way.

The recent expressions of entirely legitimate dissatisfactions with the im-plicit norms regarding who/what counts as authoritatively philosophical bring into relief a more general issue to be taken seriously: continental philosophy (and likely other traditions of philosophy as well) has not remained impervi-ous to the colonial thought-formations of the always malleable and imbricating milieus within which it travels and changes. As a whole, contemporary conti-nental philosophy has not, unlike, for example, certain sectors of anthropology, begun to grapple with the extent to which it remains materially, politically, and practically bound up with patterns and sedimentations of racial colonialism.60 While Žižek’s argument brings into relief the existence of aspects of modern racial colonialism within contemporary continental philosophy most clearly, his plea in many ways only makes explicit a number of the most typical social, political, and metaphilosophical problems that beset continental philosophy’s Eurocentric presuppositions.61 For instance, the mode of generalization that connects certain seeds (e.g., a term in a text of Aristotle, a Platonic distinction, etc.) to the supposed and subsequent germination or “forgetfulness” of such seminal ideas within history should be challenged not only as reliant on an il-legitimate mode of historical explanation, but also because the West does not really have any perduring identity at all. And as the above criticism of Žižek’s essay suggests, one should not simply criticize philosophical commitments to Eurocentrism because these are culturally taboo, but rather because such pre-suppositions often rely on and fuel conceptions of history, society, culture, and politics that are false, inconsistent, and/or implausible. — • —

59. Žižek, Trouble in Paradise, 57.60. See Bisogno “¿Descolonizar la Antropología?”; de Castro and Skafish, Cannibal

Metaphysics; and Harrison, Decolonizing Anthropology. Of course, this is not to say either that I am the first one to engage in such a critique or that those in other disciplines have not begun to philosophically rethink decolonization broadly construed. See Grosfoguel and Hernández, Lugares Descoloniales; Boulbina, La décolonisation des savoirs; Grosfoguel and Castro-Gómez, El Giro Decolonial; Serequeberhan, “Decolonization and the Practice of Philosophy”; Serequeberhan, The Hermeneutics of African Philosophy; Maldonado-Torres, Against War; Maldonado-Torres, “Lecture at the Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues”; Broeck and Junker, Postcoloniality – Decoloniality – Black Critique; Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies; Mignolo and Escobar, Globalization and the Decolonial Option; and Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregi, Coloniality at Large.

61. For the significant traces of colonialist attitudes in Merleau-Ponty’s work, see Wood, “Revisiting La Question.”

Political Philosophy and the Vestiges of Colonialism

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