I should confess that I've been on the fence about Slavoj Zizek for a long time. I've read books and essays here and there, but nothing systematically except for The Ticklish Subject, which I learned a lot from in places. In his case I have shamelessly indulged in that very bad habit of reading more about someone than by him, because Zizek the pop phenomenon is significantly more interesting than Zizek the philosopher.

I've been kept on the fence by a real lack of clarity about whether the broad strokes of Zizek's anti-liberalism are of the astute-if-esoteric or the glibly-sensationalist sort. That is, I have always known that Zizek and I do not share the same critiques of liberalism -- but I had still been wondering whether he couldn't be some kind of helpful ally.

But, Adam Kirsch is right. Zizek's popularity is either genuinely terrifying or deeply depressing -- here's hoping it's the latter.

There is a name for the politics that glorifies risk, decision, and will; that yearns for the hero, the master, and the leader; that prefers death and the infinite to democracy and the pragmatic; that finds the only true freedom in the terror of violence. Its name is not communism. Its name is fascism, and in his most recent work Zizek has inarguably revealed himself as some sort of fascist. He admits as much in Violence, where he quotes the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on the "re-emerging Left-Fascist whispering at the borders of academia"--"where, I guess, I belong." There is no need to guess. ...

In this way, Zizek's allegedly progressive thought leads directly into a pit of moral and intellectual squalor. In his New York Times piece against torture, Zizek worried that the normalization of torture as an instrument of state was the first step in "a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone." This is a good description of Zizek's own work. Under the cover of comedy and hyperbole, in between allusions to movies and video games, he is engaged in the rehabilitation of many of the most evil ideas of the last century. He is trying to undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence, and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse. Is Zizek's audience too busy laughing at him to hear him? I hope so, because the idea that they can hear him without recoiling from him is too dismal, and frightening, to contemplate.

I have to think that Zizek is more than smart enough to understand all of this -- that is, to understand that his own radicalism is actually the linchpin of the domestication of much of American intellectual culture into milquetoast bourgeois po-mo leftism. I have to think he must only be laughing about it -- and that is even more disgusting.