Esben Bøgh Sørensen: Žižek’s “typical left-liberal” — a figure that is reiterated and criticized throughout much of his writing — is a figure who holds tolerant and multicultural views, but whose antiracism is actually a kind of subtle racism. In the piece in question the “left-liberal” humanist figure is a person who is afraid of criticizing Islam and who (according to Žižek) unjustly accuses those who do so of being Islamophobic.
But who is this “left-liberal” Žižek has spent so much time criticizing? On closer inspection this figure does not actually represent any position on the left. The left does not face a problem of too much tolerance, this is a straw man. If anything, it faces the twin problems of nationalism (or a national imaginary) and an inability to adequately critique Western values — problems which Žižek’s text demonstrate.
Žižek’s critique therefore completely misses the heart of the discussion: how to thoughtfully criticize fundamentalist religious views as well as “the West” and “Western values.” Žižek does neither of these.
Žižek places this misrepresented figure of the “left-liberal” on the one side, while countering it with an even more problematic and essentially racist stereotyped figure of the refugee/migrant. Žižek’s sentiments are remarkably similar to the rhetoric of the European far-right.
[…] Rather than fighting together for freedom of movement for all, Žižek thinks the national and supranational elites should curb this right. Rather than fighting for open borders and against the nation-states and their political elites, he supports a centralized distribution of refugees by the nation-states. Rather than analyzing the current conjuncture and the possibilities for contesting the institutions of European political and economic elites — Fortress Europe — Žižek falls back on the same institutional solutions and becomes the “left defender” of Fortress Europe.
Moreover, instead of situating the struggles of refugees and migrants within an analysis of capitalism, Žižek refers abstractly to the problems caused by “the integration of local agriculture into global economy.” Žižek’s avoidance of political economy is not new, but it becomes particularly problematic in this case because it’s not coupled with an analysis of the current social struggles throughout Europe and beyond, resulting in a strange opposition between abstract “class struggle” and the struggles of refugees and migrants.
There is no serious attempt to analyze the potentialities of these struggles and how their articulation to other social struggles could potentially challenge the extreme right. More here.