The Zižekian Critique of Multiculturalism. Multiculturalism versus Paul?

The popularity of Slavoj Žižek is on a continual rise ever since the outbreak of the global financial crisis. This fact seems readily understandable, since he is the representative of a view directed against banks, big capital, and exploitation. Žižek is among those contemporary, anti-postmodernist philosophers, who think that political consequences can be drawn from the Christian message, and that contemporary political philosophy is in need of Christianity. In his work The Ticklish Subject. The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (1999), following Alain Badiou, Žižek traces a parallel between the American global domination of our time and the late Roman Empire, also a “multiculturalist” global state in which ethnic groups were held together by a non-substantial link (in this case not by capital, but by Roman law). Therefore, what we need today, according to Žižek, is the gesture that would undermine capitalist globalization from the standpoint of a universal Truth, as Pauline Christianity did to the global Roman Empire. The postmodernist multiculturalism critiqued by Žižek tolerates the otherness of the Other by eliminating its very essence. According to the (multiculturalist) ethics of tolerance, respect is formal, empty, and devoid of substance: the moral position turns into not judging/not evaluating – e.g. you can do anything you want if it does not concern me –, morality turns into its own opposite.

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