At a Guardian Live event, the Slovenian philosopher explains why he wants to ‘problematise’ Europe and why ‘the Donald’ is something of a paradox

Depending on who you ask, Slavoj Žižek is either a darling of the international left; “the most dangerous philosopher in the west”; or, in some quarters, a cryptofascist buffoon, whose outspoken – although frequently ironic – stances against political correctness are singled out in particular as a grave threat to the cause by those ready to disavow him on his own side of politics.

What happens to democracy when the majority is inclined to vote for racist and sexist laws?

That he is one of the most influential and indeed popular public intellectuals in the world seems more or less beyond doubt, though few self-declared Leninists could ever expect to draw sold-out crowds to their public appearances, as was the case at last week’s Guardian Live event at London’s Emmanuel Centre.

But Žižek is not just any self-declared Leninist: the Slovenian philosopher not only incorporates the intellectual rigours of Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis into his wideranging critique of global capitalism, but also deploys an arsenal of dirty jokes and cultural references high and low to leaven the subject with sometimes outrageous humour – arguably rendering the critique all the more effective.

His new book, Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours, seeks to address the existential dilemmas that have beset Europe since the financial crisis.

“Many people complain about the so-called democratic deficit in Europe: I want to problematise it,” said Žižek, who used his opening address to point out that a more democratic Europe – his shorthand for one in which the views of the majority of the public were always adhered to – would not necessarily be a better one, and took the hardening of public attitudes in Europe towards refugees in recent months as his example.

“We encounter here the old problem: what happens to democracy when the majority is inclined to vote for racist and sexist laws? I am not afraid to draw the conclusion that emancipatory politics should not be bound a priori by formal democratic procedures; people quite often do not know what they want, or do not want what they know, or they simply want the wrong thing.”

Perhaps inevitably, it was not long before Žižek turned, in his discussion with the Guardian columnist Gary Younge, from rightwing populism in Europe to rightwing populism in the US, and its unavoidable, totemic figure: Donald Trump.

“Read Trump closely – it is difficult to do, I know – and if you extract his total racist and sexist stupidities, you will see that here and there, where he makes a complete proposal, they’re usually not so bad,” said Žižek. “He said he will not totally dismantle universal healthcare, raise the minimum wage, and so on.”

“Trump is a paradox: he is really a centrist liberal, and maybe even in his economic policies closer to the Democrats, and he desperately tries to mask this. So the function of all of these dirty jokes and stupidities is to cover up that he is really a pretty ordinary, centrist politician.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Žižek believes there are two strong Europes - ‘anti-immigrant Europe’ and ‘anonymous Brussels Europe’ Photograph: Anna Gordon/The Guardian

But Europe’s current predicament, Žižek argued, is that its most potent political forces – the technocratic power base in Brussels on one hand and rightwing nationalist parties such as Pegida and Front National on the other – represent the greatest danger to the universalist values on which the European Union, or any form of transnational government, ought to be predicated.

In this formulation, the European central government is reduced, perhaps not unfairly, to little more than an instrument of global capital; in touch only with the managerial class and unable to provide a unified response to any of the manifold problems assailing Europe in 2016. The deadening effect on public and political life of a Brussels beholden to its banks thus finds its perverse echo in the considerable number of voters now throwing their weight behind Europe’s new far-right. The task of the left, according to Žižek, is nothing less than to save Europe from itself.

“There are basically at this moment two strong Europes: anti-immigrant, racist Europe and this anonymous Brussels Europe. They are both horrific. If this remains the only choice, Europe is over.”

So what is to be done? It is at this point that things get interesting. While always happy to provoke the liberal left with his support for the death penalty or a call for the “militarisation” of Europe’s response to the refugee crisis – by which, to be clear, he means deploying the military in something like its capacity for disaster relief, as opposed to armed intervention – Žižek never fails to return to what, in the end, amounts to a fairly modest set of proposals.

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek talks to Gary Younge – Guardian Live event Read more

Chiefly, that the emancipatory left must engage in the process of reform, and demand what is prima facie politically and economically possible within the current system, but nonetheless designated impossible for ideological reasons. The example of this, he returns to time and again, being the introduction of universal healthcare in the US – an achievement worthy of the highest praise for Obama and countless thousands of Americans who worked to realise it over decades, but not one that can be linked categorically to the radical left.

All of this begs the question: could it be that Žižek is really not so different to Trump? Both thrive on their quotability, knowing full well how easily so much of what they say can provoke outrage when read out of context; and both of them are, in their own very different ways, what the press loves to call “big personalities”.

What if, after all of the dirty jokes and PC-baiting is put to one side, it turns out that the man himself is, like Trump, just another wooly liberal trying to shock us into thinking otherwise.

Slavoj Žižek was in conversation with Gary Younge at a Guardian Live event. To find out what other events are coming up sign up to become a Guardian Member.