Rejoin­ders to Slavoj Zizek’s polemic on the refugee cri­sis insist on turn­ing this exchange into Zizek’s Hei­deg­ger­ian moment. His inter­locu­tors find his puta­tive­ly racist and xeno­pho­bic claims about refugees and their cul­tur­al tra­di­tions to be reck­less, irre­spon­si­ble and incon­sis­tent with his self-pro­fessed rad­i­cal egal­i­tar­i­an politics.

Zizek argues that the only way to undo this global capitalist deadlock is to re-inscribe the fundamental antagonism, precisely by insisting on the “global solidarity of the exploited.”

Even worse, they claim that they can hard­ly dis­tin­guish his claims from pop­ulist, con­ser­v­a­tive, anti-immi­grant, right-wing Neo­fas­cist pro­pa­gan­da, that such claims prove that he has been a clos­et­ed racist Neo­fas­cist all along. Writ­ing for ROAR mag­a­zine, for exam­ple, Esben Bogh Sorensen writes, ​“Essen­tial­ly, Zizek accepts the dom­i­nant idea — shared by insti­tu­tion­al Europe and the extreme right — that refugees and migrants pose a prob­lem, threat, or some kind of cri­sis for ​‘us’ and ​‘our egal­i­tar­i­an­ism and per­son­al freedoms.’”

Iron­i­cal­ly, as Zizek him­self responds to Sara Ahmed, his cri­tique of the hege­mo­ny of mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism as an ide­ol­o­gy does not mean that he uses mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism as a nor­ma­tive descrip­tion of the ​“real­i­ty of pre­dom­i­nant social rela­tions.” Adam Kot­sko thus cor­rect­ly points out, ​“Every time [Zizek] men­tions the exis­tence of intol­er­ance or cul­tur­al dif­fer­ence, for instance, it is tak­en as an endorse­ment or legit­i­ma­tion rather than a descrip­tion of facts that must be tak­en into account.”

Racist pre­sup­po­si­tions, left­ist taboos

The prob­lem in the crit­i­cal recep­tion of his polemic on the refugees is not so much, as Kot­sko main­tains, that Zizek over-iden­ti­fies with the “(inad­e­quate) terms of the pub­lic debate.” Rather, Zizek’s prob­lema­ti­za­tion of the pre­sup­po­si­tions inher­ent to both West­ern lib­er­al mul­ti­cul­tur­al and pop­ulist, anti-immi­grant, neo­fas­cist dis­cours­es on the refugees are mis­tak­en for his own posi­tion on the polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect and post­mod­ern taboos that he oppos­es. These pre­sup­po­si­tions, how­ev­er, are clear­ly dis­tinct from his posi­tion on the taboos.

The three main pre­sup­po­si­tions that Zizek engages in this polemic, and the PC taboos that are relat­ed to them, include the fol­low­ing: First, the slip­page between refugees and Islam­ic ter­ror­ists, by which racist dis­cours­es seem to sug­gest that the refugees are some­how ISIS ter­ror­ists who were trans­plant­ed into Europe direct­ly from some ISIS’s ter­ror­ism train­ing camps. The cor­re­spond­ing PC and post­mod­ern taboo that Zizek force­ful­ly dis­avows is the taboo about demo­niz­ing the ISIS ter­ror­ists — those who enforce this taboo tend to sub­jec­tivize the ter­ror­ists, with the inten­tion of offer­ing a ​“deep­er under­stand­ing” of their human­i­ty in their strug­gle against West­ern colo­nial inter­ven­tions. For Zizek, there should be no sym­pa­thy for the ter­ror­ist Other.

Sec­ond, the corol­lary to the slip­page between refugees and ter­ror­ists is the sweep­ing homog­e­niza­tion of all Arab refugees into Mus­lims, where­by the reli­gious, eth­nic and cul­tur­al diver­si­ty of these refugee com­mu­ni­ties is flat­tened out. Here Zizek pro­pos­es that the taboo con­cern­ing the ban on Islam­o­pho­bia — that any cri­tique of Islam is an expres­sion of Islam­o­pho­bic sen­ti­ments, should be com­plete­ly reject­ed. He makes it clear that such an atti­tude is based on noth­ing but pater­nal­is­tic condescension.

And final­ly, he iden­ti­fies the Left’s embar­rass­ing silence over oppres­sive cul­tur­al prac­tices among spe­cif­ic Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ties in Europe. Here Zizek insists on break­ing the PC and post­mod­ern taboo against Euro­cen­trism. In his view, the Euro­pean val­ues that ush­ered the Enlight­en­ment lega­cy are much need­ed today, when the glob­al cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem has decou­pled itself from the demo­c­ra­t­ic project and mutat­ed into a glob­al econ­o­my that pur­sues ruth­less accu­mu­la­tion based instead on the author­i­tar­i­an cap­i­tal­ist poli­cies of the late Sin­ga­pore­an leader Lee Kwan Yew.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, his crit­ics do not only con­flate these racist claims on the Left and the Right with his own cri­tique of the PC and post­mod­ern taboos, but also down­play Zizek’s sym­pa­thy for the refugees and their human­i­tar­i­an cri­sis. He is wary that the refugees will be the ones to pay the price for the Paris ter­ror­ist attacks and seems to be gen­uine­ly con­cerned about their wel­fare in the con­text of ris­ing pop­ulist anti-immi­grant and neo-fas­cist sen­ti­ments by the glob­al cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem itself in their host countries.

He thus pro­pos­es insti­tu­tion­al and struc­tur­al solu­tions to the refugee cri­sis — he calls for a prop­er large-scale, as prob­lem­at­ic as it may sound, ​“mil­i­ta­rized” coor­di­na­tion oper­a­tion. His main con­cern here is to warn against the poten­tial trag­ic con­se­quences of a hap­haz­ard re-set­tle­ment plan that sim­ply advo­cates ​“open bor­der” poli­cies that fails to take into con­sid­er­a­tion the ris­ing tide of anti-immi­grant hostilities.

His views on the mon­stros­i­ty of the neigh­bor (that he is not per­son­al­ly inter­est­ed in host­ing any refugees at his home, because ​“he would not like to host his own fam­i­ly mem­bers at home either”) are well known. Nonethe­less, it is worth not­ing that else­where Zizek also expressed his will­ing­ness to have the gov­ern­ment deduct half of his salary to help accom­mo­date these refugees. In fideli­ty to fash­ion­able trends in refugee stud­ies, fur­ther­more, he under­scores not only the Imag­i­nary dimen­sion of their Oth­er­ness (the refugees are ​“peo­ple just like us”), but also the refugees’ class posi­tion­al­i­ty and polit­i­cal agency, how­ev­er utopi­an it may seem (they are not mere­ly poor, pas­sive victims).

Zizek for Arabs

These views are con­sis­tent with his views on Arabs and Mus­lims through­out his oeu­vre. To call Zizek racist and Islam­o­pho­bic is to ignore his sober cri­tique of the polit­i­cal real­i­ties of the Arab world with­in the cur­rent geopo­lit­i­cal con­text of the glob­al cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem. Indeed, he could have been eas­i­ly accused of sym­pa­thiz­ing with Islam­ic fun­da­men­tal­ists. For exam­ple, he rejects facile lib­er­al the­o­ries of the ​“clash of civ­i­liza­tions” (Hunt­ing­ton) and all Ori­en­tal­ist think­ing about Arabs and Islam, opt­ing instead to link the trou­bling events in the Arab and Islam­ic world, as well as socio-polit­i­cal excess­es, to Euro-Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ism and to the under­ly­ing dynam­ics of glob­al capitalism.

To be clear, he delves deep­er into these real­i­ties and their caus­es in order to show how they pre­vent us from find­ing out the truth about glob­al cap­i­tal­ism. For exam­ple, he reads reli­gious fun­da­men­tal­ism, whether Islam­ic, Chris­t­ian, or Jew­ish, not as a symp­tom of an inher­ent patho­log­i­cal cul­ture or mind, but as a byprod­uct of the con­tra­dic­tions of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism. He thus con­demns Bin Laden and Breivik in the same breath.

Zizek thus states that Islam­ic fun­da­men­tal­ism ​“has noth­ing to do with a tra­di­tion sup­pos­ed­ly restored,” and con­se­quent­ly, it is imper­a­tive to shift the cri­tique to West­ern pro­jec­tion of their own fan­tasies on Islam and Mus­lims and to the ​“the dra­mat­ic impass­es of cap­i­tal­ist moder­ni­ty.” Islam­ic Fun­da­men­tal­ism, as he writes about the Balka­ns in the West­ern imag­i­na­tion, is abhor­rent to West­ern­ers, because ​“they them­selves intro­duced [it] there; what they com­bat is their own his­tor­i­cal lega­cy run amok.”

Zizek also links the rise of fun­da­men­tal­ism in the Arabo-Islam­ic world with the trau­mat­ic impact of mod­ern­iza­tion on Mus­lim cul­tures. In Europe, the impact of mod­ern­iza­tion was absorbed over cen­turies through Kul­tur­ar­beit, or the ​“for­ma­tion of new social nar­ra­tives and myths.” In con­trast, as he writes in the Uni­ver­sal Excep­tion, Mus­lim cul­tures expe­ri­enced the shock of mod­ern­iza­tion direct­ly, with­out medi­a­tion, a ​“pro­tec­tive screen or tem­po­ral delay,” in a way that shat­tered their ​“sym­bol­ic uni­verse … even more brutally.”

One of the oth­er themes that he dis­cuss­es in his work con­cerns the demise of the Arab Left. He shows that West­ern poli­cies in the Cold War encour­aged total­i­tar­i­an regimes and destroyed left­ist move­ments. As a result, the gap that was left was filled by the grow­ing fun­da­men­tal­ist move­ments — these Islamo-fas­cists plug them­selves into the frus­tra­tions of young peo­ple and dis­tort the real issues in the name of religion.

More recent­ly, he talked about the dreams and fail­ures of the Arab Spring in his book The Year of Dream­ing Dan­ger­ous­ly, in the con­text of the rad­i­cal, if not rev­o­lu­tion­ary, move­ments that dom­i­nat­ed the polit­i­cal scene in 2011. Like these oth­er move­ments, the Arab Spring failed because there was no rad­i­cal and rev­o­lu­tion­ary vision that was aim­ing at trans­form­ing the nature of social rela­tions under glob­al cap­i­tal­ism. Once cer­tain demands were met, the rev­o­lu­tion came to a halt. Inter­est­ing­ly enough, Zizek main­tains that there is a real rad­i­cal val­ue for polit­i­cal Islam that was not prop­er­ly uti­lized in the Arab Spring. But he always makes clear that polit­i­cal Islam is not Islam­ic fas­cism, for which he has no sympathies.

In his writ­ings about Pales­tine, fur­ther­more, Zizek has been pay­ing clos­er atten­tion to Zion­ist geno­ci­dal ide­ol­o­gy and its man­i­fes­ta­tions in Israeli pol­i­tics and cul­ture. He has writ­ten exten­sive­ly about Zion­ist eth­nic cleans­ing and set­tler ter­ror­ism, and how it per­vades Israeli rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the colo­nial occu­pa­tion (“hamatzav”). He has even writ­ten about Zion­ist con­nec­tions to Nazi Ger­many dur­ing WWII — a move which earned him the label of ​“anti-Semi­te” from Adam Kirsch and oth­ers. Yet Zizek is also crit­i­cal of anti-Semi­tism not only in the Arab world, but in its Zion­ist and Chris­t­ian Zion­ist man­i­fes­ta­tions as well.

For Zizek, anti-Semi­tism at the philo­soph­i­cal lev­el is not an iso­lat­ed socio-polit­i­cal phe­nom­e­non. Rather, the prob­lem with anti-Semi­tism is that it dis­places the real ene­my from glob­al cap­i­tal­ism onto the fig­ure of the Jew. The strug­gle, then, lies not with the Jews as a reli­gious or eth­nic com­mu­ni­ty, but with a polit­i­cal move­ment (Zion­ism) that has estab­lished a set­tler-colo­nial régime in the ser­vice of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism in the Mid­dle East to fur­ther advance its glob­al cap­i­tal­ist encroach­ment around the world. The crit­ics who missed this point inter­pret­ed his tac­ti­cal dis­en­gage­ment with Zion­ism in his ear­li­er work as a sign of silence over the Israeli apartheid pol­i­tics and the Zion­ist set­tler-colo­nial project in Palestine.

Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism and glob­al solidarity

Nonethe­less, the prob­lem of this polemic lies else­where. From the out­set of his piece, Zizek is con­cerned with the ques­tion of how to break out of the glob­al cap­i­tal­ist dead­lock and its mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ist log­ic. Indeed, he makes it very clear that the refugee cri­sis is a symp­tom of the glob­al cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem espe­cial­ly, its recent muta­tion into cap­i­tal­ism with Sin­ga­pore­an val­ues. As a result of these changes, glob­al cap­i­tal­ism inten­si­fies world-wide crises, in order to relo­cate dis­pos­able and uncount­able pop­u­la­tions in zones of unem­ploy­a­bil­i­ty in the glob­al North. Con­se­quent­ly, these forcibly or vol­un­tar­i­ly relo­cat­ed com­mu­ni­ties can be man­aged and con­trolled more eas­i­ly on wel­fare and oth­er schemes (the sec­ond sec­tion of the piece is sub­head­ed ​“the polit­i­cal econ­o­my of the refugees”).

Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, as he states in no equiv­o­cal terms, serves as an ali­bi to the glob­al cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, oper­at­ing as the main ide­o­log­i­cal vehi­cle for sup­press­ing and dis­plac­ing the class strug­gle. In turn, the false uni­ver­sal­ism of glob­al cap­i­tal­ism sus­tains this mul­ti­cul­tur­al ide­ol­o­gy. It allows peo­ple uni­ver­sal access to eco­nom­ic exchange, while keep­ing cul­tur­al iden­ti­ty particular.

At the same time, glob­al cap­i­tal­ism has begun to de-cou­ple itself from the West­ern demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions out of which it has got­ten so much mileage (this helps explain the cor­re­la­tion between beef­ing up the secu­ri­ty-sur­veil­lance state and the vol­un­tary com­pro­mise of per­son­al free­doms and civ­il lib­er­ties which ush­ers what Agam­ben, after Carl Schmitt, calls the ​“state of excep­tion”). Con­se­quent­ly, Zizek argues that the only way to undo this glob­al cap­i­tal­ist dead­lock is to re-inscribe the fun­da­men­tal antag­o­nism, pre­cise­ly by insist­ing on the ​“glob­al sol­i­dar­i­ty of the exploited.”

Nev­er­the­less, Zizek does not explain how these refugee com­mu­ni­ties, like oth­er minor­i­ty and col­o­nized groups in met­ro­pol­i­tan cen­ters, can become a part of this egal­i­tar­i­an rev­o­lu­tion­ary project of glob­al sol­i­dar­i­ty. With­in the real­i­ties of mul­ti­cul­tur­al West­ern soci­eties and their sanc­ti­mo­nious pol­i­tics of iden­ti­ty, these par­tic­u­lar com­mu­ni­ties are exclu­sive­ly invest­ed with spe­cif­ic forms of strug­gle struc­tured around var­i­ous sec­ondary con­tra­dic­tions, includ­ing sex­ism, racism, homo­pho­bia, and colo­nial­ism. The prob­lem is that the sur­plus-invest­ment from the class strug­gle is pro­ject­ed on these sec­ondary con­tra­dic­tions, in a way that obfus­cates the true hor­rors of the fun­da­men­tal antagonism.

The chal­lenge for glob­al rev­o­lu­tion­ary projects is to find a way that can allow these com­mu­ni­ties to trans­form the oppres­sive struc­tures that direct­ly and vis­i­bly exploit them, while insist­ing on link­ing these sec­ondary strug­gles back to the fun­da­men­tal antag­o­nism (class strug­gle) as a part of this glob­al strug­gle for eman­ci­pa­tion and free­dom. This is where Zizek is nev­er explicit.

Mal­colm X: sub­jec­tive des­ti­tu­tion and missed opportunities

One thing Zizek is unequiv­o­cal about here is that the terms of these strug­gles around iden­ti­ty pol­i­tics and sec­ondary con­tra­dic­tions must be set by these com­mu­ni­ties them­selves. Lat­er in the polemic, he refers to the famous encounter between Mal­colm X and the sym­pa­thet­ic white female stu­dent in which Mal­colm sug­gests that white lib­er­als ​“should first accept that black lib­er­a­tion should be the work of the blacks them­selves, not some­thing bestowed on them as a gift by the good white lib­er­als.” White lib­er­als can only join the black strug­gle on the terms set by black rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies themselves.

Inter­est­ing­ly enough, Zizek does not delve fur­ther into the full con­text from which the rev­o­lu­tion­ary think­ing of his hero Mal­colm X was born. Unlike oth­er black nation­al­ists, Mal­colm X was not obsessed with search­ing for pre­colo­nial African roots. Rather, as Zizek states, Mal­com X saw the oppor­tu­ni­ty afford­ed by the trau­mat­ic African-Amer­i­can his­to­ry of slav­ery, forcible dis­lo­ca­tion and the invol­un­tary era­sure of cul­ture and the past, as an open­ing to the free­dom to invent a new uni­ver­sal iden­ti­ty. This is pre­cise­ly the mean­ing of his new­ly icon­ic last name (X). As he says to Tavis Smi­ley in an inter­view,

Because of this Mal­colm X … wasn’t play­ing the Hol­ly­wood game, Roots. You remem­ber that stu­pid TV series? The great­est hon­or for you blacks’ desire is to find some tribe in Africa. Oh, I’m from there. No. Of course, Mal­colm X meant by the bru­tal­i­ty of white men, being enslaved, we were deprived of our roots and so on. But he wrote about it. He says, but this X para­dox­i­cal­ly opens up a new free­dom for us, all that white peo­ple want to be, not prim­i­tive trib­al, but uni­ver­sal, cre­at­ing their own space. We, black peo­ple, have a unique chance not to become, not to return to our par­tic­u­lar [roots], to be more uni­ver­sal, eman­ci­pat­ed than white peo­ple them­selves. You see, this is the impor­tant thing for me.

Mal­com X thus tra­versed the fan­ta­sy of roots and past. Else­where, Zizek calls this process ​“sub­jec­tive des­ti­tu­tion,” which makes it pos­si­ble for the rev­o­lu­tion­ary sub­ject to invest in a new rad­i­cal uni­ver­sal subjectivity.

For Zizek, Mal­colm X’s sub­jec­tive des­ti­tu­tion is more rad­i­cal than the latter’s con­ver­sion to Islam and his belief in the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of the Islam­ic Ummah. El-Hajj Malik el-Shab­bazz (Malcolm’s Islam­ic name) did not only prop up Islam as a new mas­ter sig­ni­fi­er. More impor­tant­ly, accord­ing to Zizek’s Hegelian read­ing of Islam as the reli­gion of sub­lim­i­ty, Islam could nev­er be authen­ti­cal­ly uni­ver­sal, because it is com­plete­ly antag­o­nis­tic to con­crete images and to the mul­ti­plic­i­ty or self-dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of God, or the One. For Hegel, Islam dis­torts the par­tic­u­lar­i­ty of Jew­ish monothe­ism and over­comes it in a new form of uni­ver­sal reli­gion, but this uni­ver­sal­i­ty remains false.

Because it still con­tains a uni­ver­sal ker­nel, how­ev­er dis­tort­ed it is, Islam remains ​“unde­cid­able” and open to resig­ni­fi­ca­tion into a new social­ist (uni­ver­sal) reg­is­ter beyond itself. Hence, as he writes in Iraq: the Bor­rowed Ket­tle, ​“Pre­cise­ly because Islam [har­bors] the ​‘worst’ poten­tials of the Fas­cist answer to our present predica­ment, it can also turn out to be the site for the ​‘best.’” The struc­ture here is akin to Zizek’s old favorite joke, the Rabi­novitch joke, in which ​“an argu­ment against some­thing is an argu­ment for it.”

While it is impor­tant to explore Islam’s polit­i­cal ambi­gu­i­ty, as he sug­gests, the task involves prob­lema­tiz­ing fur­ther two issues that still have no sat­is­fac­to­ry answers: First, the valid­i­ty of the Hegelian claim about Islam’s uni­ver­sal­i­ty that remains com­mit­ted to abstrac­tions. This gloss­es over the place of the Kaa’bah as a con­crete object in the for­ma­tion of Islam­ic universality.

This cuboid struc­ture stands in the mid­dle of the Sacred Mosque in Mec­ca for or towards which Mus­lims pray five times a day. Need­less to men­tion, the Kaa­ba bears the traces not only of the poly­the­is­tic roots of Islam, but also pre-Islam­ic ani­mistic tra­di­tions asso­ci­at­ed with stone fetish­es (there was more than the Black Stone of the Kaa­ba, includ­ing a white stone and a red stone, in dif­fer­ent shrines around the Ara­bi­an Penin­su­la). Until the Prophet Muham­mad con­quered Mec­ca in 629 CE, more­over, the Kaa­ba was con­sid­ered the shrine of the Nabatean deity Hubal, and host­ed 360 idols, rep­re­sent­ing dif­fer­ent deities, three of which made their con­tro­ver­sial appear­ance in the Quran in the infa­mous Satan­ic vers­es episode. In fact, for one year at least dur­ing the Treaty of Huday­biyya (628−629 CE), Mus­lims per­formed the hajj, or pil­grim­age, to Allah, the One, in the pres­ence of all oth­er deities.

Sec­ond, the oth­er issue that this dis­cus­sion of the polit­i­cal ambi­gu­i­ty of Islam dodges is the prob­lem of Islam’s con­sti­tu­tive sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship to cap­i­tal­ism — this com­pli­cates Zizek’s claim that Islam ​“resists inte­gra­tion into the glob­al cap­i­tal­ist order.”

Con­crete uni­ver­sal­i­ty and the chal­lenge of rev­o­lu­tion­ary pol­i­tics today

The true answer to the rad­i­cal poten­tial of the refugees lies else­where in Zizek’s polit­i­cal the­o­ry, away from all this the­o­log­i­cal mys­ti­fi­ca­tion of the fun­da­men­tal antag­o­nism. It can be more pro­duc­tive­ly locat­ed in his rework­ing of Hegelian notion of ​“con­crete uni­ver­sal­i­ty.” In so far as they lack any deter­mi­nate place in the hege­mo­ny of the neolib­er­al glob­al cap­i­tal­ist régime, these refugees can be said to rep­re­sent the symp­tomal truth of the sys­tem, its con­sti­tu­tive injus­tice and inequal­i­ty. Zizek explains to Glyn Daly: ​“when you have in a cer­tain social total­i­ty those who are ​‘below us’ — the negat­ed or out­cast — then pre­cise­ly inso­far as they are the abject, they stand for uni­ver­sal­i­ty.” As such, refugees con­sti­tute the part of the no part of the sys­tem, its point of inher­ent exclu­sion or excep­tion, in the alleged­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic and egal­i­tar­i­an neolib­er­al glob­al cap­i­tal­ist system.

In oth­er words, refugees are con­sti­tu­tive of the glob­al cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, and at the same time they stand out­side its notion of the good, a part of no part, as they are increas­ing­ly sub­ject­ed to dif­fer­ent forms of enclo­sure with­in advanced tech­nolo­gies of apartheid.

They are in the mar­ket sys­tem, but they can­not indulge in the absolute enjoy­ment of con­sump­tion. They are a part of the nation, but they are con­signed to spaces of abjec­tion out­side the purview of cit­i­zen­ship. And final­ly, they are with­in the repub­lic, but they are denied the demo­c­ra­t­ic rights that are enshrined in the law. As such, as he says to Daly, they embody the fail­ure of uni­ver­sal­i­ty and stand for the lie of the exist­ing uni­ver­sal sys­tem and ​“what is wrong with society.”

As an excep­tion, there­fore, these refugees dis­close and desta­bi­lize the hege­mon­ic uni­ver­sal frame­work of the glob­al cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem, with­in which the trou­bling excess of the fun­da­men­tal antag­o­nism is fore­closed. In Less Than Noth­ing: Hegel and the Shad­ow of Dialec­ti­cal Mate­ri­al­ism, Zizek writes in rela­tion to Hegel’s ​“rab­ble,” as a trope for the excep­tion, that ​“it is pre­cise­ly those who are with­out their prop­er place with­in the social Whole (like the rab­ble) that stand for the uni­ver­sal dimen­sion of the soci­ety which gen­er­ates them. This is why the rab­ble can­not be abol­ished with­out rad­i­cal­ly trans­form­ing the entire social edifice.”

From this van­tage point, it becomes pos­si­ble to sub­vert the total­i­ty of the sys­tem, since the domain of pol­i­tics prop­er is not sim­ply about ​“the nego­ti­a­tion of inter­ests but aims at some­thing more, and starts to func­tion as the metaphor­ic con­den­sa­tion of the glob­al restruc­tur­ing of the social space” (Zizek, The Tick­lish Sub­ject 208). The con­crete uni­ver­sal­i­ty of the part of no part becomes, then, the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of ​“the pub­lic use of rea­son,” which can rede­fine ​“the very uni­ver­sal­i­ty of what it means to be human.”

This makes it pos­si­ble for rad­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion­ary pol­i­tics to emerge, because it is from their per­spec­tive that a rad­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion­ary project can be con­ceived and the­o­rized now, mak­ing them the ​“very site of polit­i­cal uni­ver­sal­i­ty.” As such, rad­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion­ary and sol­i­dar­i­ty projects can ful­ly assume the repressed point of exclu­sion, in order to recon­fig­ure the very coor­di­nates and terms of universality.

To this extent, refugees would not sim­ply engage in inscrib­ing a par­tic­u­lar form of dif­fer­ence (i.e., cul­tur­al, racial, or reli­gious dif­fer­ence) with­in the matrix of the dom­i­nant sym­bol­ic order. Rather, these exclud­ed com­mu­ni­ties turn the con­flict under glob­al cap­i­tal­ism from one between two par­tic­u­lar groups to one between the glob­al order and this rad­i­cal uni­ver­sal­i­ty, since such com­mu­ni­ties are more than will­ing to ​“intro­duce a divi­sion of ​‘Us’ ver­sus ​‘Them.’” The part of no part thus intro­duces, he writes esle­where, ​“a total­ly dif­fer­ent Uni­ver­sal, that of an antag­o­nis­tic strug­gle which does not take place between par­tic­u­lar com­mu­ni­ties, but splits from with­in each com­mu­ni­ty, so that the ​‘trans-cul­tur­al’ link between com­mu­ni­ties is that of a shared struggle.”

This way, the con­crete uni­ver­sal­i­ty of spe­cif­ic forms of strug­gle can be made in a dou­ble inscrip­tion: it is an artic­u­la­tion of par­tic­u­lar forms of strug­gle against exploita­tion based on the spe­cif­ic expe­ri­ences of the exploit­ed and oppressed and the sec­ondary con­tra­dic­tions that sus­tain them At the same time, there is also a re-artic­u­la­tion of these sec­ondary strug­gles with­in the strug­gle over the fun­da­men­tal antag­o­nism or the class struggle.

In the case of anoth­er ​“symp­tomal point” name­ly, the pro­le­tari­at, Zizek writes that ​“an event prop­er occurs only when this symp­tomal point is ful­ly assumed in its truth — say, when the pro­le­tari­at grasps that its lack of a prop­er place with­in the social body sig­nals that it stands for the uni­ver­sal­i­ty (uni­ver­sal truth) of the soci­ety in which there are proletarians.”

The main chal­lenge of eman­ci­pa­to­ry pol­i­tics today is to assume this truth, by iden­ti­fy­ing with this symp­tomal point, the refugees, so that the moment of the truth of the glob­al cap­i­tal­ist sys­tem can be reached and the rev­o­lu­tion­ary event can occur.