Social issues
Žižek's views on social issues such as Eurocentrism, immigration and LGBT people have drawn criticism and accusations of bigotry.
In January 2017, Žižek argued that the populist right represents "the decay of common morality and decency". He contrasted Hegel's concept of Sittlichkeit, the "thick unwritten rules which makes our social life bearable", with political correctness, which he described as "a desperate reaction to this disintegration", that fails by trying to produce precise regulations and prohibitions. In 2018, Žižek wrote that "manners do matter. In tense situations, they are a matter of life and death, a thin line that separates barbarism from civilization." He noted that where vulgarity was associated in the 1960s with the political left, "today, vulgar language is an almost exclusive prerogative of the radical Right, so that the Left finds itself in a surprising position of the defender of decency and public manners".
In November 2024, in a speech at the Oxford Union, Žižek argued that, contrary to the expectation that exposing Donald Trump's vulgarities and lies should weaken him, these are the basis of why his supporters identify with him. "When I was young, we were these old style leftists, we thought those in power have dignity, but we [use] obscene gestures, we use dirty words. And we got the answer, which is that those in power are now more obscene than we even imagined to be. We got it so wrong." Žižek concluded that in the current era of permissiveness, "the question to ask is ... how to restore a basic sense of shame".
In his 1997 article 'Multiculturalism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism', Žižek critiqued multiculturalism for privileging a culturally 'neutral' perspective from which all cultures are disaffectedly apprehended in their particularity because this distancing reproduces the racist procedure of Othering. He further argues that a fixation on particular identities and struggles corresponds to an abandonment of the universal struggle against global capitalism.
In his 1998 article 'A Leftist Plea for "Eurocentrism"', he argued that Leftists should 'undermine the global empire of capital, not by asserting particular identities, but through the assertion of a new universality', and that in this struggle the European universalist value of equaliberty (Étienne Balibar's term) should be foregrounded, proposing 'a Leftist appropriation of the European legacy'. Elsewhere, he has also argued, defending Marx, that Europe's destruction of non-European tradition (e.g. through imperialism and slavery) has opened up the space for a 'double liberation', both from tradition and from European domination.
In her 2010 article 'The Two Zizeks', Nivedita Menon criticised Žižek for focusing on differentiation as a colonial project, ignoring how assimilation was also such a project; she also critiqued him for privileging the European Enlightenment Christian legacy as neutral, 'free of the cultural markers that fatally afflict all other religions.' David Pavón Cuéllar, closer to Žižek, also criticised him.
In the mid-2010s, over the issue of Eurocentrism, there was a dispute between Žižek and Walter Mignolo, in which Mignolo (supporting a previous article by Hamid Dabashi, which argued against the centrality of European philosophers like Žižek, criticised by Michael Marder) argued, against Žižek, that decolonial struggle should forget European philosophy, purportedly following Frantz Fanon; in response, Žižek pointed out Fanon's European intellectual influences, and his resistance to being confined within the black tradition, and claimed to be following Fanon on this point. In his book Can Non-Europeans Think? (foreworded by Mignolo), Dabashi also critiqued Žižek for privileging Europe; Žižek argued that Dabashi slanderously and comically misrepresents him through misattribution, a critique supported by Ilan Kapoor.
In his 2016 article "The Sexual Is Political", Žižek argued that all subjects are, like transgender subjects, in discord with the sexual position assigned to them. For Žižek, any attempt to escape this antagonism is false and utopian: thus, he rejects both the reactionary attempt to violently impose sexual fixity and the "postgenderist" attempt to escape sexual fixity entirely; he aligns the latter with 'transgenderism', which he claims does not adequately describe the behaviour of actual transgender subjects, who seek a stable "place where they could recognise themselves" (e.g., a bathroom that confirms their identity). Žižek argues for a third bathroom: a "GENERAL GENDER" bathroom that would represent the fact that both sexual positions (Žižek insists on the unavoidable "twoness" of the sexual landscape) are missing something and thus fail to adequately represent the subjects that take them on.
In his 2019 article "Transgender dogma is naive and incompatible with Freud", Žižek argued that there is "a tension in LGBT+ ideology between social constructivism and (some kind of biological) determinism", between the idea that gender is a social construct, and the idea that gender is essential and pre-social. He concludes the essay with a "Freudian solution" to this deadlock:
...psychic sexual identity is a choice, not a biological fact, but it is not a conscious choice that the subject can playfully repeat and transform. It is an unconscious choice which precedes subjective constitution and which is, as such, formative of subjectivity, which means that the change of this choice entails the radical transformation of the bearer of the choice.
Che Gossett criticized Žižek for his use of the "pathologising" term "transgenderism" throughout the 2016 article, and for writing "about trans subjectivity with such assumed authority while ignoring the voices of trans theorists (academics and activists) entirely", as well as for purportedly claiming that a "futuristic" vision underlies so-called "transgenderism", ignoring present-day oppression. Sam Warren Miell and Chris Coffman, both psychoanalytically inclined, have separately criticized Žižek for conflating transgenderism and postgenderism; Miell further criticised the 2014 article for rehearsing homophobic/transphobic clichés (including Žižek's designation of inter-species marriage as a possible "anti-discriminatory demand"), and misusing Lacanian theory; Coffman argued that Žižek should have engaged with contemporary Lacanian trans studies, which would have shown that psychoanalytic and transgender discourses were aligned, not opposed. In response to the title of the 2019 article, McKenzie Wark had t-shirts made with the transgender flag and "Incompatible with Freud" printed on them.
Žižek defended his 2016 article in two follow-up pieces. The first addresses purported misreadings of his position, while the second is a more sustained defence (against Miell) of the article's application of Lacanian theory, to which Miell responded in turn. Douglas Lain also defended Žižek, claiming that context makes it clear that Žižek is "not opposed [to] the struggle of LGBTQ people" but is instead critiquing "a phony liberal ideology that set up the terms of the LGBTQ struggle", "a certain utopian postmodern ideology that seeks to eliminate all limits, to eliminate all binaries, to go beyond norms because the imposition of a limit is patriarchal and oppressive."
In a 2023 piece for Compact, Žižek took an overall negative stance towards access to puberty blockers for trans youth, and against trans adults being sent to prisons matching their gender, citing the case of Isla Bryson, whom he referred to as "a person who identifies itself as a woman using its penis to rape two women". Both of these things were attributed by Žižek to wokeness (the wider subject of the article).
