"My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions"
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Zizek is smuggling a warning inside a geopolitical diagnosis: the world is no longer organized around a single boss, and the left can’t keep acting like history has a main character. “Multicentric” is his tidy term for a messy reality - rising regional powers, fractured alliances, competing capitalisms, and no credible moral referee. The sting is in the next clause: this shift forces “unpleasant questions” that the traditional left has dodged because they ruin the comforting script.
Zizek’s intent isn’t to celebrate multipolarity as automatic progress; it’s to puncture the left’s habit of treating anti-Americanism as a sufficient politics. If power is dispersed, then “the enemy” isn’t singular, and resistance can’t be a one-note performance. The subtext: some non-Western centers of power are not emancipatory projects in disguise; they can be authoritarian, nationalist, patriarchal, or brutally capitalist in their own right. A multicentric world also complicates solidarity: whose struggles get prioritized when the old map of oppressor/oppressed stops lining up neatly with borders?
Contextually, Zizek is speaking from the post-Cold War hangover and the post-2008 crisis mood, where liberal triumphalism collapsed but no left alternative consolidated. His provocation is aimed inward. He’s asking whether a left built around critique alone can survive a world where critique must be paired with choices: defense, sovereignty, security, climate bargaining, migration - the unglamorous stuff. “Unpleasant” is the tell. It means trade-offs, not purity.
Zizek’s intent isn’t to celebrate multipolarity as automatic progress; it’s to puncture the left’s habit of treating anti-Americanism as a sufficient politics. If power is dispersed, then “the enemy” isn’t singular, and resistance can’t be a one-note performance. The subtext: some non-Western centers of power are not emancipatory projects in disguise; they can be authoritarian, nationalist, patriarchal, or brutally capitalist in their own right. A multicentric world also complicates solidarity: whose struggles get prioritized when the old map of oppressor/oppressed stops lining up neatly with borders?
Contextually, Zizek is speaking from the post-Cold War hangover and the post-2008 crisis mood, where liberal triumphalism collapsed but no left alternative consolidated. His provocation is aimed inward. He’s asking whether a left built around critique alone can survive a world where critique must be paired with choices: defense, sovereignty, security, climate bargaining, migration - the unglamorous stuff. “Unpleasant” is the tell. It means trade-offs, not purity.
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| Topic | Deep |
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