Slavoj Žižek delivers a jarring diagnosis of modern political pathology: the most dangerous ideologies are not those that reject reason, but those that desperately try to erase the very gap that makes reason possible. In this dense, second part of his essay on abjection, he argues that fascism and right-wing populism emerge not from a return to primitive drives, but from a paranoid attempt to smooth over the inherent contradictions of society by inventing a scapegoat. For a reader navigating a world increasingly fractured by identity politics and global instability, this is not just literary theory; it is a map of why our attempts to find pure, harmonious solutions often lead to the darkest outcomes.
The Trap of the Harmonious Whole
Žižek begins by revisiting the work of Julia Kristeva, specifically her analysis of the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Kristeva, who famously defined the "abject" as that which disrupts identity and borders, saw in Céline's work a terrifying confrontation with the formless. Žižek notes that while art and religion often serve to "purify the abject," making the unbearable tolerable, Céline's work pushes past this safety net. He writes, "The whole of modern literature and art, from Artaud to Céline, from Kandinsky to Rothko, confronts and tries to sublimate the abject." This is a crucial distinction: art usually acts as a screen, a "last curtain before the horrible," but Céline's syntax and content dissolve that screen entirely.
The historical context here is vital. Céline, a literary giant of the early 20th century, eventually became a virulent anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator. Žižek uses this trajectory to dismantle a common assumption: that engaging with our darkest, most irrational impulses is inherently liberating. One might expect that breaking free from the rigid structures of the "symbolic order" would lead to freedom. Instead, Žižek points out the paradox: "every attempt to escape the patriarchal/rational symbolic order and enact a return to the prepatriarchal feminine rhythm of drives necessarily ends up in anti-Semitic fascism."
This is a provocative claim. It suggests that the desire to return to a pre-linguistic, harmonious state of being is a trap. When we try to bypass the necessary friction of social rules and language, we don't find liberation; we find a vacuum that gets filled by paranoia. As Žižek puts it, "Do not all attempts, in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping from the Judeo-Christian compound by means of a unilateral call to return to what it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same Celinian anti-Semitic fantasy?"
The dream of such attempts is not to suspend the Symbolic, but to have the (symbolic) cake and eat it, that is, to dwell in the Symbolic without the price we have to pay for it.
The Mechanics of the Scapegoat
The core of Žižek's argument lies in how this philosophical failure translates into political violence. He argues that fascism is not a regression to chaos, but a "regression controlled/totalized by Reason." It is a system that takes the chaotic, conflicting nature of human desire and forces it into a single, coherent narrative. The mechanism for this is the creation of a "spectral object"—a specific group blamed for all societal ills. In the case of Céline and the Nazis, this object was "the Jew."
Žižek explains that this figure serves a specific psychological function: it allows the subject to avoid the difficult, real choices of political life. "The phobic object is precisely avoidance of choice, it tries as long as possible to maintain the subject far from a decision," he writes. By blaming an external enemy for the tensions between capital and labor, the fascist ideology promises a harmonious society where work and capital can coexist. This is a seductive lie. It offers the comfort of a world without internal contradiction.
He illustrates this with a striking example from a campaign in Carinthia, Austria, where leftists countered nationalist slogans not with rational debate, but with obscene, nonsensical variations of the motto. This direct intrusion of the "obscene" into language disrupted the nationalist narrative without trying to out-argue it on its own terms. It was a way of exposing the absurdity of the totalizing logic. However, Žižek warns that this is a delicate line. If one simply tries to return to the "Semiotic" (the realm of drives and rhythms) without acknowledging the structural role of the "abject," one risks falling into the very paranoia one seeks to escape.
Critics might note that Žižek's reliance on high-level psychoanalytic theory can obscure the material, economic drivers of fascism that are often more immediate than the psychological mechanisms he describes. While the internal logic of the scapegoat is undeniable, the fuel for the fire is often tangible economic anxiety, not just a philosophical refusal to choose.
Alienation as a Shield
The essay takes a surprising turn in its conclusion, moving from the pathology of fascism to a defense of a concept usually reviled: alienation. In a world obsessed with "understanding each other" and breaking down barriers, Žižek suggests that total transparency is dangerous. Citing Peter Sloterdijk, he notes that "More communication means at first above all more conflict." When the "Neighbor"—someone with a different way of life or rituals—comes too close, the disruption to our own sense of order can trigger aggression.
Here, Žižek reframes the coldness of modern social life. The distance we keep from our neighbors, the "mechanical" rules we follow without sharing our inner worlds, is not a failure of civilization. It is a necessary buffer. "Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that, sometimes, a dose of alienation is indispensable for the peaceful coexistence of ways of life," he argues. This is a stark counter-intuitive point in an era that champions radical empathy and total integration. He suggests that the "weakness" of European social alienation is actually its strength, preventing the kind of intimate, paranoiac clashes that fuel the abject hatred of the fascist imagination.
Bottom Line
Žižek's most powerful contribution here is the redefinition of fascism not as a rejection of order, but as a desperate, paranoid attempt to create a perfect, contradiction-free order by projecting all conflict onto a single enemy. The argument's greatest strength is its ability to link the abstract mechanics of language and desire to the concrete horrors of political violence. Its vulnerability lies in its dense, theoretical density, which may alienate readers looking for direct policy prescriptions. The reader should watch for how this framework applies to modern populism, where the promise of a harmonious society is increasingly sold through the demonization of the "other."
The phobic object is precisely avoidance of choice, it tries as long as possible to maintain the subject far from a decision.