View this link:

http://itself.wordpress.com/2009/01/17/laid-to-rest/

In an ongoing debate with John Holbo (of The Valve), Adam Kotsko has this to say regarding Zizek and democracy:

… Lenin is suspending the ethical from two points of view—he’s violating liberal democracy, obviously, but he’s also violating the supposed “natural” course of events dictated by Marxist theory. He has no guarantees, either of liberal proceduralism nor Marxist progressivism. That is the aspect of Lenin Zizek finds most appealing, not some bullshit about broken eggs automatically leading to omelettes. The whole point is that Lenin has no guarantee…

He’s talking about being willing to take a risk, being willing to take steps that within your present “normal” frame of reference may even seem despicable. Now there’s the Jack Bauer version of that, being willing to torture, etc., to save the system (the same might be said of Bush, or indeed of Stalin)—Zizek’s clear that that’s not what he’s after. He’s talking about taking a risk in service of revolutionary change… Zizek already knows that the results of revolution aren’t guaranteed and can be quite ugly. He was born and raised in a communist society, for example. So the whole Gulag Archipelago thing was pretty pointless, especially given that Zizek’s opposition to Stalinism has been a constant.