Abstract
The Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Žižek quips that “every true philosophical dialogue” is but “an interaction of two monologues” (MC, 235). Dialogue, for Žižek, is as tired as political correctness and multiculturalism. Not just tired: the desire for dialogue is a symptom of liberal false consciousness, the explicit commitment to open exchange that elides the presupposed rules and conditions governing that exchange. The liberal pluralist, the Catholic, the Jew, the Hindu, and the Muslim can sit around the campfi re and sing songs that celebrate their differences, but they sing to the beat of the liberal pluralist. It is tempting to respond that the insidious hegemony of the liberal pluralist is evaded when the dialogue is goal-oriented, when the participants share a common political aim. The dialogue between Žižek, Judith Butler, and Ernesto Laclau, published as Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, was seemingly motivated by such an aim.1 But might this pragmatic motivation for dialogue involve a second-order false consciousness? The offi cial motivation is no longer celebrating difference, it is mobilizing for action, but the ef-
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