The Shepherd Borat?

Author argues that it would be a mistake to treat Slavoj Žižek’s political philosophy as if it were a performance act. Žižek is a neo-Leninist writer, a political- philosophical shepherd, but he is not the Shepherd Borat. Kurelić criticizes and rejects Žižek’s reinterpretation of Benjamins’s ‘divine violence’ as theoretically incorrect and politically useless. By comparing Žižek’s and Arendt’s understanding of the French Revolution Kurelić wants to show why the ‘divine violence’ recommended by Žižek would for Arendt be an ‘element of totalitarianism’. He points out that the political success of socialist and communist ideas was always derived from the vision of the better future, not from the promises of unrestrained revenge and political violence. Žižek’s attempt to reconcile the terror of the Jacobins with his modern revolutionary neo-Leninism is a political nonstarter.