Provocateurs, united, will never be defeated

Having shocked a bien pensant student by noting that I respect the writing of both Michael Kirby and Dyson Heydon (apparently such promiscuity deserves punishment by stoning) I note Alan Johnson's short dismissal of Žižek in Dissent.

Johnson quotes Norberto Bobbio as -

My experience of both public and private life has taught me that "for the most part", the solutions provided by people who avoid clear-cut "either-or" approaches are, if not better, then at least less imperfect. I am a convinced democrat, so convinced that I continue to defend democracy when it is inefficient, corrupt and risks plunging into one of two extremes: either war of everyone against everyone else or rigid order imposed from above. Democracy is where extremists do not prevail (and if they prevail then democracy is finished. This is also the reason why the extreme wings of a pluralistic political spectrum on the right and left are united in their hatred of democracy, albeit for opposing reasons.

Democracy and its ally reformism can make mistakes because democratic procedures themselves make the correction of mistakes possible. Extremists cannot afford to make mistakes because they cannot turn back. Mistakes made by democratic and reformist moderates can be put right, those made by extremists cannot, or, at least, can only be put right by shifting from one extreme position to another. ...

[We should respect] the most salutary fruits of the European intellectual tradition, the value of enquiry, the ferment of doubt, willingness to dialogue, a spirit of criticism, moderation of judgment, philological scruple, a sense of the complexity of things.

Johnson highlights Žižek's claim in the New Statesman invocation of Christianity as -

a destructive negativity, which does not end in a chaotic void but reverts (and organises itself) into a new order, imposing it on to reality

and claim that

Revolutionary politics is not a matter of opinions but of the truth on behalf of which one often is compelled to disregard the 'opinion of the majority' and to impose the revolutionary will against it"

Foucault and Schmitt did that schtick so much better but aren't round any more for a soundbite ... First As Tragedy, Then As Farce (London: Verso 2010), to adopt the title of Žižek's latest potboiler.