This week’s Inside Zero Books is from the archive. It’s a chat with the co-host of Symptomatic Redness Amogh Sahu on the topic of Hegelian Dialectics, Zizek, and Idealism. I’m posting this now in response to Zizek’s misguided endorsement of the Trump campaign and his accelerationist stance on radical change. I was very disappointed to find out that Zizek had taken this position as I am convinced that a Trump victory would be far worse than a Clinton victory, not only in immediate material terms, but also for the left and any remnant of a left project to go beyond the immediate.

Having said that I’ll also say that the reaction to Zizek’s claim that Trump would be a change agent, forcing the left to react and organize against him, the impulse to toss him into the dustbin of history, is misguided. Rather than toss him aside we should counter him, find out where his radical project took a wrong turn. I suspect that the mistake in Zizek is just as common in Lacanians who support Clinton as it is in Zizek.

Overall, four days out from the election we should be asking ourselves how we ended up in this predicament. The US is, hopefully temporarily, in a moment where dissent against the status quo can only appear as a kind of reactionary nihilism. Zizek’s career is the least of the casualties of this moment, but, if we only heap scorn upon him then we risk a repetition of his mistakes.