Zizek’s Critique of the Authoritarian Personality

In light of the global resurgence of rightwing authoritarianism, studies of the authoritarian personality have once again become an urgent focus for leftwing research, with the classical position articulated by Theodor Adorno now a standard reference on the topic. That is somewhat surprising, however, because the classical theory of the authoritarian personality relies on a teleological philosophy of history that Althusser’s modernist Marxism demolished. The explanation of this is that when it came to relating Althusser’s revolutionary conception of the social formation to the question of political subjectivity, Althusser’s theory of ideology, despite its influence, remained a sketch. It was only with Zizek’s Lacanian interpretation of “ideological interpellation” that a modernist theorisation of social subjectivity became available to researchers and activists, as an alternative to the classical position. This chapter explicates Zizek’s theory of subjectivity, as elaborated in The Sublime Object of Ideology, For They Know Not What They Do and Tarrying with the Negative, in light of the problem of the authoritarian personality. After clarifying the theoretical connections between hysterical subjectivity, nationalist enjoyment, political theology and cultural revolution, I propose that the central innovation in Zizek’s position is that it presents a modernist (i.e., anti-humanist and post-metaphysical) theory of individuality. Where Adorno and Horkheimer proposed that the authoritarian personality could became politically dominant because a sadomasochistic character structure was latent in the majority of the population, Zizek’s theory leads to a different conclusion. From a Zizekian perspective, the problem arises because of the restructuring of the subject under conditions of anxiety, in the context of authoritarian social fantasies and charismatic leader figures with which to identify. Where the classical position leads, in fact, to resignation, the modernist position implies engagement, beginning with the desublimation of leader figures, authoritarian ideals and forms of ideological enjoyment and leading to the Zizekian traversal of cultural fantasies.