While I appreciate Slavoj Žižek’s engagement with my earlier critique and his good-faith reconstruction of it, I feel compelled to push back on several points.^[1] Sharper than a dispute over tactics or political temperament, our disagreement concerns the conclusions one draws from the present conjuncture of crisis. Across a series of recent interventions, Žižek’s writing has increasingly moved from a diagnosis of fragmentation toward a politics of containment: from tracing the decomposition of liberal mediation to treating stronger borders, expanded policing, and institutional stabilization as the indispensable preconditions of universality. The shift is not reducible to conservatism in any simple sense. Nor does it amount to a straightforward ideological reversal. But it does mark a contraction.

Crisis and Containment

What concerns me in Žižek’s reply is not the recognition that institutions matter. Any serious politics requires institutional forms capable of organizing social life beyond mere spontaneity or moral gesture. The question is how one moves from diagnosis to prescription. The fact that fragmentation produces authoritarian reactions does not by itself establish reinforced bordering and social containment as the appropriate political answer. Too often in Žižek’s recent writing, historically produced arrangements begin to appear as quasi-natural limits: less structures to be transformed than conditions to which politics must adapt.

If that shift becomes especially visible around migration, it is because migration condenses many of the contradictions of the present conjuncture at once: uneven development, colonial aftermaths, labor segmentation, ecological displacement, the crisis of social democracy, the collapse of civic infrastructures, and the resurgence of nationalist politics. Immigration functions here less as a discrete policy issue than as a prism through which a broader reorientation becomes legible.

What is striking in pieces like his reply to me is the extent to which antagonism has changed valence. Where Žižek once treated contradiction as the privileged site of disclosure – the crack through which the Real erupts into the symbolic order, disclosing the constitutive incompleteness of liberal capitalism and thus preserving, however negatively, the horizon of emancipation – antagonism now appears above all as menace; it threatens systemic overload: migrants, urban fragmentation, “parallel societies,” techno-feudal decomposition, populist resentment, geopolitical realignments, multicultural unraveling. The catalogue itself is revealing. What once functioned dialectically now returns administratively: as a sequence of pressure points to be contained, regulated, neutralized.

In earlier interventions written in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and in the broader context of the wave of protests that swept across Europe in 2011, Žižek still emphasized the disorientation of the governing elites – “the ruling elite know less and less how to rule,” he wrote in a letter to Nadezhda Tolokonnikova^[2] – and treated the breakdown of expertise less as a danger demanding containment than as an opening through which political coordinates might be reconstituted.

The present crisis appears in a darker register. The system no longer merely reproduces contradictions; it increasingly overrides the normative forms that once mediated them. What emerges is a phenomenology of disorder characteristic of a historical moment in which systemic crisis persists while transformative political agency remains absent. Legal frameworks erode, procedural guarantees weaken, public institutions hollow out, symbolic coherence disintegrates. Under such conditions, what earlier Marxist traditions dismissed as merely “bourgeois legality” begins to appear as a fragile barrier against something worse.

This is the context in which Žižek can now write that “law and order is not just a motto serving to oppress minorities; it can also function as a motto to protect them.” The formulation is revealing precisely because it is not simply conservative. It expresses a broader historical intuition: that under conditions of generalized breakdown, order itself begins to acquire emancipatory significance. Liberal institutions appear less as instruments of domination than as minimal protections against escalating social decomposition.

Yet once order becomes the overriding political horizon, the threshold for legitimate coercion invariably expands. From Hobbes onward, political frameworks organized around the prevention of collapse repeatedly encounter the same temptation: exceptional powers justified in the name of preserving stability itself. The logic is familiar enough. Coercion appears at first as temporary containment, which then hardens into permanent administration. It is in this register that Žižek speaks of a situation in which “only a strong police presence can do the job,” a formulation that marks a clear shift from juridical mediation toward direct coercive stabilization. What begins as catastrophe management gradually reorganizes political imagination around security. The deeper question, then, is not whether Žižek has become conservative, but whether his crisis diagnostics increasingly stabilize into a political framework in which state force appears as the last remaining mediator of social disintegration. The problem lies less in his abstract theory of antagonism than in the strategic inferences now drawn from it.

Defensive Universalism

Žižek frames the disagreement between us as one between realism and abstraction. I defend cross-border organizing and democratic internationalism; he replies that such networks remain “marginal, without a clear political vision,” while nationalist mobilizations increasingly acquire ideological hegemony. Under present conditions, state authority and institutional mediation therefore become the necessary preconditions of any viable universal politics. Hence formulations like “If united Europe is dead, everything is allowed” – less descriptive claims than strategic provocations issued from within a landscape where both neoliberal cosmopolitanism and classical revolutionary imaginaries appear exhausted.

But this framing obscures the actual disagreement. The alternative to defensive realism is not horizontalist romanticism. The historical examples I invoked – Nyerere’s Tanzania, Sankara’s Burkina Faso, left experiments in Kerala – were never instances of spontaneous self-organization replacing political institutions. They were attempts to construct universal political projects through state power, massive democratic mobilization, and qualitative social transformation. Their significance lies precisely in demonstrating that institutions are not static containers preserving order from above, but rather products of struggle capable of reorganizing social relations themselves.

Žižek largely sidesteps these examples. Instead, the terrain shifts abruptly toward Angola, South Africa, and... the Taliban, introduced as a kind of caricatural counterexample to grassroots politics. The move bypasses the historical argument under discussion, for the Taliban is neither a failed socialist experiment nor a redistributive project. The substitution matters because it changes the level of analysis altogether.

To be fair, the underlying concern is intelligible enough. Not every anti-imperial or bottom-up movement is emancipatory; ideological forms cannot be reduced, sans plus, to material conditions. But the cases Žižek introduces function less as historical clarifications than as displaced analogies. The relevant question is not whether emancipatory projects can degenerate. Of course they can. What matters instead is what concrete social and geopolitical forces shape their trajectories.

What ultimately separates these positions is a different understanding of how universality emerges politically. Žižek’s more recent work increasingly presupposes that universalism requires a relatively coherent symbolic order in advance: functioning institutions, stable civic integration, and a sufficiently consolidated political community capable of sustaining shared obligations. Migration, viewed from this angle, appears primarily as a destabilizing force threatening already fragile forms of cohesion. Universalism becomes defensive, something to preserve before it can be expanded.

I would reverse the sequence entirely. Universality does not precede conflict and subsequently administer it. It is produced through conflict itself. Political commonality emerges when populations divided by citizenship, labor status, ethnicity, or geography create institutions and forms of collective life capable of traversing those divisions. Borders do not protect universality in this account; they organize mobility in ways that reproduce inequality while fragmenting working-class political capacities. Migration is not an external pressure imposed upon an already constituted community; it is one of the terrains upon which universality is either constructed or foreclosed.

This reversal, of course, recalls positions Žižek himself once defended. In his earlier writing, universality emerged precisely through antagonism: excluded figures disclosed contradictions internal to the social totality; political truth arrived not through harmonious integration but through struggle. Seen from that perspective, migrants do not threaten universality. They reveal the contradictions of global capitalism itself, a system dependent upon labor mobility while simultaneously criminalizing and stratifying it.

Žižek’s current orientation responds to real historical developments: 9/11, the wars in the Middle East, ISIS, the refugee crisis, Trump, the global resurgence of the far right. Under such conditions, breakdown no longer appears as the threshold of emancipation but as the breeding ground of paranoid identity politics. That perception is not irrational. The difficulty lies elsewhere; namely, the fact that crisis gives rise to reactionary outcomes does not establish existing forms of order as the full range of political possibilities.

Belonging and Breakdown

Žižek’s strongest passages are not the ones about law and order, still less the familiar invocations of migrants, borders, and social breakdown, but the ones concerning belonging. What he understands, more acutely than many liberals, is that reactionary politics operates not primarily through prohibition or fear but through the promise of ecstatic social reintegration. Discussing the Croatian far-right nationalist singer Thompson, Žižek observes that such movements offer “the vision of a community which holds out the promise that we can immerse ourselves in it and leave behind our alienation and isolation.” What liberalism experiences merely as irrational regression, Žižek grasps as libidinal compensation for a society whose forms of solidarity have been systematically liquidated.

Across much of Europe, the infrastructures that once sustained ordinary forms of social bond – unions, municipal associations, youth clubs, libraries, public housing, neighborhood organizations, non-commercial public spaces – have indeed steadily eroded or been privatized. As these mediating institutions weaken or disappear, identity formation increasingly migrates toward markets, digital platforms, algorithmic enclaves, and volatile forms of mediated belonging. The far right succeeds in this context less by reinventing solidarity than by occupying the social vacuum engendered by neoliberal restructuring.

Yet it would be misleading to reduce this dynamic to structures of anxiety, resentment, or identification at the level of subjectivity. The worldwide emergence of the far right testifies to a deep crisis, but crisis does not possess a single political or psychological grammar. The same conditions that enable reactionary reintegration can also generate countervailing forms of political invention: antifascism, renewed class organization, or experiments in collective life not organized around competition and scarcity. The dissolution of bourgeois norms may thus have an ambivalent significance: the erosion of the moral disciplines historically tied to wage-labor, property, and national identity also weakens the symbolic legitimacy of the value-form itself. As reified forms of consciousness dissolve under conditions of permanent crisis, the apparent naturalness of capitalism itself becomes more fragile, and horizons once dismissed as utopian – not only a world without borders, but a social life without surplus labor, perhaps even without money itself – begin to re-enter political imagination, however unevenly and refractedly.^[3]

The political question, then, is not whether belonging matters. It plainly does. Defensive universalism assumes that solidarity requires prior cohesion secured against destabilizing outsiders, but fragmented societies generate demands for collective form regardless. The issue then is how those demands are politically organized: through exclusionary nationalism or through institutions capable of sustaining collective life across difference.

From Class to Civilization, and Back

It is in Žižek’s displacement of class to civilization where the naturalization of crisis becomes especially consequential. What presents itself as realism increasingly treats historically produced arrangements as fixed constraints. Political possibilities narrow in advance. Migration appears less as a consequence of uneven development, imperial histories, ecological breakdown, and the global organization of labor than as pressure exerted by external populations upon a fragile European equilibrium.

This displacement from class to civilization appears most clearly in the stigmatizing rhetoric surrounding places like Molenbeek, which Žižek describes as “self-enclosed Muslim communit[ies]” where “even police avoid entering.” Here highly differentiated urban realities are compressed into symbolic shorthand for failed integration or latent radicalization. They are becoming “jihadi central[s],” writes Žižek, invoking a broader media discourse of civilizational panic that converts politically produced fragmentation into quasi-cultural diagnosis. Beneath this register, an entire social geography – labor-market exclusion, housing segregation, over-policing, deindustrialization, postcolonial legacies, racism – tends to disappear.

None of this requires denying the existence of tensions, fundamentalist currents, or failed forms of integration. The problem lies in explanatory hierarchy. Once such phenomena are detached from the institutional conditions producing them, effects begin to masquerade as causes. Second-generation alienation is read by Žižek as civilizational refusal when it may instead express the experience of suspended inclusion: blocked mobility, racialized policing, segmented labor markets, schools and institutions that promise universality while distributing it selectively. What emerges then is a displacement whereby institutional failures are recoded as cultural pathology. Yet, in this case, what appears culturally as rejection may reflect political skepticism toward a social contract experienced as structurally incomplete.

Borders and Political Recomposition

Borders become central to this disagreement because they condense these tensions institutionally. Migrant incorporation should not be understood primarily as humanitarian concession but as a problem of political composition: whether fragmented populations can be reorganized into broader forms of democratic and class capacity. Under contemporary conditions, class solidarity no longer resembles a return to industrial homogeneity. It depends instead upon recomposition across fragmented regimes of labor, migration, care work, logistics, and social reproduction.

Against the fantasy that immigration inherently weakens labor, legal incorporation and political organization generally expand collective capacities by reducing precarity and segmentation. Climate change will intensify these dynamics further. Ecological displacement is already underway, rendering rigid border regimes increasingly analogous to systems of global apartheid: vast security architectures designed to manage the human consequences of planetary inequality while leaving its underlying structures intact. Borders do not simply regulate movement. They frequently intensify the instabilities they claim to contain by forcing migration into clandestine circuits while expanding surveillance infrastructures, detention systems, and coercive apparatuses across entire regions. Rather than a frontier, the Mediterranean now resembles a militarized sorting mechanism for surplus populations.

None of this implies voluntarism. Politics always unfolds within inherited conditions not of its own choosing. But inherited conditions are not immutable horizons. The disagreement with Žižek concerns whether present constraints should be treated as endpoints to be managed or as historically sedimented arrangements susceptible to transformation. Nor does this entail abandoning institutions or strategy. The state remains an indispensable terrain of class struggle. The strategic question, however, extends beyond redistribution toward economic power itself: who controls investment, infrastructure, mobility, housing, energy systems, and the institutions organizing everyday life? The relevant distinction is not between purity and pragmatism. It is between measures that reproduce existing architectures of exclusion and those that begin, however partially, to displace them.

Contemporary Spain, despite its limits and contradictions, gestures toward a different sequencing: partial regularizations, labor incorporation, and attempts to frame migration within broader social dynamics rather than civilizational panic. Such measures remain constrained, reversible, and insufficient. But they demonstrate that even restrictive frameworks remain politically contestable.

This, however, raises a more general question of strategy that cannot be reduced to the immediate balance of forces within national electorates. Politics unfolds simultaneously across multiple temporal and spatial scales. On one level stand domestic electoral calculations, institutional fragilities, and the rapid advance of the far right; on another, the deeper global structures continuously generating displacement and precarity in the first place: imperial legacies, uneven development, climate breakdown, the transnational organization of labor and capital. An emancipatory politics capable of persisting within the present conjuncture must find ways of articulating these levels rather than collapsing one into the other.

Žižek fears that without a coherent Europe, universality will dissolve into fragmentation and geopolitical barbarism. The concern is understandable. Yet a universality secured through selective mobility, externalized borders, and managed exclusion is already hollowed out from within. The challenge is not to preserve Europe against the world. It is to construct political forms adequate to a world already shaped by ecological interdependence, mass displacement, and global inequality; a world no longer containable within national borders or stabilized through increasingly militarized regimes of exclusion. The decisive question is therefore not whether order matters, but whether it remains open to transformation – or whether necessity becomes another name for resignation and universality a form of managed exclusion.

1. My earlier essay, “Going Awry: Žižek’s Misfires in Immigration and Radical Politics,” appeared in Cosmonaut on March 18, 2026, https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/03/going-awry-zizeks-misfires-in-immigration-and-radical-politics. Žižek’s response, “If United Europe is Dead, Everything is Allowed,” was published on his Substack page on April 24, 2026, https://slavoj.substack.com/p/if-united-europe-is-dead-everything. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Žižek in this essay are drawn from that response.

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2. See Comradely Greetings: The Prison Letters of Nadya and Slavoj (Verso, 2014).

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3. For the utopian thought experiment of a society beyond money and value-mediated social relations, see Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso, 2005); for a contemporary account of the good life beyond capitalist imperatives of endless growth and consumption, see Kate Soper, Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism (Verso, 2023); and for reflections on urban life, collective infrastructures, and ecological survival beyond market rationality, see Mike Davis, Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory (Verso, 2018).

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