"Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of
Multinational Capitalism"

Slavoj Zizek

It is as if we are witnessing today the ultimate
confirmation of Freud's thesis, from Civilization and
its Discontents, on how, after every assertion of
Eros, Thanatos reasserts itself with a vengeance. At
the very moment when, according to the predominant
liberal ideology, we are finally leaving behind the
"immature" political passions (the regime of the
"political": class struggle and other "out-dated"
divisive antagonisms) for the post-ideological
"mature" pragmatic universe of rational administration
and negotiated consensus, for the universe, free of
utopian impulses, in which the dispassionate
administration of social affairs goes hand in hand
with the aestheticized hedonism (the pluralism of
"ways of life"), -- at this very moment, the foreclosed
political is celebrating a triumphant comeback in its
most archaic form of pure, undistilled racist hatred
of the Other which renders the rational tolerant
attitude utterly impotent.In this precise sense,
contemporary "postmodern" racism is the symptom of
multiculturalist late capitalism, bringing to
light the inherent contradiction of the
liberal-democratic ideological project. Liberal
"tolerance" condones the folklorist Other deprived of
its substance (like the multitude of "ethnic cuisines"
in a contemporary megalopolis) -- any "real" Other is
instantly denounced for its "fundamentalism", since
the kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of
its jouissance, i.e. the "real Other" is by definition
"patriarchal", "violent", never the Other of ethereal
wisdom and charming customs. One is tempted to
reactualize here the old Marcusean notion of
"repressive tolerance", reconceiving it as the
tolerance of the Other in its aseptized, benign form,
which forecloses the dimension of the Real of the
Other's jouissance.