What Slavoj Žižek Gets Wrong About Political Correctness

Why Žižek should read Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D'Ambrosio's You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity

This is the last week to sign up for my upcoming seminar, Marxism and the History of Ethics and Moral Philosophy.

Slavoj Žižek is one of the most popular critics of political correctness (PC) from the ‘left.’ It is a topic he addresses in numerous books and popular articles. While the general spirit of critiquing PC culture or wokeism from the left is certainly one I am sympathetic to, he fundamentally misunderstands the level at which political correctness operates, placing it within an archaic sincerity paradigm, and not within its proper profilic context.

In Absolute Recoil, he writes that “under the discursive regime of political correctness, it is not enough to follow external rules of politeness, one is expected to be ‘sincerely’ respectful of others, and continually examined on the sincerity of one’s innermost convictions.”

This, frankly, completely misses the logic through which political correctness operates. The regime of PC culture (which is today almost wholly overcome) is intimately tied to profilicity. It does not concern itself with sincere role enactment — akin to how Lionel Trilling would describe the dominant identity technology in the pre-capitalist, pre-authenticity world. Neither is PC culture operative at the level of authenticity. Politically correct culture does not concern itself with whether one is dutifully enacting a role (sincerity), nor whether one is authentic about one’s pronouncements.

PC culture operates purely at the level of the surface — what matters is not what one actually believes (authenticity), nor the duties one fulfills (sincerity), but what one says (profilicity). Here the work of Hans Georg-Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio in You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity remains the best description of the shifts that have occurred at the basic levels of digital human sociality and identity construction.

Under the regime of PC, it is what appears on your profile which comes to matter most. One could actively fulfill one’s duty as an activist against racism, one can be authentically committed to fighting against racists, but neither your practices nor your subjective beliefs matter for PC culture — if you say a politically incorrect racial joke, or use a politically incorrect racial term (even in a non-racist or even anti-racist context) you will still be cancelled. It will leave (when PC was dominant) a seemingly eternal scarlet letter A on your profile.

Is the point, for instance, of all the DEI trainings universities have staff do really to inspire a certain set of practices or ideas on their staff? Or, is the role such trainings play in curating the profile of the institution as ‘woke’ and ‘progressive’ a greater motivating factor?

Is the point of the CIA ‘woke’ ad to inspire a sincere role enactment, or an authentic subjective belief about upholding disabled, trans, lesbian, Hispanic women? Or, is it about shaping the profile of how the institution is seen — or better yet, how it is seen as being seen, how it looks from the standpoint of second order observation?

Here is what Žižek gets most egregiously wrong about political correctness — what comes to matter most for it is the surface, not practice nor so-called subjective belief. In some ways, it operates at the level of form, in a manner reminiscent, but thoroughly distorted, of the way that Marxism and psychoanalysis treat form and content. If we recall, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek correctly identifies the ways in which both Marxism and Freud understand that the key operation is not piercing through the form to get at the content (traditional western philosophical cannon approach to ‘truth’), but understanding the secret of the form itself — why the ‘content’ needs to take on a distorted form. The distortion of form is not an external filter blurring a ‘truth’ which lies deeper in the content, it is a constitutive moment of the content itself, such that — as an apparent obstacle — removing it entails also the elimination of that which it is an obstacle for.

This dialectical treatment of form and content is not, of course, what we get with PC. However, it also isn’t the traditional paradigm of piercing through form to get at content, which is what is implied in Žižek’s treatment of it within the mode of sincerity. His treatment suggests that for PC there is a deeper belief (content) that must be sincere, that is, that must be consistent with the form. But this is not at all what PC culture was about — it was wholly concerned with the surface, with form. Not with the secret of the form itself (Marxism), but with the form as devoid of secrets, the form as a source of authority akin to the ‘content’ in the previous, traditional paradigm.

As such, PC must be understood within the context of the emergence of profilicity and second order observation, a development arising out of the development of the productive forces that comes with the technological revolution.

For PC culture what always mattered was the words you said, not the context in which you said them, nor the spirit in which you did it. What mattered is the formal letter of the law, not its spirit. Therefore, Žižek’s understanding of it within the mode of sincerity is wholly inadequate. PC culture can be understood only within the logic of profilicity and second order observation.

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Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Party and as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think-tank in the United States. Dr. Garrido has authored a few books, including Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), and the two forthcoming texts, Domenico Losurdo and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Western Marxism (2026) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2026-7). Dr. Garrido has published over a dozen scholarly articles and over a hundred articles in popular settings across the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Iran, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Peru, Canada, etc. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes short form articles for his Substack, @philosophyincrisis, and does regular YouTube programs for the Midwestern Marx Institute channel. He is on Instagram @carlos.l.garrido

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