[...] Does Žižek really think that when he runs this rather tainted phrase up the flagpole, his readers are going to salute? It seems unlikely. This is not carelessness on Žižek’s part. He’s got to know that what it will most likely do is make people stay in their seats, fully entertained, enjoying the outrageousness rather than marching or leafletting or (God forbid) joining anything. When Žižek proclaims his communism, he is not recruiting. There’s no piety, and there are no strings — and having no strings is part of the magic formula that keeps his audiences so thoroughly entertained. It doesn’t seem coincidental that the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” (on which Balibar has also written provocatively, but in 1976) is resuscitated on the same page as an endorsement of Badiou’s argument “against participation in ‘democratic’ voting.”