This paper draws selectively and critically on works of Slavoj Žižek to explore the implications of some of his insights for GCE. It aims to explore the gifts and limits of Žižek’s theorizing within current discussions on GCE with the hope of opening more spaces for a critical reflection on the role of GCE within the context of (post)modern globalized societies. Žižek makes a distinction between the concepts of global and universal categories showing that globalization forecloses any attempt at universalizing claims made by a particular (suppressed) group – thus rendering politicization impossible. Žižek refers to the regulated political discourse within a representational space between acknowledged parties or agents as parapolitics. For Žižek politics is exemplified in acts where members of society that have no firmly dedicated space in hierarchical social structure (the excluded, the suppressed) present themselves as representatives not only of themselves, but of the whole of society. The political is thus always disruptive of the existing social order, which is why in the parapolitical space of modern liberal/social democracies that acknowledge the gap between formal equality and its implementation networks of (restorative) measures are taken with the purpose of de-antagonising the political. In Žižekian terms GCE and the very idea of global citizenship could be considered as means of de-antagonising the potential for authentic political articulation of universalizing claims of particular excluded/suppressed groups. Multi-faceted tolerance, assertion of human rights and the rights of ethnic groups in multicultural societies are for Žižek not a sign of increased political equality of even the most marginalized groups, but rather a signifier of the impossibility of their authentic political articulation. For Žižek identity politics of various (ethnic, sexual etc.) lifestyles are enacted with the goal to assert one’s particular identity and one’s proper place within the social structure that fits perfectly the depoliticized notion of society in which every particular group is accounted for. In this sense postmodern identity politics produces the logic of ressentiment in which the victims/victimized expect the dominant social Other to pay for the damage, while universalizing claims (that are no longer possible) break out of the cycle of ressentiment. Žižek suggests that the re-affirmation of the disruptive potential of democratic politicization offers a return to the universalizing claims of égaliberte against the logic ressentiment. The paper aims to analyse the paradoxes surrounding the discourses on GCE that are produced within what Žižek calls postmodern postpolitical space.

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