Wokeness Is Here To Stay

Slavoj Žižek

Some claim that “wokeness” is on the wane. In fact, it is gradually being normalized,
conformed to even by those who inwardly doubt it, and prac?ced by the majority of
academic, corporate, and state ins?tu?ons. This is why it deserves more than ever our
cri?cism—together with its opposite, the obscenity of the new populism and religious
fundamentalism.

Let’s begin with Scotland, where Nicola Sturgeon’s government pushed woke-ism and
LGBT causes (almost) to the end. In December 2022, it hailed a “historic day for
equality” aOer ScoPsh lawmakers approved plans to make it easier for individuals to
legally change their gender, extending the new system of self-iden?fica?on to 16- and
17-year-olds. Basically, you declare what you feel you are, and you are registered as
what you want to be. A predictable problem emerged when Isla Bryson, a biological
male convicted of rape, was remanded to a women’s prison in S?rling.

Bryson decided that he was no longer a man only aOer appearing in court on a rape
charge. So we have a person who iden?fies itself as a woman using its penis to rape
two women. It is quite logical: If maleness and femaleness have nothing to do with
one’s body, and everything to do with one’s subjec?ve self-defini?on, then one must
put a penis-having rapist in prison with cap?ve women. AOer protests, Bryson was put
into a male prison. Again, this is problema?c under ScoPsh law, since we have now a
self-iden?fied woman in male prison.

Sturgeon resigned because she alienated a part of the popula?on that isn’t an?-LGBT,
but simply rejects such measures. The point here is that there is no easy solu?on,
because sexual iden?ty is in itself not a simple form of iden?ty, but a complex
dimension, full of inconsistencies and unconscious features—something that in no way
can be established by a direct reference to how we feel.

The recent controversy about the use of so-called puberty blockers concerns another
aspect of this same complexity: The Tavistock clinic in London was ordered by higher
authori?es to restrict the use of puberty blockers that suppress hormones and in this
way pause a child’s development of sex-based characteris?cs, such as breasts. Tavistock
was administering these drugs to youngsters between 9 and 16 who appeared not to
be able to choose their sexual iden?ty. Tavistock’s clinicians reasoned that there is a
danger that youngsters who can’t determine their sexual iden?ty would make an
enforced choice under the pressure of their environment, thus repressing their true
inclina?on (to be trans, mostly). Puberty blockers were necessary to allow such youth
to postpone their entry into puberty, gran?ng them more ?me during which to reflect
on their sexual iden?ty before deciding on it at a more mature age.

Puberty blockers were administered to almost all children sent for assessment at
Tavistock, including to au?s?c and troubled youngsters, who may have been
misdiagnosed as uncertain about their sexuality. In other words, life-altering
treatments were being given to vulnerable children before they were old enough to
know whether they wanted to medically transi?on. As one of the cri?cs said, “a child
experiencing gender distress needs ?me and support—not to be set on a medical
pathway they may later regret.”

The paradox is clear: Puberty blockers were given to allow youngsters to pause
maturity and freely decide about their sexual iden?ty, but these drugs may also cause
numerous other physical and psychic pathologies, and nobody asked the youngsters if
they were ready to receive drugs with such consequences. Dr. Hilary Cass, one of the
cri?cs, wrote, “We …have no way of knowing whether, rather than buying ?me to make
a decision, puberty blockers may disrupt that decision-making process. Brain
matura?on may be temporarily or permanently disrupted.”

One should take a step even further in this cri?cism and ques?on the very basic claim
that arriving at sexual iden?ty is a ma`er of mature free choice. There is nothing
“abnormal” in sexual confusion: What we call “sexual matura?on” is a long, complex,
and mostly unconscious process. It is full of violent tensions and reversals—not a
process of discovering what one really is in the depth of one’s psyche.

At many gender clinics across the West, doctors feel compelled to adopt an
“unques?oning affirma?ve approach,” one cri?c noted, with li`le regard to other
underlying mental-health crises troubling children. The pressure is, in fact, twofold. For
one thing, clinicians are cowed by the trans lobby, which interprets skep?cism
regarding puberty blockers as a conserva?ve a`empt to make it more difficult for trans
individuals to actualize their sexual iden?ty. This is compounded by a financial
compulsion: More than half of Tavistock’s income, for example, came from the
treatment of youngsters’ sexual troubles. In short, what we have here is the worst
combina?on of poli?cally correct badgering with the brutal calcula?on of financial
interests. The use of puberty blockers is yet another case of woke capitalism.

To be sure, both of these controversies resulted in at least par?al victory for “an?-
woke” forces: Sturgeon resigned, and the Tavistock clinic was closed. But the forces at
work have a momentum that far exceeds the views of individual poli?cians and the
dynamics of par?cular ins?tu?ons. If anything, individuals and ins?tu?ons are
constantly a`emp?ng to accommodate themselves to strictures coming from
elsewhere, rather than imposing them top-down. It is therefore certain that similar
scandals will con?nue to mul?ply.

As if interest-group agita?on and the compulsions of capital weren’t enough, wokeness

can also draw upon reserves of religious strength. In our official ideological space, of
course, wokenness and religious fundamentalism appear as incompa?ble opposites—
but are they really?

Nearly a decade ago, the ex-Muslim ac?vist Maryam Namazie was invited by London’s
Goldsmiths College to lecture on the topic “Apostasy, Blasphemy and Free Expression in
the Age of ISIS.” Her talk, which focused on Islamic oppression of women, was
repeatedly and rudely disrupted by Muslim students. Did Namazie find allies among
the college’s Feminist Society? No. The feminists sided with the Goldsmiths Islamic
Society.

This unexpected solidarity is ul?mately grounded in the similarity in form of the two
discourses: Wokeness operates as a secularized religious dogma, with all the
contradic?ons this implies. John McWhorter, a black cri?c of racial wokeness, has
enumerated some of them in his recent book, Woke Racism: “You must strive eternally
to understand the experiences of black people / You can never understand what it is to
be black, and if you think you do, you’re a racist”; “Show interest in mul?culturalism /
Do not culturally appropriate.”

This is no exaggera?on. Anyone who doubts the movement’s repressive poten?al

would be well-advised to read “A Black Professor Trapped in An?-Racist Hell,” Vincent
Lloyd’s account in Compact of his encounter with wokeness at its worst. Lloyd’s
creden?als are impeccable: A black professor and director of the Center for Poli?cal
Theology at Villanova University, he is the former director of his university’s black-
studies program, leads an?-racism and transforma?ve-jus?ce workshops, and
publishes books on an?-black racism and prison aboli?on, including the classic text
Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domina?on.

In the summer of 2022, Lloyd was asked by the Telluride Associa?on to lead a six-week
seminar on “Race and the Limits of Law in America” a`ended by 12 carefully selected
17-year-olds. Four weeks later, two of the students had been voted out by their
fellows, and Lloyd himself was soon ostracized and booted. In his last class,

each student read from a prepared statement about how the seminar perpetuated
an?-black violence in its content and form, how the black students had been harmed,
how I was guilty of countless micro-aggressions, including through my body language,
and how students didn’t feel safe because I didn’t immediately correct views that failed
to treat an?-blackness as the cause of all the world’s ills.

Lloyd compares these trends to “that moment in the 1970s when leOist organiza?ons
imploded, the need to match and raise the militancy of one’s comrades leading to a
toxic culture filled with dogma?sm and disillusion.” His cri?cs relied on a series of
dogmas, among them: “There is no hierarchy of oppressions—except for an?-black
oppression, which is in a class of its own”; “Trust black women”; “Prison is never the
answer”; “All non-black people, and many black people, are guilty of an?-blackness.”

But more crucial than content was the conflict of forms between seminar and
workshop. Lloyd tried to prac?ce the seminar, an exchange of opinions: One
interven?on builds on another, as one student no?ces what another student
overlooked, and as the professor guides the discussion toward the most important
ques?ons. Seminars usually focus on a par?cular text, and the par?cipants try to
uncover its meaning pa?ently. By contrast, in the sort of an?-racist workshop that Lloyd
cri?ques, the dogma is clearly established, and the exchange focuses on how and
where somebody knowingly or unknowingly violated it. As Alenka Zupančič has noted,
the universe of PC workshops is the universe of Berthold Brecht’s Jasager: Everybody
says yes again and again, and the main argument against those who are not accepted
as sincere par?sans is “harm.” Here is how “harm” works, according to Lloyd:

During our discussion of incarcera?on, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate

demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students
said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objec?ve
facts are a tool of white supremacy. Outside of the seminar, I was told, the black
students had to devote a great deal of ?me to making right the harm that was inflicted
on them by hearing prison sta?s?cs that were not about blacks. A few days later, the
Asian-American student was expelled from the program.

Two things should surprise us here. First, this new cult combines belief in fixed,
objec?vized dogmas with full trust in how one feels (although only the oppressed
blacks have the right to refer to their feeling as the measure of the racist’s guilt). A
cri?cal confronta?on of arguments plays no role, which implies that “open debate” is a
racist, white-supremacist no?on. “Objec?ve facts are a tool of white supremacy”—yes,
so that, as Trumpists used to say, we need to generate alterna?ve facts…

“The woke are a rela9vely privileged minority of a minority.”

To be clear: There is a kernel of truth in this. Those who are brutally oppressed can’t
afford the deep reflec?on and well-elaborated debate needed to bring out the falsity of
liberal-humanist ideology. But in this case, as in most other cases, those who
appropriate the role of the leaders of the revolt are precisely not the brutalized vic?ms
of the racist oppression. The woke are a rela?vely privileged minority of a minority
allowed to par?cipate in a top quality workshop of an elite university.

Second, the mystery resides in the func?oning of the big Other (the Telluride
administra?ve authority, in this case): The view gradually imposed on all by the
awokened black elite was the view of a minority (ini?ally, even among the black
par?cipants). But how and why did these few not only succeed in terrorizing the
majority, but even compelling the Telluride Associa?on to take their side and decline to
defend Lloyd? Why didn’t they at least assume a more nuanced posi?on? How does
wokenness, although a minority view, manage to neutralize the larger liberal and leOist
space, ins?lling in it a profound fear about openly opposing the woke?

Psychoanalysis has a clear answer to this paradox: the no?on of superego. Superego is
a cruel and insa?able agency that bombards me with impossible demands and mocks
my failed a`empts to meet them. It is the agency in the eyes of which I am all the more
guilty, the more I try to suppress my “sinful” strivings. The old cynical Stalinist mo`o
about the accused at the show trials who professed their innocence—“The more they
are innocent, the more they deserve to be shot”—is superego at its purest.

And did McWhorter in the quoted passage not reproduce the exact structure of the
superego paradox? “You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black
people / You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do,
you’re a racist.” In short, you must but you can’t, because you shouldn’t—the greatest
sin is to do what you should strive for… This convoluted structure of an injunc?on,
which is fulfilled when we fail to meet it, accounts for the paradox of superego. As
Freud noted, the more we obey the superego commandment, the guil?er we feel. The
paradox also holds in the Lacanian reading of the superego as an injunc?on to enjoy:
Enjoyment is an impossible-real, we can’t ever fully a`ain it, and this failure makes us
feel guilty.

A series of situa?ons that characterize today’s society exemplify perfectly this type of
superego pressure, like the endless PC self-examina?on: Was my glance at the flight
a`endant too intrusive and sexually offensive? Did I use any words with a possible
sexist undertone while addressing her? And so on and so on. The pleasure, thrill even,
provided by such self-probing is evident.

And does the same not hold even for the pathological fear some Western liberal leOists
have of being counted guilty of Islamophobia? In this telling, any cri?que of Islam can
only be an expression of Western Islamophobia. Salman Rushdie is denounced for
unnecessarily provoking Muslims and thus (par?ally, at least) invi?ng the fatwa
condemning him to death. The result is predictable: The more the Western liberal
leOists probe their guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of
being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. This constella?on again
perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: The more you obey what the Other
demands of you, the guil?er you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the
stronger its pressure on you will be….

This superego structure, then, explains how and why, in the Telluride case, the majority
and the ins?tu?onal big Other were both terrorized by the woke minority. All of them
were exposed to a superego pressure that is far from an authen?c call to jus?ce. The
black woke elite is fully aware it won’t achieve its declared goal of diminishing black
oppression—and it doesn’t even want that. What they really want is what they are
achieving: a posi?on of moral authority from which they may terrorize all others,
without effec?vely changing social rela?ons of domina?on.

The situa?on of those terrorized by the woke elite is more complex, but s?ll clear: They
submit to woke demands because most of them really are guilty of par?cipa?ng in
social domina?on, but submiPng to woke demands offers them an easy way out—you
gladly assume your guilt insofar as this enables you to go on living the way you did. It’s
the old Protestant logic: “Do whatever you want, just feel guilty for it.”

“Wokeness” effec?vely stands for its exact opposite. In his Interpreta?on of Dreams,
Freud reports on a dream dreamt by a father who falls asleep while keeping vigil at his
son’s coffin. In this dream, his dead son appears to him, pronouncing the terrible
appeal, “Father, can’t you see that I am burning?” When the father awakens, he
discovers that the cloth on the son’s coffin has caught fire from a falling candle.

So why did the father awaken? Was it because the smell of the smoke got too strong,
so that it was no longer possible to prolong the sleep by way of including it into the
improvised dream? Lacan proposes a much more interes?ng reading:
If the func?on of the dream is to prolong sleep, if the dream, aOer all, may come so
near to the reality that causes it, can we not say that it might correspond to this reality
without emerging from sleep? AOer all, there is such a thing as somnambulis?c ac?vity.
The ques?on that arises, and which indeed all Freud’s previous indica?ons allow us
here to produce, is—What is it that wakes the sleeper? Is it not, in the dream, another
reality?—the reality that Freud describes thus—Dass das Kind an seinem Be`e steht,
that the child is near his bed, ihn am Arme fasst, takes him by the arm and whispers to
him reproachfully, und ihm vorwurfsvoll zuraunt: Vater, siehst du denn nicht, Father,
can’t you see, dass ich verbrenne, that I am burning? Is there not more reality in this
message than in the noise by which the father also iden?fies the strange reality of
what is happening in the room next door? Is not the missed reality that caused the
death of the child expressed in these words?

“The woke awaken us—to racism and sexism—precisely to enable us to go on

sleeping.”

So it wasn’t the intrusion of the signal from external reality that awakened the
unfortunate father, but the unbearably trauma?c character of what he encountered in
the dream. Insofar as “dreaming” means fantasizing in order to avoid confron?ng the
Real, the father literally awakened so that he could go on dreaming. The scenario was
the following one: When his sleep was disturbed by the smoke, the father quickly
constructed a dream which incorporated the disturbing element (smoke-fire) in order
to prolong his sleep; however, what he confronted in the dream was a trauma (of his
responsibility for the son’s death) much stronger than reality, so he awakened into
reality in order to avoid the Real….

And it is exactly the same with much of the ongoing “woke” movement: The woke
awaken us—to racism and sexism—precisely to enable us to go on sleeping. They show
us certain reali?es so that we can go on ignoring the true roots and depth of our racial
and sexual traumas.