Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines

Volume 22, Issue 2, Winter 2003

Thinking Critically, Choosing Politically

The Spectre of ‘And’
Multiculturalism, Antiracism and the Third Continent

‘And’ thus splits up the ambiguous starting unity, introduces into it the difference between ideology and science ... since the gesture of distinguishing ‘mere ideology’ from ‘reality’ implies the epistemologically untenable ‘God's view’, that is, access to objective reality as it ‘truly is’... [And] what emerges via distortions of the accurate representation of reality is the real -- that is, the trauma around which social reality is structured. (Zizek, 2000, pp. 24-5, original emphasis)