The challenge for Žižek, then, is to reinvent what he describes as emancipatory or egalitarian terror in order that it might be deployed in today's circumstances. What would this look like? We get a clue from the critical remarks directed against Danton's efforts to turn Jacobin revolutionary terror into "statist violence". Žižek's preference is for "the direct ‘divine' violence of the sans-culottes, of the people themselves". The same sentiment was repeated in a recent article in the New Statesman, where he expressed his admiration for the radical politics of Haiti's Lavalas movement and its leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Here is a movement that is "exemplary of principled heroism". He also endorsed Aristide's failure to condemn acts of popular violence against the people's enemies.

However, in Žižek's view, there is more to egalitarian terror than the eruption of the mob into violence. It amounts to a radical upheaval of basic social relations and the imposition of a new order on quotidian reality. It is at the very end of In Defense of Lost Causes, when he holds out the prospect of impending ecological catastrophe, that Žižek most clearly sketches the chilling vision of what he takes to be an emancipatory politics of "revolutionary-democratic terror". First would be a strict egalitarian justice: the same norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on, would be imposed on everyone. Next would be terror, including "ruthless punishment", severe limitations on liberal freedoms, and technological control of "prospective" law-breakers. Third would be recourse to voluntarism in the form of "large-scale collective decisions" running counter to the logic of capitalism. Finally, all this would be combined with trust in the people, the wager that the vast majority of people would support these "severe measures" and would be "ready to participate in their enforcement". Such would be egalitarian-revolutionary terror. It amounts to a reinvented version of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Slavoj Žižek might tell good jokes but this is not one of them. He might be a jester but some people take him very seriously.