Romanticizing Hunger: Žižek, Lacan, and the Dangerous Idealization of Communism
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| Nostalgic? AI art |
In a widely circulated video clip in YouTube titled “Why People Were ‘Happier’ Under Communism,” Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek delivers a provocative thesis: that people in communist regimes experienced a peculiar form of psychological stability, even happiness, precisely because their lives were constrained. The following is a summary of selected moments from the video:
“The notion of happiness itself is very ambiguous and has deep implications. There was a brief period of political openness in Prague in 1968. Then, the Soviet tanks came and crushed the reforms.
But here's the paradox: people often claim they were happier during that period. Because their material needs were modestly met. Maybe once a month you'd go to the supermarket and buy coffee. It wasn’t much, but there was a certain comfort in the limitations. You weren’t constantly bombarded with choices and pressure to succeed
This is why happiness is not necessarily about having more. Sometimes, it's about having less, but in a structured, limited way that frees you from certain kinds of anxiety. Some people today feel nostalgia for that time.”
To many, this statement reads as either ironic or outrageous. Yet Žižek insists that he is not idealizing communism. What, then, is he doing?
Lacan, Lack, and Enjoyment
Žižek’s argument draws heavily from the psychoanalytic tradition of Jacques Lacan, particularly the concepts of lack, jouissance (a paradoxical form of excessive enjoyment), and the symbolic order, which governs human desire through prohibition. According to Lacan, desire is never directed toward an object that will truly satisfy us — what we want is shaped precisely by what is denied to us.
Within this framework, the phallus becomes a symbol of what is missing, a signifier of the structuring absence around which desire circulates. Thus, prohibition is not the enemy of desire; it is its very condition.
Žižek applies this to political life: In the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, people’s choices were starkly limited — what you could eat, read, say, and do were all heavily regulated. But this very limitation, he argues, produced a psychic structure within which people could live without the burden of constantly choosing, performing, and optimizing. If something went wrong, you could simply blame the Party. You were not held personally responsible for your unhappiness.
From Theory to Reality
This line of thought has a certain philosophical sophistication. Žižek offers a psychoanalytically informed critique of the capitalist command to enjoy, which often creates more anxiety than liberation. But when such theory is used to recast authoritarian repression as psychologically liberating, it crosses into dangerous territory — where romanticization displaces reality, and rhetoric erases suffering.
The reality of life under communism, as experienced by millions, cannot be abstracted into Lacanian paradoxes. In many countries across the Eastern bloc, citizens endured severe shortages of food, medicine, and basic goods. State violence was not an abstract symbolic order, but a concrete apparatus of control. People went to bed hungry. Speaking your mind could land you in prison. In Romania, Albania, or East Germany, escape attempts often ended in death.
Žižek’s nostalgic tone — however self-aware — risks trivializing this suffering.
Žižek’s Position of Privilege
It is important to note that Žižek himself did not experience communism in its harshest forms. He grew up in Slovenia, the most liberal and Western-facing republic of the former Yugoslavia. His father was a civil servant; his mother, an accountant. Although he was not a member of the Communist Party, Žižek was nonetheless allowed to study in Paris in the 1980s — a privilege almost unheard of for Eastern Europeans at the time.
His intellectual formation occurred under comparatively permissive conditions, within a version of socialism far more tolerant and materially stable than what others endured in the Eastern Bloc.
This context matters. Žižek’s Lacanian reinterpretation of communist life, while intellectually engaging, is ultimately theorizing from a place of exception, not from the rule. The comfort he speaks of was not available to the vast majority of those who lived under authoritarian socialism. The "limits" were not gentle symbolic prohibitions; they were brutal material deprivations.
The Risk of Misleading the Uninformed
What makes this even more troubling is that Žižek’s position — because of his global visibility — risks misleading people who have not experienced communism first-hand into believing that it might offer a solution to the anxieties of late capitalism. But as anyone who has actually lived under such regimes knows, this is not the case.
This “knowing” is not theoretical — it is existential, embedded in memory and survival, not in conceptual abstraction. Despite Žižek’s fancy Lacanian language, the facts remain: millions suffered under these systems, and no symbolic reframe can undo that history.
Between Critique and Complicity
This is not to say that the critiques of contemporary liberal capitalism are unfounded. Economic inequality, alienation, and the mental health crisis are real and growing. But these problems will not be resolved by returning to a system that systematically suppressed freedom, creativity, and dignity.
The nostalgic framing that Žižek provides may offer an aesthetic contrast to the chaos of the market, but it lacks any ethical responsibility to history. At best, it is an intellectual provocation. At worst, it is a form of ideological laundering.
Philosophy Must Remain Answerable to Experience
Perhaps Žižek would respond that he is exposing the contradictions of desire — that even freedom, in excess, becomes oppressive. But such insight must not come at the cost of trivializing oppression. When philosophical theory attempts to reframe historical atrocities as psychologically beneficial, it fails not just as politics, but as philosophy itself.
As Adorno once wrote, “The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth.” Theory must remain answerable to experience.
To invoke Lacan: “There is no metalanguage.” No one can speak from outside the structure, exempt from its effects. But Žižek seems to come dangerously close to such a position — theorizing lack without ever having lacked essentials, turning real pain into conceptual play.
Conclusion: Memory Over Paradox
In the end, the difference between Žižek’s “nostalgia for that time” and the experience of those who lived under communism is not a matter of ideology, but of memory. Where he sees paradox, others remember hunger. Where he theorizes psychic relief, others recall repression.
These are not competing political positions — they are fundamentally different epistemologies. And only one of them begins with the obligation to say: “I will not forget what it felt like to be afraid of my own government. I will not forget going to bed without food.”
Sources & Bibliography
- Žižek, Slavoj. Why People Were “Happier” Under Communism. YouTube
- Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Routledge, 2001.
- Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Norton, 1998.
- Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Continuum, 1973.
- Applebaum, Anne. Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944–1956. Doubleday, 2012.
- Havel, Václav. The Power of the Powerless. Routledge, 1985.
- Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010.
- Garton Ash, Timothy. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. Vintage, 1993.
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