Tea with Žižek

Abstract

When the Occupy Wall Street movement burst on to the political scene in 2011 an analysis developed by the Lacanian theorist Slavoj Žižek (and others) became a critical lens by which to understand the events. Yet this was not the first instance of widespread dissent in the United States to follow from the crisis of 2008. In 2009, the Tea Party Movement had emerged as a major agent of dissent. In this paper, we seek to apply Žižek's analysis to the Tea Party Movement and, in so doing, point to the relative merits and limitations of such an approach.