darkmatter

Despite indications of a movement towards recession, some businesses in Ireland have continued to thrive. During the last fiscal year Bridgestock Ltd. increased its profits before tax by over 600% on an annual turnover of over 6.1 million. Bridgestock is one of the country’s largest privately run ‘direct provision’ centres responsible for accommodating over 20% of the 6,844 asylum seekers dispersed across the State.In marked contrast, asylum seekers housed in these centres have continued to live precarious lives on a weekly allowance of €19.10 for adults and €9.60 for children, which for a single adult amounts to about 3% of the national average industrial wage. This amount was established in 2000 and remains unchanged despite inflation. Given that over 49,100 asylum seekers have passed through this system since then, the numbers who have lived a socially excluded, marginalized existence since this system was put in place, are by no means insignificant.

Of the many strange permutations that the so-called ‘war on terror’ has thrown up perhaps none is stranger than that by which the distinctions between Left and Right which orientated Western metropolitan politics since the time of the French Revolution have seemingly collapsed in relation to the ‘Muslim question’.

On stage at a recent gig in New York, Gil Scott-Heron complained that the designation of February as Black History Month (BHM) was just another example of black people getting short changed: having oppressed them for centuries through slavery and exploitation, the system now conspires to cut short their heritage celebrations by consigning them to the shortest month of the year. Though only half-serious, Scott-Heron’s rye musings are indicative of a certain scepticism with which some have come to regard ‘minority’ history months.

In his plenary talk at the Law and Critique Conference (2007)¹ Slavoj Žižek repeatedly asserted that liberal multiculturalism – and its ‘politically correct’ premise of respecting the other’s difference – is hegemonic. When asked questions about this position from the floor, he stated insistently that it was an ‘empirical fact’ that liberal multiculturalism was hegemonic, and challenged anyone to prove otherwise. I am writing this response as a way of taking up his challenge.