"A commonsensical reproach arises here: why dictatorship? Why not true democracy or simply the power of the proletariat? The term 'proletarian dictatorship' continues to point towards the crucial issue. 'Dictatorship' does not mean the opposite of democracy, but democracy's own underlying mode of functioning - from the very beginning, the thesis on the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' involved the presupposition that it is the opposite of other form(s) of dictatorship, since the entire field of state power is that of dictatorship. When Lenin designated liberal democracy as a form of bourgeois dictatorship, he did not imply a simplistic notion that democracy is really manipulated, a mere facade, that some secret clique is really in power and controls things, and that, if threatened with losing its power in democratic elections, it will show its true face and assume direct power. What he means is that the very /form/ of the bourgeois-democratic state, the sovereignty of its power in its ideologico-political presuppositions, embodies a 'bourgeois' logic.
One should thus use the term 'dictatorship' in the precise sense in which democracy is also a form of dictatorship, that is, as a purely /formal/ determination. It is often pointed out that self-questioning is constitutive of democracy, that democracy always allows, solicits even, constant self-interrogation of its features. However, this self-referentiality has to stop at some point: even the most 'free' elections cannot put in question legal procedures that legitimize and organize them, the state apparatuses that guarantee (by force, if necessary) the electoral process, and so on. The state in its institutional aspect is a massive presence which cannot be accounted for in terms of the representation of interests - the democratic illusion is that it can. Badiou has conceptualized this excess as the excess of state representation over what it represents. One can also put it in Benjaminian terms: while democracy can more or less eliminate constituted violence, is still has to rely continuously on constitutive violence.
Let us recall the lesson of Hegelian 'concrete universality' - imagine a philosophical debate between a hermeneuticist, a deconstructionist, and an analytic philosopher. What they sooner or later discover is that they do not simply occupy positions within a shared common space called 'philosophy': what distinguishes them is the very notion of what philosophy is as such...So when the participants in the debate are struck by this fundamental gap that separates them, they stumble upon the moment of 'dictatorship.' And, in a homologous fashion, the same goes for political democracy: its dictatorial dimension becomes palpable when the struggle turns into the struggle about the field of struggle itself."
- Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes, Ch. 7, " Alain Badiou, or The Violence of Subtraction"
