Neoliberalism, Moralism, and Critique in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

TLDR: Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1989) diagnoses Margaret Thatcher's brand of capitalism as self-ironizing, cynical, and postmodern as mentioned in this paper, and argues that moralistic discourses such as identity politics fail to effectively critique those cynical figures who, like Thatcher's elite entrepreneurs, trumpet multiculturalism and satirize themselves in advance.

Abstract: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989) diagnoses Margaret Thatcher’s brand of capitalism as self-ironizing, cynical, and postmodern. This article focuses on a largely ignored portion of Rushdie’s novel—its satire of Britain’s shift from Keynes’s “dependency culture” to Thatcher’s “enterprise culture.” Citing Slavoj Zizek’s (1989) claim that cynicism is a dominant form of ideology today, the article discusses why moralistic discourses such as identity politics fail to effectively critique those cynical figures who, like Thatcher’s elite entrepreneurs, trumpet multiculturalism and satirize themselves in advance. Rushdie confronts this critical impasse by doubling down on the power of satire, exchanging the politics of blame and victimization for a form of mutually implicating humor. Rushdie’s text often blames everyone—including itself—by insisting that we are all, to different degrees, risible, mutually implicated subjects, especially in our postcolonial, neoliberal age.