Mikhail Bakunin at the margins of Slavoj Žižek

This thesis presents a new analysis of Slavoj Žižek’s political thought and challenges the prevailing assessments of his Marxism. Its’ stimulus is Žižek’s neglect throughout his career to cite Mikhail Bakunin’s Anarchism as having been an influence, when his conception of revolution closely resembles Bakunin’s. Žižek’s presentation of himself as an iconoclastic Marxist has been based on his inflection of the Marxist appetite for essentialism with indeterminacy; the consequence of Kant’s transcendental idealism, Žižek says, was that it introduced a painfully reflexive self-awareness into philosophy – we secretly know, when we talk about the external world that we are also revealing something about the nature of our desires, because the inherent unknowability of the external world provokes in us an anxiety, which we try to dampen with essentialisms. The reflexive political subject therefore operates from an indeterminate place, both in relation to the external world and also to other subjects. The sympathetic portrayal of Žižek has invariably been that he transcodes this indeterminacy, mostly successfully, into the historical materialist frame, but his instinctive conception of subjectivity is too fissile to contribute productively to the ‘unity of thought and action’ on which Marxism turns. This thesis shows that Žižek’s Marxism has no positive contours of its’ own but rather consists in an absence in his work of a commemoration of Bakunin that should come naturally to him. Žižek’s position is ultimately simple: a naked telos-to-violence, but it gets obfuscated by the méconnaissance that marks his spiritualization of revolt.