Título en inglés: Slavoj Žižek: Repeating Bakunin

Abstract

Abstract: The question that underpins this entire article concerns the type of subject that is concealed behind the formal requirements of the act in Žižek's philosophy. Who are the implicit empirical subjects in his concept of the act? The act is an act without a subject, it has no causal explanation. And yet, if it does not offer a positive notion with specific contours and a concrete content, there is an implicit sociological dimension. Where does that ‘concrete universality’ lie sociologically? If the most immediate effect of what Žižek calls ‘postmodernism’ is the depoliticisation of the economy, who is the repoliticising agent? What place might they occupy today for the ‘proletariat position’? We argue that while Žižek proposes repeating Lenin versus economistic concepts, his view of the lumpen as the ‘universal individual’ situates him closer to Bakunin than to Marx, as he sees a potential revolutionary subject in excluded figures.