Fanon, Zizek, and the Violence of Resistance

In a novel pairing of anti-colonial theorist Frantz Fanon with Marxist-Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Zahi Zalloua explores the ways both thinkers expose the violence of political structures. This inventive exploration advances an anti-racist critique, describing how ontology operates in a racial matrix to produce some human bodies that count and others (deemed not-quite- or non-human) that do not.For Fanon and Žižek, the violence of ontology must be met with another form of violence, a revolutionary violence that delegitimizes the logic of the symbolic order and troubles its collective fantasies.Whereas Fanon begins his challenge to ontology by exposing its historical linkages to Europe’s destructive imperialist procedures before proceeding to “stretch” Marxism, along with psychoanalysis, to account for the crushing (neo)colonial situation, Žižek premises his work on the refusal to accept the totality of ontology. Because of these different points of intervention, Fanon and Žižek