Fanon, Žižek, and the Violence of Resistance

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Zahi Zalloua (Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures / Whitman College, Whitman College, USA)

Fanon, Žižek, and the Violence of Resistance

Zahi Zalloua (Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures / Whitman College, Whitman College, USA)

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
21 August 2025

Colonialism & imperialism; Social & political philosophy; Psychoanalytical theory (Freudian psychology)

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 together offer a powerful and multifaceted assessment of the liberal anti-racist paradigm whose propensity for identity politics and aversion to class struggle silence the cry of the dispossessed and foreclose radical change. Avoiding contemporary separatist temptations (decoloniality and Afropessimism), and breaking with a non-violent, sentimentalist futurology that announces more of the same, Fanon and Žižek point in a different direction, one that eschews identitarian thought in favor of a collective struggle for freedom and equality.

By: Zahi Zalloua (Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures / Whitman College Whitman College USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 238mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 22mm
Weight: 600g
ISBN: 9781350513280
ISBN 10: 1350513288
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 21 August 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Zahi Zalloua is the Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College, USA and Editor of The Comparatist. His recent books include The Politics of the Wretched: Race, Reason, and Ressentiment (Bloomsbury, 2024); Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality, Being Posthuman: Ontologies of the Future (Bloomsbury 2021) and Žižek on Race: Toward an Anti-Racist Future (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Reviews for Fanon, Žižek, and the Violence of Resistance

Zahi Zalloua’s book compellingly achieves what is most urgently needed in our current social and political predicament. By bringing together Fanon and Žižek as a philosophical pair, he constructs a genuinely novel conceptual tool—one that goes a long way in dismantling the false oppositions and dividing lines that so often paralyze us, replacing them with ones that could truly make a difference. * Alenka Zupancic, Professor of Philosophy, Slovene Academy of Science and Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia * Zahi Zalloua’s Fanon, Žižek, and the Violence of Resistance represents a radical breakthrough in the understanding and theorizing of political violence. It profoundly grasps the connection between the political philosophies of Fanon and Žižek, two thinkers never hitherto thought together. But after the event of Zalloua’s book, we can never think them apart. It’s a landmark work that transforms the terrain of our political thinking. * Todd McGowan, Author of Pure Excess: Capitalism and the Commodity (2024) *