ABSTRACT

In commenting on the social unrest and resistance movements of 2011, Zizek suggested that the manifesto of the Spanish indignados revealed much about of the "post-ideological" era we find ourselves in. This chapter outlines two of the key competing perspectives within the radical intellectual left on contemporary resistance to the capitalist order. On the one side, Zizek emerges from a strand of the Western intelligentsia still tightly rooted in the modernist philosophical movement against bourgeois conservatism that began in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the other side of the radical intellectual left, we find thinkers like Hardt and Negri who emanate from a strand of the Western intelligentsia that is determined to rip open the modernist legacy. For Hardt and Negri, modernity began with the emergence of Renaissance humanism, or a European revolution between 1200 and 1600, during which time "humans declared themselves masters of their own lives" and began to reject "the transcendent realm".