Zizek on the proletariat

Today's historical situation does not compel us to drop the notion of the proletariat, of the proletarian position; on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level well beyond Marx' s imagination. We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject, a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content. For this reason, the new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. The ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure - in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance . Today, we are all potentially a Homo Sacer, and the only way to stop actually becoming one is to act preventively.