The Politics of Waiting: Subalternity, Marginalisation, and Failed Resistance in Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Satantango

Abstract

Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Satantango presents a marginalised rural community whose inhabitants exist within conditions of poverty, isolation, uncertainty, and social disintegration. This paper examines waiting as a political condition through which subalternity and failed resistance are produced and sustained. Rather than treating waiting merely as a psychological state or a feature of narrative temporality, the study argues that waiting in Satantango reflects an unequal distribution of agency: while some characters possess mobility, information, and access to institutional power, others are compelled to wait for change to arrive from outside themselves. Drawing on Ranajit Guha’s Subaltern Studies and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s discussion of subalternity, representation, and agency, the paper examines the inhabitants of the unnamed settlement as marginalised subjects whose desires and voices do not readily develop into collective political action. Marxist perspectives are employed to connect their marginalisation with material deprivation, economic insecurity, labour, and unequal power relations. Particular attention is given to the decaying settlement as a marginal space, the villagers’ expectation of Irimias, and the transformation of their desire for liberation into dependence. Irimias’s return exposes the vulnerability of a community whose hopes have become attached to an external figure promising renewal. The paper argues that the failure of resistance in Satantango does not arise from an absence of dissatisfaction but from the fragmentation of agency under conditions of material and social marginalisation. Waiting consequently becomes a mechanism through which hope, dependence, and power intersect. Krasznahorkai’s novel ultimately demonstrates that the desire to escape oppression does not automatically generate liberation; without collective agency, material autonomy, and the ability to challenge structures of power, resistance remains vulnerable to manipulation and failure.