The prevalent reading of Žižek in the Anglo-American academy tends to situate him in a long tradition of Western European political philosophy with little regard for his actual political praxis. Taking my cue from Žižek's recent injunctions to ‘return to the beginning again’ in hopes of not repeating the mistakes of the past; I recur to Žižek's early political interventions in the former Yugoslavia to assess his contemporary notions of ‘Bartleby Politics’ and a politics of the ‘not-all’. I conclude that a purely formal notion of Žižek's politics does not offer a way forward for the contemporary Left.