Marxism's collapse in the twentieth century profoundly altered the style and substance of Western European radical thought. To build a more robust form of democratic theory and action, prominent theorists moved to reject revolution, abandon class for more fragmented models of social action, and elevate the political over the social. Acknowledging the constructedness of society and politics, they chose the "symbolic" as a concept powerful enough to reinvent leftist thought outside a Marxist framework. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic, which reassessed philosophical Marxism at mid century, Warren Breckman critically revisits these thrilling experiments in the aftermath of Marxism.
The post-Marxist idea of the symbolic is dynamic and complex, uncannily echoing the early German Romantics, who first advanced a modern conception of symbolism and the symbolic. Hegel and Marx denounced the Romantics for their otherworldly and nebulous posture, yet post-Marxist thinkers appreciated the rich potential of the ambiguities and paradoxes the Romantics first recognized. Mapping different ideas of the symbolic among contemporary thinkers, Breckman traces a fascinating reflection of Romantic themes and resonances, and he explores in depth the effort to reconcile a radical and democratic political agenda with a politics that does not privilege materialist understandings of the social. Engaging with the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj iek, Breckman uniquely situates these important theorists within two hundred years of European thought and extends their profound relevance to today's political activism.
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- CHAPTER ONE: The Symbolic Dimensionand the Politics of Young Hegelianism
- The Symbol from Classicism to Romanticism
- Hegelian Spirit from Symbol to Sign
- Left Hegelian Desymbolization
- Feuerbach’s Naturalist Symbol
- Ambiguity and Radical Democracy
- CHAPTER TWO: The Fate of the Symbolic from Romantic Socialism to a Marxism in extremis
- Leroux and the Aesthetic Symbol
- The Style Symbolique and the Question of Society
- Marx and the Symbolic
- Marxism in extremis : Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, Baudrillard
- CHAPTER THREE: From the Symbolic Turn to the Social Imaginary
- Arrival Points
- The Imaginary in Context
- Castoriadis Contra Lévi-Strauss
- Starting Points
- CHAPTER FOUR: Democracy Between Disenchantment and Political Theology
- Two Turns and a Twist
- The Thought of the “Political”
- The Religious and the Political
- Marcel Gauchet and the Birth of Autonomy from the Spirit of Religion
- Democracy Against Itself?
- CHAPTER FIVE: The Post-Marx of the Letter
- The International Career of Hegemony
- Mourning or Melancholy?
- The National Contexts of Marxism’s Crisis
- Placing the Post-Marxist Intellectual
- Trauma and the Post-Marxist Subject: Žižek’s “Beyond Discourse-Analysis”
- CHAPTER SIX: Of Empty Places
- Žižek the Radical Democrat
- Politics Needs a Vacuum
- Partisan Universality
- Religion Without Religion
- Holding the Place or Filling It? Yes, Please!
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Index
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