Contents
Foreword
Dick Howard
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Post-Marxism and the Symbolic Turn
CHAPTER ONE
The Symbolic Dimension and 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: Castoriadis’s Project of Autonomy
Arrival Points
The Imaginary in Context
Castoriadis
Contra
Lévi-Strauss
Starting Points
CHAPTER FOUR
Democracy Between Disenchantment and Political Theology: French Post-Marxism and the Return of Religion
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: Laclau and Mouffe Between Postmodern Melancholy and Post-Marxist Mourning
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 and Laclau; or, The End of the Affair
Žižek the Radical Democrat
Politics Needs a Vacuum
Partisan Universality
Religion Without Religion
Holding the Place or Filling It? Yes, Please!
Epilogue
Notes
Index