Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy

POST-MARXISM EMERGED in the 1970s and 1980s as Marxism lost its hold on the imagination of the western European intellectual left. The post-Marxism that we encounter in Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Derrida, and the young Slavoj Žižek attempts to hold onto the possibility of radical action and progressive transformation, while at the same time it renounces Marxism’s idea of a privileged social actor, Leninism’s insistence on a vanguard party possessing correct theory, and indeed, the basic Marxist-Leninist belief that a theory could ever adequately guide social movements operating within a complex historical reality. These theoretical projects intersected with many intellectual currents in twentieth-century thought, but, above all, they drew on the antifoundationalism that became especially potent in French intellectual life after, roughly, 1960. Contingency, indeterminacy, the complex relationship between sign and signifier, representation and represented, are all themes that bind post-Marxism to the French intellectual context, even if, as we have seen, that context cannot be spatially delimited to Paris or even to the Hexagon.

Post-Marxism owes still more to a French context, for it came to observe a certain number of prohibitions that emerged in the antitotalitarian discourse of French thought. It would be an error to see the antitotalitarian moment simply in terms of a renunciation of any lingering vestige of enthusiasm for the Soviet Union. It had much more to do with realignments in French left-wing politics and, at a deeper level, with an emotional and intellectual reorientation. The results were varied in the extreme: from the New Philosophers’ denunciation of all power to Marcel Gauchet’s long march from anarchism to liberalism to establishment republicanism. Generally, the antitotalitarian moment helped to detach the question of democracy from the question of revolution and launched a number of theoretical projects that together contemporaries heralded as the return of the political. Even more generally, antitotalitarianism may be taken as a factor in the widespread rejection of “totality” that became a hallmark of French thought. These were all developments in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, as we have seen, Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort forged ideas in the 1950s and 1960s that opened up many of the questions and styles of thought that would gain greater traction in the wake of 1968.

As we saw, Slavoj Žižek’s career took him from an early allegiance to the idea of post-Marxist radical democracy to a militant call for the return of Marx, the critique of capitalism, and a fight against the one-sided universality of capitalism in the name of an equally one-sided and undreamt new order. Žižek’s trajectory prompts a question akin to that asked of so-called postmodernism: insofar as most of us now use the term postmodern with skepticism, misgiving, or irony, are we in a post-postmodern condition or was postmodernity always merely part of modernity? In similar spirit, does Žižek’s example suggest that we are entering (or have entered) a post-post-Marxist phase? Or might it be that post-Marxism is a dialectical moment in the history of Marxism? As Fredric Jameson has noted, “few intellectual movements have known quite so many internal schisms” as Marxism.1 Is post-Marxism another internal schism? Where do things stand now? An impossible question admitting no definitive answer, but imperative nonetheless.

Alain Badiou insists that the “historical paradox” of the early twenty-first century “is that, in a certain way, we are closer to problems investigated in the first half of the nineteenth century than we are to those we have inherited from the twentieth century. Just as in around 1840, today we are faced with an utterly cynical capitalism, which is certain that it is the only possible option for a rational organization of society.” Badiou goes on to note that now, as then, the poor are blamed for their own plight, widening gulfs separate rich nations from poor nations, while even in the wealthiest countries extreme poverty is contemplated with complacency, and political power does not even try to veil its function as an agent of capitalism. Now, as then, capitalism faces no other system that challenges its monopoly on the organization of really existing societies: as in the 1840s, “Revolutionaries are divided and only weakly organized, broad sectors of working-class youth have fallen prey to nihilistic despair, the vast majority of intellectuals are servile.”² To Badiou’s list I would add that elements of the intellectual habitus of the European left in the years just before Marxism began its ascent to dominance over the international socialist movement have resurfaced in the period after Marxism’s collapse.

In my admittedly limited exploration of this theoretical landscape, we have seen unabashed appeals to the constructive power of imagination and the potential world-creating force of words, calls to untether utopianism from the leaden weight of an apparently self-evident reality, the deployment of the potencies of religion, the attempt to mobilize political energies around figures of impossibility. If, as Fredric Jameson has insisted, our age “demands a politics of ambivalence or ambiguity,”3 its resources and the roots of its temperament will certainly not be found exclusively in the short twentieth century, Hobsbawm’s “age of extremes.” The figures I have discussed frequently turn back to the period prior to the rise of Marxism. Castoriadis finds inspiration for his concept of the radical imagination in Fichte’s theory of productive imagination (productive Einbildungskraft). In his interrogation of modern democracy, Claude Lefort returns frequently to the years immediately after the fall of Napoleon, to writers who “still lived in the gap between a world that was disappearing and a world that was appearing” and whose “thought was still haunted by questions which knew no limits.”⁴ Miguel Abensour seeks resources for a revival of utopianism in Romantic socialism, including that of Pierre Leroux, to whom he dedicates numerous articles.⁵ Jean Baudrillard, in the brief moment between his incarnations as Marxist radical and prophet of the postmodern simulacrum, turns for figures of revolt to the poète maudit and the revolutionary Romantic. Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau cite the Romantic mythologist Friedrich Creuzer’s description of the symbol when they wish to illustrate the excess of the signified over the signifier, which for them conditions the operation of hegemony.⁶ Slavoj Žižek returns again and again to Hegel, though not the Hegel of a rigid dialectic inexorably moving toward absolute reason, but the philosopher of a failed symbolic whose dialectic reveals the impossibility of resolution. And, to underscore this refashioning of Hegel, Žižek turns liberally to the work of Friedrich Schelling, whose later philosophy rested on an insight into the ontological incompleteness of being itself. To these examples from the figures treated in this book, we might add others. Jacques Rancière comes especially to mind: his recourse to Kant, Schiller, and Schlegel; his refusal, contra Habermas, of a “division between a rational order of argument and a poetic, if not irrational, order of commentary and metaphor”; his deflection of Walter Benjamin’s classically modernist worries about the aestheticization of politics into an insistence that politics, properly understood, inevitably contains an aesthetic dimension insofar as “politics is always both argument and opening up the world where argument can be received and have an impact.”⁷

Many of these resonances between the eras before and after Marxism’s ascendancy may be tied to the prominent role of the symbolic, which has furnished us a red thread by which to track a number of thinkers wrestling with the challenge of reconceiving democratic theory in a context marked by the collapse of really existing socialism and the weakening hold of the Marxist model. We have seen that the notion of the symbolic construction of social reality was seized by figures like Merleau-Ponty or Althusser in various efforts to save Marxism from the economistic reductionism and epistemological realism of vulgar Marxism. Such attempts to rescue Marxism from its internal impasse moved rather seamlessly into attempts to rescue radical thought from Marxism itself. These strategies tie the various trajectories traced in this book to a great sea change in twentieth-century thought. Typically known as the linguistic turn, I have suggested in the introduction that the phenomenon might be better described as a symbolic turn. To invoke the term symbolic is inevitably to mobilize associations with the idea of the symbolic order articulated by structuralism and carried forward in poststructuralism. And, to be sure, Lévi-Strauss and, above all, Lacan exercised considerable influence over the theoretists explored here. Indeed, one way to sort out the positions we have explored is to weigh them in relation to Lacan’s idea of the symbolic order. In this typology, Castoriadis emerges as an anti-Lacanian who views the symbolic order as the product and manifestation of the imagination working at both the individual and the anonymous social level; Lefort and Gauchet both draw on Lacan’s idea of constitutive division to theorize the relationship of the symbolic and the real, yet their view of the symbolic is heavily influenced by phenomenological ideas about the background conditions of intelligibility; and, finally, Laclau, Mouffe, and Žižek all structure social theory around the basic Lacanian theory of desire, whereby the symbolic is driven by failed attempts to fill the lack in the heart of being. If the impact of structuralism upon these various post-Marxist styles is indisputable, nonetheless, a central assumption of this book has been that structuralism’s relatively rigid semiotic conception of the symbolic order does not adequately accommodate the mode of the symbolic mobilized by post-Marxist theorists. The symbolic is, I have argued, an irreducibly polyvalent construct, one that oscillates between the theory of arbitrary signs and the ideal of motivated signs, between the power to “present” the thing and the demonstration of a gap between the thing and the sign, between the power to body forth an idea and the impossibility of fully adequate representation of it.

The critique of representation was, of course, the stock-in-trade of certain currents of what, for want of a better term, we can call postmodernism. At their worst, skepticism of representation could lead to the conclusion that all representations are equally inadequate or inadequate in the same way or that, as in the case of Baudrillard, the simulacrum has fully replaced social reality. Somewhat more soberly, and not surprisingly, postmodern critique gave a new relevance to the figure of the sublime. Most notable here is Jean-François Lyotard, who made the impossibility of representation the centerpiece of his critique of the modern projects of political emancipation. In truth, however, the extremes of postmodernist doubt have gained little purchase among the theorists discussed in this book. And even the idea of the sublime has been less important to post-Marxist thought than the idea that the representation of the ideas of political reason fails, but not in the absolute sense implied by Lyotard’s deployment of Kant. We see a particularly clear version of this in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of hegemony, in which the effort to represent becomes the driving engine of political contest. I would add that similar impulses are at the basis of Rancière’s critique of Lyotard, whose turn to the sublime deflects politics into an ethics grounded in the insurmountable unrepresentability of the ideas of reason. For Rancière, the proper task of politics, which he defines as the demand for equality of that part of society that has no “part,” as opposed to police, defined as the administration of social life, is to contest the very partition of the perceptible, whereby a social space opens onto those who have a part and those who do not, those who are visible in the common and those who remain invisible. And here Rancière sees an intersection between the egalitarian thrust of politics and the “fragile politics” of art, which “consists in bringing about a reframing of material and symbolic space.”8 From a different angle, Frank Ankersmit also develops a theory of politics that acknowledges both the imperative and the impossibility of representation. To be sure, Ankersmit himself evokes the sublime in his discussions of democratic politics and, especially, his treatment of historical knowledge.⁹ But the real emphasis in his theory of politics falls upon the work of representation. In an unjustly neglected book, Ankersmit pursues a theory of democratic politics based on aestheticization; whereas Benjamin’s famous anxieties circled around fascist yearnings for political spectacle and an organic state conceived as a Gesamtkunstwerk, Ankersmit bases his aesthetic politics not on the organic unity of the work of art, but on “the insurmountable barrier between the represented and its representation.” Ankersmit calls this an aesthetic of “brokenness,” and this particular aesthetic underpins his plea for a democratic politics that is aware of the irreducible nonidentity of the representation and the represented. “Political reality,” he writes, “is not something we come across as if it has always existed; it is not found or discovered, but made, in and by the procedures of political representation.”¹⁰ In a pivotal chapter Ankersmit locates the emergence of this awareness of the complex work of political representation in the Romantic era.¹¹

It has been a gambit of this book to open with two chapters on the Romantic theory of the symbolic. At the book’s beginning, it may have struck readers as a curious choice for a study of post-Marxism and, at its end, it may remain so for some. I hope, though, that for many this initial focus has proven illuminating. My intention, in the first instance, was to create a certain narrative arc: Marxism inherited Left Hegelianism’s hostility to Romanticism, including its politics, most obviously that of restorationist Romantics but also that of Romantic socialists such as Pierre Leroux. In the name of a this-worldly, disenchanting, desymbolizing logic, that hostility extended to a critique of the symbolic sensibility that governs so much of Romantic thought. Marx followed the Left Hegelians in associating human emancipation with the task of overcoming the otherness, heteronomy, and unmasterability implied by symbolic representation. Even if the subsequent history of Marxist theory contained many heterodox elements, the main current strongly embraced a desymbolizing impulse, epistemological realism, and economistic materialism. In the period of Marxism’s most severe crisis, the intellectual left’s suspicion of symbolic form eased. Recourse to the symbolic presented itself as an antidote to Marxism’s perceived flaws and a more promising way to conceptualize a democratic politics that no longer orients itself toward a foundational logic of the historical world. With this move, the dialectic of desymbolization was in certain ways reversed. The symbolic offered a way to rethink the social space as contingent and open, irreducible to an anterior or prior instance or foundation beyond and outside representation; and the symbolic carried a certain lesson in moderation, fitting with the more ambivalent and ambiguous sensibility of leftist theorists chastened by the history of the twentieth-century socialist experience. Further, the symbolic furnished the lever switching left-wing theory from a preoccupation with the logic of the social to an exploration of the logic of the political. And, as I have argued, the return to the symbolic reopened the question of the immanent and the transcendent for political theory, a question that for the left had been foreclosed by Left Hegelian and Marxist thought. Attending that reopening of the problem of immanence and transcendence, we have seen, were revived concerns about the intersections of the theological and the political or, as in the case of Derrida, Žižek, and Badiou, outright borrowings from the archive of religion.

The mobilization of the symbolic brought with it much of the polyvalence, ambiguity, and paradoxical richness already evident when Romantic theorists struggled to articulate a new theory of the symbol around 1800. It is worth pausing for a moment to recall that, for a time, it was customary to describe postmodern culture as allegorical; in a canonical essay, Craig Owens equates postmodernism with the allegorical mode, which presents “the world [as] a vast network of signs … [which] continually elicits reading, interpretation.”12 In this framework, postmodernism’s allegorical sensibility is explicitly contrasted to modernism’s symbolist sensibility, that is, an aesthetic of fragmentation, displacement, and supplement is pitted against an aesthetic of presence, embodiment, and holism. Romanticism is habitually depicted as a culprit for introducing an aesthetic idealism that rests on an expressive theory of symbols, “the presentational union of the ‘inner essence’ and outward expression, which are in fact revealed to be identical.”¹³ Postmodernism, so this narrative runs, no longer proclaims the work’s autonomy, self-sufficiency, transcendence, and fulfillment of desire, but rather it speaks of the work’s contingency, insufficiency, lack of transcendence, and perpetual frustration.¹⁴ Readers may well have been wondering if, when the post-Marxist theorists insist on the failure of representation, they are in fact expressing an allegorical, rather than symbolic sensibility. As I argued in chapter 1, however, the Romantics quickly blurred any rigorous distinction between the allegorical and the symbolic, with Friedrich Schlegel even using the terms interchangeably; in fact, the Romantic conception of the symbolic gained its fullest meaning precisely by reaching into the terrain of the allegorical, the impossibility of representation that theorists like Owens assign to postmodernism. I have chosen to stress the “symbolic” and its Romantic provenance because it is there that we see the characteristic tension between the power of symbols to present and their inevitable failure, which is precisely the tension that separates a properly postmodern theorist like Lyotard from the theorists of the political that I have discussed.

Thus my second motive in juxtaposing Romantic and post-Marxist thought: to counteract the all-too-frequent presentism that accompanies so much discussion of various currents of modern theory, including post-Marxism, by deepening the historical perspective. Here I need to repeat a disclaimer from the book’s introduction. My aim has not been, in any way, to argue for direct lines of influence or causality stretching from Romanticism to post-Marxism, nor has it been to efface the significant differences between intellectual currents separated by wide gulfs of time and temper. Rather, in following the adventures of the symbolic, I have sought, in a manner that is, admittedly, itself somewhat Romantic, to create associations, resonances, and reverberations that may alter and inflect the way we read and hear contemporary theory. A comment from Georges Gusdorf, encountered as I approached the end of this task, more or less expresses my own sensibility and aim: “We are not masters of words; they come to us from the depths of ages charged with resonances and harmonies, with significations which continue to be enriched in usage by encounters, agreements, and disagreements with other words, whence arises unpredictable surges across mental space.”15

In naming this book, I wanted to invoke a (modest) parallel between my assessment of an important current in recent left-wing theory and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s famous mid-twentieth-century evaluation of the state of Marxist thought and politics; further, I wished to suggest that something like a substitution might have occurred, with the symbolic coming to occupy in post-Marxism the place that the dialectic had occupied in Marxism. Certainly, one can find in the collapse of Marxism ample evidence to support Michel Foucault’s insistence in 1966 that “a nondialectical culture is in the process of taking shape.”16 Yet, if Foucault’s assessment of postmodern culture seems confirmed, for example, in Jean Baudrillard’s insistence that the symbolic is through and through un-dialectical because it permanently resists definition or masterability, Foucault would appear to be disproven by Slavoj Žižek, who insists that the symbolic is essentially dialectical precisely because of its unmasterability. Clearly, Žižek’s dialectic, with its rejection of Aufhebung and its emphasis on contingency, incommensurabilities, and discontinuities, is won at the cost of relinquishing the main assumptions about dialectics that have dominated generations of thinkers. Nonetheless, it is not unprecedented within the history of the left; not only might Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics come to mind but also Ludwig Feuerbach’s dialectic, with its disruptive positive remainder, discussed in chapter 1. If, from certain vantage points in the 1970s or 1980s, it could look like dialectics was on its way out, the view from the present suggests a very different conclusion. One might be tempted to say that the relationship between the dialectical and the nondialectical is itself undecidable. In fact, however, I am inclined to see this relationship as precisely an instance of a dialectic that works through oppositions, conscious of their intertwining and reciprocal effects but also of the impossibility of their resolution. It is hard to disagree with Fredric Jameson that “this very opposition is itself dialectical: to resolve it one way or another is the non-dialectical temptation.”¹⁷

The old dialectics, with its confidence or at least hope that thought and being, idea and history, are marching to the same drumbeat, the dialectics of the old communist movement against which thinkers like Cornelius Castoriadis set their teeth, is long dead. Indeed, that dialectics died several deaths, at the hands of post-Marxists and, before them, philosophically sophisticated Marxists at various moments in the twentieth century. With that death came anxieties that are familiar to anyone who has concerned herself with the possible pitfalls of embracing social constructivism, namely that critical theory falls into one-sidedness, losing its capacity or even its will to imagine processes beyond itself. Certainly, the idea that everything about the human world is a social construction has become a commonplace. Indeed, if at various points sophisticated Marxists, non-Marxists, and post-Marxists alike have found it useful to point to the symbolic constitution of the social as a corrective to the stale opposition between base and superstructure, this idea has become sufficiently uncontroversial that the billionaire George Soros has built his thinking on the notion that reflexivity shapes the economy right down to the fundamentals.18 Yet undoubtedly the shift to the symbolic brings with it the danger that analysts come to think of the world as just representation and cease to believe that some representations may be more adequate than others and that, as David Harvey puts it, “the search for proper and powerful representations (theory) is always a matter of serious commitment for committed people”¹⁹ or, at the very least, that they neglect the task of analyzing the economy outside the parameters of the symbolic dimension. Jameson expresses anxiety about this peril in a 2008 discussion of Pierre Bourdieu.²⁰ In his 2009 opus on dialectics he does an end run around this worry by arguing that contemporary Marxism must, appropriately, be a Marxism of the superstructures because “late capitalism” has “profoundly and structurally modified” the relationship of base and superstructure.²¹

Ultimately, what was once taken as a heresy within the left, namely to overturn what a scathing attack on Laclau and Mouffe once called Marxism’s “categorial priority,”²² does not necessarily mean a lapse from materialism back into idealism. Indeed, the old idealist insistence that the human world is a construction of spirit is better understood through the theory of social institution, which emerged precisely as a means to get beyond the old spirit-matter dualism. The obstacle to the critique of political economy has stemmed not from the idea that the social world, including all facets of the economy, is instituted. That claim in itself does not at all deny that social processes function at various levels of agency and structure, all of which are open to analysis; and it has the entirely salutary effect of repeatedly unmasking capitalism’s tendency to naturalize its operations, a tendency particularly pronounced in the era of neoliberalism’s regnancy. The real problem has rested in the inclination, as the hold of a foundational logic of the social weakened, to accentuate contingency and indeterminacy while ignoring constraints. Undoubtedly, among poststructuralist and post-Marxist thinkers, the pendulum could swing too far in that direction, but nonetheless postfoundationalist theory presented a vital corrective within leftist thought. In turn, Moishe Postone offers a corrective to the corrective when he recognizes its value for thinking about action but calls for a crucial supplement: “Positions that ontologize historical indeterminacy emphasize that freedom and contingency are related. However, they overlook the constraints on contingency exerted by capital as a structuring form of social life and are, for this reason, ultimately inadequate as critical theories of the present.”²³

This summons back to the analysis of capitalism, and with it the return or reassertion of Marxism among many leading left-wing theorists in western Europe and America, is perhaps the best proof that, despite appearances, dialectics is alive and well. If the various strands of post-Marxist thought tended to minimize the sphere of the economy in favor of the shaping power of the political, the failure of what Rancière calls the “capitalist utopia” has reinvigorated the critique of political economy.24 And here Marx’s value turns out never to have been diminished. Indeed, as Dick Howard has put it, “Marxism in the postcommunist world could be thought of as a theory happily rescued from the weight of a failed experiment.”²⁵ So, for example, David Harvey’s brilliant analyses of global capitalism have, for several decades, drawn chiefly on Marx, while Chris Harman began writing his important book Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx years before the crash in 2008.²⁶ At the opening of the twenty-first century, the list of important and creative work conducted within a Marxist analytic framework is not negligible.²⁷ Crucial to the reassertion of Marx’s heuristic value is skepticism toward inflated claims of capitalism’s historic transformation in recent decades. The stakes are clear. Just as Marxian political ideas might seem invalidated by the tragic course of communist totalitarianism, so too might Marxian economics be dismissed by the apparent fact that capitalism has changed beyond recognition in the many decades since Marx and Engels. Postindustrialism, postmodernism, the information society, the triumph of neoliberalism, globalization itself: all reinforced the sense that capitalism had moved beyond the Marxian framework.

In light of this, it is unsurprising to see recent champions of Marx warning that we must not overstate the extent of capitalism’s alteration in recent times. Rather than overestimating the breaks and discontinuities of capitalism, we should develop a dialectical perspective on its continuities.²⁸ Likewise, even as we may recognize profound changes in the nature of labor, class, and the social bases of activism, we should not exaggerate the disappearance of the working class.²⁹ At the very least, North Americans who have become enamored of the idea of their postindustrial information society are well reminded by Žižek that the American working class is alive and well and living in China. Ultimately, Jameson seems right when he notes that “it seems paradoxical to celebrate the death of Marxism in the same breath with which you greet the ultimate triumph of capitalism. For Marxism is the very science of capitalism; its epistemological vocation lies in its unmatched capacity to describe capitalism’s historical originality; its fundamental structural contradictions endow it with its political and its prophetic vocation, which can scarcely be distinguished from the analytic ones.”³⁰

The failure of the neoliberal capitalist utopia has put Marxist analysis back on the agenda. However, if this is true, we also see a dialectic at work whereby the sensibility expressed in post-Marxist theory finds its counterpart in a certain kind of Marxism. Hence, for example, in a perceptive essay from 1995, Douglas Kellner argues for the continuing relevance of “a reconstructed Marxism, a Marxism without guarantees, teleology, and foundations.” Such a Marxism, he continues, “will be more open, tolerant, skeptical, and modest than previous versions. A Marxism for the twenty-first century could help promote democracy, freedom, justice, and equality, and counterattack conservative ideologies that merely promote the interests of the rich and powerful.”31 A similar spirit presides in the concluding remarks of Stuart Sim’s intellectual history of post-Marxism. Sim foresees an important but diminished role for Marxism within a pluralistic political and theoretical landscape in which “one might be a Marxist on some issues, but not necessarily on all.”³² That seems like a position that almost all the figures discussed in this book might support. After all, even Castoriadis, the one most vociferously critical of Marx, concedes the “sociological” if not economic value of Marx’s exploration of the mechanisms of capitalism.³³ Even Jameson’s “postmodern Marxism” remains by and large consistent with a modest Marxism inhabiting a pluralist theoretical landscape.

Yet, although Marxian concepts might be appreciated as valuable tools in one’s kit, it is not clear whether it makes any sense to call oneself a Marxist in certain regards but not in others. Throughout its history, Marxism’s claims on its adherents have been much more demanding. It has not been a taxi that one can get out of at will, as Max Weber once said of the ethos promulgated by the Sermon on the Mount. Marxism has offered a comprehensive theory of historical process and society. Insofar as capitalism is an economic system that penetrates every corner of contemporary life, any theory of capitalism of necessity aspires to totality; and Marxism has been the aspirant par excellence.³⁴ Certainly in Slavoj Žižek’s trajectory away from initial sympathy with post-Marxism to renewed fidelity to Marxism we see the return of a more encompassing claim on the theorist’s identity and, with it, of the classic tropes of Marxist totalization: demand for a complete change of horizon, yearning for a new positive order to end the vicious cycle of revolt and its recuperation, centrality of class struggle and the agency of the working class, insistence on a logic of capital, spectral as that may be. Žižek’s most recent writings have been much more explicit in tying this to the project of communism. “What is now required,” he claimed in 2011, “is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.”³⁵

Among the dialectical twists that we have been tracing in these concluding pages, the return of communism as a kind of horizon of leftist thought is surely one of the more surprising. Žižek is by no means alone in shrugging off a prohibition that had descended upon the name of communism. Indeed, an anthology of essays on the “idea of communism” published in 2010 gathers a who’s who of European and North American theorists.36 Though not all the contributors are willing to accept the program, there is, nonetheless, an earnest engagement that is in itself striking. We saw in chapter 6 that Žižek’s work had been moving in this direction for over a decade. But it is in fact Alain Badiou who has done the most to reactivate the question of communism. Badiou elaborated what he calls the “communist hypothesis” in his 2007 book De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? which subsequently appeared in English in 2010 as The Meaning of Sarkozy, accompanied by the volume The Communist Hypothesis.³⁷ “For about two centuries (from Babeuf’s ‘community of equals’ to the 1980s),” Badiou notes, “the word ‘communism’ was the most important name of an Idea located in the field of emancipatory, or revolutionary, politics.”³⁸ Insofar as that version of communism became linked to membership in a party that dreamed of capturing the state and establishing a regime grounded in radical egalitarianism, Badiou refuses nostalgia. “Marxism, the workers’ movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the party of the proletariat, the socialist state—all the inventions of the 20th century—are not really useful to us any more.”³⁹ Thus “the only real question is how to begin a second sequence of this Idea, in which it prevails over the clash of interests by means other than bureaucratic terrorism.”⁴⁰ Badiou leaves this unanswered and seems mainly interested in holding open a dream for the future.⁴¹ Yet if his communist idea has tendrils connecting it to the past and the future, the historicity of the communist horizon intersects with what he believes is an invariant, transtemporal core in the communist idea: “As a pure Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since the beginning of the state.” This dehistoricizing, Platonizing move effectively means that communism appears “as soon as mass action opposes state coercion in the name of egalitarian justice.”⁴² In turn, he insists, in such confrontations the idea achieves materiality and symbolization, which produces a truth event that creates a new political subjectivity. Although emancipatory politics is essentially a politics of anonymous masses, Badiou warns his reader not to overlook the power of proper names in revolutionary politics, a pantheon of communist heroes: Spartacus, Thomas Münzer, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture, Blanqui, Marx, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Mao, Che Guevara. “The anonymous action of millions of militants, rebels, fighters, unrepresentable as such, is combined and counted as one in the simple, powerful symbol of the proper name.”⁴³ Badiou warns against fully accepting Kruschev’s critique of the cult of personality; if the cult of the leader in really existing communism finds its consummation in the mausoleum, the pantheon should be an open shrine inspiring action and always ready to accommodate new heroes.

Badiou rejects compromises with parliamentary democracy, which he regards as inextricably complicit with capitalism, and he draws a hard line between socialism and communism; but, for all that, his communism is a tremulous creature. “Is it,” he asks, “a question of a regulative Idea, in Kant’s sense of the term, having no real efficacy but able to set reasonable goals for our understanding? Or is it an agenda that must be carried out over time through a new post-revolutionary State’s action on the world? Is it a utopia, perhaps a plainly dangerous, and even criminal, one? Or is it the name of Reason in History?” Badiou surmises that this debate can never be concluded, because of the complex operation of the idea in history and subjective experience.⁴⁴ Yet it seems clear that Badiou’s worries about the dangers of conceiving communism as a concrete political program are sufficiently strong that he inclines toward communism as a “very general set of intellectual representations” that fulfill a regulatory function in the Kantian sense.⁴⁵ The communist idea is eternal, its tasks infinite.

As with many aspects of his thinking, Žižek draws heavily from Badiou. Yet even if he affirms the “eternal idea of communism,”46 he strongly rejects the notion that communism functions best as a regulative idea.⁴⁷ Here familiar themes from our earlier discussion of Žižek resurface. For one thing, he criticizes Badiou (and incidentally Rancière) for distinguishing between moments of authentic political contestation and the mere policing of men and goods. Ultimately, Žižek argues, Badiou (and Rancière) suffers from a fear that the purity of the idea will be sullied the moment communists truly struggle for power. Locating this anxiety in the longer history of the left, Žižek lumps Badiou (and Rancière) in with the “young Hegelian” rejection of the state, even as he himself takes the side of the “old Hegelians” in their quest for a “strong State grounded in a shared ethical substance.”⁴⁸ Badiou’s worries about power take him further into what Žižek regards as an almost “Gnostic” dualism between “the corrupted ‘fallen world’ of the economy and spiritual Truth.” This leads Badiou to miss “the properly Marxist idea of communism whose core principle is precisely that this corrupt state of the economy is not an eternal fate, a universal ontological condition of man, but is a state that can be radically changed such that it will no longer be reducible to the interplay of private interests.”⁴⁹ In sharp opposition to both Badiou and Rancière, Žižek insists that communism should not consist only of a history of effervescent democratic moments.⁵⁰ “Out of revolt,” he writes in 2009, “we should shamelessly pass to enforcing a new order.”⁵¹ The task is not infinite, but finite: to translate and inscribe “the democratic explosion into the positive ‘police’ order, imposing on social reality a new lasting order.”⁵² Strikingly, the impatience that drove a wedge between Žižek and Laclau reemerges in Žižek’s treatment of his current allies in the new philosophical ultra-left.⁵³

Badiou and Žižek represent two diverging tracks in the current revival of interest in communism, but both equally reveal the profound problems of this revival. There is, for instance, the question whether the communist idea can sufficiently free itself from the philosophical assumptions that prevailed in orthodox Marxist communism. As Simon Critchley puts it, “The idea of communism remains ontologically suspect because of the essentialist idealist metaphysics of species-being (Gattungswesen) that determines the concept in Marx’s work. Communism is a word that, in my view, remains captive to an essentially aestheticized and organicist notion of community.”54 In reply to Critchley, one might point to current discussions of “leftist ontology,” which Bruno Bosteels emphasizes are aware of the need “to come to terms with the inherent gap or ghostly remainder in the discourse of being qua being.” This imperative on “delinking” or “unbinding” the social, Bosteels reports, leads to the “stubborn, not to say hackneyed, insistence on motifs—here we can forgo the mention of proper names—such as the indivisible remainder or reserve, the constitutive outside, the real that resists symbolization absolutely, the dialectic of lack and excess, or the necessary gap separating representation from presentation pure and simple.”⁵⁵ Yet these motifs are exactly those that were, historically, at the core of the post-Marxist turn away from communism to various conceptions of radical democracy. What is the imperative that drives the transfer of these motifs from their provenance in post-Marxism to their reappropriation as communist? Perhaps little more than impatience or the desire to occupy the ultra position within the spectrum of leftism. Precisely because in this brand of communism the social remains unbound by any underlying social logic, the theorist is at liberty to crank up the rhetorical volume.

Even more basic is the question whether communism can be detached sufficiently from the actual history of the twentieth century to serve as a productive register for the theory and practice of the left. The difficulty is compounded if that detachment can only be won by turning communism into the name of an eternal idea that periodically intersects with real history. If, as Žižek insists, communism is today not a solution, but the name of a problem, namely the “problem of the commons in all its dimensions,”56 why burden this pressing concern with a name that is indissociable from such difficult recent history? Conversely, Žižek’s insistent call for a communist politics that aims to create a new order sounds, simply put, so detached from the situation today that its usefulness wanes even as its compulsive rhetoric waxes. We are told at the opening of Living in the End Times that “the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zeropoint.”⁵⁷ It is hard not to agree that capitalism’s four riders of the apocalypse do indeed bear tidings of catastrophe: the ecological crisis, effects of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances in the system itself, and the growth of ever deeper social divisions and exclusions. From this crisis scenario, Žižek spins out a dialectic in which communism is not merely the name of a generalized problem but also the portent of some not yet fully imagined solution. How, then, are we to react when we encounter Žižek telling a journalist, “The suggestion that capitalism is ready to collapse is perhaps, I admit it, wishful thinking”? Or, later in the same article, when he concedes, “I am utterly pessimistic about the future, about the possibility of an emancipated communist society. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to imagine it”?⁵⁸ Moments of wishful thinking are allowed, but in light of Žižek’s sober and, probably, self-ironizing concessions, would it not be more useful for Žižek to explore the possibility of the remotely possible, rather than constantly beating our breasts with the slogan that the impossible can happen? As for imagining, what could be a more basic exercise of the radical mind? Badiou has the virtue of honesty in urging his reader to “cling” to the hypothesis of a world freed from the reign of profit and private interest, writing that “I am telling you as a philosopher that we have to live with an idea.”⁵⁹ By contrast, with Žižek, in view of his struggle between pessimism and imagination, why expend so much energy denouncing utopianism and regulative ideas when his own thought operates in those registers?

The summons to the idea of communism is meant to galvanize the left by restoring to it a positive vision. Yet in truth the divisive rhetoric of this revival—so thinly connected to likely prospects in the current world, so philosophically ethereal, so lacking in relation to any significant mass of political agents—is but a hollow echo of the schisms that tore apart the international left from 1900 to the 1930s. In the either/or, with-us-or-against us tone that is reemerging among some leftist theorists, an anachronistic cloud of suspicion settles back over electoral politics, democratic activism, reformism, and even socialism. And, ironically, suspicion also falls on the only truly visible political movements that contested neoliberal global capitalism during the past decade or so, organizations such as ATTAC, the World Social Forum, and the various groups within the alter-globalization movement. Through Žižek’s eyes, radical as these groups may be, they are at best ethical anticapitalists who still treat the “democratic institutional framework of the (bourgeois) state” as a “sacred cow.”⁶⁰

In its retrospective for the year in which Žižek published that pronouncement, 2011, Time magazine declared the person of the year to be the Protester. Noting that, for at least two decades, large-scale protest had seemed “obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of cavalry to mid-20th-century war,” the article proceeds: “‘Massive and effective street protest’ was a global oxymoron until—suddenly, shockingly—starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.”61 Protest on this scale was indeed unpredicted and unforeseen as 2010 drew to a close. By mid-2011, massive and courageous demonstrations had toppled authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, and protest had spilled over into armed conflict in Libya, eventually leading to the death of Muammar Gaddafi. Struggle continues in Arab countries like Bahrain and, above all, in Syria, where the regime of Bashar al-Assad has waged an ever more brutal campaign of repression that escalated into all-out civil war by mid-2012. Protest in Greece against austerity measures imposed by the European Union, the Indignados movement in Spain, unrest in the face of the corruption and ineptitude of Berlusconi regime’s and the technocratic government of Mario Monti that succeeded him, mass demonstrations in Moscow against flawed electoral processes, each of these protest movements exerted pressure on established powers and political decision making; and, along with the Arab Spring, they entered into an international circuit of mutually reinforcing political activism. This dynamic helped spawn the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began with protesters camping in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan in late September 2011 and then spread rapidly to many American cities. If the Occupy movement drew inspiration from protests in Europe and the Middle East, it took its turn as a global inspiration on October 15, when people marched in 951 cities in 82 countries around the world to protest income inequality, political corruption, and economies skewed to the benefit of a small wealthy minority.⁶² By the end of November, police had raided and cleared Zuccotti Park and other symbolically important sites that protesters had physically occupied in other American cities. At the end of 2012, when I write these words, Occupy’s future is entirely uncertain. The anniversary of Occupy’s birth came and went with little fanfare. It has not yet launched any new prominent actions or recaptured the media attention that it briefly enjoyed in the final months of 2011. Nonetheless, it continues to build networks behind the scenes and its ideas percolate, as evidenced in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, when Occupy organized aid to the hardest hit areas of New York while linking that action to a critique of income inequality and uneven access to government services. Still, whatever the movement’s future, it undoubtedly changed the “national conversation,” as the bromide would put it, forcing the theme of inequality into a political arena where it had been studiously ignored for decades.⁶³

Žižek was quick to emphasize the ostensibly anticapitalist orientation of the uprisings that roiled the Arab world in 2011.64 However, if we may venture a brief comment on Egypt, generally seen as the bellwether for the entire Middle East, reports in early 2011 indicated that, although they were involved in demonstrations against Hosni Mubarak in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, political communists were a small minority. And even if many of the revolutionaries embraced solidaristic values and demands for social and economic justice that were at odds with Western neoliberal capitalism, no one has dared claim that communism, however loosely defined, was even remotely significant compared to the ideal of a democratic civil society confronting a tyrannical regime. The Arab Spring’s democratic ideals have certainly come under tremendous strain in post-revolutionary Egypt, first when a ruling military council meant to serve in the transition toward a new constitution and parliamentary government seemed reluctant to relinquish power and at times turned violently against peaceful protesters. The conflict between the generals and new civilian rulers was probably not resolved by the military’s grudging recognition of Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood as the winner of Egypt’s first competitive presidential election in late June 2012. In any case, the democratic values of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, which was at the forefront of the struggle against Mubarak, have yet to be tested against their belief that ``Islam is the solution” to the nation’s woes or their ability to control even more fundamentalist Islamists to their right. Morsi’s own motives became very murky in November 2012 when he attempted to elevate himself beyond any checks and balances, promising, like an ancient Greek tyrant, that these extraordinary powers would last only so long as necessary to steer the nation toward a new constitution. When protests against Morsi once again brought violent reprisals, this time not only from the police but from Muslim Brotherhood gangs, it was hard not to conclude that the Egyptian revolution was coming full circle back to dictatorship. Still, writing these sentences in mid-December 2012, with results of a referendum on a Muslim-backed draft constitution still pending, I am acutely aware that the situation in Egypt and the rest of the Arab world is far too fluid to venture any confident predictions. It seems safe to say, however, that the great struggle is first and foremost precisely for what Žižek so readily dismisses, the “democratic institutional framework of the (bourgeois) state.”

Žižek seemed to forget his ambivalence toward ethical anticapitalism when he addressed the Occupy Wall Street movement at Zuccotti Park on October 9, 2011. Or, more to the point, he pressed the Occupy movement into the mold of his own preoccupations. “Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire,” he urged his listeners, and by this he meant nothing less than the overcoming of capitalism. Disavowing any attachment to the communism that collapsed in 1990, he nonetheless addressed his listeners—using the inclusive “we”—as “communists” insofar as “we care for the commons.”65 Occupy Wall Street is without question a very big tent, and there are undoubtedly participants who dream of a world beyond capitalism. Yet opposition to capitalism per se seems far less a driving force than does opposition to neoliberal capitalism, to the unbridled free market capitalism that over the last thirty years or so has allowed an unparalleled concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, great economic disparities, a retreat on environmental regulations, unevenly distributed tax burdens, and so forth.⁶⁶ The point of Occupy is certainly not to create an ethical capitalism, which may in any case be an oxymoron, but rather to subdue the most extravagant abuses of capitalism and contest the monopoly of capitalist form by imagining and possibly implementing other forms of economic interaction; the goal is not to overcome all inequality, but to contest a situation where inequality has reached such gross levels that social trust is collapsing.

In that effort the Occupy movement does not hesitate to address itself to the state. After all, among the protesters’ demands are calls for a more equitable tax structure, elimination of corporate personhood, campaign finance reform, and, most generally, the liberation of society and government from corporate dominance. The movement does not make the state as such its target but rather took aim at a set of practices that have come to distort and gravely weaken the democratic foundation of American politics. Yet the democratic aspirations of Occupy Wall Street reached further than political reform, for, in the daily practices that emerged in Zuccotti Park and other sites of occupation, the movement tried to model a positive alternative form of sociality and politics in which equality was the core value and fundamental possibility of social and political relations. Occupy’s general assemblies, with their time-consuming and patient processes of discussion and consensus, invited some ridicule from the mainstream media, but participants saw these as crucial and transformative exercises in the practice of deep democracy. Likewise, many onlookers attacked Occupy Wall Street for the absence of concrete demands. In rebuttal, one might simply ask why, after decades of more or less quiescence, anyone should expect a protest movement to instantly crystallize into a list of demands, especially when the immensity of the problems makes a specific agenda seem less important than contesting the basic values and organizing structures of present-day society. When members of the media tried to explain the aims of the Occupiers, they were frequently bemused by the apparent lack of leaders and designated spokespeople. Yet, here again, this was not a failure of organization, but a principle of organization—a movement without strong leaders, nonhierarchical and open, its decision making operating horizontally among participants rather than vertically between leaders and rank and file. Surveying what at times could seem like a carnivalesque inversion of how a movement might try to exert influence, the writer Jeff Sharlet aptly wrote, “In fact, the protesters are fools—but in the holy tradition, the tradition that speaks not truth to power but imagination to things as they are.”67 Or, expressed differently, Occupy Wall Street presented a form of prefigurative politics. As the anthropologist David Graeber put it in 2007, “Direct action is a form of resistance which, in its structure, is meant to prefigure the genuinely free society one wishes to create. Revolutionary action is not a form of self-sacrifice, a grim dedication to doing whatever it takes to achieve a future world of freedom. It is the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.”⁶⁸

Occupy Wall Street was very reluctant to identify leaders and intellectual figureheads, but, again and again, reports pointed to Graeber as an instrumental figure behind the movement’s inception. An American teaching at the University of London’s Goldsmiths College, Graeber was active in antiglobalization protests for over a decade and established himself as a prominent theorist of direct action.⁶⁹ In New York City in early August 2011 he helped steer protesters away from a rally near Wall Street that took on a conventional form with, as Andy Kroll reports, “speakers and microphones exhorting a mostly passive crowd.”⁷⁰ More and more participants broke away from the rally and joined an informal discussion group with Graeber at its center. This became, more or less, the seed for the general assemblies that would come to define the movement’s core consensual decision-making process.⁷¹ Pointedly, three days after the demonstrations began, Graeber left New York. He wanted to prevent the formation of an intellectual vanguard. “We don’t want to create a leadership structure,” he told a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education. “The fact I was being promoted as a celebrity is a danger. It’s the kids who made this happen.”⁷²

The Chronicle article suggested something of a genealogy of Graeber’s ideas, emphasizing the impact of the long tradition of anarchist thought and politics as well as the lessons he had learned doing fieldwork between 1989 and 1991 on a community in central Madagascar that, more or less abandoned by the Malagasy state, had developed a form of self-governance based on direct participation and consensus decision making.73 A fuller scrutiny of his writings suggests a specific influence much closer to the concerns of this book. In an extended essay on the antiglobalization movement published in 2007, Graeber calls for a form of political action based on what he describes as “a political ontology of imagination.” Distancing himself from one of the most famous slogans of May ’68, he continues, “It’s not so much a matter of giving ‘power to the imagination’ as recognizing that the imagination is the source of power in the first place.”⁷⁴ Earlier in the same volume, Graeber indicates what he calls “the key question” for revolutionary theory, namely “what precisely is the role of creativity, collective or individual, of the imagination, in radical social change? … The revolutionary theorist who grappled with the problem most explicitly was Cornelius Castoriadis.”⁷⁵

Elsewhere, in a passage that merits quotation at length, Graeber locates his own engagement with Castoriadis through specific reference to a “great intellectual rupture” he sees emerging out of 1968.

If one goes to an anarchist bookstore or infoshop in almost any part of the world, this is what one is still likely to find: There will be works by and about the Situationists (particularly Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem), and the Socialisme ou Barbarie authors (certainly Cornelius Castoriadis, occasionally even Claude Lefort), alongside others continuing in the same tradition, and anarchist journals of every sort. Usually equally striking in their absence will be the work of the most famous poststructuralist authors like Michel Foucault, or Deleuze and Guattari. The absence of the latter can be partly attributed to the fact that they are so easily available elsewhere. University bookstores are crammed full of the stuff and rarely carry anything by the authors likely to be found in infoshops. It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that the readership for French theory has effectively split in two. Activists continue to read the works immediately preceding May ’68: works that anticipated revolution. They also continue to develop them. Academics continue to read and develop the works from immediately afterwards. The result is two different streams of literature. Activists do draw from the academic stream to a certain degree, but the academics almost never read the other one.⁷⁶

Castoriadis could not have said it better himself, or, in fact, he said exactly this, as we saw in chapter 3. My point here is not to end by suggesting the posthumous triumph of the frequently neglected Cornelius Castoriadis or to subordinate the complex and diverse phenomena of contemporary protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street to one or another theoretical progenitor. Rather, let us treat Graeber’s emphatic remarks on Castoriadis as pars pro toto for a more general philosophical and political orientation that has been at the heart of this book. In that spirit, my aim is to underscore the pressing relevance of radical democratic theory to the prospects of protest movements for contesting and transforming the coordinates of the world as it is.

Back in 1999 Wendy Brown trenchantly analyzed the symptoms of “left melancholy” in a historical situation in which the left was awash in losses: “not only a lost movement but a lost historical moment; not only a lost theoretical and empirical coherence but a lost way of life and a lost course of pursuits.”⁷⁷ The way out of melancholy, she insisted, lies not in clinging to old leftist truisms, but in “embracing the notion of a deep and indeed unsettling transformation of society rather than one that recoils at this prospect, even as we must be wise to the fact that neither total revolution nor the automatic progress of history will carry us toward whatever reformulated vision we might develop.” The kinds of energies and ideas expressed in the Occupy Wall Street movement might buoy the spirits of leftists, at least those of a certain stripe; but it is still far too early to know what Occupy and related protest movements in Europe and elsewhere really mean. Are they the embryo of something bigger or have they already spent their most vital energies? Under these uncertain circumstances, it is impossible to say that the left has traveled very far toward realizing Wendy Brown’s vision. The challenges are daunting, as the close of Brown’s essay makes succinctly clear:

To pursue whatever positive agenda the left might establish while also attending to prohibitions that reflection and historical experience alike have imposed points to the “politics of ambivalence or ambiguity” that Fredric Jameson believes is called for in our age.79 Democracy is the regime of ambivalence and ambiguity par excellence—not the democracy of liberal capitalism, of elections, parliamentary representation, and plutocracy, but radical democracy. Žižek would tell us that communism is the name of a problem, not a solution, but a similar formula from Dick Howard seems more relevant to the prospects of the left: “democracy is not a solution; it is a problem, inseparably philosophical and political. After 1989, when its reified opposition to communism no longer made it into an unquestionable value, its problematic nature could and should again become manifest.”⁸⁰ To the task of making democracy’s problematic nature manifest, the thinkers examined in this book contributed vitally, and well before 1989. Above all, they have shown, in various ways, that, far from rendering it weak, democracy’s problems are what enable it. Howard gives us one crucial formulation of that paradox: “Based on the protection of individual rights while seeking at the same time and for just that reason the common good, democracy is a problem, and democratic politics consists in maintaining that problem, not in solving it once and for all.”⁸¹