Current radical democratic politics is characterized by new participatory spaces for citizens’ engagement, which aim at facilitating the democratic ideals of freedom and equality. These spaces are, however, situated in the context of deep societal inequalities. Modes of discrimination are carried over into participatory interaction. The democratic subject is judged by its physically embodied appearance, which replicates external hierarchies and impedes the freedom of self-expression. To tackle this problem, this article seeks to identify ways to increase the freedom of the (...) subject to explore its multiple self. Understanding the self as inherently fugitive, the article investigates participatory, deliberative and agonistic concepts of self-transformation. As all of them appear limited, it introduces a transformative perspective in democratic thought. Enriching the transformative perspective with queer and gender theory, the article generates the concept of a politics of becoming, which, through radical democratic practices of disidentification, advances the freedom of the subject to change. (shrink)

Setting out from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, this article engages with post-Heideggerian thought on community, seeking to bring out and to enhance its political thrust for contemporary democracies. It shows how Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben, ‘common the political’, that is, how they reconsider politics in light of a fundamental sense of co-existence which clears the ground for social openness, solidarity, plurality and autonomy. It then responds to a series of pertinent objections by further politicizing the post-Heideggerian (...) vision of the common. I set out to translate the ontologies of the common into more concrete political logics by relating them to actual political practices and by joining them to the political theory of hegemony and antagonism set out by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Their conjunction of the ‘common’ with the antagonistic politics of hegemony is tension-ridden, as they draw from conflicting understandings of ‘the political’, pitting plurality and horizontal relations against division and uneven power. To mitigate that conflict, these two approaches should be situated at different sites of political action, and the hegemonic framework should be recast so as to bring it more into line with horizontalist ‘common’ politics. (shrink)

This review-essay analyses John Beverley’s post-subalternist perspective on the intertwinement of theoretical discourse and politics – so-called Latinamericanism – in the Latin American context. This conjuncture is characterised by themarea rosada, or pink tide, of moderate leftist governments. I contend that Beverley grasps the change introduced by this trend and lucidly criticises the neoconservative, moderate, and deficient political implications of different theoretical views. This contribution notwithstanding, I argue that Beverley’s theoretical project fails effectively to conceptualise this political tide as an (...) object of theoretical inquiry: namely, to grapple with themarea rosada’s Latinamericanism as a populist political logic that simultaneously neutralises and drives socialist transformation. (shrink)

Hegemony is one of the most widely diffused concepts in the contemporary social sciences and humanities internationally, interpreted in a variety of ways in different disciplinary and national contexts. However, its contemporary relevance and conceptual coherence has recently been challenged by various theories of ‘posthegemony’. This article offers a critical assessment of this theoretical initiative. In the first part of the article, I distinguish between three main versions of posthegemony – temporal, foundational and expansive – characterized by different understandings of (...) the temporal and logical implications of hegemony. I then offer a critical assessment of the shared presuppositions of these theories, including their ‘pre-Gramscianism’, their indebtedness to Laclau and Mouffe’s formulation of hegemony, and their characterization of hegemony in terms compatible with modern theories of sovereignty. I conclude by arguing that the contradictions and oversights of the debate on posthegemony encourage us to undertake a reassessment of the real historical complexity of hegemonic politics and its different traditions of conceptualization. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the deployment and the transformation of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony and the purpose it serves. I argue that, in its travel from Rome to London, this notion acquired something like a truth-value. In London the notion yielded what I call ‘hegemony thinking’: a distinctive style of thinking that focused on strategy to carry out effective political interventions. To demonstrate my claim I trace the Marxism Today discussion on the crisis of the Left and strategy in (...) the UK. In particular, I look at the engagements of the late historian Eric Hobsbawm and the cultural theorist Stuart Hall with Gramsci’s work, and examine the appropriation of the coordinates of hegemony by the entrepreneur and Blair policy advisor Geoff Mulgan. (shrink)

Described as ‘the most original and innovative Latin American Marxist’ by Michael Löwy – a sentiment repeated by many others – the work of José Carlos Mariátegui remains a largely untapped resource in the Western Marxist tradition outside of specialist circles. This review essay considers the recent publication of a translation and anthology of Mariátegui’s work into English by Harry Vanden and Mark Becker as a first step towards correcting this trend. It highlights Mariátegui’s understanding of race, power, and identity; (...) the combined and uneven development of capital; and the role of myth and voluntarism in revolutionary struggle as key points in which the early-twentieth-century Peruvian contributes to contemporary debates in Marxist praxis in Latin America and beyond. (shrink)

This review examines two works that address the theoretical importance of Latin American political movements over the last two decades. I argue that while Boaventura de Sousa Santos raises the important issue of the political relationship between difference and unity, his work lends itself to ambiguous conclusions regarding this relationship. In particular, de Sousa Santos underestimates Marxism’s potential role as a theory and practice of political union. Nonetheless, his work provides certain insights on epistemology and political temporality that may help (...) Marxism amplify its political relevance today. Álvaro García Linera’s text represents a particular mode by which Marxism may engage with a politics of difference; however, I argue that García Linera’s work contains a tension between difference construed in autonomist, material terms and difference construed as identity. The latter, I suggest, has come to serve in Bolivia as the basis for an ultimately limited political project. (shrink)

Gramsci’s concept of hegemony has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways, including a theory of consent, of political unity, of ‘anti-politics’, and of geopolitical competition. These interpretations are united in regarding hegemony as a general theory of political power and domination, and as deriving from a particular interpretation of the concept of passive revolution. Building upon the recent intense season of philological research on the Prison Notebooks, this article argues that the concept of hegemony is better understood as (...) a ‘dialectical chain’ composed of four integrally related ‘moments’: hegemony as social and political leadership, as a political project, as a hegemonic apparatus, and as the social and political hegemony of the workers’ movement. This alternative typology of hegemony provides both a sophisticated analysis of the emergence of modern state power and a theory of political organization of the subaltern social groups. This project is encapsulated in Gramsci’s notion of the formation of a ‘modern Prince’, conceived as both political party and civilizational process, which represents an emancipatory alternative to the dominant forms of political modernity. (shrink)

This review examines a collection of essays that engage with the thought of Antonio Gramsci in relation to the postcolonial. I argue that some of the chapters display a symptomatic tendency to read into Gramsci’s concepts a moral charge that detracts from their theoretical value, and that on the whole here Gramsci is either read in a post-Marxist key or dismissed as inoperable for the globalised postcolony of the present.

This review assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Peter Thomas’s long-awaited study ofThe Prison Notebooks, based on his extensive research and philological reconstruction of the critical edition. I distinguish three senses in which the ‘moment’ in the book’s title can be understood: as the historical moment around 1932 in which Gramsci proposed the outline of his distinct brand of the philosophy of praxis; as the moment or momentum that still lies in wait for a future research programme in Marxist philosophy; (...) and as a methodological principle for understanding the dialectic as a theory in which entities such as state and civil society, but also coercion and consent, far from allowing the kind of Eurocommunist or post-Marxist instrumentalisations in which they are seen as part of a chain of binaries, are actually moments of a unified larger structure that in Gramsci’s work comes to be associated with the idea of the integral state. This impressive reconstruction of Gramsci’s notebooks, however, also reveals some major lacunae, above all, in terms of the lack of attention given to Gramscian developments in the non-European world, in places such as India or Latin America. This omission is all the more surprising given the longstanding tradition, particularly in Latin America, of viewing Gramsci as a theorist of the integral state more so than of hegemony. (shrink)

This article begins with a theoretical tension. Radical democracy, in the joint work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, can be understood as a joint articulation of a post-foundational ontology of contingency and a politics of autonomy of ‘democratic struggles’ within a hegemonic bloc as loci of antagonisms in their own right, while Laclau’s theory of populism marks a shift from the autonomy of struggles to the representative function of the empty signifier as a constitutive dimension. This tension between a (...) horizontal logic of autonomy and a vertical logic of representation comes to the fore not least in the manifold attempts to combine radical-democratic and populist practices in the wake of the ‘movements of the squares.’ This argument is illustrated empirically in the cases of two party projects situating themselves in contexts of social protest—‘Social Movement’ in Ukraine and Podemos in Spain—both of which seek to combine a left-populist discursive strategy with some form of radical-democratic politics of autonomy, either by supporting local alliances independent from the party or by integrating trade union representatives into the organizational center, which in turn finds expression in a representative logic. (shrink)