Contemporary politics is often said to lack utopias. For prevailing understandings of the practical force of political theory, this looks like cause for celebration. As blueprints to apply to political practice, utopias invariably seem too strong or too weak. Through an immanent critique of political realism, I argue that utopian thought, and political theory generally, is better conceived as supplying an orientation to politics. Realists including Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss explain how utopian programs like universal human rights poorly orient (...) their adherents to politics, but the realists wrongly conclude that utopias and other ideal theories necessarily disorient us. As I show through an analysis of utopian claims made by Michel Foucault, Malcolm X, and John Rawls, utopias today can effectively disrupt entrenched forms of legitimation, foster new forms of political identity, and reveal new possibilities within existing institutions. Utopias are needed to understand the political choices we face today. (shrink)

This review-essay discusses the contributions to Ricardo Bellofiore’s bookRosa Luxemburg and the Critique of Political Economyin their respective historical and theoretical contexts. A key goal of the book is to establish Luxemburg’s work as a ‘macro-monetary class approach’, which means linking an economic outlook on effective demand and finance with a political focus on class-struggles in the domestic and international arenas. This approach marks a significant, and positive, departure from widespread interpretations that separate Luxemburg’s political theory from her economic theory. (...) Given the apparent limits of neoliberal globalisation it is also a very timely approach that can help us to understand the current conjuncture of economic and political crises. Bellofiore’s book offers a useful framework for such analysis but focuses much more on economic theory than on politics and the historical developments of global capitalism. To fully exploit the potential of Luxemburg’s political economy, complementary work on these latter two aspects has to be done. (shrink)

This article argues that a transcendental materialist conception of subjectivity can move us beyond the orthodox idealist theories that dominate progressive thought in advanced consumer-capitalism. This position can shed new light on current forms of subjectivity that seem to prefer life in consumer culture's surrogate social world rather than active participation in cultural and political resistance and transformation, which requires far more than simply 'transcending the norm'. The rebirth of creative political subjectivity is impossible unless the subject is prepared to (...) risk a traumatic encounter with the Real, the fundamental indeterminacy that exists not in the ideal-symbolic but the material realm, and prepared to reject liberal-postmodernist identity politics to participate in the construction of a coherent alternative ideology. (shrink)

Reification, a central theme in radical social/political theory from the 1920s onward, has started falling out of fashion since the 1970s, a period when a number of crucial alterations in the compo...

There has been a significant increase in studies devoted to Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love in contemporary Kierkegaard research. There are several good reasons why this is so. The single theme that dominates, though, is the relation between preferential love and neighborly love. Are they reconcilable or not? The present paper recasts this discussion by situating Works of Love in the trajectory of deconstructive readings of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and onwards. It is divided into three sections. It is first (...) shown that a deconstructive take on preferential and neighborly love indicates how any community has a place for love as its condition of (im)possibility. The opening of this place is then located in the Christian love-commandment. Finally, the expanse of this place is found in the spreading-out of the promise of love. The paper is conceived as a step towards letting love find its place in the analytics of being-there—as the phenomenon which opens the “there” without losing its “with.” The paper concludes with a postscript that points towards this broader context. (shrink)

In this polemical intervention within the field of French and European social theory, Franck Fischbach proposes to revive and radicalise the tradition of social philosophy. The latter is understood, following Axel Honneth, in terms of the normatively-driven analysis of socio-economic processes that may be characterised as pathologies of the social. Fischbach contrasts the lessons of social philosophy from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School with the recent ascendance to intellectual hegemony of a formalistic, procedural liberalism which is oblivious to social negativity. (...) The review questions the capacity of social philosophy to synthesise stances as politically and methodologically different as those of de Maistre, Nietzsche and Marx, as well as the very pertinence of the appellation ‘philosophy’. Fischbach’s more historically determinate definition of social philosophy as arising out of the critique of Jacobin revolutionary political thought, with its supposed abstraction and voluntarism, fails to contend with the claims of ruptural politics, as well as with those positions that would regard crisis and pathology not just as a menace, but also as an opportunity for liberation. In the end, in spite of its able historical and conceptual mapping, and its commendable demand for totalising critique, Fischbach fails to persuade in his claim that social philosophy is the name for emancipatory thought in the present. (shrink)