Some thoughts on Post-Foundational Political Thought

This is a draft of my review of Olive Marchart, (2007). Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh. ISBN: 0748624988

 

An age-old question: Surely there must be a definite set of relationships between culture or society and politics, between politics and philosophy, and between philosophy and society or culture. Such a set of relationships has often been posited. However, quite what they are is not something that has ever settled into any kind of agreement. This is because, as Nietzsche observed, even if there is truth, and even if we were to hit upon it now and then, we could never actually know for sure. This is because whatever access we have to anything and everything is constituted in and mediated through language and discourse. Thus, across the disciplines that take the fields of culture, society, politics and philosophy as their object (such as cultural studies, sociology, politics and philosophy), and, indeed, within each of them, the relationship – if there is one – between the political and the social is the very stuff of theoretical discourse. The question of this relation is the eternally returning object of academic, intellectual, theoretical and political discourse. It is a scene of interminable disagreement.

 

If no consensus can be found (or maintained) on the question of the relation between politics and philosophy, this is certainly not least because of the conceptual drift or virement possible within the semantic range of each term. This complexity is of course exponentially expanded when we evoke a relation between such uncertain terms. The relation may even explode into an equation between two unknowns. What, for instance, might we be evoking when we ask after 'the' relationship between politics and philosophy? Are we interested in enumerating the interpretations of each term and listing the results of different combinations, before ultimately adjudicating on which we believe to be the best? Or are we interested in establishing whether philosophical ideas (or the productions of the discipline of philosophy) might become effective politically? Or are we asking after the implicit or explicit 'philosophical' or theoretical notions of 'politics' which have underpinned and orientated political thinking and action? Or, conversely, are we conceiving of the relation as interactive and agonistic – perhaps seeking an understanding of the extent to which the notion of politics is philosophical or the notion of philosophy determined politically? Do we want, like the young Marx, to make the world more philosophical; or do we want to make philosophy more political? And so on.

 

Within any one discipline, there is much disagreement about such relations. So, one might suspect that across and between disciplines must lie vast aporias separating different disciplinary conceptual universes. However, Oliver Marchart's book, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press: 2007), offers an analysis which proposes to clarify the fundamental way in which it is possible to identify a certain topos, ethos or common ground defining one of the predominant (although not simply dominant) problematics shared in common and confronted differently by multiple disciplines and diverse thinkers. This 'fundamental' connection is figured in Marchart as a certain shared engagement with questions of fundamentals: the ontology, the grounding of society, the foundations of culture, society, politics and philosophy. This widespread – even epistemic – engagement Marchart calls post-foundational.

 

Of course, diagnosing commonalities across contexts is common practice. How many times have we heard about when and why everybody was Marxist, everybody was modernist, everybody was feminist, everybody was postmodernist, everybody was kung fu fighting, and so on? Zeitdiagnose, it seems, is a virtually transhistorical (if not transcontextual) practice. But what is perhaps most refreshing about Marchart's epochal picture-painting is both its lack of polemicism and its consistent analytical precision and clarity of focus. Marchart demonstrates his claims through focused readings of familiar but certainly not identical thinkers, whose core concerns and central theses he identifies with razor-sharp efficiency, as he reveals their proximate connections and shared problematics with a systematicity and acuity that is at once understated and yet analytically brilliant. These connections relate to nothing less than the familiar theme of the question of the ground of the social, and a particular response to this question that Marchart calls post-foundational political thought.

 

Post-foundational political thought is defined by a particular line of thought that Marchart finds exemplified in the work of Heidegger. The status of Heidegger's philosophy for work in post-structuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism, etc., has been well remarked, to say the least. For Heidegger's thinking is, despite being tarred by association with his terrible politics, nevertheless unavoidably influential. Marchart undertakes an interrogation of why and what it is about Heideggerian thinking, which has far reaching implications for our understanding of a whole range of important contemporary landmarks, including those listed in his subtitle, of course (Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau), but also, along the way, thinkers such as Machiavelli, Gramsci, Schmitt and Arendt, more recent beacons such as Levinas, Lyotard, Deleuze, Lacan, Habermas and Derrida, and on to contemporary theorists including Mouffe, Rancière and Žižek. What Marchart does extremely well – as well, of course, as marshalling such a broad range of theory and argument with both respectfulness and authoritativeness – is to highlight the traits and lines of force that structure (or overdetermine) the extent to which so many thinkers are both indebted to and responsive to Heidegger, even when they claim to take (or rather to keep) their distances from him – Badiou and Rancière in particular.

 

The centrality of Heidegger to post-foundational political thought relates to his philosophical engagement with questions of ontology and difference. This – what has been called the ontico-ontological difference – has many dimensions; but here it pertains directly to those questions which became, in debates in French, for instance, carried out in terms of the difference between le politique and la politique, or politics construed as ontic arrangements of society, its institutions and orders. These contingent ('political') arrangements arise as such (with different aspects of them becoming at different times the stuff of 'politics') because of the nature of ontology – an ontology that has come to be thought of as 'political'. That is, it is only because the ontological level enables/necessitates contingent arrangements that politics both possible and indeed inevitable. Thus, contingency is necessary for fundamental reasons. The 'foundations' of society are fundamentally contingent. Politics is contingent. Ontology is political.

 

Marchart sets out the key coordinates of this influential train of thought very clearly, comprehensively, and in a way that, despite the currency and familiarity of this discourse, is nevertheless illuminating. For although it is a well-worn road (this is part of his point), Marchart homes in on the significance of the relationship of necessary supplementarity between politics and the political. Indeed, you will already have noticed the inevitable slipping into and out of and flipping between 'politics' and 'the political' in my own words in the paragraph above: each seems necessarily to be different from the other; but each shades into the other; and neither seems to exist as such without reference to the other. As Marchart shows, in the post-foundational formation, no matter how hard one tries to rid oneself of one of the terms (for example, in the case of Rancière's use of 'politics' and 'police' versus 'politics' and 'the political'), and no matter whether one tries to change the semantic polarities of the two terms (as in the writings of Jacob Torfing, for instance, who swaps the meanings of 'politics' and 'political'), at a certain point a single term becomes inadequate and calls upon a second to supplement it. Politics and the political are mutually reinforcing and reciprocally subverting terms.

 

The first two chapters of Post-Foundational Political Thought undertake an extremely lucid account of the thinking which has lead to a post-foundational movement in political thought, which confronts the apparently absent ground of society and the necessity of contingency. Upon this impressive achievement, Marchart turns to the work of the subtitle: examining the place and significance of political difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau. These proper names indicate wider tendencies; and they also name the order in which the chapters proceed. This order is telling. For, each of Marchart's readings builds both broadly historically and conceptually upon what precedes it. As such, you may suspect that this book is going to turn out to be, in the last analysis, Laclauian. And this would be largely correct. Marchart finds in Laclau a political thought which he clearly regards as superior to the other political thinkers he studies. But his is neither simple support nor dismissive value judgement. Indeed, Marchart takes Laclau's political thought further than Laclau may ever have wanted it to go. Similarly, the limits that Marchart finds in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and others are largely characterised in terms of what he calls their displacements: the points and tendencies within their work in which they move away from political thought and into either philosophism or ethicism. This is no great sin, of course. But if it is political thinking that you are interested in or purporting to be engaged in, then any move into philosophism or ethicism amounts to a limit.

 

So, rather than simply following any of these thinkers, Marchart traces the contours of their interventions, the way they negotiate the political difference (ontico-ontological, politics-political, politics-ethics, etc.), re-marking the moments at which they veer away from the full implications of their thought and operate according to other investments.

 

It is in Laclau that Marchart finds the most compelling version of political thought.  This is primarily because of what Laclau offers to the thinking of political ontology. Using Laclau, ontology, Marchart clarifies, is ontopolitical. But in rendering Laclau thus, Marchart is pushing the implications of Laclau's thought to a point that Laclau himself has always hesitated to go. Marchart argues for the importance and value of such a move. And this is the grounding of his own conclusion – or, we might say, his own clarification of the current starting point for political theory.

 

Marchart concludes with a consideration of the old chestnut, 'the moment of the political': what it is, how it is, how it comes to be, or happen, and what that might mean for any kind of 'practice', whether institutional or subjective. Contra the (supposed) deconstructive tendency to regard everything as political (although this is a caricature), and also contra the Rancièrean counter-claim that not everything is political and that the moment of the political is actually very rare, Marchart clarifies why these two sets of claims are neither opposed nor completely correct in and of themselves. What is required to elucidate their deep interimplication, for Marchart, is a Laclauian understanding of political ontology: the social, the cultural and the political are, in their instituted forms, sedimented structures whose institution is always contingent, partial, biased, and hence political, and whose transformation is always possible in the moment of a decision – a decision which is never simply ungrounded, aleatory, or simply free, but which is also neither simply preordained or preprogrammed. There are ingrained sets of articulations and reticulations between the different institutional bases of societies, but these are never – even if they seem to be entrenched – set in stone. Rather, the relationships between elements and moments of culture or society and politics, between politics and philosophy, and between philosophy and society or culture 'always possibly might' be transformable as a consequence of re-instituting decisions, practices and acts.

 

However, given Marchart's insistence that the primary task of political philosophy is the establishment of a political ontology, and given that he finds this in Laclau, the question must be: does the Laclauian achievement in this regard signal the end of political philosophy as political ontology? Or does it just signal the limit point of Laclauian political thought? In other words, is Laclauian thought the death of a discipline, or the death of a school of thought? To my mind, in any eventuality, it should be regarded as the beginning of cultural studies.

 

 

Paul Bowman

 

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http://cardiff.academia.edu/PaulBowman