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From Political Topographies to Political Logics: Post-Marxism and Historicity

2015; Wiley; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/1467-8675.12199

1467-8675

Paul Rekret, Simon Choat,

Humanities and Social Sciences

This paper engages with the question of the historical and ontological status of the logics of hegemony articulated by Ernesto Laclau.It interrogates the concept of real abstraction that Laclau mobilises to explain the historical status of his theory.It is argued that while Laclau grounds his conceptual system in an ontology of generalised antagonism, this is done to the exclusion of formally conceiving the historical conditions of those logics.The paper demonstrates that it is the irreducible gap between reflection on historical and ontological conditions of possibility from which the most pervasive critiques of Laclau's work are derived.In turning to the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel, the paper suggests a different conception of real abstraction, one which locates the sources of abstraction in the division of mental and manual labour.In drawing on the Marxist analysis of real abstraction and the division of labour, the essay seeks to deflate the subsumption of politics to ontology and to turn attention to the logics which condition the possibility of social struggle todaynamely, the logics of contemporary capitalism.