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by
George J. Ciccariello Maher IV
Summary: This
paper mounts a critique of Laclau and Mouffe's logic of hegemony, in which a
radical social subject is purportedly constituted through never-ending chains
of articulation. I first highlight Laclau and Mouffe's (mis)use of French
Anarcho-Syndicalist Georges Sorel and the subsumption of the latter to a
Gramscian logic of hegemony, before attempting to rescue some elements of
Sorel's thought that are crucial to thinking a revolutionary subjectivity in
the present. Chief among these elements is what I deem the “logic of
separation” which – in contradistinction to introverted separatism –
posits a paradox of antagonistic separation through which separation is
affirmed precisely through the delineation of a frontier of contact
within society. In this logic, any sufficiently radical prefigurative programme
is premised upon a prior separation, and this separation is in turn premised
upon the maintenance of antagonism. I then trace this logic through the early
work of Antonio Negri – particularly his Domination and Sabotage – and
into its decolonial manifestation in Frantz Fanon's discussion of Négritude in Black
Skin, White Masks and critique of the national bourgeoisie in The
Wretched of the Earth. While Sorel was disavowed by both Negri (explicitly)
and Fanon (indirectly, through Sartre’s “Preface”), I argue that once properly
reoriented, Sorel’s thought provides a key to grappling with the perennial
question of constituting a revolutionary social subject.
CV:
George Ciccariello-Maher is a Ph.D candidate in political theory at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds prior degrees from St. John’s College, Cambridge, and St. Lawrence University. His publications include “The Internal Limits of the European Gaze: Césaire and Fanon Beyond Sartre and Foucault,” forthcoming in Radical Philosophy Review; “Detached Irony Toward the Rest”: Working-Class One-Sidedness from Sorel to Tronti,” forthcoming in The Commoner; “Sidney Webb: Positivism, Fetishism, and Fabian Socialism,” forthcoming in G. Butler, ed., Political Economy in Philosophic Perspective; “Brechtian Hip-Hop: Didactics and Self-Production in Post-Gangsta Political Mixtapes,” in Journal of Black Studies; as well as various translations. His interests include race, coloniality, and radical political praxis in Latin America.
E-mail: [email protected]