The Quasi-Transcendentality of Hegemony Theory on The Ethico-Political Commitments of Post-Marxism Outside The Usual Context

Min Seong Kim

Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

minseong.kim@outlook.com

Abstract

I explore the ethico-political implications of research in cultural studies in Indonesia by way of questioning the relation between the theoretical and the empirical in Ernesto Laclau’s post-Marxism. As evinced by his disdain for the “‘superhard’ transcendentality” of “theoretical perspective” and “the mythological world of case studies” (Laclau, 1989, p. xiii), part of what Laclau understands as the “post-theoretical” moment consists in the overcoming of the relation of exteriority between the theoretical and the empirical. If there is “no commonly agreed, codified, correct way of doing [post-Marxist] Discourse Theory ‘by to the book’” (Jacobs, 2018), this owes, to a certain degree, to the fact that Laclau’s post-Marxism encourages not some mechanistic application of a “method” but rather the creative configuration of a variety of middle-range theories to operationalize its theoretical perspective in diverse empirical contexts (Cleen, Goyvaerts, Carpentier, Glynos, & Stavrakakis, 2021). Although this sort of adaptability appears consistent with his post-theoretical outlook, Laclau has not, in fact, been entirely clear about what might be termed the “quasi-transcendentality” of post-Marxism (Arditi, 2014; Bowman, 2007). His theorization of politics as hegemony, for instance, oscillates between, on the one hand, a theorization of a particular historical form of politics enabled by the “democratic revolution”—understood along broadly Lefortian lines (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985)—and, on the other, a theorization of politics tout court (Laclau, 2005). I suggest that such oscillations regarding the relation between post-Marxist theory and history finally point to the question of the ethico-political dimension of the theory itself. I argue that this dimension is not easily identifiable as “critique”—understood either in terms of “the self-clarification of the wishes and struggles of the age” (Fraser, 1985, p. 97) or of “debunking” dominant ideologies (Latour, 2004)—but implies a commitment to creating the conditions of its own interventional capacity.

Keywords: Hegemony theory, Quasi-transcendentality, Post-Marxist discourse theory, Democratic revolution

References

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