Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau

Oliver Marchart

A wide-ranging overview of the emergence of post-foundationalism and a survey of the work of its key contemporary exponents.

This book presents the first systematic coverage of the conceptual difference between ‘politics’ (the practice of conventional politics: the political system or political forms of action) and ‘the political’ (a much more radical aspect which cannot be restricted to the realms of institutional politics). It is also the first introductory overview of post-foundationalism and the tradition of ‘left Heideggerianism’: the political thought of contemporary theorists who make frequent use of the idea of political difference: Jean-Luc Nancy, Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou, and Ernesto Laclau.

After an overview of current trends in social post-foundationalism and a genealogical chapter on the historical emergence of the difference between the concepts of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, the work of individual theorists is presented and discussed at length. Individual chapters are presented on the political thought of Jean-Luc Nancy (including Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe), Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou, and Ernesto Laclau (including Chantal Mouffe).

Overall the book offers an elaboration of the idea of a post-foundational conception of politics.

Related Subjects

• Political Philosophy
• Political Theory

About the Author

Oliver Marchart is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Lucerne. Co-editor (with Simon Critchley) of Laclau: A Critical Reader (2004) and author of six books written in German including Beginning Anew: Hannah Arendt, Revolution and Globalisation (2005), and Techno-Colonialism: Theory and Imaginary Cartography of Culture and the Media (2004).

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