On the notion of the political in postmarxist theory.

Seminars

20.04.2013
The practise of doing nothing  
Unemployed positivity

04.11.2012
Miguel Abensour as reader of Spinoza
Spinoza, Marx, Moses Hess

05.10.2012
Agamben and Nancy as readers of Spinoza
Leaving Immanence?

06.06.2012
Feminist readings of Spinoza
Becoming woman?

03.05.2012
Deleuze on Spinoza's theory of affects  
From the ontological to the affective

04.04.2012
Spinoza with Deleuze
The underground current of the philosophy of immanence

07.03.2012
Macherey's Spinoza
Ontology of multiplicity or materialist dialectic?

08.02.2012
Althusser's concept of immanent causality  - Seminar
Marx with Spinoza

08.12.2011
Exhausting politics  
Being out of class (Deleuze)

01.11.2011
What is an inoperativity that consists in contemplating one's own potentiality to act?
The messianic class

29.06.2011
Sharing the inappropriatable
The retreating class

26.05.2011
The political capacity of the proletariat
The subtractive class II

07.04.2011
The political capacity of the proletariat
The subtractive class

03.03.2011
Disrupting the logic of division
The supplementary class

04.02.2011
The antinomies of proletarian politics
The paradoxical class

02.12.2010
Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe on political difference
Retreating the political

08.11.2010
Lars T. Lih as Reader of Lenin
What Is to be Done? and Bolshevism

03.10.2010
The concept of capitalism in "Anti-Oedipus"
Capitalism deterritorialized

30.06.2010
Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan
An impossible encounter I

28.05.2010
An impossible encounter: Deleuze, Guattari and Lacan
Preparatory Meeting

27.05.2010
Micropolitics in "A thousand plateaus"
Molecular Politics I

07.04.2010
On affectivity and potentiality
Spinoza with Deleuze

04.03.2010
Nietzsche with Deleuze
The negative in the positive

04.02.2010
The notion of becoming in Deleuze and Guattari
Becoming

04.11.2009
On Esposito's concept of bio/politics
Biopotentiality

08.10.2009
Reading Althusser

07.10.2009
Rancière's farewell to Althusserian Marxism
La leçon d'Althusser

06.10.2009
Debating Althusser's philosophy of the encounter
What is aleatory materialism?

03.09.2009
Negri on materialism
Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo

02.09.2009
Tronti and Cacciari's concept of the political
The autonomy of the political

17.06.2009
"From Capital-Labor to Capital-Life" by M. Lazzarato
Invention

20.05.2009
Reading Simondon
Individuation

09.04.2009
Nancy on the singularity of death
Excess

11.03.2009
Agamben and Deleuze on pure immanence
Immanence

11.03.2009
Encountering Althusser
Preparatory meeting

11.03.2009
Workshop: becoming-major, becoming-minor
Preparatory meeting

07.02.2009
Foucault with Deleuze
The force of the outside II

06.02.2009
Superimposing diagrams: discipline and governmentality
The force of the outside

06.02.2009
Encountering Althusser
Preparatory Meeting

05.12.2008
Reading Jacques Rancière's "Dis-agreement"
Marx's Metapolitics

04.11.2008
Reading Balibar's "The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism"
The non-totalizable complexity of the historical process

05.10.2008
Reading Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx"
Deconstructing Value Theory

11.09.2008
Reading Moishe Postone's "Time, Labor and Social Domination"
Value and Capitalist Capacities

01.07.2008
Debating "The mirror of production" by Jean Baudrillard
Marx with Bataille

06.06.2008
The coming communities of commons

05.06.2008
Feminist comments on the relation between politics and labor
The arcane of reproduction

09.05.2008
Rancière on the inactuality of communism and the intelligence of the unqualified

07.05.2008
Virno on Marx's "Fragments on machines"
Notes on the general intellect

04.04.2008
Virno on the concept of bio-politics in Postoperaism
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy? II

03.04.2008
Jason Read on abstract and living labor
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy?

07.03.2008
Reading Negri's "Twenty Theses on Marx"
The autonomy of living labor

08.02.2008
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
The emergence of the socialised worker II

07.02.2008
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
The emergence of the socialised worker

07.12.2007
On Badiou's concept of truth procedure
Assigning a measure to the excessive power of the state

09.11.2007
Reading Jacques Ranciere's "Ten theses on politics"
The supplementary part that disconnects the people from itself

04.10.2007
Deleuze and Guattari on the concept of minoritarian struggle
Micropolitics

07.09.2007
On class composition and radical negativity
Domestic work and class struggle within the class II

06.09.2007
On class composition and radical negativity
Domestic work and class struggle within the class

02.07.2007
From class to minority
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism III

01.07.2007
On the concept of the concrete universal
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism II

30.06.2007
On Marx and Foucault
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism

30.05.2007
Dictatorship of the proletariat and council movement
The Soviet experience II

29.05.2007
Rosa Luxemburg on the Russian Revolution
The Soviet experience

06.04.2007
Negri on Lenin
Democracy beyond law II

05.04.2007
Lenin's concept of the dictatorship of protetariat
Democracy beyond law

09.03.2007
Benjamin's concept of mysthic and divine violence
To bring about the real state of exception II

08.03.2007
Agamben's reading of Benjamin
To bring about the real state of exception

09.02.2007
Agamben's sovereign theoretical turn in thinking potentiality
Potentiality of impotentiality II

08.02.2007
Agamben's theory of autonomous potentiality
Potentiality of impotentiality

Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe on political difference
Retreating the political

At our December meeting, we will conclude the discussion on micropolitics by confronting the thought of molecular revolution with the left-Heideggerian theme of the retreat of the political debating Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's "Opening Adress to the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political", delivered at the ENS in 1980, and the paper hold at the close of the Centre's second year, "The 'Retreat' of the Political".

While Deleuze and Guattari supplement Marx and the instable oscillation that characterises his idea of politics by reading Nietzsche and Spinoza introducing the concepts of becoming and affect, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe turn to Bataille and Heidegger in the thought of which they detect the idea of a limit and an excess immanent to the political and opening to its exterior.

By reconsidering the legacy of Marxism, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe assume to have privileged access to the question of a community's relation to itself that, to their mind, has been both opened and destroyed within the Marxist trajectory. Reducing the reading of Marx to the period of 1843 to 1846, they criticize Marx's thought to be a secular eschatology of man re-appropriating himself in his humanity and work and thereby setting an extraordinary example of philosophy completing itself as politics.

Taking up Heidegger's "Verwindung" of metaphysics, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe focus on questioning what could be determined as essence of the political without resorting to foundationalist categories (origin, subject, telos). They propose to define the essence of the political as its very retreat - the retreat of essence - hence, displaying both a withdrawal and a new beginning which makes them demand to think the social bond as a relation whose terms are retreating. Thus, they adress the political through the problem of the retreat and the non-dialectical negativity by which a relation is characterised as proceeding from the division or incision that it presents.

Ultimately, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe substitute a social ontology of Being-With for a thought of political conflicts and struggles.

If one of you would like to comment on the four, partly rather brief texts from "Retreating the Political" or on one of the numerous theoretical detours that Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe undertake, in particular via Heidegger, Bataille, Arendt and Lefort, she or he is very welcome. Please contact me, if you like to do so.

Jean-Luc Nancy/ Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1981,1983): Retreating the political, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, pp. 105-140 [Chapters: Foreword to the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political (CPRP), Opening Adress to the CPRP, The retreat of the political, Annexe]