This intervention aims to question the opposition between a ‘politics of immanence’ and a ‘politics of transcendence’ through a critical assessment of some contemporary philosophical approaches to politics and a reappraisal of Mario Tronti’s account of the autonomy of the political. I shall argue that the contrast between immanence and transcendence is ultimately politically disabling, as it fails to provide an adequate position from which to situate a political thinking and practice.

Daniel Bensaïd was prominent among the revolutionary thinkers and activists who emerged from the mass insurgency of the 1960s, a period in which anti-capitalist organisers had genuine social weight grounded in connections to broad layers of the working class and radical movements. As the neoliberal offensive developed, working-class and allied movements experienced crucial defeats that marginalised anti-capitalist theory and practice. Bensaïd developed a unique theoretical analysis of radical mobilising during the neoliberal period, at once grounded in the history of revolutionary (...) organising and audaciously open-ended in assessing the impact of capitalist restructuring and the employers’ offensive. The basis of his theoretical renewal lay in a new approach to understanding temporality that undercut any sense of socialist inevitability, and a commitment to revolutionary pluralism that was crucially located in the political sphere. (shrink)