Volume 15, Issue 3/4, 2005
Sources and New Dreams of Western Wisdom
Russell Ford
Pages 87-98
A Fabulous Interruption
Towards a Mythic Politics
The aim of this essay is to specify the chief concern for post-Marxist political strategy as the discovery or invention of a new political logic. Beginning with Laclau and Mouffe’s influential Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, this essay extends Lyotard’s well-known diagnosis of the status of metanarratives to a consideration of the conditions for political resistance and dissent. Using concepts drawn from the work of Althusser, Nealon, and others, it reworks Laclau and Mouffe’s appropriation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in order to separate it from any foundational, normative political identity. In conclusion, the essay uses Bergson’s discussion of intuition and fabulation in order to begin to articulate the concepts of a democratic politics.