Slavoj Zizek is a contemporary political philosopher widely recognized for his aphoristic style. Contrary to many forms of more traditional theory, Zizek does not forward his arguments as a series of well-argued, logically flowing propositions, but rather as a cacophony of diagnoses running the gamut of social science and culture studies while nevertheless always slipping from one position to another, occupying at times the position of the orthodox Marxist in the face of post-modernism’s excesses, and at other times doing quite the opposite. This study proposes a reading methodology that takes aphorism and hyperbole as key elements of writing; more specifically, this study understands writing as a political intervention, and reads Zizek’s recent works in this light. Arguing that Zizek occupies a multitude of positions against a multitude of interlocutors on the post-Marxist scene, this thesis claims that it is precisely his ability to navigate between two distinct scenes which constitutes his novelty. Zizek combats conventional forms of leftism in order to open up a space for a new theoretical position, denying the coordinates of both post-Marxism and postmodernism.

Slavoj Zizek is a contemporary political philosopher widely recognized for his aphoristic style. Contrary to many forms of more traditional theory, Zizek does not forward his arguments as a series of well-argued, logically flowing propositions, but rather as a cacophony of diagnoses running the gamut of social science and culture studies while nevertheless always slipping from one position to another, occupying at times the position of the orthodox Marxist in the face of post-modernism’s excesses, and at other times doing quite the opposite. This study proposes a reading methodology that takes aphorism and hyperbole as key elements of writing; more specifically, this study understands writing as a political intervention, and reads Zizek’s recent works in this light. Arguing that Zizek occupies a multitude of positions against a multitude of interlocutors on the post-Marxist scene, this thesis claims that it is precisely his ability to navigate between two distinct scenes which constitutes his novelty. Zizek combats conventional forms of leftism in order to open up a space for a new theoretical position, denying the coordinates of both post-Marxism and postmodernism.

This work seeks to address the major texts of Slavoj Zizek using a reading methodology which treats political philosophy as a practice, rather than a series of logical propositions or claims of truth or falsity. Philosophy is herein understood as a field of relations among authors who occupy precise theoretical and political coordinates. Writing produces and reproduces an author's position within this field via the way in which an author communicates with his/her peers, draws on past concepts, and designs new ones. This paper argues that Zizek cannot usefully be grasped as a theorist attempting to provide positive political solutions or analyses, but rather as a 'negative' force who occupies an impossible position by attempting to negate his peers and popular contemporary theoretical concepts - Zizek wishes to create a new intellectual space where political possibilities can be rethought and rediscovered, and he does this in his texts by ephemerally occupying multiple positions only to displace them.

This work seeks to address the major texts of Slavoj Zizek using a reading methodology which treats political philosophy as a practice, rather than a series of logical propositions or claims of truth or falsity. Philosophy is herein understood as a field of relations among authors who occupy precise theoretical and political coordinates. Writing produces and reproduces an author's position within this field via the way in which an author communicates with his/her peers, draws on past concepts, and designs new ones. This paper argues that Zizek cannot usefully be grasped as a theorist attempting to provide positive political solutions or analyses, but rather as a 'negative' force who occupies an impossible position by attempting to negate his peers and popular contemporary theoretical concepts - Zizek wishes to create a new intellectual space where political possibilities can be rethought and rediscovered, and he does this in his texts by ephemerally occupying multiple positions only to displace them.

According to Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, our postmodern era and its correlate political problematic requires a shift in positing socialist strategy. Their wager is that by shifting away from essentialist Marxism, and towards a post-Marxist theory of hegemony which they adapt from Gramsci, the analytic for overturning contemporary hegemony will take the form of a radical democratic politics. My contention is that in shifting away from essentialist Marxism through their post-structuralist deconstructive stance, Laclau and Mouffe overstep and make their analytic for socialist strategy impotent. In order to show where Laclau and Mouffe have gone wrong I use primarily the work of Michel Foucault and Slavoj Žižek in order to demonstrate how a post-structuralist theory of ideology need not be a post-Marxist theory of ideology. / Master of Arts

<p>This thesis coheres around the issue of collective political mobilisation within one part of the contemporary feminist movement, or more specifically, within the Swedish feminist zine community. A feminist zine, also commonly referred to as Grrrlzine or femizine, is a small non-commercial and non-professional publication, which is distributed by channels other than that of the mainstream media.</p><p>The aim of the thesis is to examine what role the 'name' ' sisterhood' has in the constitution of a feminist zine community. Further, it is to explore the ways in which this 'name' is expressed and the precise function this name has within the community itself. That 'sisterhood' is necessary for a feminist politics is, according to the vast majority of the zines studied, obvious. Nevertheless the issue of what sisterhood 'is' or what it ’ought to be’ is constantly under negotiation. In this thesis I study how the name sisterhood works to create a collective feminist identity – even if this very 'name' comes to be articulated in, sometimes radically, different forms.</p><p>In order to conduct my analysis, I have taken several theoretical decisions. First, I have chosen to frame the zine community in accordance with the term communitas, defined as a collective identity constituted in terms of its opposites, by that which it is not. In this specific case, this Other consists of the commercial media, that is also, conceived as an effect of a wider patriarchal threat.</p><p>Second, to understand the differences which exist within this community, I have chosen to develop three feminist logics, to capture some quite contradictory articulatory strategies. They are referred to as ’liberal feminist’, ’radical feminist’ and ’post feminist’. The concept of logics allows me to interpret how it is that three different (and sometimes competing) feminist traditions can be found in the zine community, and commonly how in a single zine, or a single text, the three logics can coalsce.</p><p>As mentioned above, it is the 'name' sisterhood that provides the glue that holds the feminist zine community together. To understand this I have analyzed sisterhood by way of the concept 'empty signifier', that is, a 'name' which is partially emptied of meaning and which serves as a surface of inscription for a variety of feminist demands, demands that in themselves may have very little, or even nothing in common.</p><p>Finally, the ideas outlined in the thesis call for reflexivity, that is, for an explicit meta-analysis of the conduct of one’s own research process. In this thesis I discuss the problematic arising when the feminist researcher studies a feminist movement, and the inevitable blurring of political partisanship and theoretical analysis that takes place. Here I pay particular attention to the frontiers that a political community is always-already in a process of re-negotiating, and how the researcher is herself part of this very re-negotiation.</p>

This dissertation provides a particular Marxian class analytical political economy critique of post-Marxism. The dissertation demonstrates the ways in which different positions within post-Marxism continue to essentialize the conceptualizations of class and capitalist economy. What distinguishes this dissertation from other dominant critiques of post-Marxism is the anti-essentialist epistemological and ontological position it adopts. By adopting an anti-essentialist epistemological position the dissertation is able to demonstrate the discontinuities and continuities between post-Marxism and the Marxian tradition. The dissertation does this by reading the heterogeneous and disparate post-Marxian approaches as so many different ways to "resolve" the central tension of the Althusserian mode of production debate of the 1960s and 1970s: The tension between the desire to think the overdetermination of social reproduction and transformation and the effort to explain the stability of class domination . The dissertation argues one of the effects of this tension to be the lapse of the Althusserian mode of production problematic into reproductionism .Drawing extensively on the scholarship of Ernesto Laclau and Étienne Balibar, the dissertation substantiates the ways in which the post-Althusserian post-Marxism has developed a critique of the reproductionist tendency of this problematic and constructed a theory of the social that allows for conceiving social reproduction to be both provisionally stable and overdetermined. The dissertation argues, however, that such "resolutions" have failed in different ways to dislodge the constitution of class and capitalist reproduction from essentialist narratives, with the effect of restaging the ontological duality of the mode of production problematic (i.e., overdetermination vs. determinism qua reproductionism ) in a new form: The contingency of politics and the necessity of class and capitalist reproduction. After showing the limitations of some of the prominent positions within post-Althusserian post-Marxism, the dissertation concludes with an alternative post-Althusserian Marxian perspective, initially developed by Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, that provides an overdetermined understanding of social and economic reproduction from the entry point of class qua surplus.

This thesis coheres around the issue of collective political mobilisation within one part of the contemporary feminist movement, or more specifically, within the Swedish feminist zine community. A feminist zine, also commonly referred to as Grrrlzine or femizine, is a small non-commercial and non-professional publication, which is distributed by channels other than that of the mainstream media. The aim of the thesis is to examine what role the 'name' ' sisterhood' has in the constitution of a feminist zine community. Further, it is to explore the ways in which this 'name' is expressed and the precise function this name has within the community itself. That 'sisterhood' is necessary for a feminist politics is, according to the vast majority of the zines studied, obvious. Nevertheless the issue of what sisterhood 'is' or what it ’ought to be’ is constantly under negotiation. In this thesis I study how the name sisterhood works to create a collective feminist identity – even if this very 'name' comes to be articulated in, sometimes radically, different forms. In order to conduct my analysis, I have taken several theoretical decisions. First, I have chosen to frame the zine community in accordance with the term communitas, defined as a collective identity constituted in terms of its opposites, by that which it is not. In this specific case, this Other consists of the commercial media, that is also, conceived as an effect of a wider patriarchal threat. Second, to understand the differences which exist within this community, I have chosen to develop three feminist logics, to capture some quite contradictory articulatory strategies. They are referred to as ’liberal feminist’, ’radical feminist’ and ’post feminist’. The concept of logics allows me to interpret how it is that three different (and sometimes competing) feminist traditions can be found in the zine community, and commonly how in a single zine, or a single text, the three logics can coalsce. As mentioned above, it is the 'name' sisterhood that provides the glue that holds the feminist zine community together. To understand this I have analyzed sisterhood by way of the concept 'empty signifier', that is, a 'name' which is partially emptied of meaning and which serves as a surface of inscription for a variety of feminist demands, demands that in themselves may have very little, or even nothing in common. Finally, the ideas outlined in the thesis call for reflexivity, that is, for an explicit meta-analysis of the conduct of one’s own research process. In this thesis I discuss the problematic arising when the feminist researcher studies a feminist movement, and the inevitable blurring of political partisanship and theoretical analysis that takes place. Here I pay particular attention to the frontiers that a political community is always-already in a process of re-negotiating, and how the researcher is herself part of this very re-negotiation.

This article proposes an approach to contemporary transformations of the legal, from the articulation between critical theory of law and the Lacanian left. On the one hand, it is stated that in contemporary times, under the dominance of the capitalist discourse, the legal has undergone a metamorphosis that can be characterized as the passage from bourgeois legal form to the right to jouissance. On the other hand, this paper claims that the law of populism can become, as residue of that discourse that it fails to reabsorb, a device capable of producing cuts on the capitalist circuit. In this context, the capitalist revolution refers to the radical change in policies and institutions and legal forms that lacks an emancipatory orientation and, on the contrary, promotes the consolidation and deepening of its repetition and reproduction. In this sense, identification with the subversive can become a mean by which the law of populism is capable of promoting the production of memories of terrorism that reinstate the social antagonism as a way of extracting a truth from the capitalist discourse for the return-invention of the political in its hegemonic form. / Este artículo propone un abordaje de las transformaciones contemporáneas de lo jurídico desde la articulación entre teoría crítica del derecho e izquierda lacaniana. Por un lado, se afirma que, en la época contemporánea bajo el predominio del discurso capitalista, lo jurídico ha sufrido una metamorfosis que podemos caracterizar como el paso de la forma jurídica burguesa al derecho al goce. Por otro lado, se sostiene que, en tal contexto, el derecho del populismo puede constituirse, en tanto residuo que aquel discurso falla en reabsorber, en un dispositivo susceptible de producir cortes al circuito capitalista. En este marco, la revolución capitalista refiere al cambio radical en instituciones y formas políticas y jurídicas que carece de una orientación emancipatoria y que, por el contrario, promueve la consolidación y profundización de su repetición y reproducción. En tal sentido, la identificación con lo subversivo puede constituirse en una vía por la cual el derecho del populismo sea capaz de promover la producción de memorias del terrorismo que reinstauren al antagonismo social como modo de sustraer una verdad al discurso capitalista para el retorno-invención de la política en su forma hegemónica.

v anglickém jazyce Proposed thesis focuses on the writings of french theoretician Jacques Rancière. Particular emphasis is put on a manner, in which the spheres of aesthetics and politics appear and intervine in Rancière's works. The consequence of forementioned delimitation of the subject of my interest is that the thesis doesn't fully embody Rancière's thought. Mainly because of the restricted space, i omitted Rancière's historiographical works and also texts that deal with the narrowly defined questions of literature and film. Despite of those limitations, my goal is to provide a monographical introduction to Rancière's thought. This monograph, on the one hand, doesn't claim the complete coverage of Rancière's works, but it aims, on the other hand, to provide the overall insight into the essential questions that shaped (and still shape) Rancière's thought.