The present work aims at exploring the re-elaboration of the ideology problematique in post-Marxist philosophy and social theory. The traditional problematique - drawing mainly on Marxist categories - articulates the relation between the analysis of determining instances operating beneath the layer of reflective consciousness and the possibility of subjective autonomy. As a result of the post-structuralist turn in philosophy and social sciences, this space of enquiry has been progressively associated to untenable metaphysical assumptions - among which the idea of an essential reality, meaning or telos beyond discursive mediation and the possibility of defining a self-sustained system of rationality as a parameter to measure ideological distortion. The present work argues that the implicative connection between the critique of essentialist metaphysics and the abandonment of the Marxist emancipatory model - resulting in a deep suspicion towards comprehensive explanatory frameworks and universalist political projects - is theoretically questionable and politically debilitating. However, one main hypothesis underpinning the thesis is that the post-structuralist problematization of such model mediates in theory real socio-historical impasses - related to deepening patterns of capitalist deterritorialization - whose analysis requires novel theoretical elaborations. Accordingly, this dissertation aims at demonstrating that the paradigms developed by seminal authors on the Left (Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou and Fredric Jameson), operating in the space of enquiry opened up by the intersection between Marxist and post-structuralist categories of analysis, can be read as attempts to rethink the traditional ideology problematique in terms appropriate to the present historical situation. This central argument unfolds in different theoretical articulations. Firstly, the thesis explores how the post-foundationalist ontologies developed by the above mentioned authors contribute to outline the sedimentation of new patterns of subjection characterizing the contemporary symbolic economy. By doing this, it also individuates, by means of immanent critique, recurrent contradictions and problematic knots traversing the post-Marxist intellectual field. Finally, such contradictions and knots are dialectically rescued as further avenues to outline objective limits imposed on affectivity and cognition by the current development of the capitalist mode of production.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:633128 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Silvaggi, Lorenzo |
| Publisher | University of Bristol |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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