Adventures of the Symbolic

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Machine generated contents note: ch. One The Symbolic Dimension and the Politics of Young Hegelianism -- The Symbol from Classicism to Romanticism -- Hegelian Spirit from Symbol to Sign -- Left Hegelian Desymbolization -- Feuerbach's Naturalist Symbol -- Ambiguity and Radical Democracy -- ch. Two The Fate of the Symbolic from Romantic Socialism to a Marxism in extremis -- Leroux and the Aesthetic Symbol -- The Style Symbolique and the Question of Society -- Marx and the Symbolic -- Marxism in extremis: Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, Baudrillard -- ch. Three From the Symbolic Turn to the Social Imaginary: Castoriadis's Project of Autonomy -- Arrival Points -- The Imaginary in Context -- Castoriadis Contra Levi-Strauss -- Starting Points -- ch. Four Democracy Between Disenchantment and Political Theology: French Post-Marxism and the Return of Religion -- Two Turns and a Twist -- The Thought of the "Political" -- The Religious and the Political -- Marcel Gauchet and the Birth of Autonomy from the Spirit of Religion -- Democracy Against Itself? -- ch. Five The Post-Marx of the Letter: Laclau and Mouffe Between Postmodern Melancholy and Post-Marxist Mourning -- The International Career of Hegemony -- Mourning or Melancholy? -- The National Contexts of Marxism's Crisis -- Placing the Post-Marxist Intellectual -- Trauma and the Post-Marxist Subject: Zizek's "Beyond Discourse-Analysis" -- ch. Six Of Empty Places: Zizek and Laclau; or, The End of the Affair -- Zizek the Radical Democrat -- Politics Needs a Vacuum -- Partisan Universality -- Religion Without Religion -- Holding the Place or Filling It? Yes, Please!
Marxism's collapse in the twentieth century profoundly altered the style and substance of Western European radical thought. To build a more robust form of democratic theory and action, prominent theorists moved to reject revolution, abandon class for more fragmented models of social action, and elevate the political over the social. Acknowledging the constructedness of society and politics, they chose the "symbolic" as a concept powerful enough to reinvent leftist thought outside of a Marxist framework. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic, which reassessed philosophical Marxism at mid century, Warren Breckman critically revisits these thrilling experiments in the aftermath of Marxism.
Includes bibliographical references and index.