Foucault’s Outside: Contingency, May-Being, and Revolt

In this paper, I argue for an alternative reading of Michel Foucault as an anti-correlationist thinker. Specifically, I position him as aligned with what philosopher Quentin Meillassoux calls speculative materialism (an offshoot of speculative realism). Given the resurgent and exciting prioritization of speculative ontology over concrete politics among these thinkers, coupled with the need for a revolutionary anti-capitalist political movement, my approach aims to take speculative materialists’ claims regarding access to the in-itself seriously while also devoting attention to their (underdeveloped) political dimension. It is in this latter realm Foucault proves particularly helpful to think alongside. Though Foucault has often and convincingly been portrayed as an anti-universalist, postmodern, and epistemologically-oriented figure, I present him as concerned with the subject’s access to the Outside (the great outdoors, things-in-themselves) as well as the politics of such access. I do so through a study of a wide selection of his works (books, essays, interviews, articles), a comparison between his philosophical position and that of Meillassoux’s, and an expansion upon Foucault’s analysis of Diego Velázquez’s “Las Meninas” in The Order of Things, positing the artwork as a speculative object. I suggest, in short, that Foucault’s concepts of thought, force, and the subject have surprisingly striking similarities to Meillassoux’s absolute contingency and his political subject (the ‘vectoral militant’). We can, then, begin to see a revolutionary politics arising out of what I understand as Foucault’s speculative stance—hopefully providing an opportunity to both (re)consider Foucault and highlight the politics incipient in contemporary explorations into the Outside.

The Political Practice and its Subjects in of New Critical Theories: Complicities and Points of Adversity

These four theoretical bets on the “multitude” (Hardt and Negri), on the political subject as fidelity to an event (Badiou), on the “people” as a hegemonic interaction of heterogeneous demands (Laclau and Mouffe), on the political subject as an emergent subject of an egalitarian irruption (Rancière), illustrate the seek for new political subjectivities after abandoning the Marxist thesis that gives a decisive role to the working-class in the process of social transformation. Apart from this binding nucleus, they present divergences that place the question about the subject of emancipation in a field of confrontations, and bifurcation points. This work aims at delimiting the lines of combat, voices of consent and dissent found in these new critical theories regarding the connection between political subjectivity, and economic relations, the issue of the strategy, the nationalism/internationalism dilemma and the disjunction between statism and anti-statism.

Counter-populist performances of (in)security: Feminist resistance in the face of right-wing populism in Poland

IR scholarship has recently seen a burgeoning interest in the right-wing populist politics of security, showing that it tends to align with the international ultraconservative mobilisation against ‘gender ideology’. In contrast, this article investigates how local feminist actors can resist right-wing populist constructions of (in)security by introducing counter-populist discourses and aesthetics of security. I analyse the case of Poland, which presents two competing populist performances of (in)security: the Independence March organised by right-wing groups on Poland's Independence Day and the Women's Strike protests against the near-total ban on abortion. The article draws on Judith Butler's theory of the performative politics of public assembly, which elucidates how the political subject of ‘the people’ can emerge as bodies come together to make security demands through both verbal and non-verbal acts. I argue that the feminist movement used the vehicle of populist performance to subvert the exclusionary constructions of (in)security by right-wing populists. In the process, it introduced a different conception of security in the struggle for a ‘livable life’. The study expands the understanding of the relationship between populism, security and feminism in IR by exploring how the populist politics of security is differently enacted by everyday agents in local contexts.

A Question of Race: Ana Tijoux’s album Vengo

This article hones in on the question of ‘race’ in hip-hop artist Ana Tijoux’s album Vengo (2014), which anticipates, in a musical format, the social demands which would emerge years later in Chile’s Estallido Social. More specifically, it dissects the ways in which this socially-engaged rapper transcodes (Hall, “Representation” 270) the racialized categories of ‘indio’ and ‘the south’ from a position of colonial difference (Mignolo 61). I argue that, by adopting this subversive and historicizing semiotic strategy, she casts these oppressive labels into productive political subject positions from which to level received racial hierarchies rooted in colonialism and reinforced by neoliberalism. They offer the individuals who are classified as such a blueprint to mobilize themselves and enact alternative ways of being; to come up for their rights; and to resist the inequalities that are perpetuated and naturalized by a system of organization which ranks them as inferior.

Jacques Lacan’s Theory of Rupture: the Perspective of the Real

The article analyses Jacques Lacan’s theory of rupture that encompasses the three planes – the imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real – that comprise his topology. It is named the theory of rupture because it allows grasping the unfinished Lacanian subject as it encounters Other in all of those planes. The main question is whether this lack could be considered as positive. The attention is paid to the phallic signifier; the hypothesis is that this signifier, by linking the symbolic and the Real, allows the creation of new meanings and the resistance towards the fundamental fantasy.The Lacanian ternary conception of topology helps us to analyse the field of politics. While grasping this field from the “ex-sisting” perspective of the Real, we can observe the two scenarios of the development of (political) subject. On the one hand, there is a possible link between the subject and fantasy, in which one tries to compensate for the lack of the Real by “comforting” itself in the plane of symbolic discourse. On the other hand, in the alternative scenario, the subject consciously admits its lack, rejects the fantasy and begins to create new names which “hole” the symbolic discourse itself as well as the insufficiency of the symbolic field. The Real is defended by the phallic signifier, which helps to maintain the subject’s negativity and militancy. By enclosing the Real into the Symbolic we create the new consistency as the subject seeks not to maintain a passive form and place inside the structure, but names the positive lack in the structure itself and thereby creates the new political content.

Subramania Bharati and the Rhetoric of Enthusiasm

This article identifies the rhetoric and sentiment of enthusiasm as a certain specifically Tamil historical-aesthetic-political conjuncture that operates in both an affective register and as a structure of publicity. The “people,” who emerge as a subject of politics within the crucible of the swadeshi movement, are both “the masses” (a populist political subject) as well as the anticipated citizens of a future sovereign democracy. To distinguish the Tamil conjuncture from the histories of European populism, Part I outlines the political implications of public enthusiasm in the European Enlightenment. Kant, in his articulation of enthusiasm as a form of reason, is the critical figure here. Whereas in English poetry enthusiasm was domesticated and contained, Bharati’s writings and their impact exemplify its very different trajectory in colonial India. In Part II, Bharati’s poetry is analyzed under three heads: the enthusiasm it manifests, its language and rhetoric, and its focus on nationalism and social reform. Part III describes the communicative technologies and the formation of Bharati’s public and then the colonial conjuncture in which his work encountered censorship and prohibition. The conclusion underlines the significance of Bharati’s writings and the relevance of the political enthusiasm they generated—and still do.

Populism, Liberalism and the Eclipse of Emotion

I argue that the way philosophy conceives of the political subject fails to understand the populist subject. In Section I, I shall sketch an ambiguity in how Hobbes conceives of the political subject as both driven by the passions and yet capable of rationally subduing them. In Section II, I argue that these two different conceptions of the will lead to different models of political representation. In Section III, I offer an sketch of some of the ways the Hobbesian picture of the mind as fueled by the passions has been eschewed by modern liberal philosophy. Finally, in Section IV, I offer an account of two features of populism which seem to me to suggest that the Humean model of the will is appropriate to understand certain essential features of populist politics.

A Populist Experiment in Spanish Political Culture? On the Cultural Politics of Podemos

The goal of this essay is to explain Podemos's 2014 emergence in Spanish politics in terms of its contributions to a possible long-term shift in Spanish political culture. For doing that, the essay focuses not so much on the party's electoral ups and downs but on a series of main discursive lines and elements of the party's trajectory that help explain its relevance in the context of recent Spanish political and cultural history: the crisis of middle classes; the plebeian as political subject linked to an alliance between precarized middle classes and precarious working classes; plurinationality and the Spanish territorial debates; historical memory and Spanish Republicanism; and popular sovereignty.