The Post-Political and

Its Discontents
Spaces of Depoliticisation,
Spectres of Radical Politics

edited by Japhy Wilson and

Erik Swyngedouw
For Tim, in return for your Little Red Book
For Arno, Nikolaas, and Eva: the world is yours to make

Japhy Wilson acknowledges the financial support of the Hallsworth Research

Fellowship. Erik Swyngedouw acknowledges the financial support of the
People Programme (Maria Currie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh
Framework Programme; under REAS agreeement No 289374 – ‘ENTITLE’.

© editorial matter and organisation Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw, 2014
© the chapters their several authors, 2014

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Contents

Contents

List of Contributors vii

Seeds of Dystopia: Post-Politics and the Return of the
Political 1
Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

Part I Spaces of Depoliticisation

1. The Post-Politics of Sustainability Planning: Privatisation
and the Demise of Democratic Government 25
Mike Raco
2. The Post-Political and the End of Nature: The
Genetically Modified Organism 48
Larry Reynolds and Bronislaw Szerszynski
3. The New Development Architecture and the Post-
Political in the Global South 67
Sangeeta Kamat
4. Opening Up the Post-Political Condition:
Multiculturalism and the Matrix of Depoliticisation 86
Nicolas Van Puymbroeck and Stijn Oosterlynck
5. The Jouissance of Philanthrocapitalism: Enjoyment as a
Post-Political Factor 109
Japhy Wilson
6. Religious Antinomies of Post-Politics 126
Bülent Diken
7. Post-Ecologist Governmentality: Post-Democracy, Post-
Politics and the Politics of Unsustainability 146
Ingolfur Blühdorn
vi Contents

Part II Spectres of Radical Politics

8. Insurgent Architects, Radical Cities and the Promise of
the Political 169
Erik Swyngedouw
9. The Limits of Post-Politics: Rethinking Radical Social
Enterprise 189
Wendy Larner
10. Neither Cosmopolitanism nor Multipolarity: The
Political Beyond Global Governmentality 208
Hans-Martin Jaeger
11. Against a Speculative Leftism 229
Alex Loftus
12. Spatialising Politics: Antagonistic Imaginaries of
Indignant Squares 244
Maria Kaika and Lazaros Karaliotas
13. After Post-Politics: Occupation and the Return of
Communism 261
Jodi Dean
14. The Enigma of Revolt: Militant Politics in a ‘Post-
Political’ Age 279
Andy Merrifield

There Is No Alternative 299

Erik Swyngedouw and Japhy Wilson

Index 313
Contributors

Contributors

Ingolfur Blühdorn is Reader in Politics/Political Sociology at the

University of Bath. Located at the crossroads of eco-political, demo-
cratic and social theory, his work focuses on contemporary ecologi-
cal and emancipatory politics. It has informed academic and public
debates in Europe, the USA and Australia.

Jodi Dean is the Donald R. Harter ’39 Professor of Humanities and

Social Sciences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is co-
editor of the international journal of contemporary theory, Theory
& Event. Her books include Democracy and Other Neoliberal
Fantasies (2009) and The Communist Horizon (2012).

Bülent Diken is Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University. His

research topics are social and political philosophy, urbanism, cinema,
terror and religion. His books include The Culture of Exception
(2005, with C. B. Laustsen); Sociology Through the Projector (2007,
with C. B. Laustsen); Nihilism (2009); and Revolt, Revolution,
Critique – The Paradox of Society (2012).

Hans-Martin Jaeger is Associate Professor in the Department of

Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa. His work on
international political theory and sociology, global governance,
and international organisations has been published in International
Theory, European Journal of International Relations, Review of
International Studies, International Political Sociology, and other
journals.

Maria Kaika is Professor of Human Geography at the University of

Manchester, and Editor of the International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research. Her research focuses on urban political ecology,
viii Contributors

land rent, land financialisation, urban imaginaries, iconic architec-

ture, and European environmental policy. She is author of City of
Flows (2005).

Sangeeta Kamat is Associate Professor in the College of Education at

the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her areas of interest are
the sociology and anthropology of development and neoliberalism.
Her research is on NGOs and development in a neoliberal context,
and more recently in critical geography studies in education.

Lazaros Karaliotas is a PhD candidate in Human Geography at

the University of Manchester. He has recently submitted his PhD
thesis under the title The post-democratic city? Urban politics
and governance in Thessaloniki’s port restructuring. His research
addresses urban restructuring, processes of post-politicisation and
post-democratisation, radical politics, urban social movements and
environmental politics.

Wendy Larner is Professor of Human Geography and Sociology at

the University of Bristol. She has published widely on topics of glo-
balisation, neoliberalism, governance and gender. Her most recent
book is Fashioning Globalisation: New Zealand Design, Working
Women and the Cultural Economy (2013, with Maureen Molloy).

Alex Loftus in Senior Lecturer in Geography at King’s College

London. He is the author of Everyday Environmentalism: Creating
an Urban Political Ecology (2012), and co-editor of Gramsci: Space,
Nature, Politics (2013).

Andy Merrifield is a writer, social theorist and urban geographer. He

is the author of numerous books, including most recently, Magical
Marxism (2011), John Berger (2012), The Politics of the Encounter
(2013), and The New Urban Question (2014).

Stijn Oosterlynck is Assistant Professor in Urban Sociology at the

University of Antwerp, Belgium. He is the director of the Center
for Inequality, Poverty, Social Exclusion and the City (OASeS). His
research focuses on the politics of urban development and commu-
nity development, social innovation and welfare state restructuring
and solidarity in diversity.

Mike Raco is Professor of Urban Governance and Development

in the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. He
has published widely on urban governance, sustainability, and the
 Contributors ix

politics of urban and regional development. His latest book is State-

led Privatisation and the Demise of the Democratic State: Welfare
Reform and Localism in an Era of Regulatory Capitalism (2013).

Larry Reynolds is Einstein Postdoctoral Fellow at the Freie Universität

Berlin. His work develops insights from the historical materialist tra-
dition to explore the problematic of socio-technical transition to a
post-fossil fuel society. His PhD addressed the socio-technical battle
around GM Crops, He has co-authored a series of articles, papers
and book chapters on these questions with Bronislaw Szerszynski.

Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at Manchester

University. His research interests include political ecology, urban
governance, democracy and political power, and the politics of glo-
balisation. He was previously Professor of Geography at Oxford
University, and held the Vincent Wright Visiting Professorship in
Political Science at Science Po, Paris, in 2014.

Bronislaw Szerszynski is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster

University. He is author of Nature, Technology and the Sacred
(2005), and co-editor of Risk, Environment and Modernity (1996),
Re-Ordering Nature (2003), Nature Performed (2003) and a special
double issue of Theory Culture and Society on ‘Changing Climates’
(2010).

Nicolas Van Puymbroeck is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the

University of Antwerp. His PhD research, which is funded by the
Flanders Research Foundation, draws on theoretical insights derived
from post-foundational political thought to explore the dynamics of
urban immigrant integration policies.

Japhy Wilson is Lecturer in International Political Economy at the

University of Manchester. His research draws on historical materi-
alism and the psychoanalytic critique of ideology, in exploring the
intertwining of space, power and ideology in the politics of interna-
tional development. He is the author of Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange
Case of Dr Shock and Mr Aid (2014).
Seeds of Dystopia: Post-Politics and the
Return of the Political
Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

Western democracies are only the political facade of economic power.

A facade with colours, banners, and endless debates about sacrosanct
democracy. We live in an era where we can discuss everything. With one
exception: Democracy. She is there, an acquired dogma. Don’t touch, like
a museum display. Elections have become an absurd comedy, shameful,
in which the participation of the citizen is very weak, and governments
represent the political commissionaires of economic power. There isn’t
democracy, only the appearance of democracy. We live in a simulation. If
we want real democracy, we will have to create it ourselves.
José Saramago (2006)

In Seeing, the final installment of his magisterial urban trilogy, José

Saramago offers an incisive dissection of our current political pre-
dicament. A few years after a strange episode of collective blindness,
city administrators are preparing for a general election. The great
day for the democratic festival is a miserably rainy Sunday, and
once all the ballots are counted, it turns out that a large percent-
age of people have spoiled their votes. The city elites of the Party
of the Left, the Party of the Middle, and the Party of the Right are
disquieted, if not alarmed. Something must have gone wrong, these
surmise, probably the bad weather . . . A week later, the elections are
repeated. This time the weather is better, but the electoral outcome
is even worse: 83 per cent of the citizens vote blank. What Saramago
calls ‘the simple right not to follow any consensually established
opinion’ deeply troubles the city government. One minister refers to
it as a conspiracy against the democratic system itself. In its desper-
ate attempt to understand what is going on, and to root out what
must be an organised subversion against the sacrosanct democratic
principle, the government declares ‘a state of emergency’, unleashing
all manner of repressive tactics to uncover the masterminding source
2 Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

of the anti-democratic plot. But none can be found. In a final desper-

ate attempt to make the city and its citizens come to their senses, the
government decides to decamp to another place, leaving the residents
to their own devices and anticipating a descent into anarchic catas-
trophe. However, nothing of the sort happens. Everyone goes about
his or her daily life, and the city continues as normal.
In this allegory, first published in 2004, Saramago ruthlessly sati-
rises the disaffection of a growing number of people with the insti-
tuted rituals of representative democracy. Thousands of passive
rebels refuse to do what is expected of them. They reject the ballot
box, and just go on with life as if nothing has happened. With chilling
precision, Saramago diagnoses the deadlock of contemporary ‘demo-
cratic’ governance. We live in times both haunted and paradoxical.
Instituted representational democracy is more widespread than ever;
identitarian concerns and all manner of issues and problems are
made visible and politicised; ‘participatory’ and ‘inclusive’ forms of
governance are nurtured and fostered on a range of geographical
scales; and lifestyle preferences, the unsustainable re-engineering of
our climate, the sexual escapades of the former IMF chairman, the
heroic resistances of indigenous peoples, fracking, the repression
of gay people in Russia, the garbage left on the sidewalk, the plight
of the whale, the governments’ austerity agendas to get the economy
out of the doldrums – all these issues and an infinity of others are
politicised in certain ways. That is, they are discussed, dissected,
evaluated, raised as issues of public concern and debated at length in
a variety of public and political arenas. Everything, so it seems, can
be aired, made visible, discussed, and rendered contentious.
In short, democracy as the theatre of and for the pluralistic and
disputed consideration of matters of public concern would appear to
be triumphant. Political elites, irrespective of their particular party
allegiance, do not tire of pointing out the great strides that demo-
cratic civic life has made. We are told that the great battle of the
twentieth century between totalitarianism and democracy has been
finally and decisively concluded in favour of the latter. The history
of humanity, marked by heroic-tragic ideological battles between
opposing visions of what constitutes a ‘good’ society, has suppos-
edly come to an end. Democracy is now firmly and consensually
established as the uncontested and rarely examined ideal of institu-
tionalised political life. There are of course still ongoing rearguard
archaic ideological battles on the geographical and political margins
of the civilised world, waged by those who have not yet understood
the lie of the land and the new horizon of history. When the need
arises, they are corralled by any means necessary into consensual
participation in the new global democratic order (although not
 Seeds of Dystopia 3

always effectively, as the Afghanistan and Iraq disasters testify). In

contrast, we – the West and its allies – will now forever live happily
in the complacent knowledge that democracy has been finetuned
to assure the efficient management of a liberal and pluralist society
under the uncontested aegis of a naturalised market-based configu-
ration of the production and distribution of a cornucopia of goods
and services. Any remaining problems and issues will be dealt with
in the appropriate manner, through consensual forms of techno-
managerial negotiation.
This is supposed to be the final realisation of the liberal idyll. An
untroubled, undivided, cohesive and common-sense society in which
everyone knows his or her place and performs his or her duties in
their own (and hence in everyone else’s) interests, organised through
a diversity of institutionalised forms of representative government,
aided and supported by participatory governance arrangements for
all sorts of recognised problems, issues and matters of public concern.
Yet political apathy for mainstream parties and politics, and for the
ritualised choreographies of representative electoral procedures, is
at an all-time high. Indeed, as soon as the practices of government
were reduced to the bio-political management of the ‘happiness’ of
the population and the neoliberal organisation of the transforma-
tion of nature and the appropriation and distribution of its associ-
ated wealth, new spectres of the political appeared on the horizon.
Insurrectional and incipiently democratising movements and mobi-
lisations exploded in 2011, and continue to smoulder and flare:
Syntagma Square, Puerta del Sol, Zuccotti Park, Paternoster Square,
Taksim Square, Tahrir Square, Sao Paulo, Oakland, Montreal . . .
These are just a few of the more evocative names that have become
associated with emergent new forms of politicisation. Assembled
under the generic banner ‘Real Democracy Now!’ the gathered insur-
gents have expressed an extraordinary antagonism to the instituted
– and often formally democratic – forms of governing, and have
staged, performed and choreographed new configurations of the
democratic. While often articulated around an emblematic quilt-
ing point (a threatened park, devastating austerity measures, the
public bailout of irresponsible financial institutions, rising tuition
fees, a price hike in public transport, and the like), these movements
quickly universalised their claims to embrace a desire for a fully-
fledged transformation of the political structuring of life, against the
exclusive, oligarchic, and consensual governance of an alliance of
professional economic, political and technocratic elites determined
to defend the neoliberal order by any means necessary.
It is precisely this parallax gap that sets the contours and contents
of this book.
4 Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

From one vantage point – usually nurtured by those who seek to

maintain things as they are – democracy is alive and kicking. From
the other perspective, the democratic functioning of the political
terrain has been eroded to such an extent that a radical re-ordering
and re-configuration of the practices of ‘governing by the people
for the people’ is urgently required. The latter position demands a
dramatic transformation of the depoliticising practices that have
marked the past few decades, and that have survived the global eco-
nomic crisis in the perverted form of a ‘zombie neoliberalism’ (Peck
2010), which staggers blindly forward in the absence of its once-
inspiring master discourses. Its continuity is ensured by a range of
political elites from both Right and Left, and is legitimised by their
continuous election to power – a power that has become more and
more enfeebled as they delegate social and political choices to those
demanded, staged, figured and ‘imposed’ by the socially disembodied
‘hidden hand of the market’.
Consider, for example, the radical austerity measures pursued
by those who have no choice (like the Greek, Portuguese, Irish
or Spanish governments) and by those who do (like the British,
American, Dutch and Danish regimes). These measures are wholly
inoperative in macro-economic terms, but are brutally effective in
terms of redrawing class configurations. ‘Austerity’ is a class war
fought by experts, consultants, economists and other elite bureau-
crats and policy-makers, in close consultation with business elites
and allegedly abstract and disembodied ‘financial markets’. This con-
sensualised framing of the natural order of the social stands in stark
contrast to the politicising mobilisations of the past few years. The
growing unrest of a large part of ‘the people’ has rattled the elites
assembled in Davos and elsewhere, and the uprisings against auster-
ity were labelled ‘seeds of dystopia’ by the World Economic Forum
in its 2012 World Risk Report:

Two dominant issues of concern emerged from the Arab Spring, the
‘Occupy’ movements worldwide and recent similar incidents of civil
discontent: the growing frustration among citizens with the political and
economic establishment, and the rapid public mobilization enabled by
greater technological connectivity. A macro and longer-term interpreta-
tion of these events highlights the need to improve the management of
global economic and demographic transformations that stand to increas-
ingly define global social trends in the decade to come . . . A society that
continues to sow the seeds of dystopia – by failing to manage ageing pop-
ulations, youth unemployment, rising inequalities and fiscal imbalances
– can expect greater social unrest and instability in the years to come.
(World Economic Forum 2012: 16)
 Seeds of Dystopia 5

What is the relationship between these seeds of dystopia and the

political desert in which they stubbornly take root? Already in the
early 1990s, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy (1997)
provided an exquisitely dialectical exploration of what they labelled
‘the retreat of the political’, understood as both the disappearance
and the re-treating of the political in theoretical musings as well as
modes of appearance. A proliferating body of thought has since
begun to decipher, both theoretically and empirically, the dynam-
ics of depoliticisation, and the contours and characteristics of the
alleged ‘disappearance of the political’. According to this literature,
contemporary forms of depoliticisation are characterised by the
erosion of democracy and the weakening of the public sphere, as a
consensual mode of governance has colonised, if not sutured, politi-
cal space. In the process, agnostic political disagreement has been
replaced by an ultra-politics of ethnicised and violent disavowal
on the one hand, and the exclusion and containment of those who
pursue a different political-economic model on the other. These
extremes are placed outside the post-democratic inclusion of differ-
ent opinions on anything imaginable in stakeholder arrangements
of impotent participation and ‘good governance’, which ensure that
the framework of debate and decision-making does not question
or disrupt the existing state of the neoliberal political-economic
configuration. This process is generally referred to as one of post-
politicisation, institutionally configured through modes of post-
democratic governance.
This book explores the contours of post-politicisation, and pro-
poses a series of theoretical approaches to excavating the dynamics
through which post-political modes of governing come into being. In
addition, the book identifies a range of new forms of politicisation,
which mark the present geopolitical landscape in ways that poten-
tially open up an incipient ‘return of the political’. In the remainder of
this introductory chapter, we provide some conceptual clarifications
regarding the nature of post-politics. We then explore the philosoph-
ical, terminological and political differences between some of the key
thinkers of post-politics, focusing on the theorists whose work most
consistently informs the contributions to this book: Chantal Mouffe,
Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek. We conclude with an overview
of the book as a whole.

The meaning of post-politics

During times of decline and reaction in which an actual transformation

of the prevailing political order seems ever more unlikely, language often
6 Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

comes to the rescue so as to allow one to revitalize, think anew, or at the

very least re-delimit the concepts of ‘politics’ or ‘the political’ with the
simple yet thought-provoking addition of a prefix. (Bosteels 2011: 76)

In recent years, an emergent literature across the social sciences has

conceptualised contemporary processes of depoliticisation in terms
of ‘post-politics’, ‘post-democracy’, and ‘the post-political’ (see for
example Allmendinger and Haughton 2011; Catney and Doyle 2011;
Clarke and Cochrane 2013; Crouch 2004; Diken 2009; Fuller 2012;
Garsten and Jacobsson 2007; Goeminne 2012; Hilding-Rydevik,
Hakansson and Isaksson 2011; Kythreotis 2012; Mouffe 2005;
Oosterlynk and Swyngedouw 2010; Pares 2011; Raco and Lin 2012;
Rancière 1999; Rorty 2004; Schlembach, Lear and Bowman 2012;
Swyngedouw 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011; Vergopoulos 2001; Williams
and Booth 2013; Wilson 2013; Žižek 1999). The precise meaning
of these terms is highly contested. Broadly speaking, however, they
all refer to a situation in which the political – understood as a space
of contestation and agonistic engagement – is increasingly colonised
by politics – understood as technocratic mechanisms and consensual
procedures that operate within an unquestioned framework of rep-
resentative democracy, free market economics, and cosmopolitan
liberalism. In post-politics, political contradictions are reduced to
policy problems to be managed by experts and legitimated through
participatory processes in which the scope of possible outcomes
is narrowly defined in advance. ‘The people’ – as a potentially
disruptive political collective – is replaced by the population – the
aggregated object of opinion polls, surveillance, and bio-political
optimisation. Citizens become consumers, and elections are framed
as just another ‘choice’, in which individuals privately select their
preferred managers of the conditions of economic necessity. Under
these circumstances, as Rancière observes,

the disenchanted opinion spreads that there isn’t much to deliberate

and that decisions make themselves, the work proper to politics simply
involving an opportune adaptability in terms of the demands of the world
marketplace and the equitable distribution of the profits and costs of this
adaptability. (Rancière 1999: viii)

The contributions to this volume seek to make sense of this situ-

ation, exploring the specific mechanisms through which the post-
political is constituted, and searching for the political possibilities
that continue to haunt the present. They engage directly with the
political theory underpinning the literature on post-politics, seeking
variously to affirm, challenge, and extend the parameters of this
 Seeds of Dystopia 7

theoretical approach, through the detailed empirical analysis of

contemporary processes of post-politicisation. In the literature on
post-politics, there is a great deal of confusion and divergence over
the precise meaning of the term. Here we provide a theoretical
introduction to post-politics, post-democracy, and the post-political,
in preparation for the much more involved debates that form the
substance of this book.
The post-political can be thought of as what Jacques Lacan would
call a Borromean knot – a set of densely intertwined registers that
constitute what we call ‘reality’. Lacan named these registers the
Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. In Lacanian terms, the post-
political can be understood as a Borromean knot comprised of
the Imaginary – the ideology of the ‘end of history’ according to
which the great ideological battles of the past have all been settled;
the Symbolic – the set of institutional mechanisms and practices
through which politics is reduced to the consensual management of
economic necessity; and the Real – the ontological displacement or
erasure of ‘the political difference’ between the established institu-
tional arrangements of a given social order, and the establishment of
that social order on an always absent ground.
In ideological (or Imaginary) terms, the post-political era began
with Francis Fukayama’s notorious proclamation of ‘the end of
history’, according to which the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the
conclusion of the long historical struggle between competing ideolo-
gies. Liberal democracy and the market economy had proved them-
selves to be the best possible basis for social organisation, and all that
remained was for the backward parts of the world to catch up with
the West (Fukayama 1992). The end of history was also declared
to be ‘the end of ideology’ and even ‘the end of politics’, ‘whereby
both senses of “end”, as a telos fulfilling itself and as an eliminating
gesture, come to coincide exactly’ (Rancière 1999: 75). Utopia, in
short, was a thing of the past:

If we are to believe the discourse of the wise, our fin de siècle is the finally
conquered age of realism. We have buried Marxism and swept aside all
utopias. We have even buried the thing that made them possible: the belief
that time carried a meaning and a promise . . . The ‘end of history’ is the
end of an era in which we believed in ‘history’, in time marching towards
a goal, towards the manifestation of a truth or the accomplishment of
an emancipation . . . The thinkers who have made it their speciality to
remind us without respite of the [twentieth] century’s horrors also explain
to us relentlessly that they all stem from one fundamental crime. The
crime is to have believed that history had a meaning and that it fell to the
world’s peoples to realize it. (Rancière 2010a: 8)
8 Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

Of course, the end of utopia is itself utopian, and the end of ideology
is itself ideological. Yet while it is easy to deride the end of history
thesis as the most transparent of ideological contrivances, it contains
an important truth. In Fredric Jameson’s words, the political horizon
of our times is defined by the fact that ‘It is easier to imagine the end
of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’ (Jameson 2003:
73). The defeat of actually existing communism signified a crisis of
the political imaginary of the Left, from which it has yet to recover.
As Žižek has observed, ‘today’s predominant form of ideological
“closure” takes the precise form of a mental block which prevents us
from imagining a fundamental social change, in the interests of a “real-
istic” and “mature” attitude’ (Žižek 2000: 324). In recent years, this
mental block has manifested itself in the inability of the Left to mount
a meaningful and sustained challenge to neoliberalism in the context
of the greatest crisis of global capitalism since the Great Depression
(Hall, Massey and Rustin 2013). Meanwhile, politicians, business
leaders, and liberal intellectuals have persisted in their insistence that,
faced with the unprecedented breakdown of the ‘free market’ system,
there is still no alternative. As banks are bailed out with public money
and the welfare state is dismantled in the name of austerity, electorates
are told that ‘We’re all in this together’, and are called upon to unite
in support of the expert managers of the global economy. An editorial
in The Economist explains the situation as follows:

In the short term, defending capitalism means, paradoxically, state inter-

vention. There is a justifiable sense of outrage amongst voters . . . that
$2.5 trillion of taxpayers’ money now has to be spent on a highly
rewarded industry. But the global bail-out is pragmatic, not ideological.
When Francois Mitterand nationalised France’s banks in 1981 he did so
because he thought the state would run them better. This time govern-
ments are buying banks (or shares in them) because they believe, rightly,
that public capital is needed to keep credit flowing. (The Economist 2008,
emphasis added)

The ‘pragmatic’ combination of socialism for the rich and austerity

for the poor has been accompanied by the continuing evisceration
of political contestation from the institutional (or Symbolic) mecha-
nisms of the global economy. In institutional terms, post-politics is
defined by the reduction of the political to the economic – the crea-
tion of a ‘welcoming business environment’, which inspires ‘investor
confidence’, and provides the economic guarantees deemed necessary
for ‘strong and stable markets’. This subordination is not purely ide-
ological, but is embodied in concrete institutional forms, including
the privatisation of central banks; the imposition of austerity on the
 Seeds of Dystopia 9

instruction of the International Monetary Fund; the subordination

of national legislation to the juridical regimes of the World Trade
Organization and other multilateral organisations; the translation
of corporate agendas into public policy through close formal and
informal cooperation with business networks; and the delegation
of numerous decision-making powers to non-state and quasi-state
institutional forms (Crouch 2004; Brand 2005; Swyngedouw 2005).
The economy is therefore increasingly insulated from even the most
limited forms of democratic accountability, even as the state increas-
ingly legitimises itself in terms of its capacity for ‘pragmatic’ and
‘responsible’ economic management:

The legitimacy of state power is thereby reinforced by the very affirma-

tion of its own impotence, of its lack of choice faced with the world-wide
necessity it is dominated by. The theme of the common will is replaced
by that of the lack of personal will, of capacity for autonomous action
that is anything more than just management of necessity. From an alleg-
edly defunct Marxism, the supposedly reigning liberalism borrows the
theme of objective necessity, identified with the constraints and caprices
of the world market. Marx’s once scandalous thesis that governments are
simple business agents for international capital is today the obvious fact
on which ‘liberals’ and ‘socialists’ agree. The absolute identification of
politics with the management of capital is no longer the shameful secret
hidden behind the ‘forms’ of democracy; it is the openly declared truth by
which our governments acquire legitimacy. (Rancière 1999: 113)

The elision of democracy with the dictates of capital has only been
further consolidated by the ongoing fallout from the global eco-
nomic crisis. Elected leaders slavishly follow the orders of banks,
bond markets, and multilateral institutions. In the cases of Greece
and Italy, they have even been deposed on the instruction of these
institutions, and replaced by ‘non-ideological’ technocrats (Rachman
2011). The political novelty of this scenario has been noted in the
pages of the Financial Times:

European democracy has a new organising assumption. Citizens may still

change their leaders from time to time, but only on the clear understand-
ing that elections do not herald a change of direction. Left or right, inside
or outside the euro, ruling elites are worshipping at the altar of austerity.
Governments are permitted a tilt here, or a shading there. None dares
challenge the catechism of fiscal rectitude. (Stephens 2012)

The situation is little different elsewhere. Around the world, not-

withstanding the protests that have flared up around Occupy, the
10 Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

Indignados, and the so-called Arab Spring, the global economic crisis
has been mobilised not to re-politicise the economy, but to further
advance its depoliticisation. We now live in a permanent state of
economic, environmental and social emergency, in which

our societies must no longer be concerned with the fight for freedom and
equality . . . but with the struggle for survival, which is prey to the slight-
est blunder. The smallest wage rise, the smallest [fluctuation] in inter-
est rates, the slightest unforeseen market reaction is, in fact, enough to
disrupt the acrobatic balance on which our societies rest and plunge the
entire planet into chaos. (Rancière 2010a: 18)

This image of a society poised above the abyss invokes the onto-
logical (or Real) dimension of the post-political. The key thinkers of
the post-political share a post-foundational ontology, according to
which there is no essential ground to any social order. In contrast to
political philosophies that ground society in a state of nature, a pri-
mordial hierarchy, or an economic base, post-foundational theorists
begin from the position that all social orders are profoundly con-
tingent, and structured to conceal their own absent ground. Just as
Heidegger distinguished between the ontic and the ontological, and
Lacan delineated reality from the Real, so these theorists distinguish
between politics and the political (Bosteels 2011: 45–9). ‘The politi-
cal difference’ (Marchart 2007) is not between politics and other
social spheres, such as civil society or the economy, but between
politics as the contingent and incomplete attempt to ground a par-
ticular set of power relations on an ultimately absent foundation,
and the political as the ineradicable presence of this absence itself,
which continually undermines the social orders constructed upon it,
and which holds open the possibility of radical change. In Marchart’s
phrase, ‘Not “everything is political”, but the absent ground/abyss of
everything is the political’ (Marchart 2007: 169).
This ontological dimension is crucial to the meaning of post-
politics. Indeed, we would suggest that many of the criticisms and
limitations of the literature on post-politics result from a failure
to adequately grasp the significance of this dimension. Orthodox
Marxists, for example, accuse the theorists of post-politics of fetish-
ising the political as a separate sphere independent of economic pro-
cesses (see for example Walker 2012). But the distinction that is being
drawn is not between politics and the economy, but between politics-
as-social order and the political as the ontological void beneath that
order – an order that includes the entirety of the ‘political economy’
with which orthodox Marxists concern themselves.
The post-political literature is also accused of conspiring in the
 Seeds of Dystopia 11

processes of post-politicisation that it claims to critique, by paint-

ing a picture of a closed world in which transformative action has
become impossible (see for example Darling 2013). This is indeed
the case for some of the secondary literature, but only to the extent
that it strips the theory of its ontological dimension, on the assump-
tion that ‘Worrying too much about the ontological status of politics
may risk causing us to overlook its everydayness’ (Gill, Johnstone
and Williams 2012). It is precisely the Real dimension of the political
which ensures the impossibility of the closure of politics, and which
implies an understanding of the post-political, not as a realised total-
ity, but as an anxiety-ridden and necessarily impossible attempt to
erase ‘the ontological instance of antagonism’ (Marchart 2007: 161).
If real politics and real democracy can only exist in the gap between
the post-political and the void that it denies, then ‘it is the lack of
understanding of “the political” in its ontological dimension which
is at the origin of our current incapacity to think in a political way’
(Mouffe 2005: 9).

Theoretical mediators: Mouffe, Rancière, Žižek

The key thinkers of post-politics share a post-foundational ontology,

a concern with the evacuation of the political, and a commitment
to radical democratisation and egalitarian emancipation. However,
their conceptualisations of post-politics, democracy, and the politi-
cal differ in significant respects, and a basic grasp of these differences
is essential for an understanding of the debates played out in this
volume. Here we will limit ourselves to a schematic presentation of
their positions. We will begin by summarising their understandings
of post-politics and the political difference, before briefly considering
their positions on the nature and possibility of radical politics today.
For Chantal Mouffe, the political is ‘the dimension of antagonism
. . . constitutive of human societies’, while politics is ‘the set of prac-
tices through which an order is created’ (Mouffe 2005: 9). Mouffe
equates ‘politics’ with the contingent construction of hegemony, and
‘the political’ with a we/they antagonism that she claims is the neces-
sary condition of all political identities (Mouffe 2005: 16–17). The
political subverts any hegemonic formation, ‘destroying its ambi-
tion to constitute a full presence . . . as an objective reality’ (Laclau
and Mouffe 1985: 127). Democracy, for Mouffe, is an institutional
arrangement in which the antagonistic confrontation between
enemies is sublimated into the agonistic engagement of adversaries
(Mouffe 2009: 551). The post-political names a hegemonic order
in which the antagonistic dimension of the political has not been
12 Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

sublimated, but repressed (Mouffe 2005: 18). The demise of social

democracy, the rise of the Third Way ‘beyond Left and Right’, and
the ‘unchallenged hegemony of neoliberalism’ are all symptomatic of
a state of affairs in which there is no longer any room for agonistic
dispute (Mouffe 2005: 35–63). But because antagonism is inherent
to society, the post-political results not in the end of history, but in
a return of the repressed, in the form of right-wing nationalisms and
religious fundamentalisms, which give expression to the antagonism
that has been eviscerated from the domain of democratic contesta-
tion (Mouffe 2005: 64–72). According to Mouffe (2009: 552), ‘it
is the lack of political channels for challenging the hegemony of
the neoliberal model of globalisation which is at the origin of the
proliferation of discourses and practices of radical negation of the
established order’.
Rancière agrees with Mouffe concerning the structure of the politi-
cal difference, but conceptualises it in terms of a tripartite division
between the political (le politique), politics (la politique), and the
police (la police). For Rancière, the relationship between ‘the politi-
cal’ and ‘the police’ is symmetrical to Mouffe’s distinction between
the political and politics. That is to say, society’s absent ground
is defined as ‘the political’, and the institutions that reproduce a
given social hierarchy are identified as ‘the police’. In contrast to
Mouffe, however, Rancière uses the word ‘politics’ to denote ‘the
meeting ground’ between the political and the police. Furthermore,
for Rancière the absent ground of the social is defined not by antago-
nism, but by equality – the unconditional equality of each and every
one of us as speaking (and hence political) beings (Rancière 1999:
16). The governmental order of the police determines the ‘distribu-
tion of the sensible’ – the systematic organisation and naturalisation
of inequality as common sense. It is structured against the equality
that it conceals, and operates through the exclusion of a part of
society that is given no part in society (Rancière 1999: 21–42; 2001:
Thesis 7).
Democracy, which for Rancière is another word for politics, is
staged whenever a part of those who have no part asserts its presence,
as the embodiment of the universal principle of equality (Rancière
1999: 99–101). Equality is to be understood as neither a utopian
longing nor a sociologically verifiable condition, but is an ontological
given, which is affirmed and given content precisely through its per-
formative staging and enacting. Politics (or democracy) is the staging
of equality that exposes a wrong, and through this, attempts to
inaugurate a new partition of the sensible. Politics therefore always
works on the police. It is the confrontation of the inegalitarian and
oligarchic logic of the police with the logic of inequality.
 Seeds of Dystopia 13

Rancière uses the concept of ‘post-democracy’ to refer to what

Mouffe calls ‘the post-political’. In contrast to Mouffe’s approach,
Rancière sees post-democracy as operating not through repression,
but through disavowal. In psychoanalytic terms, disavowal denotes a
defence mechanism based not on repressing pathological symptoms,
but on accounting for them in such a way that their traumatic dimen-
sion is diminished. For Rancière, post-democracy involves a specific
configuration of three forms of the disavowal of politics, through
which the police order seeks to neutralise the political agency of
the part of those who have no part. These are: archi-politics – the
representation of the community as an organic whole with nothing
left over (for example anti-immigrant nationalism); para-politics –
the institutionalised competition for places within an established
hierarchy (for example representative democracy); and meta-politics
– the subordination of politics to a deeper ‘essence’ (for example
‘the market economy’) (Rancière 1999: 61–93). Post-democracy is
a specific distribution of the sensible, which synthesises these forms
of disavowal under the banner of ‘consensus’. The outcome is the
eradication of democracy in the name of democracy itself:

Every politics is democratic in this precise sense: not in the sense of a

set of institutions, but in the sense of forms of expression that confront
the logic of equality with the logic of police order. It is on this basis that
we use the notion of post-democracy . . . to denote the paradox that,
in the name of democracy, emphasises the consensual practice of effac-
ing the forms of democratic action . . . It is the disappearance of the
mechanisms of appearance, of the dispute opened up by the name ‘people’
and the vacuum of their freedom. It is, in a word, the disappearance of
politics. (Rancière 1999: 101–2)

Like Mouffe, Rancière is clear that post-democracy results not in

the smooth order of rational consensus, but in the resurgence of iden-
tity politics and violent fundamentalisms (Rancière 1999: 124–5).
For Rancière, however, this is not an expression of an ineradicable
friend/enemy antagonism, but is a fragmented, inarticulate eruption
of the demand for equality, which cannot be articulated in universal
terms within the post-democratic order (Rancière 1999: 118–19).
Žižek follows Rancière in framing the political difference in terms
of politics and the police. Drawing on Lacan, however, Žižek claims
that Rancière ‘fetishizes the order of police’, by failing to take into
account the violence on which it is founded, and the obscene enjoy-
ment of power, which is the underside of its meticulous distribu-
tions of the sensible (Žižek 1999: 187, 282). Žižek also differs from
Mouffe, to the extent that he identifies a historically specific form of
14 Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

class struggle, rather than a transhistorical antagonism, as the void

that prevents the totalisation of society. For Žižek, class is to be
understood not in sociological terms, but as a rupture in the fabric
of capitalist society that perpetually undermines any attempt at unity
or coherence (Žižek 1991: 100). It is this rupture that is sutured by
contemporary modalities of depoliticisation.
In his account of depoliticisation, Žižek adopts Rancière’s three
forms of disavowal, but adds a fourth, which he calls ‘ultra-politics’
(Žižek 1999: 220–35). Ultra-politics, as embodied in the so-called
‘War on Terror’, establishes an absolute distinction between ‘us’
and ‘them’, denying any shared symbolic space in which to engage
on terms other than violence. Žižek augments these four forms of
disavowal with his concept of ‘post-politics’. Whereas for Mouffe
the post-political is defined by repression, and for Rancière post-
democracy is a specific form of disavowal, Žižek distinguishes post-
politics from other forms of depoliticisation on the basis that it
operates not through repression or disavowal but through foreclosure
– the total erasure of the political from the Symbolic. The outcome of
foreclosure is not ‘a truncated symbolic order’, but a seemingly com-
plete symbolic order, which ‘lacks the inscription of its lack’ (Žižek
2008: xii). Foreclosure, it should be noted, is the form of denegation
peculiar to psychosis. It is this shift from disavowal to foreclosure –
from a neurotic to a psychotic ideological structure – which defines
post-politics as a modality of depoliticisation, and which explains the
violence that erupts within it:

Today, however, we are dealing with another form of the denegation of

the political, postmodern post-politics, which no longer merely represses
the political, trying to contain and pacify the ‘returns of the repressed’,
but much more effectively ‘forecloses’ it . . . Post-politics emphasises the
need to leave old ideological divisions behind and confront new issues,
armed with the necessary expert knowledge and free deliberation that
takes people’s concrete needs and demands into account . . . [However,]
the political (the space of litigation in which the excluded can protest the
wrong/injustice done to them) foreclosed from the Symbolic returns in
the Real . . . in thoroughly ‘irrational’ excessive outbursts of violence . . .
These violent passages à l’acte bear witness to some underlying antago-
nism that can no longer be formulated in properly political terms. (Žižek
1999: 236–7, 243)

To summarise the respective positions of Mouffe, Rancière, and

Žižek, we can say that Mouffe is concerned with the post-political as
the repression of antagonism, Rancière with post-democracy as the
disavowal of equality, and Žižek with post-politics as the foreclosure
 Seeds of Dystopia 15

of class struggle. These divergent understandings of the nature of

post-politics imply very different political projects. For Mouffe, the
post-political evisceration of agonistic dispute from the public sphere
threatens an escalation of violent antagonisms, and must be chal-
lenged by a reanimation of social democracy, a repoliticisation of
the division between Left and Right, and a radical democracy of
agonistic pluralism (Mouffe 2005: 21–3, 119). She is opposed to ‘the
traditional conception of revolutionary politics’, and is focused not
on the overthrow of liberal democracy, but on ensuring that liberal
democracy realises its unfulfilled potential (Mouffe 2005: 51–3).
Žižek is highly critical of this form of ‘radical democracy’, arguing
that it participates in the foreclosure of class struggle by limiting
itself to ‘palliative damage-control measures within the global capi-
talist framework’ (Žižek 2000: 321). In her call for a modification
of the police order designed to prevent the emergence of antago-
nism, Mouffe also differs from Rancière, who is committed to the
antagonistic disruption of the police order by the staging of equality
by those excluded from it. For Žižek and Rancière, as we have seen,
the ontological dimension of the political difference is not structured
by antagonism in the abstract, but by class struggle and equality
respectively. They affirm the political potential of this dimension,
and therefore ground their politics in the antagonistic moment that
Mouffe seeks to avoid. Rancière defines this as the moment of ‘dis-
sensus: the putting of two worlds in one and the same world’, in
which a part of those who have no part presents itself as a singular
embodiment of universality (Rancière 2010b: 69). For Žižek, the
political moment is defined by an ‘Act’. Against the post-political
reduction of possibility to reality, an Act realises the impossible, by
changing ‘the very parameters of what is considered possible in the
existing constellation’ (Žižek 1999: 237).
According to Rancière, the political moment ‘consists above all in
the act of revoking the law of birth and wealth; in affirming the pure
contingency whereby individuals come to find themselves in this or
that place; in the attempt to build a common world on the basis of
that sole contingency’ (Rancière 2010a: 6). Žižek would endorse the
egalitarian spirit of this statement, but has criticised Rancière for his
singular commitment to the spontaneous uprisings of the oppressed,
which he sees as politically ineffective (Žižek 1999: 281). For Žižek,
‘because the depoliticized economy is the “fundamental fantasy” of
postmodern politics, a properly political act would necessarily entail
the repoliticization of the economy’ (Žižek 1999: 432). In collabora-
tion with Alain Badiou, Žižek has sought to rehabilitate ‘the idea of
communism’ (Badiou 2010; Douzinas and Žižek 2010; Žižek 2013),
insisting that ‘[t]he only true question today is . . . does today’s
16 Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

global capitalism contain antagonisms powerful enough to prevent

its indefinite reproduction?’ (Žižek 2010: 212).
Rancière, however, is strictly opposed to any return to the meta-
politics of orthodox Marxism, which he accuses of subordinating
politics to economic and historical laws, and of constructing new
forms of inequality on the basis of claims to exclusive knowledge
of these laws (Rancière 1999: 81–91). Such laws do not exist for
Rancière, and while an anti-capitalist politics is necessary in his
opinion, it cannot be derived from the internal dynamics of the
capitalist system, but ‘must be radically heterogeneous to the logic
of capitalism and the materiality of the capitalist world’ (Rancière
2010b: 82–3). For Rancière, communism is just another name for
democracy, and ‘Being . . . communists means being thinkers and
actors of the unconditional equality of anybody and everybody’
(Rancière 2010b: 82). We return to the meaning of communism in
the Conclusion of this book, in which we also engage with the work
of Alain Badiou, as a fourth important thinker of the political.

The post-political and its discontents

The contributions to this book build on the theoretical approaches

sketched here, through the exploration of specific sites of post-
politicisation. The aim throughout is threefold. First, to critically
engage with the theoretical literature on the post-political, mobilis-
ing it as a tool of critique, and developing it in relation to the com-
plexities of actually existing processes of depoliticisation. Second, to
identify the discourses and practices through which the post-political
is constructed in diverse spheres of reality, in order to reveal the
contingency, fragility, and incompleteness of post-politics, as well
as exposing its imaginaries, its strategies, and its effects. Third, to
search for the spectres of radical politics that continue to haunt the
post-political world, exploring their emancipatory potentialities, and
confronting their political limitations.
There is no consensus among the contributions here. Indeed, the
book can be read as an irruption of dissensus, not only against the
post-political police order, but also against any attempt to police
the conceptual terrain of its critique. Many of our contributors are
convinced of the critical value of the theoretical literature on post-
politics, and seek to put it to use, identifying its tensions and weak-
nesses, while modifying and extending it in relation to a complex and
ever-changing reality. But some are highly critical of this literature,
drawing on specific cases of depoliticisation and repoliticisation to
argue that the conceptual apparatus of post-politics is inadequate to
 Seeds of Dystopia 17

the critical analysis of our political predicament. This is as it should

be. After all, what could be more absurd than a critique of post-
politics in which everyone agreed?
The book is divided into two parts. Part I explores contemporary
spaces of depoliticisation, while Part II focuses on the return of the
political. Part I begins with a triptych of cases of the post-political
in the fields of planning, ecology, and development. Mike Raco pro-
vides a fine-grained analysis of planning reform and public-private
partnerships in the UK, as an example of broader processes of
post-politicisation, which operate through ‘isolating and contrac-
tualising key dimensions of decision-making and removing them
from the terrain of formal politics’. Larry Reynolds and Bronislaw
Szersynski then discuss the post-politics of agricultural biotechnol-
ogy. They trace a dialectic of depoliticisation and repoliticisation
through which technology and science have been mobilised in the
contested regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in
the European Union. In her chapter, Sangeeta Kamat argues that
post-politics is not restricted to ‘the West’, but is the dominant politi-
cal modality of contemporary international development. Kamat
critiques the ways in which seemingly democratising discourses of
empowerment, inclusion and participation are mobilised within
the new development architecture. Drawing on research in Andhra
Pradesh, India, she shows how the formally democratic practices
of women’s self-help groups have failed to challenge entrenched
relations of domination.
The next four chapters engage more critically with the post-
political approach, questioning its political limitations and expand-
ing its theoretical parameters. Nicolas Van Puymbroeck and Stijn
Oosterlynck criticise the literature on post-politics for applying ‘the
notion of the “post-political condition” as a one-size-fits-all label
to describe (rather than explain) currently dominant political forms
associated with global capitalism and the neoliberal order’. Drawing
on the work of Rancière, Puymbroeck and Oosterlynck develop a
more nuanced conceptual approach, which they put to work in an
exploration of the relationship between liberal multiculturalism and
racist ultra-politics. Japhy Wilson then assesses the emergent devel-
opment paradigm of ‘philanthrocapitalism’. Building on Žižek’s
work on jouissance, Wilson uses the case of philanthrocapitalism
to argue that the post-political operates not only through discursive
and institutional mechanisms, but also through the mobilisation of
disavowed forms of enjoyment. In his chapter, Bülent Diken draws
on Žižek, Agamben, Badiou, and Marx, in an exploration of the
relationship between post-politics, religion, and violence. Diken con-
ceptualises post-politics as a form of ‘economic theology’, and argues
18 Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw

that ‘despite seeking to expel violence from its system of values at

a surface level, post-politics itself produces a paradoxical, ecstatic
violence’. The section concludes with Ingolfur Blühdorn’s stark
assessment of the depoliticisation of contemporary environmental
governance, which he conceptualises as a ‘technocratic politics of
unsustainability’. Blühdorn is highly critical of the literature on post-
politics, arguing that it indulges in a romantic attachment to radical
political transformation, which prevents the Left from confronting
the true gravity of the ecological crisis.
Part II begins with Erik Swyngedouw’s account of the prolif-
eration of insurgencies across the world’s major cities since 2011.
Swyngedouw argues that the spectres of the political immanent in
these rebellions pose a series of theoretical and practical questions
that require urgent attention. His contribution considers what to
think and do now. Is there further thought and practice possible
after the squares have been cleared, the tents have been broken up,
the energies have been dissipated, and everyday life has resumed its
routine practices? Where and how can fidelity to the emancipatory
Idea immanent in these insurrectional events be nurtured and sus-
tained? In her chapter, Wendy Larner takes issue with Swyngedouw,
and with the post-political approach in general. Larner argues that
this approach is politically disempowering, to the extent that it
denies the political status of less explosive forms of contestation.
Drawing on her work with a ‘radical social enterprise’ in the city of
Bristol in the UK, Larner claims that ‘it is out of such incomplete,
paradoxical, and compromised experiments . . . that new political
formations will emerge’. Shifting from the micro-politics of grass-
roots urban renewal to the geopolitical domain of global governance,
Hans-Martin Jaeger makes a similar argument for the political status
of a seemingly limited project. Through a critical engagement with
the work of Mouffe, Rancière, and Foucault, Jaeger contrasts two
visions of world order – the ‘cosmopolitan’ project of the EU and
the ‘multipolarity’ of the ‘BRICS’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and
South Africa). He argues that despite being integral to the global
police order, the BRICS are opening a space of dissensus within it, by
calling international inequalities into question.
The final four chapters return to the wave of protests and upris-
ings that swept across the world in 2011. In his contribution, Alex
Loftus asks what the literature on post-politics can contribute to
our understanding of these events. Building on Bosteels’ critique of
the ‘speculative leftism’ of post-foundational theory, Loftus chal-
lenges Laclau and Mouffe’s appropriation of Gramsci’s concept of
hegemony, arguing that Gramsci’s original Marxist project offers
a more fruitful basis for radical critique. Maria Kaika and Lazaros
 Seeds of Dystopia 19

Karaliotas then seek to demonstrate the critical utility of the post-

politics literature, though an ethnographic analysis of anti-auster-
ity protests in Syntagma Square in Athens. Drawing primarily on
Rancière, they show how the protests became divided, the ‘upper
square’ degenerating into nationalist populism, while the ‘collective
self-management of the “lower square” conveyed valuable new ele-
ments for democratic politics’. In her analysis of anti-austerity pro-
tests around the world, Jodi Dean notes the tendency of protesters
to frame their struggles in post-political terms, suggesting that post-
politics is primarily a condition, not of the Right, but of the Left, and
that ‘the real political problem today is that the left accepts capital-
ism.’ In a detailed critique of the Occupy Wall Street protests in
New York’s Zucotti Park, Dean claims that their concern with direct
democracy prevented the realisation of their communist potential. In
the final chapter, Andy Merrifield provides a freewheeling overview
of the possibilities for militant politics in our time. Comparing the
post-political condition to Kafka’s The Castle, Merrifield argues
that attempts to either storm or escape the castle are equally futile,
and that radical politics must retain a fidelity to the conviction that
‘underneath everything we see, everything we know, even beyond
what we can currently imagine, there lies another reality, one uniting
all hitherto ununited aspects of reality, all hitherto ununited social
movements.’ In the Conclusion, we reflect on the lessons to be drawn
concerning the nature of our political predicament, in which radical
change has never seemed less possible, yet has never been more
necessary.

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