Gramsci and the political
From the state as ‘metaphysical event’ to hegemony as ‘philosophical fact’

Peter Thomas

One of the forms in which the waves of protests against the ‘new world order’ in the 1990s and, particularly, the varied political and social movements of the new millennium have been registered in political philosophy has been in a renewed interest in the nature of ‘the political’ and its relationship with ‘politics’. Even and especially in their hesitancies, weaknesses and defeats, these movements have prompted debate over the coordinates necessary to define a realistic leftist political project today. In turn, these discussions have reopened, at least for a significant ‘minoritarian’ current, the question of the contribution that philosophical practice can make to projects of political emancipation.

The return of ‘the political’

Schematically, we can distinguish between at least two broad ‘camps’ or approaches to the question of the nature of ‘the political’ operative in contemporary leftist political philosophy. One current – strengthened by its intersection with the revival of normativity in mainstream philosophy – has sought to formalize the relationship between ‘politics’ and a particular concept of ‘the political’ in a foundational sense, with the latter providing the ground or origin for the former. Determining the nature of the political is then seen as the sine qua non for the elaboration of political practice, precisely because politics is represented as but the conjunctural instantiation of a structure of ‘the political’ that necessarily and always exceeds it. While by no means limited to it, the rediscovery of the figure of Carl Schmitt by leftist political philosophers (particularly in the anglophone world) has perhaps been emblematic of this initiative.1 For not so well disguised ‘Platonizing’ theories such as Schmitt’s and its latter-day derivatives, ‘the political’ is not produced, constituted or even repressed by politics; rather, it is productive and constituting of it, preceding it in both a temporal and logical sense. In this perspective, ‘the political’ denotes an autonomous and irreducible realm of human experience whose basic structures and logic are distinct from other equally autonomous and irreducible realms: ‘the social’, ‘the economic’, ‘the aesthetic’ and so forth. Thus, just as any particular social practice participates in the ‘logic’ of the social, so any particular political act must participate in and finds its meaning within the logic of ‘the political’.2

Whatever the claims sometimes made regarding its radical gritty realism, the Schmittian concept of the political in reality participates in one of the most venerable illusions of the Western metaphysical tradition: namely, the dogmatic assertion of a moment that provides the essence for the contingent events that are determined by it. Political philosophy, as the specific form of philosophy that thinks the political (and as distinct from modern political science, which can only analyse ‘mere’ politics), claims to have a privileged access to this moment, as the art of symptomatically reading the traces of the political whose nature is precisely to remain forever concealed as an essence within the mundanity of politics or concrete political activity. The claim, however, is of course tautological: in so far as this concept of the political is itself already a metaphysical construction, a certain type of metaphysical philosophy cannot but have privileged access to it, in a relationship of mutual confirmation. What remains unthought in this entirely traditional approach is both the production of the conceptual space of the political within philosophy and the constitution of philosophy itself, the material forms in which the political achieves its hegemony over politics and philosophy asserts its mastery of both.

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