TY - JOUR

T1 - Resisting foundations

T2 - Politics between determinate negation and the ultimate double bind

AU - Schneider, Nicolas

PY - 2025/2/18

Y1 - 2025/2/18

N2 - This article develops a critique of the post-foundationalist conception of politics put forward by Oliver Marchart. Confronting the depoliticizations that follow from both the foundationalist insistence on transhistorical foundations and the anti-foundationalist rejection of all foundations as fictions, post-foundationalism casts resistance as determinate negation of concrete political institutions rather than as opposition to phantasmatic totalities. I argue that this precludes the possibility to consider phantasmatic referents (be they divine right, natural law, the nation or the demos) as neither transhistorical/fictional nor exclusively political but to interpret them in terms of a conflict between competing modes of presencing. I elucidate this claim with reference to the work of Reiner Schürmann, which Marchart introduces as an exponent of post-foundationalism but which is better grasped as outlining a ‘para-foundational’ view. In focusing on the ultimate double bind that subtends foundations, Schürmann affords a more comprehensive perspective on the life and afterlife of the Western political and philosophical tradition.

AB - This article develops a critique of the post-foundationalist conception of politics put forward by Oliver Marchart. Confronting the depoliticizations that follow from both the foundationalist insistence on transhistorical foundations and the anti-foundationalist rejection of all foundations as fictions, post-foundationalism casts resistance as determinate negation of concrete political institutions rather than as opposition to phantasmatic totalities. I argue that this precludes the possibility to consider phantasmatic referents (be they divine right, natural law, the nation or the demos) as neither transhistorical/fictional nor exclusively political but to interpret them in terms of a conflict between competing modes of presencing. I elucidate this claim with reference to the work of Reiner Schürmann, which Marchart introduces as an exponent of post-foundationalism but which is better grasped as outlining a ‘para-foundational’ view. In focusing on the ultimate double bind that subtends foundations, Schürmann affords a more comprehensive perspective on the life and afterlife of the Western political and philosophical tradition.

KW - Politics

KW - post-foundationalism

KW - resistance

KW - determination

KW - antagonism

KW - phantasm

KW - universal

KW - singular

KW - Rainer Schürmann

KW - Oliver Marchart

U2 - 10.1177/01914537241308104

DO - 10.1177/01914537241308104

M3 - Journal articles

JO - Philosophy and Social Criticism

JF - Philosophy and Social Criticism

SN - 0191-4537

ER -