[...] the 'working class' is ultimately an empirical category designating a part of society (wage workers), while the proletariat is more a formal category designing the 'part of no-part' of the social body, the point of its symptomal torsion or, as Marx put it, the un-reason within reason--the rational structure of asociety. [...]

the Paulinian idea of passing from Law to love

The difference between liberalism and the radical Left is that, although they refer to the same three elements (the liberal centre, the populist Right, and the radical Left), they locate them in a different topology: for the liberal centre, the radical Left and Right are two forms of the same 'totalitarian' excess, while for the Left, the only true alternative is the one between itself and the liberal mainstream, with the populist 'radical' Right as nothing but the symptom of liberalism's inability to deal with the Leftist threat. When we hear today's politicians or ideologists offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, and triumphantly asking a (purely rhetorical) question 'Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? Do you want everyone who mocks religion to be punished by death?', what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer--who would ever want that? The problem is that such a simplistic liberal universalism lost its innocence long ago. This is why, for a true Leftist, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict--a vicious cycle of two poles generating and presupposing each other. One should take a Hegelian step back and question the very measure from which fundamentalism appears in all its horror. [...]

One should take a Hegelian step back and question the very measure from which fundamentalism appears in all its horror.

don't the recent vicissitudes of Muslim fundamentalism confirm Walter Benjamin's old insight that 'every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution'?

This is why every revolution has to be repeated. It is only after the first enthusiastic unity disintegrates that true universality can be formulated, a universality no longer sustained by imaginary illusions. It is only after the initial unity of the people falls apart that the real work begins, the hard work of assuming all the implications of the struggle for an egalitarian and just society. It is not enough simply to get rid of the tyrant; the society which gave birth to the tyrant has to be thoroughly transformed. [...]

No wonder that genuine revolutionary moments are so rare: no teleology guarantees them; they hinge on whether there is a political agent able to seize a (contingent, unpredictable) opening.

The paradox is that, precisely because it lacks democratic legitimacy, an authoritarian regime can sometimes be more responsible towards its subjects than one that was democratically elected: since it lacks democratic legitimacy, it has to legitimize itself by providing services to the citizens, with the underlying reasoning, 'True, we are not democratically elected, but as such, since we do not have to play the game of striving for cheap popularity, we can focus on citizens' real needs.' A democratically elected government, on the contrary, can fully exert its power for the narrow private interests of its members; they already have the legitimacy provided by elections, so they don't need any further legitimization and can feel safe doing what they want--they can say to those who complain, 'You elected us, now it's too late.'

it is also an 'ontological' struggle, a struggle which concerns the thing itself, a struggle that goes on in the very heart of the protests themselves

Global capitalism tends to reduce the commons to res nullius which in Roman law designates anything that can be owned [...] but which is not yet the object of the rights of any specific subject--such things are considered ownerless property, 'free to be owned'.

there is no analytic value in blaming neoliberalism for our particular woes: today's world order is a concrete totality within which specific situations ask for specific acts

[...] the great lesson of state socialism is that the direct abolition of private property and market-regulated exchange without concrete forms of social regulation of the process of production necessarily resuscitates relations of servitude and domination. If we merely abolish the market (inclusive of market exploitation) without replacing it with a proper form of Communist organization of production and exchange, domination returns with a vengeance, and with it direct exploitation.

the pure lawless Real resists symbolic grasp, so that we should always be aware that our attempts to conceptualize it are mere semblances, defensive elucubrations

rejection of the eschatological notion of the Future which Marxism inherited from the Christian tradition

[...] Perhaps the Left should learn fully to assume the basic 'alienation' of the historical process: we cannot control the consequences of our acts--not because we are just puppets in the hand of some secret Master or Fate which pulls the strings, but for precisely the opposite reason: there is no big Other, no agent of total accountability that can take into account the consequences of our own acts. This acceptance of 'alienation' in no way entails a cynical distance; it implies a fully engaged position aware of the risks involved--there is no higher historical Necessity whose instruments we are and which guarantees the final outcome of our interventions. From this standpoint, our despair at the present deadlock appears in a new light: we have to renounce the very eschatological scheme which underlies our despair. There will never be a Left that magically transforms confused revolts and protests into one big consistent Project of Salvation; all we have is our activity, open to all the risks of contingent history. [...]

the most dangerous place to be at the time of the terrible 1930s purges in the Soviet Union was at the top of the nomenklatura