The industrial working class was fragmented, while formerly auxiliary subaltern sectors made their voice heard independently. The outcome was the situation of indeterminacy we are still in today, which is prompting more sophisticated theoretical accounts.

Rancière proposes an aetiology of the degeneration to which politics is liable. It is sometimes transformed into ‘archi-politics’.

According to Žižek, the subject is a ‘vanishing mediator’.39 This concept is adopted from Jameson. In the latter it refers to any phenomenon that allows another phenomenon to emerge and disappears once it has performed that task.

he argues that the form of domination which obtains in the economic sphere – exploitation – possesses primacy over other forms of oppression. Together with his desire to rehabilitate the Cartesian subject, this is a second thesis which sees the philosopher oppose the reigning doxa in ‘western academia’.

Žižek adopts the Marxist argument of ‘reification’ developed, in particular, by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1923).