Presented at the Association for Political Theory, October 2014. Full paper.

For many post-Marxists, the political is a vitally important category and it is established, and must be defended, by maintaining the specificity of the political, by preventing its colonization by other categories. The authors I have in mind here include Alain Badiou, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Jacques Rancière, as well as more recent work by Jodi Dean and Peter Hallward. In very general terms, all these authors share a concern with something encroaching on the political, whether that is a theoretical encroachment of Marxist economic determinism, or a practical encroachment of neoliberal marketisation. In either case, these authors assert the separateness of the political as a way of ensuring a space for human agency against the realm of necessity.

The problem is that this insistence on the separateness of the political leads to a narrow and abstract understanding of politics, which cuts politics of from the world in which it is supposed to act. Instead of all the complex considerations we encounter when we engage in political activity, these approaches reduce politics to some formal criteria, such as ‘contestation’ or ‘the incompleteness of the social’. It is because of this reductionism that I refer to approaches to the political which concentrate on its separateness as ‘austere’. In this paper, I attempt to find what we might call an ‘anti-austerity’ conception of politics. A turn to the sensuous or phenomenological, I argue, helps us to understand the richness of politics, that is to say, the multiple varying factors that come together to form the space in which we can take political action.