The Idea of the Party
Abstract
Recent scholarship on the idea of communism leads to questions of organization and what Michael Hardt refers to as “the problem of leadership.” Beyond the critical assessment of the crises of contemporary capitalism, and beyond the existing social democratic solutions, a psychoanalytically-informed Žižekian notion of the party offers solutions to ultra-left theories of networked horizontalism as well as versions of the party that repeat the problems of communist modernism. If the context of climate change, economic inequality and political authoritarianism require that we reconsider “what is to be done” about global neoliberal capitalism, then the idea of the political party, understood in terms of Jacques Lacan’s Discourse of the Analyst, can provisionally occupy the place of a neutral knowledge of the objective demands of history that is premised on the experiences of the emancipatory left. Like the Analyst, the party does not stand in for or represent the people. However, through the fetishistic aspect of representation, as opposed to materially or ontologically-grounded guarantees for political power, the party registers a minimal difference from a technocratic University Discourse and an ultra-left Discourse of the Hysteric.
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