HEGEMONY AND SOCIAL AUTONOMY IN RADICAL DEMOCRATIC THEORY

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the content of the radical theory of democracy, represented by two directions – hegemony and social autonomy. The key ideas of these two directions, their specificity and limitations are analyzed. It is proved that the first approach confirms the need for a unitary political subject, even if it is post-fundamental (E. Laclau, S. Mouffe), and the second justifies the need for social autonomy without going beyond it (J. Deleuze). The opinion is substantiated that the theory of radical democracy became a reaction to the crisis of representative democracy. A unitary entity is capable of creating policies that unite differences. Due to the lack of an objective synthesis, there is a need to return to unity in a strategic way. The aporia of representation is emphasized by the Lacanian linguistic approach to the process of subject construction. The Lacanian subject is constitutively decentralized and relational. Representation is constituted not only through the exclusion of something, but, more radically, it is constituted on the “impossibility of representation”, which ceaselessly reopens the territory for the next hegemonic encounter. The radicalism of democracy arises paradoxically due to the constitutive lack of roots, due to the structural gap between the representation of the Whole and the Real conflict multiplicity. The radical democratic theory of hegemony is entirely focused on the separation of politics from the political: its center is the question of the political and its constitution, not the plan of technique and practice of service. Therefore, the logic of the political is consciously autonomous from the social. J. Deleuze leads to philosophical radicalism, a specific feature of radical-democratic thought, which refers to the living order – creation, process and event, and as such cannot be separated from existence. His ontology escapes the pressure of molar power and its representative logic, passing from the field of negation, which repeats in reverse what it negates.