ABSTRACT

One can, however, find plenty of other Marxists willing to challenge the idea that they are committed to reducing the political to a purely epiphenomenal status. Thus Stathis Kouvelakis, writing from a standpoint otherwise sympathetic to those of Jameson and Zˇizˇek, argues: “Rather than an Achilles heel, or the sign of a troubling lacuna, politics is, in my opinion, Marx’s strong point, the point where his work is at its most open and innovative” (Kouvelakis 2003: 351). Kouvelakis bases his view on an interpretation of the development of the young Marx, but those sharing his position can point to the later trajectory of Marxist thought, notably in the writings of Lenin and Gramsci. As Daniel Bensaïd puts it:

Lenin was one of the first to conceive the specificity of the political field as a play of transfigured powers and social antagonisms, translated into a language

of its own, full of displacements, of condensations and of revealing slips of the tongue.