Loss as Resistance; Towards a Hermeneutic of Revolution (Radical Notes - 6)

Loss is not a central conceptual figure in the Marxist inventory of concepts and practices. Or, so it is usually believed. In this monograph the author argues against both the communistological proponents and poststructuralist detractors of the Marxist science of working-class politics to assert that loss is the essential point of departure for any revolutionary politics as the phenomenon and discursive concept of loss is intrinsic to capitalism. He, however, contends that loss, as far as working-class politics is concerned, must be freed from its univocal articulation by the symbolic logic of capital so that it becomes its own singular ground reconstituted as resistance. Through an unorthodox Marxist re-reading of an eclectic motley of works of literature, art, cinema, psychoanalysis and philosophy, the author attempts to show how loss is posited as resistance, either actively or as an immanent tendency, by the texts under discussion. This essay is a plea for envisaging Marxist theory as a hermeneutic of revolution, thereby returning its idealised, philosophical form to its performative material origin.