The article aims to study the usages of the “people” as a critical idea in the texts of two contemporary radical political philosophers: Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. The author’s intention is not so much to point out the divergence between them, rather it is to grasp a common trend imposing the figure of the “people” as a main subject of the political and as a source of a desired, but hardly conceivable social change. The strong appeal to an epochal (...) rupture, yet unsupported by any utopia, could be considered as a double crisis—of the institutions of liberal democracy as well as of the critical imagination itself. (shrink)

The article is dedicated to the pragmatic social critique as one of the most influential patterns of contemporary social critique. It is focused on the evolution of Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology of the critique, which initially refused to play an overtly critical role and restricted itself to reconstructing the modalities of critique social actors recourse to in their everyday practices. In his most recent publication, however, Boltanski seems to return to Pierre Bourdieu’s definition of sociology as a critical sociology. According (...) to Boltanski, the critical vocation of sociology is supposed to answer the increasing critical deficit that social actors experience in the context of contemporary societies with their complex forms of domination.The aim of our study is to make this two-sided transformation comprehensible by putting into question the underlying methodological and political arguments. The pragmatic sociology seems methodologically more convincing but politically weaker than Bourdieu’s critical sociology. Moreover, it seems more legitimate but less efficient in its critical effects. How could this dilemma of social critique opposing requirements of legitimacy and requirements of efficiency be solved? (shrink)

The article aims at revealing the historical reinterpretations of one of social sciences’ key concepts, namely that of ideology. Referring to the analyses of Étienne Balibar and Jacques Derrida, it tries, firstly, to clarify the main moments of the Marxian concept of ideology. In Karl Marx’s view ideology is an expression of the social deformations of consciousness in class divided bourgeois society, while in the works of his disciples, among others Louis Althusser, the ideological phenomenon is generalized and conceived of (...) as a basic principle of all human practice and as a necessary condition for the social integration of individuals. Moving still further form Marx, Pierre Bourdieu deepens Louis Althusser’s line of interpretation and abandons the very concept of ideology substituting for it the concepts of “doxa,” which does not bind human sociality to consciousness, but to corporeal dispositions. Unlike ideology, doxa is not just an effect of an already constituted social reality, but rather a principle of its constitution, and, therefore, a principle of constitution of social domination as well. (shrink)

This article aims to study the present-day disarray of radical social critique, as represented by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, which lacks reliable mainstays in contemporary societies and therefore resorts to religion in order to justify the universality of its revolutionary project. Emphasizing the opposition between particularity and universality, both Badiou and Žižek reject religion as a cultural particularity, attempting at the same time to discover in religion the symbolic codifications of the universal experience of a radical social change. Precisely (...) this is the task of Alain Badiou’s book on Saint Paul, which focuses on religious events such as the Resurrection and religious concepts such as grace. However, as the article tries to point out, this recourse to religion is certainly not innocuous, insofar as the desired radicality of social critique implies dogmatism, traditionalism and a hidden appeal to violence. (shrink)