ABSTRACT

This chapter examines some of the foundational concepts and arguments in postmarxist theory. It considers the postmarxist concepts of antagonism and equivalence. Most importantly, both antagonism and equivalence are political processes operating upon social relations to produce new sets of meaning. Hegemony in postmarxism represents the movement from commonsense as particularity to good sense as universality and as such defines the very terrain upon which a political relation is enabled and the social is constituted. An empty signifier is effectively a signifier without any specific and/or stable signified, where signifier refers to the representation or name of the thing and the signified refers to the meaning or content attached to the thing. Most importantly, an empty signifier, even one that becomes community, cannot and will not have or produce a signifier of its own and with its own signified.