Dalla critica dell’economia politica alla critica della politica: Althusser, Luporini, Laclau e il “political turn” del pensiero critico contemporaneo

Abstract

The post-marxism of Ernesto Laclau has a prehistory. One of the most relevant genealogical lines, as important at least as the wittgensteinian and derridean lines, is the link with the philosophy of Louis Althusser. Althusser’s reformulation of the statute of the political in its relationship with the economic sphere, during the ’60’s and the 70’s, is recognized and discussed in Italy by Cesare Luporini: some notes from his copies of Althusser’s Pour Marx and his indirect answer to Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses are relevant to an analysis of this dialogue. Laclau in the 80’s increased the separation, opened by Althusser, with the Marxist concept of politics, from the notion of the economic sphere as a “last instance”, to an autonomy of politics that establishes the basis, in a common direction with other philosophical traditions, for the “political turn” of contemporary radical thought.