Postscript: Communist Subjectivity and the Politics of Collectiversalism

Abstract

This article begins by acknowledging the legacy of both the French and the Russian Revolution in establishing collectivity as the core element of revolutionary process par excellence. Nevertheless and as the paper argues, both “the people” and “the party” as paradigmatic collectivities failed to implement the totality of their goals due to the fact that in the course of the revolutions they instantiated, those collectives were universalized and as such they forfeited their collective, diverse character and fell back to become mere supra-individual entities. Though this can be easily attributed to adhering to a notion of subjectivity that bestows the subject with a metaphysically grounded revolutionary agency, the decentering of the subject that was pursued in the aftermath of May ’68 as a remedy to this problematic is equally insufficient since as soon as there is no subject there is no revolutionary subject—and if there is no revolutionary subject, there is no revolution. With this as backbone, the paper argues that an alternative understanding of the subject as a socially constructed collective subjectivity can serve as an alternative to this conundrum and can be traced back to Marx’ understanding of the subject as being in its “individual existence […] at the same time a social being.” By taking into account similar notions to be found in Judith Butler, intersectionality studies and Jean-Luc Nancy the paper substantiates the notion of a communist, collective subjectivity that becomes capable to engage in collective actions due to its social-ontological production as a collective. The last part is dedicated to the practices that are to be derived from such an understanding of subjectivity and how the collective agency of this subjectivity can obviate the impasses of both the universal-idealist and the hollowed-decentered subject.