The Concept of the Political In the Post-Althusserian Paradigm

The French thinker Louis Althusser is known primarily as a founder of Structural Marxism - a philosophical trend that originated in the 60s and 70s of the 20th century and based on the new interpretation of Marx's theory. This approach calls into question the lack of independent status of the political within the Marxist intellectual tradition, which was often expressed in the economic interpretation of any political process. In addition, Althusser was also the founder of his own scientific school, the influence of which was experienced by many key representatives of modern political philosophy. The purpose of this research is to characterize the evolution of the post-Althusserian political philosophy on the basis of comparing the ideas of some of its representatives with the source texts of Althusser. The author of the article, relying on the hermeneutical method of P. Riker, tries to build a general genealogy of various trends of post-Althusserianism, analyzing the works of such thinkers as E. Balibar, A. Negri, J. Ranciere, A. Badiou, E. Laclau, and Ch. Mouffe. The study reveals that the most significant differences between the approaches of these authors are in their original interpretations of policy and the political as fundamental concepts of political philosophy. Based on a comparative analysis, the author of the article identifies three key directions of modern post-Althusserianism and comes to the conclusion that their representatives rely on Althusser's works belonging to different periods of his oeuvre. Further divergence in interpretation of the Althusserian legacy occurred under the influence of other directions of socio-political philosophy, including Workerism (or Operaismo), theories of G. Deleuze, A. Gramsci, and C. Schmitt. Eventually, all this has led to the formation of various approaches to the definition of the political in the post-Althusserian paradigm.