On the final (im-)possibility of resistance, progress and avant-garde

Abstract

The category of political resp. artistic avant-garde – as being progressive, sectarian and dogmatic – is under assault. However, there is no emancipatory politics feasible without any Jacobin element. In order to develop a post-avant-garde (as opposed to both avant-garde and non-avant-garde) democratic strategy everything depends on our ability to establish the paradoxes of a non-teleological progressivism, an empty and relative universalism and an asymmetric particularism. This search for a political stand, which has not yet lost any idea of the New as the empty signifier of (Non-)Order, may lead us to what Laclau and Mouffe have called »radical and plural democracy«. Such hegemonic pluralism might be the alternative to muddy strategical pragma (Lenin), clean messianic theory (popularized Derrida) and po-mo happy dispersion (Lyotard, et alii).