On the Final (Im-)Possibility of Resistance, 
Progress and Avant-Garde 
Oliver Marchart 
(New) order 
Today, nothing seems more out-dated than the idea of progress and the concept of avant-garde. However, we want to show that probably there is 
a chance left for avant-garde politics under the conditions of impossibility of 
avant-garde. Before being able to reflect on the (im-)possibility of radical, 
dissident or avant-garde politics, we have to clear the field of hegemony 
theory along the lines of the following questions: What exactly is the function 
of politics and on what kind of terrain does it operate? How are political 
operations related to the logics of discourse and of signifying practices in 
general? How, in particular, does Laclau's and Mouffe's concept of radical 
and plural democratic politics relate to other modes of »post-structuralist« 
politics (Althusserian jacobinism, Lacano-Hegelian monarchism, Derridean 
messianism, Lyotardian pluralism, etc.)? 
With Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe 
developed a whole new perspective on Marxisan political theory. This »post-
marxist« perspective lead especially Ernesto Laclau's work into a field of 
considerably high abstraction, where political theory turns into a general 
theory of signification, which in our view is ready to be applied to other areas 
as well. 
(Non) order 
If we start from the Saussurian assumption that meaning is produced in a 
system of differential relations, then we immediately confront the following 
problem: What is beyond this system and what is the nature of the frontiers 
encircling that system? If the outside of the differential system was simply 
another difference, then we would not be in a position to distinguish between 
the system and its beyond. In this case, the outside is simply part of the inside 
- which amounts to saying that there is no outside at all. This leads to the 
conclusion - given that whatever lies beyond the system cannot be part of the 
system - that this outside must be of a radically different nature. For only as 
far as the outside is a radical outside we can speak about an outside at all. 
Fil. vest. /Acta Phil., XVI (2/1995), 159-133. 
160 Oliver Mar char t 
Now, for the sake of saving time and space I do not hesitate to set the wheels of 
definition going - a more elaborate summary of Laclau and Mouffe would 
clearly be beyond the scope of this paper. 
Politics we call the process of »coming to terms« with the radical outside of 
the social. The outside of the social we can also call the Political With a capital 
P - another name for antagonisms: »antagonisms are not internal but external 
to society; or rather they constitute the limits of society, the latter's impossibil-
ity of constituting itself« (Laclau/Mouffe 1985, 125). Therefore by refering to 
antagonisms as the instance which threatens the systematicity of the social 
system, we should rather speak about Antagonism with a capital A in order to 
indicate the radical and non-differential character of the exterior. Because of 
this, Antagonism has been compared to the Lacanian Real. 
Antagonism, however, is inflected into the system through politics. Hence, the 
work of politics is to establish discursive antagonisms by inflecting Antago-
nism into the social, so that the latter becomes internally criss-crossed by 
antagonisms and therefore never reaches final stability. Politics can do so 
because every system is dislocated in the first place. (There would be no 
politics in a closed stabilized system without any constitutive outside). Dislo-
cation we call »the disruption of a structure by forces operating outside 
it«(Laclau 1990, 50). Although the constitutive outside of the structure/system 
necessarily escapes signification, it is nonetheless revealed and signified as the 
instace of (non-)order as such. In the first case we may speak about the outside 
as the event (»This 'experience' of the limit of all objectivity does have a form 
of discursive presence, and this is antagonism«. Laclau 1990, 122), in the 
second case it is the empty signifier which points at the outside from the inside. 
Hence, the only thing the empty signifier (the signifier without signified) 
signifies is the very instance of (non-)signification. The struggle for the 
temporary incarnation of this empty signifier of the (absent) order we name 
hegemony. 
Now - somewhat speeding down - we can drive by and have a closer look at 
some of these concepts. Everything boils down to the process of fixation and 
de-fixation of meaning. It is precisely because a signifying system can never 
entirely stop the flux of meaning that the temporary fixation or pragmatic 
construction of meaning becomes possible: »if all objectivity is systematically 
overflown by a constitutive outside, any form of unity, articulation and 
hierarchization that may exist between the various regions and levels will be 
the result of a contingent and pragmatic construction, and not an essential 
connection that can be recognized« (Laclau 1990, 186). 
Laclau calls the outcome of the articulatory practice - the fixation of meaning 
- space, while on the other hand he sees a temporal phenomenon in the 
On the Final (Im-)Possibility of Resistance, Progress and Avant-Garde 161 
dislocatory effects to which every structure is subjected to. This is because the 
very idea of a structure implies spatiality resp. topography (otherwise, simply 
spoken, the structure is not structured at all). Establishing a topography there-
fore implies the effort of transferring time into space (Laclau calls this the 
»hegemonization of time by space«), decreasing the dislocatory »destructuring« 
effects to a minimum and fixing the flux of meaning, essentially through 
repetition (the mythical figure of the eternal return of the same is in this sense 
spatial — for it describes a circle - and not temporal). The sedimented social 
customs and traditions are nothing else than a result of repetitive practices. 
(»Any repetition that is governed by a structural law of successions is space«, 
Laclau 1990, 41). But they have lost their contingent origin in the course of 
this repetition so that we now perceive them as necessary, uncontestable, 
eternal etc. 
But as far as these sedimented layers of repetitive practices can be reactivated, 
Laclau maintains that »there is a temporalization of space or a widening of the 
field of the possible (...)«. We can call this the process of de-fixation of 
meaning. More and more elements, layers and places are going to be perceived 
as contingent in their relational nature. A fixed topography vanishes into a 
fluctuating wave. As the dislocatory effects in a structure are often experi-
enced as a threat which simply demands their fixation and arrest, we can detect 
two counter-rotating movements: both fixation of meaning (hegemony) and 
de-fixation of sedimented meaning (reactivation1), both on the basis of the 
general un-fixity of meaning (dislocations). 
It should have become possible now to understand the three main Laclauian 
categories of the social, the political, and politics. Again let us depart from a 
quote: »The sedimented forms of 'objectivity' make up the field of what we 
will call the 'social'. The moment of antagonism where the undecidable nature 
of the alternatives and their resolution through power relations becomes fully 
visible constitutes the field of the 'political'. (...) The distinction between the 
social and the political is thus ontologically constitutive of social relations. It 
could be called, to use a term from Heidegger, an 'existential'. But the 
boundary of what is social and what is political in society is constantly 
displaced« (Laclau 1990, 35). Since social relations »can be radically trans-
formed through struggle« (Laclau 1990, 36) we can identify behind this 
boundary the category of politics. There we have the three registers or in-
stances in the Laclauian conception: first, the Political as governed by the 
logics of the Antagonism (pure »temporality«), second, the social in the sense 
' Reactivation means the political shaking up of the sedimented layers of the social: »Reactiva-
tion does not therefore consist of returning to the original situation, but merely of rediscovering, 
through the emergence of new antagonisms, the contingent nature of so-called 'objectivity'« 
(Laclau 1990, 34) 
162 Oliver Mar char t 
of sedimented forms of objectivity (pure »spatiality«) and third politics (reac-
tivation of social sediments). 
table 1: 
the Political politics the social 
Antagonism antagonisms society as horizon 
temporality hegemonization of time 
by space 
spatiality 
collapse of signification empty signifier signifying system 
undecidability decisions forgotten origins 
of decisions 
constitutive outside of 
every objectivity 
reactivation sedimented forms 
of objectivity 
event fidelity (Badiou), 
dogmatism (Althusser) 
presence (Derrida) 
New (order) 
Hopefully the remarks given above have prepared the terrain and the tools for 
a discussion of how avant-garde politics (or arts) may to work under condi-
tions of a growing impossibility of avant-garde. Obviously there is a whole 
bunch of different ideas about what exactly avant-garde is. We concentrate on 
three major attributes. Avant-garde is - in its own view - new (»progressive«), 
sectarian (»particularistic«) and dogmatic (»universalistic«). Our thesis is that 
these three attributes are closely interconnected in classical avant-garde, and 
the only way to rescue some ideas and practices of avant-garde as pcwi-avant-
garde depends on our ability to establish the interrelated paradoxes of a non-
teleological progressivism, an empty und relative universalism and an asym-
metric particularism. We will dwell on this later. 
First, let us have a look on the central category of the avant-garde, the New. 
Nothing seems more dépassé than the New. After everything said before, we 
must claim that the New is a concept of radical exteriority, of something that 
doesn't exist, but under certain circumstances may create a myth, i.e. a space 
of inscription, which is ordered around precisely this empty signifier of »the 
New«. But what required of »newness« in order to become an empty signifier? 
If a given system heavily relies on notions like »tradition«, »customs«, »un-
contested rules«, »the glorious past«, etc., then, in a moment of crisis and 
growing dislocation, the resistant factions will start signifying their opposition 
in terms of »the new« and a rhetorics of »novelty«, »unprecedence«, »rup-
On the Final (Im-)Possibility of Resistance, Progress and Avant-Garde 163 
ture«. We are facing a phenomenon of absolute sublimity, as it was the case in 
the French Revolution. The problem is that, according to the the significatory 
logics, as soon as we can sufficiently describe what the new thing is, then it is 
not new anymore - it is already part of the known, »the old«. Thus, »the New« 
points at the outside of signification, it is the name for the instance of tempo-
rality in the Laclauian sense. So we can claim that newness has no object. 
What does it mean to say that - in a »modernist«2 conjuncture - the event will 
be conceived as sublime. It is not for nothing that the French revolution has 
been experienced according to the aesthetics of the Sublime. The whole 
metaphoric arsenal of the Sublime - descriptions of the revolution as storm, 
hurricane, maelstrom, landslide, earthquake, volcanic eruption - can be found 
in the reports of visitors (revolutionary »tourists«) of the events of 1789. 
Laclauian political theory may help us to understand the close relationship 
between the revolution and the Sublime. If we see sublimation as a process of 
emptying out centred around the category of the empty signifier then we can 
give it a discourse analytical theorization starting from - the both necessary 
and seemingly contradictory assumption - that an empty signifier must be 
radically empty and »more or less« empty at the same time. 
On one hand, during the process of its hegemonization/universalization/ puri-
fication any political signifier (like »democracy«, »freedom«, »revolution« 
etc.) gradually loses more and more of its specific content. This is the problem 
of any alliance or coalition: the more social groups join in their articulation of 
certain demands the smaller is the extent of demands which all participants are 
prepared to endorse (this may be called the logics of compromise). Here, 
floating signiflers - more or less empty - simply indicate antagonisms which 
are criss-crossing the political field. 
But on the other hand, though, the empty signifier is not simply evacuated of 
its specific signifieds step by step, it also »signifies« that which lies beyond 
signification, its constitutive outside. It is precisely because of this sublime 
2 Laclau speaks of »democratic struggles where these imply a plurality of political spaces, and 
of popular struggles where certain discourses tendentially construct the division of a single 
political space in two opposed fields. But it is clear that the fundamental concept is that of 
'democratic struggles', and that popular struggles are merely specific conjunctures resulting 
from the multiplication of equivalence effects among democratic struggles.« (Laclau/Mouffe 
1985,137) Revolutionary or popular struggles are clearly accompanied by a certain rhetorical 
pathos (as we find it in manifestos). The »emptier« a signifier is the more struggles it can unite 
under its banner. It is in this sense that we speak about a modernist conjuncture. Although the 
»conditions of political struggle in mature capitalism are increasingly distant from the 
nineteenth-century model of a clear-cut 'politics of frontiers'« (Laclau/Mouffe 1985,133) the 
empty siginifier appears as truly sublime signifier only in a modernist conjuncture, in a situation 
of a »politics of frontiers«. The pathos of decision and revolutionary rhetorics are necessary to 
emotionalize and motivate people during a popular struggle. 
164 Oliver Mar char t 
signification of the absent fullness, of the outside of the signifying system as 
such, why the empty signifier is able to sew the political field. As we said, in 
Laclau this outside of signification is conceived as something which threatens 
the signifying system, as Antagonism. This profound Antagonism can only 
show or reveal itself as an event (because the collapse of signification can't be 
a part of signification, in this case it would be no collapse: »if the event was 
not essentially exterior to the structure, it could be inscribed as an internal 
moment of the latter«, Laclau 1990, 44). While the gradual sublimity belongs 
to the order of politics, the absolute Sublime belongs to the order of the 
Political. Hence, the Political is the name for the very moment of »openness«3, 
when the sedimented structure of society is radically questioned, as it usually 
happens in the case of revolutions. 
So we can say - with Kant - that what is »represented« in the Sublime is 
unrepresentable formlessness as such, and we can say - with Laclau - that 
what is »represented« in the revolution is not the one or the other specific 
demand but the entirely empty concept of (new) order as such. It is the very 
systematicity of the old signifying system (of the ancien régime) which is 
under assault. Hence, the empty signifier »revolution« »symbolizes the very 
principle of spatiality and structurality«, that is, the proposed (new) order. But 
as far as this order is diametrically opposed to the existing (old) order, it 
symbolizes the very principle of temporality, the proposed new or «orc-(order), 
even chaos and destruction. This new order has no content and no object. 
It is precisely because of their objectlessness why avant-garde movements are 
dogmatic - dogmatic in the Althusserian sense. For Althusser, a true philoso-
pher of avant-garde, philosophy has no object either. Marxism and psycho-
analysis are radically opposed to a hostile outside - »bourgeois« ideology. 
This outside is inflected into the inside in form of revisionisms (Jung, Adler 
etc.), and thus it becomes inevitable to draw a line of demarcation between 
dogmatism and revisionism. Philosophy is even reduced for Althusser to the 
mere performative act of drawing this line of demarcation by declaring a 
3 As Pierre Bertaux mentioned, one could see even the Heideggerian category of Openness 
through Hölderlin 's eyes as a revolutionary category: »Die Revolution ist Offen-barung und 
umgekehrt. Der Begriff des 'Offenen' wird später in Hölderlins Dichtung eine bedeutende 
Rolle spielen; er kommt etwa zwanzigmal in der Lyrik nach 1800 vor: Das 'Offene' enthält an 
sich schon den Inbegriff des Revolutionären, nämlich daß die Welt nicht mehr als ein 
Abgeschlossenes, sondern als ein Offenes erscheint, als ein Augenblick, in dem plötzlich alles 
möglich ist oder möglich scheint, was sonst unmöglich war« (Bertaux 1990, 66). The same 
holds for all the famous young pupils of the »Tübinger Stift«, who felt more than enthusiastic 
about the French Revolution. Hegel's philosophy, as the conservative philosopher Joachim 
Ritter has noticed, is revolutionary in its innermost motives: »es gibt keine zweite Philosophie, 
die so sehr und bis in ihre innersten Antriebe hinein Philosophie der Revolution ist wie die 
Hegels.« (Ritter 1977, 192) 
On the Final (Im-)Possibility of Resistance, Progress and Avant-Garde 165 
thesis. So it is, in its very essence, a thetical declamation without any object. 
The resemblance between artistic and political avant-garde practices is strik-
ing. Not by accident the manifesto, a mere gesture of declaration, became the 
genre of every vanguard movement. 
So we are confronted with the strange case of an empty and anti-essentialist 
dogmatism that keeps faith in its own objectlessness, and by defending the 
very principle of temporality against spatiality, avant-garde dogmatism opens 
a place for the myth of modernity/emancipation/enlightenment. The second 
table shows how this idea of avant-garde as political principle structurally 
relates to immanentism, monarchism and the project of a radical and plural 
democracy. 
First, an avant-garde concerned with the New, works on the backround of an 
empty dogmatism since the New itself has no object. Second, classical avant-
garde still sees itself as being in a symmetric, that is, necessary relation to the 
empty universalism of newness: a privileged particularity ready to incarnate 
this universality. However, an asymmetric dialectics between particularism 
and universalism, between politics and the Political, between the empty signifier 
and the (absent) fullness, between the signifying system and its constitutive 
outside, in fact became feasible after the democratic invention. 
table 2: 
full universalism 
(=foundationalism) 
empty universalism 
(=anti-essentialist »dogmatism«) 
»expressive« incarnation immanentism avant- garde/j acobi ni sm 
asymmetric incarnation monarchism democratic pluralism 
Let us concentrate on the right side of this table. A good example for an empty 
universalism might be democracy in the Lefortian sense, where, after the 
decorporation of the king, the place of power became empty. There is no 
essence of democracy, precisely because democracy is lacking any grounding 
by a transcendent power. But how to keep the place of power empty? 
Jacobinism 
Now, jacobinism and its avant-garde successors adopted the role of the expres-
sive (that is necessary) incorporation of the universalism of the empty place of 
democracy or the impossible »newness« of revolution. The avant-garde, thus, 
is positioned in a non-contingent relation to the empty signifier, while at the 
same time accepting the radically empty character of this signifier und keep-
166 Oliver Mar char t 
ing it empty »by all means necessary«. Thus, it is on the one hand opposed to 
any form of immanentism which doesn't accept the empty character of its 
foundations. Immanentism - following Jean-Luc Nancy - quite on the con-
trary, supposes the essential identity between universality and incarnatory 
object, the junction of outside and inside, or the »communion« of community 
and leader. But on the other hand avant-garde is also opposed to monarchism, 
where a contingent, particular object (the hereditary monarch) represents 
universality. However, even if their relation is an asymmetrical one, the place 
of power is not empty in monarchism - we will come back to that later. 
Given that the Jacobin particularism »expresses« the emptyness of the empty 
place of power by occupying it, we will encounter a first problem with 
jacobinism. For under conditions where the public sphere is not one but 
multiple we can't anymore speak about the unique empty place of power. 
There will be a multiplicity of empty power places4 (to be occupied/con-
structed or not) on every single level of society. Under these conditions the 
instance of power is still empty, but it is not unique, that is to say, we will 
neither find nor be able to construct the one and single nodal point which has 
the capacity to suture society as a whole. This was part of the Jacobin fantasy. 
Therefore it doesn't suffice to save the empty universalism of democracy on 
the parliamentary level alone. 
To suppose such an »expressive« and non-multiple empty universalism can 
even get us into a deadlock resembling a systems theoretical paradox, as it is 
the case with the Algerian experiment. A paradox arises if we look at the very 
distinction between the two terms of the basic binary code of a system through 
the eyes of one of these very terms. Supposed the Algerian code reads »de-
mocracy vs. fundamentalism«: Is it democratic or is it fundamentalistic to 
draw a line of demarcation between democracy and fundamentalism? Is it 
democratic to abolish democracy - if there is majority in favour of fundamen-
talism? Or is it fundamentalistic to stick to democracy against the will of an 
anti-democratic majority? 
If we restrict our notion of democracy to a representational majority principle 
(thereby excluding the questions of human rights, of an open public sphere, 
etc.), that is to the battle for the single empty place of representational power, 
then the Algerian military junta and its fight against immanentism is a modern 
example for the (strategic) Jacobin paradox: In order to save democracy we 
4 »Social dislocation is therefore coterminous with the construction of power centres. But given 
that the possibility of resistance to that power means that the latter is not a total power, the vision 
of the social emerging from this description is that of a plurality of power centres, each with a 
different capacity to irradiate and structure. That is what is meant by a decentred structure: not 
just the absence of a centre but the practice of decentring through antagonism« (Laclau 1990, 
40). 
On the Final (Im-)Possibility of Resistance, Progress and Avant-Garde 167 
have to abolish democracy. The rousseauesque idea behind the dictatorship of 
freedom is that the only way to build a reign of freedom is to force people to be 
free. Jacobinism defends the empty universalism of democracy by expres-
sively incorporating it. 
Fundamentalism, on the other hand, perceives itself as the incarnation of a 
supposedly coherent body of holy texts, rules, customs and traditions - parts of 
a full universalism - and uses democratic elections strategically in order to 
overcome democracy. From this point of view fundamentalists don't face a 
paradox since for them there is no empty place of power to be protected. The 
place of power is already occupied by the transcendental body of the Lord as 
well as by His direct and symmetric earthly incarnation - the fundamentalist 
religion. The immanentist has not yet experienced the simultaneous decorpo-
ration of the King's two bodies. S/he takes the empty signifier for a »full« 
signifier - overflown by a transcendental signified. 
The conclusion we draw from this example is that we should avoid both the 
idea of a single place that has or has not to be occupied by an avant-garde party 
with an intrinsic and privileged relation to this place, and, as a consequence, 
the idea of a single place that has to be occupied by a particularism which 
relates to this place in an asymmetric and purely particular way, as it is the 
case with the Hegelian monarch. For Hegel, the physical body of the heredi-
tary monarch is thought as the material complement to rational universality 
precisely because it is alienated of any universal grounding. It is in this sense 
that Slavoj Žižek could propose a kind of Lacano-Hegelian monarchism. For 
Žižek, the monarch defends the emptyness of democratic power by reversing 
the Jacobin strategy and occupying the empty place with its own contingent, 
non-necessary body. 
However, it is rarely more than a Hegelian joke to take the monarch as 
representative of an empty universalism. The only universality represented by 
the monarch is the principle of monarchy; the only thing the particular, 
contingent body of the monarch does point at is the transcendental body of the 
monarch - and not the principle of democracy. In this sense the empty 
signifier »monarch« is nothing else than the - however asymmetric ^biologi-
cally contingent) - incarnation of the transcendental signifier »monarchy« (or 
»rationality« in Hegel), but there is no way for »monarch« to signify »democ-
racy«. Only a monarchy without monarch could do so. But such a monarchy 
without monarch, in which a plurality of social actors - each of them being 
equally entitled - compete in order to temporarily signify the empty places of 
power, cannot be called a monarchy anymore - it would simply be a democ-
racy. 
What remains now is the quite ordinary idea of democratic pluralism. But here 
168 Oliver Mar char t 
we arrive at the whole point of our argument. In what follows we will claim 
that there is no feasible democratic pluralism without an element of avant-
garde jacobinism. In the course of our argument we will focus on the right side 
of table 2, the side of empty universalism or dogmatism, and we will split up 
both the categories of jacobinism and pluralism into two tendencies each: a 
pragmatic or strategic dogmatism on the one side, and a theoreticist dogma-
tism on the other. What we will get is table 3: 
table 3: 
pragmatism 
(strategic dogmatism) 
theorism 
(»dogmatic dogmatism«) 
avant-garde democracy Leninism (Necaev) démocratie à venir (Derrida) 
post-avant-garde democracy hegemonic pluralism 
(Laclau/Mouffe) 
dispersive pluralism 
(Lyotard) 
The content of the whole table is dogmatic in the Althusserian sense: it is 
faithfully oriented towards a universality without object. This universality is 
just a name for the event. In the case of »dogmatic dogmatism« we may speak 
about an event to come, in the case of strategic dogmatism we may speak about 
an event to be produced. These are the two extremes on the modernist horizon-
tal axis: here the avant-garde is confronted with democracy as an impossible 
task, an impossible object or good, that is never fully realized. This contraction 
of both a Lacanian and a Derridian concept is a strong element in Laclau/ 
Mouffe: »Central to this approach is the awareness that a pluralist democracy 
contains a paradox, since the very moment of its realization would see its 
disintegration. It should be conceived as a good that only exists as good so 
long as it cannot be reached. Such a democracy will therefore always be a 
democracy 'to come' (...)« (Mouffe 1993, 8) This we may call a jacobinism 
without blood on its gloves. But this »negative« jacobinism that merely 
concentrates on the emptyness of the place of power without protecting it, 
without constructing new power centres, remains to a considerably high de-
gree politically impotent5. It may be a highly ethical stand, but it is not a 
political one. 
5 An Althusserian would claim at this point that the empty act of drawing a line of demarcation 
in the realm of theory certainly produces effects in politics. Even if we concede that - what we 
do - it is only under the assumption of a deterministic relationship between theory and the realm 
where the effects are going to emerge that we are able to foresee the kind of effects being 
produced. For example, our »correct« intervention in theory could have entirely counterpro-
ductive effects elsewhere. 
On the Final (Im-)Possibility of Resistance, Progress and Avant-Garde 169 
On the other end of the modernist scale, though, we may find a purely strategic 
jacobinism: this is the Jesuit and Macchiavellistic tradition that leads to 
Blanqui, to Lenin, and later to urban guerrilla (the guerilla fighter as Jesuit of 
warfare6), the Black Panther Party, the Red Army Faction, and so on. Here, 
nearly everything is allowed in order to defend or construct the empty signifiers 
»revolution«, »freedom« or »equality« - all of them synonyms for the radical 
»new«, the sublime event. One of the best examples for such a stand is Sergej 
Necaev, the Saint-Just of 19th century anarchism. It would be difficult to find 
a concept more unspecified and empty than the notion of »revolution« in his 
»Revolutionary Catechism«. Almost nothing can be said about the revolution 
- it was Bakunin who called Necaev a believer without God and a hero without 
phrases. Revolution is not much more than the principle of the entire destruc-
tion of all traditions, laws and classes of the state. The revolutionary, accord-
ing to Necaev, knows only one science: the science of destruction. Applying 
Saint-Just to Necaev we could paraphrase: What constitutes the empty signifier 
of »revolution« (the New) is the total destruction of what is not empty (the 
old). However, it is quite clear that Necaev's conspirational vanguard associa-
tion stands in an »expressive« and necessary relation to this negative principle. 
Post-Avant-Garde 
While in this Jacobin trend the idea of a strategy which allows everything in 
order to achieve the goal7 may lead in the last instance to decisionism, the idea 
of la démocratie à venir on the other hand doesn't explain why democracy 
should be constructed at all (and not be simply awaited). The same with 
dispersive pluralism. It supposes a play or flux of signifiers without delivering 
6 For Che Guevara the »guerilla band is an armed nucleus, the fighting vanguard of the people« 
(Guevara 1970,15). The guerilla soldier can be called a Jesuit because of his »elastic positions«, 
which reminds to the »revolutionary elasticity« (Hannes Meyer) of Leninism. It is expressed 
in his »flexibility, his ability to adapt himself to all circumstances, and to convert to his service 
all of the accidents of the action. Against the rigidity of classical methods of fighting, the 
guerilla fighter invents his own tactics at every minute of the fight and constantly surprises the 
enemy« (Guevara 1970, 25) 
7 As an example we quote paragraph 22 from the German edition of the »Revolutionary 
Catechism«: »Die Assoziation hat kein anderes Ziel als vollständige Befreiung und Glück des 
Volkes, das heißt, der leidenden Menschen. Aber davon überzeugt, daß diese Befreiung und 
dieses Glück nur auf dem Wege einer alles zerstörenden Volksrevolution erreicht werden 
können, wird die Assoziation alle ihre Mittel und alle ihre Kräfte darauf verwenden, die Leiden 
und das Unglück zu vergrößern und zu vermehren, die schließlich die Geduld des Volkes 
erschöpfen und es zu einem Massenaufstand veranlassen muß« (Bakunin/Necaev 1980, 123). 
And paragraph 4: »Moralisch ist für ihn (the revolutionary, O.M.) alles, was den Sieg der 
Revolution unterstützt, unmoralisch, was sich ihm in den Weg stellt« (Bakunin/Necaev 1980, 
118). 
170 Oliver Mar char t 
any concept of how they are going to agglomerate. Lyotard's »minoritarian 
patchwork« is one example, Deleuze's »micropolitics« is another one. Thus, 
the concepts of the right vertical axis of table 3 are, in a way, purely theoreti-
cal. They can't account for the articulatory process of fixation of meaning, the 
only thing they can account for is un-fixity. 
But if Laclau is right in his assumption that the »way to overcome the 
temporal, traumatic and unrepresentable nature of dislocation is to construct it 
as a moment in permanent structural relations with other moments, in which 
case the pure temporality of the 'event' is eliminated« (Laclau 1990, 72), and 
if Mouffe is also right in her assumption that the democratic »coming to 
terms« contains the paradox of the absent event - insofar as every real event is 
an event 'to come' - then we have a situation of mutual contamination 
between a strategico-pragmatic jacobinism and a theoretical messianic without 
messianism. But there is the third term that has to be included: pluralism. 
Although we must say that a dispersive pluralism would be a self-defeating 
enterprise, pluralism as regulative idea can and must be maintained, since it 
disperses the »expressive« relation of the avant-garde party to the empty 
universalism - no single movement can claim to have privileged access to the 
latter. Quite on the contrary, a plurality of movements compete in order to 
incarnate the empty place of power, that is, to construct power centres. 
Democratico-hegemonic pluralism is therefore not only adjacent to the other 
three boxes, it is even nothing without these elements. 
1. Hegemonic pluralism acknowledges the emptiness of the universal. 
2. Hegemonic pluralism remains oriented towards dispersive pluralism, since 
it doesn't believe in an a priori privileged role of any single element in 
politics. It is because of this neighborhood to a range of other particularisms 
that hegemonic pluralism keeps the possibility open to build a common 
chain of equivalence, while at the same time acknowledging that any 
incarnation will always be insufficient and asymmetric in relation to what-
ever universality incarnated. 
3. However, hegemonic pluralism accepts the constant competition or power-
struggles amongst the political actors in order to take the lead. Any single 
movement may temporarily take over the lead according to the logics of 
hegemony. Hence, it has to open itself to a kind of »dirty realism«. 
So we actually can speak about avant-garde. An avant-garde, though, under 
conditions of the general impossibility of avant-garde. An avant-garde amongst 
other competing movements - none of them standing in the pole position of 
history. The direction has still to be negotiated. But different to other compet-
ing groups, this post-avant-garde has not yet lost any concept of the New. 
Progress towards the New, though, should only be negatively defined as a 
On the Final (Im-)Possibility of Resistance, Progress and Avant-Garde 171 
movement away from the heap of ruins of history - not according to the 
apocalyptic picture as it was drawn by Walter Benjamin, rather in the sense of 
the pragmatic words of Bert Brecht: »Wirklicher Fortschritt hat als Ursache 
die Unhaltbarkeit eines wirklichen Zustandes und als Folge seine Veränderung« 
(Hecht 1986, 346). Otherwise post-avant-garde would have to claim a superior 
knowledge about the future - what would clearly be absurd. 
Post-avant-garde, thus, doesn't anymore occupy a privileged position but 
simply a position that keeps faith in the entirely empty and groundless event of 
the New as opposed to the old. Post-avant-gardists would have to reformulate 
Alain Badiou's hypothèse fondatrice (»II y a une capacité politique ordonné à 
la non-domination«, Badiou 1985, 61) into: Il y a une capacité politique 
ordonné au non-passé8. This hypothesis is what it is, a hypothesis, an assump-
tion. Not more. And since the possibility of emancipation (= non-domination) 
is hypothetical, engagement cannot logically be derived either: »L'engagement 
est axiomatique« (Badiou 1985, 76). Considering the axiomatic character of 
every engagement, be it radical, resistant or avant-garde, we can only repeat 
the poignant words coined by »Nike« for their sneaker-ads: »Just do it«. 
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8 If we were traditionalists we would obviously inforce a kind of »politique ordonné à la 
tradition«. But usally traditionalists don't formulate their politics as a mere hypothesis. Post-
avant-garde, which is »non-passé«, is entirely non-grounded, an empty universalism, while the 
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may put into the slot. It is simply a question of the structural relation between particularism and 
universalism, and not of the specific signifiers we use. 
172 Oliver Mar char t 
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