Resisting foundations: Politics between determinate negation and the ultimate double bind

This article develops a critique of the post-foundationalist conception of politics put forward by Oliver Marchart. Confronting the depoliticizations that follow from both the foundationalist insistence on transhistorical foundations and the anti-foundationalist rejection of all foundations as fictions, post-foundationalism casts resistance as determinate negation of concrete political institutions rather than as opposition to phantasmatic totalities. I argue that this precludes the possibility to consider phantasmatic referents (be they divine right, natural law, the nation or the demos) as neither transhistorical/fictional nor exclusively political but to interpret them in terms of a conflict between competing modes of presencing. I elucidate this claim with reference to the work of Reiner Schürmann, which Marchart introduces as an exponent of post-foundationalism but which is better grasped as outlining a ‘para-foundational’ view. In focusing on the ultimate double bind that subtends foundations, Schürmann affords a more comprehensive perspective on the life and afterlife of the Western political and philosophical tradition.