Politics consistent with modern science

http://problemi.si/issues/p2017-1/problemi_international_2017_01.pdf#page=7





It’s not that the universe of modern science should directly impose itself onto the sphere of politics, so that social life will be regulated by the insights based on the cognitivist/biogenetic naturalization of human life (the tech-gnostic vision of society regulated by the digital big Other).




It’s simply that the subject engaged in politics should no longer be conceived as the liberal free agent pursuing its interests but as the subject of modern science, the Cartesian cogito, which, Lacan dixit, is the subject of psychoanalysis.




Therein resides the problem: can we imagine an emancipatory politics whose agent is the empty Cartesian subject?




Jacques-Alain Miller’s answer is that the domain of politics is by definition the domain of imaginary and symbolic collective identifications, so that all psychoanalysis can do is to retain a healthy cynical distance towards the sphere of politics—psychoanalysis cannot ground a specific form of political engagement.




The wager of the Communist hypothesis is, on the contrary, that there is a politics based on the empty Cartesian subject: the political name of the empty Cartesian subject is a proletarian, an agent reduced to the empty point of substanceless subjectivity.




A politics of radical universal emancipation can only be grounded on the proletarian experience.