Reorganisisng identity through the Political.

What entails Re-thinking the political, especially since the political is the sphere of identity formation, contestation and hegemonic practices that follow…

Politics is constitutive, it organizes human coexistence, where as the political has the inevitable dimension of antagonism. Mouffe demonstrates that despite the seemingly constitutive character of politics, it is through the discourse of the Political, with its operations “of power, conflict and antagonism”, where identity gets formulated based on antagonistic “we/ they oppositions”. Hegemony gets contested as polarities enter such identity formative exercises. Hegemony is generated through certain articulatory practices in the sphere of the social, fixing on certain dominant sets of meanings/ practices. The tools of Post structuralist discourse analysis helps recognize the agonistic (internally combative) character within dominant antagonisms.
Transforming antagonism into agonism means that the opposing parties begin to realize that there is no pure antagonism, with absolute conflicting ends (which will guarantee their respective identities), but that the opposing/antagonistic parties are but elements of opposition within the larger structure of the social. For example (and simplistically speaking), the Hindu and Muslim are conflicting identities, but are only so opposition to each other, but are will become singular (though conflicting, and retaining their irreducible plurality) combative species within the larger category of the nation as whole and must operate as a unity as against, another antagonistic element such as America.
Politics is the pragmatic whereas the Political is the field of metaphysical enquiries of ‘the self’. One of the imperatives of the Political, as examined through the framework of Post structuralism is the process of identity formation. In contrast to earlier forms of utopianism, Post structuralism denies any overarching criteria of progress; therefore the politics of identity formation will not be treated in the vocabulary of progress, an onward movement. Drawing from Post structuralist conceptions of the Political, one could say that it arbitrates a sense of ‘becoming political’ by thrusting a certain radicalism and critical structure onto the intuitive notions of the present as well as one’s presence in society. Going by these expansions, the Political is, one, an acute awareness of the present (even as this utopic exercise is often contested on the grounds of weather such an awareness is possible at all, given the fantasmagorial nature of political dissemination) and two, a re-enquiry of the objects and systems in the material/ relational world that seem static and walled. The way in which Marx conceptualizes Labour, is evidential of such an enquiry. Marx did not, as classical economic studies profess, ‘introduce’ the concept of Labour as an extension to the value theory of commodities (as if it were a progression of sorts). But Marxian dialectics culled out form within the conceptual framework of commodity, the immanent presence of Labour. This is a moment of political logic, where an underscored dimension of what is already, always naturalized within the social is contested through an examination into its immanent antagonistic dimension.