History of political thought at a standstill: Abensour, constellations and textual alterity

Abstract

This article suggests that the philosophical contributions of the French democratic theorist Miguel Abensour offer a unique model for the practice of the history of political thought. Under the influence of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theory, Abensour can be seen as applying a method of thinking in constellations to the study of historical texts, the critical rearrangement of conceptual elements drawn from the latter generating new dialectical images that reveal something previously obscured about the object of investigation. The history of political thought on this model is less about the recuperation of a definite textual intelligibility than the revelation of social and political alterity.

Beyond the Education of Desire

“…This ignored that Abensour situated the education of desire in the context of the dialectic of emancipation -the idea that attempts at emancipation produce new forms of domination. In his work on Étienne de La Boétie, Abensour (Abensour and Gauchet 1976) went so far as to argue that the desire for emancipation could produce the desire for domination, such that -far from being a panacea for utopia -desire was ambivalent, producing tensions within any utopian project (Holman 2022;Mazzocchi 2018). To circumvent this dialectic, the new utopian spirit attempted to identify 'the centres or nodes' in which emancipation capsizes into domination.…”