“Event” and “discourse” as key concepts of post-Marxism

The article deals with the importance of the concepts of “event” and “discourse” in the post-Marxism philosophy. It is shown that these concepts are key ones to unessentialist and unsubstantialist understanding society, typical of the modern post-Marxism. The author analyzes the works of Alain Badiou, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and demonstrates how the Marxist objectivating approach to the study of society in the post- Marxism is replaced by a constructivist one. It is shown that the post-Marxists understand the history of society not as a history of class struggle, but as a history of changing discourses that are in agonal relations. In the article it is approved that the post-Marxists do not set themselves the task to find an existing social group, being able to be the source of the revolutionary movement, as it did once Marxists and neo-Marxists. Their goal is to show that those groups can be constructed on the basis of a common faith in the revolutionary events through revolutionizing the discursive practice. A variety of events and discourses is a pledge variety of public spaces and agonal communications of decentered society. The terms “event” and “discourse” allow post-Marxists to focus on the non-essential, non-substantial and dynamic nature of the social and the political, and to not abandon the idea of the One and Universal.