p17: It is characteristic of Hegelian and Marxist versions of history that, at the very point of opening up to a deeper understanding of the role of struggle and negativity in the construction of the social, they immediately step back and attempt to integrate this understanding into a most traditional kind of theory of the positivity of the social – a theory based, of course, on what Heidegger and Derrida have termed the ‘metaphysics of presence’.

p35-36: [I]f social relations are contingent, it means they can be radically transformed through struggle, instead of that transformation being conceived as a self-transformation of an objective nature; if power is ineradicable, it is because there is radical liberty that is not fettered by any essence; and if opaqueness is constitutive of the social, it is precisely this which makes access to the truth conceived as an unveiling (aletheia) possible.

p45: Our basic thesis is that the possibility of a radical democracy is directly linked to the level and extension of structural dislocations operating in contemporary capitalism.

p80-81: [S]ince all universality is only built through the overdetermination of an indefinite and open range of concrete demands, it is a question of the force intended to embody such 'relative universalities' being indeterminate; and such a force will only be the result of a hegemonic struggle. This is exactly what politics consists of.

p81: This means that the question of power, the intrinsic impurity of antagonisms and struggles, penetrate the field of the universal itself. Recognition of the historical limitation of social agents is the very condition for democracy; but for the same reason, power is paradoxically the very condition for freedom.

p81-82: The fragmentation and limitation of social actors is linked to the multiplication of the dislocations produced by 'disorganized capitalism'. It follows from this that more and more areas of social life must become the product of political forms of reconstruction and regulation. But the very abundance of such dislocations and their intrinsic antagonisms means that the limitation and fragmentation of the social actors they give rise to also increase. This fragmentation, however, does not mean atomization: isolated demands are overdetermined in the constitution of social imaginaries, and mythical spaces -- which compete for the hegemonization of the imaginaries -- articulate demands in various ways. In turn, the role of those spaces and imaginaries in transforming dislocations into demands is absolutely central. There is thus no longer any room for the base/superstructure dichotomy: any social level – if we can speak of levels to refer to something that is essentially non-spatial -- can be the location of mythical re-articulations and imaginary aggregations. Society, then, is ultimately unrepresentable: any representation -- and thus any space – is an attempt to constitute society, not to state what it is. But the antagonistic moment of collision between the various representations cannot be reduced to space, and is itself unrepresentable. It is therefore mere event, mere temporality. For reasons we have explained, this final incompletion of the social is the main source of our political hope in the contemporary world: only it can assure the conditions for a radical democracy.

p82-83: The state of social struggles in the contemporary world offers several grounds for political optimism. They at least create the preconditions for a radicalization of democracy, which is increasingly becoming the reference point for the construction of a new left. We are faced with a growing fragmentation of social actors, but this, far from being the cause for any nostalgia for the lost 'universal class', must be the source for a new militancy and a new optimism. One of the consequences of fragmentation is that the issues, which are the rallying point for the various social struggles, acquire greater autonomy and face the political system with growing demands. They thus become more difficult to manipulate and disregard. The self-evidence and homogeneity of the subject of social control in traditional socialist discourse has disappeared. Instead, a plurality of subjects exercise a democratic and negotiated control of the productive process on the basis of this fragmentation, thus avoiding any form of dictatorship, whether by the market, the state or direct producers. The indeterminacy of the relations between the different demands of the social actors certainly does open the possibility for their articulation by the right but insofar as such articulations are not necessary, the field of possibilities for historical action is also widened, as counter-hegemonic struggles become possible in many areas traditionally associated with the sedimented forms of the status quo. The future is indeterminate and certainly not guaranteed for us; but that is precisely why it is not lost either. The current expansion of democratic struggles in the international arena gives cause for cautious optimism.

p83: To what extent does placing in question the rationalism characterizing the project of modernity not mean undermining the foundations of the emancipatory project linked to it? From the earlier development of our argument it is clear what our reply will be. In our perspective it is a question of historically constituting the subject to be emancipated -- indeed, emancipation and constitution are part of the same process. But in that case, why prefer one future over another? Why choose between different types of society? There can be no reply if the question is asking for a kind of Cartesian certainty that pre-exists any belief. But if the agent who must choose is someone who already has certain beliefs and values, then criteria for choice -- with all the intrinsic ambiguities that a choice involves -- can be formulated. Such an acceptance of the facticity of certain strata of our beliefs is nothing but the acceptance of our contingency and historicity. We could even go so far as to say that it is the acceptance of our 'humanity' as an entity to be constructed; while in the case of rationalism, we have been given 'humanity' and are merely left with the secondary task of realizing it historically. For the reasons we have identified, this recognition of our limitation and contingency, of the precarious and pragmatic construction of the universality of our values -- a pragmatism that leaves the perverse dialectics of 'necessary embodiments' behind -- is the very condition for a democratic society. To reformulate the values of the Enlightenment in the direction of a radical historicism and to renounce its rationalistic epistemological and ontological foundations, then, is to expand the democratic potentialities of that tradition, while abandoning the totalitarian tendencies arising from its reoccupation of the ground of apocalyptic universalism.