Power, ideology, politics and the revolutionary subject

The synthesis of different modalities of power and ideological frameworks has ensured an overpowering and suffocating interpellation of the subject. The state apparatus in conjunction with the capitalist dispositif dictates not only the ontological realities of the subject but also its social destiny, its subjective capabilities and degree of appearance in the world. In this paper, we examine and revisit Louis Althusser’s dual mode of politico-ontological subjectivity: the Good-Subject and the bad-subject. The former is the interpellated human-animal of the world of domestication which through erasing or denying revolutionary-truth comes to conceive politics merely as the art of being governed. This Good-Subject conceives political subjectivity as either an endeavour to return to an authentic originary past, an ad hominem identitarian logicality, or at best the amendment of the existing configuration of the system. On the other hand, the bad-subject is one that is obsessed with the question of how not to be governed by the existing capitalo-statist logic and order. We argue here that the bad-subject is a generic subjective-operator consisting of a set of critical procedures, radical ethos and praxical political steps that introduce a novel revolutionary-truth into the structured hierarchized capitalo-statist world.