Introduction

The introduction begins by arguing that political theory has been driven by base assumptions concerning the agency and transparency of the subject. Such assumptions are what were challenged by Marxist thinking, which, through the failure of the revolution to materialise in industrialised nations, instigated a more refined turn to ideology in the works of the neo-Marxists. Arguing this turn is limited in its focus on pre-conscious interests, I outline post-Marxism as an attempt to move towards an analysis of unconscious libidinal investments, which also signifies a turn to human ontology. The ontological turn faces a split, however, been transcendence on the one hand an immanence on the other. In exploring the two positions, it is argued that immanence has been rejected to the point of vindicating of transcendence as a necessary position in order to conceptualise the political. The chapter ends by arguing that this rejection and the related vindication, is premised a gross misreading and misunderstanding of immanence; that immanence is the ontological centre of micropolitics as that which precedes the politics of identity and representation. Moreover, this is an ontology that, at least insofar as it concerns the political, starts with Sartre and is developed by Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze.