Postliberal agency in marx’s brumaire

In this essay, I read Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte as an attempt to articulate a theory of agency despite a lack of adequate concepts. Exhibiting a discomfort with the dueling possibilities of a liberal voluntarism and a structuralist determinism, Marx upsets this supposed dichotomy with an exaggerated use of metonymy. He thus demonstrates the reductive nature of the process of identifying coherent and autonomous subjects, and brings attention to how conventional discourse compels such reductions. Revealing both the inadequacy and the indispensability of established concepts, he tinkers with linguistic convention as a means to open the possibility of thinking and writing beyond them. As these concepts restrict the form of political narratives that can be spoken, he contributes to an enriched political discourse better able to inform political action without succumbing to the liberal tendency to fetishize the individual.