Karel Kosík and post-Marxism

e-mail: hauser@sok.bz

The principal question concerning Kosík´s Dialectics of the Concrete is the one of its contemporary relevance. Do the Kosík´s concepts have just historical meaning or can they be revived in the context of the today´s philosophical thought, especially the post-Marxism? I would like to argue that the crucial concepts of Dialectics of the Concrete like “praxis” or “labor” aren´t represented in the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek etc. I will try to outline their meaning in the Dialectics of the Concrete and to compare them with the basic concepts of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, which are parallel to them (e.g. Badiou´s “generic procedure” or Žižek ´s theory of act). It will be showed that the Kosík´s work provides us with theoretical apparatus enabling to explain the phenomena which are neglected by post-Marxism.