The neg’s poststructuralism privileges the speech act as resistance, which collapses back into neoliberal economy of signs---they reinscribe and reify the humanist notions of individual agency and radical freedom of action as the bases for radical politics.

This article has illuminated ways in which emphases on the political potencies of language have brought about a variety of problems for the critical efficacies of poststructuralist political thought in the context of the global expanse of neoliberal capital. It initiated an original dialogue between two poststructuralist authors and raised this to a second engagement with current debates over the crises of critical thought and, by extension, carries contemporary relevance as well. As I have sought to argue, both authors deliver on a vision of radicalized autonomy through linguistic creativity that bears great similarity to and continuity with modern visions of the agonistic play of autonomies that have been integral to liberal conceptions of civil society and negative liberty. With Delanty (2000: 148), then, their work becomes representative of a deep entanglement of modern and postmodern thought in that “what liberalism and postmodernism share is a strong privatism and a skepticism about the possibility of universal validity and of foundations.” As Paul Patton (2006: 132) frames the relationship, liberal democratic “values and institutions are presupposed” by poststructuralist thinkers precisely “to concentrate attention on the conditions under which limits to their application may be overcome.” In essence, then, poststructuralist politics becomes a means of liberating liberalism to its better self and, further, I would argue, a rife ground for theoretical and practical cooperation with it. The continuity with liberal conceptions of liberty and diversity emerges with radical poststructuralist commitment to forms of linguistic pluralism, ones that lead to the conclusion, with Baudrillard (2015: 71), that “the world” cannot be brought to the subject but rather that the two stand permanently apart: “to clear a space, as it were, around the object, to act so that it shone out resplendent in all its indifference . . . so that the subject himself can attune himself to the world in a kind of symbolic exchange of indifference.” This bleak and fatalistic assessment commits postmodern persons and their political powers to forms of agency circumscribed by the boundaries of discursive power and, by extension, a destiny of attuning themselves to the neoliberal landscape as it is and as they find it. Having stripped history and politics bare to their discursive wills to power, their adaptations of pataphysical and paralogical agencies to the neoliberal landscape as sine qua nons of poststructuralist linguistic gaming become, paradoxically, capitulations to neoliberalism. In essence, their goal of securing persons and groups space for normative, political, and surely material leverage through linguistic forms of agency achieves, with Emilia Steuerman (1992: 100), “a radicalization that in no way challenges the modernity project as such” but instead entrenches and deepens its crises. Against my and related positions, not all of them programmatically Marxist, Dillet, MacKenzie, and Porter (2013: 522) present a contemporary defense of the critical potency and usefulness of poststructuralist thought but do recognize the cogency of “the argument that the ideas of 1968 were complicit and prepared the terrain for a new form of capitalism.” They counter, however, that “it is not the ideas of poststructuralists that ground a new form of capitalism, but their recuperation” (522). In short, on their account, appropriations of poststructuralism have become embroiled in projects that have diverged from its original and innovative purposes. On these grounds they defend the position that the “transgressive nature of poststructuralism is a way to revivify this project in an intellectual and cultural landscape that tends toward homogenizing experience in the name of capitalist axiomatics” (512). In response though, and given this comparative study of paralogy and pataphysics, the poststructuralist divorce of the signified and the referent has been part and parcel of a broad contemporary shift toward a politics of difference and identity, one that aligns its forms of political agency with the pluralist priorities of liberalism and, by extension, neoliberalism. On the theoretical side, Susen (2015) has recognized the continuities between poststructuralist emphases and the liberal tradition. He argues that the “celebration of signs and appearances under the banner of postmodernism constitutes an extreme form of liberal individualism,” one that he sees as concomitant of the contemporary emphasis on embodiment as an expansion of personal freedom from external intervention (115–16). This emphasis on “the autonomy from power” and negative liberty that can be witnessed in both Baudrillard and Lyotard, as well as the classical liberals examined above, extends to ongoing poststructuralist theorizations of insurrection and inclusion for the precarious subjects of the late capitalist condition (115–16). A preeminent case in point is Judith Butler’s performative politics of the precarious. Her recent works (Butler and Athanasiou 2013; J. Butler 2015) on the political promise of the performative meet up with those of Lyotard and Baudrillard in the way incommensurable groups and persons come to represent themselves through linguistic and embodied forms of resistance and subversion. With Lois Ruskai Melina (2014: 321), Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. (1995: xxv), and Susen, however, the political potentials inherent to “language, are not suppressed but, rather, promoted and re-appropriated by the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ and, hence, by the predominantly neoliberal policies designed to defend and realize it” (Susen 2015: 201). By extension, the “singularity” of late capital, the reduction of history to regimes of space, as Jameson (2015: 128) reminds, has lowered the horizon of politics to the body precisely because the diminishment of our “experience of past and future [amounts to] the reduction of our temporality to the present of the body.” In these ways, the counterpart to poststructuralist language games of subversion is the reinforcement of liberal norms and rights, aligning these subversive forms with liberal and neoliberal policies that conjointly take possession and the “sanctity of contracts and the individual right to freedom of action” as the legitimate basis of social and political life (Harvey 2005: 64). My study then, albeit a partial one, suggests serious limitations for the fate of poststructuralism as an effective mode of critical and political resistance in the condition of late capitalism. To the extent that poststructuralism’s “submersion within the academy . . . as a critical undercurrent . . . [is] one that does not cause too many waves,” its diminished horizon as a critical force may be the dusk in which philosophy now paints its grey in grey and the owl once again takes flight (Dillet, Mackenzie, and Porter 2013: 511).