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The post-Marxism of the Essex School is a recognition of the contingent nature of social struggles and identities: the eschewal of any reference to a privileged subject of eman-cipation as well as an attempt to restore the possibility of political decision-making on the shifting sand of postmodernity. The notion of discursive formation, a product of Foucault’s thought, is one of the central concepts thereof; the symbolic framework of the polis thus appears to be composed of an unstable system of heterogeneous significations appended to things and people, a discourse whose hegemonic fixation constitutes the stakes of political struggles. Far from any essentialist teleology proclaiming the end of history, this acceptance of contingency as the privileged terrain of social conflicts serves to renew the role of politics as the deciding of the social structure with regard to its own meaning and of the subject with regard to its own fluctuating and unsettled identity.