Ernesto Laclau and the logic of ‘the political’

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 111-134

  Norris, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

antagonism; autonomy; decision; freedom; hegemony; identity; Laclau; rule following; Wittgenstein; the political

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247649375     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453706059848     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. While most of Laclau's works cited here were not written in collaboration with Chantal Mouffe, he acknowledges them as extensions of the common project announced in their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985).
2. The fact that I will, for purposes of convenience, write of Laclau as the author of these ideas is not meant to deny this fact, or the fact that Mouffe has developed these ideas in her own way. For a recent discussion of the differences between the two that favors Mouffe's recent work, see Mark A. Wenman, ‘Laclau or Mouffe? Splitting the Difference’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 29, 5 (2003): 581–606.
3. Jules Townsend gives a sympathetic historical account of the reception of their work in ‘Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemonic Project: The Story So Far’, Political Studies 52 (2004): 269–88.
4. For other indications of the extraordinary influence their work has had, see the Introduction to Laclau, Butler, and Zizek's collaboration, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 1–2, where Butler and Zizek acknowledge Laclau and Mouffe's work as the necessary background for their own contributions to the debate.
5. For examples of this, see José Medina, ‘Identity Trouble: Disidentification and the Problem of Difference’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 29, 6 (2003): 655–80
6. and Andrew Norris, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy and the Myth of the Common’, Constellations 7, 2 (June 2000): 272–95.
7. Simon Critchley argues that this unhappy result is precisely what is avoided by Laclau, whom he proposes as a ‘supplement’ to the less politically efficacious arguments of Nancy and Derrida (The Ethics of Deconstruction [Oxford: Blackwell, 1992], pp. 199–200). It is the burden of the present essay to argue that, initial appearances notwithstanding, Critchley's hope is misplaced.
8. Günter Gaus, Gespräch mit Hannah Arendt (Munich: Piper, 1965), p. 20;
9. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought, expanded edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 65. This reference to a concept of the political is even more obvious in German, which is the probable source of much of this way of talking, and where talk of das Politische first appears in discussions of der Begriff des Politischen. This is particularly striking, given the ease and frequency with which German and German academic writing in particular renders adjectives into abstract substantives. Indeed, das Politische is an apparently recent addition, Grimm's 1898 Deutsches Wörterbuch having no entry for it. Though the expression was not coined by Carl Schmitt, it was certainly popularized by his 1927 Concept of the Political, and it remains extremely closely associated with this text and its author.
10. As noted above, Laclau and Mouffe describe antagonism as a ‘discursive form’ (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy [London: Verso, 1985], p. 122) the understanding of which illuminates the political.
11. Compare Laclau, ‘Identity and Hegemony’, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), p. 76
12. and, for a brief general account, Laclau, ‘Discourse’, in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. R. Goodin and P. Pettit (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 431–7.
13. All quotations in this paragraph are from Laclau, ‘Preface’, in New Reflections on the Revolution in Our Time, ed. Ernesto Laclau (London: Verso, 1990), pp. xv–xvi. I focus on the title essay of this volume as Laclau describes it as a more ‘positive’ and ‘clear and logically structured’ account of his and Mouffe's central argument than the ‘deconstructive’ account of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (pp. 4 and 5), and because on Laclau's own account he has not significantly changed any of the positions he takes there in his more recent work. All further references to this essay will be made in the text and indicated by NR.
14. For Laclau's quite typical claim to be breaking with a tradition that is blind to the political, see Laclau, ‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony’, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 66.
15. Zizek argues that Laclau's adoption of a theorist's global perspective from which to evaluate the role of perspectival struggle is inconsistent with his commitment to antagonism as a quasi-transcendental. As Thomas Brokelman puts it, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy ‘remains beholden, argues Zizek, to an Althusserian vision of the subject, one which conceives of society as constructed as various “subject-positions” each of which brings its own “point of view” on political matters. Such a vision of the political, however, implicitly already substantializes society — suggesting a master “viewpoint” of the social itself, a viewpoint from which all the discourses of the “subject-positions” are exposed as limited and ideological. Antagonism, on the other hand, disallows the constitution of society as substantial’ (Brokelman, ‘The Failure of the Radical Democratic Imaginary: Zizek versus Laclau and Mouffe on Vestigial Utopia’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 29, 2 [2003]: 190). I do not deny that this contradiction is found in Laclau and Mouffe's work. Here I only want to note the presence of one half of it.
16. See, for instance, Laclau, ‘Identity and Hegemony’, p. 55.
17. Laclau, ‘Democracy and the Question of Power’, Constellations 8, 1 (2001): 9.
18. Compare Laclau, ‘Structure, History and the Political’, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, p. 185. This dismissal of the meaning of political concepts accounts for the vagueness of the language of ‘the embodiment of a fullness’: one does not claim to represent truth or justice or any other substantive good except in so far as those are markers for the absent ‘fullness’ of a sutured identity.
19. Laclau, ‘Community and Its Paradoxes’, in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), p. 113.
20. I discuss this comparison at length in Norris, ‘Against Antagonism: On Ernesto Laclau's Political Thought’, Constellations 9, 4 (December 2002): 562ff.
21. Indeed, recent readings of Schmitt use Laclau and Mouffe's ideas so as to draw out Schmitt's alleged contributions to radical democracy. See, for instance, Andreas Kalyvas's review essay, ‘Who's Afraid of Carl Schmitt?’, Philosophy & Social Criticism 25, 5 (September 1999)
22. and Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 260–8.
23. Instead of empirical studies, Laclau relies upon Lacan. Space does not permit consideration here of the relevance of the latter's psychoanalytic theory to political theory. Yannis Stavrakakis's Lacan and the Political (London: Routledge, 1999) argues that the connection can fruitfully be made, and does so with regular reference to Laclau. I argue in ‘Against Antagonism’ that this confidence is misplaced.
24. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 124–5.
25. Presumably if there is a violent hierarchy between the terms dog and dogs this reflects the desire to establish fixed essences to variable things such as dogs — that is, the desire to resist and reject Laclau's ‘antagonistic’ ontology. On Laclau's use of a theory of linguistics to develop a theory of political conflict, see Peter Osborne, ‘Radicalism Without Limit? Discourse, Democracy and the Politics of Identity’, in Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism, ed. P. Osborne (London: Verso, 1991).
26. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7A. I focus on Hegel here because I think Laclau is right to propose him as alternative to Laclau's own ‘dialectic’ (NR, 21). But there are numerous other philosophers, particularly those influenced by Heidegger's account of the ecstatic nature of human being, who conceive of the constitutive outside in non-antagonistic terms.
27. Laclau, ‘What do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?’, in Emancipation(s), p. 41.
28. With the exception of the last item, I owe this helpful list to Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 14 and 284, n. 9. Hegel's claim that these are rational identifiable interests takes the form of the argument that these are the necessary forms of the free will's realization, and that this necessity is itself determined by the free will. In other words, these and the other features of the state sketched out in the Philosophy of Right are the preconditions of a free will, which in the end only wills itself. Laclau wildly exaggerates the role of necessity here when he claims that ‘contingency is eliminated’ in it (NR, 20 and 26). Hegel makes it plain in his accounts of law and of sovereignty that contingency plays an important role in political life. Moreover, Hegel is explicit that the state he is describing as a state will take a variety of constitutional forms reflecting the various cultures of different communities.
29. ‘And once he slipped his neck in the strap of Fate, / his spirit veering black, impure, unholy, / once he turned he stopped at nothing, / seized with the frenzy / blinding driving to outrage — / wretched frenzy, cause of all our grief! / He had it in him — / to sacrifice his daughter, / to bless the war that avenged a woman's loss, / a bridal rite that sped the men-of-war’ (Aeschylus, ‘Agamemnon’, 217–26
30. from The Oresteia, trans. R. Fagles [New York: Viking, 1975]). Compare Laclau below on ‘the moment of madness’ that is the decision.
31. ‘Community and Its Paradoxes’, pp. 113, 117, and 115. This account mirrors perfectly Laclau's claim that the decision as he characterizes it is necessary because there is ‘an undecidability located within reason itself’ (NR, 31).
32. ‘Community and Its Paradoxes’, p. 113.
33. ‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony’, pp. 52, 55.
34. Laclau's commitment to the usefulness of Kierkegaard's description of the moment of decision as a madness is strong enough that he cites it again in ‘Identity and Hegemony’, p. 79 and was still citing it in his remarks at the 2000 Castoriadis conference at Columbia University. Derrida cites the Kierkegaard in the essay ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. D. Carlson, D. Cornell, and M. Rosenfeld (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 26.
35. Laclau, ‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony’, p. 57.
36. Laclau, ‘Constructing Universality’, in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, p. 289.
37. More recently Laclau has made the stronger claim that ‘the application of the rule already involves its own subversion’ (‘Identity and Hegemony’, p. 77).
38. This undercuts Laclau's claim that the ‘sedimentation’ of past decisions limits any given decision enough to distinguish his position from decisionism (‘Identity and Hegemony’, p. 83).
39. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), Part I, section 172.
40. To be fair to Sartre, one should note that he himself renounced the pathos of the decision, and attributed his early existentialist celebration of it to the fact that that work was written during the war, when decisions were actually experienced in such terms (Martin Suhr, Sartre zur Einführung [Hamburg: Junius, 1989], p. 89f.). This only highlights the dubiousness of Laclau's rhetoric of violence.
41. No doubt, Laclau uses the phrase ‘free society’, as when he writes: ‘A free society is not one where a social order has been established that is better adapted to human nature, but one which is more aware of the contingency and historicity of any order’ (‘Theory, Democracy and Socialism’, in New Reflections on the Revolution in Our Time, p. 211). But what this last phrase means for him is ‘a society which is more aware of its own impossibility’, where that impossibility calls forth endless ‘acts of freedom’ that take the form of decisions on how to constitute a stable social order that, in so far as it is stable, inhibits the exercise of freedom in such decision-making. In constitutional terms, we might say that Laclau thinks only the founders are free.
42. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 189
43. and ‘Constructing Universality’, p. 294.
44. On the next page, Laclau writes: ‘if an external intervention is experienced as an interference in the development of a certain activity, we can indeed propose the need to autonomize [sic] that activity in terms of the intervention interfering in its development…. Without interference, then, autonomy does not exist.’ Compare ‘Identity and Hegemony’, pp. 79–80.