Why constructing a people is the main task of radical politics

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 32, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 646-680

  Laclau, Ernesto ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

^b NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 41149129664     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/508086     Document Type: Review

References (18)

1. See Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London, 2005).
2. In the passage quoted by Žižek I am just summarizing, approvingly, the analysis of Chartism by Gareth Stedman Jones, "Rethinking Chartism," Languages of Class, Studies in Working Class History 1832-1902 (Cambridge, 1983).
3. See Laclau, "Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?" Emancipation(s) (London, 1996), pp. 36-46.
4. Here I am not using the term symbolic in the Lacanian sense but in the one frequently found in discussions concerning representation. See, for instance, Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley, 1967), chap. 5.
5. See the excellent book by Ian Steedman, Marx after Sraffa (London, 1977).
6. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, trans. pub., ed. Robert C. Lucker (New York, 1978), p. 478.
7. See Alain Badiou, l'Être et l'événement (Paris, 1988).
8. See Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack (London, 1985), chap. 3
9. and Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London, 1990), pp. 17-27
10. and On Populist Reason, pp. 139-56.
11. See on this subject the classic article by Joan Copjec, "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason," Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), pp. 201-36.
12. See Balibar, "Sur la dialectique historique: Quelques remarques critiques à propos de Lire le Capital," Cinq Études du materialisme historique (Paris, 1974), pp. 205-45.
13. Whenever there is the definition of the ground organizing a certain area of subjectivity, the limits of the latter change, and, as a result, the referents addressed by that discourse are substantially modified. See, for instance, the following passage from Freud: "By demonstrating the part played by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in the psychoneuroses, we have quite remarkably increased the number of people who might be regarded as perverts. ... Thus the extraordinarily wide dissemination of the perversions forces us to suppose that the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the normal constitution" (Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. [London, 1953-74], 7:171). The same can be said about populism.
14. See Laclau, "Las manos en la masa," Radar, 5 June 2005, p. 20, www.pagina12.com.ar/diaro/suplementos/radar/9-2286-2005-06.09.html
15. and "Žižek: Estados Unidos debería intervenir más y mejor en el mundo: Pide que asuma su papel de policía global," La nacion, 10 Mar. 2004, www. lanacion.com.ar/04/03/10dg-580163. asp
16. "Žižek."
17. It is some motive for celebration that Žižek, in his Critical Inquiry article, has for the first time made an effort to discuss separately my work and that of Chantal Mouffe, instead of attributing to each of us the assertions of the other. To refer to a particularly outrageous example: after a long quotation from a work by Mouffe, he comments: "the problem here is that this translation of antagonism into agonism, into the regulated game of political competition, by definition involves a constitutive exclusion, and it is this exclusion that Laclau fails to thematize" (Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle [London, 2004], p. 90; hereafter abbreviated I). The problem is not whether I agree or disagree with what Mouffe has said; the problem is that it is dishonest to criticize an author for what another author has said.
18. Žižek, "Holding the Place," in Judith Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London, 2000), p. 326.