Ernesto Laclau

Politics and the Limits of Modernity

The theme of postmodernity, which first appeared within aesthetics, has been displaced to ever wider areas until it has become the new horizon of our cultural, philosophical, and political experience. In the latter realm, to which I shall here limit my analysis, postmodernity has advanced by means of two converging intellectual operations whose complex interweavings and juxtapositions have, however, also contributed to a large extent to obscuring the problems at hand. Both operations share, without doubt, one characteristic: the attempt to establish boundaries, that is to say, to separate an ensemble of historical features and phenomena (postmodern) from others also appertaining to the past and that can be grouped under the rubric of modernity. In both cases the boundaries of modernity are established in radically different ways. The first announces a weakening of the metaphysical and rationalist pretensions of modernity, by way of challenging the foundational status of certain narratives. The second challenges not the ontological status of narrative as such, but rather the current validity of certain narratives: those that Lyotard has called metanarratives (meta-recits), which unified the totality of the historical experience of modernity (including science as one of its essential elements) within the project of global, human emancipation. In what follows, I shall consider the status of metanarratives and offer as basic theses: 1) that there has been a radical change in the thought and culture of the past few decades (concerning which there would be no inconvenience in considering it as the entry to a sort of postmodernity), which, however, passes neither through a crisis nor, much less, to an abandonment of metanarratives; 2) that the very

The death and resurrection of the theory of ideology

Abstract This article deals with the reasons that have led to an increasing abandonment of the concept of ‘ideology’ and with the basis of its possible reemergence. The abandonment of the concept is explained on the one hand by its increasing inflation accompanying the crisis of a holistic and naturalistic conception of the social, and on the other hand by the erosion of those metalinguistic positions which provided a neutral viewpoint from which to expose the various forms of a distorted consciousness. Consequently, the ‘ideological’ invaded the totality of the social field and lost all analytic value. It is argued that the notion of ‘distortion’ cannot be abandoned, as far as a post‐ ‘critique of ideology’ approach asserts that the illusion of closure is the main source of a distorted consciousness. The conditions of possibility of a constitutive distortion are then explored in connection with the logic of equivalence in the production of social meaning. The results of this analysis are illustrated thro...

Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics

I have been rather surprised by Slavoj Žižek’s critique of my book On Populist Reason (see Slavoj Žižek, “Against the Populist Temptation,”Critical Inquiry 32 [Spring 2006]: 551–74).Given that the latter is stronglycritical of Žižek’s approach, I was expecting, of course, some reaction on his part. He has chosen for his reply, however, a rather indirect and oblique road; he does not answer a single of my criticisms of his work and formulates, instead, a series of objections to my book that only make sense if one fully accepts his theoretical perspective—which is, precisely, what I had questioned. To avoid continuing with this dialogue of the deaf I will take the bull by the horns, reasserting what I see as fundamentally wrong in Žižek’s approach and, in the course of this argument, I will refute also Žižek’s criticisms.

Democracy and the Question of Power

Discussion on the viability of democracy in what can be broadly conceived as a “postmodern” age has mainly turned around two central issues: 1) does not the current dispersion and fragmentation of political actors conspire against the emergence of strong social identities which could operate as nodal points for the consolidation and expansion of democratic practices?; and 2) is not this very multiplicity the source of a particularism of social aims which could result in the dissolution of the wider emancipatory discourses considered as constitutive of the democratic imaginary? The first issue is connected with the increasing awareness of the ambiguities of those very social movements about which so many sanguine hopes were conceived in the 1970s. There is no doubt that their emergence involved an expansion of the egalitarian imaginary to increasingly wider areas of social relations. However, it also became progressively clearer that such an expansion does not necessarily lead to the aggregation of the plurality of demands around a broader collective will (in the Gramscian sense). Some years ago, for instance, in San Francisco there was widespread belief in the potential for the formation of a powerful popular pole, given the proliferation of demands coming from blacks, Chicanos, and gay people. Nothing of the kind, however, happened, among other reasons because the demands of each of these groups clashed with those of the others. Even more: does not this fragmentation of social demands make it easier for the state apparatuses to deal with them in an administrative fashion ‐ which results in the formation of all types of clientelistic networks, capable of neutralizing any democratic opening? The horizontal expansion itself of those demands which the political system has to be sensitive to conspires against their vertical aggregation in a popular will capable of challenging the existing status quo. Political projects such as the “Third Way” or the “radical center” clearly express this ideal of creating a state apparatus sensitive to some extent to social demands, but which operates as an instrument of demobilization. As for the second issue, its formulation runs along parallel lines. With the breaking up of the totalizing discourses of modernity, we are running the risk of being confronted with a plurality of social spaces, governed by their own aims and rules of constitution, leaving any management of the community ‐ conceived in a global sense ‐ in the hands of a technobureaucracy located beyond any democratic control. With this, the notion of a public sphere, to which was always linked the very possibility of a democratic experience, is seriously put into question. One

Ideology and post-Marxism

The article traces the emergence within post-Marxism of the notions of antagonism and heterogeneity out of dissatisfaction with the tension exhibited by Marxism between objectivity and class antagonism. The rhetoric of discourse and the representation of antagonistic relations are discussed, and the consequently crucial role of the ‘empty signifier’ is offered as a unifying name for radically contingent features rather than as a concept with a common core. The political is thus seen as the world of contingent articulations, and it is popular in the sense that it is a nodal re-aggregation of plural demands. Ideology is the representational, metaphorical and precarious closure that stabilizes meaning within specific contexts.

On "Real" and "Absolute" Enemies

The interest of Carl Schmitťs Theory of the Partisan is that it throws new light on central categories with which we have been familiar since the publication of his classical study, The Concept of the Political , in 1928. What the work we are now considering adds to that book is a new emphasis on political subjectivity and new precisions on the links between war and politics, together with a differentiation between various kinds of hostility. It is to this differentiation that my commentaries will be mainly addressed, but before that I will briefly describe the logical sequence of the main categories of Schmitťs theory of the partisan. Schmitt starts by pointing out a momentous event that took place in European military history: the emergence of an irregular kind of warfare whose first expression was the Spanish partisan resistance to the Napoleonic armies between 1808 and 1813. At the epicenter of this new phenomenon we find the revolutionary restructuration of the art of war brought about by Napoleon, who broke with all the classical rules of the military art as they had been codified in the eighteenth century. Schmitt

Is Radical Atheism a Good Name for Deconstruction

In Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, Martin Hägglund fails to proceed deconstructively in his conception of radical atheism, opting instead for one term of an opposition, between the desire for immortality and an irreducible mortality that structures all human desire, rather than exploring the contamination of one term of an opposition by the other. The paper also responds to Hägglunds criticism of the authors account of articulation.

Laclau en debate: postmarxismo, populismo, multitud y acontecimiento (entrevistado por Ricardo Camargo)

En esta entrevista Ernesto Laclau comienza haciendo un recorrido por su evolucion intelectual, la que ha transitado desde un Marxismo latinoamericano hacia un postmarxismo con influencias Gramscianas y Lacanianas. En seguida, la entrevista se centra en el debate que Laclau ha venido sosteniendo con las nociones de Multitud y Acontecimiento desarrolladas por Toni Negri y Alain Badiou, respectivamente. Por ultimo, la entrevista aborda las nociones de Populismo, Hegemonia y Contra-hegemonia desarrolladas por Laclau en sus ultimos trabajos, teniendo siempre como referencia explicita el acontecer politico latinoamericano y en especial el actual proceso boliviano.