Laclau

A Critical Reader

Simon Critchley, Oliver Marchart, Simon Critchley, Oliver Marchart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135641672
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Laclau: A Critical Reader is the first full-length critical appraisal of Laclau's work and includes contributions from several leading philosophers and theorists. The first section examines Laclau's theory that the contest between universalism and particularism provides much of the philosophical background to political and social struggle, taking up the important place accorded to, amongst others, Hegel and Lacan in Laclau's work. The second section of the book considers what Laclau's 'radical democracy' might look like and reflects on its ethical implications, particularly in relation to Laclau's post-Marxism and thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas. The final section investigates the place of hegemony in Laclau's work, the idea for which he is perhaps best-known.This stimulating collection also includes replies to his critics by Laclau and the important exchange between Laclau and Judith Butler on equality, making it an excellent companion to Laclau's work and essential reading for students of political and social theory.

Part I

PHILOSOPHY

Universality, singularity, difference

1
HOW EMPTY CAN EMPTY BE?

On the place of the universal

Rodolphe Gasché

One of the many merits of Ernesto Laclau’s political and theoretical work has been to forcefully reintroduce the problematic of universality into political philosophy at a time, precisely, when such a project would seem the least welcome, that is, at a time when this subject has become forbidden territory within the prevailing discourses. With the left hopelessly divided, trends like multiculturalism dominate, and various intellectual discourses from neopragmatism to a certain interpretation of deconstruction seem to consider any reflection on universality as inherently Eurocentric. Needless to say, this reintroduction of the question of universality into political philosophy does not amount to bringing back the spurious notion of universality which has been abandoned for historical and theoretical reasons. The criticism that has been leveled against received conceptions of universality remains in vigor, but the insight that there can be no politics, no society, and no democracy, without reference to universality, has led Laclau to rethink this concept. The problem of universality reemerges in Laclau’s thought precisely in the context of the attempt to reconceive of political thought itself in the wake of the failure of the Enlightenment project, and above all, of its Marxist version, that is, in the wake of a project that amounted to a disappearance of the political. Laclau’s thinking is thus a thought in process, still in the making. In the same way as the political is reinvented, so too does the concept of universality undergo a radical reformulation. Even though Laclau does not put it this way, his reference to universality as an empty space also suggests that this is a space still to be thought, or differently worded, a space that coincides with a task – the task to think the universal.

Yet, in the final pages of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe conclude their analysis of hegemonic articulation as a condition of possibility of a radical democracy by making what they claim to be a decisive point, namely, that ‘there is no radical and plural democracy without renouncing the discourse of the universal’ (HSS 191–2). However, this seemingly intransigent declaration, which is justified by the very need to liberate the thought of hegemony from the constraints within which it remains caught in Marxism, concerns only one form of universality (though this work gives no hint as to other possible notions of universality). Laclau and Mouffe identify the target of their criticism when they write:

The classic discourse of socialism […] was a discourse of the universal, which transformed certain social categories into depositories of political and epistemological privileges; it was an a priori discourse concerning differential levels of effectiveness within the social – and as such it reduced the field of the discursive surfaces on which it considered that it was possible and legitimate to operate (HSS 57).

The critical debate with the Marxist discourse of universality ‘in which a limited actor – the working class – [is] raised to the status of “universal class”’ (ibid.), seeks to break the classical bond between socialist practice and a working class whose ontological status is tied to the centrality of economism. This Marxist discourse of universality, however, not only represents the precise historical formulation of the universal to be rejected in the name of a democratic practice of hegemony, it also provides the framework within which Laclau’s subsequent elaborations on universality have taken place, and in which some of his more provocative statements – for example, that the universal is an empty place – gain their significance.

I have qualified the socialist conception of universality as one discursive form of universality among others. However, as Laclau’s attempt to sketch out the genealogy of this precise form of universality demonstrates, the socialist formulation of the universal is not just one such formulation among many. Its dialectical genealogy shows that it is rather the formulation par excellence of the spurious form of universality. Emancipation(s) distinguishes three historical forms in which the relationship between universality and particularity has been discussed, that is, the classical, Christian, and rationalist conceptions of universality. Because of the very way in which this genealogy is construed, the rationalist conception of universality, the one to which Marxism subscribes, appears to be the dialectical sublation of both the classical and Christian paradigm. While the inaugural distinction between universality and particularity in ancient philosophy conceives of the universal as a pole entirely graspable by reason, and which is separated from the particular through an uncontaminated dividing line, in Christianity, a universal which is accessible to us only through revelation incarnates itself in finite and contingent reality without having any intrinsic rational connection to the latter, and according to reasons that remain opaque to human comprehension. Yet, the new paradigm that comes into being with the Enlightenment unites the classical conception of the intelligibility of the universal with the Christian conception of incarnation, now radically transformed so as to make possible a rational connection of total transparency between the incarnating body and the incarnated universal. The Hegelian conception of the rationality of the real, and the Marxist idea of a universal class, are prime examples of this novel way in which the relation between universality and particularity is shaped. Yet, even though the new notion of a ‘privileged agent of history’ whose particular body becomes the transparent expression of a universality transcending it, tends to ‘interrupt the [Christian] logic of incarnation’, ‘the modern idea of a “universal class” and the various forms of Eurocentrism are [according to Laclau] nothing but the distant historical effects of the logic of incarnation’. He writes:

the body of the proletariat is no longer a particular body in which a universality external to it has to be incarnated: it is instead a body in which the distinction between particularity and universality is canceled and, as a result, the need for any incarnation is definitely eradicated (E 23–4).

However complex the relation to its antecedents in ancient philosophy and Christianity may be, the new paradigm to which the Marxist discourse of universality belongs is unique in that it overcomes the difficulties that haunted the previous formulations. The theoretical superiority of the new conception of the relation between the universal and the particular, one that is due to the postulation of ‘a body which is, in and of itself, the universal’, lies in its ability to raise particularity to the level of universality. This conception of universalistic rationalism is, therefore, also the blueprint for Eurocentrism. The universal having found its own body, there is, as Laclau remarks,

no intellectual means of distinguishing between European particularism and the universal functions that it was supposed to incarnate, given that European universalism had constructed its identity precisely through the cancellation of the logic of incarnation and, as a result, through the universalization of its own particularism (E 23–4).

The Enlightenment conception of the relation between the universal and the particular is admittedly a secular one. But precisely as a secular conception, the Enlightenment remains indebted to what it overcomes. No surprise, therefore, if the logic of incarnation is reintroduced into rationalist universalism, at the very moment when Europe faces resistance to its imperialist expansion and its self-proclaimed civilizing mission, by other cultures, thus effectively establishing ‘an essential inequality between the objective positions of social agents’ (E 25). The logic of incarnation is reintroduced as well and with the same result as soon as the Party declares itself to be the representative of the working class.

As the criticism of spurious universality demonstrates, the foil against which Laclau critically develops his own notion of universality is universalistic rationalism embodied in exemplary fashion by socialism. Indeed, as was already clear in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the rejection of socialist universalism was based primarily on its positing of the working class as the one, and sole, universal social agent. As a function of its economic position, the universal character of the working class was seen to follow with necessity. The prime target of Laclau’s critique is the very restriction of the universal to one historical or social agent. This restriction is, for Laclau, always based upon the assumption that this agent occupies an essential position within the relations of capitalist production, or – more generally – because this agent is believed to embody some transcultural human essence, norms, values, or unconditioned a priori principles, from which its privilege as an agent derives with absolute necessity. The moment of necessity, he holds, is an inheritance of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment (Laclau 2000a: 75). Furthermore, the theological ramifications of this secular concept of universality form an essential part of the background against which Laclau reworks his notion of universality. To bring into relief the implicit theological underpinnings of the secular conception of the universal, I refer to the essay he co-authored with Lilian Zac, ‘Minding the gap’ (1994). There, they conclude with an assessment of the role of Hobbes for the constitution of the political discourse of modernity. Modern political theory, they argue, either deepens or develops the split that characterizes the secular conception of the political order, that is, the split between, on the one hand, the ruling function of the Leviathan and, on the other, the particular and plural contents that can possibly actualize the former. At stake in democracy, in the modern sense, ‘is the institution of signifiers of a social lack resulting from the absence of God as fullness of Being’ (Laclau and Zac 1994: 36). Since these signifiers are the floating and empty signifiers that assume a universalizing function, the conception of the universal as an empty space must not only be thought in opposition to the spurious formulations of the universal in which the latter is identified with a transcultural essence, or value, it must also be thought from, and with respect to, the withdrawal of God that gives birth to the secular vision of the Enlightenment, and to which it thus remains indebted (Laclau 2000c: 305).

One must not lose sight of these two aspects which configure Laclau’s answer to the problem of universality – the debate with rationalist universalism, primarily in its Marxist form, and with the theological heritage of this secular form of universality. But there is a further, and equally important, aspect of his reconception of the universal that needs to be mentioned here. For Laclau, the universal is primarily a social and political category. Even though the style of the discussion of the question of universality is largely one of formal analyses, analyses that, therefore, are not necessarily formalistic, the notion of universality in question is, far from being an abstract or merely formal concept, intimately linked to other issues such as hegemonic articulation, the question of representation, democratic society, and indeed the very possibility of the social and the political. Together with particularization, universalization is a concrete move constitutive of social and political life. As we have seen, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the very need to radically question the socialist universal discourse in order to secure democratic hegemonic practice called for the abandonment of the notion of universality. But in this work, Laclau and Mouffe also recognize:

the symmetrically opposite danger of a lack of all reference to […] unity. For, even though impossible, this remains a horizon which, given the absence of articulation between social relations, is necessary in order to prevent an implosion of the social and an absence of any common point of reference. This unraveling of the social fabric caused by the destruction of the symbolic framework is another form of the disappearance of the political. In contrast to the danger of totalitarianism, which imposes immutable articulations in an authoritarian manner, the problem here is the absence of those articulations which allow the establishment of meanings common to the different social subjects (HSS 188).

This important passage not only sets the stage for the criticism of multiculturalism and radical particularism in Laclau’s later works, it also clearly highlights the decisive fact that a certain notion of universality is indispensable for any constitution of the social and the political. Emancipation(s) makes this point with all the required force: ‘the abandonment of universalism undermines the foundation of a democratic society […] Without a universalism of sorts […] a truly democratic society is impossible’ (E 122). Indeed, the universal:

is absolutely essential for any kind of political interaction, for if the latter took place without universal reference, there would be no political interaction at all: we would only have either a complementarity of differences which would be totally non-antagonistic, or a totally antagonistic one, one where differences entirely lack any commensurability, and whose only possible resolution is the mutual destruction of the adversaries (E 61).

Furthermore, the claim made in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, that ‘the moment of the universality of the community, the moment in which, beyond any particularism, the universal speaks by itself’, coincides with ‘the ethical substance of the community’, shows to what extent the very possibility of the social hinges on a sense of universality which concerns the social unity, or community, of individuals, or particular groups (2000a: 80, 84). As understood by Laclau, universality could be called a social or political a priori. Its concretely substantive texture is the very fabric within which the formal analyses are made concerning a relation of universality and particularity, a fabric that is distinct from the one found in socialist universal discourse, and in the history of the relation that preceded the latter. The following analyses will seek to highlight to what extent Laclau’s recasting of the relation of the particular and the universal – in particular his thesis that the universal is an empty place – is a function of this social and political understanding of universality. Although the central notion of hegemony overlaps in several regards with more philosophical, or quasi-philosophical, concepts, for example, with différance, it is above all a socio-political category. The specific reformulation that the universal undergoes in Laclau’s thought is tied to this socio-political concept which describes the political articulation of the particular and the universal. The questions that I intend to raise with respect to the definition of the universal as an empty signifier or place later in this essay are questions that presuppose this highly tangible nature of the universal. While, in her dialogue with Laclau, Judith Butler has sought to criticize what she deems to be a formalist conception of the universal on the basis of the concrete social and cultural plurality of competing universals, I would like to address some questions to Laclau’s reformulation of the universal from what may be considered, in this particular context, an ultra-formalist stance. They are not questions that spring from any specific or definite philosophical concept of universality that I would hold, but rather from certain implications stemming from the concept of universality itself.

In the current socio-political configuration, Laclau’s insistence on the need not only to reformulate, but to salvage the concept of universality in the first place, is targeted primarily against the particularism that threatens multiculturalism, and the ‘politics of difference’ advanced by it. Under the general heading of the ‘logic of differ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I. Philosophy: Universality, singularity, difference
• PART II. Democracy: Politics, ethics, normativity
• PART III. Hegemony: Discourse, rhetorics, antagonism
• PART IV. A Reply
• Appendix I. the uses of equality
• Appendix II. Bibliography of Ernesto Laclau’s Work
• Index