Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy

IN A LATE TEXT LOUIS ALTHUSSER urged his readers to give “the crisis of Marxism” a “completely different sense from collapse and death.” Instead of writing the epitaph for Marxism, he insisted, it was necessary to show “how something vital and alive can be liberated by this crisis and in this crisis.”1 This missive went unanswered by Althusser’s French readers, and in fundamental ways it remains unanswered to this day. Indeed, by the time Althusser dispatched his call in 1977, the French intelligentsia was in “the process of full de-Marxification.”² With the left-wing parties and unions compromised by their response to the events of May 1968, the 1970s witnessed the fragmentation of the left followed by the near wholesale collapse of the miscellany of Maoists, Trotskyists, autogestionnaires and council socialists, anarchists, and so on. The leading edge of radicalism had passed to the philosophers of desire and the postmodern critics of normativity, metanarratives, and metaphysical “humanism.” The podium of moral declamation had been seized, albeit briefly, by the ex-Marxist New Philosophers, while, more quietly and more profoundly, the ground was shifting toward liberal democratic pluralism, a sea change that would thrust into prominence older figures like Claude Lefort and François Furet and prepare the way for younger talents like Marcel Gauchet and Pierre Rosanvallon. In such a climate, not only was Althusser’s call unheeded but also his once extraordinarily influential brand of structural Marxism, his so-called theoretical practice, was permanently eclipsed.

Yet this seems to be a case verifying Jacques Lacan’s remark that “a letter always arrives at its destination.”3 For if the call went unanswered in France, it was heard in England; or at least the spirit of a call that was not Althusser’s alone animated a great deal of English intellectual labor of the late 1970s and 1980s. The contrast between the two contexts during that period is striking. For even though the post-1968 British left entered a period of crisis that only escalated with the success of Thatcherism in the early 1980s, the desire to liberate something “vital and alive” from this crisis remained powerful. Perhaps the most original, intellectually engaging, and influential of all such efforts was Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the 1985 book written by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, an Argentine and a Belgian who had made their careers in England. Yet it was undoubtedly one of the most controversial as well, for Laclau and Mouffe sought to restore the theoretical dignity of Marxism by articulating a “post-Marxism without apologies.”⁴ Their double gesture of going beyond Marxism while incorporating it as a legacy and moral compass—signaled concisely in their claim to be both “post-Marxist” and “post-Marxist”—thematized the ambiguity of their intervention in relation to the various discourses that claimed patrimony from Marx. Yet another ambiguity resided in the fact that Mouffe and Laclau sought to rethink leftist politics using precisely the poststructuralist conceptual tools that in France had operated simultaneously as cause and symptom of the collapse of Marxist politics in the 1970s.

When Jacques Derrida addressed Marxism’s collapse in his 1993 book Specters of Marx, he spoke of a sense of déjà vu that made the question of Marxism’s fate resonate like “an old repetition.”⁶ Similarly, Mouffe and Laclau placed themselves in relation to a genealogy of distress within Marxism. As Laclau emphasized in a 1988 interview, “post-Marxism” is not a deviation from a pure source, but a radicalization of “the ambiguity of Marxism—which runs through its whole history” and is present even in Marx himself. “The act of constitution of post-Marxism is not different from its genealogy: that is, from the complex discourses through which it has been gradually gestating, including the Marxist tradition.”⁷ A substantial part of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is devoted to this genealogical reconstruction of the conflict in twentieth-century socialist thought between a deterministic social metaphysics grounded in the essentialist categories of class and economy and the contingencies and exigencies of historical existence.

Antonio Gramsci holds pride of place in this history because of his radical reworking of the idea of hegemony, which he inherited from Russian debates about the gap between the “necessary laws of history” and the actual political demands of the Russian situation. Gramsci’s emphasis on the importance of consent in the formation of bourgeois domination shifted the proletarian struggle onto the ideological terrain of civil society; at the same time, his conception of the materiality of ideology identified ideology not merely with ideas or mental representations, but with “an organic and relational whole, embodied in institutions and apparatuses, which weld together a historical bloc around a number of basic articulatory practices. This precludes the possibility of a ‘superstructuralist’ reading of the ideological.”⁸ Finally, and most important for Mouffe and Laclau, Gramsci’s recognition of the historical and contingent character of the working class’ assertion of its claims and identity subverted the essentialist determinist logic of Marxist thinking about class. Gramsci thereby pointed toward a new recognition of “social complexity as the very condition of political struggle,” and thus his conception of hegemony “sets the basis for a democratic practice of politics, compatible with a plurality of historical subjects.”⁹

Laclau and Mouffe’s appropriation of the Gramscian concept of hegemony came as they distanced themselves from their earlier attachment to Althusser. In an online interview in 1998, Mouffe, who had been a student of Althusser’s in Paris, explained that, “I became a Gramscian when I ceased to be an Althusserian.” Gramsci offered her a way out of an “Althusserian kind of dogmatism” that Althusser’s followers were then putting into practice.10 Laclau’s attachment was more tenuous than that of his wife. Although the theory of ideology offered in his 1977 book, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, contains a strong Althusserian dimension, Laclau emphasized in a 1988 interview that it was only insofar as Althusser seemed to subvert the totalizing character of Marxist discourse that his work attracted him. This disruptive resource lay in Althusser’s “overdetermined contradiction,” a concept with a psychoanalytic provenance that opened the way for Laclau and Mouffe’s break with the economistic reductionism of classic Marxism. Yet, as Laclau has often noted, the nonreductionist theory suggested in Althusser’s For Marx, the 1965 collection of his articles from the early 1960s, was belied by the tendency toward a closed structuralist system already discernible in Reading Capital, published also in 1965.¹¹ Given Althusser’s increasing rigidity, Laclau maintained in the 1988 interview, it was not surprising that the Althusserian school “had little time to mature intellectually in a post-Marxist direction—the ‘68 wave created a new historical climate that turned obsolete all that analytical-interpretative lucubration around Marx’s holy texts; but in the second place … the Althusserian project was conceived as an attempt at an internal theoretical renewal of the French Communist Party—a project that gradually lost significance in the seventies.”¹² Althusser’s own development may have been arrested by both his own internal impasses and the course of post-1968 politics, but Laclau acknowledged that “a great deal of my later works can be seen as a radicalization of many themes already hinted at in For Marx.”¹³ The recovery of Gramsci played an indispensable role in this process of radicalization.

In thus turning to Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe were in fact participants in an international surge of engagement with the Italian theorist. In England the influence of Gramsci can be found as early as the post-1956 thaw, when de-Stalinization and the formation of the New Left found a resource in the 1957 edition of The Modern Prince and Other Writings.14 The cultural and historical analysis pioneered by scholars like Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson drew on Gramsci, as did Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson’s theoretical analyses of the British state and the labor movement. In the mid-1970s Gramsci’s influence strengthened, as Gramscians gained considerable influence in the British Communist Party and played a crucial role in the emergence of a Eurocommunist majority at the party’s Thirty-fifth Congress in 1977. On a different plane, the cultural Marxist appropriation of Gramsci begun by figures like Thompson and Williams gained new momentum in cultural and media studies, most importantly at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University and the Popular Culture group at the Open University. Surveying the Continent in 1977, Chantal Mouffe and Anne Showstack Sassoon argued that the end of the 1960s marked an important turning point in French and Italian Gramscian studies because the parochial and dogmatic treatment of Gramsci as the theorist of the Italian Communist Party had broken down. Freed from the narrow reading of the Italian communists, Gramsci emerged as the “theoretician of the revolution in the West.” Mouffe and Sassoon reserved special praise for the works of Leonardo Paggi and Christine Buci-Glucksmann, who offered compelling readings of Gramsci as the theorist of the superstructures.¹⁵ Even more important, both Paggi and Buci-Glucksmann used Gramsci to criticize Althusser’s insistence upon distinguishing “ideology” and “science” as well as his characterization of Marxist philosophy as the “theory of theoretical practice.” Gramsci, by contrast, rejected the notion of philosophy as a “science with a specific object” and recognized philosophy as a vital political action in the ideological struggle.¹⁶ In Mouffe and Sassoon’s reading, Gramsci thus emerges as a kind of post-Althusserian. As Mouffe wrote, “If the history of Marxist theory during the 1960s can be characterized by the reign of ‘althusserianism,’ then we have now, without a doubt, entered a new phase: that of ‘gramscism.’”¹⁷ In Britain, too, the decline of Althusserianism coincided with the rise of Gramsci, as structuralist analysis gave way to awareness of the need for historical modes of analysis to account for the “surging conservative revival coalescing around the person of Margaret Thatcher.”¹⁸

Mouffe’s own contribution to her 1977 edited volume on Gramsci and Marxist Theory points toward important dimensions of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, but it remained within a Marxist framework as did most of the international engagement with Gramsci. In the intervening years leading up to the publication of Hegemony, Mouffe and Laclau became convinced that Marxism was not only inadequate but was rather an obstacle to the effort to understand the post-1968 proliferation of new social movements—“feminisms, ecology, peace, Third World solidarities, gay-lesbian rights, and antiracism, as well as squatting and the broader alternative scenes”—and the distinctive forms of democratic politics that had emerged after ’68.19 Gramsci offered a promising resource for this project, but only if his ideas were detached from his own ultimate reliance on the essentialist core of Marxism: its insistence on the foundational status of the material base. Hence Laclau and Mouffe grafted the notion of hegemony onto the stem of French poststructuralism, seeing hegemony as the process whereby the social world is constructed through discourse. Viewed in this light, the relationship between workers and socialism, for example, is not a necessary relationship, but rather the outcome of a process of articulation and political contestation. Social agents do not discover their common interests in an underlying shared essence, but forge them through “articulatory practices” that construct discourses operating within a political space that is itself not determined by the logic of anything exterior to it. “The relation of articulation is not a relation of necessity,” wrote Laclau and Mouffe. “What the discourse of ‘historical interests’ does is to hegemonize certain demands. … Political practice constructs the interests it represents.”²⁰

This detachment of interests from some anterior social base might alone have been sufficiently blasphemous to draw the wrath of many Marxists, but the real novelty and radicalism of Laclau and Mouffe came from their appropriation of poststructuralism. Following Derrida’s deconstructive strategy, they argued that there is no “transcendental signified,” no “eidos, arché, telos, energia, ousia, alétheia, etc.”21 Lacking a point of anchor, meaning is purely relational, emerging out of a mobile play of differences, presences, and absences. Insofar as society is discursively constructed, this differential element ensures that society itself can never be a closed, fixed system of meaning. “Society” is impossible, in the strict sense that society can never be fully present as an objective field, “a sutured and self-defined totality.”²² But Mouffe and Laclau were also careful to insist that if society is not “totally possible, neither is it totally impossible.”²³ This play of possibility and impossibility within an overdetermined field opens up the potentiality of hegemonic politics. Hegemony works by establishing equivalential links among entities within a field of difference. Hence, for example, the articulation of the Rights of Man and Citizen opens further arguments that those rights require an extension to people of color as well as to women, thereby displacing democratic discourse from the field of political equality among citizens to the field of equality between the sexes or between races. Hegemony is not “an irradiation of effects from a privileged point,” but “basically metonymical: its effects always emerge from a surplus of meaning.”²⁴ Hegemony combines elements around a core, what Mouffe and Laclau named a point de capiton, borrowing Lacan’s term for the “privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of a signifying chain” and thereby establish the positions that make predication possible.²⁵ In a key statement, Mouffe and Laclau wrote: “The practice of articulation, therefore, consists in the construction of nodal points which partially fix meaning; and the partial character of this fixation proceeds from the openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity.”²⁶

In the 1990s Laclau’s work became increasingly stamped by Lacan, inspired in part by Slavoj Žižek’s efforts to fully integrate post-Marxism into the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis. This is a topic to which we will return in the concluding pages of this chapter, but, at present, it suffices to note that in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy Lacan was just one resource underlying Laclau and Mouffe’s insistence that the “meaning-giving” human subject cannot be defended as the last redoubt of essentialism. Having abandoned the straitjacket of Marxism, Laclau and Mouffe refused to have their identities bounded by any specific theoretical frontier. Many theoretical legacies tattoo the body of their text. Hence they located themselves in a continuum with Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and, of course, the French poststructuralists in contesting the view of the subject as an “agent both rational and transparent to itself” and the “conception of the subject as origin and basis of social relations.”27 In place of “subjects,” they spoke of “subject positions” formed within a discursive structure. The subject is itself a point de capiton, a nodal point that is implicated within and created by the practices of articulation. As with every other element of the discursive field, the subjectivity of the agent is penetrated by the same precariousness and polysemy that overflow all attempts to conceal or “suture” the indeterminacy of meaning. Ultimately, then, hegemonic politics is about the struggle for the creation of new subjects or, more precisely, new subject positions, through the practices of articulation. The distance from Marxism is clear; as with any other social identity, class identity is a subject position created through articulation. The classic socialist struggle over the relations of production has no primacy, but is itself the outcome of a certain discursive practice. Indeed, even though Mouffe and Laclau went to great lengths to emphasize that the preoccupations of traditional socialist politics remain important dimensions of democratic struggle, they become just one dimension of “radical democracy,” the concept offered by Laclau and Mouffe to describe the political project opened by the much more fractured, pluralistic, and mobile front of new social movements contesting social, sexual, racial, and gender hierarchies.

Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of the construction of the subject through language “as a partial and metaphorical incorporation into a symbolic order” has led some critics to argue that they were insufficiently detached from Althusser’s view of the subject as passively produced through the process of ideological interpellation.²⁸ Laclau went to some lengths to dispel this view in a 1988 interview. While acknowledging that his first works had drawn on Althusser’s “Spinozan notion of a ‘subject effect,’ which merely stems from the logic of the structures,” he emphasized that the production of subjects through interpellation works only if the individuals thus being hailed identify with ideology. Given this view, he and Mouffe conceived interpellation “as part of an open, contingent, hegemonic-articulatory process which can in no sense be confused with Spinozan ‘eternity.’”²⁹ Laclau and Mouffe’s resistance to Althusser found a striking expression in their intervention in the debate prompted by Edward Thompson’s attack on the Althusserians in The Poverty of Theory.³⁰ In opposition to Thompson’s essentialist humanism, Laclau and Mouffe emphasized the complexity of the discourses that have produced the modern subject and hence the fragility and incomplete project of “humanism,” and, contrary to Althusser’s relegation of humanism to the field of ideology, they insisted not only on the effective power of humanist discourse in emancipatory struggles since the eighteenth century but also on the forms of overdetermination that always put subjects in excess of any symbolic order.³¹ Between the essentialism of the humanist “subject” and the excessive swing of poststructuralist thought toward the metaphor of dispersal, Laclau and Mouffe insisted that an analysis of subjectivity “cannot dispense with the forms of overdetermination of some positions by others,” a conception of relation that resists both dispersal and suture.³²

Post-Marxism reinvents social struggle in terms of postmodernism’s general critique of logocentrism and essentialism. Post-Marxism thereby taps directly into a main intellectual trend in French thought since the 1960s. After 1968, when orthodox Marxism and the Parti communiste français revealed their bankruptcy in the streets, French theorists turned to new forms of critical thought emphasizing the importance of contingency, microresistance, cultural rebellion, and a conception of the political no longer bounded by the state. Waves of theory ceased to refer to Marx and socialism and celebrated new forms of liberation instead. Hence Deleuze and Guattari’s schizopolitics, Foucault’s micropolitics, Lyotard’s gaming, Derrida’s aesthetic play, and Baudrillard’s celebration of the hyperreal simulacrum.

In an essay entitled “The Apocalyptic Imagination and the Inability to Mourn” Martin Jay explores the double meaning of these febrile gestures of postmodernism. Jay takes his point of departure from Eric Santner’s suggestion that much postmodernism represents itself as a healthy mourning for the lost hopes of the modernist project. However, drawing on Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia, Jay underscores the apparent endlessness of postmodern mourning. The insistence on the inability of language to achieve a plenitude of meaning leads to “a valorization of repetition that is closer to melancholy than mourning per se.”33 As Jean Baudrillard wrote in 1981, “Melancholy is the quality inherent in the mode of disappearance of meaning, in the mode of volatilization of meaning in operational systems. And we are all melancholic.”³⁴ In Freud’s famous discussion, writes Jay, the work of mourning is “conscious of the love-object it has lost,” and “it is able to learn from reality testing about the actual disappearance of the object and thus slowly and painfully withdraw its libido from it. The love-object remains in memory, it is not obliterated, but it is no longer the target of the same type of emotional investment as before.”³⁵ Instead of gradually withdrawing his libidinal attachment from the lost object, the melancholic internalizes the object as a form of self-identification. According to Freud’s model, the melancholic ego’s regressive narcissistic identification with the lost object couples with guilt to produce alternating states of manic elation and self-punishing low-esteem. From this perspective it might be suggested that postmodernism’s celebration of excess is the manic side of a melancholia that manifests itself in fantasies of obliteration and endless dispersal. Martin Jay argues that this vacillation helps to explain the peculiarity of the postmodern apocalyptic imagination, which works with only one side of the apocalyptic tradition: the threat of destruction, but not the promise of revelation.

Post-Marxism would seem to compound the sources of melancholy, as it not only inhabits the loss of meaning but also the specific loss of Marxism as a privileged object, intellectual investment, and emotional cathexis. Certainly, the language of mourning is not absent. Laclau and Mouffe viewed Marxism as a tradition, a culture, a collective memory, a personal past, and a personal identity. As Laclau said in 1988, “The loss of collective memory is not something to be overjoyed about. It is always an impoverishment and a traumatic fact. One only thinks from a tradition.”36 Jacques Derrida, who entered this discussion with Specters of Marx, oriented the discussion of Marxism toward bereavement. Derrida wrote of an uncanny situation in which Marx has vanished but continues to haunt us. Marx’s specter becomes a way for Derrida to activate the trace of meaning as a political principle; the ghostly presence of Marx’s demand for justice disrupts the seamlessness of contemporary time. It orients Derrida’s call for justice toward the ghosts of those who were and those yet to be. The logic of spectrality, further, furnishes Derrida with a weak—a deliberately weak—hold on the Marxian tradition or at least a “certain spirit of Marxism.” That is to say, a dimension of “radical critique” and a “certain emancipatory and messianic affirmation” of a democracy that is always a “promise that can only arise in … failure, inadequation, disjunction, disadjustment, being ‘out of joint.’”³⁷

Although Specters of Marx is elegiac in tone, it aims to further the work of mourning by preserving Marxism’s radical spirit while rejecting the strong messianism, determinism, and ontological foundationalism that overburdened the Marxist tradition. In a lengthy 1999 response to his Marxist critics, Derrida sharply distanced his book from despair or nostalgia. He insisted that “one can discuss the work of mourning, analyze its necessity and political effects across the globe (after the alleged ‘death of Marx’ or of the communist idea)—one can be constrained to do so for all kinds of reasons, without therefore relinquishing a certain gaiety of affirmative thinking. Even without recalling the many texts and talks I have devoted to this possibility, I think it fair to say that Specters of Marx is anything but a sad book.”³⁸

At its most fundamental, this post-Marxist principle of hope rests on the recovery of “historicity,” that is, the final liberation of the historical world from all vestiges of determinism. Derrida’s Specters of Marx reminds the reader of deconstruction’s basic critique of “the onto-theo- but also archeo-teleological concept of history—in Hegel, Marx, or even in the epochal thinking of Heidegger.” This is to be a critique, Derrida wrote, undertaken for the sake of “thinking another historicity … another opening of event-ness as historicity that permit[s] one not to renounce, but on the contrary to open up access to an affirmative thinking of the messianic and emancipatory promise as promise: as promise and not as onto-theological or teleological program or design.”⁴² Laclau and Mouffe likewise urge a “radical historicism” based on an “acceptance of our contingency and historicity.”⁴³ Ultimately, both Derrida and the post-Marxists invoke an ontological condition wherein the impossibility of closure defines our “historicity” as the condition of all “history,” eventness the condition of the specificity of the event.

Similar concerns animate Žižek’s more recent critique of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, which he conducts in a text whose title—in Žižek’s typically vaudevillian way—shines a light down one path leading from the French exit from Marxism: “MELANCHOLY AND THE ACT in which the reader will be surprised to learn that anyone who is not a melancholic, or does not agree that we are thrown into a contingent finite universe, can today be suspected of ‘totalitarianism.’”⁴⁶ Žižek offers a drastic redefinition of the melancholic, whom he no longer sees as “primarily the subject fixated on the lost object, unable to perform the work of mourning it, but, rather, the subject who possesses the object, but has lost his desire for it, because the cause which made him desire this object has withdrawn, lost its efficacy.” Melancholia “occurs when we finally get the desired object, but are disappointed with it.”⁴⁷ Derrida’s spectral turn to a “certain spirit of Marxism” may indeed be melancholic in this way, or, even better, it may be a melancholic prophylaxis insofar as the messianic promise of a democracy à venir remains ineluctably distant from all positive incarnations of democracy. Watching Derrida address his Marxist critics in “Marx & Sons,” one shares his irritation at the proprietary and censorious tones of unreconstructed hardliners like Terry Eagleton, but it is hard not to be struck by his double prohibition—against bringing his vision into focus, let alone acting upon it. Derrida’s affirmative gaiety seems a very different affair from the recognizably political contours of Laclau’s hegemonic logic, not to mention from Žižek’s call for specific “economico-political measures” to address poverty and other injustices.⁴⁸

Supporters and critics of poststructuralism alike have frequently imputed a specific politics to it. In response, Laclau has insisted that “there is nothing that can be called a ‘politics of poststructuralism.’” Rejecting the idea that there are philosophical systems with “unbroken continuities” that go from metaphysics to politics, Laclau held in an interview that “the correct question … is not so much which is the politics of poststructuralism, but rather what are the possibilities a poststructuralist theoretical perspective opens for the deepening of those political practices that go in the direction of a ‘radical democracy.’”⁴⁹ Likewise, in his review of Specters of Marx Laclau maintained that, “with any deconstruction worthy of the name, there is a plurality of directions in which one can move.”⁵⁰ Certainly, if one looks to the early 1980s, when Laclau and Mouffe were composing their book, there can be no question of the lability of deconstructive politics. Derrida may have praised Laclau and Mouffe in 1993 for their “novel elaboration, in a ‘deconstructive’ style, of the concept of hegemony,”⁵¹ but in the early 1980s the most prominent deconstructive variation on the much-remarked “return of the political” in France was the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and the Center for Philosophical Research on the Political that they founded in 1980. For Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, politics is, à la Heidegger, implicated in the long history of humanism’s forgetting of Being. Tying political action to the human subject’s “exorbitant” drive toward unity, essence, and domination, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe could at best offer the paradoxical ideal of the “inoperative community,” a being-in-common that only works so long as it does not work. Ruling out all exercise of will as a recuperation of the totalitarian mania for fusion, communion, and substance, Nancy could only invoke Gelassenheit, or resignation, as the means by which the inoperative community would be “exposed” as “this strange being-the-one-with-the-other.”⁵² The contrast to Laclau and Mouffe grows sharper if one measures their different perspectives on autogestion, the political goal of self-management first articulated by Cornelius Castoriadis and Socialisme ou Barbarie in the 1950s and revived as an ideal by student activists in 1968 and then by the Deuxième Gauche, the post-’68 leftist tendency that repudiated the bureaucratized politics of the PCF in favor of direct democracy. Where Laclau and Mouffe criticized self-management only because they believed that shop-floor politics should not be limited to workers themselves but should be articulated hegemonically with the interests of other political agents, Lacoue-Labarthe acknowledged the politics of self-management as the only viable “provisional politics” in the broken landscape of the left, even as he fretted that councilist politics focus “unduly on what could indisputably lead to ‘Marxist metaphysics,’ on the motif of self-organization, and that is to say on the conception of the proletariat as Subject.”⁵³

We may readily accept Laclau’s claim that undecidabilty and contingency accompany the moves that political thinkers make, but does that mean there are no other considerations – dare one say, determinations – that might contribute to an understanding of the specific moves that Laclau and Mouffe chose to make? Here it is necessary to expand the discussion of the contextual complexities of their intervention. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy is a hybrid product, drawing on various theoretical legacies and responding to various contexts. Differences between the French and English contexts, the remaining pages of this section will argue, help to explain the differences in tone and project that we have noted in the contrast between Laclau and Mouffe, on one side, and figures like Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy, on the other.

The Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 had some similar effects among both English and French left-wing intellectuals. For many, profound disillusionment led them to break with the Communist Party and embark on the various political and intellectual projects that may be loosely grouped as the New Left. In the French context, as we saw in chapter 2, membership in Socialisme ou Barbarie spiked briefly after the Hungarian invasion, while anti-Stalinist groups like the Situationist International and the Arguments circle emerged in direct reaction against the Soviet aggression. Yet it was Althusserian Marxism that profited most in the 1960s from French leftist intellectuals’ disenchantment with communism. The events of May 1968 shook Althusserianism, as it did structuralism as a whole. Nonetheless, as Dosse notes, the second wind of Marxism among intellectuals after 1968 actually raised Althusser’s stocks to unprecedented highs. With Althusser enjoying a growing readership, new enthusiasts, academic consecration, and official PCF recognition, the Althusserians resumed their long march through the structures. Yet “the triumphal period” proved to be as “ephemeral as it was exciting.”⁵⁴ Indeed, the intellectual left unraveled with stunning speed, and episodes like Althusser’s self-criticism, an act of self-destruction that he considered more radical than suicide, or the scathing critique of the apostate Jacques Rancière were local events within a larger story that includes the effects of the “Common Program” that brought the PCF and the Socialist Party into an electoral alliance in 1972, the French publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, and the paradoxical effects of François Mitterrand’s electoral victory in 1981 upon the leftist sympathies of intellectuals.⁵⁵ The rise of the Nouveaux Philosophes, the apotheosis of Raymond Aron, the impact of François Furet and Claude Lefort, the revival of political liberalism in the 1980s, the hyperallergic reaction of postmodernists to any manner of totalizing thought—all these mark a reversal that is stunning in its suddenness and depth.

It has become customary to date the decline of the iconic figure of the French intellectual to the development of the liberal consensus and the centrist republic. However, a second factor that might help explain the abrupt reversal of intellectual leftism runs in a somewhat different direction. In a 1983 interview, Michel Foucault evoked wistfully the exciting currents of left-wing thought that had existed since at least 1960 but had disappeared by the early 1980s. Foucault ventured that the crisis of Marxism was the result not of the disappearance of the public intellectual but rather of the democratization of the intellectual function. New circumstances since the 1960s had given “university activity an echo which reverberated widely beyond academic institutions or even groups of specialists, professional intellectuals.”⁶⁰ Although he acknowledged some gains in terms of public awareness, he essentially endorsed Régis Debray’s influential argument that French intellectual life had entered a “media cycle” by the 1970s. As Debray wrote, “Marx called France the land of ideas. The Atlantic world lives in the era of the scoop. Atlantic France has manufactured the ideological scoop. It teaches newsmen nothing, still less men of thought. But it satisfies a certain ‘national intellectual personality.’”⁶¹ Under the pressure of the mass media, Foucault argued,

a fairly evolved discourse, instead of being relayed by additional work which perfects it (either with criticism or amplification), rendering it more difficult and even finer, nowadays undergoes a process of amplification from the bottom up. Little by little, from the book to the review, to the newspaper article, and from the newspaper article to television, we come to summarize a work, or a problem, in terms of slogans. This passage of the philosophical question into the realm of the slogan, this transformation of the Marxist question, which becomes “Marxism is dead,” is not the responsibility of any one person in particular, but we can see the slide whereby philosophical thought, or a philosophical issue, becomes a consumer item.⁶²

In France, a context unusual for the extent of the centralization of education, intellectual life, the media, and the public sphere, the media could perhaps play a particularly strong role in transforming an unsettled debate into the decided conviction of public opinion. That this amplification-effect could stifle debate is made clear if we recall Derrida’s announcement at a conference in 1981 that he had maintained “a silence with respect to Marxism” at a time when critical reflection on Marx would simply get sucked into the “anti-Marxist concert.”63

In his memoir, Eric Hobsbawm recalls with distaste the “militant and ill-tempered anti-communism of so many of the formerly left-wing ‘intellocrats’” in the France of the 1980s and 1990s. He writes, “As a by now quite well-known Marxist historian, I found myself for a while a champion of the embattled and besieged French intellectual Left.”⁶⁴ Although Hobsbawm, a self-described “heterodox communist” right up to his death in late 2012, was by no means typical of contemporary British leftists, his remarks suggest something of the relevant comparison between France and Britain in the post-1968 period. Without question, the British left entered an open-ended period of crisis, defined by the defeat of the Labour Party, the disastrous miners’ strikes, eighteen years of Conservative rule, and the return to power in the late 1990s of a Labour Party transformed almost beyond recognition, led by a man whom Hobsbawm calls “Thatcher in trousers.”⁶⁵ The 1980s saw much discussion around the question, “What’s Left?” Despairing as that question was, however, it did not suggest a massive rejection of left-wing allegiances among the intellectuals who continued to pose and explore it. In fact, although the 1980s were politically disastrous for the British left, a left-wing intellectual culture continued in Britain. Lin Chun, a historian of the British New Left, details the growth of left-wing publications and activities during the 1970s. She writes, “All these developments had combined to transform the environment of the intellectual work of the Left. By the end of the decade, Marxist traditions had been much strengthened in some fields in this notoriously parochial country, in sharp contrast to the collapse of Marxist strongholds on the continent at exactly the same time.”⁶⁶

These circumstances bore directly on the British reception of French poststructuralism. According to Antony Easthope, author of the major survey of British poststructuralism, “Whereas the ‘new ideas’ and the ‘new criticism’ were assimilated in America to a liberal and libertarian tradition, in Britain they acquired a radical and political force because they were adopted into the British Marxist and left-culturalist inheritance.”69 In America the reception first began with Derrida and then moved on to Lacan, thus bypassing almost entirely the work of Althusser. In Britain, Easthope shows, the reception began with Althusser in the 1960s and then progressed, through the analysis of ideology, to Lacan.⁷⁰ To be sure, with the growth of analytical Marxism, much of the energy on the intellectual left had swung back from the French to the native English “linguistic turn” by the mid-1980s, and even at the height of the British enthusiasm for French theory there were many left-wing dissenters who attacked Althusserian sectarians and regarded structuralism and poststructuralism to be antithetical to the socialist project. One thinks immediately of Edward Thompson, but Perry Anderson can be added to the list of prominent opponents. Despite his willingness to defend Althusser against Thompson, Anderson’s In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983) damns the French theorists; and that condemnation extends to his ill-informed, indeed outright wrong inclusion of Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, and Marcel Gauchet among the priests of “Desire,” the latest “fashionable philosophy of Parisian irrationalism.”⁷¹ Dogged by controversy as British Althusserianism and Lacanianism undoubtedly were, the important point is that French theory unfolded within, not against, the broad culture of the British left.

Left-wing British intellectuals had often envied the partisan vitality of French intellectual life, the prominence of the public intellectual in France, and the subtleties of French political discussion.⁷² Perhaps, however, the more decentralized nature of intellectual life in Britain, the weaker hold of revolution on the political imagination of the left, the strong orientation of leftist intellectuals to questions of culture, the greater distance of intellectuals from the mass media, indeed, the greater marginality of intellectuals within a culture that remained suspicious of abstraction and never appointed its leading writers to a higher moral tribunal, had the effects of immunizing the British left against the more extreme swings that accompanied the collapse of Marxism in France. Post-Marxism may have been vigorously attacked by its staunchest British Marxist critics as quite simply “ex-Marxism,”⁷³ but we would miss a crucial dimension of the tone and substance of Mouffe and Laclau’s appropriation of poststructuralism if we failed to see it as partly a product of the British context, where the crisis of Marxism was not accompanied by an “antitotalitarian moment,” public rituals of self-abasement, and the manic-depressive tone of so much French thought of the period.

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was a relay between two political and intellectual cultures that responded quite differently to the crisis of the left after 1968. Lest we fall into a simple image of a two-way trade between the British and French elements of this construction, it is important to at least mention yet another context haunting their discourse, namely the impact of their Latin American experiences. Mouffe, who had moved from Belgium to Paris in the mid-1960s, became involved in anti-imperialist movements and Latin American politics. This led her to go to Colombia, where she lectured in philosophy at the National University from 1967 to 1973. Mouffe credits the specific dynamics of Latin American politics with accelerating a critical revaluation of structural Marxism that had begun even before she left Paris.74 To an even greater extent, Ernesto Laclau’s formative experiences were Latin American, due to his involvement in the Argentine Socialist Party of the national left during the 1960s. Within that context, Laclau has emphasized, the classical issues and divisions of the European left were overshadowed by the political legacy of Juan Perón, who had been elected president in 1946 by “a heterogeneous coalition of the most diverse kind, ranging from the far-left to the far-right.”⁷⁵ The challenges of left-wing politics in a situation dominated by Peronist populism gave Laclau the “experience of the ambiguity of democratic banners—what we would today call ‘floating signifiers’—as well as the recognition of the centrality of the categories of ‘articulation’ and ‘hegemony.’” It was unnecessary, Laclau has maintained, to read poststructuralist texts to learn the lessons of contingency and undecidability. “I’d already learnt this through my practical experience as a political activist in Buenos Aires. So when today I read Of Grammatology, S/Z, or the Écrits of Lacan, the examples which always spring to mind are not from philosophical or literary texts; they are from a discussion in an Argentinian trade union, a clash of opposing slogans at a demonstration, or a debate during a party congress.”⁷⁶ After he came to Europe in 1969, earned a Ph.D. at the University of Essex, and began teaching there, these experiences continued as points of reference for a “nondogmatic” reflection on Marxist theory and politics.

From the time when Marx declared that the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy, through to the Leninist vanguard, Gramsci’s war of position, Sartre’s committed writer, and Althusser’s “theoretical practice,” the Marxist tradition reserved a privileged place for the radical intellectual. In the French context a Marxist belief in the unity of theory and practice amplified a long association of the French intellectual with the defense of universal values. Although the figure of the philosophe engagé has continued to haunt the French imaginary, the collapse of Marxism ushered in an ongoing discussion of the disappearance of the great intellectual as well as a widespread critique of universal values and the maîtres à penser (including structuralists like Lévi-Strauss and Althusser) who had spoken for them. The late 1970s and the 1980s witnessed numerous efforts to demystify that figure. One immediately thinks of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of academia as well as attempts to reconceptualize the political role of intellectuals, such as Foucault’s idea of the “specific intellectual” or Julia Kristeva’s notion of the dissident, the latter privileging the Freudian and the avant-garde writer, but not the rebel who confronts political power directly.⁷⁷ What was the fate of the radical intellectual’s political vocation for Mouffe and Laclau, thinkers who situated themselves within the discourses of suspicion directed against the universalism and essentialism that had sustained the traditional intellectual, who nonetheless still claimed, however ambiguously, a legacy in Marxism?

Post-Marxism would seem to imply a greatly diminished place for the political intellectual. After all, the identity of theory and practice seems to be the first casualty of the post-Marxist critique of historical determinism and foundationalist logics. With no logical historical process to discover and no foundation upon which to articulate normative arguments about justice and the good, the older privilege of the intellectual would seem irretrievably shattered. Laclau addressed this issue directly in a 1988 interview, when he described his and Mouffe’s role as an extension of Gramsci’s idea of the organic intellectual. Like Gramsci, Laclau rejected the definition of intellectuals as a segregated group and instead emphasized “the intellectual function,” which establishes “the organic unity of a set of activities, which, left to their own resources, would remain fragmented and dispersed.”⁷⁸ The intellectual function is thus the practice of articulation. Far from diminishing the intellectual function, the dissolution of rationalist social ontologies like Marxism actually amplifies it because “hegemonic articulations are not a secondary or marginal effect but the ontological level itself of the constitution of the social.” Where the tradition of “great intellectuals” had rested on a claim that the intrinsic truth of things could be recognized by certain persons possessing the means of access, the organic intellectual participates in the construction of a truth that is “essentially pragmatic” and “democratic.”⁷⁹ The intellectual function thus “consists in the invention of languages. If the unity of historical blocs is given by ‘organic ideologies’ that articulate into new projects fragmented and dispersed social elements, the production of those ideologies is the intellectual function par excellence.” Laclau emphasizes that these ideologies are not “utopias” proposed to society, but “inseparable from the collective practices through which social articulation takes place.”⁸⁰

This radicalization of the Gramscian organic intellectual raises as many problems as it resolves, however. For one thing, it suffers the dilemma common to pragmatist arguments, for it dispenses with the effort to confirm truth claims in any manner beyond the validation that comes when an argument works politically. A glaring example of this problem comes when Mouffe and Laclau seek support in Georges Sorel’s concept of “myth.”81 Even leaving aside the troubling political vacillations in Sorel’s career and considering only strategic concerns, the Sorelian myth of the general strike seems to illustrate precisely the inadequacy of an articulation that no longer searches for verification beyond the discursive terms set by itself. After all, it can be plausibly argued that the myth of the general strike lulled socialists into complacency, blinded them to their real situation, and impeded their strategic thinking in the years leading up to the outbreak of war in 1914. Laclau and Mouffe’s detachment of truth claims from a materialist foundation was, of course, what most upset Marxists. However, even among postfoundationalist political thinkers, one sees a striking contrast. Jürgen Habermas’s attempt to develop a discourse theory of democratic legitimation springs immediately to mind; even closer to the discursive tradition within which Laclau and Mouffe operate, their position contrasts sharply with a figure like Claude Lefort. Lefort, whose discussion of the dynamics of the democratic revolution that has unfolded ever since 1789 figures prominently in the final pages of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, approaches their position when he writes that “the quest for truth and the truth itself are one and the same,” but his argument that both politics and truth depend on utterance, performance, and a “process of questioning” that is implicit in modern social practices opens a different prospect for the intellectual.⁸² Lefort describes the intellectual pursuit as requiring a “heroism of mind” animated and haunted by “the ‘impossible’ task of disclosing that which is—the being of history, of society, of man—and of creating, of bringing forth through the exercise of a vertiginous right to thought and to speech, the work in which meaning makes its appearance.”⁸³ In admittedly quite different ways, Habermas and Lefort each insists upon the intellectual’s responsibility to the argument itself as well as the possibility of deliberative capacities within the public(s) construed in the broadest terms. Vexed though the question of validity has become, there remains a compelling need to understand the process whereby we test our claims as something that reaches beyond the pragmatic goal of constructing historical blocs, even if we also recognize the impossibility of foundational guarantees and the untenability of the traditional intellectual’s privileged position vis-à-vis truth.

Laclau maintained that even after toppling the pillars of Marxist orthodoxies, the concept of ideology could be retained, “even in the sense of ‘false consciousness,’ if by the latter we understand that illusion of ‘closure’ which is the imaginary horizon that accompanies the constitution of all objectivity.”85 Yet the constitution of “objectivity” seems to be a condition of all social movements, thereby rendering all of them instances of false consciousness. To update a Leninist dictum according to post-Marxist logic, left to themselves political agents will never develop more than a predicative consciousness. But how many social movements could survive in the full light of Laclau and Mouffe’s knowledge? There seems to be a clear divide between the organic intellectual of the social movement and the deconstructive analyst who exposes the ontology of the social. Possessed of this knowledge, the post-Marxist seems condemned to what Roland Barthes called “theoretical sociality”: “we constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness. For if we penetrate the object, we liberate it but destroy it; and if we acknowledge its full weight, we respect it, but restore it to a state which is still mystified.”⁸⁶

This observation returns us to the question of trauma. This chapter has argued that Laclau and Mouffe redirected the sources of postmodern melancholia toward the work of mourning, of working through the loss of Marxism and, indeed, the redemptive project of revolution itself. I have tried to delineate their appropriation of poststructuralist theory and suggest reasons—both internal to their own trajectories and related to the contextual hybridity that stamps their work—why they embraced an affirmative stance vis-à-vis the collapse of Marxism, moving beyond a potential impasse into a fruitful theory of social antagonism and the role of discourse in the formation of political movements, in short, why their theory is so French and so very un-French. Yet if the “final incompletion of the social” offers the main source of hope for the project of radical democracy, have the post-Marxists worked through their own mourning at the risk of minimizing a deeper trauma connected to democracy itself? Claude Lefort, whose work represents the best that issued from the French reflection on totalitarianism, speaks of the traumatic core of democracy itself, which was born in the symbolic disincorporation of power. The loss of the visible unity of the body politic, the experience of social division and indetermination haunt the democratic experience. The death of embodied power was the enabling condition of modern democracy, but it also marks an originary scene of loss that still seems to exert power over the psychical life of democracy. “Is it not true,” Lefort writes, “that in order to sustain the ordeal of the division of the subject, in order to dislodge the reference points of the self and the other, to depose the position of the possessor of power and knowledge, one must assume responsibility for an experience instituted by democracy, the indetermination that was born from the loss of the substance of the body politic?”⁸⁷

In many respects, this reading of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy looks like a textbook example of one of Slavoj Žižek’s favorite moves, retroactive reinscription or resymbolization. Lacan, after all, was but one of a number of putatively “poststructuralist” theorists mobilized in Laclau and Mouffe’s eclectic book, and their concept of antagonism arguably had more to do with the poststructuralist critique of the metaphysics of presence than with the traumatic encounter between the symbolic and the real.91 Indeed, in an otherwise laudatory preface to The Sublime Object of Ideology, Laclau worried about Žižek’s overly “drastic” separation between Lacanian theory and poststructuralism; likewise, having firmly identified Hegel with the kind of totalizing and deterministic thinking that he and Mouffe aimed to overcome, Laclau voiced skepticism about the Slovenian school’s “special combination of Hegelianism and Lacanian theory.”⁹² As for Žižek, his firmer rooting in Lacanian theory manifests itself in a significant recasting of the notion of antagonism as an effect of the traumatic dynamics of the symbolic and the real.

Certainly, Laclau and Mouffe disclosed a debt to Lacan when they described the linguistic construction of the subject “as a partial and metaphorical incorporation into a symbolic order.”⁹³ Yet in many ways their formulation had affinities with Louis Althusser. Of course, Althusser himself had drawn on Lacan, but only on a rigidly structuralist version of Lacanianism that depicted the subject as the interpellated product of the “big Other,” that place where the authority of the symbolic order is assumed to lie, that ultimate “quilting point” that stabilizes the entire system of signification and loads individuals with a symbolic mandate and a place in the intersubjective network of symbolic relations.⁹⁴ We have already seen that Laclau attempted to distance himself and Mouffe from Althusser, insofar as he insisted that an adequate theory of interpellation would require three elements missing from Althusser: an accompanying theory of the process whereby subjects come to identify themselves with ideology, a view of interpellation as part of a contingent hegemonic-articulatory process, and full recognition that forms of overdetermination ensure that subjects will always be in excess of any symbolic order. Notwithstanding these objections to the Althusserian theory of subjectivation, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy remained predominantly within the framework of a linguistic conception of the subject. To be sure, Althusser’s rigid structuralism has given way to a more dynamic decentered model animated by surplus and slippage, and interpellation is now imagined as the outcome of political contestation, not an automatic effect irradiating from the big Other. However, Laclau and Mouffe still understand subjectivity as a product of the symbolic order, with identities being relayed up and down the chain of signification, while they see the “overdetermination” that exceeds the symbolic as stemming from the indeterminacies of signifiers themselves. Laclau’s recognition that interpellation must be supplemented by a theory of subjective identification does not find its way into the pages of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. In short, Laclau and Mouffe did not provide a theory of the subject so much as a more supple theory of subjectivation, that is, of the creation of subject positions.⁹⁵

Žižek’s contrast between Althusser’s reliance upon the symbolic and Lacan’s emphasis upon the real rests on one of the central gambits of Žižek’s work, namely his insistence on a deep contrast between Lacan’s structuralist phase in the 1950s and his subsequent phase as the analyst of the real.⁹⁷ In the final stage of his career, Lacan became intensely concerned with that kernel or remainder that can never be integrated into the symbolic order, but produces effects that may be constructed retroactively in the ways it distorts the symbolic reality of subjects. Žižek illustrates this by contrasting the structuralist Lacan’s concept of symptom to the later Lacan’s notion of fantasy. In the early fifties Lacan conceived symptoms as

In Lacan’s final period, writes Žižek, “we have the big Other, the symbolic order, with a traumatic element at its very heart.”98 This big Other bears no resemblance to Althusser’s description of the big Other as an “Absolute Subject” that “occupies the unique place of the Centre, and interpellates around it the infinity of individuals into subjects.”⁹⁹ Instead, the big Other, the symbolic order, is flawed. It is not-all, carrying an unsymbolizable element at its very heart, an empty place.

Fantasy, in this late Lacanian view, is “conceived as a construction allowing the subject to come to terms with this traumatic kernel.” So, writes Žižek, “the final moment of the [analytic process] is defined as ‘going through the fantasy’: not its symbolic interpretation but the experience of the fact that the fantasy-object, by its fascinating presence, is merely filling out a lack, a void in the Other. There is nothing ‘behind’ the fantasy; the fantasy is a construction whose function is to hide this void, this ‘nothing’—that is, the lack in the Other.”¹⁰⁰ Far from trying to exhaustively translate the symptom into the language of the other, the later Lacan focuses on the way the subject organizes itself around the lack or void of the real; a successful analysis would end with the patient identifying himself with his symptom, recognizing in the real of his symptom the only support of his being.¹⁰¹ From the perspective of the later Lacan’s understanding of the subject’s fantasmatic projections onto the big Other, Žižek offers a corrective to Althusser’s account of interpellation that answers to Laclau’s call for a theory of identification—namely, before being caught in an ideological identification, in a process of symbolic recognition or misrecognition, the subject is “trapped by the Other through a paradoxical object-cause of desire in the midst of it.”¹⁰² That is to say, identification with ideology rests on the constitutive “lack” in the subject itself, which fuels fantasies that somewhere out there is the lost object that will plug the gap in its own makeup. The internalization of ideology never fully succeeds, Žižek argues, because of the residue of the real, but “this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it : it is precisely this non-integrated surplus of senseless traumatism which confers on the Law its unconditional authority.”¹⁰³

Žižek’s understanding of Lacan’s final phase allowed him to assert the connection between psychoanalysis and social analysis by arguing that both the individual subject and the “big Other, the symbolic order itself,” are “barré—crossed-out—by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack.”104 Arguably, then, when he credited Laclau and Mouffe with reinventing the Lacanian real as a tool for social and ideological analysis, Žižek offered empty praise, not only because it is not clear that they were really doing that but also because this was in fact the defining core of Žižek’s own enterprise, visible already in his first published book, Hegel: Les plus sublimes des hysteriques, and spectacularly elaborated in The Sublime Object of Ideology, which, incidentally, repackages much of his first French book for an English readership. In recasting Laclau and Mouffe’s concept of antagonism he brings to bear the full weight of his own reading of Lacan.

“Beyond Discourse-Analysis” endorsed Laclau and Mouffe’s basic claim that antagonism arises from the impossibility of society ever achieving fullness or self-identity, yet Žižek argues that they did not take this idea to its most radical conclusion, for they stopped with a vision of various competing subject positions encountering others as impediments to the attainment of full identity.¹⁰⁵ To track antagonism to its most radical dimension, Žižek emphasized the need to move beyond the idea of subject positions and recognize the “traumatic kernel the symbolization of which always fails; and—this is our hypothesis—it is precisely the Lacanian notion of the subject as ‘the empty place of the structure’ which describes the subject in its confrontation with the antagonism, the subject which isn’t covering up the traumatic dimension of social antagonism.”¹⁰⁶ Prior to social conflict, Žižek insisted, “every identity is already in itself blocked, marked by an impossibility, and the external enemy is simply the small piece, the rest of reality upon which we ‘project’ or ‘externalize’ this intrinsic, immanent impossibility.”¹⁰⁷ The antagonistic fight between subject positions is merely a part of “social reality,” already a part of the symbolic order; by contrast, “pure antagonism” is real, a “limit of the social… the impossibility around which the social field is structured,” the “internal limit preventing the symbolic field from realizing its full identity.”¹⁰⁸ Žižek ended the core section of the essay by returning to the Lacanian subject, “a paradoxical entity which is so to speak its own negative, i.e. which persists only insofar as its full realization is blocked—the fully realized subject would be no longer subject but substance.” The subject is therefore “beyond or before subjectivation,” for whereas subjectivation already implies integration into a “universe of meaning,” the subject is precisely the failure of subjectivation, the “left-over which cannot be integrated into the symbolic universe.”¹⁰⁹

Žižek’s analysis amounts in many respects to a dramatic reorientation of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of antagonism, from the social and pragmatic register to a seemingly anterior psychical domain. Nonetheless, Laclau, for his part, readily accepted Žižek’s identification of antagonism with the Lacanian real, and his theoretical work in the early 1990s moved more decidedly onto Lacanian terrain.110 By contrast, Lacan remains one among many theorists kept in circulation in Mouffe’s work after Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Indeed, his presence in her own work is quite minor. That is not the only difference marking Laclau and Mouffe’s thought after their collaboration in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. From the early 1990s to the present, Mouffe has focused on the conditions for a radically pluralistic conception of democracy. She explicitly rejects consensus models of liberal democracy like those of John Rawls or Jürgen Habermas, arguing instead that political orders are always hegemonic. That means that they involve frontiers and processes of inclusion and exclusion; it also means that the political is passionate, conflictual, and dissensual. This has led Mouffe to an engagement with Carl Schmitt, the thinker whose conception of the political concentrates most emphatically on conflict. While this has brought some to attack Mouffe as a left-wing Schmittian, such critiques miss the crucial point, namely that Mouffe is deeply intent on counteracting Schmitt’s inflexible “friend-foe” distinction with an agonistic model of liberal democracy. Antagonism persists as a central term in Mouffe’s work, but the goal is now to transform struggles between enemies into democratic contests between adversaries. Agon, after all, signifies a de-escalation of the existential struggle implied in the concept of antagonism, and, in this sense, the presiding figure in Mouffe’s later work is not Schmitt, but Hannah Arendt. Mouffe remains committed to a project that challenges the hegemonic self-understanding of liberal democracy, but she does so from a position that explicitly embraces the legitimacy of liberal democratic values and institutions.¹¹¹

In the course of the 1990s, Laclau’s work came to be driven by his conviction that emancipatory politics would not survive the ceaseless fragmentation that underpins the postmodern vision of politics at its most extreme. Indeed, he came to believe that fragmentation threatens the very space of politics where antagonistic struggles take place, insofar as some common ground is necessary even for the sharpest of rivals.¹¹⁴ Yet, if the idea of universality must accompany any viable concept of progressive politics and democratic renewal, it would not be enough simply to reassert the purity of the universal.

By the end of the 1990s, Žižek had abandoned the view of a necessary fictional universal disconnected from particular practice. Instead, he came to insist on a committed universality, a universal truth worth fighting for, but, paradoxically, a universalism that only emerges from the position of engaged particularity. Like Laclau, Žižek renounced received ideas about really existing universality and sought instead a new understanding of the inextricable and mutually tainting relationship between universality and particularity. Yet behind the shared Lacanian vocabulary and the apparent similarities of their attempts to reconnect leftist thought with universalism, Žižek and Laclau were in fact on sharply diverging paths. Indeed, in Žižek’s trajectory, we see an increasing impatience with the constraints and restraints imposed on post-Marxism by its formative context in the antitotalitarian discourse of French thought. In the name of a renewed radicalism, Žižek has shrugged off many of the taboos that shaped post-Marxism. With this act, he has reopened the themes and tropes of precisely the revolutionary tradition that post-Marxism had pronounced exhausted. Consistent with Žižek’s Kierkegaardian definition of repetition—indeed consistent with everything about Žižek—his return to revolution is anything but straightforward. To trace out and evaluate Žižek’s development from post-Marxism to self-avowed revolutionary will be the task of the next and final chapter.