Ernesto Laclau

Abstract

Ernesto Laclau (1939–2014) has been praised for producing challenging and multilayered theoretical work focusing mainly on three fields: discourse, hegemony, and populism. Laclau was professor of political theory in the Department of Government at the University of Essex until 2008, when he became an emeritus professor. At Essex he established and directed for many years the doctoral program in ideology and discourse analysis. From 1990 to 1997 he also served as director of the Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and the Social Sciences. His academic and political trajectory started in Argentina, where, initially as a history student and activist, he became associated with a series of leftist political formations from 1958 to 1968. In 1969, he moved to the United Kingdom, where he completed his studies and eventually started his academic career at the University of Essex. He is considered one of the founding figures of so-called post-Marxism, and his theoretical insights formed a school of thought often discussed as the Essex School of Discourse Analysis. Ernesto Laclau introduced, throughout his career—either alone or in collaboration with Chantal Mouffe—a complex and robust conceptual apparatus (comprising concepts like “articulation,” the “nodal point,” “dislocation,” the “empty signifier,” etc.) as a result of the radicalization and re-elaboration of the Gramscian conceptualization of hegemony. The roots of his post-Marxism can be traced back to the Argentinean political landscape of the 1960s, as he felt the deep impact of Peronism—hence his lifelong interest in the illumination of populist politics. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, his most well-known work, coauthored with Chantal Mouffe, marks his outright passage to this terrain. The two authors radically opposed the reductionism and essentialism of orthodox Marxism, eventually turning their interest to the development of a comprehensive poststructuralist theory of discourse. The constitutive character of the discursive within a negative ontology of the limit forms the cornerstone of Laclau’s take on hegemony and the operation(s) of the political. Throughout his entire theoretical trajectory, he continued to develop and explore with great consistency this perspective through an ongoing dialogue with many traditions of thought: Marxism, semiology, deconstruction, post-analytical philosophy, the mystical tradition in theology, psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan) and beyond.