Towards a Rethinking of Laclau and Mouffe’s Conception of “Social Antagonisms”

Abstract

One possible way to organize divergent-and even contradictory- conceptions of politics is to distinguish conflict-oriented approaches from consensus-oriented approaches. The latter group is notably represented by socio-political thought of Jurgen Habermas and John Rawls who, their disagreements notwithstanding, conceive bond on a rational and normative basis. Principles, which all rational agents agree on in ideal speech situations or behind a veil of ignorance, structure in such a way that politics is downplayed-if not eliminated altogether-and reduced to rational and just management of affairs.1 From conflict-oriented perspective, on contrary, is cut across by an split that divides and, at same time, constitutes bond. The infamous case is Carl Schmitt's Der Begriff des Politischen that proposes a friend-enemy criterion for distinguishing the (das Politische) from economical, aesthetic, and ethical.2 More contemporary examples include works of Claude Lefort and Jacques Ranciere. The current article, however, examines Ernesto Laclau's and Chantal Mouffe's influential book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics that puts forward a novel concept of social antagonisms.3The current article takes as its point of departure concept of relation, with which, as I maintain, it is possible to grasp subject matter at issue in work of Laclau and Mouffe. The relation is not an objective relation between fully constituted objectivities such as pure contingency or pure necessity, but rather a limit type of concept that points to undecidable threshold where binary opposites reciprocally subvert and constitute one another. This limit type of relation is, for Laclau and Mouffe, principally an antagonistic relation.4 light of this, Giorgio Agamben's influential, and probably most controversial, work Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Life elaborates a diametrically opposed perspective that aims at conceiving not only ontology but also politics beyond category of relation.5 Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy? Laclau criticizes Agamben for eliminating relation and, together with it, politics.6 To clarify issue, question we should ask is: Does revocation of relation reconcile with itself? The present article argues against Laclau and Mouffe that answer is No.To make a long story short, antagonisms bring forth limits that constitute an order and that, on other hand, signify the impossibility of society as a self-sufficient and self-identical being. The limit does not demarcate conflicting identities or territories, but rather marks internal fault line where an order suspends its normal functioning and, as a result, exists beyond itself as empty form: In a situation of radical disorder 'order' is present as that which is absent.7 Agamben reformulates same idea in other terms: an order, in order to be effective, has to be capable of suspending itself and of giving rise to the state of exception. An order, conceived either in a discursive-hegemonic or juridico-political terms, is therefore capable of existing in a state of privation. These limits reveal zone of undecidability where empty form of relation between binary oppositional concepts such as outside and inside or law and life is at stake. This undecidable terrain, moreover, is original locus of practice-or, to be exact, of Laclau and Mouffe's political articulation and of Agamben's sovereign decision that engender a discursive-hegemonic order and a juridico-political order, respectively.8As long as undecidability-or better yet, antagonisms-constitute society, there cannot be communitarian fullness that sutures reflexive determination of dichotomous opposites. The self-signification of field is never-ending mediation, which never achieves that which it aims at-that is, as a reconciled and immediate fullness. …