Laclau Research Articles

The Spatiality of Popular Politics on the Urban Margins: Insights from Argentina and Chile

AbstractPopular politics—a heterogeneous set of grassroots demands and subjectivities antagonistic to dominant power blocs—finds itself at a crossroads in Latin America. In Argentina and Chile, progressive governments have failed to curtail a resurgent populist‐right despite, as recently as 2019, appearing to be on the brink of a new centre‐left hegemony. This paper argues that paying attention to the spatiality of popular politics demonstrates a failure to articulate popular politics within a national movement, either neglecting them (under Boric in Chile) or incorporating them in a top‐down strategy that erased particularities (under Fernández in Argentina). It does so from the vantage point of two neighbourhoods at the urban margins in Buenos Aires and Santiago. Bringing together Ernesto Laclau's work on populism together with Henri Lefebvre's relational understanding of urban space, it analyses how popular demands and subjectivities have been articulated in relation to national progressive politics.

The value of owning the symbols that orientate us within Subjectivity

Judith Butler contests Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek's argument that the limits to symbolisation which shape political action are best accounted for through Jacques Lacan's account of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real. Butler agrees that we each emerge as social subjects on the condition of foreclosures, but disagrees that such foreclosures are prior to the social or explicable through a universal account of kinship. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyĕwùmí has a somewhat similar critique of the Eurocentric foundations of feminist concepts. She argues that Western hierarchies, organised through ‘bio-logic’ or ‘body-reasoning’ with an emphasis on the sex/gender binary, are culturally particular. Oyĕwùmí distinguishes between relational, dynamic, fluid social hierarchies organised by seniority, and hierarchies organised by body-reasoning which are orientated towards fixity, and certainties. In this article I outline Bracha Ettinger's matrixial theory and argue that while it does not do what either Oyĕwùmí (transcend the terms of the nuclear family) or Butler (divest Lacan's paternal law of its power) advocate, it does provide us with the language to better account for how ‘body-reasoning’ structures our orientations and sets constraints on transformative processes. Through an account of multiple strata of subjectivity, within an expanded Symbolic, inscribed in social life through symbolic filters based on corporeality, matrixial theory enables us to account for the embeddedness of a strong orientation towards constant individuation, alongside a persistent disavowal and fear of processes of co-emergence at a non-cognitive level of subjectivity within Western thought. In their exchange, Laclau theorises social transformation through articulatory logics whereas Butler stresses the need for the work of cultural translation. Drawing on Ettinger’s and Oyĕwùmí's work, I propose that practices of translation must include a rigorous accounting for our orientations and investments within Subjectivity.

Populism and foreign policy: India's refugee policy towards the Rohingya

Abstract In this article, we investigate how India's refugee policy towards the Rohingya is implicated in the (re)production of the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) populist project. We enhance an innovative contextual intersectional framework, drawing on Ernesto Laclau's conceptualization of populism as a political logic and build on Shweta Singh and Élise Féron's understanding of this populist logic as discursively co-constituted and based on varying intersecting identity constellations including race/ethnicity, religion, caste, class or gender/sexual orientation. Using this framework, we investigate how India's refugee policy towards Rohingya refugees in particular has evolved under successive populist governments led by the BJP. Analysing three key dimensions of India's refugee policy—legal framework, admission and status, and protection and security—we demonstrate significant shifts along these dimensions in India's refugee policy towards the Rohingya, and explicate the populist logic that is reinscribed through these changes at the site of ‘foreign policy’. Our analysis reveals these shifts as co-constituted in and through the populist logic of the BJP-led governments and relying on identity assemblages that emphasized the Rohingya's ethnicity/religion (Rohingya ‘Muslims’), gender/ sexual orientation (Rohingya ‘men’) and class (Rohingya in need of resources/ privileges). Our study opens up grounds for further research on how refugee policy, as a mode of foreign policy, becomes a site where populist governments reinscribe differences between the ‘people’ and dangerous enemy ‘others’ to (re)produce their populist political projects.

Political Ontology and Emancipation in Castoriadis and Laclau–Mouffe

Abstract Cornelius Castoriadis’ The Imaginary Institution of Society and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy are two cornerstones of contemporary political philosophy. Insufficient consideration has been given to the fact that both works show important theoretical coincidences in terms of structure and content. The first part of this article explores the possibility of reading Castoriadis’ work in post-foundational terms, following Oliver Marchart's approach. In addition, the respective political ontologies of Castoriadis and Laclau and Mouffe are presented as ‘ontologies of signification’ in which the imaginary/discursive component is central. Finally, the contributions of the three authors to the emancipatory project through the notions of ‘autonomy’ (Castoriadis) and ‘radical democracy’ (Laclau and Mouffe) are considered, highlighting both their common features and their divergences. The latter had to do mainly with their antagonistic conceptions of political representation and its relation to democracy.

The Hegemonization and Counter-Hegemonization of Polish Copyright Discourses

This article explores the nature and structure of Polish discourses on copyright, specifically revealing to what extent social conflict over copyright is visible within these discourses and presenting the most important parties in this conflict. Following Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discursive reconstruction of the hegemony, the article indicates that Polish copyright discourses are structured by an alternating sequence of discursive hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practices. The article specifies the most important logic applied within discursive battles over copyright by deconstructing the central dualities visible in Polish copyright debates. Hegemonization and counter-hegemonization of the discourses are indicated based on the discourse analysis of the Polish public debate on copyright and a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews and focus group interviews with representatives of selected parties in the social conflict over copyright.

Demands as the black box of discourse theory: the German integration debate, demanding a ‘leading culture’ and the mainstreaming of the far-right

ABSTRACT The recent rise of the far-right ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ (AfD) in Germany has puzzled researchers. How did demands around cultural homogeneity and the need to be protected from ‘dangerous’ immigrants become acceptable in the mainstream when previously they were not? Crucially, understanding political change is paramount for discourse theorist Ernesto Laclau, who considers ‘demands’ as pivotal for the construction of political identities. Yet, the notion is underdeveloped in his writings. I discuss the aporias in Laclau’s understanding of demands and probe how far we can take Laclau in theoretically accounting for the emergence of demands. The concepts of horizon and dislocation are most helpful in this regard. I then utilise those concepts to analyse demand emergence in the ‘Leitkultur’ (leading culture) debate. I show how the horizon on which these demands are inscripted changed over the years, with a culturalistic discourse becoming dominant. There, following a dislocatory public debate of a non-fiction bestseller by career bureaucrat Thilo Sarrazin, integration was increasingly framed as problematic and foreigners needing to shed unintegratable parts of their own culture to assimilate to a German Leitkultur. I argue that acts of mainstreaming like these allowed the AfD to make their formerly radical demands seem credible.

Discourse Theory, Nodal Points, and Stereoscopic Optics on Justice

ABSTRACT Specific domains of modern life—social, ecological, legal—involve distinct issues of justice that often lead to a single-focused political-philosophical engagement with justice. Such engagements, argues Marianna Papastephanou, risk turning issues of justice that lie beyond the adopted perspective into discursive injustices (i.e. of silencing the Other’s voice) and condemning them to invisibility. To address this risk, Papastephanou proposes a stereoscopic approach that better illuminates the many facets of justice and, concomitantly, the many instances of injustice that escape the dominant political-philosophical perspectives on justice. In the present article, I discuss Papastephanou’s theory of a stereoscopic approach to justice along with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory and notion of “nodal points.” I suggest that the synergy between the two approaches enhances their efficacy: Papastephanou’s theorization concretizes the implications of establishing nodal points, which, in turn, reveal how the reduction of justice to one of its facets occurs at the discursive level. Enriched by Papastephanou’s theorization, discourse theory makes more visible how a stereoscopic approach to justice can unveil discursive injustices of selective and partial outlooks on (in)justice.

Democracy as intra-action: Some educational implications when we diffract John Dewey’s, Karen Barad’s and Ernesto Laclau’s work

This article scrutinises the ontological nature of democracy and the implications that different ontological assumptions might have for educational practice. To achieve this, we use Karen Barad’s notion of diffraction to read John Dewey’s, Ernesto Laclau’s and Barad’s theoretical insights through one another. Our starting point is Dewey’s famous sentence that ‘democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living’ (2001, p. 91). Based on this, we pose two questions. Firstly, we ask, ‘How can we understand democracy as a mode of associated living?’ We explore Dewey’s quotation first, then fold in Laclau’s conflictual understanding of democracy, followed by Barad’s agential realist notion of intra-action. Secondly, we ask, ‘What are the educational consequences of these ontological understandings?’ Here, we make three assertions: (a) democracy and education could be understood as emerging together involving entanglements that cut across micro-macro levels of scale; (b) democratic processes always contain exclusions carrying risks for educators and (c) ‘living’ needs to trouble the well-worn human/non-human binary and consider wider naturalcultural phenomena.

The notion of transformism in Gramscian theories and its application to social movements studies

The current article examines the notion of transformism within the framework of Gramscian theories. This term was initially used to describe parliamentary politics in Italy and meant the cooptation of radical parties into the government under the leadership of moderate parties and the subsequent moderation of radical parties. Antonio Gramsci rethinks transformism and defines it as the strengthening of the ruling class through the absorption of active elements from other classes. Although this can be found in works of some scholars utilizing different Gramscian approaches, it still requires some concretization. The article examines the development of this notion in Gramsci's texts as well as its usage in the Gramscian political economy and Ernesto Laclau's theory. The article demonstrates that the notion of transformism can be applied to social movements studies. Under conditions of transformism separate achievements of social movements turn into strategic failures. The functioning of transformism is based mainly on trade-offs between upper and lower classes. Upper classes satisfy some demands from below and lower classes constrain their discontent to cooperate with upper classes. Transformism amounts to the absence of independence of social movements, their readiness for trade-offs, cooperation with the authorities and parliamentary mechanisms as well as organizational weakness.

Ecclesiastical populism in contemporary Russia? ‘the people’ in the political discourse of the orthodox church

ABSTRACT The image of ‘the people’ has occupied a central place in the discourse of the contemporary Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) for many years. However, the ROC’s ecclesiastical ‘populism’ has not been systematically analyzed. The study at hand aims to fill this gap by examining the representations of ‘the people’ articulated at the Bishops’ Council of the ROC in the last three decades. Following and modifying Ernesto Laclau and his followers’ approach to studying populism, the analysis of the Council’s documents shows that the official Church plays a dual language game, simultaneously constructing a hegemonic order in Russia and its alleged ‘civilizational space’ and promoting a seemingly counter-hegemonic project in global politics. However, the role of ‘the people’ in this setting is far from Laclau’s conception of radical popular agency. Instead, the Bishops’ Council calls for the preservation of traditional identities and local hierarchies in order to ensure Russia’s continuity and greatness. Thus, the official Church has been contributing to the elitist, statist, and great-power nationalist hegemony in Russia.

Collective Subjectivity of Literary Characters as Exemplified by Jorge Amado’s Marginalized Figures

The potential of the use of the concept of collective subjectivity, in literary analyses, has been partially discerned by Mario Vargas Llosa, Gérard Klein, and a group of scholars inspired by Klein’s observations (Bellagamba; Picholle; Tron, 2012). Since none of them have proposed any systematic framework, the paper theorizes the concept, proposes an analysis methodology, and presents the results of a model analysis of the collective subjectivity of Jorge Amado’s marginalized characters and its relation to the hegemonic discourses of Amado’s storyworlds and of Brazil in the 1930s, respectively. The article also presents an evaluation of the concept’s usefulness for narrative scholars. As analyzing a fictional collective subjectivity requires a custom-made framework, it has been elaborated on the basis of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (2001) Discourse Theory, Discourse-Theoretical Analysis (both alarmingly absent in literary studies), the psycho-sociological framework for real-world collective subjectivity analysis (Fabris; Puccini; Cambiaso, 2019), and narratological findings related to Possible Worlds Theory and fictional minds (Palmer, 2004). The study confirms that the use of the concept as an analytical tool can shed new light on our understanding of numerous narrative art works, especially regarding such issues as focalization, perspective, ideology, narrative empathy, unreliable narration, and consciousness representation. Moreover, the framework enables us to: 1) describe precisely the particularities of the ideological profile of a fictional collectivity and the narrator’s/implied author’s attitude towards them; 2) relate this profile to the context systematically (both to the storyworld and real-world context).

Hegemony Approach and Political Struggles over a New Political Order: The Case of Turkey

Abstract This paper proposes an analytical framework that employs a hegemony approach to political transformations, which bring about significant changes in the fundamental norms and values of a political community, as well as in the organizing principles of the social and economic system. The hegemony approach, drawing inspiration from the works of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, provides political theorists and social scientists with conceptual tools for analyzing struggles over political power. The paper argues that attempts at hegemonic formations, when extended to political transformations, involve articulations around social antagonisms, the construction of the people, establishment of political frontiers, and mobilization of the demands of excluded and oppressed groups. The Justice and Development Party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, serves as a unique case study to illustrate this approach.

Women marching for solidarity: 5 years of Aurat March in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan

In this paper, I argue that the Aurat March (Urdu: Woman March) in Pakistan has developed from a one-off event to a social movement that operates according to a populist logic as articulated by Ernesto Laclau (2018). I demonstrate how a diverse array of women’s demands is linked by a chain of equivalence to create solidarity between disparate communities of women. Here, all protestors define themselves in opposition to a common enemy, the patriarchy, allowing for a wide array of marginalized ethnic, religious and gender identities to be subsumed under the Aurat March banner. The slogan mera jism meri marzi (Urdu: my body, my choice) acts as a signifier that becomes increasingly empty, allowing a variety of demands to be projected upon it. I analyze conservative discourses around the Aurat March to demonstrate how right-wing detractors attempt to fill the empty signifier with morally charged content that disrupts the solidaric bonds holding together the Aurat March coalition. Finally, I explain how Aurat March organizers attempt to restore the openness of their signifier and the solidarity at the heart of their movement.

Toward a universalistic theory of political obligation: A post-structuralist approach

Developing a plausible theory of political obligation is crucial for understanding our current political lives or constructing new ones. However, it proved to be hard to arrive at a theory that is universalistic and logically consistent. Without adherence to certain universalistic principles, such as freedom and equality, one might be tempted to justify individuals’ allegiance to authoritarian regimes based on particularistic reasons. Also, one may argue that if a general theory of political obligation cannot be devised, we are justified to resort to anarchism. Despite such high political stakes involved, a contention arose that universalistic approaches to political obligation are logically inconsistent because they run afoul of a particularity requirement. The latter is a demand that any plausible theory of individuals’ obligations toward a political entity should account for the reasons why they should obey the rules and orders of a specific authority. In this article, drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-structuralist theory, I demonstrate that the dichotomy of universalism vs. particularism need not have destructive effects for a successful theory of political obligation. Indeed, it is possible to accept a particularity requirement but at the same time, argue that political obligations have a universalistic thrust.

Meaning and Language based on a poststructuralist approach to Discourse Theory

This paper specifically develops a discussion on how, based on the Discourse Theory, initially developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, we can articulate the notions of meaning and language as instituting the real through discourse. For this, through two sections we develop an argument that considers reality as always being mediated by language and we also emphasize how the category of discourse is understood as a privileged space in which the processes of meaning of this same reality take place. This approach is part of a sometimes heteroclite theoretical framework, which approximates philosophical contributions considered, in general, as poststructuralists and postfoundationalists, provoking us to think that, in the impossibility of being a fundamental thought, philosophy becomes an intrinsically political thought.

The Transformative Potential of Platform Cooperativism: The Case of CoopCycle

The paper sets out to dissolve a contrast between traditional coop sectoral enclosure, on the one hand, and platform coop diversity, on the other hand, which often resonates with precariousness, marginalisation, fragmentation, whitewashing and corporatisation. To tackle traditional and platform coop discordance, the paper draws on the model of open cooperativism introduced by Vasilis Kostakis and Michel Bauwens, passed through the lens of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s discourse theory of hegemony, to weave a narrative that seeks to unite and broaden the scope of the cooperative sector. In doing so, the paper reviews CoopCycle as an illustrative case study of platform cooperativism. CoopCycle is a global federation of bike delivery coops that deploy the digital commons to install workplace democracy in the bike delivery sector. The paper aims at contributing to the understanding of platform cooperativism, all the while embedding the model of platform cooperativism into the counter-hegemony of open cooperativism aiming to challenge the current hegemony of neoliberalism. The main argument here is that the model of open cooperativism bears comparative advantages vis-à-vis closed proprietary socio-economic models.

Populism, post-Marxism and Iran: an essay towards a decolonization of knowledge

This essay is an exposition of the philosophy of populism, a philosophy by and large inspired by Michel Foucault to herald the New Discourse called ‘post-Marxism' a term made famous by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe which would lay the foundations for not so much the secular New Social Movements comprising multiple issues like gay rights and environment, but ironically would be an apologia for right-wing populist movements based on messianic theologies. It claims that while post-Marxism wanted to jump over Marxism, in actuality it became partner to radical messianic politics as in the case of Foucault's ardent support for radical Shiite Islam in Iran. This essay concentrates on the theory of populism and connects it to the politics of messianism in Iran claiming that these theories of populism are theories created in Western universities comprising Eurocentric ideas based on the uncanny combination of the theory of the ‘essential spiritualism of Asia' and ‘biopolitics'. This essay claims that the contemporary politics of Shiite Islam in Iran have less to do with the internal history of Iran, and more to do with a form of ‘manufactured Islam' where Islamic radicals picked up Ali Shariati's existential rendering of ‘authenticity’ as jihad and martyrdom (shahadat) in order to mobilize the masses first against the shah and then in the bloody war against Iraq. It argues for a decolonization of knowledge that leads to the decoupling of the nineteenth and twentieth century European ideas of spiritualism and biopolitics in order that one is able to see non-Western societies as they are and not as they are imagined by Orientalist scholarship.

Productivity of the Common as Property in the Context of the Symbolic Propertization of Indigenous Knowledge: The Biopolitics of Traditional Malay Wau Bulan and Wau Kucing Kelantanese Kite Making as State Symbolic Property

This essay examines factors responsible for the increase of productivity in traditional Malay wau bulan and wau kucing kite-making, indigenous to the Malaysian state of Kelantan and appropriated by the state as a common biopolitical production and symbolic property. This increase in productivity means increased accessibility of the commons among the community, achieved through state economic support and efforts by the community and state to promote the kite-making craft. Such increased productivity contradicts Michael Hardt’s reasoning that property’s productivity is usually reduced. Extending Hardt’s theory to Ernesto Laclau’s ideas on the relationship between the particular and the universal, the essay argues that the symbolic propertization of Kelantan kite making does not reflect a distinction between the kites’ qualities as common versus symbolic property. Input from selected authoritative kite-making practitioners and recent cultural memory shows that the Kelantan community benefits economically from the state’s appropriation of its traditional kites.

The forgetting of Hegel in Ernesto Laclau: An unfortunate disengagement

Ernesto Laclau criticises Hegelian dialectics for allegedly introducing the logic of necessity into Marxism, which, he argues, hinders the consideration of contingency. This article examines Laclau?s interpretation of Hegelian dialectics across various works and scrutinises his exploration of the concepts of determination, negativity, and contingency. Revisiting these concepts may offer a non-deterministic understanding of dialectics more aligned with post-foundational political thought, thereby facilitating reflection on social ontology and antagonisms.

The Conundrum of Being a Minority: Choosing a Collective Identity in the Era of Neoliberal Globalism

This paper argues that by portraying minority concerns primarily as cultural concerns and by discussing minority existence independently of capitalism, neoliberalism, feminism, environmentalism, globalization, and the distinction between the Right and the Left, the dominant discourse on ethno-cultural minorities, namely multiculturalism, may lead to the reduction of minority communities to cultural entities in the collective consciousness of the dominant majority. Such reductionism endangers minority existence by identifying the question of minorities with the question of culture to the point that minorities voicing their noncultural political concerns increasingly appear unintelligible, presumptuous, or even destructive to wider society. Against this background, the paper discusses why and how ethno-cultural minorities may find their collective identity in different, not necessarily ethno-cultural, political formations in the age of neoliberal globalism, such as anti-neoliberal, anti-globalist, cosmopolitan, environmentalist, anti-capitalist, feminist, radical democratic, republican, and anti-imperialist. This discussion is based on Ernesto Laclau’s and Chantal Mouffe’s understanding of hegemony and social antagonism.