fred dallmayr

hegemony and democracy:

a review of laclau and mouffe
hegemony and socialist
strategy: towards a radical
democratic politics

Post-structuralism and deconstruction frequently are seen as

mere academic trends, soon to be replaced or outdated by newer
fashions. This view is reinforced by their prominent role in literary
criticism and aesthetics―fie!ds notoriously prone to quick
fluctuations of taste. In application to politics and political theory,
deconstruction often appears as little more than a mode of
escapism, an attempt at verbal obfuscation oblivious of concrete
social contexts and power constellations. Against this
background, the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
offers an invigorating breath of fresh air; brushing aside academic
cobwebs, their writings-most notably Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (of 1985)’-
relentlessly and almost passionately probe the implications of
deconstruction and anti-foundationalism for political life.
Unpretentiously stated (and thus shunning notoriety), their
arguments touch at the core of contemporary political and
philosophical concerns. Far from indulging in facile rhetoric, the
of
study &dquo;hegemony&dquo; is the outcome of rigorous and sustained
intellectual labor, a labor only barely concealed in an array of
succinct and lucid theoretical formulations. Countering their
association with escapism or a simple-minded anarchism, the
book demonstrates the relevance of post-structural or
deconstructive themes for the theoretical grasp of liberalism and
socialism, and particularly for the future of &dquo;democratic politics.&dquo;

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 ,

From the vantage of Laclau and Mouffe, the relevance of

deconstruction manifests itself prominently or with special
virulence in the context of socialist thought (as part and parcel of
the so-called &dquo;crisis of Marxism&dquo;). As they observe in their
&dquo;Introduction&dquo;: &dquo;Left-wing thought today stands at a crossroads.
The ‘evident truths’ of the past have been seriously challenged
...

by an avalanche of historical mutations which have riven the

ground on which those truths were constituted.&dquo; Apart from a host
of social and political changes the authors appeal to more subtle
intellectual dislocations, especially the effects of post-
metaphysics with its attack on stable foundations: &dquo;What is now
in crisis is a whole conception of socialism which rests upon the
ontological centrality of the working class, upon the role of the
Revolution (with a capital ’r’), as the founding moment in the
transition from one type of society to another, and upon the
illusory prospect of a perfectly unitary and homogeneous
collective will that will render pointless the moment of politics.&dquo;
According to Laclau and Mouffe, it is the &dquo;plural and multifarious
character&dquo; of contemporary social struggles-together with their
theoretical repercussions-which have undermined the &dquo;Jacobin
imaginary&dquo; present in foundationalist Marxism, and especially the
&dquo;monist aspiration&dquo; of that doctrine to capture &dquo;the essence or
underlying meaning of History.&dquo; In turning to the concept of
&dquo;hegemony,&dquo; the study seeks to do more than add a further
refinement or &dquo;complementary&dquo; twist to traditional essentialism;
instead, the aim is to initiate a paradigmatic shift reverberating
through the entire set of categories and providing a new
&dquo;anchorage&dquo; from which contemporary social struggles are
&dquo;thinkable in their specificity.&dquo;~ In the followingI shall lift up for
closer scrutiny several of the chief theoretical innovations of the
study, and then conclude with some critical observations or
afterthoughts.
I.

Although amenable to diverse interpretations, Hegemony and

Socialist Strategy is basically a political text, offering a splendid
example of innovative political theorizing. Apart from its historical
resonances, the accent on &dquo;hegemony&dquo; involves centrally a
revalorization of politics against all forms of reductionism
(subordinating politics to other domains). A crucial assault
launched in the study is directed at &dquo;sociologism&dquo; as well as
&dquo;economism.&dquo; In a bold formulation-challenging prominent
portrayals of sociology as &dquo;master social science&dquo;-Laclau and
Mouffe speak of the &dquo;impossibility of society,&dquo; that is, the inability
of the social domain to provide a firm grounding of analysis. As
they write, pinpointing a &dquo;decisive point&dquo; in their argument: ‘The
incomplete character of every totality leads us to abandon, as a
284 terrain of analysis, the premise of ’society’ as à sutured and self-

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 defined totality. ’Society’ is not a valid object of discourse&dquo; since
there is &dquo;no single underlying principle fixing-and hence
constituting-the whole field of differences.&dquo; What society needs
to gain contours is some kind of political articulation, that is, the
formulation and establishment of hegemonic political
relationship. Reminiscent vaguely of Arendtian arguments, the
study defines politics as &dquo;a practice of creation, reproduction and
transformation of social relations,&dquo; a practice that cannot be
located at a &dquo;determinate level of the social&dquo; since the problem of
the political is &dquo;the problem of the institution of the social, that is,
of the definition and articulation of social relations in afield criss-
crossed with antagonisms.&dquo; Moving beyond Arendt, however, the
authors do not accord to politics a stable space or a completely
autonomous sphere. In effect, radical democracy in their text is
presented as a form of politics which is founded &dquo;not upon
dogmatic postulation of any ’essence of the social,’ but, on the
contrary, on affirmation of the contingency and ambiguity of every
’essence,’ and on the constitutive character of social division and
antagonism. Affirmation of a ‘ground’ which lives only by negating
its fundamental character; of an ’order’ which exists only as a
partial limiting of ‘disorders
The attack on the constitutive character of the social domain
applies with particular force to &dquo;economism&dquo; as it has operated in
traditional Marxism. Challenging the presumed determination of
the labor process and of class struggle by an abstract &dquo;logic of
capital,&dquo; Laclau and Mouffe assert the dependence of the latter on
antagonisms linked with a pervasive &dquo;politics of production.&dquo; A
numberof recent studies, they write, &dquo;have analyzed the evolution
of the labor process from the point of view of the relation of forces
between workers and capitalists, and of the workers’ resistance.
These reveal the presence of a ’politics of production&dquo;’ at odds
with the notion that capitalist development is the effect &dquo;solely of
the laws of competition and the exigencies of accumulation.&dquo; To
be sure, attacking economism is not the same as postulating a
rigid separation between economics and politics or ascribing a
foundational status of the latter. According to the authors, such a
view could only be maintained &dquo;if political practice was a perfectly
delimited field whose frontiers with the economy could be drawn
more geometrico-that is, if we excluded as a matter of principle
any overdetermination of the political by the economic or vice
versa.&dquo; Given that politics is a matter of hegemonic articulation,
the relationship between politics and economics cannot be
permanently fixed or stabilized and depends on circumstances
and prevailing articulatory practices. &dquo;Let us accept instead,&dquo; the
study asserts, &dquo;that neither the political identity nor the economic
identity of the agents crystallizes as differential moment of a
unified discourse, and that the relation between them is the
285 precarious unity of a tension. We already know what this means:

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 the subversion of each of the terms by a polysemy which prevents
their stable articulation. In this case, the economic Is and is not
present in the political and vice versa; the relation is not one of
literal differentiations but of unstable analogies between the two
terms.&dquo;4

The dismantling of univocal fixity and the accent on complex

relationships lends to the study a quasi-Hegelian or (more
properly) post-Hegelian flavor-a circumstance readily
acknowledged by the authors. In terms of Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy, Hegel’s philosophy is precariously and ambiguously
lodged at the intersection between metaphysics and post-
metaphysics-more specifically between a theory of &dquo;totality&dquo; and
a theory of &dquo;hegemony&dquo; (or else between total &dquo;mediation&dquo; and
hegemonic &dquo;articulation&dquo;). In the authors’ words, Hegel’s work is
at once the &dquo;highest moment&dquo; of German rationalism and idealism
and simultaneously &dquo;the first modern-that is to say, post-
Entightenment-reflection on society.&dquo; The ambiguity has to do
chiefly with the ability of reason to grasp reality as a whole,
differently phrased: with the respective weights assigned to
absolute logic and a more opaque and contingent &dquo;cunning of
reason.&dquo; Occupying a &dquo;watershed&dquo; between two epochs, Hegel is
said to represent on the one hand the culmination of rationalism:
namely, &dquo;the moment when it attempts to embrace within the field
of reason, without dualisms, the totality of the universe of
differences.&dquo; On the other hand, however, Hegel’s totality or
synthesis contains &dquo;all the seeds of its dissolution,&dquo; as the
rationality of history can be affirmed &dquo;only at the price of
introducing contradiction into the field of reason itself.&dquo; The
continued significance of Hegel’s thought resides basically in the
second dimension: namely, in its midwifing role for a theory of
hegemony opening reflection up to the flux of contingent and not
purely logical (or essential) relationships. For Laclau and Mouffe,
this is precisely the mark of &dquo;Hegel’s modernity&dquo; (or post-
modernism) : in his work &dquo;identity is never positive and closed in
itself, but is constituted as transition, relation, difference.&dquo; But if
logical relations become contingent transitions, then &dquo;the
connections between them cannot be fixed as moments of an
underlying or sutured totality&dquo;-which means that they are
&dquo;articulations. ’’5

The post-Hegelian quality of the study-ar its Hegelianism with a

deconstructive twist-surfaces at numerous points and most
prominently in the discussion of hegemony and its relation to
antagonism. In this context, antagonism denotes not simply a
juxtaposition of objective entities (either on a logical or a factual
level), but rather involves a process of mutual contestation and
struggle. In general philosophical terms, antagonism arises from
286 hegemony’s inability to effect social and political closure-that is,

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 from the polysemy and &dquo;surplus of meaning&dquo; constantly
overreaching and destabilizing discursive practices. In language
reminiscent of Hegel, the study situates social formations at the
crossroads of positivity and negativity, where negativity
designates not simply a lack but a &dquo;nihilating&dquo; potency. &dquo;This
impossibility of the real-negativity-has attained a form of
presence,&dquo; we read. &dquo;As the social is penetrated by negativity-
that is, by antagonism-it does not attain the status of
transparency, of full presence, and the objectivity of its identities
is permanently subverted. From here onward, the impossible
relation between objectivity and negativity has become
constitutive of the social.&dquo; The tensional relation between
presence and absence resurfaces or is rearticulated as the
interplay of two social &dquo;logics,&dquo; namely, the logics of &dquo;equivalence&dquo;
and &dquo;difference.&dquo; Here again it is important to notice that, although
the two point in opposite directions, neither logic is able to achieve
foundational status or complete self-enclosure. In the authors’
words: If negativity and positivity exist only &dquo;through their
reciprocal subversion,&dquo; this means that &dquo;neither the conditions of
total equivalence northose of total differential objectivity are ever
fully achieved.&dquo; Translating the interplay of logics into the more
traditional correlation of liberty and equality another passage
asserts: &dquo;The precariousness of every equivalence demands that
it be complemented/limited by the logic of autonomy. It is for this
reason that the demand for equality is not sufficient, but needs to
be balanced by the demand for liberty, which leads us to speak of
a radical and plural democracy

The notion of the correlation and interpenetration of social logics

presents politics-particularly democratic politics-as an arena
of contestation and interrogation, but not as a field of total
domination or else mutual destruction. The accent on the
relational character of antagonism injects into politics a moral or
qualitative dimension, an aspect hostile to the reduction of politics
to a simple organism (or mechanism) or else to a naturalistic state
of war. If social identities are acquired only through agonal
interaction, then it is impossible or illicit either to impose stable
identity through a model of integral totality or to foreclose
interaction through a system of radical equivalence. Integral
closure~he lure of complete social positivity-is chiefly the
temptation of the &dquo;logic of difference.&dquo; As the authors point out,
however, due to its negative potency, antagonism signifies the
&dquo;limit&dquo; of any given social order &dquo;and not the moment of a broader
totality in relation to which the two poles of the antagonism would
constitute differential-i.e., objective-partial instances.&dquo; The
opposite temptation arises from the &dquo;logic of equivalence&dquo;:
radically pursued, equivalence either totally negates discursive
formations and social identities or else polarizes society into two
287 hostile forces of which each operates as the negation of the other.

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 An example of the latter altemative-Laclau and Mouffe
observe-can be found in millenarian movements where &dquo;the
world divides, through a system of paratactical equivalences, into
two camps&dquo; related only in the mode of negative reversal. More
recent instances are terrorism or totalitarian absolutism. By
contrast, properly political relations are marked by neither fusion
nor fission: social identities are neither objectively given nor
totally dissolved, but rather emerge through constant
renegotiation (or a process of challenge and response). ’Thus,
the two conditions of a hegemonic articulation,&dquo; the authors state,
&dquo;are the presence of antagonistic forces and the instability of the
frontiers which separate them. Only the presence of a vast area
of floating elements and the possibility of their articulation to
opposite camps-which implies a constant redefinition of the
latter-is what constitutes the terrain permitting us to define a
practice as hegemonic&dquo; and more particularly as a democratic
practice.’7
The implications of this relational conception are multiple and
significant: only a few can be highlighted here. Although the
study’s post-Hegelian thrust is directed chiefly against all forms of
integral closure or &dquo;sutured&dquo; totality, the proposed remedy or
antidote is not random fragmentation. While critical of the
pretense of &dquo;universal&dquo; principles or discourses, the authors do
not simply opt for particularism-which would only entail a new
kind of self-enclosure or a &dquo;monadic&dquo; essentialism. As they
indicate, a mere dismantling of totality readilyconjures upthe peril
of &dquo;a new form of fixity,&dquo; namely, on the level of &dquo;decentered
subject positions.&dquo; For this reason, a &dquo;logic of detotalization&dquo;
cannot simply affirm &dquo;the separation of different struggles and
demands,&dquo; just as &dquo;articulation&dquo; cannot purely be conceived as
&dquo;the linkage of dissimilar and fully constituted elements.&dquo; Through
a strategy of disaggregation we are in danger of moving &dquo;from an
essentialism of the totality to an essentialism of the elements&dquo; or
of replacing &dquo;Spinoza with Leibniz.&dquo; The means for overcoming
this danger is provided by the logic of &dquo;overdetermination.&dquo; For,
we read, if the sense of every identity is overdetermined, then &dquo;far
from there being an essentialist totalization, or a no less essen-
tialist separation among objects, the presence of some objects in
the others prevents any of their identities from being fixed.
Objects appear articulated not like pieces in a clockwork
mechanism, but because the presence of some in the others
hinders the suturing of the identity of any of them.&dquo; Similar
considerations apply to the issue of pluralism. Although
endorsing a &dquo;radical and plural democracy,&dquo; the study holds no
brief for group egotism. In the authors’ words, either an absolute
pluralism or a &dquo;total diffusion of power within the social&dquo; would
blind us to the operation of overdetermination and to the presence
288 of &dquo;nodal points&dquo; in every social formulation. With slight modifi-

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 cations, relationism or the interpenetration of identities also
affects the status of individual autonomy or liberty. Segregated
from equality or equivalence, such autonomy only fosters new
modes of totalization-~vhich points up the need to reformulate
’bourgeois individualism&dquo;: &dquo;What is involved is the production of
another individual, an individual who is no longer constructed out
of the matrix of possessive individualism.... It is never possible for
individual rights to be defined in isolation, but only in the context
of social relations which define determinate subject positions.&dquo;8

Among the most significant contributions of the study are its

caveats against total antagonism or against the polarization and
militarization of politics. In our violence-prone age when manyflirt
with theories of radical discord-as an antidote to co-optation-
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy offers a welcome corrective. In the
presentation of Laclau and Mouffe, polarization was the
trademark of both Jacobinism and essentialist Marxism; from
Lenin’s What Is to be Done to Zinoviev’s motto of bolshevization, a
&dquo;military conception of politics&dquo; dominated the range of strategic
calculations. In this conception political struggle is basically a
zero-sum game, a game producing a &dquo;segregation effect&dquo; in the
sense that the hostile camps tend to retreat into the shells of their
separate identities. Polar vocabulary was still present-though
ambiguously and in modified form-in the Gramscian notion of
&dquo;war of position.&dquo; For Gramsci, war of position involved the
progressive disaggregation of a social formation and the
construction of a new hegemony of forces-but along a path
which left the identity of the opponents malleable and subject to
a continuous process of transformation. Thus, the military
imagery was in this case &dquo;metaphorized&dquo; in a direction colliding
with its literal sense: &dquo;if in Leninism there was a militarization of
politics, in Gramsci there is a demilitarization of war&dquo;-although
the reformulation reached its limit in the assumption of an ultimate
class core of every hegemony. Once the latter assumption is
dropped, Gramsci’s notion can be &dquo;metaphorized&dquo; further in a
manner compatible with radical democracy. At this point, the
distinction between &dquo;popular struggles&dquo; and &dquo;democratic
struggles&dquo; becomes relevant. While Gramsci still presupposed
the division of political space along the lines of &dquo;popular&dquo; identities
(though granting their constructed character), relinquishing this
premise opens the way to a fluid and non-dichotomous concept
of hegemony: &dquo;We will thus retain from the Gramscian view the
logic of articulation and the political centrality of the frontier
effects, but we will eliminate the assumption of a single political
space as the necessary framework for those phenomena to arise.&dquo;
Democratic struggles are precisely those that involve a plurality
of political spaces.9

289

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 II.

While appreciating the depth and rigor of the reviewed study,I

cannot refrain from voicing some reservations or critical
afterthoughts. These comments are not meant to deprecate the
cogencp- and overall direction of its arguments, but rather to
amplify and strengthen the same direction-which is basically
that of a viable post-Hegelian political theory. Precisely from an
Hegelian vantage, some of the accents of the study appear to me
lopsided or skewed. In tracing the genealogy of hegemony, the
opening chapter places a heavy-and probably excessive-
emphasis on autonomous action and initiative. Thus, in the
discussion of Luxembourg, the &dquo;logic of spontaneism&dquo; is singled
out as an important counterpoint to class-based essentialism and
the literal fixation of social meanings. Similarly, Sorel’s myth of the
general strike is held up for its focus on &dquo;contingency&dquo; and
&dquo;freedom,&dquo; in contradistinction to the chain of social and economic
necessity; influenced by Nietzsche and Bergson, Sorel’s
philosophy is said to be &dquo;one of action and will, in which the future
is unforeseeable, and hinges on will.&dquo; Formulations of this kind are
liable to inject into the study a flavor of voluntarism which is not
entirely congruent with the author’s broader perspective. The
impression is reinforced in the central portion of the study:
namely, in the equation of hegemony with &dquo;articulation&dquo; and of the
latter with a mode of &dquo;political construction from dissimilar
elements.&dquo; The term &dquo;construction&dquo; seems to place hegemony in
the rubric of a &dquo;purposive&dquo; and voluntaristic type of action (in the
Weberian sense)-in a manner obfuscating the distinction
between praxis (or practical conduct) and technical-instrumental
behavior. Although perhaps inadvertent, the confluence of mean-
ings needs in my view to be sorted out in order to differentiate
hegemony more clearly from forms of instrumentalism. 10
Once voluntarism is advocated as remedy for essentialist fixation,
the study embarks on hazardous terrain. In fact, its theory of
hegemony is lodged at one of the most difficult junctures of
Hegelian thought (and of traditional metaphysics in general): the
juncture marked by the categories of &dquo;freedom&dquo; and &dquo;necessity,&dquo;
of &dquo;determinism&dquo; and &dquo;contingency.&dquo; Occasionally, hegemony is
portrayed almost as an exit route from necessity and all modes of
social determinism. Thus, while Marxist essentialism is said to
have banished contingency to the margins of necessity, the
relationship is claimed to be reversed in hegemonic articulation-
in the sense that necessity now &dquo;only exists as a partial limitation
of the field of contingency.&dquo; As the authors somewhat exuberantly
add: If we accept &dquo;that a discursive totality never exists in the form
of a simply given and delimited positivity, the relational logic will be
incomplete and pierced by contingency.... A no-man’s-land thus
290 emerges, making the articulatory practice possible.&dquo; Elsewhere,

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 however, this simple reversal is called into question-which
opens the road to a complex and fascinating conceptualization of
hegemony in terms of an intertwining and mutual subversion of
necessity and contingency. Once the goal of final fixation
recedes, Laclau and Mouffe observe, a profound ambivalence
emerges: at this point &dquo;not only does the very category of
necessity fall, but it is no longer possible to account for the
hegemonic relation in terms of pure contingency, as the space
which made intelligible the necessary/contingent opposition has
dissolved.&dquo; What emerges at this point is no longer a simple
external delimitation of two contiguous fields, but rather a
relationship of mutual interpenetration and contestation. As they
write, the relations between necessity and contingency cannot be
conceived as &dquo;relations between two areas that are delimited and
external to each other... because the contingent only exists within
the necessary. This presence of the contingent in the necessary
is what we earlier called subversion&dquo;-and what, in effect, must be
called reciprocal subversion. As a result, the centrality of
hegemony is predicated on &dquo;the collapse of a clear demarcation
line between the internal and the external, between the
contingent and the necessary.&dquo;’I
What the preceding comments adumbrate is a theoretical
relationship which is recalcitrant both to &dquo;dualism&dquo; and to
&dquo;monism&dquo; (in their traditional metaphysical sense). The
opposition to dualism is a recurrent theme of the study. Thus,
Bernstein’s revisionism is chided for embracing a &dquo;Kantian
dualism&dquo; pitting autonomous ethical subjects against economic
determinism. Similarly, Marxist orthodoxy is taken to task for
harboring a &dquo;permanent&dquo; and &dquo;irreducible&dquo; dualism between the
logic of necessity and the logic of contingency, with each side
being merely the &dquo;negative reverse&dquo; of the other. Such dualism,
the authors note, establishes merely a &dquo;relation of frontiers,&dquo; that
is, an external limitation of domains devoid of reciprocal effects.
Opposition to dualism is also evident in the notion of discursive
materiality and the critique of the thought-reality bifurcation. Yet,
at the same time, anti-dualism does not vindicate a simple
fusionism or a complete elimination of non-identity. The
distinction between &dquo;elements&dquo; and &dquo;moments&dquo; in articulatory
practices is, in fact, predicated on the persistence of a (non-
dualistic mode of) non-identity. If articulation is a practice, we
read, &dquo;it must imply some form of separate presence of the
elements which that practice articulates or recomposes&dquo;; it must
also exclude the complete transformation of elements into
integral moments or components. The same kind of non-identical
relationship prevails between social formations seen as
articulated discursive chains, on the one hand, and &dquo;floating
signifiers&dquo; constantly exceeding these chains, on the other, and
291 ultimately between discursive practices in general and the

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 &dquo;infinitude of the field of discursivity.&dquo; What comes into view here
is a term placed midway between identity and total non-identity,
a term which some post-structuralist thinkers have thematized
under such labels as &dquo;intertwining&dquo; or &dquo;duality&dquo;; Heidegger’s
&dquo;Zwiefalt&dquo; (two-foldedness) and the Derridean notion of
&dquo;diff6rancoY’ point in the same direction. 12

In a prominent manner, the notion of intertwining or duality would

seem to be applicable to the relation between positivity and
negativity or between the logics of &dquo;difference&dquo; and &dquo;equivalence&dquo;
(as these terms are used in the study). As the authors repeatedly
affirm, negativity is not simply a void or a logical negation but a
nihilating ferment exerting real effects: &dquo;The presence of the
Other is not a logical impossibility; it exists--so it is not a
contradiction.&dquo; The same thought is expressed in the argument
that negativity and positivity exist only &dquo;through their reciprocal
subversion,&dquo; and also in the view that antagonism as the negation
of a given order operates as the intrinsic &dquo;limit&dquo; of that order-and
not as an alien force imposing external constraints. Unfortunately,
passages of this kind collide with occasional formulations which
approximate the interplay to a Sartrean kind of antithesis (of being
and nothingness). As Laclau and Mouffe state: &dquo;Insofar as there
is antagonism, I cannot be a full presence for myself. But nor is the
force that antagonizes me such a presence: its objective being is
a symbol of my non-being&dquo;-where &dquo;non-being&dquo; is surely an
overstatement. Small wonder that on such premises antagonism
begins to shade over into total conflict-as happens in a passage
which finds the &dquo;formula of antagonism&dquo; in a &dquo;relation of total
equivalence where the differential positivity of all terms is ...

dissolved.&dquo; Flirtation with nothingness is also evident in the

statement that experience of negativity is &dquo;not an access to a
diverse ontological order, to a something beyond differences,
simply because... there is no beyond.&dquo;Yet, the fact that negativity
is not another objective (or positive) order does not mean that
what lies &dquo;beyond differences&dquo; is simply nothingness. In fact, if
differences were related strictly by nothing, the result would be
total segregation or equivalence-and by no means the complex
web of relationships thematized under the label of &dquo;hegemony.&dquo;
In Heidegger’s vocabulary (which, to be sure, has to be employed
cautiously), different elements in orderto enjoy a relationship are
linked on the level of &dquo;being’=a term denoting a non-objective
type of matrix in which positivity and negativity, ground and abyss
(Abgrund) are peculiarly intertwined.13
A similar intertwining affects another oppositional pair closely
linked with the nexus of presence and absence: the relation of
inside and outside, of interiority and exteriority. On this issue, too,
the authors are not always entirely clear and oscillate between
292 divergent conceptions. Thus, in presenting every social formation

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 as a &dquo;delimitedpositivity,&dquo; they affirm that &dquo;there is no social
identity fully protected from a discursive exterior that deforms it
and prevents its becoming fully sutured.&dquo; The accent on
exteriority is further reinforced in a passage dealing with the
character of social antagonism. As a witness of the &dquo;impossibility
of a final suture,&dquo; we read, antagonism &dquo;is the ‘experience’ of the
limit of the social. Strictly speaking, antagonisms are not Internal
but external to society; or rather, they constitute the limits of
society, the latter’s impossibility of fully constituting itself.&dquo; This
formulation, of course, stands in conflict with the notion of &dquo;limit&dquo;
as a mode of internal subversion or the claim that society is
everywhere &dquo;penetrated by its limits.&dquo; Elsewhere, it is true, the
study insists explicitly on the &dquo;irresoluble interiority/exteriority
tension&dquo; as a &dquo;condition of any social practice,&dquo; and on the
collapse of a &dquo;clear demarcation line between the internal and the
external.&dquo; This conception, in my view, is more readily congruent
with the emphasis on non-essentialist types of antagonism and
on the relational quality of hegemony. The discussion of
hegemony contains, in fact, a lucid endorsement of this tensional
approach. The hegemonic subject, we learn there, &dquo;must be
partially exterior to what it articulates-otherwise, there would not
be any articulation at all.&dquo; On the other hand, however, &dquo;such
exteriority cannot be conceived as that existing between two
different ontological levels.&dquo;As a result, to the extent that the term
is applicable, exteriority &dquo;cannot correspond to two fully
constituted discursive formations&dquo; or to &dquo;two systems of fully
constituted differences&dquo; (that is, to two domains radically exteriorr
to each other). 14

The external-internal quandary carries over into the conception of

democracy-surely a centerpiece of Hegemony and Socialist
Practice. In this context, the quandary surfaces as the opposition
between democracy construed as a system of radical
equivalence and democracy as a social formation intrinsically
marked by the tension between equivalence and difference. The
first altemative is stressed in the historical narrative tracing the
emergence and spreading of &dquo;democratic revolution.&dquo; Referring
to the beginning of this process, the study detects a &dquo;decisive
mutation in the political imaginary of Western societies&dquo; at the
time of the French Revolution, a mutation which is defined in
these terms: &dquo;the logic of equivalence was transformed into the
fundamental instrument of the production of the social.&dquo; The same
kind of principle is said to govern the subsequent process of
democratization: &dquo;The logic of democracy is simply the
equivalential displacement of the egalitarian imaginary to ever
more extensive social relations, and, as such, it is only a logic of
the elimination of relations of subordination and of inequalities&dquo;
and &dquo;not a logic of the positivity of the social.&dquo; Not surprisingly, in
293 order to constitute a viable social order, democracy defined in this

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 manner-as a pure &dquo;strategy of opposition&dquo;-needs to be
supplemented with a &dquo;strategy of construction of a new order,&dquo;
bringing into play the &dquo;element of social positivity.&dquo; Actually,
however, the construal of democracy as radical equivalence or as
expression of a purely &dquo;subversive logic&dquo; stands in conflict with the
conception of ‘plural democracy&dquo; emphasized in the study-a
conception in which equivalence and difference, equality and
liberty (or autonomy) are inextricably linked. As Laclau and
Mouffe state (in an instructive passage): &dquo;Between the logic of
complete identity and that of pure difference, the experience of
democracy should consist of the recognition of the multiplicity of
social logics along with the necessity of their articu lation.&dquo; Against
the background of this tensional experience, the pursuit of pure
equivalence emerges in fact as a sign of political deformation-
provoking the specter of despotism and totalitarianism. 15
The latter deformation leads me to a final comment. If democracy
involves a complex relationship of forces and groupings
(recalcitrant to total opposition or essentialist fixation), then
antagonism does not necessarily have to have a hostile and
mutually coercive character. If hegemony denotes a non-
exclusive articu lation-f oste ring an intertwining of exteriority and
interiority-then room seems to be made for a more friendly or
sympathetic mode of interaction (which, to be sure, cannot
entirely cancel negativity and thus an element of equivalence and
power). Against this background it appears possible to
reinvigorate the Aristotelian notion of &dquo;friendship&dquo; seen as a
binding matrix of political life-provided political friendship is
carefully differentiated from its more utilitarian and instrumental
variants. Extending the study’s post-Hegelian leanings, it seems
likewise feasible and legitimate to view politics as permeated by
ethical concerns or by the Hegelian category of Sittlichkeit. Along
the same lines, there may be an opportunity today to &dquo;rethink&dquo; the
Hegelian state-in such a manner that &dquo;state&dquo; no longer signifies
a positive structure or totality, and certainly not simply an
instrument of coercion, but rather the fragile ethical bond implicit
in hegemonic political relations. Democracy under these
auspices is still an arena of struggle-but a struggle directed not
simply toward domination but toward the establishment of a
tensional balance between presence and absence, liberty and
equality: that is, a struggle for mutual recognition (of differences).

University of Notre Dame

294

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 ENDNOTES

1. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:

Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul
Cammack (London: Verso, 1985).

2. , pp. 1-4. In critiquing a class-based essentialism, Laclau and

Ibid.
Mouffe locate themselves plainly in "a Post-Marxist terrain"—which does
not imply a summary dismissal of Marxism. As they emphasize (p. 4): "If
our intellectual project in this book is post-Marxist, it is evidently also post-
Marxist." Moreover, the critique of essentialism extends beyond
traditional Marxism to other discursive frameworks or "normative
epistemologies" (p. 3): "Political conclusions similar to those set forth in
this book could have been approximated from very different discursive
formations-for example, from certain forms of Christianity, or from
libertarian discourses alien to the socialist tradition—none of which could
aspire to be the truth of society."
3. Ibid., pp. 111, 122, 153, 193. As they add, the prevalence of politics
also injects instability into the distinction of public and private spheres,
leading to a pervasive politicization of life (p. 181): "What has been
exploded is the idea and the reality itself of a unique space of constitution
of the political. What we are witnessing is a politicization far more radical
than any we have known in the past, because it tends to dissolve the
distinction between the public and the private, not in terms of the
encroachment on the private by a unified public space, but in terms of a
proliferation of radically new and different political spaces."
4. Ibid., pp. 79, 120-121.

5. Ibid., pp. 94-95. The repercussions of traditional rationalism are

found in Hegel’s theory of the "state" and especially in his conception of
the bureaucracy as "universal class" (p. 191). The assessment of Hegel
relies strongly on F.A. Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen (first ed.
1840; 3rd ed., Leipzig: Hirzel, 1870).

6. Ibid., pp. 129, 184. Another passage (p.130) phrases the two logics
in the vocabulary of linguistics, associating the logic of difference with the
"syntagmatic pole" of language (the sequence of continuous
combinations) and the logic of equivalence with the "paradigmatic pole"
(relations of substitution).
7. Ibid., pp. 126, 129, 136. Elsewhere the danger of the two social
logics is seen in their transformation from a "horizon" into a "foundation"
(p. 183).
8. Ibid., pp. 87, 103-104, 142, 182-184. Regarding universalism
compare these comments (pp. 191-192): "The discourse of radical
democracy is no longer the discourse of the universal.... This point is
decisive: there is no radical and plural democracy without renouncing the
295 discourse of the universal and its implicit assumption of a privileged point

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 of access to ’the truth,’ which can be reached only by a limited number
of subjects."
9. Ibid., pp. 59, 69-70, 137. For a critique of the ’foundational"
treatment of power or domination in political life see p. 142. As it seems
to me, Foucault’s later writings point in a similar direction; compare my
"Pluralism Old and New: Foucault on Power" in Polis and Praxis: Exercises
in Contemporary Political Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), pp.
77-103, and my "Democracy and Postmodernism," Human Studies, Vol.
10 (1986), pp. 143-170.

10. Ibid., pp. 12, 37-38, 85, 93. For a differentiation of "praxis" from
Weberian categories of action theory compare my "Praxis and
Experience" in Polls and Praxis, pp. 47-76.
11. Ibid, pp. 86, 110-111, 114, 142. Another passage presents the
external demarcation of the two categories under the image of a "double
void" (p. 13).

12. Ibid, pp. 12-13, 25, 34, 47, 93, 108-110, 113. Compare Martin
Heidegger, "Moira," in Vorträge und Aufsätze (3rd ed.; Pfullingen: Neske,
1967), Vol. 3, pp. 36-38, 45-48, also Identität und Differenz (Pfullingen:
Neske, 1957); and Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan
Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). For the notion of
"intertwining" see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible,
trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1968).
13. Ibid., pp. 125-126, 128-129. Compare also Heidegger, On Time and
Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).
14. pp. 111, 125, 127, 135, 142.
Ibid.,
15. Ibid., pp. 155, 188-189. The tensional view is also endorsed in the
assertion (p. 189) that the "project for a radical democracy" must "base
itself upon the search for a point of equilibrium between a maximum
advance for the democratic revolution in a broad range of spheres, and
the capacity for the hegemonic direction and positive reconstruction of
these spheres on the part of subordinated groups." In part, the authors’
ambivalence stems from a mingling of two conceptions of politics:
namely, politics as "polity" (or political regime) and politics as "policy."For
this distinction see Ernst Vollrath, "The Concept of the Political," in
Philosophy and Social Criticism, Vol. 13 No. 1 (1987), pp. 17-29 (and my
response, pp. 31-37).

296

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