Hegemony after deconstruction: the consequences of undecidability

Abstract

Hegemonic decisions institute and shape the ideological terrain in which politics occurs; different forms of decision will structure the terrain in different ways. This article explores the decisions inaugurating specifically democratic forms of hegemony. It analyses this question by investigating the conditions under which such decisions emerge. Its starting‐point is Laclau's account of hegemony as a decision taken in an undecidable terrain. However, by utilizing a morphological approach, I argue that undecidability cannot be understood and its consequences for politico‐ideological analysis cannot be developed to the full, unless the other terms giving sense to undecidability are taken seriously. In particular, I give attention to Derrida's account of responsibility and democracy‐to‐come, linked to a very specific understanding of the subject and the decision. I argue that once we understand undecidability in this context, it can no longer be regarded as a mere propadeutic to hegemony per se. Rather, it contains important insights into the institution of democratic political orders.

Notes

Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 93. Emphasis in the original.

Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), p. 105.

For an early conceptualisation of the relation between politics and deconstruction, see Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

Nancy Fraser ‘The French Derrideans: Politicizing deconstruction or deconstructing the political?’, New German Critique, 33 (1984), pp. 127–154.

Glendinning discusses the reception of continental philosophy in the UK. Simon Glendinning, ‘The ethics of exclusion: incorporating the continent’, in Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (Eds), Questioning Ethics (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 120–132.

Derrida, quoted in Fraser, op. cit., Ref. 4, pp. 133–134.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Routledge: London, 1994).

E.E. Berns ‘Decision, hegemony and law’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 22 (4) (1997), pp. 71–80 at p. 71.

See Jacques Derrida with Alexander Garcia Düttmann, ‘Perhaps or maybe’, Responsibilities of Deconstruction, in Jonathon Dronsfield and Nick Midgley (Eds), Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 6 (1997), pp. 1–18, at p. 12. It is notable that Derrida here equates the demand for reflection on political issues with addressing ‘political examples’. Contrary to his own deconstructive practice, this both denigrates the role of concrete examples in theorising and reflects his disregard for careful genealogies in the field of political theory.

Derrida's recent writings on politics include, inter alia, On Cosmopolitanism and Foregiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 1997); Negotiations. Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, ed. and trans. with Introduction by Elizabeth Rottenberg, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror. Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Three relatively distinct phases can be discerned in Laclau's work: the early Marxist writings up to an including Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London: Verso, 1978); the middle phase in which post‐Marxist arguments were worked through, including Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, with Chantal Mouffe, (London: Verso, 1985); a later phase in which both deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalysis began to take on a more explicit role, and in which there is greater engagement with general issues in philosophy and ethics.

Gasché argues that terms such as arche‐trace, differance, supplementarity, iterability and remark in Derrida's writings can be understood as infrastructural ‘grounds’ by means of which deconstruction attempts to account for the contradictions and dissimilarities in the production of discursive totalities. These infrastructures are irremediably plural, pre‐logical and pre‐ontological. For a fuller discussion, see Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror (London: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 142–163. For a critical reading of Gasché's attempt to systematise the Derridean enterprise, see, G. Bennington, ‘Deconstruction and the Philosophers (The Very Idea)’, Oxford Literary Review, 10 (1988), pp. 73–130.

Laclau in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zˇižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London: Verso, 2000), p. 53.

Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. with an Introduction by Alan Bass (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1978), p. 289.

Anna Marie Smith, New Right Discourse on Race & Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and David Howarth, ‘Complexities of identity/difference: Black Consciousness ideology in South Africa’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 2(1) (1997), pp. 51–78.

For instance, the specific infrastructural logics of supplementarity and iterability allow Smith and Howarth to bring to the fore the complexities and entangled character of political identities and ideologies under discussion. In this vein Howarth has argued that the interweaving of repetition and alteration in linguistic signification encapsulated in the infrastructure of iterability enabled him to analyse the operation of two different strategies by which Black Consciousness ideology was constructed, and to deal with ‘the way in which already existing ideological elements were disarticulated from their previous systems and rearticulated into the newly emergent formation’. Howarth, ibid., pp. 70–72.

I will not here consider the many examples deploying deconstructive readings of politics. See, for instance, Neil Harvey and Chris Halverson, ‘The secret and the promise: women’s struggles in Chiapas', in David Howarth, Aletta J. Norval and Yannis Stavrakakis (Eds), Discourse Theory and Political Analysis, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 151–167; and Aletta J. Norval, Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse (London: Verso, 1996).

Morag Patrick, Derrida, Responsibility and Politics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), p. xi.

See also, Chantal Mouffe, ‘Deconstruction, pragmatism and the politics of democracy’, in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, Chantal Mouffe (Ed), (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 1–12; and Slavoj Zizek ‘Melancholy and the act’, Critical Inquiry, 26 (2000), pp. 657–681.

The term ‘conceptual morphology’ draws on Michael Freeden's Ideologies and Political Theory. A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 75. Just as one needs to give attention to the internal morphology of specific concepts, one also needs to be sensitive to the morphological complexes of combinations of concepts.

Derrida, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 306.

For a further discussion of this matter, see David Howarth, ‘Theorising Hegemony’, in Contemporary Political Studies 1996, Ian Hampsher‐Monk and Jeff Stanyer (Eds), (Glasgow: PSA UK, 1996), pp. 944–956.

Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 28–29.

As Laclau puts it: ‘The ideological would consist of those discursive forms through which society tries to institute itself as such on the basis of closure, of the fixation of meaning’. Ernesto Laclau ‘The impossibility of society’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 7 (1983), p. 24. For a discussion of the similarities between Laclau's understanding of ideology and Freeden's account of decontestation, see, Aletta J. Norval, ‘Review article: The things we do with words—contemporary approaches to the analysis of ideology’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 30, pp. 313–346.

See Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, in Mouffe, op. cit., Ref. 19, pp. 83–84.

Ernesto Laclau, ‘Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony’, in Mouffe, op. cit, Ref. 19, p. 48.

Laclau, ibid., pp. 59–60.

For a discussion of the place of dislocation in relation to antagonism, see, Aletta J. Norval, ‘The impurity of politics’, Essex Papers in Government and Politics, Sub‐series in Ideology and Discourse Analysis, No. 18, 2002.

Ernesto Laclau, ‘The time is out of joint’, in Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), p. 78.

For a discussion of the ethicization of Derrida's work via a reading of Levinas see, inter alia, Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Mark Dooley ‘The civic religion of social hope. A response to Simon Critchley’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 27 (5) (2001), pp. 35–58. For Laclau's response to Critchley see, inter alia, ‘Ethics, politics and radical democracy—a response to Simon Critchley’, Culture Machine, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Articles/laclau.htm

See Laclau, op. cit., Ref. 26, p. 48.

Laclau, ibid., p. 53.

Laclau, ibid., p. 55.

These views were first expressed in the first essay of New Reflections, which bears the clear imprint of Lacanian inspired account of the subject.

Laclau, op. cit., Ref. 23, p. 60.

Laclau, ibid., p. 61.

Laclau, op. cit., Ref. 26, p. 56.

Laclau, ibid., p. 57.

Laclau and Mouffe, op. cit., Ref. 11, p. 112.

Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences’, Writing and Difference (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 278–294.

Laclau, op. cit., Ref. 24. In Laclau's later work, from New Reflections onwards, this emphasis on ‘excess’ is replaced by a theorisation of ‘lack’ drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis. See, Laclau, op. cit., Ref. 24, pp. 3–85.

Op. cit., Ref. 13.

Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 19.

Jacques Derrida, ‘Afterword: toward an ethic of discussion’, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 148.

See, for instance, Derrida's argument on this in Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 220.

Derrida often stipulates that undecidability arises between two determinate possibilities only. See, for instance, ‘Hospitality, justice and responsibility. A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in Kearney and Dooley, op. cit., Ref. 5, pp. 65–83 at p. 66.

Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), p. 31.

Derrida's notes on the delineation of context are pertinent here. He argues that it is not a question as to whether a politics is implied in the practice of contextualization, but simply which politics. Derrida, op. cit., Ref. 44, p. 136.

A hegemonic force often succeeds in becoming hegemonic as a result of its ‘suspension’ of different possibilities, and its ability to hold together ‘contradictory’ moments.

See Derrida's reading of Husserlian phenomenology in Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

Derrida, op. cit., Ref. 44, p. 116.

John P. Leavey, ‘Preface: undecidables and old names’, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry : An Introduction, Jacques Derrida, trans. John P. Leavey (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), pp. 1–20 at p. 5.

Derrida with Düttmann, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 10.

This is particularly clear in Derrida's reading of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena, where he argues that the Husserlian enterprise envisages momentarily, but closes off the possibility of a conception of meaning not dominated by object intuition.

Derrida holds that a decision ‘must be prepared for as far as possible by knowledge, by information, by infinite analysis’, even though it must, inevitably, exceed it. Derrida, op. cit., Ref. 46, p. 66.

Derrida, ibid., p. 66.

Derrida, ibid.

Derrida, ibid., p. 67.

Derrida, ibid.

The conception of responsibility usually accompanying a liberal political theory assumes precisely what Derrida puts into question: the subject is responsible because she is a rational, knowledgeable subject.

See Derrida, op. cit., Ref. 50, and Gasché, op. cit., Ref. 12.

David Wood, ‘The experience of the ethical’, in Kearney and Dooley, op. cit., Ref. 5, pp. 105–119 at p. 112.

Wood, ibid., p. 115.

Derrida, op. cit., Ref. 46, p. 66.

Why does one not just face such a situation with paralysis? Derrida replies through a reading of Hamlet as a ‘victim of undecidability’: ‘if we assume that Hamlet is a figure of paralysis or neurosis because of undecidability, he might also be a paradigm for action: he understands what actions should be and he undergoes the process of undecidability at the beginning’. Derrida, ibid., p. 68.

Wood, op. cit., Ref. 62, p. 115. Wood links this account to Heidegger on ethos. Wood, ibid., pp. 107–108.

For Derrida there are three modes of response, or ethical answerability. They include, first, to ‘answer for’ oneself or something; second, to ‘answer before’ another, a community of others or court of law; and third, to ‘answer to’, unconditionally, the other. See, Derrida, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 251.

Ricoeur notes that the term ‘responsibility’ has undergone a shift from its juridical usage, defined by ‘the obligation to make up or to compensate for the tort one has caused’ to an obligation that ‘overflows the framework of compensation and punishment’. The latter informs much contemporary writings on responsibility, in particular, that of Levinas. See, Paul Ricoeur, ‘The concept of responsibility’, The Just, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 11–12.

Robert Bernasconi, ‘Justice without Ethics?’, in Dronsfield and Midgley, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 60, and p. 66. For a discussion of infinite responsibility and good conscience, see also, Jason Glynos ‘Thinking the ethics of the political in the context of a postfoundational world’, Theory & Event, 4 (4) (2000) ⟨http@//muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/archive.html#4.4⟩

Simon Critchley, ‘The ethics of deconstruction: an attempt at self‐criticism’, in Dronsfield and Midgley, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 91.

David Wood, ‘Responsibility reinscribed (and how)’, in Dronsfield and Midgley, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 105.

Wood, ibid., p. 111.

Derrida with Düttman, op. cit., Ref. 9, p. 13. This problematizes accusations of a lack of a ‘theory of the subject’ in deconstruction.

Derrida, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 105.

Derrida, op. cit., Ref. 7, p. 111.

‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’, in G. Borrodori, op. cit., Ref. 10, pp. 85–136 at p. 120.

Derrida, ibid., p. 121.

Laclau, op. cit., Ref. 29, p. 74.

Derrida, Negotiations, op. cit., Ref. 10, p. 182.

Derrida does not propose a weak‐kneed openness to the other. He is strongly aware of the violence inherent in any relation of response and discussion. This violence should not simply be accepted, nor denied either. It needs to be analysed. Derrida, op. cit., Ref. 44, p. 112. He is also quite clear, for instance, that the discourse of a ‘bin Laden’ does not offer the promise of a perspective open to perfectibility, ‘at least not one for this world’. See, Derrida, op. cit., Ref. 76, p. 114.

‘In order for an emerging people to appreciate the healthy maxims of politics … the effect would have to become cause; the social spirit, which should be the result of the institution would have to preside over the founding of the institution itself; and men would have to be prior to the laws what they ought to become by means of laws’. Rousseau, quoted in William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1995), p. 138.