The Concept of the Subject in Laclau

Abstract

In this article Laclau's conception of the subject as ‘the distance from undecidability to the decision’ is explained, defended and criticised. The starting point of Laclau's intervention, namely the impasse of both the transcendental and structuralist conceptions of the subject, is sketched and the conception of the subject in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (HSS) is examined and its shortcoming pointed out. Laclau's post-HSS conception of the subject stricto sensu, that is, as distinct from the ‘full ego subject’ or subject qua ‘subject-position’, is then presented and contrasted with the theories of the subject advanced by Sartre and Zizek. In conclusion, Laclau's conception is itself criticised on the ground that it excludes the subject's own contribution to its emergence – the subject cannot be reduced to ‘the distance from undecidability to the decision’, but must also refer to the distance from antagonism to undecidability.

Notes

1. See Williams (2001) and Balibar (1972, 1975) on structuralism and its difficulties with the subject.

2. See Balibar (1972, 1975) on the incoherence of the concept ‘a transitional mode of production’ which he introduced in Reading Capital.

3. ‘Whenever we use the category of “subject” in the text, we will do so in the sense of “subject-positions” within a discursive structure. Subjects cannot be the origin of social relations – not even in the limited sense of being endowed with powers that render an experience possible – as all “experience” depends on “precise discursive conditions of possibility” (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, p. 115)

4. See Laclau (1996, pp. 20, 21) on conceptions of the subject in structuralist and post-structuralist thought.

5. See Laclau (1990, p. 30; 2000, pp. 58, 78, 82–5) on how articulation itself entails the intervention of the subject.

6. See Pecheux (1975, pp. 144, 146) on the concept of a discursive formation as the ‘matrix’ of meaning determining ‘what can and should be done’.

7. The Laclauian subject is thus both ‘thrown into the structure’ (Laclau, 1990, p.50) – a condition of it being a subject at all – and ‘thrown up’ (1990, p. 44) by a failed structure, i.e. it always ‘depends’ on the signifier even in as ‘the locus of a decision not determined by the structure’ (1990, p. 30).

8. The Laclauian subject stricto sensu is thus a ‘weak’ subject-position – one that is barred ($) and faltering because lacking the support of a master-signifier (S1) which, in providing it with the identification – support it requires, eclipses it (S1/$): see Miller (1987).

9. The existentialist theory of Sartre refers to the ‘early’ Sartre, i.e. to The Transcendence of the Ego (1936), Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1937), The Imaginary (1940), and Being and Nothingness (1943).

10. The spontaneity of the Sartrean subject goes all the way down. The ‘for-itself’ can nihiliate the facticity of any situation as ‘tis being in the world…is a choice’ (Sartre, 1956, p. 57) and ‘there is no situation in which the given would crush beneath its weight the freedom which constitutes it as such – conversely there is no situation in which the for-itself would be more free than others’ (Sartre, 1956, p. 549). For Sartre's existentialist theory, to allow the object to penetrate and limit the subject in any way is to deny the subject any freedom at all. For Sartre (1956, p. 617), ‘… nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, what we are’. For Laclau, on the other hand, ‘I am a subject precisely because I cannot be an absolute consciousness, because something constitutively alien penetrates me’ (Laclau, 1996, p. 21). In Adventures of the Dialectic Merleau-Ponty (1973, pp. 124, 132) famously drew attention to the ‘ultra-bolshevism’ lodged within the Sartrean subject with its ‘vertiginous freedom’ and magic power to make ourselves whatever we want'.

11. For Laclau (1990, p. 61), on the other hand, the subject is at the extremity of the structure – the limit point beyond which meaning and identity dissolve; it is ‘constituted on the structure's uneven edges’.

12. See Hampshire (1965, p. 190) on the subject's ‘backward-stepping’ or adoption of the recessive attitude (p. 124) as a condition of possibility of reflection on its own possibilities.

13. ‘…we must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Newath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea’ (Quine, 1980, pp. 78, 79). See also Hookway (1988).

14. ‘Our thesis is that antagonism has a revelatory function, in that it shows the ultimately contingent nature of all objectivity’. And ‘The moment of antagonism where the undecidable nature of the alternatives…becomes fully visible constitutes the filed of the political’ (Laclau, 1990, pp. 18, 35).