The sudden death of Ernesto Laclau this month is another loss to an intellectual milieu that has recently suffered the departures of David Viñas, León Rozitchner and Eliseo Verón. An important thinker in and of his native Argentina, Laclau had established himself as a significant voice in the global attempt to understand the contemporary political conjuncture and had completed a manuscript on the rhetorical foundations of society to be published later this year by Verso. A forceful and trenchant critic of the Marxist tradition, he nevertheless remained connected to it and sought its renewal through an engagement with the resources of European philosophy and most especially the development of Gramsci’s insights on the nature of the popular.
Born in Argentina in the década infame his political coming of age was marked by the engagement with the diffuse Trotskyism and the more protean Peronism of the sixties, where ideas of uneven development and the even anti-imperialist people provided tools for thinking through the possible subject of revolutionary transformation of the semi-periphery, as Mouzelis called that fringe of territories that bordered the central capitalist states of the post-war. A move to Britain in the early 1970s saw him find a home at the University of Essex where he remained till his death (as well as teaching at other universities world-wide), his teaching on ideology and political discourse providing many of us with a route into a complex understanding of what has become the central problem of our current situation – how to generate a progressive politics that is alive to the contingency of political identity and the constitutive failures of representation, a politics, that is, which finds no natural and unitary subject of transformation produced by the unfolding of history, but rather a myriad of subjects constituted in and by language that must somehow be articulated (Laclau’s central notion) and made affective (a later preoccupation) in order to be politically effective.
Laclau’s early work engages with what remains a distinctive problematic for Latin American Marxism – the particular forms of capitalism in Latin America and Latin America’s incorporation within the global capitalist mode of production. This entailed an attack on André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein and a valorisation of theoretical practice that shows how Althusser came to influence him. The latter’s disaggregation of the social formation into particular instances each with its own specificity provides a logic that Laclau will follow to denaturalise the relation between economic position and consciousness. An expanded notion of Althusser’s notion of interpellation becomes central to his later thought and brings him to his defining preoccupation, that of the ‘people’, that provides a constant thread in his work. In his engagement with Poulantzas’s theory of fascism we can see how a post-Althusserian account of the multiple interpellations of the subject comes to form the pivot of an anti-reductionist understanding of the role of ideology in the production of class agents and the persistence of the ‘people’ as a site of identification within any social formation. Fascism now is one possible response to a crisis of the power bloc and a crisis of the working class in its failure to hegemonise struggles over the bloc’s successor. In these Gramscian terms Laclau is coming to understand ‘popular-democratic’ interpellations as the ‘domain of ideological class struggle par excellence’: whilst production relations are ‘determinant in the last instance’, the central task is to ‘articulate popular-democratic interpellations in the ideological discourses of antagonistic classes’. Against Poulantzas, Laclau will depathologise the ‘autonomous domain of the popular democratic struggle’, and as his own work progresses he will see this struggle as more and more important – explanatorily and politically, as his seminal essay ‘Towards a Theory of Populism’ (1977) shows. Here the emergence of populism is symptomatic of crisis and its articulation an attempt to resolve that crisis: populist discourse is neither reducible to a particular class discourse, but nor is it above class discourse. Crucially populism is not a function of a ‘stage of development’ but is potentially emergent at any point. In the essay Laclau analyses Peronism historically in terms of its mobilisation of the ‘people’ around a new power bloc of the military, small capital, and trade union organisations after the collapse of the agro-exporting oligarchic bloc as a consequence of the Great Depression. What concerns Laclau here is both the success and the limitations of Peronism – its effective constitution of a unified popular democratic language and its containment of the mobilised people within certain limits of antagonism: famously the ‘oligarchy’ becomes the antagonist of Evita’s fulminations, but antagonism to it is bounded by the limits drawn by the bureaucratic-corporatist state. This account of Peronism and populism more generally precipitated intense debate on the left in Europe as the rudiments of ‘Eurocommunism’ began to appear with its reworking of Gramsci, and was subjected to critique by figures like Nicos Mouzelis in New Left Review and Emilio de Ipola in Argentina. The vigour of this critical engagement marks all subsequent engagement with Laclau’s work: his thought seemed to provoke and its rigour often produced a highly emotional backlash (from the polemics of Ellen Meiksins Wood around post-Marxism to the later misprisions of Jon Beasley Murray).
But the developments of a rapprochement between the Althusser of ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ and the Gramsci of the Prison Notebooks provided a theoretical optic and lexicon that he would elaborate over the next 30 years: the necessity of the ‘popular-democratic’ moment; the notion of antagonism as defining contradiction; the effectivity of interpellations; and the growing use of Gramsci’s language of ‘bloc’, ‘transformism’ and, crucially, hegemony. A residual Althusserian understanding of determination in the last instance by the economy and what one might describe as a certain class piety holds some of these elaborations in check, but their logic leads to a breach with the versions of Marxism based on traditional conceptions of the working class which were already foundering as capitalism was rebooted under neo-liberalism.
With the growth of non-class based opposition to the Right’s ideological offensive in the North (even as dictatorship provided the transitional mechanism to neo-liberalism in the South) Laclau’s work began to use new social movements as the historical data for an extensive re-theorisation of the political, a project that he shared with his partner Chantal Mouffe, and the first product of which was Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and co-written with Mouffe. Published in English at the moment of the greatest defeat of traditional working class militancy under Thatcherism – the 1984–85 Miners’ Strike – the book seemed to capture a felt discontent with extant understandings of ‘socialist strategy’, and underscored the emergence of new actors within an expanded field of the political. Along with the work of Stuart Hall in the UK and other so-called post-Marxist currents, Laclau and Mouffe’s interventions offered a promising route to conceptualise the ways in which modern capitalism dislocated identities and discourses, permitting the extension of democratic possibilities beyond both the state and traditional sites of worker action. The political ceased to be defined by the classic trinity of state, party and trade union and found expression throughout the social. The book itself tracked the notion of hegemony through the 2nd and 3rd Internationals and their maverick outriders, Luxemburg, Sorel and Gramsci. Hegemony becomes the key to the order of the social as such, parallel with an understanding of social change that is marked by increasing social contingency. The category of historical necessity, already fractured by Bolshevik voluntarism, is further dissolved as the economic fails even to determine ‘in the last instance’. Laclau and Mouffe extend the notion of interpellation to the production of identities through multiple differences that emerge in the constant process of dislocation constituted by the disembedding extension of commodity relations. Differences, however, can be brought together in relations of equivalence by hegemonic articulation: but the site and agent of articulation need not be traditional institutions or organisations. Rather discursive equivalences can be produced at any point in the social formation. A further innovation is the recognition that hegemonic articulation is in principle incomplete: differences are always produced outside the chains of equivalence constituted by any given hegemonic principle. There is no closed totality, but rather an open field of differences that can be articulated through different discourses. Totality is only introduced by a constitutive negativity, a defining against some other in antagonism. Such totalities are unstable, ever open to the disarticulatory moment of difference, but in certain conditions can provide the possibility of rupture, where a single bloc opposes some limit other: the revolutionary moment before the hegemonic operation begins again.
What we have here then is a thinking of the political through a model of ideology conceived after post-structuralism. Politics operates at the level of discourse through signification, and the previous ontology of the political – especially Marxism – that produced such entities as castes, classes and interests is replaced by that of the signifier and the sign. The domain of the subject is produced discursively through language understood in post-Saussurean fashion. Such an account made the work amenable to those subjects emerging around sexuality, race, ecology, etc. (that is non-class antagonisms) and who saw media-disseminated discourse as crucial to the new moment of the cultural reproduction of capitalism, but the object of fierce critique by others who saw the replacement of one reductionism (class) by another (discourse). Yet the primacy of articulation and hegemony, and the absolute value of radical democracy that subtended them, did seem to offer many a better understanding of the formation of political subjects in the current phase of capitalism, and Laclau sought to rectify many of the perceived deficiencies of his account, such as the account of signification which seemed to leave the political at the mercy of a certain intellectualist and rationalist deformation, not least around the question of the ‘who’ that articulates discourse.
What is interesting is that at this juncture Laclau de-emphasises the ‘people’ in favour of democracy and the logic of difference, and the plural assemblage of ‘social movements’. (Oddly, even the discussion of Gramsci in the Hegemony book has more to say about bloc, militarism and so on than the ‘national-popular’.) In a way this has to do with the object of critique – the Marxist tradition with its aversion to thinking the nation – and the conjuncture of the North, with the defeat of the post-war consensus, even though Hall et al. had coined the notion of ‘authoritarian populism’ to designate the particular phenomenon of Thatcherism. But as Laclau’s work sought a fuller understanding of the content of hegemonic projects, leaning more and more on a psychoanalytic register that went beyond the idea of the imaginary borrowed from Althusser’s crude Lacanianism, the ‘people’ emerged again as an unavoidable horizon for political thinking. Conjuncturally, this may also have something to do with the ‘return of democracy’ in Latin America and the forms that social antagonisms began to take in the re-ordered globality of neo-liberalism. As if playing out an existential version of his own thinking of the relation between universal and particular, Laclau always moved between North and South, between general intellectual and local militant.
So the last phase of his work deepens his engagement with a Lacanian psychoanalysis to give substance to the affective dimension of politics and returns to the question of the ‘people’ as an unavoidable moment of all political work. To do this he hypothesises that the hegemonic moment builds around the construction of tendentially empty signifiers which whilst themselves particulars can stand for universal features, even as their own content is voided to enable their generalisation and effectivity as sites of identification. The empty signifier, however, also carries an affective charge, which Laclau theorises in terms of Lacan’s objet a, that trace of a lost fullness: the empty signifier does not merely act as a signifier linking other signifiers in the chains of equivalence that constitute the hegemonic projects he identified in the mid-1980s, but also carries with it the trace of the mythic trans- or ur-political (the social prior to antagonism evoked by every revolutionary discourse) that Laclau discusses in the famous essay ‘New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Times’ (1990). The empty signifier comes to stand for the irrepresentable social whole that would end politics in its lack of lack, its lack of antagonism or negativity. This central moment of affective investment is crucial to Laclau’s recent thinking: he claims in his 2005 On Populist Reason that ‘any social whole results from an indissociable articulation between signifying and affective dimensions’, where affect is seen as ‘differential cathexis’. The hegemonic work now has this affective aspect, driving towards some unity of differential objets a, where some particular can embody fullness, can become ‘a nodal point of sublimation’. Fullness is named and that name becomes the horizon of the achievable: a particular takes on the full weight of universality. The ‘people’ then become one name for this universal-particular. But since the production of the empty signifier is a necessary pre-condition for the hegemonic operation, and all empty signifiers are cemented into equivalential chains by affect, and affect is the trace of unity, the structural identity of the ‘people’ means that in some sense, its name is hidden in all names for the representative of the structural impossibility of total representation. It is this understanding of the ‘people’ as a necessary component of the construction of democratic politics, understood as the plural constitution of contingent positions by discursive means, the ‘people’ or the ‘popular’ as a necessary moment of politics as such that gives Laclau’s later work its analytic power in seeing populism as both a wider phenomenon than traditional views would have it, and not to be explained in terms of exception, developmental crisis or political pathology.
The relation between the ‘people’ and its various names and embodiments – especially in the figure of the popular tribune such as Chávez – as well as the working out of the logic of contingency and universality has been the source of much debate around Laclau’s work, and the polemic encounters with Žižek, Butler and others have provided scope for reworking and refining the problematic of signifier, affect and power. The theorisation of hegemony and its necessity has also been the object of major criticism, notably in the current that bears the name ‘post-hegemony’, which sees Laclau as remaining captured by the thought of the state and ignoring or devaluing the non-hegemonic moments of resistance and political creativity. Laclau’s work also sits in critical relation to what one might ungenerously call the neo-Bernsteinism of Hardt and Negri’s hymns to the multitude, stressing as he does the need for political work in the articulation of a strategy for transformation, Similarly he differs from Badiou and his epigones in the demand for content within political discourse against the tendential formalism of the figure of the Badiouvian militant.
These contributions to the central theoretico-political debates of our period demonstrate the power and acuity of Laclau as thinker, and his connection to the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner showed a willingness to engage with the messy problems of hegemonic practice. His loss is a signal one.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Philip Derbyshire
Philip Derbyshire is a writer and translator. He lives and teaches in London and has been a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American Studies since 2007.