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Cultural Studies

ISSN: 0950-2386 (Print) 1466-4348 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcus20

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Ernesto Laclau

To cite this article: Ernesto Laclau (2012) REPLY, Cultural Studies, 26:2-3, 391-415, DOI:10.1080/09502386.2011.647651

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.647651

Published online: 30 Mar 2012.

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Ernesto Laclau

REPLY

In the reply to his critics and interlocutors, Laclau clarifies his position regardinga series of concepts such as representation, fraternity (or democratic solidarity),identification, signification, affect, extimacy, spectacle and social sedimentationas they arise in or pertain to his theory of populism and populist reason. In theprocess of those clarifications, Laclau also explains how his views differ from otherrelevant thinkers such as Hannah Pitkin (on representation), Jurgen Habermas(on new social movements), Guy Debord (on spectacle) and Jacques Lacan (onextimacy).

Keywords demand; empty signifier; fraternity; hegemony; populism;representation

The category of representation

This is the notion on which the remarkable piece by Lisa Disch is centred.Before going into the detail of her analysis, let me say something about why Isee representation as crucial for political analysis.

In theoretical philosophy, representation has been at the centre of manycontroversies, but, I would argue, many of these controversies are, in myview, grounded in some fundamental misunderstandings. For Jacques Derrida,for instance, representation plays an absolutely central role in theconstitution of objectivity. In some sense, there is nothing but representation.For Gilles Deleuze, on the contrary, the notion of representation has to beresolutely abandoned. There is no representation but only simulacra.Apparently, each is saying exactly the opposite of the other, but, I wouldargue, as far as this issue is concerned, they are saying exactly the same thing.For Derrida there is only representation if an original presentation whichwould be later duplicated by the re- of representation never obtains. We livein a world in which there is no original presence and so we are necessarilycaught in the nets of representation. For Deleuze, there is no originalpresentation either, but for him the notion of representation presupposes anoriginal of which representation would be a copy, he abandons representationaltogether and calls a copy which has no original a simulacrum. Butobviously, the Derridean representation and the Deleuzian simulacrum areas similar to each other as two drops of water.

Cultural Studies Vol. 26, Nos. 23 MarchMay 2012, pp. 391415ISSN 0950-2386 print/ISSN 1466-4348 online # 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2011.647651

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This is a good starting point to explain why I see representation as crucialin the constitution of political identities. Democratic theory has alwaysdistrusted processes of representation because it has seen them as potentialways of betraying the will of those who are represented. But, as I have argued,this distrust fails to see what is in fact the essential point: the degree to whichthere is a pre-constituted will which is merely re-duplicated in the process ofrepresentation. As in the case of Derrida and Deleuze, we are here again facingthe question of the original and the copy. Social situations vary enormouslyin this respect. A corporate group, with clear-cut interests, would tend tosubordinate its representatives to a narrow set of options dictated by a willwhich is largely (although never entirely so) autonomous from therepresentative process; while the marginal masses of shanty towns dependmuch more on the representative net for the constitution of their own identity.And if we consider the general conditions of our globalised world, weimmediately see that we live in societies in which there are only simulacra andnot originals (Deleuze) or only representation and not presentation (Derrida).

This is what Disch has very well perceived as distinctive of my approach:that representative processes are essential to the constitution of politicalidentities. Her analysis is very much centred on a comparison between myapproach and that of Hannah Fenichel Pitkin and on the way she sees myviews go beyond the limitations of Pitkins perspective. She starts by assertingthat I have been slightly unfair to Pitkin because, in Dischs opinion, she hasadvanced in my direction more than I realise, and that her departure fromtraditional views would be more radical than I am prepared to recognise. Ithink that Disch is a bit optimistic about Pitkin, but the disagreement is notreally important, given that, in the first place, I have myself asserted thatPitkins book is the best study we have, so far, on political representation, and,secondly, that Dischs remarks concerning Pitkins shortcomings, wholly go ina direction with which I am fully sympathetic.

The whole question turns around the rather dismissive treatment by Pitkinof the notion of symbolic representation, which belongs for me to the essenceof any representative process. For Pitkin, symbolic representation is essentiallymanipulative, because it involves the subordination of the people to the leaderand, in that way, there is a magic fascination by which people loseconsciousness of their own interests that is, it teleologically leads in thedirection of fascism. For me the question should be put in an entirely differentway. The real issue is whether one can have a process of identity formationwhich skips the moment of identification. As somebody well acquainted withFreudian theory, Pitkin should know that this is impossible. Withoutidentification there is no identity, and identification involves a moment ofexternality which is unavoidable. Without this externality inscribed at the heartof identification there is neither identity nor interests which could berecognised. And identification is the essence of symbolic representation.Identification has, indeed, operated in Fascism, but also in all other kinds of

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political movements, from Gaullism to Leninism, from the 1968 mobilisationsto the Algerian Revolution. It does not make sense to multiply the examples,because symbolic representation is the core of any representation whatsoever,and representation is the core of the political.

In all these aspects the outlook of Disch is very close to my own. Let meenumerate the aspects of her analysis that I find particularly congenial. Firstly,her assertion that Pitkins analysis remains half-way between the bedrocknorm and the retreat from the radical conclusions that would follow from herown theoretical intervention. In Dischs words:

Pitkin made a bold critique of the bedrock norm, acknowledged thepeople as limit and then recoiled from the most radical implications ofher argument as if they posed a threat to democratic politics. Laclauswork, which does not merely refute Pitkins but advances a line ofargument that she sets in motion, reveals that what Pitkin feared may wellbe the vitality of democracy.

Secondly, her recognition of Pitkins limited conception of symbolicrepresentation, which she conceives as pathology. Thirdly, Dischs way ofpointing out Pitkins morally charged distinction between a leadership whichis compatible with democracy and a manipulation which is essentiallyauthoritarian. In this connection, Disch accepts entirely the critique that I havemade of the way Pitkin uses the distinction between causes and reasons. Forthe same reason, as Disch points out, Pitkin is blind to the role thatimagination must play in representation. The moment of emptiness, which isso central to my own approach to these matters, has to be either ignored orstrictly limited in Pitkins study, largely because of the reasons mentioned byDisch.

Those sections of Dischs piece which present the structure andimplications of my own analysis are quite insightful and accurate and I haveno objection to them. The only reservation I have is in Dischs treatment of thequestion of metaphor. According to her:

Whereas metaphor posits a mythical unity among elements that arenecessarily related, analogous to one another and, so, perfectlysubstitutable for one another, metonymic preserves the heterogeneity ofthe elements of a unity . . . Whereas metaphoric unity is an alignment ofwills incarnated by a leader, hegemony, the metonymic alliance of amultifarious democratic identity that preserves the specificity andparticular objectives of the various struggles of which it is composed.

I would put the argument in a slightly different way. I would say that metaphorand metonymy are not separated by an ontological chasm but that they areboth constitutive dimensions of all political experience although their

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relative weight would vary from case to case. A space only constituted in ametonymic way, without being contaminated by any metaphoric operationwould be a pure space of differences, incompatible with the action ofhegemonic logics. But the unilateralisation of metaphor would lead to the sameresult: if all differences collapse there would be an uncontaminated unity, andthere would be nothing to hegemonise (even the leader would become entirelyunnecessary). What there is, in fact, is a constant process of mutualcontamination between metaphor and metonymy, which is what gives itscentrality to hegemony as a political logic. Disch herself seems to be quiteclose to this conclusion when she asserts: In practice the two (metaphor andmetonymy) are intertwined. A hegemonic operation will always try torepresent itself as incarnating a necessary alliance, while a mythical unity willalways be contaminated by metonymic contingency. I entirely agree withthis way of presenting the argument.

Levels of articulation of the social whole

The discussion on representation is crucial, because it is the royal road leadingto the central role that the notion of articulation plays in socio-politicalanalysis. If the different levels of social reality are not united by an unbrokenchain making possible a smooth transition from one sphere to the other, in thatcase the links between them are to be explained by mechanisms different fromthose available to mere gradualism. It is here that representation startsrevealing all its ontological potentialities. This question is at the root of boththe interventions by Oliver Marchart and Henry Kripps.

Before moving to the substantive arguments by Marchart, I would like tomake a small biographical rectification. Marchart makes reference to myparticipation in the Peronist student movement. In actual fact I was never amember of that movement, largely because it developed in a significative wayonly in the second half of the 1960s, in the wake of the military coup of 1966,at a time in which I had already finished my university studies. In the first halfof the 1960s the time of my student militancy what predominated inuniversity circles were different factions of the Left. The watershed was thatbetween a national and popular Left, which gave critical support to Peronismand a liberal cosmopolitan Left. I belonged to the first, but although our pro-populist orientation was clear, it was that of political formations different fromthe Peronist Youth, which was going to flourish in a later period. In the sameway, I have never tried to present Peronism as an archetypal model ofpopulism. My theory on populism has its historical sources in a variety ofpolitical experiences and not only on that of Peronism even if I considerPeronism, especially that of the 1960s as a particularly revealing example ofhow an equivalential logic operates.

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Coming now to Marcharts substantive claims, I think that he draws quite anaccurate picture of the contrasts between the Cultural Studies tradition and thatassociation with the hegemonic approach that I have advocated. I do not haveany disagreement with Marcharts formulations, so rather than paraphrasingthem, I will simply add a few complementary remarks.

In the first place, I want to stress the fact that the differential andequivalential logics, which are the two possible forms of articulation a notionwhose pivotal role in explaining the constitution of the social Marchart correctlyunderlines are not privative of either what he calls the micro or the macrolevels but cut across both. This is quite crucial to my hegemonic approach.Hegemony is not a category applicable to just one level of social reality withexclusion of the other but is the very logic of constitution of any social identitywhatsoever. Gramsci asserted that the construction of hegemony started at thefactory floor. And as Marchart quite rightly points out, a writer like Stuart Hall,whose work has been decisive in the emergence of Cultural Studies, constantlytransgresses the line separating the micro from the macro analytical levels in his studies on Thatcherism, for instance. As I have tried to show in my work, ahegemonic logic blurs the distinction between State and civil society andcontaminates the categories belonging to both. As against the Marxist emphasison civil society, which reduces the State to a mere superstructure, Gramsci seesthe becoming State of a class as the highest moment in constituting itself as anhegemonic sector. And as against Hegel, he does not see, however, the State as asphere separated from civil society, because the latter is already the locus of apolitical construction. The consequence is that neither State nor civil society, asparticular spheres, can operate as a ground of the social, as points at which onecould find the sole course of social change.

Secondly, however, an interrogation remains open. If there is no orderlytransition from one sphere of social reality to the other, so that all of them,in their differential ontic specificity would concur to the structuration of acomplete whole, how to conceive of the actual relation between spheres,between whole and parts? It is here that our previous consideration of therelation of representation shows its full relevance. The whole, we havesaid, is not a ground so it cannot assign, through its immanent endogenousmovements, differential locations to the particular spheres. Does this,however, mean that the whole simply disappears as an ontologicaldimension? Several reasons conspire against this solution, the most importantbeing that if ontic differences were the only thing that ontologically is, onewould have to determine the terrain in which those differences constitutetheir differential specificity, and with this the dimension of grounded, whichwe were trying to exclude, would be smuggled back into the argument. Wehave tried to provide a different answer to this question, and Marchart showsvery well what that answer is. In its most general formulation it consists inasserting that the holistic dimension remains, but that it does not consist in aground but in a horizon. While in a ground, in the strong sense of the term,

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the ontological function of grounding derives from the ontic specificity of theentity fulfilling that function, in the case of a horizon such an automaticderivation does not obtain. The function of grounding remains an ontologicalunavoidable requirement, but such a function is only possible if the entityfulfilling it cancels, or at least blurs, its ontic specificity that is, if it becomesan empty signifier, in the sense that we have attributed to this term. And anempty signifier is a hegemonic one, if hegemony is conceived as a relation inwhich a particularity, without ceasing to be particular, assumes therepresentation of a universality which is utterly incommensurable with itsontic differential identity. But if this is the primary ontological terrain, if thetotality is not directly derivable from any such ontic identity, but isconstructed through this hegemonic taking over of the grounding function,in that case relations of representation are ontologically constitutive (in thetranscendental sense of the term). This explains why, for us, there is anintimate imbrication between the micro and the macro levels to whichMarchart refers.

Finally, let us say something concerning the various approaches to theinteractions between the micro and the macro levels. There areapproaches for which the macro level is the only possible source ofsociety effects for instance, Hobbes Leviathan. He is at one removefrom classical forms of essentialism as for him the covenant is an artificialact, but the mortal God that this act constitutes remains a logical necessityof the social order, as far as the only alternative to it is the state of nature.At the other extreme, we have the extreme forms of particularism as insome contemporary multiculturalist approaches, for which only the microlevel of society counts, while the macro level is dismissed as a source oftotalitarian interference. Multiculturalism has been criticised with theargument that particularistic demands can be easily integrated by the forcesof the status quo. There is some truth in this argument (at least when it isaddressed to extreme forms of particularism), but it is considerablyweakened when accompanied by the frequent parallel assertion that thereare social actors (the working class is usually brought to the fore here) who,given their structural social location would escape the danger of thisintegrationist trend. Slavoj Zizek is a particularly nave example of thisapproach. The truth is that there is no social actor neither working class,nor anybody else who can escape the danger of integration since, for thereasons that we have presented, there is no structural social location whichcan produce out of itself society effects (let alone emancipatory ones). Tohave the latter something else is needed: hegemonic practices which, throughequivalential relations between a plurality of structural positions, wouldconstruct new popular identities.

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Henry Kripps addresses also the problem of the specific demands emergingfrom particular sectors and movements and the possibility of theiruniversalisation through their inscription in a wider public sphere. He doesit, however, from a different angle than Marcharts: by discussing the NewSocial Movements which have emerged since the 1960s and their interpretationby the sociological literature, in particular the work of Habermas and that ofAndrew Arato and Jean Cohen.

As far as Habermas is concerned, his approach, as presented by Kripps,would be part of his theory of a public sphere which would have developedsince the eighteenth century and would have resulted in the constitution of anintermediate terrain of resistance both to the encroachment by the economicsubsystem and the colonisation by the political subsystem. (This intermediateplace of resistance would constitute the more optimistic Habermasianalternative to the unimpeded rationalisation process detected by the earlierFrankfurt School theorists.) It is within this cycle of an expanding public spherethat, according to Habermas, the New Social Movements (NSM) have to beinscribed. There would be, however, an essential ambiguity in theiremergence, for if the NSM fully participate in the general democratic impulse,they would lose their particularistic identity and would not be new at all;while, if they assert that particularistic identity, they would be condemned to apurely defensive politics and their democratic potential would be threatened.In Krippss words: according to Habermas, the politics of NSM split betweentwo alternatives: either a familiar offensive liberal politics or a purely defensiveidentity politics. Kripps later discusses the various approaches to NSM (theResource Mobilization Paradigm and the New Social Movements theory)and the way in which Habermas stands in relation to them, and points to theexistence of a third paradigm (the identity politics proposed by Gorz and Offe)with its insistence in the possibility of constituting counter-institutions whichwould be the starting point of a culture of resistance putting limits to theaction of both the economic and the politico-administrative subsystems.Habermas, however, would dismiss this third alternative as unrealistic,probably, as Kripps adds, because their counter-offensive against the colonisingsystem is neither broad nor expansive enough.

As for Arato and Cohen, they would try, in Krippss view, to open up theHabermasian game, insisting that the NSM can have a creating political role inhanging systemic social structures, but they would finally remain anchored inthe Habermasian problematic, by restricting the effectivity of the NSM to bejust the preconditions of a purely political intervention, whose only terrain canbe civil and political society. It is here that Kripps finds the potential of myown populistic approach: in transcending the Habermasian dichotomy and inappealing to a new terrain which would go deeper than the dichotomy itself. InKrippss words:

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I will show that Laclaus concept of populist reason provides a way ofavoiding this devastating conclusion [the Habermasian dichotomy]. Inparticular it offers a way of understanding NSMs as a new post-liberalform of democratic-emancipatory politics that it sources in the lifeworld.

I will not go into the detail of Krippss presentation of my own approach,which the reader will find in his contribution to this volume and which I findaccurate, although, on occasion, I am hesitant to follow his terminology aswhen he assimilates Gramscis hegemonic articulation to manufacturedconsent. The problem is that manufactured consent has pejorativeconnotations in the sociological literature, and although those connotationsare absent from Krippss use of the term, I do not think it wise to give a newuse to a term which has such a widespread established meaning. What I willinstead do is to add to Krippss analyses some comments which are, I think,pertinent to his argument.

The first point I want to make is that Krippss and Marcharts discussionsare addressing, although from different angles, similar issues. For Marchart,the issue was how to connect what he called the micro and the macro levelsof political analysis, which he illustrated by the different but complementaryapproaches of Cultural Studies and the theory of hegemony. As I have argued and Marchart concurs the latter involves that the frontier separating bothlevels of analysis has to be constantly transgressed. And, as Kripps shows, forHabermas that frontier not only can never be transgressed, but its rigiditygenerates an ambiguity in the identity of social movements which can never bemediated. Thus, the dichotomic alternative. This is exactly the point at which auniversalism a` la Habermas and the theory of hegemony part company: whilefor the former the universal is the precipitate of a dialogical interactionbetween rational agents, for the latter the only conceivable universality is ahegemonic one, which presupposes the emptying of a particular contentthrough the operation of equivalential logics. This involves a mechanism ofidentification which is entirely absent from the dialogical perspective. Krippshas rightly indicated that this could be described as what he calls a movementfrom the sign to the signifier, from the notion of a signifier which would be thetransparent medium through which a signified shows itself, to what in Lacanianterms could be called the constant slide of the signified under the signifier,which submits the signified to its own logic. I would add, incorporating alogical distinction, that the emptier the signifier is, the richer it becomes in itsextensionality, but the poorer in its intensionality.

There are two further aspects of Krippss analysis to which I would like torefer. The first concerns his assertion that the politicising of a set ofheterogeneous demands within a populist movement comes at a cost, becausethose demands experience a partial loss of their original heterogeneity.However, as Kripps adds, that loss is compensated by a counter-movement,given that the progressive emptying of a signifier allows it to represent an

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expanded chain of social demands. This point is crucial and it shows in allpurity the crossroad where our analysis parts company with that of Habermas.What for Habermas was a dichotomy opening an exclusive alternative, for us isthe moment of a tension, and this tension is what constitutes the political assuch. It is true that the erosion of heterogeneity is the precondition of theemergence of a hegemonic centre; but the reverse is also true: any centre willbe systematically eroded by the operation of a non-eradicable heterogeneity.That is why society is constitutively political and why hegemony is the veryform of the political as such.

Finally, a few words concerning populus. The notion of populus, in mywork, has been opposed following a Latin distinction to that of plebs.While populus is the body of all citizens, without distinctions, plebs is apartitive category within that body. But beyond those juridical distinctions,plebs has also come to signify the underdog, those excluded from fullparticipation in the life of the community. Once this second signification hasbeen attached to the category, there is only one step to reverse the moment ofexclusion, and to make it the signified uniting those aspiring, in spite of theirexclusion, to become the totality of the community the only authenticcommunity. That is, plebs comes to name the subject of an emancipatoryprocess, as the cross, which was before a symbol of ignominy became, for theChristians, a symbol of the highest dignity. Once this reversal has taken place,we have the people of populism.

On fraternity

At this point I would like to answer three questions put to me by Ivor Chipkin.He writes:

If the condition of the demos is an affective relation between its citizensthen several questions present themselves. In the first place, will anyaffective relation do? Or does a democracy require a particular kind ofsolidarity between its citizens? If so, what are the conditions of democraticlove?

In the first place, it is necessary to separate the general question of affect fromthe question of democracy. Affect is constitutive of any human experience andit is not limited to any particular content, political or otherwise. Strongsolidarity and, as a result, fraternity can exist among members of acommunity, without the identification link between those members beingdemocratic at all. Several of the examples that Chipkin gives are particularlyexplicit in this respect. Anybody knows that feelings of fraternity were veryimportant in Fascist movements. What is essential in an affective relation isthat particular symbols are the objects of a strong emotional investment. So the

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answer to the first question is that given the right context any politicalcontent can be the point of an affective investment be it positive or negative.And this applies as well to the case of Althussers ideological State apparatusesthat Chipkin mentions. In different situations the State interpellates individualsas subjects in diametrically opposed ways.

As for the other two questions, their meaning requires clarification beforean answer is possible. Are they normative questions? If so, the analyst mustdetermine what he understands by democracy independently of particularpolitical arrangements, and later to assess the latter on the basis of theircoincidence or not with the general norm. The really relevant question,however, is whether it is possible to ground democracy in a purely formalsystem of rules merely procedural, as the Habermasians would have it independently of all type of substantive collective identification. I do not thinkthis is possible, among other reasons, because to agree in those proceduresalready involves an agreement about more substantive matters. So we have, onthe one hand, substantive collective identifications and, on the other, forms ofdemocratic participation extended to increasingly larger sections of thepopulation. The essential point is that there is no logical transition, no squarecircle that allows a move from the one to the other. But as we are not inthe business of drawing blueprints of ideal societies, it does not matter that thetransition is not logically grounded, as far as it can be the object of a hegemonicconstruction. Heterogeneous principles can be discursively articulated. InSouth Africa we have all kinds of racial and ethnic identification, as Chipkinpoints out, but also the construction of an identification of people as citizens,without discrimination, which cuts across particularistic barriers. This is acomplex process, as we well know, but this complexity has always beeninherent to the construction of a democratic culture.

There remains an important issue that Chipkin raises in his intervention:the question of fraternity. At first sight, it is difficult to clearly differentiateequality from fraternity. Is it not the equivalential relation between a pluralityof demands as a result of which a certain equality is established betweenthem, as well as between the subjects who are their bearers the ground itselfof fraternity? Does the relation of fraternity add anything that the mereprinciple of equality does not provide? I think it does, but to identify that extrasomething we have to ask ourselves about the precise discursive status of thetriad liberty, equality, fraternity. Is it just the statement of a factual situation,or is it an injunction? I think it is clearly the latter, for even in those cases inwhich it is presented as the ground of a communitarian order as in theDeclaration of the Rights of Man, for instance it has a performativedimension; it makes an implicit allusion to a task ahead. Seen in this way, it isessentially linked to a discourse of emancipation. In this sense, each of thecomponents of the triad finds its precise meaning. In the community to beconstructed as a result of the injunction, liberty means liberty from(oppression or its equivalents) and equality means the relation established

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between the human beings who are the bearers of freedom. So what aboutfraternity? I think that it adds an essential component to the process ofconstruction of a collective subject: the identification with the principle ofequality. Without this identification there would not be the collectivesolidarity needed for the emergence of a people. From this perspective,Chipkin is absolutely right; without the identification on which fraternity isbased, there would be no possibility of populism. The mechanisms of thisidentification have been explored at the psychoanalytic level by both Freud andLacan, and in my book I have extended this exploration to various dimensionsof the political field. I cannot address here this whole question; so I limitmyself to remind the reader that identification, as conceived in this context,essentially involves the cathexis of equalitarian subject positions.

Lacanian and pseudo-Lacanian interventions

I have to precede the consideration of the three pieces dealing with my bookfrom a Lacanian perspective, with a preliminary remark, and it is that I am not aLacanian theorist, if by that it is understood one that tries to formalise its ownfindings in terms of Lacanian categories. I have elaborated my own theoreticalperspective and if I have drawn on several authors to formulate it, I am not adisciple of anybody. That is the reason why I find it irritating that somecommentators try to translate my categories into Lacanian ones, and find thenan easy ride in showing that I am using them inconsistently with the Lacaniandoxa: what happens is that the initial translation was totally unwarranted.

Let us start with the piece by Randall Bush, who claims that my approachto lack, emptiness and so on has exclusively concentrated on symbolicidentification and entirely ignored the imaginary one. How does Bush reachthis conclusion? Only by ascribing the relevant categories of my analysis discourse, in the first place to the register that Lacan calls the symbolic.But this is an entirely spurious ascription. It is true that in Lacanian theory onehas to distinguish between the symbolic object, on the one hand, and, on theother the stage of the mirror and the imaginary object closely linked to theKleinian approach and the Freudian theory of narcissism but the distinctionbetween the symbolic and the imaginary is not present in my theoreticalapproach. It is not that I am against this distinction, and in Lacans work itmakes perfect sense although its terms are rather hesitant, because Lacansdistinction between the three registers oscillated quite a bit throughout hisintellectual trajectory. The question is, rather, that in my theoretical approachthe relevant distinctions are different, so that no mechanical translation ofthem into Lacanian categories is possible. My notion of discourse, forinstance, includes dimensions of the three Lacanian registers. And the sameapplies to the whole field of rhetoricity.

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So, in that case, what about the homologies that I have myself foundbetween Lacans approach and my own? They are certainly there and they arerelevant, but they have to be precisely located as far as their pertinence isconcerned. I have, for instance, asserted that the hegemonic logic and the oneassociated to the investment making possible the emergence of the object a inLacan are identical and not only vaguely homologous, but this does not meanthat the construction of any possible object is, in my work nor, indeed, inthat of Lacan reducible to that homology.

There is, however, a last point to make. What I have just said does notmean that I think a comparison between two theoretical approaches isimpossible. It only means that such a comparison has to operate avoiding easytranslations and respecting the autonomy of the two theoretical fields beingcompared. The work of Paula Biglieri and Gloria Perello, to which I will referlater on, from this viewpoint, is exemplary. They are both Lacanian theoristsand, also, seriously interested in the hegemonic approach to politics. Theyhave, as we will see later, made a distinction between the three registerswhich, at the same time that it follows a rigorous Lacanian logic shows itshomologous points with the hegemonic logic.

*****

Considering now the piece by Christian Lundberg, I think that it presentsan insightful analysis of the way in which the notion of demand operates in thework of Freud and Lacan. The only point in which I disagree with him is in hisassertion that my analysis does not integrate the idea of jouissance and remainsat a purely formal indeed, quasi-structuralist study of the logic ofsignification. To this effect, he refers to a criticism raised in an essay by JasonGlynos and Yannis Stavrakakis (in S. Critchley and O. Marchart, Laclau.ACritical Reader) and which has been expanded by Stavrakakis in a recent book(The Lacanian Left). I have already answered that criticism (in the same volumeedited by Critchley and Marchart), so I find it slightly strange that Lundbergdoes not make any reference to my reply. To summarise my argument, I haveto say that, for me, there is no drastic separation between affect (jouissance)and signification, because affect only consists in the differential (uneven)investment of a signifying chain, while signification includes in its logicaldeterminations its being structured by such an affective investment. They arenot separate objects but two dimensions of the same process which are onlyanalytically distinguishable. While signification deals with the form of theinvestment, affect deals with its force.

Lundberg writes:

Yet enjoyment provides one particularly difficult stumbling block for adedicated formal account. To start with, enjoyment is never quite asachievable as the preceding quotation might suggest. Far from being

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the consummation of a logic of structure and investment, enjoyment is asupplement to a failing in a structure: for example, Lacan framesjouissance as a useless enjoyment of ones own subjectivity thatsupplements the fundamental failings of a subject in either finding agrounding or consummating an authoritative account of its coherence.This uselessness defines the operation of jouissance.

Now I find this quotation surprising because, although the author referred to isLacan, it could also be an accurate description of my own approach. At nopoint have I asserted that there is a structural closure of the social whole butexactly the opposite: that such a structural closure is unachievable and that,because of that, an uneven investment is required. Lundberg speaks of a logicof structure and investment as if it was an homogeneous operation, but inactual fact investment is necessary because the structure cannot achieve anyclosure of its own. This investment is the supplement that Lundberg demandsbut which, for the reasons that I have explained, can only exist as a distortionof the process of signification. The key category here is that of emptysignifier, which is absolutely central to my approach but to which Lundbergdoes not make the slightest allusion in his piece. If a structure could be closedin a saturated logical space we would have a symbolic space without holes, andno hegemonic operation would be required. From the notions of emptysignifier and hegemony we naturally pass to two other aspects whichare crucial for my approach. The first is the centrality of naming in the cons-titution of objectivity which presupposes the breaking of the structuralistisomorphism between signifier and signified; the second is the centrality ofrhetoric in the very structure of signification. Saussure himself realised that,while the combinations proper of the syntagmatic axis of language can beapprehended through strict syntactic rules, the associative or paradigmatic axiscannot be so domesticated, because the associations can advance in all kinds ofdirections. The consequence is that tropological mechanisms operate at thevery heart of signification. This is the point where psychoanalytic categoriesbecome relevant and where problems concerning the site of excess, thatLundberg raises, should be inscribed.

There is a last point in relation to Lundbergs piece that I would like tobriefly refer to. It is that concerning the nature of the addressees in a globalisedworld. It is also a question that I have raised on several occasions. To refer toan example which I have given elsewhere: if a group of students start amobilisation for the reduction of the price of the ticket in the universityrestaurant, the enemy is perfectly clear and delimited it is the universityadministration. Let us suppose now that we have a popular mobilisation of veryheterogeneous social sectors: in this case, the enemy is not obvious andrequires a far more complex process of discursive construction. This is thereason why the category of empty signifier, which presupposes a relativelystable political frontier, is insufficient. To deal with these more complex

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situations is why other notions such as floating signifiers and socialheterogeneity have to be introduced into the analysis. The key question is,however, the following: do we have, with these conceptual additions, theintellectual tools to deal with the new situations arising in a globalised world? Ithink that we have them. In the first place, frontier effects dividing society intotwo camps have not disappeared. We have them, on the contrary, constantlyreproducing themselves in the contemporary scene. But, in the second place,the vulgar postmodern image of a universe dominated by a plurality ofpunctual conflicts not crossed by any equivalential logic does not evenremotely correspond to the way in which social antagonisms emerge anddevelop in the world in which we live.

The essay by Biglieri and Perello constitutes an exemplary theoreticalintervention, as far as our present discussion is concerned, in at least threeaspects. Firstly, because it does not simply list a series of psychoanalyticalcategories, but attempts to show their specific interconnections; secondly,because it deals with both political and psychoanalytical concepts, respectingtheir autonomy and without engaging in any mechanical reduction of one fieldto the other; finally, because it opens the way to a certain universalisation ofthose categories that is, to their potential inscription into a generalontological reflection.

Let us start with the first aspect. Biglieri and Perello assert:

The imaginary order has to do with the image; it has to do with the notionof representation (that is to say, with something which is presented oncemore instead of that which is an absence). It is an attempt to reach asynthesis, to unify or to establish a closure of meaning. The Symbolicorder, in a broad sense, can be understood as culture passed on throughlanguage. It is an organizer that gives shape to imaginary representationsthrough the laws of language. We can say that the Symbolic order in theLacanian sense is composed by Saussures linguistics, Levi-Straussanthropology and symbolic logic. The Symbolic order can be separatedneither from the Imaginary nor from the Real. Lacan defines the Real inseveral different ways: as mere leftovers, because it is what belongsneither to the Imaginary nor to the Symbolic order; as that which alwaysreturns to the same place; as the impossible, that is to say, as that which isimpossible to represent the logically impossible. However, none ofthese definitions exhausts or cancels the others. All of them are valid. Aswe have said, Imaginary order, Symbolic order and Real are inseparableand during the last period of his teaching Lacan used topology to translatethe trilogy Imaginary, Symbolic and Real into a Borromean knot.

As we see, it is a matter of analytic distinction and factual inseparability. Thesame applies to the basic categories of my approach empty signifier,hegemony, discourse, populism and so on. It is, in that sense, a useless

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exercise to try to determine if they belong to the Symbolic or to the Imaginaryregisters, because they are located at the exact point of interaction betweenboth. And if I have insisted about this moment of actual interaction, it isbecause of the particular way in which the political logic operates (more aboutthis in a moment).

Let us consider the category of heterogeneity which, as Biglieri andPerello have pointed out, is central to my approach. What exactly does it meanto be heterogeneous? As I have asserted, a plurality whose component elementsdo not belong to the same space of representation. This not belonging,however, is of a very peculiar kind. It cannot be a not belonging whoseelements would just be external to each other; it is one in which the elements,in spite of being not representable within an objective continuum, would stillinteract with each other. What, in that case, would be a representation which isbeyond the limits of an objective representation antagonistic relation?

To answer this question it is essential to bring to the fore the notion ofantagonism. The central thesis that I have presented throughout my work isthat social antagonisms are not objective relations but relations through whichthe limits of all objectivity are shown. In what way, however, is such showingstill a relation? The answer is to be given in two steps. The first is to clarify thepreconditions for grasping the specificity of that kind of relation, by showingwhat the requirements would be for a conceptual transition to full objectiverepresentability. In a purely antagonistic relation (which in the actual worldwould be difficult to find in such uncontaminated purity) the discourses of thetwo antagonistic forces would be strictly incommensurable. This means, first,that one cannot logically move from one to the other of the antagonistic polesin terms of the discourse of either of them; and, second, that the moment ofclash between them becomes strictly irrepresentable as an objective instance.What, in that case, would be required to reintroduce a dimension of objectiverepresentability? Clearly, that there is a third agent Absolute Spirit, orwhatever that detects an objective meaning a cunning of reason whichescapes the consciousness of the antagonistic agents. If that third agent isbrought into the picture, it is clear that full objectivity is restored; but, withimplacable logic, the antagonistic dimension of the clash, by the same stroke,evaporates. So the alternative is clear: Either antagonisms are subsumed undera logic of history which reduces them to be the epiphenomenal expression ofsomething incommensurable with them; or there is no such underlying logic,in which case we only have the discourses of contingent antagonistic agentsand, as a result, the moment of the clash becomes strictly irrepresentable.

But our answer is still incomplete, because the question remains: if theantagonistic relation is not an objective one, what kind of relation are wetalking about? This brings us to the second step of our argument. The keyconsideration is that, while in an objective relation the full identity of the twoopposed forces is entirely asserted and absorbed (as in the clash between twostones, cut also in the case of a dialectical deduction) in an antagonistic relation

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each force interrupts the identity of the other. The presence of the otherprevents me from fully being what I am. While in an objective developmentthere is an exact overlapping between the ontic and the ontological, here theontic presence of the other is the source of an ontological dimension theother becomes the representation of the impossibility of fully being what I am that such ontic presence cannot master or reduce. This is the point, asBiglieri and Perello have clearly perceived, where my approach to antagonismsand the Lacanian Real find clear homologies. The Lacanian Real disrupts theSymbolic, interrupting its mastery. This is the reason why in my analysis I haveprivileged the relation between the Symbolic and the Real. Not, as RandallBush thinks, because I am ignoring the Imaginary register, but because, as mytheme was the interruption of social objectivity by the irrepresentabilitybrought about by antagonism, I had to give pride of place to the interactionsbetween the Real and the Symbolic. Lacans priorities were different, becausehe was not primarily interested in the question of conceptualising socialantagonisms. But several of his theoretical concepts object a, extimity, plusde jouir are susceptible, as Biglieri and Perello have indicated, to at least acomparative study with those proceeding from my intellectual arsenal.

I have just mentioned extimacy, and it is to the question of its theoreticalstatus, also raised by our two authors, to which I want now to turn. As theyargue, while in my previous work I had emphasised antagonism, in my morerecent work I have pointed to dislocation as a more primary ontologicalterrain, and it would be that terrain the one or, in our terminology, theconstitutive character of which would make full sense of the notion ofheterogeneity. Antagonism would already involve a certain discursiveinscription. I would agree with that way of presenting the argument, but Iwould like to say something more about the kind of inscription that we aretalking about. Biglieri and Perello assert that:

(t)he heterogeneous is not placed within or without, inside or outside, butat the point of extimacy. Through this neologism, extimacy, Lacanunderstands the most intimate dimension to be found at the externaldimension, and announces its presence as a foreign body, a parasite, whichrecognizes a constitutional rupture of intimacy.

This already shows that the kind of inscription through which an antagonisticrelation is constituted cannot be fully symbolic, that is, a new difference in theSaussurean sense of the term. To inscribe, in our new sense, means endowing acertain content with a dimension exceeding its ontic determination. To put it inmore precise terms: the ontic content expresses or represents somethingdifferent from itself. The ontic content is there, but just to show the chasmbetween the ontic and the ontological, the Abgrund or, in our terminology, theconstitutive character of dislocation. This, in Lacanian terms, would be the pointof extimacy. In not identical, but at least comparable terms, it would be what, in

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Derridean language would be a hinge, such as hymen or pharmakon. To give onemore example, taken from medieval mystical theology: in expressions such assuper-Goodness or super-Wisdom to refer to the essence of God, we areapparently following the via affirmative, for we are attributing a positive contentto the divinity, but in fact we are embarking on the via negative for, as the prefixsuper- refers to something which is beyond language and understanding, thoseexpressions are ways of saying that God is beyond qualifications such as wisdomor goodness. That is what makes the figural ontologically primary. In terms ofour political analysis, it is what gives its centrality to the notion of emptysignifier. Absence of meaning can only be shown through distortions ofmeaning. So although it is true that ultimate dislocation does not necessarilymanifest itself through an antagonistic inscription, it is also true that, however, itsmanifestation will always require some kind of inscription.

On populism and spectacle

In her excellent piece, Meghan Sutherland makes a quite meaningfulcomparison between my theoretical approach and the one contained in thewell-known book by Guy Debord The Society of Spectacle. There are threeaspects of Sutherlands argument that I would particularly want to underline.

1. There is, in the first place, Sutherlands perceptive assertion that, in spiteof terminological differences which, at some points seem to suggestdiametrical oppositions, there is a whole terrain of analogies to bedetected. Thus she asserts that

Debords cryptic statements about the ontological status of spectacle like his proposal that spectacle is not a decorative element but rather,the very heart of societys real unreality also begin to evoke Laclauscharacterization of populist rhetorical excess more than the metaphy-sical denunciation of representation that serves as their chronological, ifnot philosophical, premise.

This point is crucial. For me, there is only representation because an originalpresentation in the Platonic sense of the term never takes place. To assertthe constitutive ontological role of a discursive mediation involves that neithera referent, nor a phenomenon, nor a sign (as the isomorphic attachment of asignifier to a signified) can reach the status of a full presence (i.e. they cannotgive access to the things themselves, as Husserl wanted). It remains,however, that, differently from Debord, I have a less negative view of thiscentrality of representation in contemporary societies, as the language gamesthat the theory of hegemony make possible show.

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2. Sutherlands penetrating analysis of the black face minstrelsy show is anexcellent illustration of the main theoretico-political categories underlyingmy analysis. I will not repeat here the whole of Sutherlands argument,which can be found in her essay. Let me just enumerate some of its keypoints that I find particularly valuable: her several remarks concerning theaesthetic of the spectacle; the latters connection with the notion of emptysignifier (see especially her assertion that one has to recognise spectacle asa signifier of the empty signifier); the links between the doublepresentation of an articulated spectacle, on the one hand, and thespectacle of the reciprocally articulated audience for this spectacle, on theother; the way in which race and ethnicity become both mixed andconstructed through the whole game of the performance; the way in whichLotts analysis is brought into the picture and so on. One can say thatSutherlands intervention reflects one theoretical language into severalothers and, in this way, performs a highly useful comparatist exercise.

3. Finally, I want to point out what is perhaps the main theoretical assertionof the essay. Sutherland says:

the ontological production of the people that takes place in the realmof popular entertainment cannot constitute a populist political move-ment on its own. But if it can be said to either compete with,contribute to, or foreclose the productions of social objectivity on whichsuch movements depend for their own representational success, it isonly because it competes for visibility on the same ontological ground thatmore properly political rhetorical productions of the people do. Towhich she adds: the aesthetic relations of popular spectacle reproducethis rhetoric on their own terms all the time, and in the context of newmedia culture, we must necessarily imagine the ontological productionof populist rhetoric that Laclau draws out in detail as a figuration of thesocial that must either harmonize with a million other such figurations,or else, successfully compete with them on yet another register ofhegemonic status.

Although Sutherland does not mention the fact, this conclusion is profoundlyGramscian, as it presents the hegemonic operation not as taking place in anarrowly defined public sphere, but as permeating all strata and levels ofsociety. That is the reason of the centrality attributed by Gramsci to nationalculture, and its expansion of the notion of organic intellectual to types ofsocial interventions which would have not been considered as intellectual inthe conventional sense of the term. In my work I have attempted to showhow there is, in Gramsci, a cutting across the spheres of the State and civilsociety (or of politics and culture). While for Hegel the sphere ofuniversality is the State against the particularism of civil society; and

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while in Marx civil society had to generate out of itself a universal classdestined to bring about the end of politics; for Gramsci there is a doublemovement consisting in the politicisation of civil society and a socialisation ofpolitics. This double movement is at the root of any hegemonic operation.The latter always feeds itself out of the molecular changes taking place in anational culture. As Sutherland shows, public entertainment is one of theareas in which those changes operate. The main theoretical consequence ofthis approach is that the categories of the theory of hegemony should notremain circumscribed to the narrow field of politics in the conventionalsense but should be expanded through their connection to a whole area ofcultural and social phenomena which traditionally had been thought asescaping their scope.

Misrepresentations

Finally, I have to refer to two essays that do not present punctual critiques tomy argument but launch themselves into a head-on confrontation with thewhole of my theoretical approach. I refer, of course, to the essays by MichaelKaplan and Elizabeth Povinelli. I find it a bit difficult to deal with theirarguments because it is always complicated to reply to discourses so wild anderratic that even the basic meaning of ones own assertions is lost. But,anyway, as noblesse oblige, I will try to say something about them.

Let us start with Kaplan, who, although utterly misrepresenting myargument, has the comparative advantage over Povinelli of at least raisingissues which are theoretically meaningful. A first cluster of problems, in hisview, concerns the status of the economy. Now here he mixes issues thatshould have been kept analytically separated. Firstly, he illegitimatelyassimilates Jean-Joseph Gouxs transformation of the basic categories ofeconomic analysis into a general ontological logic, to Derridas approach. Letus just quote the way he refers to Derridas use of the notion of economy:economy of perception and experience in Husserl, an economy of violence inLevinas, an economy of the sign in Saussure, an economy of structure in Levi-Strauss, and economy of psychic drives in Freud, and so on. Now, thisassimilation of the use of the economic in Goux and in Derrida is utterlyillegitimate. While in Gouxs work, the economic retains a literal meaningthat he wants to see operating in quite different areas from those in whichthose categories were originally thought as pertinent, the economic is, inDerridas work, used in a merely metaphoric way. By economy Derridasimply means what, in my work, I have called logic that is, a rarefied spacein which some objects are representable while other are excluded. So theassimilation of Goux to Derrida is entirely spurious.

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From there, however, Kaplan moves to my controversy with Zizekconcerning the economic, and there he grounds his argument, in a secondand equally wild assimilation: he, first, thinks that what Derrida and Gouxhad in mind as the economic which by no means, as we said, is thesame is exactly what we are discussing with Zizek as far as the economicspace is concerned. This is absurd. The discussion I had with Zizek isabout an entirely different matter than that referred to by either Derrida orGoux: namely, the question of whether the economy can be considered as aself-generated sphere providing, out of itself, everything needed to explainwhat is going on in society, or if, alternatively, the economy is a terrainsubmitted to conditions of possibility which cannot be derived from theinternal analysis of commodity. If the second alternative is accepted, weobviously have to move to a conception of social totality not derived froman elementary form commodity or its equivalents and to conceive theontological priority of a complex articulated whole (such as hegemonicformation).

This leads us to a final point concerning economic matters. Kaplan hasobjections to my notion of globalised capitalism. What exactly do Iunderstand by that as far as it is considered a terrain of contemporarysocial struggles? In the 1930s Marxist theoreticians Trotsky, prominently spoke about combined and uneven development, meaning by that a newsocial reality in which the automatism of straightforward economicantagonisms was decreasing and in which the political mediation whatwe could call the intimate imbrication between economic processes andtheir conditions of existence became more intimate. Globalisationrepresents a new and fundamental turn in this logic of articulation, andone which is showing the way to a new emancipatory social ontology oneof which Kaplan, of course, is entirely unaware. Let us come back for amoment to this question of social totality. In traditional Marxism, socialtotality was structured around a self-defining core, which was the mode ofproduction. The more the analysis and the historical experience advanced, the less it was possible to maintain the logic of the mode ofproduction as a self-defined core or mechanism, and the more theincorporation of the conditions of possibility of that core to its internalworkings was required, so that in the end, the ontological logicsestablishing the links between the components of the social whole had tobe radically reconsidered. Our critic is not prepared to engage in the leastin this process of reconsideration and, not surprisingly, he rejects Lacaniantheory as a whole. But I do not think that he shows a proper understandingof the Derridean approach either.

**********

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Peirce or Saussure?

I do not have much to say about the piece by Elizabeth Povinelli because, inspite of being formally presented as a critique of my approach, it amounts tolittle more than a formulation of her own alternative views about the issues atstake, without any attempt at explaining why those issues can not be addressedwithin my own theorisation. As is well known, contemporary semiotics hasfollowed two different routes in its process of self-constitution: the Saussureanroute, grounded in a dichotomic linguistic model, and a trichotomic one, basedin the Peircean tradition. I chose the first, while Povinelli opts for the second.It is, of course, her right to do so, but what is less legitimate is that shecriticises me for not following the Peircean model, without explaining whattheoretical, social or cultural dimensions are blocked in a Saussurean or post-Saussurean analysis. So Povinelli does not engage in a critique but in just adogmatic assertion of her alternative view.

This absence of a proper critique exempts me from the obligation ofdefending my choice. I will only comment that, in my view, in the trichotomicPeircean model, the three components are not in pari materia, and so that thedegree of formalisation which is achievable is less than in the Saussureanperspective. There is always the implicit danger of a sociologistic descriptivismwhich in the essay by Povinelli becomes quite explicit and exacerbated.

There are, in the first place, those points in which Povinelli simplymisrepresents my position. I cannot fully enumerate those points, but I willgive a few examples. She asks herself: What conceptual advantage do we gainby considering the people to be a rhetorical figure rather than a pre-rhetorical social referent? Let us pass this naive appeal to a pre-discursive(which Povinelli calls pre-rhetorical social referent). The important point isthat, in my approach, that question does not make any sense, because forme the discursive (conceived in a way very close to Wittgensteins languagegames i.e. not merely as speech and writing, but as any signifying structure)is co-terminus with the social. And, in that case, the really relevant question iswhether signification can constitute itself without the operation of figuralmechanisms. My answer to this question is negative. As Povinelli does notdiscuss my grounds for that answer quite explicitly formulated at severalpoints of my work I consider myself dispensed from the obligation ofrepeating again my whole argument.

A typical example of Povinellis argumentative strategy can be found in thefollowing passage:

But, not only do I disagree with how Laclau theoretically anchors hismodel of rhetoric, I want to suggest a kind of social analysis that might bepossible if we were to make a decisive break with the logic of theSaussurean sign (not merely structuralism, but the language of the signifierand the signified) and its continuing hold on the humanistic social sciences.

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One would have expected that a programmatic statement like this, whichproclaims a decisive break with a theoretical paradigm, would explain what iswrong with such a paradigm. But of such explanation we are still waiting theAdvent.

Let me give a third example. Povinelli asserts:

The purpose of this section is to tease out how, in spite of his intentionsand the potential power of his approach, Laclau collapses politicalprocesses into a specific linguistic theory that continually deflects analysisaway from the body politic and its institutional sedimentation.

I have made a specific reference to sedimentation in my work, but with ameaning which is largely opposite to that in which Povinelli uses the term. Iused it in the context of the Husserlian distinction between sedimentationand reactivation. What I asserted is that sedimentation refers to theinstitutionalised forms of the social (broadly speaking, to what Ranciere callspolice) and are the point at which the countable and the uncountableexclude each other. The moment of the political is, on the contrary, themoment of reactivation, the moment in which the institutional order isthreatened and new social forces emerge. The specific form that this threatassumes in my analysis is the construction of equivalential chains whichdislocate institutional sedimentation. To speak about sedimentation as internalto the political, as Povinelli seems to do she even explicitly asserts that theaim and end of a political theory is social sediment sounds as little morethan a sanction of the status quo.

Finally, I want to quickly refer to the two doorframes a mens bathroomin the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the frontdoor of an indigenous familys house in the Northern territory of Australia that Povinelli analyses in the last part of her essay. The Australian doorframe,first. Povinelli sees the situation through the Peircean category of interpretantand concludes that the different actors participating in that situationinterpreted it in different ways. She says:

The problem was with competing truths both within any social structureand their social world and between social subjects and their socialworlds . . . All of these material grounds of interpreting social life and ofinterpreting various grounds of interpretation . . . occur within socialinstitutions that amplify, impede, or deflect one possible reading or theother.

I do not disagree with this analysis as far as it goes. My difficulty is that I do notsee why the situation that Povinelli describes would be unapproachable withinmy theoretical perspective. Finally, I have systematically insisted that thediscursive construction of social antagonisms presupposes a plurality of

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readings of a certain situation of conflict between social actors, and that thesereadings are not reducible to an aprioristic infrastructural social logic.Consequently, in this war of interpretations, the discourses of what inPeirces terminology would be interpretations would necessarily confronteach other. If I think that my analytical instrumental is more powerful than thatof Povinelli, it is because through categories such as equivalential anddifferential logics, empty signifiers or hegemony, I can better describe themicropolitics through which interpretants constitute, articulate and changetheir identities. Povinellis analysis is, instead, based on categories moremacro-sociological, and, as a result, has to rely more on an institutionalapproach based on categories such as sedimentation, used in a sense that I findrather problematic.

As for the first doorframe, the one of the mens toilet, it is little more thana joke, so my only commentary is that Povinellis assertion that our protagonistwill initially seem to be standing in isolation, experiencing the centring effectsof the empty signifier is a nonsense, because in that situation there is no emptysignifier whatsoever. To have an empty signifier it is necessary to have anequivalential chain between a plurality of demands, while in Povinellisexample all the impulses of that woman conflict with each other. So we canforget about that womans conflict between the demands of her bladder andthe social conveniences.

Conclusion

I would like to add a few reflections as a conclusion. A recurrent trend in myargument has been to invert the relations of priority that social and ideologicallevels have traditionally had in the consideration of the social whole. Populismhad been usually conceived as a side-effect or epiphenomenon of social forceswhich were considered as constituted by logics quite different from theirideological effects. That is the reason why populism was supposed to show itsinner nature when led back to particular social forces which expressedthemselves through populistic discourses. The result was a persistent andmisguided question: Which social forces express themselves through populistforms, and why? Our approach has been exactly the opposite: we see inpopulist discourses i.e. in equivalential logics not the externalmanifestation of an ultimate social core different from that expression, butthe very articulatory practice which constitutes that core. This means thatpopulism is not something different in its inner, ultimate nature, fromits external, surface expression: it is rather that expression what constitutesits inner core.

This inversion of social priorities requires, in turn, two other ontologicalinversions. First is to see the discursive, articulatory moment as constitutive (in

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the transcendental sense of the term). The logics of equivalence and difference in the sense we have defined them are the ultimate ontological bedrock ofobjectivity. This duality of logics expresses itself depending on which ofthem prevails in the pre-dominion of either a populist or an institutionaliststructuration of society.

But here comes the second inversion the two logics do not merge intoone another in a harmonious way, but subverting the rules of their mutualoperations. The result is an essential unevenness of the social: as no socialelement finds in itself the source of its own, monadic identity, and as the socialwhole can not be achieved either as a self-contained, closed totality, whateverclosure can be reached will do so through the over investment of one elementwhich endows all the others with a certain, precarious fixation. These over-invested elements are what we call hegemonic or empty signifiers (see myessay Why do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics? in Emancipation(s), London,Verso, 1996). The conclusion of this analysis is that displacements of sense that is, tropological movements are constitutive of discursivity. Therhetorical moment is, in that sense, constitutive of discourse and, as a result, ofobjectivity tout court.

Finally this leads us to re-think the relations of priority traditionallyascribed to the social and the political. While the nineteenth century ascribedan absolute priority to the social while the political was conceived as asubsystem or superstructure we tend today to see the political as theinstituting moment of the social, while the latter is conceived as thesedimented form of the former. This distinction sedimentation andreactivation comes, of course, from Husserl; but while he linked institutionto the founding act of a transcendental subject, for us that act involves radicalcontingency, and as a result, a purely political intervention.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank you the various authors for their replies to my work and for thevery thoughtful comments they have provided. The above is a very provisionaland tentative answer.

Notes on contributor

Ernesto Laclau was, for many years, Director of the Program in Ideologyand Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex. He has taught at many otheruniversities as well, and currently is University Professor of the Humanitiesand Rhetorical Studies at Northwestern University. His publications includePolitics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (NLB, 1977), Hegemony and Socialist

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Strategy (with Chantal Mouffe, Verso, 1985), New Reflections on the Revolution ofour Time (Verso, 1990), The Making of Political Identities (editor, Verso, 1994).Emancipation(s) (Verso, 1996), Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (with JudithButler and Slavoj Zizek, Verso, 2000), On Populist Reason (Verso, 2005) andElusive Universality (Routledge, forthcoming). His work has been translated intoa number of European languages.

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