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Jos Luis Villacaas Berlanga, Jorge Ledo
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DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2010.0017
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The Liberal Roots of PopulismA Critique of Laclau
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a
Universidad Complutense, Madrid
T r a n s l a t e d b y J o r g e L e d o
What is Liberalism?, wondered Foucault at the beginning of The
Birth of Biopolitics. Th e question was urgent. Beginning with Society Must Be
Defended and Security, Territory, Population, his references to this issue in his
seminars were constant. My argument will take the same point of departure,
with the aim of revealing the liberal conditions of populism and, more con-
cretely, what Laclau calls populist reason.
Although we are not in a position to extract a precise reply from Fou-
caults texts, we can at least find a good point of departure for the definition
of liberalism, and this will be my first step. Foucault was destined to continue
his investigation into the current neoliberalism. And that was precisely what
he did in Th e Birth of Biopolitics. I will talk about this in the second part
of my lecture, along with the link between Foucault and Lacan. Th irdly, I
will develop Laclaus progression from the notion of hegemony to populist
reason. Fourthly, I will identify Laclaus liberal position in the very core of his
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m152
populist reason. Finally, I will identify the weak points in Laclaus arguments,
his faith in rhetoric, and his obsession with the concept of hegemony.
1 . F o u c a u l t o n L i b e r a l i s m
In Foucault, liberalism introduces the framework of political rationality
to the state mechanisms based on disciplineright and biopoliticswhere
biopolitics is understood as a technology of populations (2008a). Th is func-
tion is very complex since it determines the crucial tasks of the system,
challenging the aforementioned apparatuses and defining their own limits.
Th is question, when brought to an adequate level of theoretical radicalness,
can identify the existing mediation between liberty and governmental ap-
paratuses. Between a system concerned about respect for legal subjects and
individual free enterprise (2008, 317), on the one hand, and the disciplin-
ary and biopolitical apparatuses that consider population en masse, on the
other, adequate mediations should be established. We can see that Foucault
addresses the classic problem of the tensions between the massive and
individualistic dimensions of democratic society. In liberalism, the former
constitute the framework of political rationality and the latter concentrate
on the action of government as biopower.
In Foucaults analysis, as in the rest of conventional analyses, such ten-
sions cannot be completely resolved. For that reason, critique appears as
the only appropriate practice for liberalism, that is to say, the continuous
reflection, the aspiration to rationalize the government. Liberalism requires
the governmentwith all its apparatusesnot to be an end in and of it-
self. Government cannot become absolute. Th is rationalization humiliates
the old raison dtat and reduces the central role of police.1 For liberalism,
Foucault recalls, governments always govern too much. Th e liberal attitude
imposes even the need to legitimize anything that could be an aim of the
government. For liberalism, government will no longer have its own aims
because it is no longer considered a natural institution. Now Foucault must
respond to the question, Why must one govern? (2008a, 319).
In the summary of his 197879 seminar, Foucault spoke about a liberal
technology of government, employing Franklins phrase, a technology of
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 153
frugal government (2008a, 322), as a general expedient to establish the me-
diation we are talking about. In his opinionforged in the perception of the
diff erences between the physiocrats and the liberalsthe said technology re-
quired social regulation.2 He described it in classic fashion, as participation
of the governed in drawing up the law in a parliamentary system (2008a, 321).
Th is was the technique that seemed most rational and compatible with the
governmental economy, or with a rationalization of the government. Here, a
historical synthesis that was neither necessary nor typical took place. Liber-
alism has not always been linked to democratic parliamentarianism, just as
democracy, always endowed with technical and disciplinary biopolitics, has
not always been linked to liberalism. In fact, liberalism can drastically limit
its criticism, reducing it to its economic aspects. Th e state can even eliminate
criticism, as occurs in authoritarian states.
Th e most interesting part of Foucaults descriptionfor it cannot be said
he is off ering a theoryin his identification of natural structures as the basis
for the development of liberalism. Logically, he identified those structures
surrounding the idea of civil society. Even without referring to Adam Smiths
canonical analysesas he would in Th e Birth of Biopoliticsit was also clear
for Foucault that the points of departure for liberalism are those scenarios
of natural freedom. Th ese marked moments unconnected with the state, but
it is precisely to these moments that the state should accredit its rationality.
Th us, Foucault considers the market to be a tool by which to measure gov-
ernmental excesses, and shows that an optimal development in economy is
incompatible with the maximization of the government.3 In a certain sense,
natural freedom found one of its expressions in the market, but was not ex-
hausted in it. It can be said that a completely liberal civil society is a place of
natural freedom. Civil society maintains a complex relation with the state: it
is outside and inside at the same time, and it is itself the basis for mediation.4
It embodies liberty, but it is in need of rational government.
Foucault made explicit the decisive and paradoxical argument for this
issue. Since it seems clear that natural freedom should be as such (free)
because of its capacity to self-govern, Foucault cleverly observed that this
order does not arise from a political society founded on a contractual bond
(2008a, 321). On the contrary, there was already a need for government in
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m154
the natural order. Adam Smith would have focused his argument by saying
that the results of natural freedom have to be regular to guarantee their own
perpetuation. Long before Marx, the Scottish philosopher found a contra-
diction in the economic system. Th us, the need of the government had to
do with the regulation of natural liberty itself and aspired to maintain it in
that naturalness. For instance, this was the purpose of antimonopoly laws,
one of the inevitable and unacceptable results of liberty. Th us, government
guarantees natural liberty: its ethical-legal regulation of the market tries
to guarantee the equality of opportunities, free competition, the liberty of
pricesthat is, the natural free market. Only by the ethical-legal regulation
of the government, then, does natural freedom regulate itself. Th e adequate
relation between the state and civil society is configured inside and out
through synthesis of natural and political regulation, of legal positivism and
iusnaturalism. Foucault is familiar with this phenomenon and he describes
it adequately, although without quoting Smiths category of natural freedom.5
Th e notion of regulation is here the decisive one. As such, it reproduces
the paradox of an intervention that opens to the possibility for things to run
under the guidance of their nature. Th ere will be regulation for that which
can maintain its natural attributes through regulation. Th at is the reason
liberal government neither consists in discipliningits aims are not to forbid
or to order (2000b, 47)nor in imagining the negative. Rather, it is linked
to security apparatuses, although Foucault did not clarify this point.6 He
defended these positions in his previous seminarSecurity, Territory, Popu-
lationwhere we find this powerful passage: Th e game of liberalismnot
interfering, allowing free movement, letting things follow their course; lais-
ser faire, passer et allerbasically and fundamentally means acting so that
reality develops, goes its way, and follows its own course according to the
laws, principles, and mechanisms of reality itself (2008b, 48). Some ethical-
political laws are proper and adequate to natural reality. Th is is the paradox
and it can only be reduced because, in both society and government, we
speak about laws of freedom. Regulation is justified only if it off ers securities
to preserve freedom naturally as it is. Th e security mechanisms only make
sense through the link they establish with freedom, as its framework and
playground.7
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 155
From all this we can draw a conclusion: freedom is integrated into the
core of the technologies of power. Liberal government is the aftermath of this
mutation. In this new technique, government must think about the nature
of things, and the nature of things in this context is nothing other than the
liberty of human beings. Liberal government technique takes into account
what [people] want to do, what are they interested in doing, what they think
about doing (Foucault 2008b, 49). Th e being-together of human beings has
a specific naturalness of the relations of the men among themselves, that
has to do with living together, working together, and producing together.
Only at the end of Security, Territory, Population does Foucault arrive upon
the naturalness of society and tackle the notion of regulation (343). Finally, in
Th e Birth of Biopolitics, liberalism finds its basis in a naturalism, and it is only
at this point that he is dealing with human nature (2008a, 61). Th ese natural
relations, if they are to be respected by the government, must translate into
scientific knowledge.8 Liberal government and the knowledge of the nature
of things, as they refer to the coexistence of human beings, are thus inex-
tricable. So we have a scientific knowledge indispensable to government,
concludes Foucault, that also characterizes liberal government as a specific
correlation between power and knowledge now identified as government
and science. Government must mold its decisions from science. Th is would
be its procedure of rationalization.
2 . N e o - L i b e r a l i s m a n d t h e
l i n k w i t h L a c a n
Th e topic laid out by Foucault in these seminars aimed at presenting the
problem of the relations between truth and subject in the core of liberalism
understood as an art of government.9 Th e seminars that followed should
have dealt with the problem, but what we read in Th e Hermeneutics of the
Subject is disappointing: all we find is that liberalism is not the right attitude
with which to approach the teckn tou biou (art of living) of the ancients
(2005, 48587). With regard to contemporary liberalism, his best approach is
found in Th e Birth of Biopolitics, and even it is not very substantial. Th ere, he
clarified that liberalism was an art of governing according to the rationality
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m156
of economic agents and, more generally, according to the rationality of the
governed themselves (2008a, 313). From the point of view of liberalism, he
clearly suggested that the issue of the relations between truth and subject
was to be found in the market. Here the revelation of what is right in gov-
ernmental sense, as lieu de vridiction (place of verification), took place.10
Th erefore, it is the market where we find the key for the verification or for
the falsification of the governmental practice. Th e practice based on this
assumption has a nature similar to that of scientific praxis.
To accomplish that mission, some type of relation among truth, reason,
and freedom of the governed had to be established. Th e expression and rev-
elation of that relation was permeated by the market. Foucault proposed
utility as a center for the synthesis of these elements. From the point of view
of the population that finds its rhetoric in the idea of utility, Foucault talked
about a rpublique phnomnale des intrts (the phenomenal republic of
interests, 2008a, 46). Th is governmental needed freedom, as only through
it does the subject find its truth, define its interest, and calculate its utility
in the market. Th erefore, to consume in the market one must first consume
freedom, and to do this, freedom has to be produced and organized (2008a,
65), the phenomena that tend to destroy it must be regulated, and its circula-
tion within a space must be assured. We have, away from any kind of uni-
lateralism, the market looking after the state and the state looking after the
market (Zanini 2006, 136). Th e institution of a panopticon is thus unfeasible.
Th e set of problems raised by the human natural order as a fundamental
premise of neoliberalism is enormous. It is odd that the seminar on Th e Birth
of Biopolitics does not tackle them. Th e course was devoted to demonstrating
that the crisis of liberalism, and the collapse of its confidence in the rational-
ity of the governed, led to Nazism and the fascist state,11 to which neoliberal-
ism off ered an alternative solution. Foucaults annotations on neoliberalism
are quite scattered but important. Th e key question lays in the fact that, if the
market is the place for truth, then it should not be understood as a place for
trading, but rather as a place for competition. Th e action of the government
is related to this question, and it should recreate it continuously. Th is is es-
sentially the transformation of neoliberalism (2008a, 14546). Th erefore, the
government does not intervene in the market, but rather in society itself and
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 157
in the social environment. Th ere, liberty should be produced and human na-
ture should be approached. And it must be done not only by assuring market
homogeneity and its equivalence, but its heterogeneity, diff erentiation, and
multiplicity as well. Th e human being considered by neoliberalism is not the
one that makes demands of the marketas if he had a core of fixed needs
but the one that produces diff erence by means of his own enterprise. Th e
homo conomicus is not lhomme de lchange, but lhomme de lenterprise.
Th is is the true power of society, and it is for this reason that society needs
to assume, to consume, and to renew freedom. Th is homo conomicus is
the interface of government and the free individual (253). Th e neoliberal
government technique procures diff erentiation, inequality, and competi-
tion. Th erefore, the sovereign loses his function: he cannot control the set of
phenomena that, from freedom, promotes enterprise (173).12
I am not interested in the need for continuous arbitration on liberty and
competition; Foucault himself wrote many pages on this question. More im-
portant is the transformation of labor into human capital, of the worker into
an enterprise in and of herself. I cannot unfold this argument either. Th ere is
no doubt about the prominence of these problems and their conformation
of the rhetoric of the present (Foucault 2008a, 22225). Otherwise, I can only
point out Foucaults flirtation with the Th eory of Systems, that is, with the
intervention of the government in the environment or scenario of the
economic system as a social system of freedom. Th e decisive aspect is that
the intervention in this environment should produce a continuous diff er-
entiation, a systematic modification (270), and a perpetual displacement of
equivalences, since the notion of competition between enterprises can only
find its place there. Foucault did not investigate what upholds this continu-
ous displacement of freedom, nor this productivity of diff erences that renders
the market more plural and incapable of establishing equivalences, more
uneven and therefore more competitive. Th us, inequality is the condition for
competition. Th e play resides in the necessity of providing heterogeneity that
can be continuously reduced to equivalencethe game of multiculturalism.
Foucault suggested that the crucial test for all of this is to be found in
economic growth, and that this is the only test that can deal with the rhetoric
that transforms the worker into a businessman who capitalizes himself.13 But
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m158
this final process has to do with the definition of a market completely mobi-
lized by competition, and this definition is related to the ability to regenerate
economic freedom continuously and to introduce new heterogeneities. Fou-
cault does not go beyond these questions. Adelino Zanini, who has studied
Th e Birth of Biopolitics in depth, said that with this problematic question we
meet with an abrupt end. Moreover, he said that this seminar sembra a tratti
sfuggire dalle mani del suo autore (seems to occasionally slip out from the
hands of his author) (2006, 147, 145).14 If the premise was that neoliberalism
was a naturalism, an assumption about human nature that knows its own
truth in the market via its conversion into enterprise, Foucault did not want
to develop this idea. As we know, he took refuge in the aesthetic elitism of
the artist in and of himself, so alien to democratic society.
I believe this is just one of two problems, and that both of them under-
score the extent of Foucaults voluntary disassociation from theory. At one
point in Th e Hermeneutics of the Subject, somebody in the audience raises a
hand and asks: Can we not see some genuinely Lacanian concepts coming
up, as operators [oprateurs] in what you are saying? (2005, 187). Foucault
demands some additional explanation, clearly puzzled by the question, to
affirm eventually that he is working out the relationships between the sub-
ject and truth. Th e questioner confirms that this is exactly what he is talking
about. Here we can see Foucault doubtful, on the defensive. He concludes by
maintaining that, on the topic of the subject and truth, I see only Heidegger
and Lacan. Personally, myself, you must have heard this, I have tried to reflect
all this from the side of Heidegger and starting from Heidegger. Th ere you
are. However, certainly you cannot avoid Lacan when you pose these kinds
of questions (189).
It was certainly a bad moment. Th e daring questioner had suggested the
possibility that Foucault employed theoretical concepts. Foucault, smirking,
confirmed that what he did was Heideggerian philology, and if he had some-
thing to say about the truth of the subject, it would have to be drawn from
a new beginning. As Heidegger went to the physis of the pre-Socratics, so
Foucault went to the Alcibiades, an apocryphal Platonic dialogue. Of course,
he recognized that the topic was linked to Lacan, but he did not take the next
step. In the end, he got rid of the situation with a pet phrase we all know: Any
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 159
other questions? (2005, 189). Actually, nobody got anything beyond what
he had said at the beginning of the seminar: Lacans analyses are powerful
insofar they renew the question of the relationships between the subject
and the truth (30). In that case, it would have been necessary to address the
question of what happened to the market as a place of verification. A similar
situation to that found in Th e Birth of Biopolitics reappeared now as a refusal
to confront Lacan.
3 . L a c l a u s M e l a n c h o l i c P o s i t i o n
I should recognize that the work of Laclau has not been discussed in Spain
as much as it deserves, even if it was translated some time ago. Nobody will
deny that his central work is Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, presented as
an introduction to radical democratic politics. In this book, the dominant
presence is not Lacan, nor Foucault, but rather Gramsci. Actually, Lacan ap-
pears in an endnotemuch more focused on Miller, by the wayin a passage
that stresses the importance of the nodal point (point de capiton),15 and in the
Spanish introduction of 1987, where he quotes Lacan, along with Heidegger
and Derrida, precisely to underscore the connection between language and
the social world (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 21). Th ere, Laclau employs terms
similar to those of Foucault at the moment of being questioned, and mani-
fests his interest about the problem of the subject. Assuming criticism on
every kind of essentialism about the subject, either Man or Class, Laclau
mediates in the crisis of Marxism, eff ecting a review inspired by Gramsci
that affirmed the importance of the concept of hegemony. Th is concept was
separated from every necessary law of history; it affirmed the contingency
and the autonomy of the political, was centered on a naked historicity, and
encouraged play in the field of concrete factuality. In short, hegemony could
be articulated in the historical present by means of an adequate administra-
tion of social antagonisms, of force fields. Th e political subject abandoned its
essentiality to the occupation of the space only by objects that can be con-
structed. In this seminal book, Laclau explains that this can only be carried
out via a radicalization of democracy, destined to articulate the struggles
against subordination, arbitrary domination, and illegitimate power (xv).
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m160
In 1985, Laclau and Mouff e found themselves continuing in two tradi-
tions: the Enlightenment and the modern democratic revolution. They
mainly spoke to the countries on the periphery of capitalism, where the
popular and collective identities can arise from the fringes of class. Neverthe-
less, this fight must recognize the end of the Jacobin and Leninist imaginary,
the political-conceptual world that arises from the Sattelzeit of Reinhart
Koselleck: the universal subjects, the history as singular, the civil society like
homogeneous structure (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 2), or the autonomous
logic of the productive forces. Th e concept of hegemony was not presented
as the political complement of a deep objective logicthe equivalent of
what ideology was to bourgeoisieor a political supplement derived from
the forms of concurrence through productive objectivity which is imposed
against all-too-human resistances.
On the contrary, hegemony implied the existence of a logic proper to
the social. For Laclau this logic harbored a center of contingency that must
be deciphered. Hegemony did not aim to produce the sense of truth in a
society, but rather to carry out or decide it. If this notion was labeled as
Marxist, it was simply because Marxism constitutes our own past (Laclau
and Mouff e 2001, 4). Th us, it was a post-Marxist confession. Actually, Gramsci
and Foucault were in agreement in their defense of contingency, reversibility,
the war of positions, and their interest in relations of power mediated only
by the logic of subjectivity.
But this was not merely a matter of post-Marxism. Laclaus analysis was
rooted in a certain melancholic confession that can be found in a central
chapter of Hegemony titled Beyond the Positivity of the Social: Antagonisms
and Hegemony. I will show that the paradoxes in this passage reveal Laclaus
avoidance of the ramifications of Foucaults eff orts to define neoliberalism. In
this sense, his analysis failed to disengage from a point of departure that is in-
ternal to the liberal regime model. I am talking about a liberal presupposition
in Laclau insofar as he does not support a theory of neoliberal government,
but shares assumptions with the situation that institutes liberal government.
Th us, Laclau talks about global capitalism as if it were still being governed in
the first steps of liberal government, without identifying neoliberalism as a
specific form of government. To consider neoliberalism seriously in 1987 was
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 161
impossible, mainly because Foucaults papers had not yet been published. As
we will see, this fact resulted in a limited use of Foucault and consequently a
still more limited use of Lacan. In any case, Laclau worked with the tools he
had prior to Th e Birth of Biopolitics, and this explains why his analysis gives
the impression of being old fashioned.
Th e decisive fact in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was that, in the ad-
vanced capitalist countries, there was an important scissors eff ect: the more
democracy they had, the less unity around a popular pole (2001, 133). Global
capitalism, Laclau asserted in the final comments to On Populist Reason, rep-
resents a qualitatively new moment in the history of capitalism, because it
becomes more difficult to determine the force against which we are fighting
(2005, 9899). Th e complex categorial displacement led by Laclau unveils its
final mechanism: in democratic society the friend/enemy distinction, the
dualism, the frontier eff ects, cease thus to be grounded upon an evident
and given separation, in a referential framework acquired once and for all
(Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 134). Th us the present comes to be characterized by
a democratic subject position, and Laclau was melancholiac about a popular
subject position. Th e latter is constituted from the division of the political
arena in a friend/enemy antagonism. Th e former does not divide society in
dualisms. In essence, both possibilities come from the social structure itself,
and both are based in the liberal diff erentiation between civil society and
political society. Perhaps the more important theoretical affirmation is the
following onean assertion, by the way, related to Foucault: if society is
never transparent to itself because it is unable to constitute itself as an objec-
tive field, neither is antagonism entirely transparent, as it does not manage
totally to dissolve the objectivity of the social (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 129).
In reality, Foucault knew that this was the case as he knew it was the key to
contemporary government: neoliberalism permits neither a sovereign nor a
dualistic antagonism, but rather circulations of competition that emanate
from the civil society and that demand plural arbitration. Laclau accepts the
liberal premise, and his aspiration is to transform competition, the antago-
nism dislocated and in continual proliferation, into a visible and dualistic
antagonism.
His theory is complex and, to my knowledge, it is constitutedin
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m162
Hegemony and Socialist Strategyby the following elements: Th e point of
departure in every kind of politics is to be found in civil society.16 Th is civil
society is unavoidably permeated by proliferating diff erences. Any of these
diff erences can create antagonisms if their rights are denied.17 Nevertheless,
the specificity of neoliberal government consists in the impossibility of le-
gitimately denying any free demand. Laclau asserts, as Foucault could have
asserted, that the outside of civil society and its diff erences consists in a
relation with political power as intelligible and instituted forms of a soci-
ety. Th ese forms rationalize their own power, as we have seen in Foucault,
inasmuch as they recognize that these diff erences are expressed as liberties
that must be guaranteed.
But Laclau has diff erent scenarios in mind. When he cites Disraeli and
his program to make one city from the two cities, he is expressing a regula-
tory idea from which the classical liberal government arises. Its logic con-
sists in avoiding diff erence as much as possible, in producing homogeneity
and equivalences, whose truth is expressed in the national market. Laclau
describes this far-reaching processa liberal government strengthener, in
Foucaultian termsas the disruption of the liberal pole and the absorp-
tion of particular free demands into positivities recognized as rational and
manageable.18 Th e melancholic moment consists in accepting as given both
that a popular pole exists and that civil society is the social origin. Th e ra-
tionalization of liberal government would imply identification and isolation
of demands, attending to them in their specificity, dismantling them from a
conception of the worldwhat Laclau calls a system of equivalencesand
a neutralizing of the possibility of the dualistic and native antagonism. Th is
use of civil society as origin and, at the same time, assertion of the mel-
ancholic position of people can only generate a singular movement: the
way for civil society to become people again is to see how the premise of
liberalism fails in its pretension of homogeneity and produces its opposite,
the people.
Actually, Laclau does not show a clear path for liberal civil society to
become people again. At least one thing is clear: this movement implies
considering the notion of civil society as ductile. Laclaus rejection of so-
ciology is, in this case, a good alibi. Perhaps this is the reason why he feels
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 163
comfortable talking about societies of limited modernitylike Hispanic
societieswhere the liberal form of civil society has not taken root. In any
case, the civil society that allows liberal government to exist is that which ar-
ticulates the clearly defined system of diff erences that Weber called spheres
of social action and Luhman social systems. Th e actions of freedom are not
free from the beginning, but ordered and diff erentiated at the core of those
systems. Th ey are scientific, economic, religious, erotic, ethical, aesthetic,
moral demands, among many others. Laclau admits, the more unstable the
social relations, the less successful will be any definite system of diff erences
and the more the points of antagonism will proliferate (Laclau and Mouff e
2001, 131). Th at is true. But perhaps Laclau does not measure the efficacy
that the diff erentiation between the spheres of social action produces for a
liberal government; this efficacy impedes exactly what he demands: a logic
of equivalences that allows a unification of all the demands in a common
denominator and, thus, founds a duality. Laclau also does not measure the
diff erences introduced by the neoliberal phase in the old liberal government,
and subsequently, we find a diff erent way to understand these spheres of
social actionnot as zones of demand, but as zones of enterprise.
At its core, Laclaus melancholy finds its origin in the works of Jacques
Rancire, emerging from his studies on nineteen-century France. Undoubt-
edly, it is in this period that Laclaus categories find their historical parallel.
If Laclau had used Foucault and his notion of liberal government, he would
perhaps have been freed of his tendency toward melancholy. If he had used
Foucaults ideas on neoliberalism, then he would have had to renounce this
facet of this work. In any case, his ideas concerning the reversibility of the his-
torical process are perhaps too sweeping. Laclaus perennial problem is how
a civil society can bring about a new people as a political subject capable of
making the friend/enemy distinction and put a new logic of hegemony into
circulation. Just like the nineteenth century, but in the twenty-first.
Here, the argument of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was rather rudi-
mentary and circular. What hindered the absorption of free demands was
their inclusion outside the systems of social diff erentiation. To achieve this,
and to avoid a diff erentiating political framework, demands had to be pre-
sented not alone, but rather as a part of a logic of equivalences where they
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m164
would be included and addressed. Th us the variety of demands that is,
positivity would not be presented as various and individual, but rather
as organically integrated, as a complete and alternative set that cannot be
analyzed or rationalized by the framework of power. In Hegemony and Social-
ist Strategy, Laclau states that this is the only way to create an antagonistic
situation, but at the same time, circularly, he defends the notion that only
negativity in the moment of addressing the demandto transform the
unaddressed demand from a partial entity to a symptom of a more radical
lackcan create that equivalence in the basis of antagonism and the friend/
enemy diff erence.19
Th e only way to break this circle would be to maintain that antagonism
can be already found in society. Th is was evident for Disraeli, and it is the
point of departure for liberal government as well. Laclau stated clearly in
2001 what he meant in 1987: we must suppose that antagonism is already
present in the society because oppressive forces have created it.20 Th at is
to say, current society functions like a threshold that opens to the age that
gives birth to liberal government. When we employ Foucaults analytical
materials, we cannot sustain this x-ray of the relation between the social
and the political. As Laclau states, that which constitutes the antagonism
is a set of negated diff erences considered as equivalents, not the diff erences
themselves. Th e oppressive forces that he presupposes are no longer the
forms adopted by the liberal technique of government, nor by the neoliberal
techniques. Lets accept that the liberal government strategy consists of at-
tending to the demand in a state of diff erence; that is to say, as a secondary
struggle. If we are right, by no means is it possible to discern the oppressive
forces. Affirming them constitutes a circle in Laclau: there exists a certain
required delimited interiority.21 If this is the case, then the diff erences be-
tween the unaddressed demands will be negated, a symptomatic equivalence
between those negations will arise, along with a concentrated antagonism
and the friend/enemy distinction. Th e fractured social space will produce a
coincidence with the political space, a hegemony will arise, and with it the
new political subject, a people.
This is just what liberal government avoids by mediating demands
through the institution of diff erent spheres of actionwhich concretizes the
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 165
nature of things and human social actionand thus off ers them, analyzed,
to a rational government. In contrast to this, if we suppose the existence of
a delimited interiority, we already assume that there exists a broken civil
society, inefficient systems of diff erentiation, and a possible friend/enemy
diff erentiation.22 If this diff erence arises, it is because it is placed in the base.
It is a circle. If our point of departure is an ontology of the social that encloses
reppresive forces, or an excluding interiority, then antagonism is served,
and politics, considered as an hegemony that works to achieve its position
by destroying the enemy, is always possible. But this social ontology is not
accredited in a proper analysis of liberal or neoliberal societies. Th e obstacles
to freedom are connatural with civil society, and they make the conflict
unavoidable. But this is neither an antagonism nor a friend/enemy distinc-
tion (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 181). On the contrary, neoliberalism centers
on juridical regulation according to a market based on the enterpreneurial
production of equivalences that necessarily integrate demandsbecause
they are anticipatedand thus the negative equivalence of their refusal
is diluted. Neoliberalism, as we have seen, is devoted to the regulation of
the market, understood as free competition of enterprises and diff erences,
of heterogeneities supported by the proliferation of the sense of freedom,
which produces as supply and yet is received as demand. Laclaus prevision,
a concentration of the conflict in the antagonism, does not seem to happen.
Following Laclaus presuppositions, his trajectory toward a populist logic
can be easily understood. His argument fundamentally consists in affirming
that the more global capitalism resists the presence of that concentrated
antagonism, the more functional populist reason becomes (2005, 231), be-
cause it takes the nature of things, human nature, and the true structure
of liberty into account. In advanced capitalism, the production of dualistic
eff ects, border eff ects, and the friend/enemy distinction constitutes the main
political problem. It was thus in Hegemony and Social Strategy. What in the
past seemed to be a natural processpolitical dualizationnow must be
governed and produced in the face of neoliberal regulation. Populist reason,
in opposition to Foucault, would be the form of government that would
regulate the intended nature of the res politica, the production of the friend/
enemy dichotomy. Th is implies that the very identities which will have to
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m166
confront one another antagonistically (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 134) must
be constituted.
Undoubtedly, this suggests the true problem, which Foucault did not
wish to undertake: the hegemonic link transforms the identity of hegemonic
subjects (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, xii) by its influence on the psyches of the
political agents. Th e hegemonic link implies a transformation of the notion of
liberty, a hermeneutic of the subject that abandons that other hermeneutic
that off ers its evidence to neoliberal government, that demands a new truth.
However, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy these constitutive processesof
both the collective and individual subjectsdid not become visible. Perhaps
this explains why in the prologue of the 2001 edition, Laclau reminds us that
the visibility of the acts of originary institutionin their specific contin-
gencyis, in this respect, the requirement of any hegemonic formation (xii).
To make visible the originary institution of the subjectivity of the historical
actors was the political agenda. In Hegemony everything was subordinated
to the identification of the enemy, who operated as an excluding represen-
tative that rejected demands and established equivalences among them.
Th e enemy negatively propelled the formation of the people. Th e priority
of negativity was the premise in his analysis. But if global capitalism and
neoliberal government had to be taken seriously, then such a thing could not
be assumed. Populist reason would have to tackle things ab integro.
4 . A L i b e r a l P r e m i s e f o r P o p u l i s t R e a s o n
In Hegemony and Social Strategy, Laclau and Mouff e appealed to Foucault
and Lacan, but in a faulty way. Nevertheless, Lacans contribution as re-
viewed by iek was decisive for On Populist Reason. In spite of this, in this
book, Laclau could still not avoid the logic of equivalence of demands, a sort
of market of unaddressed demands, a political countermarket that could
call into question the market of liberal government. In principle, the argu-
ment was similar. As Laclau himself recognized in his polemic with iek, his
entire analysis started from the concept of demand.23 In Laclaus words: Th e
smallest unit from which we will start corresponds to the category of social
demand (2005, 73). Th e liberal basis of his approach is obvious. For Laclau
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 167
the political subject is above all a liberal subject and, to a certain extent, is
seen as a consumer of certain goods. When Laclau has to justify why social
actions are demands, he withdraws into liberalist certainties about human
nature: the subject is always the subject of lack (2006, 655). Similarly to
Lacan, this lack always encourages the need for a new desire, because it is
based on the disproportion between the fullness of the community and the
particularism of a place of enunciation: in Lacans words, on the dispropor-
tion between the enunciated desire and the unconscious as social language
and as the desire of the other.
Th us, Laclau, in what I consider an intelligent gesture, shows the an-
thropological base of the liberal regime through Lacan, and explains why
demands are continuously renewed, why they never end, why the human
being is permeated by a political economy of desire that cannot be closed. In
eff ect, as with the modern Hobbesian subject, that which provides meaning
to desire is its infinite dimension, tending toward a totality that can never
be reached. Th is infinite desire unveils something impossible to obtain, an
irreparable loss, an emptiness that cannot be filled by any desire. In this way,
the libido appears as the key category explaining the nature of the social
bond (Laclau 2005, 53). Demand, destined only partially to fill the gap be-
tween lack and desire, receives its meaning from the whole society, from the
unconscious, from the language, and naturally, from the others, and here
finds its link with human beings. What we have here is a version of the nature
of things that is the point of departure for liberalism, now illuminated by
the Freudian and Lacanian analysis. Th e thesis is that individual psychol-
ogy is simultaneously social psychology,24 something that Weber already
understood to be the key to liberalismmarginal utility as key to the market.
Demands proceed from identifications as ways of expressing aff ective bonds
to others, whose desire is now our desire. Th ey configure spaces of emotional
mimesis that we use to fill the distances between the unconscious and soci-
ety as a whole. Th erefore, demands cannot be either completely addressed or
completely filled. Laclau was not blocked where Foucault was.
But Laclau does not seem to assume the approach of Lacanwho shows
the anthropological roots of capitalismin an adequate form. From my
point of view, this is the situation: Demand has as its premise the linguistic
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m168
activation of desire from the unconscious, the identification of a desire
through the desire of others (supply). Given its finite character, it presents
the impossibility of exhausting the unconscious or the whole social, a con-
quest of the infinite object that would be able to fill the constitutive lack.
Demand cannot build a stable psychical order; only repetition, variation,
and discursiveness can achieve this. Libertys claim pertains to this. Every-
thing comes from the interpretation of the desire of others and from the
linguistic strategies to express it. All that has been said about the market and
business has to do with the interpretation of the desire of others. When we
interpret the desire of otherswhen we activate our aff ectionwe present
products that fill the demands of others, that are at the same time founded
in their interpretation of the desire of others. Th e interpretation of the de-
sire from within the social core is the originary. Th e aff ective supply proper
to entrepreneurial labor precedes the demand. Here would be the point of
departure for understanding the game of neoliberalism: implying a trans-
formation of labor at the moment it discovers its own aff ective character
and understanding economic success as an enterprise that produces objects
capable of fulfilling drives. Th at is the reason why work has transformed the
notion of merchandise: it has passed from being the inert object conceived
by Marx to being the material support of supply that addresses drives. Here,
power merely regulates the environment to make heterogeneities appear,
besides all the hermeneutical statements of the subject, and maintains the
dynamism of the symbolic loaded with aff ective elements acting as new
supply to satisfy drives capable of generating demand, which expands by
way of the market.
Liberalism serves as Laclaus point of departure because it allows him to
speak in terms of demand, the nature of things, and emotional-social bonds,
but he does not want to accept the existing play between civil society and
neoliberal power. He does not want to assume neoliberalism just to ignore
what he is confronting. He accepts liberalism because otherwise his analysis
would not find its ground, but he does not think the specificity and novelty
of neoliberalism because it is easier to construct a populist logic upon the
old liberal government at its first stages, with its logic of demands, than upon
neoliberalism and its logic of supply. For him, demand does not respond to
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 169
the market-business supply, but rather it responds to power. In reality, the
beginning of demand is a request. Power, understood as liberal government,
could articulate, identify, and distribute this request. Neoliberal government
would claim that it does not receive demands, but instead that it is regulat-
ing competition to maintain social dynamism, enterprise, the capitalization
of society, and market supply. Laclau must assume this is not the case. Order,
he says, cannot fully absorb the demand, it cannot constitute itself as a co-
herent totality (2005, ix).
But we already know all too well that there is no demand for what does
not previously appear as supply. Our desire is the desire of the other. Naturally,
we do not tackle a problem on the order of power, but rather on all order, on
all subjectivity. Neoliberal power knows this and refers to productivity as a
totality in fieri, where demand unfolds following supply. Th is fact guarantees
the continuity of liberty, the repetition and feeding of the homo oeconomicus
as a premise of neoliberal government. For Laclau, the constitutive unad-
dressed demands of the liberal power produce something diff erent. Requests
become claims. For this to happen, the instance to what exigences are ad-
dressed must be identified. One has to discursively construct the enemy.
Our doubts about the circular reasoning of Hegemony and Social Strategy
reappear again. Knowing the enemy would be the same as identifying the
space of the people, the space of the friend. Th ey are equivalent.
If there is some relation between On Populist Reason and Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy, this would be the will to show the process by which
people emerges without the necessity of a given enemy. Laclau is not as-
suming that it is constituted by repressive forces. He is focused on its con-
struction from the popular friends perspective. Th is step is decisive, since
it would allow an explanation of the emergence of antagonism, even when
power wants to be liberal. In reality, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy already
allowed the ordering of the existing diff erences in the demands in a logic
of equivalences by means of certain discursive forms (Laclau and Mouff e
2001, 122). Upon assuming the social and linguistic dimension of the subject,
Laclau did not see any possibility besides that of constructing a hegemony
with the construction of a discursive space. In Hegemony and Socialist Strat-
egy, Foucaults Archeology of Knowledge (1982) was useful in supporting this
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m170
argument. If discourse is regular in the dissemination of enunciations, such
regularity comes neither from a conceptual constancy nor from an identity
in the object, but rather from configurative rules that supply that dissemina-
tion with its unifying principle. Th ese rules were not defined. For Foucault
these were practical, but for Laclau these implied a discursive dissemina-
tion that embodied a configuration of equivalence among the diff erential
discursive positions understood as demands (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 106).
Certainly, the process of discursive dissemination that implied something
similar to the Deleuzian logic of diff erence and repetition, a typical causa
sui logic that would not allow the emergence of a totality as equivalence.
Th is logicas that of neoliberal capitalismis interested in productivity, not
in equivalence. Laclaus concern, on the contrary, is to understand how an
exteriority to dissemination can be established to calculate the equivalence
between various enunciations and demands. His problem is classic: how can
a form be produced through dissemination? Th e question is unavoidable;
Carl Schmitt understood this when he established that the friend/enemy
distinction resides in the production of gestalt. Actually, Laclaus argument
is only a review of the technical facet of the construction of the enemy un-
dertaken by Schmitt.
Laclau spoke of certain logics interested not in dissemination, but rather
in equality, form, the eff ect of totality, limits, and identity (Laclau and Mouff e
2001, 131). In fact, his most interesting approach to this can be found in the
fourth chapter of Populist Reason, titled Th e People and the Discursive
Production of Emptiness. Th ere he identified these logics, interested in the
production of equivalences, as rhetorical devices (2005, 12). He positioned
an ontological constitution of the social that permits understanding the
place of the political in the rhetorical play that creates demands. Th ere he
began with a structuralist thesistotality is the condition of signification
as such (69)which is as powerful his next thesistotality is an object
which is both impossible and necessary (70). It is like the constitutive lack:
the concept, the desire, the demand, cannot cross the abyss that separates
it from the unconscious as such, even though it can only be desire insofar
it is connected with the subconscious. As we have seen, liberty funds the
human constitution as long as it lives on the negativeness produced in that
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 171
relation. Liberty implies, therefore, a perseverance within desire, because
only there does the possibility remain of connecting with the totality of the
unconscious, even if it is a continuous lack. Th e logic of freedom remains in
this disequilibrium. Nevertheless, Laclau has a diff erent point of view, which
he embraces without considering to what extent neoliberalism responds bet-
ter to the necessities of his own Lacanian premises.
Laclaus procedure can be summarized as follows: In considering the lack
that is constitutive of human naturea constitutive emptinessit becomes
necessary to explore the possibilities this lack off ers politics. Undoubtedly,
liberalism and neoliberalism are anchored to this breach, working to keep
discursive equivalence fluid by means of a continuous production of supply
that punctually interprets desire, although consciously renouncing totality.
Against this circulation of significations dedicated to feeding the consumer-
subject imaginary, Laclau asks himself what would happen if the same con-
stitutive lack that created the emptiness would become an object of desire itself.
Th is is what he means when he asserts that the category of totality cannot
be eradicated (2005, 71). It is, of course, understood in this way by the neolib-
eral regime, which as a substitute of totality invigorates the interpretations
of desire in the truth of the market; but Laclau demands the transformation
of the lost totality into an object of desire in and of itself. If we introduce
this category, the demands addressed would become worthless. In light of
the recovery of the constitutive lack, all demand would become equivalent,
but with a value approximating nothing. In turn, every unaddressed demand
would become a scheme, a verification of what we truly desire, the one thing,
the Real. Th e regime of the truth of the subject would not change. Laclau
could therefore say, what we have, ultimately, is a failed totality, the place
of an irretrievable fullness (70).
Now, when this failed totality becomes a foreground of desire, an alterna-
tive possibility opens up for Laclau. He asserts that it is possible that a partic-
ular realitya demandassumes the representation of that incommensurable
totality (2005, 70). We are now faced with the Hobbesian problem of how an
invisible reality can render itself visible.25 For Hobbes, this happens by assign-
ing sovereignty, will, and the action of totality to a visible reality. Actually, this
is related to the way in whichthinking at the level of individualsthe unity
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m172
of the people becomes visible. It can be achieved through the investiture
of a monarch. Th e procedure transforms one partial being into a sovereign,
and she is converted in turn into a unity that makes visible what would
otherwise be invisible: the people. For Laclau, this investiture is similar in
its structure to the hegemonic formation: something particular represents
totality, something visible makes present the invisible, and something par-
tial signifies the universal. Th e emptiness behind many particular desires
is fulfilled in one. Laclau has affirmed the necessity of a radical investiture
of the significant in order for this to occur (71). Undoubtedly, it is an action
analogous to a contract, a decision, an extreme nominalist action, and its
only truth is constitutive lack. Because the constitutive lack does not have a
proper name, it can only achieve this by investiture, by that figurative name.
Th is rhetorical operation is a catachresis: there is no proper name, it is but
feigned to serve the totality. Hobbes would say that the sovereign is a Per-
sona, an agent. But it cannot be otherwise. Th e Leviathan is a catachresis. It
is the same in Laclau: the political construction of the people is, for that
reason, essentially catachrestical (72).
We have here evidently reintroduced the link between totality, plenitude,
the sovereign representative, and the promise of total aff ectivityeverything
that was represented by the Weberian notion of charisma, except that now
it is illuminated in its formative mechanism, as a radical investiture in the
Freudian sense. If this instance becomes operative, then it is always possible
to reject addressable demands and to establish an equivalent among the
unaddressedall on condition that the constitutive lack (compared to which
the rest is insignificant) becomes present by way of a symbolic representa-
tive (Laclau 2005, 100). It contains the impossible totality that negatively
unifies all the unaddressed demands and rejects all those that are addressed,
because they impede adherence to the totality anticipated by the symbol
and promised in it. He who does not join this symbolic totality is excluded
within the common space it creates (106). He who has configured a subli-
mated value refuses the equivalent values in the market, finds any attention
to demands to be insignificant, and wishes only to possess the visible reality
that has been invested with the capacity for representing the only real thing:
totality. Th is would be the name of the people.
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 173
Th is radical investiture cannot be conceptually represented. It escapes
every concept and takes us back to mystical belonging, examined by Laclau
in another book.26 Th erein, aff ection, disillusioned by market equivalences
supplies and demandsis now satisfied. He who supplies simple objects and
desires, when what is desired is the Real and the Total thing, is an enemy.
Th ose who are responsible for this cannot be a legitimate part of the com-
munity; the chasm between them is irretrievable (Laclau 2005, 86). Th us
we have the Schmitt eff ect: one isolated from every truth, from every
notion of endangered life-form, from every existential dimension, created
only from the rhetorical construction that foments sublimation. It has been
possible thus for rhetoric to build a social division (87). Schmitt was never a
nominalist: the enemy is an other with real existence. Th e very most rhetoric
can do is intensify strangeness, but it never creates it. Laclau seems to say
that, in the age of neoliberalism, rhetoric creates ex nihilo. In the meantime,
neoliberalism continues to operate because its eccentric, heterogeneous,
supply-producing rhetoric involved in the work of the culture industry is
more accurate than the technified rhetoric that aspires to produce the crys-
tallization of hegemony.
What has been forged here is explicitly related to the process of conden-
sation in dreams (Laclau 2005, 97). Of course, the same dreamed character
can maintain an aff ective link with the function of leadership (97). Th is is
coherent since, in Kantian terms, if the thing in itself has no concept, then it
can have any name. Laclaus extreme nominalism, sustained both in Kripke
and in ieks Th e Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), eliminates any question
about the truth of the radical investiture. Th e originary baptism imposes
a name, defines an identity supported only by the signifier.27 It makes no
diff erence whether there are rejected demands elevated to equivalent conse-
quences of a constitutive lack, or the imposition of the sense of a constitutive
lack that rejects any of the demands addressed by the system as equivalents.
We obtain the same from a melancholic fundamentalism as we do from an
articulated system of demands. Th e radical investiture is nominalist, and it
can be called Allah, Yahweh, originary ethnicity, or people. Th e central issue
does not reside in demands that may be resolved, but rather in those who
resolve them.
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m174
5 . T h e F a i t h i n R h e t o r i c
Laclau deals with the theoretical verisimilitude of the investiture by which
a signifier identifies constitutive lackthe radical lossby employing a
Lacanian argument, the object a theory proposed by Joan Copjec. As we
know, Lacan understands the Real as something that cannot be symbolized.
It thus constitutes a dimension heterogenous to the order of the symbolic.
Th is order is that which can circulate by means of metaphors, identities, and
displacements. Th e subject that embarks on these symbolical displacements
is like the shipwrecked mariner on a raft who hopes to make it, mysteri-
ously, to the coast of the Real, but who knows that the Real resides in neither
a coast nor the sea, but rather in a star. Th is relation with the absence of
the Real is the permanent Gnostic trace in Western culture. Contemporary
political scienceas wrote Eric Vgelinappeals to this absence. As such,
the anxiety of the Real continues to encourage displacement, metonymies,
analogies, metaphors. Th e subject, so as not to completely withdraw aff ec-
tion for that activity, but to maintain and to repeat it, has to connect indi-
rectly the symbolic to the Real. With these connectionsdisplacements and
symbolical operationsthe shipwrecked mariner has to construct the raft
as she goesquoting Blumenbergs metaphornot with logs, but with the
foam of the sea, so it will sink when accelerating toward the fulfillment of
the death drive. Th ose elements in the discursive work of the symbolwhich,
for a moment, produce juissance and permit connection with the realare
called object a by Lacan. Blumenberg could call them the work on the
myth. Laclau reproduces this theory and identifies object a with the radical
investiture of the hegemonic agenda.28 Th e partial objects transforms itself
into a totality (Laclau 2005). Th us we can quote the fundamental text of his
theoretical approach:
Th e aspiration to that fullness or wholeness . . . is transferred to partial ob-
jects which are the objects of the drives. In political terms, that is exactly
what I have called a hegemonic relation: a certain particularity which as-
sumes the role of an impossible universality. Because the partial character
of these objects does not result from a particular story but is inherent in the
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 175
very structure of signification, Lacans objet petit a is the key element in a
social ontology. (115)
We hold then that populist politics are based on the nature of things in
the deep anthropology and in the social ontology. Th e consequence can be
easily observed: by radical investiture both an individual and collective
omnes et singulatimjouissance will be achieved, a symbolical rhetoric will
be provided, inside of which would be an object a that could establish the
aff ect of a community and maintain the appearance of an enjoyment of the
originary possession. In this case, the rhetorically elaborated symbol would
be the embodiment of a mythical fullness (Laclau 2005, 115), and its eff ect
would be collective enjoyment. If we remember the name that Lacan uses for
that constitutive lack, the primordial mother, mythical plenitude would be
the socially joyful equivalence of the primordial mother. Here we could recall
Carlo Ginzburgs reflections on Dumezil (1994) and the myth of matriarchate
during Nazism, and Furio Jesis (1979) parallel reflections on the work of the
Nazi-technified myth to confirm the structural similitudes of the rhetorical
construction of the collective identity.
Th e strangest aspect in Laclaus statement can be found in the fact that
a category explicitly characterized for the explanation of the untransferable
enjoyment that permits us to livethe object a, Blumenbergs personal work
on the myth, Warburgs Pathosformelnwhich maintains us as subjects, in-
dividualizes us in our shared and transmitted cultural horizon, and that we
will never be able to produce ex nihilo (a category as such, I repeat), can
be built and fixed by means of a rhetorical structure, to the extent of being
capable of constituting a collective identity. Th e object a is what suddenly,
indomitably, unexpectedly, emerges beyond its particularity, the concrete
trace that, for an instant, allows us to escape from the shipwreck of the sym-
bol and anchor ourselves in the enjoyment of the real. Th e fact that symbols
maintain, produce, and reproduce performances of object a is something
that is not within the power of human beings; its emergence does not depend
on any kind of rhetorical procedure; it cant be produced or created. Laclau,
whose anthropology is very limited, believes on the contrary that building a
radical investiture can off er a symbol that works obediently as object a for
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m176
a collective, a symbol that produces an aff ection and enjoyment as though
the Real were submitted to that community that he calls people. At one
point he assures us that the Freudian concept of overdetermination points
in the same direction. Other times he calls it sublimation. All this suggests
that Laclau, even more than Foucault, pictures a governmental technique
that shares its premises with liberalism, as long as it starts from a loss, from
a lack, from aff ection, from the unsustainable solitude of human beings,
from demands. Th is technique can explain the basic problem of classical
liberalism, how the individuals form a people. To be constituted by rhetori-
cal procedures, to produce controlled eff ects, suggests a technification in
the production of the people. In conclusion, it is necessary to maintain
blind faith in technified rhetoric, which as Carlo Michelstaedter (1995) has
explained, nobody can sustain without sharing in the nihilistic premise that
makes it possible.
Laclau has identified this radical investiture, this productivity of the
symbol that satisfies drives, this capacity to represent an empty universal
in a particular, with a passage lact, and for this reason has located in its
origin the Aktus der Freiheit (2005, 228). He has forgotten that in Lacan this
is a genuine act, prepared as the basis for the relation between the human
being and the Real, and the key for the ordering of its death drive. When
these kinds of actsoriginally planned to constitute a space for individual
identityare projected toward a sociology of the masses and introduced
rhetorically, they produce, for Laclau, a political use and configure a collec-
tive identity. Undoubtedly, this is possible and cannot be denied. Propaganda
and coercion can achieve it in a nihilistic universe. But with this, unavoidably
hallucinatory elements are introduced into political life, and consequently,
it specializes in the ordering of the death drive as well. Laclau cannot evade
these consequences. Th e entire arsenal of the sacrificial logic is implemented
through it. When in the last pages of his book, Laclau talks about the rela-
tion with contemporary political thinking, he recognizesafter nodding
to Rancires influencethat in the face of Negri and Hardt the moment of
articulation should not be forgotten. Laclau has spoken of the relevance and
centrality of this moment (2005, 249). In it Laclau identifies a partisan me-
diation. Explicitly, he talks about the people, but he conceals the political
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 177
party or the future avant garde by which it is supposed to be surpassed.
Th en, distinctly, what Foucault already understood arises: the specific form
of aff ective, totalitarian, sublime, sacrificial governability was the partisan
government. Th is, with its rhetorical powerits power for investiture, its
power of over-determination, its power to articulate demandsis what is
revealed at the end of Laclaus book.
But Laclau, in his analysis, fails to recognize the verisimilitude of neo-
liberalism as a more coherent direction for his own Lacanian premises, as a
social organization that is governed by an anthropological base quite similar
to the one he wants to provide for the political construction of the people.
Th erefore, if we concede that the present work arises from a discursive and
symbolic elaboration where we place affections, desires, processes, and
images that can increase the probability of a circulation of objects aem-
ployedin conjunction with them for the resolution of drives; if we accept
this indissoluble synthesis of work and cultural industry, in which elements of
the work of the myth are embedded, proposing supplies increasingly diverse
and useful for the prediction of demands; then we must admit that there is a
closer institution of the truth of the subject in market-enterprise than in the
technification of a rhetoric directed to off er a disciplined and sublimated
object a, governable in its social performance. Th e psychic demands of plea-
sure can be more easily found at the core of the work and self-capitalitization
than in the formation of a hegemonic rhetoric. Th ere is already a market to
articulate these demands, one that relies on the supposition of liberty as the
only means for the provision of a suitable meaning to libidinal work.
By limiting liberalism to facilitate authenticication of his populist rea-
son, Laclau cannot see that neoliberalism is thereby made more coherent.
And that is why subscription to a market-enterprise system where symbols
circulate appears more credible than the subscription to a friend/enemy
dynamic, where but one symbol concentrates all libidinal elements. In a
way, the contradiction can only be resolved by way of something that Laclau
understands: he speaking to nonliberal societies, closer to the nineteenth-
century oligarchical constructs. In these, Leftist and Rightist populist
rhetoric can even constitute a regime of drives, of aff ections, of dualist
identifications. Th is technology of populist government should not be an
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m178
object of hopesomething that could provide a solution to oligarchical soci-
etiesin the face of a true alternative to the neoliberal forms of government.
[
n o t e s
translators note: Th is lecture was originally written in Spanish under the title La raz
liberal del populismo: Crtica a Laclau, and delivered in New Paths in Political Philosophy,
an International Conference celebrated in March 2008 at the University of Buff alo (NY). I have
tried to remain loyal to the text when possible, only adapting expressions and concepts widely
known to the informed reader. Since Professor Villacaas employed mainly Spanish and Italian
translations of primary sources, I have used their equivalent English, with the aim of providing
the non-Spanish reader the access to the original texts discussed in it. I want to thank Gabriel
Horowitz for his help with the final draft of this translation.
1. It constitutes . . . a tool for the criticism of reality: criticism of a previous governmental-
ity from which one is trying to get free; of a present governmentality that one is trying
to reform and rationalize by scaling it down; or of a governmentality to which one is
opposed and whose abuses one wants to limit (Foucault 2008a, 320).
2. Quoting Foucault: Whereas economic regulation takes place spontaneously, through
the formal properties of competition, the social regulation of conflicts, irregularities of
behavior, nuissance caused by some to others, and so forth, calls for a judicial inter-
ventionism which has to operate as arbitration within the framework of the rules of the
game (2008a, 175). On the concept of regulation and its relation to Kantian thought,
see Gangemi (2006, 36 et seq.). Regulation tries to limit governmental excesses. It must
intervene only when the situation is not calmed in the market, as well as in the right
or in the administration.
3. Th e markets role in the liberal critique has been that of a test, of a privileged site of
experiment in which one can pinpoint the eff ects of excessive governmentality and take
their measure (Foucault 2008a, 320).
4. Liberal thought does not start from the existence of the state, finding in government
the means for achieving that end that the state would be of itself; it starts instead from
society, which exists in a complex relation of exteriority and interiority vis--vis the
state (Foucault 2008a, 319).
5. Working on the fundamental themes of the liberal technology of government, ordolib-
eralism tried to define what a market economy could be, organized (but not planned or
directed) within an institutional and legal framework, which, on the one hand, would
off er the guarantees and limitations of the law, and, on the other, would ensure that the
freedom of economic processes did not produce any social distortion (Foucault 2008a,
32223).
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 179
6. Indeed, in Security, Territoty, Population, the security apparatus seems to be much more
connected to the problem of sovereignity, discipline, and biopolitics: sovereignty, dis-
cipline, and governmental management, which has population as its main target and
apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism (2008b, 107). Th is was undoubtedly
not yet the moment for the liberal governmental technique, but rather it was much
more grounded in the general conception of governmentality as the ensemble of
institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow
the exercise of . . . power that has the population as its target, political economy as its
major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instru-
ment (108). As it can be seen, here the apparatuses of security are the heirs of police,
not the ancestors of liberal government. Governmentality is not merely raison dtat,
but rather the means that has allowed the state to survive (116). Here, the notion of
freedom does not arise, since society is controlled by apparatuses of security. It cannot
be denied that in Security, Territory, Population, it was impossible to identify liberal
government, because there was nothing outside of the state, which is considered as a
totalizing institution (11819). For sure, the notion of civil society only appears at the
end of the seminar (350), a weak presence when compared to that of the society of
security (11, 378). In this seminar, biopolitics is merely the external technique to medi-
cal institutions, and it is of little interest because of the in fieri statute that characterizes
Foucaults works. But it seems evident that his security apparatus and his definition of
police are the necessary conditions for the natural freedom of economy as spontane-
ous regulation of the course of things (344), which makes police regulations useless
and even harmful. Th e economy and the market will be the first major breach in the
system of police (343), the second being the relative value of population (345), no more
an absolute value as in Botero and the raison dtat. In Security, Territory, Population,
economists will be first in questioning police, first in raising their critique to the State,
and first in reflecting upon their role. Th is will be the new sect to question the power of
jurists or politiques (348).
7. More precisely and particularly, freedom is nothing else but the correlative of the de-
ployment of apparatuses of security. An apparatus of security . . . cannot operate well
except on condition that it is given freedom (Foucault 2008b, 48).
8. What are we actually dealing with in these natural phenomena the conomistes were
talking about? We are dealing with processes that can be known by methods of the
same type as any scientific knowledge. Th e claim to scientific rationality . . . is assumed
however by the eighteenth century conomistes (Foucault 2008b, 350).
9. Th e topic has been studied by A. Zanini (2006). Th e bibliography in English is already
important; see G. Burchell (1991, 1996), in French see M. Bonnafous-Boucher (2004).
10. In this sense, inasmuch as it [the market] enables production, need, supply, demand,
value, and price, et cetera, to be together through exchange, the market constitutes a
site of veridiction. I mean a site of verification-falsification for governmental practice.
Consequently, the market determines that good government is no longer quite simply
one that is just. Th e market now means that to be good government, government has to
function according to truth. In this history and formation of a new art of government,
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m180
political economy does not therefore owe its privileged role to the fact that it will dictate
a good type of conduct to government. Political economy was important, even in its
theoretical formulation inasmuch as (and only inasmuch as, but this is clearly a big
deal) it pointed out to government where it had to go to find the principle of truth of
its own governmental practice (Foucault 2008a, 32).
11. Foucault defended the idea that the Nazi state was not a result of the bureaucratization
of the state, but the development of a form of governmentality without a state. Undoubt-
edly, it was for him the governmentality of a political party (2008a, 191), a governmental-
ity alien to any inner political regulation.
12. In a way, this was predicted by liberalism with Adam Smiths idea of the invisible hand.
Th e whole process remains completely unknown because of its opacity (Foucault 2008a,
281).
13. Economic growth and only economic growth should enable all individuals to achieve a
level of income that will allow them the individual insurance, access to private property,
and individual or familial capitalization with which to absorb risks (Foucault 2008a,
144).
14. Zanini adds that Foucault falls into mille semplificazioni dottrinali e molte omissioni
(a thousand doctrinal simplifications and a big number of omissions) (2006, 148).
15. Th e problems in constructing a hegemonic language are already connected in this book
to the dominion of discursiveness, to the cessation of the flow of diff erences, to the
constitution of a center: We will call the privileged discursive points of this partial
fixation, nodal points. Lacan has insisted on these partial fixations through his concept
of points de capiton, that is, of privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of a signifying
chain (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 112). With respect to the note on Jacques-Alain Miller,
see 88 n.1, where Laclau notes that hegemonic practices are suturing because they try
to fill in that original lack. We will see that this happens through object a in section 5,
below.
16. He clearly states it in the preface, hegemonic rearticulations start at the level of civic
society (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, xii).
17. Any position in a system of diff erences, insofar as it is negated, can become the locus
of an antagonism (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 131).
18. Th e method of this rupture: the diff erential absorption of demands, which segregated
them from their chains of equivalence in the popular chain and transformed them into
objective diff erences within the systemthat is, transformed them into positivities and
thus displaced the frontier of antagonism to the periphery of the social. Th is constitu-
tion of a pure space of diff erences would be a tendential line, which was later expanded
and affirmed with the development of the Welfare State. Th is is the moment of the
positivist illusion that the ensemble of the social can be absorbed in the intelligible and
ordered framework of a society (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 130).
19. As the social is penetrated by negativitythat is, by antagonismit does not attain
the status of transparency, of full presence, and the objectivity of its identities is perma-
nently subverted. From here onward, the impossible relation between objectivity and
negativity has become constitutive of the social (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 129).
J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 181
20. On the other hand, there are social antagonisms creating internal frontiers within
society. Vis--vis oppressive forces, for instance, a set of particularities establish rela-
tions of equivalence between themselves (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, xiii).
21. Th e delimitation of a certain interiority is required to construct a totality permitting
the division of this space into two camps (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 132).
22. Laclau discards too easily Lyotards position, who postulates the inevitability of dam-
agestortbetween social agents. First, Laclau does not consider it as strong, and
second, he assumes that it makes any political rearticulation impossible (Laclau and
Mouff e 2001, xiii). Th ere is no doubt of the fact that it complicates the emergence of the
friend/enemy diff erence. Ultimately, it allows a policy of dissent, as it is understood by
Jacques Rancire.
23. Th e first path is to split the unity of the group into smaller unities that we have called
demands (Laclau 2005, ix).
24. Compare Freud (1997).
25. For the explicit relation with Leviathan, see Laclau (2005, 88).
26. I am referring to Misticismo, retrica y politica (2002). Th is book is the intermediate step
between Hegemony and Populist Reason. Unfortunately we cannot deal with it now.
27. Kripke (1980) partially supported Kantian analytic judgements and responded to
Quines works. His book supposed the foundation of a Leibnitzianism that understood
identity as naming. Laclau affirms that the identity and the unity of the object are a
result of the proper process of naming. Th is theory, however, works only in relation to
the objects that can be presented to intuition, to which the nameon the outside
of every possible descriptionwill impose on them a rigid designator. On the con-
trary, naming something that cannot be presented to intuition cannot impose a rigid
designator. Th e key aspect of this rigid designator is that it is the same for all the
possible worlds. Th at is the reason why it establishes an identity. And this is precisely
the the decisive point: that which Laclau wants to name is an emptiness or a chasm, the
thing-in-itself or the Real, and for that same reason it cannot have the same designation
in all the possible worlds. In reality, that which designates the unity of the community
as something complete and perfect can have, and has, many names: Church, Umma,
nation, class, race, people, among them. Th at is precisely why these designations do not
establish an identity as Kripke understands it. Kripkes nominalism is absolute because
it does not recognize anything alien in the act of investing for the emergence of the
object. Laclaus nominalism, on the other hand, cannot be absolute, since its point of
departure is an ontological affirmation of the primacy of the absence.
28. Th e logic of the object petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar: they are
simply identical (Laclau 2005, 116).
r e f e r e n c e s
Bonnafous-Boucher, M. 2004. Un libralisme sans libert. Du terme liberalisme dans la pense
de Michel Foucault. Paris: LHartmattan.
Burchell, G. 1991. Peculiar Interest: Civil Society and Governing Th e System of Natural Liberty.
T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m182
In Th e Foucault Eff ect: Studies