Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

vis-à-vis the masses: they will begin their interventions in popular discourse by
looking for the rationality—however unfamiliar, obscure, or even anti-
democratic—that is embodied in popular identities.
Post-Marxism and Lacanian theory
There are many important continuities between Laclau and Mouffe’s approach to

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subject position formation and Žižek’s (1989) and Salecl’s (1994) Lacanian theory
of ideology. Žižek and Salecl would agree that individuals cannot immediately
apprehend the ways in which they are located within the symbolic order, and that
they live their structural positions through phantasmatic frameworks. From a
Lacanian perspective, every explicit political discourse is supported by a hidden
fantasy structure. A political discourse can become compelling not just because of
what it explicitly says, but also because of its concealed responses to our unspeakable
desires, or more precisely, because of its ability to teach us how to desire in the first
place. Our openness to the constitutive effects of phantasmatic frameworks is,
according to Lacanian psychoanalysis, inscribed in the human condition itself.
Because we continually encounter the traumatic experience of the interruption
by the real in the symbolic order, we are constantly driven to seek compensation
for that trauma in the phantasmatic realm, for only the latter offers us a fully
sutured conception of the social.
An apparently neutral technocratic discourse about governmental budgetary
restraint, for example, might be supported by racial and sexual fantasies that are
either concealed or referred to in heavily coded ways. A subject might speak as
if her support for the massive cuts in welfare programs were motivated purely by
her neo-conservative principles. Žižek and Salecl, however, would encourage
us to look behind her affirmation of individualistic values for the implicit
phantasmatic operation of this discourse. Perhaps she has accepted the racist
and groundless assumption that there is an “epidemic of teenage pregnancy”—
which, in the United States, is a code for the threat of uncontrolled fecundity of
poor black and Latina women—and believes that the welfare system rewards
“irresponsible promiscuity.” Perhaps her support for the restriction of welfare
benefits is motivated in this manner by her fears about the expansion of a
multicultural America in which the white “middle class” would have less power.
In short, a given subject position may become compelling not solely because of
the relative attractiveness of an explicitly affirmed set of beliefs, but also because
of the ways in which underlying fantasies about threats to the social order have
become attached—in a contingent manner—to those beliefs. When the linkages
between apparently “legitimate” beliefs and unspeakable fantasies are solidified,
an extremely influential political force is set into motion. Counter-discourses
have to attend to this underlying phantasmatic structure. The attack on the
rights of the poor in the United States, for example, cannot be countered through
the recitation of statistics and direct appeals to rationality alone. Democratic
activists have rightly taken on the whole issue of racist and sexist imagery in the
fight against the right-wing anti-welfare campaign.
While these aspects of Lacanian theory are highly suggestive, it should be noted
that there is a tension between Žižek’s conception of ideology and the Gramscian
approach to historicity. Scott argues that Lacanian theory “does not permit the
introduction of a notion of historical specificity and variability” (1988:39). LaCapra
similarly contends that although Žižek rightly criticizes reductive

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contextualization, “he runs the risk of an equally reductive hypostatization and
leveling of problems” (1994:206).
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Žižek does not resolve this crucial problem; he offers a purely formal model of
the relationship between trauma, fantasy and desire. For Žižek, any fantasy could
provide the crucial suturing effect at a given moment. From his perspective, the
predominance of one fantasy over others, the emergence of new fantasies and the
decline of older ones are purely random phenomena. When Žižek argues that a
dominant discourse relies on anti-Semitism and the figure of the corrupt Jew to
patch over its inconsistencies and gaps, he cannot explain why a particular type of
anti-Semitism is prevalent in a given moment, or why it is anti-Semitism and not
racism, sexism or homophobia that does this work.
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From a Gramscian perspective,
the practical effect of a political discourse will always depend to some extent on
its historical traces, the ways in which it resonates with already normalized
traditions. Further, patterns of normalization and problematization of popular
discourses are never random events but reflect the complex fields of power relations
that obtain in a given formation.
In his more recent theoretical writing, Laclau has moved closer to Žižek’s
Lacanian formulations (Laclau 1990a; 1994; 1996d; Laclau and Zac 1994). Laclau
contends that because the subject is a subject of lack, she is caught in an endless
and impossible search for completion and is thereby driven to perform an infinite
series of identifications. Although each identification seductively promises to
deliver completion, it necessarily fails to constitute a complete identity, for in the
process of becoming a human subject, one necessarily abandons the originary
condition of completion as one enters into language. Laclau contends that it is
the impossible return to unity and completion in a formal sense that the subject
seeks through her identification with a subject position.
Identification presupposes the constitutive split of all social identity,
between the content which provides the surface of inscription and the