Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

Nodal points and subject positions
While Laclau and Mouffe’s subversion of essentialism begins with their

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appropriation of Saussurean linguistics, they introduce several important departures
from this theoretical framework. First, Laclau and Mouffe recognize that although
subject positions are constituted through their differential relations with each
other, some of the differential relations between the subject positions have more
force than others. A single subject position may, in a particular context, become
privileged such that the meaning of other subject positions becomes increasingly
defined through their relations with that position. Borrowing the Lacanian
conception of the “point de capiton,” Laclau and Mouffe call this privileged position
a nodal point. The nodal point in a given formation increasingly acts as one of
several discursive “centers” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985:112). The nodal point tends
to exercise a totalizing effect on contiguous positions such that they partially lose
their floating character and “become parts of the structured network of meaning”
(Žižek 1989:87).
In essentialist theory, essence plays this totalizing role. Essentialist class theory,
for example, defines social movements in terms of their structural class position.
Nodal points differ from essences in many ways. No one can predict with exact
certainty which subject position will become primary in any particular historical
moment. If—to paraphrase Hall—racial subject positions offer “the modality in
which class is ‘lived’” in some contexts, in other contexts sexual subject positions
may be the modality in which race is experienced, class-oriented subject positions
may be the modality in which gender is experienced, gendered subject positions
may be the modality in which national identity is experienced, and so on. Gilroy
remarks, for example, that in contemporary Western nation-states, identifications
with subject positions that are structured in terms of “nationality, ethnicity,
authenticity and cultural integrity” are widely used as “a means to make political
sense of the world,” and that it is these identifications, rather than class-based
ones, that are now ubiquitous (1993:2). He further argues that racial discourse is
now so thoroughly defined in terms of gender and sexuality that “gender is the
modality in which race is lived” (1993:85). In any event, the primacy of a specific
nodal point is always temporary; the privileged status of one subject position could
always be interrupted by new articulations. While some unusual discursive
formations may tend to be organized around a single and relatively stable nodal
point—such as a nationalist discourse that has achieved an unusual degree of
predominance and stability—most will be organized around a complex
constellation of multiple and shifting nodal points.
Laclau and Mouffe also depart from Saussurean linguistics in their conception
of the construction of a formation’s boundaries. Saussure, for example, takes the
unity of a community of language users for granted. He simply assumes that a
language-using community is a harmonious and naturally bound collective entity.
He ignores power hierarchies within the community and he provides no account
for the construction of the community’s constitutive exclusions. Further, Saussure
tends to consider a language at a given moment in time as a complete and closed
system, and defines the relations that obtain in that moment between the signs as
necessary relations. There is no moment in Saussure in which the Lacanian

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conception of the subject as a subject of lack is affirmed. For Laclau and Mouffe,
by contrast, the social never takes the form of a complete system or a closed totality,
identities are never completely constituted, every formation always remains
vulnerable to subversive interruption, and the moment of final articulation is
never obtained (Laclau 1990a:90–1). This allows Laclau and Mouffe to insist,
once again, on the contingency of articulation, and on the possibility of subversion
even in the case of the most normalized articulations.
There is some degree of tension between Laclau and Mouffe’s terminology and
the implications of their theory. Although the term “position” itself suggests a
fully defined space, Laclau and Mouffe argue that articulation can only produce
partially fixed subject positions. Subject positions should be regarded as somewhat
fluid processes rather than fixed interest groups (McClure 1992:121). Again,
concrete historical identities never fully correspond to the theoretical categories
that we use to analyze structural positionings. A worker’s experience of her position
in the capitalist wage labor contract is mediated by the interpretative work that is
performed by her identity, the ensemble of overdetermined subject positions
through which she lives her structural positionings. In actual political relations,
then, we never meet groups of people who are neatly divided up according to the
theoretical categories that we use to discuss structural relations in our social
theories. Actual workers have a much more complex principle of identity than is
anticipated in traditional Marxist theory, for they are positioned at “points of
intersection of a multiplicity of relations and contradictions articulated by class
practices” (Laclau 1977:11).
Laclau is quite close in this respect to Balibar who contends that
there is no “ideal type” of classes (proletariat and bourgeoisie) but there
are processes of proletarianization and embourgeoisement, each of which
involves its own internal conflicts (which I shall, for my part, following
Althusser, term the “overdetermination” of the antagonism): in this way
we can see how the history of the capitalist economy depends on political
struggles within the national and transnational space.
(Balibar 1991c:11)
McClure, citing the feminist theory of De Lauretis (1987), similarly argues that
the logic of articulation implies that there are no actual political subjects which
correspond to abstract structural categories. “No subject, in sum, is simply
gendered; there are no ‘women’ simpliciter, already constituted as a bound political
group with necessary common interests, already given as a political category”
(McClure 1992:122). The fact that we never actually encounter subjects that
correspond to abstract structural categories does not, of course, imply that anyone
can be anything they want to be. All workers interpret their exploitation through
the framework constructed by an overdetermined ensemble of subject positions,
such that their identities are formulated through the mediating effects of political
discourses. This does not mean, however, that an individual worker can step

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outside her exploited structural positioning at will, for, as a propertyless worker
in a capitalist society, her life chances have been shaped to a great extent in
advance.