Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

partially shaped by her racist abjection of urban life. Or we could have a gay man
whose devotion to the inclusion of gays in the military and the legality of gay
marriages is motivated not only by a concern for civil rights, but also by anxieties
produced by traumatic exclusions from American national culture and his own
family, such that he tends to embrace an uncritical, bourgeois and patriarchal
patriotism.
Further, personal loyalties and desires play a complicated role where
identification with political ideals is concerned; this condition is ubiquitous among
all types of political activists. One identification may prevail over others because
a charismatic figure embodies the political principles in question. In some cases,
the triangular dimension of identification will play a conscious or unconscious
role. Identification with a set of principles or a movement may be shaped by one’s
desire to become worthy in the gaze of the Other; in this sense, it is the Other for
whom we are performing our identifications (Žižek 1989:105, 106, 108). Again,

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the complex dimensions of identification make our decision-making vulnerable
to the interruption effects of the unconscious, and dependent upon our
unmasterable relations with otherness. It is precisely because we can never master
identification, and we can never predict the effects of our present strategies, that
we need to preserve a space for legitimate contestation. Only in this condition
could a democratizing social formation nurture those forms of resistance that would
identify the ever-changing face of domination, and agitate for new alternatives.
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I
will return to this theme in the Conclusion.
A dangerous degree of unpredictability is of course introduced wherever a
hegemonic formation so thoroughly translates itself into a social imaginary that
almost any element that adopts its logic is immediately legitimized. Many of the
most progressive American and European intellectuals, for example, viewed
eugenics as a positive development for everyone, since the policies in question-
non-consensual sterilization, forced adoption, coercive medical experimentation,
racist immigration policies, segregated blood banks, the use of soldiers from the
“lowest orders” to fight in doomed military campaigns, and so on—were framed
by Darwinian analogies with competent plant and animal husbandry. Leading
politicians who were already favorably disposed towards social engineering, social
planning and public health policies were also especially receptive to these ideas.
“Eugenic programs resulted from the ‘best’ scientific opinion of the time, the ‘best’
medical opinion, and many were ordered and carried out in the democracies with
the best of intentions” (Pfaff 1997:23). Even after the Nazis brought eugenics into
disrepute, several eugenics programs were deployed in mainland United States
and Puerto Rico during the post-war period, and forcible sterilizations continued
until they were officially banned in 1973 (Pfaff 1997).
Mouffe’s argument that radical democratic pluralism must construct mechanisms
that preserve a space for contestation is therefore entirely sound. Her work,
however, enters into a problematic terrain when she appropriates Schmitt’s
concepts about the limits of liberalism without paying enough attention to the
political location of Schmitt’s critique. She notes that Schmitt joined the Nazis
in 1933 (Mouffe 1993b:121). Schmitt also held a university position in Berlin
between 1933 and 1945, edited an important legal journal during this period and
became an enthusiastic legal counselor for the Third Reich (Schwab 1976:3; Lilla
1997:38). He fully embraced anti-Semitic ideals, and remained utterly unapologetic
about his collaboration for the rest of his life (Lilla 1997:38–44). For her part,
Mouffe does recognize that it was “his deep hostility to liberalism which made
possible, or which did not prevent, his joining the Nazis” (Mouffe 1993b:121).
Further, Mouffe is not the first radical theorist who has found inspiration in Schmitt.
Benjamin, for example, acknowledges that Schmitt influenced his early work
(Schwab 1976:4). Aron, Kojève, Taubes, and several writers in the journal Télos,
have also borrowed Schmitt’s concepts in the development of their radical critiques
of liberalism (Lilla 1997:39).
What are the limitations of legitimate appropriation from fascist sources? Lilla
contends, for example, that much of Schmitt’s anti-liberalism is thoroughly fused

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together with his deeply anti-Semitic political theology (1997:43–4). To what
extent can theoretical arguments be separated from the normative commitments
that were intertwined with them in their very formulation, such that they can be
given a different meaning in new articulations? Even though the teleological
argument that a discourse’s origin determines its meaning throughout its
articulations is vulnerable to deconstruction, we nevertheless need to ask to what
extent the traces of the past articulations of Schmitt’s discourse continue to thrive
in contemporary appropriations. A thorough response to these questions would
require detailed genealogical research.
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