Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

2 Essentialism, non-essentialism and democratic leadership:
from Lenin to Gramsci
1 The Second International was an international workers’ organization that flourished
between 1889 and the First World War. Established by Marxists and dominated by the
European labor movement, the Second International aimed to promote socialist
struggles.
2 “Structures” include not only economic relations, but all sedimented and
institutionalized practices. Structures therefore include “modes of identification, social
institutions and legal and economic practices [,] all of which, in principle, are open to
dislocation and resedimentation” (Norval 1996:26).
3 Here I am paraphrasing Hall, who contends that in contemporary Britain, “race
is… the modality in which class is ‘lived’, the medium through which class relations
are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and ‘fought through’ (Hall
1980:341).
4 We cannot have a perfectly solipsistic subject position in the same sense that we cannot
have an utterly private “language game” (Wittgenstein 1958).
5 Based on my own experience as an activist in the United Auto Workers’ Livable Wage
campaign at Cornell University, I would acknowledge that even the most apparently
neutral “fact” can, in the context of a labor dispute, become quite controversial.
6 For a critique of functionalism, see Barrett (1988:22–3).
7 It could be noted here, following Dallmayr (1987:284), that where Laclau and Mouffe
affirm that every social formation remains an incomplete totality, the authors not only
distance themselves from Lukács, but also from the sociologistic claim that we can fully
comprehend the logic of the social. For Laclau and Mouffe, we can—and indeed we
must—deploy theoretical concepts to interpret social forces, but there will always be
some untheorizable remainder that exceeds our grasp.
8 Mercer points out that there are strong continuities between the Gramscian argument
that subjectivity is constituted through political discourse, and the Foucauldian principle
that within the bio-power regime, power brings its objects into subjectivity (1980:126).
9 Maquiladoras are, generally speaking, labor-intensive light-manufacturing factories
that are owned by transnational corporations and are located in northern Mexico
near the US border. Under the NAFTA accord, they are able to benefit from the
lower Mexican wage rate while simultaneously enjoying low tariff access to the US
market. Women often make up the majority of the maquiladora’s workforce. Although
NAFTA side agreements are supposed to ensure environmentally sound production
processes and workers’ rights, there has been extensive evidence that pollution,
dangerous work conditions and anti-independent union practices prevail in the
maquiladora sector. The US labor movement is paying increasing attention to the
maquiladoras. The relocation of factories to this sector has caused profound
dislocations in the American low-skilled manual labor market. Further, US unions
are experimenting with new forms of transnational solidarity involving both Mexican
and US workers.
10 LaCapra further argues that Žižek’s theory is problematic in that it does not adequately
conceptualize the possibilities for organizing political resistance.
It is difficult to find in this…theoretical formulation a place for critical,
responsible agency within a noninvidious normative framework, even
if one carefully distinguishes the desirability of such agency from its
self-serving, indiscriminate use that is justifiably criticized by Lacan:

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N O T E S
207
the nonexplanatory, moralizing tendency to blame the victim by seeing
ethical failure as the “cause” of “pathology.”
(1994:207)
11 Salecl (1994), for her part, has begun the very important work of bridging Lacanian
formalism and Foucauldian genealogy. See also McClintock (1995), who attempts to
integrate psychoanalytic insights into her post-structuralist paradigm. From this
perspective, she takes Bhabha and Irigaray to task for perpetuating a “fetishism of form”
that precludes a historically specific analysis of social antagonisms and concrete practices
(1995:62–5, 67–8).
12 Although this analogy with Lacan’s mirror stage argument is suggestive, we must set
aside its developmental aspect. (Mis)identification is of course a permanent condition
rather than a single “stage” in human life, and societies in “organic crisis” are certainly
not more “infantile” than relatively stable societies.
13 It could be suggested that Žižek’s attempt to quarantine the historical in this manner
is itself the product of historically specific anxieties that structure that text. A full
exploration of this possibility would necessitate reading Žižek’s theory against the
background of contemporary East European politics. These remarks are inspired by
Rose’s contention that Freud’s writing retreated towards modernist closures in the face
of the unbearable character of mourning, and that that unbearability came to the fore
for him when he was faced with specific historical events. Rose argues that because the
work of mourning can never be brought to an end, our lost attachments will continue
to haunt and to threaten with pulverization our identifications in the present. With
this formulation, Rose underlines the complex and ultimately unmasterable character
of identification (1997). As I will note in Chapter 4, this approach has implications for
understanding identifications with both right-wing and radical democratic discourses.
14 Butler nevertheless points out the repetitions that can be found in Žižek’s various
attempts to describe the operation of the real. Insofar as the real is understood as the
unsymbolizable threat of castration, Žižek’s text tends to proceed as if Oedipally induced
sexual difference were always already established in the prediscursive. As a result, Žižek’s
theory
evacuates the “contingency” of its contingency. Indeed, his theory
valorizes a “law” prior to all ideological formations, one with
consequential social and political implications for the placing of the
masculine within discourse and the symbolic, and the feminine as a
“stain”, “outside the circuit of discourse.”
(1993:196)