Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

function of identification as such—the latter being independent of any
content and linked to the former only in a contingent way.
(Laclau and Zac 1994:35)
According to this analysis, it is primarily the formal character of a political discourse
that makes it a compelling site of identification. “One approves of the Law because
it is Law, not because it is rational. In a situation of radical disorganization there is
a need for an order, and its actual contents become a secondary consideration”
(Laclau 1994:3).
In a moment of organic crisis, one becomes acutely aware of the dislocation in
the structure, in the sense that one has “an ‘experience’ which makes visible the
ultimate contingency of all forms of identification” (Norval 1996:13). Craving
order, we become extremely vulnerable during a crisis to political discourses that
promise to restore coherence first by offering themselves as myths—concrete
readings of the otherwise unintelligible crisis—and later by offering themselves as

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imaginaries—horizons of intelligibility. Laclau’s central argument is that there is
nothing in the materiality of an organic crisis or a dislocation in the structure that
predetermines which political discourse will prevail in this manner. At the center
of a crisis—where we might expect an embryonic substance that will reveal itself
as the necessary solution—there is actually nothing but a radical indeterminacy,
emptiness or lack. The moment of dislocation in the structure is not just a weak
point; it is a radical absence.
In Laclau’s terms, this process of becoming caught up in one identification
rather than another is a “decision” that is taken in the (non-)space in which the
structure has failed, for our choice is ultimately contingent, rather than determined
in advance. The subject is partially “self-determined” in the sense that it is
“condemned” to take a decision in conditions that Derrida describes as the “ordeal
of the undecidable” (Laclau 1996c:53). This moment of “self-determination,”
however, should not be understood as a voluntarist expression of a preconstituted
interest, for it is produced out of a fundamental absence, namely the failure of the
structure to constitute fully the being of the subject. Laclau asserts that the “subject
equals the pure form of the structure’s dislocation, of its ineradicable distance
from itself” (1990a:60). The subject never exists as a fully self-conscious actor
who can stand back from her historical embeddedness, obtain total clarity about
her condition, and instrumentally select one alternative among many according
to her already-determined set of preferences. As Nietzsche puts it,” ‘the doer’ is
merely a fiction added to the deed” (1969:45). Nor is the subject merely the vehicle
of an omnipotent historical force or all-encompassing totality, such that all of her
decisions are always already determined. Laclau’s argument can be read, then, as a
critique of voluntarism, historicism and functionalism. To the extent that Laclau’s
position is integrated with the conceptions of the historical trace and
overdetermination, it does not collapse into a relativist agnosticism; I will return
to this problem in Chapter 3.
The selection of one political discourse instead of another in the condition of
undecidability is therefore analogous to identification in psychoanalysis, rather
than the decision in rational choice theory. If one selection prevails over another
in the context of an organic crisis, then that decision is contingent; there is nothing
that wholly guarantees that another identification could not have prevailed in its
place. With identification, we construct an analogy between political decision-
making in undecidable conditions and the struggle of Lacan’s infant in the “mirror
stage” to make sense of its chaotic world. Traumatized by the unbearable experience
of dislocation, we search for some sort of organizing framework that makes our
experience bearable. Lacan’s infant (mis-)takes the image in the mirror as its own
self, and the lure of the mirror image that facilitates this substitution consists
precisely in its framed and stabilized character. The infant thereby achieves the
sense of itself as a coherent totality, but only through (mis-) identification with
an external image that remains irreducibly “other.” In this manner, dependence
on otherness, alienation, transitivism and paranoiac knowledge are written into
the very principle of our subjectivity (Lacan 1977:1–7; Muller and Richardson

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1982:5–34). From a Lacanian perspective, there is no subject with fully formed
desires prior to the decision; there is only a deep anxious need for order. One
political discourse will tend to prevail over others, then, to the extent that it
effectively promises to provide a “minimum of consistency” (Žižek 1989:75) in
an otherwise chaotic terrain.
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Understood from a psychoanalytic perspective, the “subject” is not the same as
“subject positions.” With the psychoanalytic concept of the subject as a subject of
lack, we have the principle of the impossibility of identity, for “every identity is
already in itself blocked” (Žižek 1990:252). With subject positions, by contrast,
we emphasize the ways in which identity plays an interpretative, mediating role -
albeit in necessarily imperfect and incomplete forms—in the incitement of certain
practices in specific historical contexts. As Norval contends, an emphasis on both
dimensions is needed. Subject position theory without the principle of the
impossibility of identity could become just another version of functionalism, while
the psychoanalytic concept of subjectivity on its own tends to disregard the ways
in which social agents are constructed within historically specific networks of
power relations (Norval 1996:64).
With the emphasis on Lacanian theory in his later work, Laclau has shifted
away from his earlier post-structuralist conception of the “articulation” of “floating
signifiers.” I will deal with the concept of articulation at length in Chapter 3. At
this point, articulation can be loosely defined as follows. Political discourses
attempt to give new meaning to key signifiers such as “freedom” or “democracy,”
as they struggle to become the interpretative frameworks through which we live
our structural positionings. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), Laclau and
Mouffe argue that these struggles over meaning take the form of articulation.
“Floating signifiers,” the political concepts that are open to redefinition, are given
new meanings as they are combined with other concepts in novel ways. Every
articulation is always partial, such that the meaning of these signifiers is never
fixed once and for all. However, even when the effects of past articulations are
weakened, they are never totally lost; every signifier bears the traces of past
articulations (1985:113). Those traces are more akin to Derrida’s “minimal
remainders” than essences, in the sense that they never play a fully determining
role (Derrida 1988:51–2). The non-determining presence of those traces in every
signifier that is available for articulation nevertheless means that it is never purely
empty, never purely open to the assignment of just any meaning. With the concept
of the articulation of “floating signifiers,” Laclau and Mouffe achieve a remarkable
synthesis between the Gramscian and post-structuralist approaches. Their
argument about the non-essentialist historical continuities that consistently
reassert themselves in unpredictable ways across contingent repetitions draws on
both the Gramscian conception of historicity and the Derridean (non-)concept
of différance.
The tension between Laclau’s earlier and later work can be explained in part
with respect to the different arguments in Lacanian and post-structuralist theory
on the question of structure, the failure of closure and repetition. While both

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Lacanians and post-structuralists would agree that every structure—that is, in the
respective terms of these two theories, a symbolic order or a discourse—is never
completely closed, they disagree on the “structurality” of that openness. For
Lacanians, it is the real that constantly interrupts every structure and yet compels
the identifications that build up identity-effects and give rise to partial social
formations. For Derrideans, by contrast, a structure attempts to spatialize a semantic
field. A structure aims to achieve totality-effects; it strives to appear and to operate
as if it did have a fixed center and an unbroken ring of borders at its circumference.
To the extent that this process is successful, the discourse in question actually
does begin to have structuring effects; the signifier that poses as a center becomes
a defining point for contiguous elements, its apparent boundaries begin to exercise
border effects, and so on. Deconstruction aims precisely to demonstrate the
concealed processes that simultaneously make this spatializing effect possible, and
yet fundamentally and necessarily open every structure to différence: the movement
of difference that cannot be domesticated (Gasché 1986:143–7). Deconstructive
criticism may decenter structure, for example, by showing its hidden dependence
on multiple centers; its secret constitutive relation with what is outside the
boundaries; its consistent subversion of its own rules as each of its repetitions
introduces irreducible differentiation; and so on.
For our purposes here, we should note that these two arguments differ in one
crucial respect. The real is utterly unsymbolizable; as such, we cannot grasp via
any historical logic the relations between the different moments in which the real
interrupts the symbolic order. From Žižek’s perspective, each of the traumatic
moments in which the real erupts in history are, in a formal sense, equivalent and
substitutable (1989:50). Butler suggests that for Žižek, “what is historical and
what is traumatic are made absolutely distinct; indeed, the historical becomes
what is most indifferent to the question of trauma” (1993:202).
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It could be further
argued that the Lacanian tendency towards formalistic arguments and
transhistorical laws flows precisely from this quarantining of historicity. Butler
contends, “Žižek’s rendition of the real presupposes that there is an invariant law
that operates uniformly in all discursive regimes to produce through prohibition
this ‘lack’ that is the trauma induced by the threat of castration, the threat itself”
(1993:205).
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By contrast, post-structuralists insist on the “structured” character of the failure
of structure. While deconstruction, like psychoanalysis, holds that a series of
moments in which closure becomes impossible cannot be grasped in fully positive
terms, it does nevertheless describe these closure-failures as imperfect repetitions.
One moment in which closure fails will not only compel a reasserted attempt to
achieve closure, it will also partially construct the conditions for the next failure.
The contingency that characterizes these transitions—from failure to closure
attempt to new failure—is such that we cannot predict exactly how they will
proceed, but we can retroactively describe the traces or family resemblances that
cut in and out of these moments, and suggest various possibilities for future
iterations.

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In Butler’s commentary on Laclau’s Derridean conception of articulation, she
writes, “to take up the political signifier…is to be taken into a chain of prior
usages, to be installed in the midst of significations that cannot be situated in
terms of clear origins or ultimate goals” (1993:219). Further, Butler describes this
chain of citations as an “iterable practice that shows that what one takes to be a
political signifier is itself the sedimentation of prior signifiers” (1993:220). Each
citational moment reworks the signifier, mobilizing the “phantasmatic promise”
that was integral to past citations—namely the promise to deliver order and
completion—and yet simultaneously reconstructing those past articulations such
that the signifier also promises “‘the new,’ a ‘new’ that is itself only established
through recourse to those embedded conventions, past conventions, that have
conventionally been invested with the political power to signify the future”
(1993:220). Butler agrees with Žižek that the subject is never coherent and self-
identical because it is founded on a series of exclusions—refusals, repudiations,
repressions, abjections, and so on—and that every political signifier will necessarily
fail to deliver on its promise of order and completion. She nevertheless differs
with him on the historical character of that failure.
The “failure” of the signifier to produce the unity it appears to name is
not the result of an existential void, but the result of that term’s
incapacity to include the social relations that it provisionally stabilizes
through a set of contingent exclusions. This incompleteness will be
the result of a specific set of social exclusions that return to haunt the
claims of identity defined through negation; these exclusions need to
be read and used in the reformulation and expansion of a democratizing
reiteration of the term.
(1993:221)
Butler therefore acknowledges the openness of the structure while insisting on
the historical specificity of the instances in which the failure of completion takes
place. Further, this approach does have concrete implications for democratic
political practice. Butler is, in a sense, calling for the interpretation of what Gramsci
would call the organic character of constitutive exclusions and the deployment of
that historicizing interpretation in the construction of counter-articulations.
The non-essentialist repetition principle—what Derrida calls “iteration”
(1988)—and the concept of political signifiers in current articulations as always
bearing the non-determining traces of past articulations, has been relatively de-
emphasized in Laclau’s recent work. In a co-authored article published in 1994,
Laclau and Zac state that “terms such as ‘the unity of the people’, the ‘welfare of the