Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary

participation may, depending upon its precise structure, be compatible with the
democratic principle. It may, for example, promote civic values while enhancing
the minority members’ understanding of their rich traditions, thereby providing
them with the tools that they need to make valuable contributions to robust public
debates. A program that serves only to enshrine the anti-democratic symbols and
values that have been passed down in exclusionary traditions, such as those of
racist white Afrikaners and racist white Americans from the South, would not
have the same beneficial effect. Multicultural projects that celebrate the identity
of a disempowered group can also be problematic in those cases in which they
perpetuate capitalist exploitation, sexism, homophobia and the denigration of
other racial/ethnic differences. Some traditions are more homogeneous while others
consist of complex hybrid articulations of democratic and anti-democratic
elements. As such, no abstract rules can be drawn up in advance with respect to
the evaluation of diversity claims; each claim must be carefully assessed within a
specific historical context.
Laclau’s innovative theory of universalism provides a useful framework for
understanding these problems. Instead of constructing the universal and the
particular as separate elements, or positing the universal as a moment in which
differences are canceled out, Laclau contends that we should consider the universal
as “the symbol of a missing fullness.” Like Spivak (1988a, 1988b; Spivak and
Grosz 1990:11–12; Spivak et al. 1990:117–18) Laclau argues that particular social
groups inevitably invoke universalist discourse—that is, the principles of the

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broader community as a whole—whenever they advance their demands for access
to education, employment, consumer goods and so on. Every demand is framed in
some minimal way with reference to the larger community’s shared horizon. A
particularistic discourse in this sense employs universal principles to fill in the
gaps in its own identity: that element of legitimacy which extends beyond the
limits of its own self-referentiality. Laclau’s argument paradoxically situates the
universal as a necessary moment of compensation for incompletion within every
particularism. Further, whenever a particular social group affirms its difference as
it advances its demands for rights, it also tends to cancel out its difference—precisely
because it tends to frame its demands in terms of the broader community’s values
(1996g:28). The “universal” never becomes a dialectical category, for Laclau’s
“universal” space remains a contested terrain, and the moment in which the
difference between particularism and universalism would be finally overcome
through dialectical negation is infinitely postponed. With Mouffe, Laclau affirms
that the community’s shared norms remain incomplete and vulnerable to political
reactivation and subversive recitation (1996g:28, 33).
Laclau’s provocative formulation deserves careful analysis. He contends that a
specific group attempts to fill out its incomplete identity by invoking the common
principles of the broader community. We should note, first, that this is a very
complex operation that takes place in the context of multiple and antagonistically
opposed political discourses that compete with one another to perform this
compensatory function. Laclau contends, for example, that an ethnic minority
might advance its own particularistic demands by invoking “some universal
principles” that are shared in a broader social space (1996g:28). While Laclau
does recognize that those universal principles are always open to contestation, we
should also consider the multiplicity of “universal” spaces. In the debates on Quebec
separatism, for example, different groups invoke different “universalities”: separatist
francophones may refer to the Québecois nation, to their position within the
Quebec-United States economic community, and to the ties between their
Québecois nation and France; the anglophones, federalist francophones and the
allophones (immigrants for whom both English and French are second languages)
may refer to their rights as Canadian citizens; while the indigenous peoples may
refer to their federal rights and their rights under the United Nations Charter as
sovereign First Nations. The development of Laclau’s theory requires a detailed
investigation of the multiple and sometimes contradictory character of broader
community affiliations.
Laclau’s privileging of formalism in his more recent work has profound
implications for his argument on universalism and particularism. A “universal”
discourse is necessarily invoked within a particularistic discourse as an ultimately
vain attempt to fill in the constitutive lack that penetrates every identity. However,
as we have already seen in Chapters 2 and 5, Laclau’s argument tends to emphasize
the formal characteristics of hegemonic discourse. He asserts, for example, that in
an organic crisis,

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people need an order, and the actual content of it becomes a secondary
consideration. “Order” as such has no content, because it only exists in
the various forms in which it is actually realized, but in a situation of
radical disorder “order” is present as that which is absent; it becomes an
empty signifier, as the signifier of that absence. In this sense, various
political forces can compete in their efforts to present their particular
objectives as those which carry out the filling of that lack. To hegemonize
something is exactly to carry out this filling function. (We have spoken
about “order,” but obviously “unity,” “liberation,” “revolution,” etcetera
belong to the same order of things. Any term which, in a certain political
context becomes the signifier of the lack, plays the same role. Politics is
possible because the constitutive impossibility of society can only
represent itself through the production of empty signifiers.)
(1996h:44)
In the case of a specific group’s particularistic demand for rights, the universal
performs this “filling function”; it is the universal that sutures the group’s dislocated
identity. If we combine Laclau’s remarks on particularism and universalism with
his formalistic analysis of hegemonic discourse’s ordering effect, then we have the
following argument: in an organic crisis, the actual content of the “universal”
discourse that performs this compensatory suturing work in particularistic discourse
is much less important than its form, that is, its promise to provide some sort of
order.
Laclau does admit that the content of the hegemonic discourse has some
importance; while its content becomes a “secondary consideration,” it is never
totally irrelevant. It should also be noted that Laclau is dealing with an almost
impossible case, for indifference to the content of a hegemonic discourse increases
to the extent that the social formation is disrupted by an organic crisis. On this
account, complete indifference to historical traces and residual traditions would
only make sense in the context of a total breakdown of the social. The occasions
in which actual historical circumstances even begin to approach these conditions
are indeed very rare. Perhaps the problem with these formulations, then, is simply
that they focus exclusively on an extreme case. In more normal conditions, there
are multiple factors that make it more or less likely that one discourse will prevail
over others in a hegemonic manner. In most cases, a discourse becomes effectively
hegemonic not only because of its abstract form, but also because of its non-
essentialist continuities with residual, enduring and emerging institutions.
Laclau explicitly criticizes Eurocentrism for representing its exclusionary