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This chapter examines the movement from the symbolic to a desymbolization that opens the door to political voluntarism by focusing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Theory, where they sought to restore the theoretical dignity of Marxism by articulating a “post-Marxism without apologies.” Laclau and Mouffe's post-Marxism belongs to the intellectual history of France after 1968. In Hegemony and Socialist Theory, they reformulate proletarian dialectics into a theory that explicitly acknowledges the power of the symbolic as well as its debt to Claude Lefort's theory of democracy. Laclau's subsequent explorations and criticisms of deconstructionist philosophy and of Lacanian psychoanalysis are shown to be directed by his and Mouffe's concern to understand how radical politics can find its place in a world whose institution is ultimately symbolic and in which no agent or actor comparable to the dialectical proletariat can—or should—be imagined. An early ally in this search was Slavoj Žižek, who argues that “universality” is complicit with capitalist domination.

The assumption that the political has been systematically ‘absorbed’ by the social places the Laclauian enterprise in the framework of theories that share Carl Schmitt's neutralisation thesis and Hannah Arendt's colonisation thesis. However, no pessimistic or even fatalistic conclusions as to the irreversibility of this absorption or enclosure of the political in the ‘iron cage’ of an increasingly bureaucratised and managed society are drawn. How does Ernesto Laclau proceed about showing the primacy of the political? And how does he define the political and the social in the first place? In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, after having deconstructed the history of Marxism in a remarkable tour-de-force, Laclau and Chantal Mouffe start again building their theory of politics as hegemony by renouncing the conception of ‘society’ as founding totality of its partial processes. Laclau relates the difference between the social and the political to Edmund Husserl's distinction between sedimentation and reactivation. Laclau's theory has to be located at the antagonistic end of the scale of social post-foundationalism.

This chapter examines hegemony theory and cultural studies, with particular emphasis on their shared populism. It begins by defining and historicizing the field of cultural studies before turning to the Argentine theorist Ernesto Laclau and the development of his hegemony theory, suggesting that it simply mimics the logic of populism. It then considers the relationship between populism and the state by focusing on Argentina to show how both hegemony theory and cultural studies repeat the populist sleight of hand in which a purported anti-institutionalism in fact enables the state apparently to disappear. It argues that hegemony stands in for politics, and screens off the ways in which states anchor social order through habituation, under the guise of a fictional social contract. It also offers an alternative account of the Argentine Peronism from which Laclau’s theory arises.

Chapter 1 sets out to develop the theoretical framework for the book‘s undertaking. It outlines a discourse theoretical approach for the critical analysis of normative change which builds specifically, but not exclusively, on the discourse theory developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The chapter argues that Laclau and Mouffe‘s concepts of the destabilisation (dislocation) of discourses and their (re)construction through hegemonic struggles, provide useful tools to reconstruct processes of normative change. Moreover, the concepts of discourse and its constitution around a particular nodal point or empty universal are helpful to analyse in detail the ways in which (normative) meaning is produced and temporarily stabilized in relational systems of signification. The chapter also fleshes out the concept of the power and productivity of discourses which is central for a critical inquiry into the performance of social meanings. It shows how to question the empirical validity of social reality and examine the ways in which discourses produce one and simultaneously repress specific interpretations of the social world

Starting from a short story by Borges, this chapter discusses the role that representation may play in a project of radical democracy, defined as a ‘collective will’ aiming at expanding the democratic horizon of freedom, equality and solidarity, as established in the democratic revolution. It is radical not in the sense of referring, with these terms, to a particular ground or foundation of democracy, but to the ultimate absence of such ground. This implies that we have to see radical democracy as an emancipatory project of expanding the democratic idea of representation – as a relation of mediacy and self-alienation – to more and more social fields. The chapter takes its lead from Claude Lefort, Ernesto Laclau and Frank Ankersmit, to claim that representation should be understood as, precisely, a relation of non-identity between represented and representative, as only then it attests to the ultimately ungroundable nature of the democratic regime. These points are exemplified by analyses of the case of Bosnia, where the democratic, non-identitarian form of representation was replaced by an identitarian one, and that of the anti-representational ideology of the assembly movement of 2011, which fell into the self-delusionary trap of a fantasy of presence and immediacy.

This chapter examines political theology—the preservation and imposition of concepts and figures of thought in political theory, inherited from monotheism. It argues that positive reliance on political theology not only can have a profoundly authoritarian meaning, but is also helpful in misrepresenting that meaning, and that political theology can be thematized in order to go beyond it—a notion drawn from Claude Lefort, whose concept of democracy as the empty space of power clearly draws the line of distinction with not only totalitarianism, as he stressed, but with all modern forms of dictatorship. Additionally, the chapter explains that a political conception can be deeply theological by providing a critique of populist politics as described by Ernesto Laclau. The chapter concludes by presenting one attempt to justify populist constitution making in Latin America, one that also uses radical democratic ideology to disguise the authoritarian danger that the conception cannot eliminate.

This chapter lays out Ernesto Laclau’s theory of discourse and hegemony as the theoretical framework that, together with Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, guides the analyses of the cases studied in the book. The chapter engages with the existing literature on the contemporary representations of Muslims in Western society in order to explain how the position developed in the book – that representation is constitutive – differs from that literature. To help illustrate the implications of the theoretical framework, the chapter uses Gordon Brown’s discourse of Britishness and illustrates the theoretical points with examples from his writings and speeches and with the citizenship tests introduced by New Labour.

The ‘symbolic’ has found its way into the heart of contemporary radical democratic theory. When one encounters this term in major theorists such as Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, our first impulse is to trace its genealogy to the offspring of the linguistic turn, structuralism and poststructuralism. This paper seeks to expose the deeper history of the symbolic in the legacy of Romanticism. It argues that crucial to the concept of the symbolic is a polyvalence that was first theorized in German Romanticism. The linguistic turn that so marked the twentieth century tended to suppress this polyvalence, but it has returned as a crucial dimension of contemporary radical political theory and practice. At stake is more than a recovery of historical depth. Through a constructed dialogue between Romanticism and the thought of both Žižek and Laclau, the paper seeks to provide a sharper appreciation of the resources of the concept of the symbolic.

This book narrates the history of post-Marxism as the adventure of the symbolic. Post-Marxism involves a confrontation between the relatively rigid semiotic concept of the symbolic order and looser, less formulaic and less deterministic ideas of the symbolic. These more open concepts tap the complicated legacy of the symbolic turn, a history with roots deeper than the twentieth century. In the context of the convergence of Marxism's eclipse and the decline of foundational principles, this book evaluates the prospects for regenerating critical social and political philosophy beyond the Marxist framework, as well as the possibilities of creating and sustaining a positive emancipatory project. To do so, it draws on a series of historically and philosophically informed studies of several major thinkers who confront us with contrasting approaches to the challenges of political philosophy in the postfoundational and post-Marxist context. These figures include Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and Slavoj Žižek.

This chapter examines the representation of place on television, arguing for the need to think outside the bounds of the materialist-simulationist dichotomy. It offers a reconceptualization of television that moves away from canonical accounts of this medium’s derealization of place. It argues for an understanding of the vital role that the image of place serves (both materially and rhetorically) in the televisual representation of disaster as a means of providing an always-contingent but nevertheless indispensable grounds for the representation of the social world. Bringing together Immanuel Kant, Ernesto Laclau, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, the chapter provides a new way of understanding television and a new way of understanding place.

In the first chapter, the author evaluates the various possibilities to engage with the empirical material collected for this book. Due to the shrine’s new accessibility, paired with its recent institutionalization, many formerly disconnected practices and narratives started to meet on a regular basis. Doing fieldwork at the site, together with engaging with a variety of texts and other media, the author was confronted with the question of how to organize all of these voices that uniformly claimed to speak the truth about the shrine and its annexed practices. Chapter 1 elaborates on the theoretical foundations of this work through a concept the author calls “the solidification of tradition.” Utilizing newer anthropological theories of the ontological turn and supplementing them with the political philosophy of post-foundationalism helps the author to produce his own engagement with the various truth-claims encountered during his research.

This book explores the presidency of Hugo Chávez Frías of Venezuela (1999–present) in the context of theory on populism. It examines issues such as the continued relevance of populism itself in Latin American politics, populism's origins in the profound race/class cleavages found in the region, its ideological diversity, with, however, a programmatic emphasis on popular participation, and finally populist claims to legitimacy within a region with weak democratic institutions. It contends that it is sometimes necessary to step outside and infringe existing institutionality when that institutionality lacks legitimacy and is acting against democracy's progressive tendencies. It also looks at the dispute on populism between the ‘historical/sociological perspective’ of Gino Germani and others, and the ‘ideological perspective’ of Ernesto Laclau. Central to Germani's theories was the belief that modernisation processes formed the context in which populism emerged in Latin America. The book concludes by looking at the role of neoliberal globalisation in increasing inequality in the region.

This epilogue summarizes issues underlying the emergence of post-Marxism in the 1970s and 1980s as Marxism lost its hold on the imagination of the western European intellectual left. The post-Marxism associated with Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek attempted to hold onto the possibility of radical action and progressive transformation, while also renouncing Marxism's idea of a privileged social actor, Leninism's insistence on a vanguard party possessing correct theory, and indeed, the basic Marxist-Leninist belief that a theory could ever adequately guide social movements operating within a complex historical reality. Many of the resonances between the eras before and after Marxism's ascendancy may be tied to the prominent role of the symbolic, which has furnished us a red thread by which to track a number of thinkers wrestling with the challenge of reconceiving democratic theory in a context marked by the collapse of really existing socialism and the weakening hold of the Marxist model.

This chapter discusses the political theory of Eric Voegelin as the earliest example of anti-Schmittian political theology based on the rejection of sovereignty. The chapter shows how Voegelin adopts Schmitt’s suggestion that political theology turns on the idea of a non-electoral representation of political unity but rejects Schmitt’s identification of this representative with the sovereign. Voegelin instead argues that ‘democratic’ societies are characterized by a dual system of representation, where philosophical and theological representatives of the transcendent God stand above sovereign representatives. Conversely, ‘totalitarian’ societies are societies that ‘close’ themselves to divine transcendence because they see salvation as a function of enacting immanent social laws. The chapter ends with a discussion of the relation between Voegelin’s idea of non-sovereign representation and contemporary accounts of populism, especially that of Ernesto Laclau.

This second chapter lays down the theoretical bedrock of the book. In line with the bilateral framework of this study, it covers both the demand-side and supply-side. With respect to the latter, the chapter links cleavage theory and conflict sociology to the Laclauian notion of equivalence, arguing that the appeal of radical right-wing parties relies on their capacity to coherently unify a multiplicity of heterogeneous demands along the same main antagonism: national versus foreign. Following Weber’s and Parkin’s thoughts on social closure, the chapter theorizes that this nativist core conflict is invoked according to a specific tripartite structure, which has remained quite unnoticed in the existing literature. Pertaining to the demand-side, this chapter first discusses the assumptions underlying an electoral equifinality approach, before turning to the theoretically expected structural heterogeneity among radical right-wing voters. This heterogeneity is theorized along three dimensions within a Bourdieusian framework of social space: social characteristics (who), political preferences (why), and political interest (how). Finally, the chapter discusses different micro-level grievances that are likely to foster radical right support and links them to different socio-structural positions.