Reply to Salazar Abello Lorenzo Buti

A Reply to Salazar Abello

The limits of the discursive turn in political philosophy

Lorenzo Buti

The author has written an elegant and precise account of what constitutes post-structural discourse theory as found in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Laclau and Mouffe proposed a radical reconceptualization of the way society is instituted as a response to the crisis of Marxism, the breakdown of the hegemonic Keynesian consensus, and the rise of a new (post)-structuralist philosophical paradigm.1 They argued that previous Marxist theorists stubbornly understood society in terms of essentialized class dynamics. Marxists believed that society possesses an essential social foundation, social classes, which provide the basis for socialist politics. This philosophical belief left Marxism unable to cope with the rise of new protest movements that did not straightforwardly orientate themselves around the signifier of class, such as anti-colonial, feminist or student movements. Laclau and Mouffe thus attempted to conceptually determine how a radical politics could let go of essentialized social foundations. They argued that any social formation is the product of prior political acts that organize different identities, positions, and relations in a relatively stable way. This entailed that the foundation upon which a stable social structure is built, is always contingent.2 Any foundation of society is merely a partial foundation, but a foundation nonetheless. Practices at the level of ‘the social’ are merely the hegemonic sedimentation of foundational political acts. This is how Laclau and Mouffe could reformulate ‘the political’ as the ontological moment of the institution of social relations. As the author shows, the concepts they used were most often linguistic. A social formation was theorized as a discourse which articulates different positions or nodal points into a hegemonic whole. And ultimately, this whole can never permanently stabilize itself because its discursive construction is open to competing articulations.3

In this brief reply, I will first formulate a disagreement with respect to the interpretation of the ontic/ontological distinction put forward in the paper and conclude with a more general remark on the limits of the discursive turn in political philosophy. The author remains inconclusive regarding the extent to which Mouffe’s later project of agonistic democracy breaks with her previous work with Laclau. According to the author, Mouffe’s version

of agonistic democracy is an ontic endeavour (i.e. the concrete, practical regulation of political conflict) which risks disregarding the ontological insights of post-structuralist discourse theory. I disagree with this interpretation. On all accounts, Mouffe’s project is guided by a concern to do justice to the nature of the political. Her battles with theorists as disparate as Habermas, Rawls, Giddens, Negri and Badiou all revolve around their blindness to the constitutive antagonism at the heart of every social formation.4 What does it mean to do justice to the political? It means that we must acknowledge that every social formation is ontologically instituted by ontic political acts that antagonistically exclude certain positions to form a stable structure. The implication of this assertion is profound: the ontological foundation of social relations is not in any way a metaphysical essence. In particular, ontic political acts themselves become ontological foundations when they can successfully impose their own hegemony.5

This perspective brings the ontic dimension of politics closer to the ontological dimension of the political. Indeed, this is Mouffe’s intention, fully in line with her earlier project with Laclau. There are ways of organizing political conflict that acknowledge that ‘the social’ is the product of contingent decisions which involve the dimension of power and acts of exclusion. This, for both Laclau and Mouffe, is the value of the institutions and symbolic markers of modern democracy. But some ways of organizing politics, such as the models of deliberative democracy or a politics restrained within the narrow limits of liberal constitutionalism disavow the workings of the political. According to Mouffe, such a disavowal comes at a cost, as conflict resurfaces in a more violent form as a ‘return of the repressed’ (Freud).6 I would now like to raise a broader consideration. As Louis Althusser never stopped stressing, a theory never coincides with the real object ‘out there’.7 Constructing a theory entails choosing and developing the concepts with which one attempts to gain knowledge of what exists in the real world. As mentioned, post-structuralist discourse theory has most often chosen linguistic concepts in order to highlight how social positions contingently refer to each other by being articulated in a certain discourse. Putting it bluntly, the linguistic concepts can show that other discourses are always possible and that political actors should try to impose new ones.

We can question, however, whether this ‘discursive turn’ is the best political philosophy can do. What the linguistic concepts do not allow us to philosophically

understand is the specificity of different social practices (artistic, economic, political, legal, ideological etc.). Of course, Laclau and Mouffe do not think that everything ‘is’ language. Rather, they argue that what is philosophically relevant is that all social elements can be understood by the same concepts of hegemony, nodal points, signifiers, articulation and antagonism.8 One danger that comes with this approach is that one treats all social elements as if they have the same material ‘lightness’ that words have in a sentence. The articulation of different signifiers around a ‘master signifier’ might work smoothly in the political discourse of populist parties that try to align different cultural, historical, race, class or gender-based signifiers in a coherent discourse. But is there nothing philosophically relevant in the fact that certain elements resist this easy incorporation into a discourse on the basis of their particular qualities? Is political philosophy not impoverished when it groups together ideologies, laws, artworks, economic developments, sexual relations, and state, civil, or religious institutions under the same linguistic concepts?

I want to conclude on this open question. The author rightly remarks that post-structuralist discourse theory breaks with materialism on the basis of its conception of essentialized foundations. But perhaps those theories that grapple with the specific materiality of our social world can still provide productive resources to think our current condition, beyond essential foundations and linguistic metaphors.

Endnotes

1. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). 2. Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 3. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 79-131. 4. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2006); Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013). 5. This is in effect what the aim of a left populist project should be. See Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018). 6. Chantal Mouffe, “The ‘End of Politics’ and the Challenge of Right-wing Populism,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed. Francisco Panizza (London: Verso, 2005). For the Freudian inspiration behind this model of political conflict, see

e.g. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 535-550. 7. Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 2009). 8. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 79-131.