Laclau or Mouffe? Splitting the difference

Philosophy and Social Criticism 29 (5):581-606 (2003)
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Abstract

The majority of those who comment upon the theories of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe - both supporters and critics - treat the work of the two authors as a coherent unity. I see acute differences that demarcate the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe: differences that impede any straightforward delimitation of the authorial identity `Laclau and Mouffe'. The purpose of this paper is to bring to the fore the incommensurate political differences that separate the work of the two authors, and to establish the superiority of Mouffe's position. At its most basic both authors view politics as described in their co-authored Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: i.e. `as a practice of creation, reproduction and transformation of social relations' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 153). This agreement, however, conceals the fact that the authors describe the political articulation of social relations in distinct ways, and that those descriptions are implicated in, and reinforce, contrasting ethico-political commitments and prescriptions. These differences reflect the differences between the politics of the Marxist tradition retained by Laclau - albeit understood as a negative apparition of its former (ultimately) fully positive self - and Mouffe's radical democratic pluralism. This latter perspective - in its more recent formulations - represents a political compound of civic-republicanism with a defense of liberalism; this is a political imaginary that retains little if anything from the Marxist tradition.

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Citations of this work

Semiotics of Identity: Politics and Education.Tomasz Szkudlarek - 2011 - Studies in Philosophy and Education 30 (2):113-125.
The Dislocated Universe of Laclau and Mouffe: An Introduction to Post-Structuralist Discourse Theory.Thomas Jacobs - 2018 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 30 (3):294-315.
Laclau’s New Postmodern Radicalism: Politics, Democracy, and the Epistemology of Certainty.Pedro Góis Moreira - 2022 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 34 (2):244-278.

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References found in this work

Philosophical Investigations.Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1953 - New York, NY, USA: Wiley-Blackwell. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe.
Of grammatology.Jacques Derrida - 1976 - Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Edited by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Margins of philosophy.Jacques Derrida - 1982 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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