Paul Bowman

Interviewer’s Introduction This interview was conceived with the theme of this issue of parallax firmly in mind. The questions were presented to Professor Laclau in writing in the summer of 1998. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Laclau for his engagement with my questions, especially as their composition was influenced more by cultural studies and literary theoretical concerns than ‘postMarxist’ political philosophy. As such, I would like to propose that this interview might be read, then, as an intersection or dialogue between distinct (inter)disciplinary positions and their respective problematics. For those unfamiliar with the work of Ernesto Laclau, though, the short space of this introduction would be an inappropriate place to try to convey the extent of his work’s significance: but I hope that the questions do at least gesture towards the importance of his work for cultural studies. The answers of Ernesto Laclau will, I am sure, prove interesting and informative for all readers, whether they be ‘friends’ or students of Laclau, opponents, or indeed ‘strangers’.

1. positioning post-marxism Bowman.‘Post-Marxism’ is commonly understood to be indebted to Gramsci. But I have always found the resonances to be more like a conjunction of Derridean, Lacanian and Foucauldian insights. Derrida, in Spectres of Marx,

has referred to Hegemony and Socialist Strategy1 as being ‘a novel elaboration, in a ‘deconstructive’ style of the concept of hegemony’.2 And Slavoj Zizek has argued that ‘Laclau and Mouffe have, so to speak, reinvented the Lacanian notion of the Real as impossible, they have made it a useful tool for social and ideological analysis’.3 Your work is also closely related to Foucault. So how would you characterise post-Marxism’s relationship with Gramsci? Could post-Marxism have happened without Derrida, Lacan, or Foucault? Or, alternatively, in light of the work of these thinkers, could post-Marxism still have happened without Gramsci? Laclau. As far as ‘Post-Marxism’ is concerned, the answer is very simple: no, without Gramsci our whole intellectual project would have been impossible. I am not saying that it could not have been reformulated in different terms, but it would not have been ‘post-Marxist’. You have to think that our basic roots are in Marxism, and that it is out of Marxism that we started to establish a dialogue with the post-structural and the post-Wittgensteinian tradition. And for the particular breed of Marxism to which we were attached, the Gramscian mediation was essential. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy constructs all its basic categories starting from a deconstruction of the history of Marxism and the re-elaboration and reformulation of Gramscian categories has been a constant leitmotif of my work. The post-structuralist tradition (conceived in the very general terms in which the label has been used in Anglo-American literature) has helped to enrich considerably our theoretical arsenal. From that point of view, the main influences have been Derrida and Lacan. Foucault helped also to some extent, but I always kept my distance from his approach, for in the Archaeology of Knowledge he makes perfectly clear that for him ‘discourse’ is an object among many, a perspective that we have criticised in Hegemony.

2. polemic, antagonism and the generation of knowledge Bowman. In this issue of parallax, we are interrogating the relationship between ‘polemic’ and the generation of knowledge. Much of your own work has taken the form of critiques of specific theorists, usually from the Marxist tradition, but not always so. Would you call your interventions ‘polemical’ and if so, how would you relate the form, or style, of such interventions to the content, or kind of knowledge produced? Might there be any correlation between the way4 knowledge is created - the difference, say, between a polemical attack on another academic, as opposed to the patient exploration of some ostensibly innocuous, maybe even ancient, text - and the terrain of the disciplinary field? That is to say, might the styles of scholarship permeating, even constituting, the disciplinary space, transform that terrain, and do you see any political implications devolving on this? Could ‘polemic’ be related to ‘antagonism’? Laclau. I would take a slightly Kuhnian position about this matter. There is no such thing as a peaceful and unilinear accumulation of knowledge. There is a conflict of paradigms, and that which succeeds does not do so as a result of having proved its case in an apodictic way, but because it redescribes a whole field in a more convincing manner. As the progress of knowledge is ‘hegemonic’ to a certain extent, the polemical dimension cannot be entirely absent from the discourses of a scientific community. Once this general point has been accepted, what remains to be done is to draw a picture of the ‘literary genres’ of scientific polemics - and the range is very wide. I have always tried to keep polemics as rational as possible but, as you know, not all of my contradictors have shown the same restraint. As for your last point, yes, any kind of polemic is a sort of antagonism.

3. post-marxism and cultural studies Bowman. Your work is a growing influence within cultural studies. How do you see the relationship between your own work and that goes under the name of cultural studies? Would you class the essays comprising The Making of Political Identities5 as cultural studies? Or might you say that cultural studies is a discipline whose knowledge was always and still continues to be produced perfectly adequately within extant, ‘traditional’ disciplines? Do you think that cultural studies’ ‘knowledge’ has any specificity or uniqueness?In a sense, the invocation of Stuart Hall is apt: for the work of Hall and Hoggart et al., in the early days of cultural studies particularly, could be said to have constituted itself through polemics against the extant disciplinary demarcations, limitations, and constraints. How do you view the developments within cultural studies, and in what way do you relate the University of Essex’s Centre for Ideology and Discourse Analysis to the institutionalisation of cultural studies? Laclau. Let me make two points. Firstly, boundaries between disciplines are the result, not of a clear-cut subject differentiation but of a contingent history. In America, for instance, there has been a proliferation of centres, institutes and departments of critical studies or cultural studies, the reason being that people working in Politics or Philosophy with a progressive orientation, found it impossible to work in departments dominated by a behaviourist or an analytic philosophy approach. But, secondly, even if the starting point was circumstantial, once it took place, very valuable intellectual problematics can develop out of these contingent origins. Cultural studies, in the way they were propagated by Stuart Hall, have become one of the most exciting developments in the Anglo-Saxon cultural scene. I never worked within a cultural studies matrix, but I have taken full advantage of the intellectual stimulus that it provided. Some of the essays in The Making of Political Identities have been more influenced by cultural studies than others, but I would say that, on the

whole, they belong to a different intellectual universe. The orientation of both the Programme of Discourse Analysis and the Centre for Theoretical Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences at Essex belong, I would say, more to a terrain created by the cross-fertilisation between Continental Philosophy, Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the theory of hegemony, than to cultural studies in the usual sense of the term.

4. persuasion, force and hegemony Bowman. In face to face conversation with yourself, Jacques Derrida has offered a speculation on the possibility of a kind of friendship which might be interpreted as posing a threat to your theorisation of hegemony.6 Particularly as you refer to Derrida’s work, and as you are in dialogue with him and it, how might his speculations about friendship (and his invocation of neutralisation of the sister in fratriarchy, which is analogous to hegemony7) affect your past and future thinking? Laclau. I do not think that what Derrida asserts puts into question in the least my remark that you quote about force and persuasion.8 (At least not in the way it is formulated, although it could be that Derrida would develop his argument emphasising different dimensions than those that are important for me.) Derrida’s remark about fratriarchy refers to a different issue than the one addressed by the couple force/persuasion. As for your other quote from Derrida, I think he is pointing to a dimension which complements my analysis. I have asserted that there is no persuasion that does not include a moment of force but for the same reason I would also sustain that there is no pure force, that even the most violent of confrontations includes that dimension of disarmament to which Derrida refers. To put the matter in my own terms rather than Derrida’s: to construct a relation as antagonistic involves precisely that, a construction, an interpretation, of something which is never simply given. It is

for that, that in my later work - after Hegemony - I have insisted that ‘dislocation’ is an experience more primary than ‘antagonism’, that the latter is already a discursive inscription of dislocation and that, as such, it is purely contingent and needs discursive conditions of possibility. This discursive construction of force means that, from the very beginning, force will be contaminated by persuasion (an attempt at persuasion addressed to myself, to third parties but, I would argue, also to my antagonist to whom my force is just a way of continuing politics by other means). Force is always a complex social construction resulting from the partial stabilisation of contingent and undecidable variables.

5. genres of knowledge and hegemony Bowman. When giving a paper recently,9 you prefaced it with the comment that you ‘like to start with Saussure’, as a means by which to begin your analyses clearly - to convey your starting position clearly. I think that this is interesting in terms of the question of ‘persuasion’ and ‘hegemony’. For it seems to evince and reveal just how forceful and influential such ‘clear starting positions’ are in constituting just what can be classified as scholarship as such: i.e., governing what can be understood, in order to be dis/agreed with. Another way to look at this might be to ask you: if your own work’s intelligibility is expediated by a knowledge of Saussure, how far might this ‘fact’ or relationship reflect (or touch on) in any way, the ‘logic’ of hegemony? Laclau. You necessarily have to start somewhere. At the beginning of my theoretical reflection, the reference to Saussure was quite illuminating and, as I tried to develop my post-Gramscian approach through a dialogue with the structuralist and post-structuralist traditions, this linguistic bias was reinforced. But this starting point is largely contingent. A very similar argument could have been presented in Wittgensteinian or Heideggerian terms, and I have myself

tried to do so on several occasions, when addressing audiences less knowledgeable of the post-structuralist tradition than those attending the conference that you mention. Please, don’t misunderstand me: I am not saying that theoretical idioms can be exactly translated into one another - far from it. But what I think is that there are family resemblances between them - resulting, largely, from the problems that a particular period poses to all thinkers - which make possible the opening of dialogues and establishment of comparisons. I have always found that trying to represent an issue emerging in a certain tradition in terms of the theoretical categories of a different one, is a most fascinating exercise. And many times what is illuminating about it is the actual impossibility of that adequate representation.

6. theoria through phronesis Bowman. Bearing in mind your discussions of persuasion, force and hegemony, I wonder: in what way is persuasion linked to learning? In what ways might you differentiate between different kinds of learning? I’m thinking of your assertion: ‘One can speak of the force of persuasion but one would never say that one had been ‘persuaded’ of the correctness of the Pythagorean theorem’.10 Laclau. What I was trying to say in the passage that you quote is that in an algorithmic demonstration no persuasion is involved. In such a demonstration you see what is being demonstrated in a sudden flash. Persuasion, on the contrary, presupposes that there is no algorithmic demonstration, that you have to go around with a plurality of arguments which do not coalesce into a single logical structure but which create the verisimilitude of the course of action suggested. This means that in the algorithmic proof there is no possible subjective variation as far as the addressee of the proof is concerned: everybody has to accept it. In the case of persuasion, on the contrary, there is room for a

great deal of subjective variation: what persuades one person will not succeed in persuading somebody else. It is for this reason that persuasion is always, to some extent, a conversion: I accept an argument, I am convinced that this or that is the case - that subjective moment of acquiescence is essential to persuasion. It is because of that, that we can speak of the force of persuasion. Concerning learning, I would say that learning is, to a large extent, a process governed by the same logic as persuasion. I am not saying that at the beginning of the study of an author it is not useful to have a presentation selon l’ordre des raisons of his basic theses. But what is wrong is to limit oneself to the search for the logical coherence of the text. The work of an author is always a complex discursive universe in which concepts and categories relate and limit each other in their effects in terms of mutual references which most of the time are rhetorical and construct a coherence which is not necessarily a logical one. If persuasion is the creation of the verisimilitude of some conclusions on the basis of the contingent addition of arguments and discursive sequences, ‘understanding’ an author or a text involves exactly the same: enlarging the system of mutual discursive references on the basis of an ever expanding intertextuality. Lacan used to question the classical idea of understanding, of Verstehen, as the reduction of the new to the already known. Metaphor, on the contrary, meant for him creation of new meaningful configurations which indefinitely postponed the arrival to a last meaning. ‘Theoretical’ learning is, ultimately, the construction of theoria through phronesis.

7. deconstruction and pragmatism Bowman. Still in the realm of intelligibility, knowledge and hegemony, I would like to ask you about the book deconstruction and pragmatism, in which you engaged in a highly charged exchange with Richard Rorty. There is much that could be explored here, in an issue devoted to polemics, regarding the

series of exchanges between yourself, Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty. But perhaps we might start by referring to a discussion of this book published in parallax 9, neo-pragmatism and new romanticisms, in which it is asserted that: the most interesting problematic evinced in deconstruction and pragmatism, [is that] the whole text would seem to be a determined attempt to reconcile one influential tendency to another - but to do so with the intention of assimilating the one (Rortian pragmatism) to the other (this school of deconstruction): to articulate pragmatism and deconstruction tendentially.... The privileging of deconstruction within this text goes hand in hand with the consignment of Rorty’s pragmatism to a status akin to that of poor man’s deconstruction.11 And this dual movement is surely intentional, indeed definitely tendentious, a manifestation of a rigorously conceived strategy. For the idea of a ‘tendentious articulation’... has been expounded at great length in Laclau and Mouffe’s earlier collaboration, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.... The whole project seems to consist of pulling Rorty’s work to bits and reconstructing it, not in its own terms, but rather those required by this branch of theory.12 Do you find this kind of judgement or reading of deconstruction and pragmatism and, by extension, the strategy advocated in Hegemony, to be fair or unfair? Laclau. Let me say, in the first place, that I do not believe in ‘assimilations’ such as you are describing. Taken literally, that could only mean a complete distortion of Rorty’s thought. Rorty certainly is not the ‘poor man of deconstruction’, but an original thinker with his own problematic, his own tradition and his own aims. I wrote a piece on his work which has been included in my volume Emancipation(s), where I stress my own agreements and disagreements with his approach. He has answered my criticisms on several

occasions, the most extended piece being his reply to my intervention in the Paris workshop which is included in the volume deconstruction and pragmatism. It is true that I am closer to deconstruction than to the particular breed of pragmatism that Rorty represents, but at no point have I tried to reconcile both currents of thought, let alone subordinate one to the other. What happens is something different. It is that from the point of view of a particular ‘epoch’, some intellectual developments can be seen as parallel and some comparisons become possible, but this does not involve ‘assimilation’ or ‘reconciliation’. It is perfectly possible to speak, for instance, of the rationalism of the 17th century without denying the differences between Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz. In the same way, the contemporary critique of essentialism creates a certain commensurability between various currents of thought, but this is as important as stressing their differences. I grant you that in choosing one feature - such as anti-essentialism - rather than others, one is engaging in a ‘redescription’ which is to some extent ‘tendentious’. A good pragmatist such as Rorty is very fond of ‘redescriptions’ and knows that there is none which is the true one, but only those whose power of conviction makes them hegemonic.

8. deconstruction and post-marxism Bowman. You have stated that ‘post-structuralist categories such as ‘floating signifiers’, ‘deconstruction’ and ‘hinges’, are crucial to understanding the operation of the hegemonic logic - which for me is the very logic of the construction of the social’.13 If this is the case, then at what point would you say that your theory of hegemony parts company from deconstruction? Do you think that you are obliged - in the name of ‘justice’, perhaps - to strive to reconcile your theory with Derrida’s work, even where Derrida’s work might begin to develop in an irreconcilable (or at least extremely problematic)

manner, in terms of ‘hegemony’ as theorised so far? - I’m thinking here again of his theorisation of ‘friendship’. Laclau. It would be too early - at this stage of Derrida’s elaboration of ‘friendship’ and other connected categories - for me to take a position in relation to the ‘ethicist’ turn of his thought, especially to his passage through Levinas. In a review of Spectres of Marx published by Diacritics in 1995, I have made explicit some reservations. As for your more general question - the way in which deconstruction helps in the formulation of a theory of hegemony (which is the same as saying a theory of politics) - I have been very explicit in my work. As ‘hegemony’ is a theory of the decision taken in an undecidable terrain, and ‘deconstruction’ is a theory of the ‘undecidables’ - supplementarity, re-marking, iteration, etc. - one can say that deconstruction provides the ontological tools making it possible to grasp the working of hegemonic logics. It is in this precise sense that ours can be considered a deconstructive approach. A comparable example: Lacanian theory has made much of the aporias within formalised structures (such as Russell’s ‘class of all classes which are not members of themselves’, etc.). Bruce Fink has recently called them ‘kinks in the symbolic order’. Well, I see deconstruction as an immense enlargement of the field of aporias, as an unconcealing of the violent hierarchies which have organised our Western common sense. Objectivity shows, from this point of view, its roots in power and contingency. As you can see, it is easy to move from here to a theory of politics and hegemony.

9. the politics of psychoanalysis Bowman. I14 am also interested to know your response to a question concerning the status of psychoanalysis as a discourse. I am thinking of the ongoing dispute between yourself and Slavoj Zizek, a dispute which at one point culminated in Zizek’s insistence that only because the structure of the

subject is impossible, that it is immanently antagonised, can the social field be defined in terms of discursively mediated antagonisms among subjectpositions. Surely your rejoinder must be that the immanent antagonism of the subject, its impossibility prior to any social antagonism, is itself an effect of the discursive intervention of psychoanalysis. In other words, psychoanalysis is a discourse whose concepts (including say, the traumatic kernel of the real) are part of a field of antagonistic positions, and is thus deprived of access to the ‘real’ impossibility/the impossible reality of the subject of psychoanalysis. Is psychoanalysis a discourse in this sense? Is the fascination with ‘democracy’ (among figures like Copjec and Zizek) a symptom of the social antagonism that this discourse is producing its concepts in relation to? Why can the discourse of psychoanalysis not conceptualise its own symptom? What ‘chain of equivalencies’ is it forging, and as the expression of what politics? Laclau. Allow me to divide your questions (not all of which I am in a position to answer) into two sets. The first concerns antagonism and the subject; the second, the status of psychoanalysis as a discourse. I do not think that the two sets are related in any obvious way. Regarding the first, I think that your picture of an ongoing dispute between Zizek and myself is considerably overdrawn. Zizek’s criticism of the way in which the question of the subject was addressed in Hegemony was that we had almost reduced it to the structuralist notion of ‘subject positions’, while the Lacanian subject as the subject of the lack was almost entirely absent. He is, however, much more in agreement with the way in which the problem of the subject has been reformulated in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time and in Emancipation(s). I think there is at the moment very little disagreement in this respect between ourselves. I did not start from a Lacanian theoretical analysis, although my independent conclusions led me to a point not far away from the Lacanian notion of

subjectivity. My starting point was the impossibility of the closure of society as a result of the incompletion inherent in any structural arrangement and, consequently, that the ‘fullness’ of society was an object at the same time necessary and impossible. This being the case, from its necessity we could derive that it had to have access to the field of representation, and from its impossibility, that the representation was always going to be distorted, as far as the means of representation could only be particular differences which incarnate that impossible fullness. This taking up of the task of incarnating that impossible universality by one or other particularity is, as you know, what I call ‘hegemony’. The hegemonic subject is thus constitutively split between the subject of that lack, of that impossibility, and the particularity which attempts to fill or suture it. This split is the ontological condition which underlies any hegemonic operation. The subject of hegemony is the subject of an empty signifier not attached (a priori) to any particular content. Now, this is something which, although formulated through an intellectual route different from Zizek’s, is not far away from his view of what you call the subject as ‘immanently antagonised’. In both cases there is no logical or necessary transition from the empty place of the ‘subject’ to the particular content which will (vainly) attempt to fill it. The operation remains hegemonic down to the bottom. This formulation has given place to countless misunderstandings. Does it mean, if what we are saying is true, that one content is as good as any other, that fascism and democracy are on the same footing? Obviously, none of these absurdities is intended. It doesn’t follow, from the fact that democracy and fascism are both hegemonic constructions, that - given a certain structuration of our symbolic universe - we should not prefer one to the other, or fight for one rather than the other. What does follow, however, is that no guarantee of the permanence of a certain hegemonic arrangement is obtainable outside the hegemonic struggle itself. The confusion between these two different aspects is what lies behind this groundless criticism - which usually comes from people who do not want to face political reality and search in theory for a source of

edification. Nothing is granted as a destiny. As old Lenin said, politics consists of walking between precipices. Your second set of questions includes two different issues: the role of the psychoanalyst within the psychoanalytic session, and the politics of psychoanalysis in a wider institutional setting. Regarding the first aspect, as you know, the field is sharply divided along an arch of positions which find, at one extreme, ego psychology believing that the task of psychoanalysis is to adapt the patient to reality, and, at the other, the Lacanian view, according to which the psychoanalytic cure is a traversing of fantasy governed by the Freudian motto ‘Wo Es war, soll ich werden’. And there are many intermediate positions. I think that today we should speak of a plurality of psychoanalytic projects coming from a common matrix rather than of psychoanalysis as a unified field. As for the location of psychoanalysis within the various (academic, medical, etc.) institutions and its competition with other partially overlapping discourses, it would take too long to discuss that now.

10. determinations of dis/agreement Bowman. Your opinions about the work of Richard Rorty have been formulated in ‘Community and its Paradoxes: Richard Rorty’s ‘Liberal Utopia’’ and in deconstruction and pragmatism. Aside from your specific disagreements, it seems to me that your take on the whole situation is that Rorty has just generally missed the point. I must say, I felt quite strongly in reading deconstruction and pragmatism that the two of you were in a very significant sense ‘talking past each other’ - both coming from positions that were similar but fundamentally irreconcilable. I feel that this ‘talking past’ one another evinces a subtle but profound problem/atic. For, in your own theorisations of ‘argumentation’ and

‘persuasion’ you speak of the force of ‘cancelling out’ which is attendant to ‘persuasion’; the role of identification in decision; and the aspect of ‘allegiance’ in agreement. Derrida, too, has indicated the role played by opening a relation of friendship, and the structuring effect that this has on ‘preferring’ and choosing ‘references’15 - in short, in determining the character of the ‘knowledge’ of and between friends. What are the ‘references’ that you and Rorty have in common which open the possibility of communication; and what, also, are the differences in ‘preference’ between yourself and Rorty which only make themselves felt in the silences, the impasses, and the ‘talking past each other’ in your argumentative or theoretical positions? What would it mean for you to persuade Rorty (or anyone else, for that matter) of the truth or value of your point of view - or vice versa? Laclau. I think that you are right as far as persuasion is concerned. But let me say, to start with, that my exchanges with Rorty are not like ships passing each other in the night. I think that we understand each other perfectly well, and that there are several areas in which we certainly either agree or at least find a common ground for discussion. But there are other aspects in which no agreement is possible and in which I know that we will never be able to convince each other. He thinks that the whole project of philosophy is doomed and has to be dropped. Now I would have to agree with him if by philosophy we understood an invulnerable theoretical whole unified around the metaphysics of presence, a locus of truth radically separated from the languages of everyday life. But for me philosophy is not that: it is not a self-referential discourse, closed around its own coherence, for the simple reason that such a coherence is unachievable. Philosophical categories are traversed by all kinds of aporias, and it is through their ideal of scientificity and systematicity that they attempt to conceal the rhetorical operations which provide them with a coherence they lack. Revealing this rhetorical infrastructure is what is involved in approaching the philosophical tradition deconstructively. But it is important to realise that this rhetorical grounding is not only characteristic of philosophical discourse but of

any discourse, even the everyday common sense discourses to which Rorty appeals. Whether this deconstructive intervention is philosophical, it is something we can argue about - but it is, in any case, theoretical, and I cannot be persuaded by Rorty’s dismissal of it as useless (among other things because Rorty himself engages in it much more than he is prepared to concede). With this I come back to your more general point concerning persuasion. To persuade somebody of something is to have him or her accept a viewpoint for less than algorithmic reasons. What could these reasons be? The list is neverending, but let me give you a few examples: because people perceive their limitations and need to trust somebody who occupies a role similar to what Lacan used to call ‘the subject supposed to know’; because current views are unable to deal with new problems and a new view is expressed which, although it has not fully proved its correctness, is at least the only one which addresses those problems; because in a situation of generalised disorder people need an order, whatever it is, and a certain political or social alternative convinces people that it is the most likely candidate to bring it about, etc. As you know, rhetoric as a theory of argumentation has dealt for centuries with the question of the non-rational ways of generating conviction.

11. the poetics of logic Bowman. You use the word ‘logic’ an awful lot, and in an immense array of contexts. Does its meaning remain constant throughout all the instances of its application, in terms of the social, the subject, hegemony, the political, the decision, and so on? Is the appeal to logic an appeal to a Derridean ‘quasilogic’, like that of spectrality? Would you like to comment on your recourse to and privileging of this term so much in your work; for it seems to me that your deconstructive supercession of the ‘logic’ of identity and non-contradiction would appear to rob the term ‘logic’ of some of its force, requiring instead that

in a structured undecidable terrain, we should be thinking not through ‘logic’, but through figures, tropes, and metaphors, which are acknowledged for what they are? Do you agree that there is an ambiguity in ‘logic’ as you use it, in terms of the constantly transforming articulations which populate the discursive terrain/s? Is there an ambiguity at least in so far as the ‘logic’ you rely on might more radically be conceived of as ‘poetic’? Laclau. As you no doubt realise, by logic I do not mean formal logic, not even dialectical logic, which, in spite of its widening effects, operates at the same level of generality as the former. By logic I understand something close to its meaning when we speak, for instance, of the logic of kinship, the logic of the market, juridic logic, etc. It means that there is a special grammar governing each sphere of human activity: it determines the objects which it is possible to constitute within that sphere, the relations which are possible between those objects, etc. These are regional logics which, as such, are part of what Lacan would have called the ‘Symbolic’. But, you reasonably ask, does not the deconstructive supersession of the identitarian logic rob the term ‘logic’ of some of its force? If the symbolic logic was the only thing there is, your objection would be a pertinent one; but there is more, and this more is the crucial aspect as far as ‘logic’ is concerned. If we speak about the operation of the unconscious, we are no longer speaking about a regional logic but about something universally present, which systematically distorts the workings of the symbolic order. The crucial point is that this distortion is not a random phenomenon but an orderly drifting away: it has itself its own logic. Freud conceived psychoanalytic theory as systematically establishing the grammar of this drifting away. In the case of dreams, for instance, it operated through condensation and displacement. (This shows the absurdity of opposing the use of psychoanalytic categories in social and political analysis on the basis that the latter refer to the social and the former to the individual - this is tantamount to saying that the unconscious is a regional

category). The deconstructive movements - the quasi-transcendentals of Derrida to which we referred earlier - are also orderly forms (logics) of the drifting away from a fully identitarian logic. And the tropological movements to which you refer are another vocabulary describing the same kind of generalised logic. So I would not be against calling ‘poetics’ the ensemble of movements governing this logic of the drifting away, as far as we are clear that we are speaking of a universal logic, not a regional one. To the same order of generality belongs the logic that I call ‘hegemonic’. Its two main movements I have called ‘difference’ and ‘equivalence’ (these are, of course, only basic distinctions whose subdivisions would embrace the whole field of the political tropoi). This generalisation to the whole of society of the movements governing the political field shows that they are not regional movements but, on the contrary, pervade the ensemble of social (symbolic) relations - as far as the latter are unable to fully suture themselves, to symbolise within their differential systems a real always exceeding them.

13. antagonism and aporia Bowman. Are ‘antagonism’ and ‘aporia’ related? Laclau. I think that the categories of ‘aporia’ and ‘antagonism’ should be carefully distinguished from a conceptual point of view. Aporia refers to a difficulty emerging within a formalised system, which the system cannot solve with its own conceptual resources. Zeno’s paradoxes are examples of aporia. Or Russell’s paradox that I mentioned earlier. Antagonism, on the contrary, refers to an exterior with no common measure with the interior, not to something emerging from the internal paradoxes or contradictions of the interior - it involves, in that sense, a negativity which is not dialectizable. Contingency is, in that sense, a constitutive of antagonism as far as it remains an antagonism. The

problem that remains is, of course, to what extent an antagonistic force cannot become the dialectical other, the constitutive outside of its opponent and, in that way, reach a certain interiority through a dialectical retrieval. This possibility is, of course, always there, and there is nothing that guarantees, in the concept of antagonism as such, that it will remain attached to particular social forces as loci of contingency and dislocation. This is the complex dialectic between ‘antagonism’ and ‘dislocation’ that I have tried to explore in my recent work. Two points, however, should be made. The first, that as no dialectical retrieval takes place at the level of an impossible ‘ground’ of the social, the dimension of dislocation and contingency cannot be entirely eliminated. The second, that as nothing ensures that partial ‘dialectical’ retrievals will not operate within the social, the points within the social fabric in which dislocation and contingency ‘presentify’ themselves, will be in a constant process of displacement. As is evident from what I am saying, nothing requires that aporias should be the natural places of construction of dislocatory-antagonistic frontiers. But, of course, nothing prevents either this becoming factually the case.

14. polemics: against... Bowman. What do you make of the current state of writing within critical theory and political philosophy today? Laclau. I do not understand quite what you mean by ‘critical theory’ in this context, but let us suppose that you are referring to Left wing, progressive approaches. From that point of view, I would like to make reference to two main debates which have been at the centre of recent developments in Political Philosophy. The first is the polemic between ‘universalists’ and ‘particularists’; the second, between liberals and communitarians. As far as the first debate is concerned, the universalist position has been defended by the Habermasians,

whose model,

centred around the regulative ideal of an unbroken

communication, aims at relaunching the project of the Enlightenment. The particularist camp embraces a plurality of tendencies from Lyotard to various shades of postmodernism and multiculturalism. In my recent work I have followed a course which attempts to go beyond the two poles of that opposition. Against pure particularism, I argue that in the defence of even the most particular of groups, an appeal to the universal is unavoidable. If I speak about the rights of minorities to self-determination, what is that right but a universal principle? On the other hand, that universal is not something which has a predetermined content, but an empty signifier, variously filled by the chains of equivalence which coalesce around it. This mutual contamination between the universal and the particular is the real terrain of negotiation and elaboration of the political link. Gramsci’s distinction between ‘corporative’ and ‘hegemonic’ class is a useful starting point in dealing with this matter, but one which has, obviously, to be radicalised and reformulated in terms of the conditions prevailing in the contemporary world. The second debate confronts us with comparable alternatives. For the communitarians (Sandel, McIntyre, Taylor, etc.), the community is the source of any right; and strong communitarian allegiances, the origin of any identity. For the liberals - mainly represented by John Rawls but also by a wider range of thinkers (let’s just think of Isaiah Berlin’s classical opposition between positive and negative liberty) - the right has priority over the good. For Rawls, in the ‘original position’, a rational being determines the conditions of any just community. I certainly disagree with the notion of a rationality establishing normative principles behind a ‘veil of ignorance’, but I think also that the liberals are pointing to a problem for which the communitarians do not really have any solution: what happens if the identities of the social actors do not overlap with the limits of the community, if different communities have to coexist within the same social space? Here the notion of a language of rights independent of particular communitarian belongings plays a central role, having

effects at the level of structuration of the larger communitarian space. I do not think that between right and good one can establish a theoretically specifiable adjustment. Rights and good are ultimately incompatible but, however, also necessary to constitute a wide and plural communitarian space. The negotiation of this incompatibility is, consequently, a politico-hegemonic one.

15. reflections on intentions Bowman. It is now almost fifteen years since Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was first published. How do you view its effect on the academic disciplines which have taken it into consideration? What ‘kind’ of academics were you trying to talk to in that book, and what do you make of its incorporation into disciplines such as cultural and even literary studies? Laclau. When we were writing Hegemony, we were not thinking of a particularly academic audience but, rather, of an intellectual Marxist or Marxisant Left which was still very much alive in those years. You must remember that when we started writing the book in the early 80s, the Eurocommunist experience was still not dead, Marxist intellectuals à la New Left Review still meant a lot and, through political initiatives such as Marxism Today, bridges still existed between a political and an intellectual Left. Even in the highly theoreticist language of journals such as Theoretical Practice the militant tone was very much apparent. All that started to change in the second half of the 80s and especially after the collapse of Communism in 1989. By the beginning of the 90s Eurocommunism had disappeared, the crisis of Marxism was in full operation, the New Left of the 1960s and 70s had been replaced by a Newest Left grounded in the social movements and in identity politics and, as far as main stream politics is concerned, the gap between political (social-democratic) Left and intellectual

Left grew wider. As a result, the public which received the impact of our book was very different from the one we had in mind when we wrote it. In the 1980s the classical Left reacted ambiguously to our analyses: undisguised indignation is some quarters, uneasiness in others, firm support in those searching for a renewal. In the 1990s the reception was different: the various movements of the Newest Left were very supportive of our approach and took our analyses for granted (the world, after 1989, had advanced a great deal in the direction we had foreseen) but were less interested in the Marxist pedigree of our findings, which a new academic Left showed an increasing interest in the strictly theoretical aspects of our thought (theory of discourse, of the subject, of antagonism, etc.). As a result, our work was extensively commented on by people interested in cultural and literary studies, psychoanalysis, philosophy and related disciplines. This, of course, concerns mainly the reception of the book in the Anglo-Saxon world. In other areas - such as Latin America or South Africa - where it was also widely read and commented on, the split between its theoretical and its political influence was less.

16. polemics: the necessity of confrontation Bowman. Because this is a special issue of parallax, dealing with polemic in all its aspects, I must ask: is there anyone or any genre, style or school of study within the field of political, ideological, discourse, or textual (etc.) scholarship that you feel hostile towards, or which you tire of hearing about? If there is such a thorn in your side, would you like to take this opportunity to make your case against it? Do you think that academic positions with which you disagree were/are in any way a generative or productive influence on you own thinking and constitution of your own position? That is to say, do you agree with the Hegelian master/slave dialectic, as it has been described by the likes of Zizek?16 Or, in terms of the more recent work of Derrida, do you have any ‘enemies’ that you ‘need’,17 that have helped you develop academically, thanks

to the polemical articulation of your and ‘their’ position? - On a related note: do you perceive any theoretical or academic positions which have become constituted or consolidated as a result of a ‘hostility’ to your own work? If so, what do you make of these developments? Laclau. As Gramsci used to say, one always needs the stimulus of some confrontation to develop one’s own thought. When I was a young man, in Argentina, it was the confrontation between a liberal and a national Left (I belonged to the latter) which helped me to shape my initial political outlook. Later on, it was the conflict with a humanistic Marxism which enabled me to develop my own theoretical approach, which at the beginning was strongly influenced by Althusserianism. In the 1980s it was the conflict between Marxist essentialism and what we used to call ‘post-Marxism’. Lately, it is the need to present an alternative to the Habermasian school which has been at the centre of my theoretical preoccupations. Habermas addresses all the important issues of contemporary theory and politics, but gives them answers which are, to a large extent, the antipodes of those for which I am searching (although he has lately softened his initial positions considerably). Regarding your last question, my work has received support from many quarters and has also provoked virulent, even vicious criticism - but, as far as I know, nobody has defined his or her theoretical identity through hostility towards my positions.

Ernesto Laclau is Professor of Politics and Director of the Doctoral Programme in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex. He will be Visiting Professor of Critical Studies at the University of California, Irvine, in autumn 1999. In addition to numerous articles and interviews, he is the author of Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (1977), New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (1990), and Emancipation(s) (1996), co-author, with

Chantal Mouffe, of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), the editor of The Making of Political Identities (1994), and co-editor, with Chantal Mouffe, of Phronesis, a series of books from Verso.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985). Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994), p.180, note 31.

Slavoj Zizek, ‘Beyond Discourse Analysis’ in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, ed. E. Laclau (London: Verso, 1990), p.249.
3 4

The wording, at the very least, of this question is directly indebted to the argument of John Mowitt in the introduction of Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object (London: Duke, 1992), specifically p.17. Ernesto Laclau, ed., The Making of Political Identities (London: Verso, 1994).

Jacques Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism’, deconstruction and pragmatism, p.83.

7i.e.

‘The [hegemonic] fratriarchy may include cousins and sisters, but... including may also come to mean neutralising... forgetting, for example, with ‘the best of all intentions’, that the sister will never provide a docile example for the concept of fraternity. This is why the concept must be rendered docile, and there we have the whole of political education’, Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1997), viii. I had suggested that Derrida’s thinking of friendship might now problematise somewhat Laclau’s assertions in his essay on Richard Rorty’s ‘Liberal Utopia’ in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), p.105 ff., and Laclau’s identification of the presence of the element of force in persuasion, citing passages on p.112, and pp.116-7.

Laclau, ‘Undecidability and Power’ at the conference, ‘Politics, Friendship and ‘Democracy to come’: Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship’ (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, November 1997). See the conference report in parallax 8 (Vol. 4, No 3, July-September 1998), p.159.
9 10Laclau, 11

Emancipation(s), p.116.

Thanks to Ray Guins for the phrase ‘poor man’s deconstruction’, used to characterize a position I once held regarding Rorty’s work.

12Paul

Bowman, ‘Deconstructing Pragmatism: A War of Position’, parallax 9, neopragmatism and new romanticisms, eds. O. Cruz and R. Guins (Vol. 2, No. 4, October 1998), pp.144-45. Laclau, New Reflections, p.208.

This question was given to me by Professor John Mowitt, whom I would like to thank now. Ernesto Laclau was aware of this contribution from Professor Mowitt. The allusion here is to the thrust of the argument in chapter one of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. See, for instance, Zizek’s ‘Beyond Discourse Analysis’ in Laclau’s New Reflections.

Again, the allusion is to Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, specifically his discussion of Nietzsche in chapter 2.

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