This article defends Ernesto Laclau against the charge that his work, manifested most clearly in On Populist Reason, affirms an authoritarian politics to account for the genesis of collective identity. To outline this, I read Laclau’s thought through three logics – termed the logics of universal imposition, negation, and symbolic mediation – to argue that he rejects the first but adopts the latter two, with the logic of symbolic mediation being particularly important. Rather than unity resulting when distinct groups agree (...) over a positive meaning of a signifier or when it is imposed on them by an authoritarian leader, Laclau claims that unity depends upon the existence of empty signifiers that lack substantial meaning. Engaging with the structure and functioning of this lack, I utilize Laclau’s notion of ‘constitutive distortion’ to highlight an often overlooked structural component of his account that I call ‘misunderstanding’. Rather than a negative occurrence, misunderstanding is a fundamental and positive condition of collective identity because it permits the various groups to affirm different, even contradictory, positions regarding the meaning of empty signifiers, all the while binding each group into a collective identity. This misunderstanding, which must remain hidden from the participants of the collective identity, is a fundamental condition of the process through which collective identity is created and sustained because it permits the various groups to believe that they share a collective identity while maintaining the heterogeneity that is necessary, on Laclau's telling, for the continued existence of the collective. (shrink)

Both Judith Butler and Chantal Mouffe challenge liberal conceptions of politics based on their ontological descriptions of the political. Mouffe argues that the failure of liberalism to grasp the agonistic character of political life means that properly political conflicts get translated into moral terms. Mouffe thinks that the way to correct our “post-political” problems is to avoid translating political conflicts into a moral register. I challenge Mouffe’s separation of ethics and politics by invoking Butler’s more nuanced account of the ethical (...) sphere. I demonstrate that Mouffe does not consider that there are different orders of moral claims ; nor does Mouffe consider that there are different orders of affect, some of which cannot be simply opposed to rationality. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to show that the contradiction between dialogue and antagonism can be overcome with the help of the idea of dialogue as developed by the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin. The lack of such theory led to the rejection of liberalism or to the introduction of dialogical principle into the body of liberal politics. It was Jürgen Habermas who first understood the necessity of dialogical consensus as the basis of liberal democracy. On the other hand, Ernesto (...) Laclau and Chantal Mouffe developed the concept of agonistic democracy, claiming that conflict is inevitable in liberal democracy because consensual relations cannot harmonize contradictory political identities. The second part of the article is the elaboration of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogue and its relevance for political theory. The main point is that dialogue leads to better understanding but not necessarily to consensus. If this is so, then both conceptions of the political are moments in never-ending dialogical relations. The significance of Bakhtin’s idea of dialogue for political theory consists thus in the recognition of the inevitable dialogical nature of society. However, this dialogical concept also has a normative character. Society has to find a balance between two extremes: excessive dialogue, which leads to anarchy, and the lack of dialogue, which leads to totalitarianism. (shrink)

The article revisits the theory of hegemony of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and shows how a normative injunction, which according to Laclau is not compatible with the hegemonic logic, is not only possible but a necessary condition for hegemony to function. The article claims that the path to demonstrate this involves rethinking the relationship between the theory of hegemony and Derridean deconstruction. Following criticisms that the theory of hegemony overlooks the aporetic nature of Derridean undecidability that it nevertheless relies (...) upon, the hegemonic logic is submitted to a deconstructive reading, which reveals an internal aporia in it. It is further argued that the unaccounted aporia in the logic of hegemony explains the theory’s inability to satisfactorily account for its essential theoretical underpinning, the radical exclusion. However, the article also demonstrates that the aporia does not destroy hegemonic logic but, instead, supplements it by a normative dimension, by a demand of opening to the other as other. (shrink)

This article explores the possibility of a notion of left-wing populism that is conceptually opposed to the identitarian logic of embodiment that characterises right-populist interpellations of ‘th...

This paper will address the question of the morality of technology. I believe this is an important question for our contemporary society in which technology, especially information technology, is increasingly becoming the default mode of social ordering. I want to suggest that the conventional manner of conceptualising the morality of technology is inadequate – even dangerous. The conventional view of technology is that technology represents technical means to achieve social ends. Thus, the moral problem of technology, from this perspective, is (...) the way in which the given technical means are applied to particular (good or bad) social ends. In opposition to this I want to suggest that the assumed separation, of this approach, between technical means and social ends are inappropriate. It only serves to hide the most important political and ethical dimensions of technology. I want to suggest that the morality of technology is much more embedded and implicit than such a view would suggest. In order to critique this approach I will draw on phenomenology and the more recent work of Bruno Latour. With these intellectual resources in mind I will propose disclosive ethics as a way to make the morality of technology visible. I will give a brief account of this approach and show how it might guide our␣understanding of the ethics and politics of technology by considering two examples of contemporary information technology: search engines and plagiarism detection systems. (shrink)

Contemporary education policy discourse in the United States views teaching as the primary instrument to effect student achievement, and teachers are responding by leaving the profession and discouraging students from becoming teachers. While teaching is more commonly associated with hope, I argue that the growing dissatisfaction of teachers with their profession can be understood through despair as an ethical act. Rather than disavow the role of despair in teaching and education more broadly, the critical and provocative roles of despair are (...) emphasised here as an ethical response to a normative order of effective teaching. These roles are expressed through the question of why bother. Understanding why bother teaching as an ethical question that arises from despair serves to critique the present and provoke movement without yet projecting a future. Thus, this paper traces the ways the ethical negates a normative order to arrive at a teaching that does not follow from instrumental logic in service of a future goal, aim, or objective. This leads to a consideration of the risks involved in despairing the ethical, which I describe as a practice for which risk cannot be managed or minimised while remaining ethical. (shrink)

Ernesto Laclau’s Marxist and post-Marxist works are best understood when they are embedded in the history of Argentina’s National Left. This socialist-populist current underpinned his strategic horizons onward of at least 1963. While purely theoretical interpretations of Laclau can sometimes be enlightening, they tend to lose sight of the historical density of the Argentine’s thought. Over the course of his working life, Laclau’s theories presented the Argentinean Left with a challenge concerning how to engage with Peronism: specifically, how to develop (...) a leftist hegemonic project in an era when the working class remained stubbornly linked to a Peronist political identity. Laclau’s political trajectory and his understanding of Marxism are analysed here in order to explain the nature of his post-Marxism. (shrink)

The non-credit bearing and ongoing education and development of mid- to late-career corporate executives is known by the compound term executive education. Reductively stated, executive education, for its corporate consumers and its business school providers, is predicated on the relationship between an order and its execution ; a relationship I call the “order-execution cognate”. With the word execution derived from Greek for sequence, and with the sequence of an execution following-on from its corresponding order, sequentiality is the essence of execution, (...) and the cognate. Executive education involves the amelioration of this order-execution cognate, to the ends of increased profits and competitiveness for the corporation concerned, and increased career prospects for the individual executive. Concerning sequentiality, and as a thesis on the philosophy of executive education, I apply a strand of ontological reflection to examine this cognate, namely philosophy concerning time and temporal succession. To aid in this task I use the English translations of writings on time by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Emerging from Heidegger’s thought are two temporal types that acknowledge and critique temporal succession; chronological time and Kairotic time respectively. By associating Heidegger’s philosophic method with that of early German Romantic philosophy, I articulate how it is possible to reconceive the temporal sequence of the order-execution cognate as a productive oscillation between chronic and Kairotic time; I call this oscillation “ironic temporality,” and its productivity “ironic productivity”. My philosophical analysis of commercially lucrative and neoliberal executive education is at odds with traditional knowledge-based analyses, affording a critique of the capitalist order which the educative event serves. Disrupting temporal notions of that event then becomes a dangerous political act; becomes the means to frame the educative event for the management of our age; and becomes the new orders for executive education. (shrink)