Abstract
Ernesto Laclau introduced the category of heterogeneity into his theory of hegemony in the late 1990s. He did so as a way to capture the limits of representation, and the argument was fully developed in On Populist Reason in 2005. The chapter argues that heterogeneity should be a central category of hegemony and discourse analysis, and that antagonism can be seen as a strategy of ideological closure that suppresses heterogeneity. I show the limitations of Laclau’s concept of antagonism, and how antagonism must be relativized. I then turn to examine the concept of heterogeneity. I end by discussing the usefulness of the category of heterogeneity in the wider context of how to do discourse theory and how to conceptualize the limits of representation.
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At times, Laclau and his commentators continued to treat antagonism as the limit of objectivity (e.g., Laclau 2000a, b, c: 72, 77). Dislocation may also be said to be a discursive construction because it depends on the discursive construction of what is dislocated and of what dislocates (cf. Dyrberg 1997: 146–8; Laclau 2004: 319). In NRT, Laclau (1990a: 17f., 172f.) introduced the deconstructive notion of ‘constitutive outside’ from Henry Staten (1984: 16–18, 24), which could be another name for dislocation and heterogeneity. On Staten’s and Laclau’s uses of this notion, see Thomassen (2005b).
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In addition to these things, Bataille (1997: 126–8) refers to the unconscious, the sacred and affect.
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Thomassen, L. (2019). Discourse and Heterogeneity. In: Marttila, T. (eds) Discourse, Culture and Organization. Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94123-3_3
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