> > Well, PTNR passed. What next?
>> Doug
>
>Read Zizek... Michael Hoover
Someday I'll figure out what psychological role SZ plays for some people. In the meanwhile, atriple treat for all you fans out there - about to hit the stores from Verso: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by the power trio Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek. Here's the intro...
Doug
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Introduction
The three of us conferred for a few years on how to put together a volume that seeks both to establish the common trajectory of our thought and to stage in a productive way the different intellectual commitments that we have. We started this process by producing the three questionnaires which appear at the beginning of the volume. The result that you have before you thus represents the culmination of several conversations, of several written reviews and exchanges, and, in the case of Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau, a collaboration that dates back to 1985, the year that Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau published Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. In fact, that book provides the background for this dialogue, not only because it established a new direction to Antonio Gramsci's notion of hegemony, but also because it represented a turn to poststructuralist theory within Marxism, one that took the problem of language to be essential to the formulation of an anti-totalitarian, radical democratic project.
There are arguments in that book which are reconsidered through different theoretical tenses in the present one, and there are also arguments made against that text which are implicitly taken up in the written exchange that follows. One argument in the book took the following form: new social movements often rely on identity-claims, but 'identity' itself is never fully constituted; in fact, since identification is not reducible to identity, it is important to consider the incommensurability or gap between them. It does not follow that the failure of identity to achieve complete determination undermines the social movements at issue; on the contrary, that incompleteness is essential to the project of hegemony itself No social movement can, 'in fact, enjoy its status as an open-ended, democratic political articulation without presuming and operationalizing the negativity at the heart of identity.
The theoretical category which attempted to understand this failure, negativity, gap or incompleteness was that of 'antagonism' as formulated in that earlier work. Subsequently Laclau, who continues to situate himself in the Gramscian tradition, elaborated the category of 'dislocation', drawing his tools from an intellectual spectrum from Derrida and Lacan to Wittgenstein. Whereas Zizek most emphatically makes use of Lacanian theory to address this issue, especially through recourse to ,the Real', he also makes use of Hegel, and offers reasons for eschewing the Derridan framework. Butler may be said to make use of a different Hegel, emphasizing the possibilities of negation in his work, along with Foucault and some Derrida, to consider what remains unrealizable in the discursive constitution of the subject.
There are significant differences among us on the question of the ,subject', and this comes through as we each attempt to take account of what constitutes or conditions the failure of any claim to identity to achieve final or full determination. What remains true, however, is that we each value this 'failure' as a condition of democratic contestation itself. Where we differ is how to conceive of the subject - whether it is foundational, Cartesian; whether it is structured by sexual difference, and through what means the definition of that sexual difference is secured. We also disagree on whether to understand the failure of identity as a structural or necessary feature of all identity-constitution, and how to take account of that structure and necessity. Whereas Butler is aligned with a historically variable account of subject-constitution (a Foucauldian fine), Zizek bases his claims about the founding negativity of identity in the work of Lacan and Laclau in an approach which, without being strictly Lacanian, has several points of convergence with the Lacanian Real.
One of the arguments made against Hegemony and Socialist Strategy - and, indeed, against structuralist and poststructuralist interventions in political theory - is that it either fails to take account of the concept of universality or erodes its force by questioning its foundational status. All three of us, however, maintain that universality is not a static presumption, not an a priori given, and that it ought instead to be understood as a process or condition irreducible to any of its determinate modes of appearance. Whereas we sometimes differ on how the emphasis is to be made, we each offer accounts of universality which assume that the negative condition of all political articulation is 'universal' (Zizek), that the contestatory process determines forms of universality which are brought into a productive and ultimately irresolvable conflict with each other (Laclau), or that there is a process of translation by which the repudiated within universality is readmitted into the term in the process of remaking it (Butler).
Along the way, we each consider different ideological deployments of universality, and caution against both substantial and procedural approaches to the question. We thus differentiate ourselves (already internally differentiated) from the Habermasian effort to discover or conjure a preestablished universality as the presupposition of the speech act, a universality which is said to pertain to a rational feature of 'man', a substantive conception of universality which equates it with a knowable and predictable determination, and a procedural form which presumes that the political field is constituted by rational actors.
Of importance throughout these essays is the strategic question of hegemony: of how the political field is constituted, of what possibilities emerge from an approach to the political field that inquires into conditions of its possibility and articulation. Significantly, Laclau detects a movement of Marxist theory from the postulation of a 'universal class' which would ultimately eliminate political mediation and relations of representation, to a 'hegemonic' universality which makes the political constitutive of the social link. The poststructuralism of his approach is thus aligned with the critique of totalitarianism and, specifically, the trope of a 'knowing' vanguard subject who 'is' all the social relations he articulates and mobilizes. Whereas Laclau associates Hegel with the metaphysics of closure, Zizek understands him as a theorist of reflexivity in confrontation with the Real, and Butler makes use of him to inquire into the necessary limits of formalism in any account of sociality. Laclau makes clear the anti-totalitarianism of a logical and linguistic approach to the problem of representation that insists upon the irreducibility of difference. Zizek reminds us that global capital cannot be excluded from the 'postmodern' analysis of language and culture, and continues to expose the obscene underside of power. Butler raises the question of how new social movements rearticulate the problem of hegemony, considering the challenge of recent sexual politics to the theory of sexual difference, and proposes a counter-imperialist conception of translation.
We are all three committed to radical forms of democracy that seek to understand the processes of representation by which political articulation proceeds, the problem of identification - and its necessary failures - by which political mobilization takes place, the question of the future as it emerges for theoretical frameworks that insist upon the productive force of the negative. Although we do not self-consciously reflect upon the place of the intellectual on the Left, perhaps this text will operate as a certain kind of placement, one that recasts (and retrieves) philosophy as a critical mode of inquiry that belongs - antagonistically - to the sphere of politics.
During the course of our debates, we quote extensively from one another's contributions. Such cross-references are identified by the writer's initials, followed by the relevant page number.
This volume was written mainly in the spring and summer of 1999, coordinated by editors Jane Hindle and Sebastian Budgen at Verso. We have them to thank for keeping us on track. Judith Butler also thanks Stuart Murray for his indispensable assistance with the manuscript.
- J.B., E.L., S.Z., September 1999