Against Antagonism:On Ernesto Laclau's Political Thought

Those with a taste for etymology can already make out the main lines of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony in the Greek roots of hegemony , antagonism, and agent .1 The first derives from hegeisthai , to lead, while the second and third each derive from agon, struggle, gathering, contest, itself from agein, to lead. To be an agent, then, is to be successful in the agonand thereby assume a position of leadership. By way of contrast, to be a subject with an identity, as the Latin roots subicereand idemsuggest, is to be brought under and equated with such authority. Political activity in particular entails a series of identifications in the course of which we shift back and forth interminably between passive subjection and creative agency, and in which this creative activity is never entirely free of this passivity. The politics of identity is a politics of movements rather than states, and, paceKant, autonomous movement is only possible in the context of heteronomy. The specific form all of this takes in Laclau’s work is largely a result of his marriage of poststructuralism and Marxism. This is a union most often attempted by those working within the former camp, one effect of which is that the political philosophy that results tends to be more philosophical than political. As Laclau’s work in contrast represents a turn to poststructuralist theory from within Marxism, it promises to speak more directly to political activity than to textual exegesis. Laclau turns to poststructuralism in search of a model of identity that will allow him to apply Gramsci’s theory of the hegemonic “war of position” in a political universe in which identity politics has for many replaced class struggle. The concept of antagonism is the lynchpin here and the central concept in Laclau’s political theory of hegemony: “The moment of antagonism where the undecidable nature of the alternatives and their resolution through power relations becomes fully visible constitutes the field of the ‘political.’” “Antagonism has a revelatory function, in that it shows the ultimately contingent nature of all identity,” thereby enacting the ontological critique of the subject associated with poststructuralism. 2