Politics and the unconscious – An interview with Laclau

Interview

Politics and the unconscious – Aninterview with Ernesto Laclau

Jason Glynosa and Yannis Stavrakakisb,*aDepartment of Government, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.

bSchool of Political Sciences, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.E-mail: [email protected]

*Corresponding author.

Subjectivity (2010) 3, 231–244. doi:10.1057/sub.2010.12

Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Politics

Ernesto, you have often stated that the focus of your work is primarily

theoretical, contributing specifically to what you call a ‘political ontology’.

It is also clear, however, that you don’t view doing theory as a purely

speculative enterprise. This is evident, for example, in your claim that

theoretical work ought to be informed by the experience we derive in our

concrete practices and case studies.

In this context it may be helpful, by way of introduction, to get an initial

reaction from you to a set of preliminary questions. To start with, how

would you relate your current research to the present historical conjuncture,

a conjuncture marked by the emerging dominance of Hugo Chavez in

S. America, the election of Barack Obama in the United States, the global

financial crisis and economic recession, the urgency of avoiding the fate of

(or adapting to) global warming? You have remarked how your involvement

in 1960s Argentinian politics presented you with your first lessons in

poststructuralism (see the series of interviews included in Laclau, 1990). We

wonder what theoretical lessons you think we can draw from the current

conjuncture.

EL: I think that the present conjuncture – which is more than a conjuncture,

it marks the transition to an entirely new historical period – is characterized,

first of all, by the crisis of the neo-liberal model of world economic order,

which dominated during the 1980s and 1990s, and was epitomized by the

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so-called Washington consensus. It is clear that we are advancing towards

a different world order, a multi-polar one, in which new actors will occupy

a central role in the historical arena. In the next 20 years we are going to see the

access – already visible in its initial stages – of countries such as China, India

and Brazil to the status of world powers. It is in that context that we have to

assess the Obama phenomenon in the United States, emerging from the ashes

left over by the Bush years.

It is not very clear how we are going to get out of this world economic mess,

but we know very well how we got into it, namely, as a result of the politics of

de-regulation, which was at the core of the neo-liberal project and which led us

to the edge of a catastrophe. As for Latin America, the main countries of the

continent are reacting against neo-liberalism and de-regulation and are

developing models of growth in which state intervention plays a much more

significant role. This can be seen not only in the Venezuela of Chavez, but also

in the Brazil of Lula, in the Argentina of the Kirchners, the Bolivia of Evo

Morales and the Ecuador of Correa. The defeat of the US Latin American

politics was already visible in the meeting of American presidents in Mar del

Plata (Argentina) a few years ago, in which the Bush proposal of constituting

a unified economic space covering both North and South America was defeated

following the opposition of the main Latin American countries.

What are the theoretical consequences that one can derive from these new

developments? There are many, but perhaps the most important one is that the

idea of the economy as a unified space, dominated by its own endogenous logic,

has experienced an ultimate collapse, which is now more visible than ever

before.

What do you consider to be the central appeal of psychoanalysis when

addressing these sorts of issues? In particular, what significance do you attach to

the category of ‘the unconscious’ in thinking about the ‘hurly-burly’ of social

and political practice, but also for contemporary political theory and analysis?

For example, at an initial and quite general level we wonder how you would

relate the concept of the unconscious to the domain of political ontology

generally, and to the category of hegemony more specifically?

EL: I have already spoken in extenso about this issue throughout my work,

and I don’t think it would make much sense regurgitating here what everybody

knows are my thoughts about it. However, I would like to add one important

thing: for me, the unconscious is neither a set of underlying categories entering

into various combinatorial arrangements – a la Levi-Strauss – nor does it

refer to the pre-existing symbolic forms of a ‘collective unconscious’ – a la Jung.

It is always the result of a process of overdetermination, as Freud already

knew. This process has its own internal laws, but they do not lead back to

any a priori fixed meanings, to any predetermined origins. On the contrary,

the formation of relatively stable configurations of meaning is always the

Glynos and Stavrakakis

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result of partial fixations, constituting in each case a unique trajectory. This

applies to both individual and collective processes. In politics, for example,

the constitution of a ‘hegemonic formation’ depends entirely on a contingent

fixation – through overdetermination – which assigns to particular signifiers

a central role in structuring a discursive field. This is the reason why I see

a clear link between the theory of hegemony and psychoanalytic theory,

located in the central role of overdetermination in both psychic and collective

processes.

Of course, the idea that there are things which escape conscious thought

and control is something that has been around for a long time and there

have been many attempts in the past as well as the present to record and

better understand such phenomena. Can you say a few more words about

why you appeal to a specifically psychoanalytic understanding of such

phenomena, and why you appeal to a Freudo-Lacanian strand of this tradition

in particular?

EL: You have, indeed, many competitors to the Freudian/Lacanian theory of

the unconscious. There are, on the one hand, those theories that reduce the

unconscious to a residue of irrationality – as rational-choice theories do; and, on

the other hand, all those that attempt to delineate a strict, syntagmatic grammar

of the workings of the unconscious. I have mentioned only two examples but,

obviously, many others could be brought to the fore.

Why have I adopted in my work a Freudian/Lacanian approach rather than

any of the other available alternatives? For a start, this is a decision clearly

related to my attempt to break with essentialism, which, in the political field,

conceives politics as an epiphenomenon or a superstructure, as the mere

phenomenal expression of some underlying structure or laws – the latter being

either the mode of production (in a traditional leftist discourse), globalization

(in a neo-liberal discourse), or anything else capable of playing this role.

In opposition to all such essentialisms, the core of my philosophical project

consisted in asserting the centrality of the political moment in the constitution

of the social and, as a result, in highlighting the constitutive character – in the

transcendental sense of the term – of the category of antagonism. And this

applies to the economic level of society as well as to any other level. Thus,

the notion of ‘hegemonic formation’ tends, in my analysis, to take the central

role previously occupied by the category of ‘mode of production’. From this

point of view, the Freudian approach, together with its Lacanian reformulation,

provided crucial tools for the development of what I was trying to think at

the political level, from an anti-essentialist perspective: apart from the logic of

overdetermination, it highlighted the logic of the signifier, of the partial fixation

of meaning through the intervention of points de capiton – nodal points in the

vocabulary of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy – a whole ontology of lack and

desire, to name just a few.

An interview with Ernesto Laclau

233r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1755-6341 Subjectivity Vol. 3, 3, 231–244

Discourse and Affect

As you know, in the field of social and political analysis there have been recent

calls to refocus our attention on the affective dimension of discourse, fearing that

this dimension was too often eclipsed on account of the enthusiastic attention

paid to the symbolic dimension of discourse. Indeed, an increasingly prominent

theme in your own work concerns precisely the place of affect in discourse.

Of course, the place of affect in discourse is a theme that interested Lacan

too, even if his concern was primarily clinical, resulting in his theory of the four

discourses. In fact, this affective dimension and its relation to discourse can be

approached also from the point of view of the unconscious. ‘The unconscious is

structured like a language’ is one of Lacan’s well-known phrases, drawing

inspiration primarily from the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.

Not content, however, to remain at the level of structure or form, Lacan also

attributes to the unconscious a certain force, noting how it ‘insists’ through

a kind of ‘compulsion to repeat’.

Putting it in these terms, of course, allows us to draw out the resonances more

clearly with your own work, specifically on the respective roles you appear to

attribute to the disciplines of rhetoric and psychoanalysis. In The Laclau

Reader, for example, you acknowledge that ‘something of the order of

hegemony and rhetoric takes place which could not be explained without the

mediating role of affect’. In the same text you contrast the form of a discourse

with its force:

[W]hat rhetoric can explain is the form that an overdetermining

investment takes, but not the force that explains the investment as such

and its perdurability. Here something else has to be brought into the

picture. Any overdetermination requires not only metaphorical condensa-

tions but also cathectic investments. That is, something belonging to the

order of affect has a primary role in discursively constructing the social.

Freud already knew it: the social link is a libidinal link. And affect y is

not something added to signification, but something consubstantial with

it. So if I see rhetoric as ontologically primary in explaining the operations

inhering in and the forms taken by the hegemonic construction of society,

I see psychoanalysis as the only valid road to explain the drives behind

such construction – I see it, indeed, as the only fruitful approach to the

understanding of human reality. (Laclau, 2004, p: 326)

This passage appears to do several interesting things, among them to ascribe

ontological primacy to rhetoric, but also to suggest that the relationship

between affect and signification is not a simple additive one.

We wonder to what extent you would agree that there has been such a shift of

emphasis in social and political theory? And if so, what are the benefits and



drawbacks of such a shift? What do you think are the sorts of issues and

problems that it can help us address? Does such an analytical shift signal also a

more political and/or critical shift? How are all these developments registered in

your own work?

EL: Let me say, to start with, that I do not think there is such a shift from the

symbolic to the affective dimension of discourse in my work, because I do not

accept, in the first place, the separation between the two, which would be the

only terrain making such a shift intelligible. There is, of course, an extreme

structuralism for which only the symbolic counts, and for which this symbolic is

conceived as a ground whose laws are to be enacted in all factual instantiations.

But this is not the way in which the symbolic has been conceived in psycho-

analysis. Even Saussure made a distinction between the syntagmatic pole of

language, whose combinations could be sufficiently grasped by mere reference

to certain syntactic rules, and an associative (paradigmatic) pole, whose

substitutions are not governed by such rules. It is precisely in this world of

substitutions where the unconscious operates, and where the work of affect has

to be located. An extreme formalist such as Hjelmslev wanted to submit even

the paradigmatic pole of language to syntactic (that is, symbolic) rules; but his

attempt was less than successful.

So the work of the unconscious on affect has to be traced back to the

substitutions constituting the paradigmatic pole of language. The important

point is that without this paradigmatic pole there would be no language; so that

even the constitution of the symbolic as such requires the operation of affect and

the unconscious. Affect is not something external, added to the symbolic, but an

internal component of it. Affect is not some vague emotion external to

signification, for it can only constitute itself on the basis of overdetermining a

signifying chain. In the discourse of the ‘rat man’ that I mention in the text to

which you refer, the signifier ‘rat’ is so affectively overcharged because it evokes –

overdetermines – a plurality of currents of unconscious thoughts – money, sex,

the father, and so on. So if affect is an internal component of signification,

signification is also an internal component of affect. In that sense, I wouldn’t say

that there is a shift from emphasizing the symbolic dimension of discourse to a

new emphasis on its affective dimension. I would rather say that there is a shift

from emphasizing the syntagmatic/syntactic (as it happened during the heyday

of structuralism), to emphasizing the role of the paradigmatic dimension, and

that the necessary effect of this shift has been paying increasing attention to the

unconscious and the affective aspects of signification.

Famously, Jakobson sought to transform our understanding of rhetoric by

making the tropes of metaphor and metonymy foundational of all other tropes.

You have spoken about this yourself, especially in connection with the notion of

‘catachresis’. We would like to know how you would like to see the discipline of

rhetoric being used in social and political analysis. Do you see its role primarily



in terms of the array of rhetorical tropes it appears to furnish scholars?

If so, what role would you give particular tropes in the domain of critical

political analysis? The category of hegemony, for example, has sometimes been

thought in terms of metaphor, sometimes in terms of metonymy. What would

you say are the advantages and disadvantages of adopting one or the other

perspective, and, indeed, what other sorts of tropes might be brought to bear

in thinking about similar questions having to do with identity, democracy,

and so on?

EL: First of all, the centrality of rhetoric for social and political analysis

comes from the fact that social and political spaces are discursively construc-

ted, and that the rhetorical is inherent to discourse. You have mentioned

catachresis, and here I would like to add a qualification. Catachresis is not,

strictly speaking, a particular figure of language among many, but an index of

figurality as such. We have catachresis whenever we use a figural term, which

cannot be replaced by a literal one (as when we speak of ‘the leg of a table’).

Now, all figural expression adds some new meaning to what a literal term

(when it exists) is capable of expressing, so that any figure is, to some extent,

catachrestical.

As for the opposition metaphor/metonymy, which, as you have pointed out, is

central for Jakobson’s analysis, such a centrality results from the fact that the

distinction itself is anchored in language. Rhetoric, for Jakobson, is not, as it

had been for a long time, a heteroclite catalogue of figures, but reveals a basic

structure grounded in the opposition metaphor/metonymy. This basic distinc-

tion was, in turn, based on the structure of language, that is, the organization

around the two poles that we discussed earlier. So this same dichotomy is found

at different levels of human reality: at the level of language it refers to the

distinction between the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic poles; at the level of

rhetoric, to that between metonymy and metaphor; in psychoanalysis, it

corresponds to the duality displacement/condensation; and in politics, to that

between difference and equivalence.

It is because of this that hegemony, as the central category of political

analysis, has to take into account both the poles or dimensions we are talking

about. In my work I have attempted to show that in the socialist tradition

there have been cases of overemphasizing the metaphoric moment of

equivalence over the differentiality of metonymic positions (as in the work of

Sorel); but there has also been the opposite tendency: to present the revolu-

tionary sequence in terms of frozen metonymic positions without any role for

metaphorical contaminations (as in Leninism). The hegemonic logic, on the

contrary, goes beyond these unilateralizations and understands the political as

the constituting moment of a space within which the tension metaphor/

metonymy is never finally resolved. Reading the work of Gramsci from this

perspective would make it possible to deepen the analysis of all the subtleties of

this constitutive tension.



On what basis is it useful to address questions of ontological primacy, and how

should the relationship between symbolic and affective dimensions feature in

such a discussion?

EL: An ontological discourse is one concerning being qua being. The way an

ontology is conceived will be the determining factor deciding how all other

philosophical categories emerge. For Plato, the basic ontological category was

that of eidos, for Aristotle, substance, to take just a couple of examples. To

move to a contemporary approach, for Alain Badiou the One is not, so

multiplicity is the primary ontological terrain. From there he moves to his

mathematical ontology. In my case, while I agree with Badiou that the One is

not, I do not think that there is mere multiplicity either but, instead, failed

unicity. This leads to a different type of ontological approach, one in which the

primary categories will not be mathematical but linguistic. Failed unicity means

that you do not have unicity conceived as a ground, but you do not have a fully

fledged multiplicity either. One does not do away with the category of the One

entirely, in the sense that the failure of the One in constituting itself as ground

does not lead to its disappearance; unicity remains but with a twist, acquiring

the status of a simulacrum. This means, in my view, that totality, unicity, is not a

ground but a horizon, the latter being understood as the cathectic investment

which gives to it a centrality fully exceeding its ontic identity. This cathectic

investment is exactly the point in which affect enters the scene. The important

point is to realize that without this cathectic (affective) investment in an object

(which is what we call hegemony) there will not be a symbolic order either.

So the affective, the cathectic investment, is not the other of the symbolic but its

very precondition.

How would the relationship between the symbolic and affective dimensions

play out in relation to your theory of populism? For in your book Populist

Reason it appears that we need to distinguish populisms not only at the level of

discursive structure but also at the level of the intensity or force, that is, the

nature of the investment leaders and followers exhibit in their identifications

(Laclau, 2005).

EL: Let me make something clear. This is not a question of differentiating

the various populisms from each other first in terms of their discursive structure

and then at the level of their intensity or force. Without this intensity or force

(that is, without cathectic investment) there would be no discursive structure in

the first place. The distinction whose pertinence, however, remains, is that

between cases in which the cathectic investment in the hegemonic object is

so overwhelming that a whole symbolic order becomes totally dependent on

that object, and cases in which the symbolic order is more immanent and

self-sustained and, consequently, the cathectic investment in the hegemonic

object is weaker. In Group Psychology Freud analyzed this question in terms of

the differential distances between the ego and the ego ideal (Freud, 1991).



The problem, in terms of political analysis is, obviously, to determine the

degrees of either institutionalism or populism characteristic of a given hege-

monic formation.

Finding a satisfactory conceptualization of the relationship between signifier

and jouissance presented Lacan with a towering theoretical challenge that he

apparently never felt he came to terms with in a satisfactory way (see, for

example, Miller, 2000). You have argued that the dimension of affect, libidinal

investment and jouissance (here treated as interchangeable) was always already

implicit in your understanding of discourse. Nevertheless, it seems that some

theoretical elaboration is still called for in order to develop fully the

implications of this insight. We wonder, therefore, what exact direction this

effort should take. For example, in your reply to our JLS article you seem to

‘want to question y the idea that here we are really dealing with two sides’

(what we are calling here symbolic and affective dimensions of discourse)

(Laclau, 2003: p. 282). You have reiterated this view a number of times. We

would entirely agree with you that the two sides are intimately connected, but it

seems to us that one needs to focus on the distinctive character of each in

addition to the constitutive interimplication of affect and representation,

signifier and jouissance (this is something evident in both the Freudian and the

Lacanian corpus).

In the absence of such theoretical and analytical effort, it would be difficult to

differentiate between discourses that successfully offer up objects of affective

investment and those that do not. In other words, our worry is that to downplay

the distinctive character of these two registers, to view them as ‘simply’ co-

extensive, may lead to the bizarre conclusion that all discourses are ‘equally’

cathected (or equally significant from the point of view of affective investment).

The crucial question here is how to theorize the affective dimension in a way

that would not only avoid a kind of ‘psychologizing emotionology’ which

would reduce affects to a series of pre-existing dispositions, but also avoid the

temptation to collapse the affective dimension into the symbolic dimension.

EL: I have already touched on this question as far as populism is concerned, but

let me add a couple of further points since the way you have just formulated it,

shows that your discourse remains, to some extent, prisoner of a dualism which

creates an obstacle to its own development. As I hope I have made clear, the

distinction between affect (cathectic investment) and the symbolic is for me

intra- and not extra-discursive. In that sense, it is impossible for all discourses or

all the parts of a discursive formation to be evenly cathected. In Freudian terms

that would mean that the distance between ego and ego ideal would altogether

disappear. Or, in terms of political analysis, that an institutional moment would

prove so successful that no room would be left for any populist cathexis. It

would be like the full realization of the Saint-Simonian dream of a transition

from the government of men to the administration of things. Nobody is,



obviously, asserting such absurdities. To assert that the distinction between

affect and the symbolic is intra- and not extra-discursive is perfectly compatible

with sustaining that some elements of a discursive formation may be highly

cathected while others are not; that there is within the discursive field a certain

‘combined and uneven development’. What is being denied is the idea – that, at

some point, you are dangerously bordering – that this unevenness in cathectic

investment should be explained by the action of a force fully outside the

discursive field. Such a view would restore a radical opposition between the

discursive and the extra-discursive which is not only incompatible with my own

approach but also, I think, with basic premises of Lacanian theory.

What about the Lacanian Real then? The real seems to reveal the limits of

discourse. In this context, we would also like to ask what role you see the

category of fantasy playing here. After all, fantasy appears precisely to be a

category which seeks to ‘articulate’ the symbolic and affective dimensions of

discourse, but also to ‘negotiate’ our relation with the limits of discourse. One

way to approach this is to ask how you would conceptualize the relationship

between rhetoric and fantasy? Some might say that the appeal of both these

categories is underpinned by the recognition that the symbolic and affective

dimensions of discourse are not only equally important but that they require

each other to be effective. Nevertheless, while the appeal to rhetoric appears to

acknowledge this insight, it does not appear to offer a theoretical articulation of

these dimensions in the way that fantasy does. Would you agree?

EL: Fantasy is a Lacanian category, which I have not used, although, as you

know, a great deal of the terrain that notion covers is present in my work

through other conceptual avenues. So rather than embarking into some form of

complex comparative exegesis, let me approach this problem by relating the

psychoanalytic insights – including the status of the Lacanian Real – with

rhetoric. First of all, I think it is necessary to avoid using ‘the symbolic’ as

a synonym of ‘the discursive’, something that in some of your formulations

you are on the brink of doing. The real in the Lacanian sense, for instance, is not

part of the symbolic; it is, on the contrary, what the symbolic cannot master.

Yet, it is definitively discursive, for it produces distortions within the symbolic.

So it has some form of discursive inscription. These are, for reasons that we

have already discussed, both signifying and affective inscriptions. Cathectic

investments leave discursive traces – symptoms, for instance, require forms of

discursive visibility (repetitions, distortions, and so on).

Now, the systematic study of these distortions is, for me, precisely the task of

a psychoanalytically oriented rhetoric. According to Cicero, we use terms in

a figural sense because there are more objects in the world to be named than the

arsenal of words comprising our language. We know today that this asymmetry

is not a mere empirical failure of language; on the contrary, it is constitutive

of it. One speaks in order to say something that is essentially unsayable. So both



the symbolic and the real inhabit the discursive field. Although it is not

something that I have done myself, I suspect that it would be a highly rewarding

enterprise to enrich the category of fantasy using the conceptual tools provided

by rhetoric.

Finally, how would an emphasis upon the affective dimension of discourse

(concerning both subject and object) shape our understanding and significance

of the contrast you draw between immanence, transcendence and failed

transcendence?

EL: Transcendence, in the classical sense of the term, names the defining feature

of an absolute ground and, as such, does not require any affective dimension in

the process of its self-posing. The same thing can be said about radical

immanentism. In transcendent conceptions of the ground, the affective dimen-

sion is confined to the feeling of finitude, of the absolute distance between the

ground and the finite being. Echoes of this feeling can be found even in

immanentist conceptions – for instance, in Spinoza’s amor Dei intellectualis.

This changes with the notion of a failed transcendence, because here the notion

of a radical investment is transferred to the very ground of objectivity – or, to

put it in slightly different terms, the separation between signification and affect

is no longer possible: the investment itself becomes the source and precondition

of signification.

Hegemony, Politics, Critique

This leads us to explore more precisely what implications the above thoughts

carry for a theory of hegemony, for politics, and for questions of critique. In

particular, if hegemony is to be thought as a function of both representation and

affect, what avenues do you see as potentially productive in theorizing

this relation from the point of view of political analysis and critique generally,

and in relation to radical democracy and political economy in particular?

EL: At this point, I would like to say a few words concerning representation.

If we consider representation as the transmission of a meaning constituted at

some level of society to a different level, the link signification/affect is broken:

signification would be established from the very beginning, and its transference

to the new level would not require any kind of investment. So hegemony

would be unnecessary. Or, to put it in different terms: the cycle of representation

would take place entirely within the symbolic order, without being short-

circuited by any real. If, however, representation is not such a transparent

process but requires the construction of something new, in that case

representation would require cathectic investments, the essential link between

signification and affect would be restored, and representation would become

a central component of any hegemonic operation. And this applies to the sphere



of political economy as much as to the other spheres of society. Gone are the

days in which the economy was conceived as a self-defined universe, governed

by its own endogenous laws.

It is difficult to avoid bringing up Slavoj Zizek in this context, and this in the

full knowledge that relations between you have gone through both highs and

lows. At first, judging from his own writings, one would tend to think that

Zizek was persuaded by the radical democratic project you had put forward

with Chantal Mouffe and that he was devoted to developing its links with

Lacanian theory. He has himself noted how Hegemony helped forge a

productive link between Lacanian psychoanalysis and critical political theory

(Zizek, 1989). This, however, did not last. It was to be replaced by a more

‘Leninist’ phase in which the focus on a radicalization of democracy is replaced

by a politics of the anti-capitalist ‘act’. His major objection seems to be that

radical democracy limits itself to an awareness of contingency, which – although

useful in certain circumstances, but clearly misleading in others – is, in any case,

insufficient to ground a progressive politics. What would be your position on

this issue?

EL: About Zizek’s own intellectual evolution, it is obviously to him that one

should address such a question. But as far as his appreciation of my own work is

concerned, I can only say that, with hindsight, he does not seem to have ever

understood what we mean by ‘radical democracy’. In a recent intervention he

takes Yannis Stavrakakis to task because, as he argues, Stavrakakis has not

realized that my political perspective has changed, that while in my earlier work

I spoke of radical democracy, now I defend populism (Zizek, 2008). And he says

that in order to add a note of approval of my supposedly new stand. What Zizek

does not realize is that, for me, the kind of populism that I defend is a form

of radical democracy. There is radical democracy whenever there is a widening

of popular interventions in the public sphere on the basis of the expansion of

equivalential chains of democratic demands around a hegemonic popular core.

And this can take place within the most divergent institutional frameworks, not

all of which are going to be liberal-democratic in the usual sense of the term.

That is why, in my view, the present populist Latin American regimes to which

we have referred at the beginning of this interview are clearly radical demo-

cratic; but as radical democratic I would also consider the anti-apartheid

struggle in South Africa, Mao’s Long March, the Intifada, the Algerian

revolution and the various 1968 mobilizations both in America and in Europe.

To say that a movement cannot be radically democratic, because it is populist,

does not make any sense, as long as one accepts the meaning I have given to

these terms. As for the contingency resulting from the fragility of the equiva-

lential chains, I think it should be evident to everybody that no particular

demand has inscribed within itself, as its manifest destiny, what it will

hegemonically fix as the meaning of a particular equivalential chain. So in this



area, all kinds of combinations and perversions are possible. Zizek himself has

recognized this fact several times, so I cannot really understand all the fuss he is

making around this issue.

Zizek goes on to make more explicit his disagreement with what he

has described as the formalist element in your work. Of course, as it turns

out, his problem is not so much with formalism as such but with a particular

omission he diagnoses in your version of formalism. Consider the following

quote:

Where is my problem? Maybe my biggest disagreement with Laclau is

the following: I admire him very much when, as a true philosopher, he tries

to define notions at a logical, transcendental level y Now, the problem

I have with his work, and with Badiou and others, is the following:

why don’t they admit that what Marx called critique of political economy

is also not simply positive economics, that there is in commodity fetishism,

in the whole logic of surplus, what Laclau would call a purely formal,

transcendental dimension? In other words, what I find a little bit

suspicious is this denigration of political economy. (Zizek, 2004, p. 295 )

How would you respond to this comment at a general level?

EL: I do not think that you will find in my work even a single denigratory

reference to political economy – and I do not think that you will find it in the

work of Badiou either. This charge has its only source in Zizek’s febrile

imagination. What you will definitely find in my work is the assertion that the

economic level of society is not a self-contained entity operating as an infra-

structure; that the coherence it reaches is, as with everything else, hegemonically

constructed; and that capitalist relations of production are the locus of a

multiplicity of antagonisms and democratic demands, so that an expansive

radical democratic hegemony obviously needs to be extended to the economic

sphere.

What is, however, symptomatic of the way in which Zizek attempts to

introduce political economy into his discourse, is that he appeals to the notion

of commodity fetishism. Now, everybody has realized a long time ago that

commodity fetishism is a blind spot in Max’s theorization. It is a remainder of

Hegelianism, centred as it is in the notion of alienation. But if alienation in its

Hegelian sense is accepted, all the central categories of Lacanian theorization

fall away. This is the main problem with Zizek’s approach: that the very

insightful remarks he frequently offers do not cohere into a rigorous orientation

because of the eclecticism of their component elements.

In several places you have argued for the essential interpenetration of

the descriptive and normative aspects of discourse, baptizing this the



‘descriptive-normative complex’. But you have also argued that this descriptive-

normative dimension is ‘orthogonal’ to the ethical dimension of discourse.

There are thus two sets of distinctions at play here. First there is the descriptive-

normative distinction, and then there is the distinction between the descriptive-

normative complex, on the one hand, and the ethical as such. There are a series

of questions which arise for us here. First, how do you see the relationship

between these two distinctions? How might this relationship be cashed out as a

function of the symbolic and affective dimensions of discourse? Are there no

conditions under which the descriptive-normative dimension begins to

‘contaminate’ the ethical dimension? And if so, with what implications for

political analysis and critique?

EL: My distinction between the descriptive/normative complex and the ethical

is grounded on the role that the notion of ‘empty signifier’ plays in my

approach. As I have frequently argued, at a most general level the fullness of the

community, what makes all the communitarian elements cohere into a whole, is

an object which is, simultaneously, impossible and necessary. This double

condition – impossibility and necessity – is expressed through the semantic

presence of words without concrete contents and through their relation to

other words which have such a content, in terms which can only be conceived

as radical investment. If I say, for instance, ‘socialism is justice’, I am not

equating two concepts with precise contents of their own, but I am attributing

to the precise contents of one of them (socialism) the undefined positive value

of another (justice). How is justice conceived here then? Justice is the pure

reverse of situations experienced as unjust. I do not know what a just

arrangement would be, but I know it would be something negating and

reversing my present predicament. It is the presence of an absence. So when

I identify justice with socialism, I am, on the one hand, attaching that absence

to a concrete presence that starts to function as its incarnation – the ethical

acquires, through this investment a concrete content; but, on the other

hand, and simultaneously, that concrete content acquires an ethical dimension

that it would not have had otherwise. The notion of radical investment (with

its double dimension, signifying and affective), which has been with us from

the beginning of our exchange, thus acquires a new dimension: an ethical

dimension.

As for the question concerning ‘contamination’, everything depends on what

is understood by this term. If it refers to a total fusion or collapse of the one

onto the other, the answer is no. But if it marks a tension by which none of the

two dimensions can entirely absorb the other, a tension revealing the relation to

each other as an asymptotic movement, the answer is positive.

Thank you very much.

EL: Thank you.



About the Interviewee

Ernesto Laclau is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at the University of

Essex, Colchester, UK.

References

Freud, S. (1991) Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. Translated by J. Strachey.Civilization, Society and Religion, (Penguin Freud Library, 12) London: Penguin,pp. 91–178.

Laclau, E. (1990) New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso.

Laclau, E. (2003) Discourse and jouissance: A reply to Glynos and Stavrakakis. Journal forLacanian Studies 1(2): 278–285.

Laclau, E. (2004) Glimpsing the future: A reply. In: S. Critchley and O. Marchart (eds.)Laclau: A Critical Reader. London: Routledge.

Laclau, E. (2005) On Populist Reason. London: Verso.

Miller, J.-A. (2000) Paradigms of Jouissance. Lacanian Ink 12: 10–47.

Zizek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

Zizek, S. (2004) Psychoanalysis, theory and politics: Yannis Stavrakakis interviews SlavojZizek. Journal for Lacanian Studies 2(2): 285–305.

Zizek, S. (2008) In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.



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Politics and the unconscious – An interview with Laclau