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The hegemony of hegemony

Jeremy Valentine
History of the Human Sciences 2001 14: 88
DOI: 10.1177/095269510101400105
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HISTORY OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES

Vol. 14 No. 1

2001 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

pp. 88104

[0952-6951(200102)14:1;88104; 017798]

The hegemony of hegemony

JEREMY VALENTINE

ABSTRACT
A distinctive characteristic of Laclau and Mouffes theory of hegemony
is its insistence on the denial of an essence or ground of the subject. This
element of their theory is derived from their notion of antagonism, in
which a relation with a ground is brought into question by revealing its
contingency. This article argues that the political dimension of this
argument makes sense only in the context of Laclau and Mouffes
notion of modernity. However, the universalizing of modernity as the
form of hegemony reduces the ontological notion of antagonism to a
dialectical or empirical notion of contradiction. This article examines
two key moves in this process: first, the reduction of the subject to
Lacans account of the subject; and second, the reduction of modernity
to an ontotheologicalpolitical structure derived from Lefort as the
support of the hegemonic subject. From this the article examines
Laclaus response to the exhaustion of political modernity in the figure
of complexity, from which antagonism is evacuated through the hegemony of the category of myth. Finally, the article discusses a nonhegemonic approach to antagonism derived from the work of Foucault,
Wolin and Rancire.
Key words complexity,
political, subject

hegemony,

modernity,

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ontotheological-

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THE HEGEMONY OF HEGEMONY

A N TA G O N I S M A N D T H E M O D E R N P O L I T I C A L
SUBJECT
One of the major projects of contemporary critical-political thought is the
interrogation of the modern category of the subject. The stakes raised by this
endeavour are well known.1 Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and Laclau (1990,
1996) have contributed to this project by subordinating the subject to hegemony, a political process in which a series of equivalencies is established
between particular subjects as the basis for the representation of their commonality.2 This possibility derives from their critique of the notion that the
political subject is governed, conceptually and empirically, by a metaphysical essence. One consequence of this has been to raise the stakes of the subject
even higher. For example, in its early reception Laclau and Mouffes approach
provoked the general critical objection that it prohibited the specification of
a pre-determined subject of political action that would cement the traditional
relation between political commitment and ethical legitimacy, leading to the
pluralization or randomization of political agency (e.g. Wood, 1986; McLennan, 1989). On the other hand, subsequent objections have expressed a
disappointment with the adverse implications of their theory for the hope
that the subject guarantees the autonomous self-understanding of social
movements (Landry and Maclean, 1991: 50), and at the damage it does to the
ensemble of beliefs through which an individual interprets and responds to
her structural position within a social formation (Smith, 1998: 58).
Laclau and Mouffes anti-essentialism derives its political character from
their development of a theoretical explanation of antagonism. At the formal
level antagonism is not the impossibility of being two things at once, as in the
encounter of empirical objects, real opposition, or logical or dialectical contradiction (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 124). It is defined in ontological terms
as the impossibility of being one thing insofar as being something depends
on a relation to a ground that guarantees its existence or being. In a manner
similar to Heideggers notion of ontological difference antagonism arises
when this relation is shown to be contingent (Butler and Laclau, 1997: 11).
For example, a break in the referential totality of ontic or objective existence introduces conspicuousness, obtrusiveness and obstinacy into a
series of involvements which are normally passed over or taken for granted,
thus posing objective existence as a question of the Being of beings
(Heidegger, 1962: 91114). Although Heideggers approach is perhaps best
understood within the modernist aesthetic of making strange, Laclau and
Mouffe assign a political significance to experiences of this type. This is
expressed in the definition of antagonism as the limit of all objectivity,
where objectivity refers to the solidarity of ground and existence (1985:
122). As Laclau puts it in a later text: Antagonism does not have an objective meaning, but is that which prevents the constitution of objectivity itself

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and thus reveals the ultimately contingent nature of all objectivity (1990:
1718).
It is the insistence on the dimension of contingency which tends to
provoke hostile responses to Laclau and Mouffes work as it undermines the
authority of either a transcendental or an immanent subject. Not only is a
subject contingent, but it arises from a contingent set of relations which are
politically ordered from within those relations. Thus the objective status of
the subject is simultaneously threatened by the processes which constitute it.
Yet by itself contingency does not imply the occurrence of antagonism as it
could simply refer to the complete and irreparable randomization of everything. Were this to be the case contingency would be completely indistinguishable from necessity, its metaphysical counterpart. There is nothing
antagonistic within this purely rationalist scenario. By itself no political or
antagonistic consequences necessarily follow from an absence of grounds,
essences or foundations.3 Indeed Rorty, another prominent theorist of contingency, uses the category in order to explain a perceived decline of antagonism within contemporary Western societies (Rorty, 1989; Daly, 1994). By the
same token the notion of limit is not sufficient to provide the dimension of
antagonism. If a limit enjoyed the status of a permanent fixture it would function in the manner of a ground. The political scope of contingency thus
requires a further specification.
Here it is important to recall that Laclau and Mouffes project is not simply
an explanation of hegemony. It is also a justification of its necessity. Although
this arises from a narrative of the development of hegemony in Marxist
thought as a response to the recognition of the contingent character of political action (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 192), the condition of hegemony is in
fact the historical relationship between modernity and contingency through
which the reproduction of the different social areas takes place in permanently changing conditions which constantly require the construction of new
systems of differences (1985: 138). Modernity establishes the objectivity of
social order politically, rather than through reference to divine right or
autochthonic pedigree, precisely because it has no ground. Modern political
thought, from Hobbes to Rawls, may be seen as the attempt to provide
grounds, but the interminable nature of this project demonstrates that the
question of the basis of political order is never ultimately closed. Hegemony,
the construction of objectivity on the basis of contingency, is thus subordinate to what such thinkers as Wolin (1960), Lefort (1986), Bauman (1989) and
Heller (1990) have identified as the political dimension of modernity, a confrontation with the non-necessary character of objectivity.4
The argument of this article is that Laclau and Mouffes use of political
modernity is subject to the following line of criticism. Rather than being a
particular response to political modernity, hegemony is in fact given as its
universal form, thereby erasing the difference between the two terms.

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Therefore, hegemony is only necessary insofar as it is represented as absorbing its own conditions of existence within itself, and thus its relation to contingency, as a self-grounding process, and hegemony is objective insofar as
this process is grounded externally. In other words, hegemony is hegemonic.
There are two mechanisms that enable this equivalence. First, is a subordination of the category of the subject to the subject as it is understood in
Lacans anthropological revision of Freudian psychoanalysis in which it
acquires a universal status. Thus despite the absence of any essential content,
the formal structure of the subject and its mode of operation is the essential
ground of hegemony; all subjects are hegemonic. Second, is the reduction of
the temporal dimension of modernity to a spatial structure which supports
the universality of the subject. This move displaces antagonism from its constitutive political role to a relation between the structured space of the subject
and something exterior to it, real or imagined, which secures the objectivity
of the relation between subject and structure by threatening its existence.
Antagonism thus becomes a logical and functional relation of determination
by negation in which the category of contingency becomes otiose. In this way
antagonism is maintained as a dialectical or empirical notion of contradiction
by default.
This line of criticism raises the question of how the category of antagonism is to be thought within the relation between contingency and political
modernity? To consider this we can observe that insofar as hegemony is itself
hegemonic it follows that it is not objective, and thus antagonism remains
within the process which establishes the equivalence between hegemony and
political modernity. To locate this dimension of antagonism we can refer to
Bhabhas notion of double writing (1990). Bhabha uses this category to
falsify the notion of modernity as a political process which can be described
solely in terms of hegemonic subjects. To do this he describes the enunciation of the modern nation-state as the attempt to inscribe the essence of the
state, or what the state is, within the same discursive space as the existence of
the state, or what the state does. Non-hegemonic antagonism is derived from
the residual non-identity or difference between these two inscriptions.5 As
this notion of antagonism as the non-identity of being and doing corresponds
perfectly with Laclau and Mouffes own definition, Bhabhas approach can
be applied to their account of hegemony in order to retrieve the non-hegemonizable antagonism of political modernity.
This will be done by examining the mechanisms through which hegemony
becomes hegemonic the universalization of the subject and the spatialization of history. But this critical enterprise raises a further question: what
becomes of the relation between the modern political subject and antagonism? To situate this question the article examines Laclaus subsequent confrontation with the exhaustion of political modernity in its disorganized
form, or complexity (1990). In this scenario, hegemony persists as structure,

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but the objectivity of the structure is derived from the existence of the
mythical subject that supports it. As there is nothing which does not coincide with this structure, existence is identical with essence and antagonism is
evacuated. However, within Laclaus terms, antagonism is present insofar as
this structure is subordinate to what Nancy calls the myth of myth through
which the objectivity of myth is interrupted (1991). On this basis the article
concludes by proposing an approach to antagonism derived from Foucaults
account of the modern political subject which is taken in the direction of
Rancires notion of the political as the falsification of the distribution of
appearances, or what Laclau and Mouffe term a chain of equivalencies.

THE DOUBLE WRITING OF THE HEGEMONIC

SUBJECT
A useful illustration of the limit of the hegemonic explanation of hegemony
is provided by Zizeks critique of Laclau and Mouffe (Zizek, 1990). The force
of this critique arises from its diagnosis of a contradiction in their theory of
hegemony between a negative Lacanian account of the subject and a positive
historicist account of the subject as subject-position, which Zizek somewhat
questionably attributes to Foucault. For Zizek this gives rise to two distinct
political logics which split the notion of antagonism. Antagonisms between
different subject-positions are merely the social reality of the antagonistic
fight (1990: 253; original emphasis). They are symptoms of, and thus subordinate to, pure antagonism or antagonism as such. This distinction arises
from the Lacanian account of the constitution of the subject in which the
appearance of the subject is subordinate to the symbolic subject, the place
marked out for the subject by the grammatical pronoun through which the
subject is enunciated as agent or source of action. As no actual subject determines its place within the symbolic universe of meaning it cannot correspond
to its grammatical position, while at the same time the conviction that it does
so is derived from its grammatical position. Thus the subject is split between
a position of enunciation and the content of that enunciation. The relationship between these two aspects of the subject is normally understood in terms
of the dynamic of misrecognition in which the pronoun is never the referent
that it appears to be from within the symbolic order of discourse. This noncorrespondence is understood in terms of the Lacanian notion of the Real
which has no place in the symbolic order. As Lacan puts it; The Real resists
symbolisation absolutely (Lacan, 1988: 39). It is the presence of the Real,
which can only be indirect or as a symptom, which corresponds to pure
antagonism as it disrupts the symbolic order within which different subjects
find their place by revealing the contingency of the relation between position

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and enunciation, and thus identity. Therefore, antagonism between subjects

as subject-positions maintains the symbolic order of grammar.6
This explanation of antagonism in terms of the constitution of the subject
may appear circular. This is exactly Zizeks point. To understand this we
should bear in mind that Zizek goes beyond the riddle of Althussers explanation of ideology through the category of interpellation by insisting on its
Lacanian provenance (Althusser, 1974). The riddle is that the presupposition
of a universal capacity to be a subject through which subjects misrecognize
themselves as subjects which determine themselves is precisely what needs to
be explained (Hirst, 1979: 65). For Zizek this riddle is not at the level of explanation as it is in fact a description of the presence of what cannot be explained
within the subject itself, or what Lacan described as a constitutive lack. The
political consequences of this approach are summarized by the following
example: The feminist struggle against patriarchal, male chauvinist oppression is necessarily filled out by the illusion that afterwards, when patriarchal
oppression is abolished, women will finally achieve their full identity with
themselves, realize their human potentials, etc. (Zizek, 1990: 251; original
emphasis). For Zizek no such moment will come as there is no ultimate fullness to reach and antagonisms between subject-positions are organized
around avoiding this conclusion. This factor relegates the integrity of the selfunderstanding of subjects to an effect of a structurally necessary illusion in
which the moment of greatest victory is the moment of greatest loss or, in
Hegelian terms, the loss of the loss (ibid.: 252). For this reason Z izek regards
antagonisms between different subject-positions as ideological phenomena, a
view which underpins his numerous attacks on multiculturalism and identity
politics (e.g. 1998).
If Zizeks claim that both a positive and a negative account of the subject
are present within Laclau and Mouffes theory is true, does this render their
account contradictory?7 Taken together, statements such as the following
would suggest the veracity of Zizeks claim. Thus, on the one hand: Whenever we use the category of subject in this text, we will do so in the sense
of subject-positions within a discursive structure, where the appeal to a nondiscursive vantage point from which the sufficiency of particular subjects
could be established is methodologically illegitimate (Laclau and Mouffe,
1985: 115). On the other hand: every language and every society are constituted as a repression of the consciousness of the impossibility that penetrates
them (ibid.: 125). However, it would be a mistake to regard the relation
between these statements as governed by strict logical derivation. The presence of both the positive and negative dimensions of the subject is constitutive of hegemony as a political project. Hegemony is a pragmatic matter of
articulating subject-positions on the basis that beneath any particular subject
is a void that all share, a principle of commonality to which all subjects are
subordinate. In short, the hegemonic subject is a trade-off between the

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universal constraints of the logic of the Lacanian subject and the particularity
of empirical subject-positions.8 Subject-positions are the content of hegemony, the Lacanian subject is the form. The former is performative, the latter
is pedagogic. Through this, the Heideggerian notion of Being is equated with
the Lacanian notion of lack in being, an extremely questionable move.
How do Laclau and Mouffe inscribe this relation within the same discursive space? Here we should appreciate that for Laclau and Mouffe, negativity is decisive in the hegemonic production of objectivity. That which cannot
be represented in the subject corresponds to that which cannot be represented
in the social, where the former is the basis for an identification with the latter
through a structural homology. This enables Laclau and Mouffe to explain
how a potentially infinite series of different subject-positions is limited as a
structured hegemonic space. As negativity contradicts the existence of both
the social and the subject, the function of hegemony is to exteriorize negativity through its symbolic equation with the empirical presence of a frontier
that secures the representation of a common hegemonic space. In this way a
negative commonality acquires a positive expression, and the frontier, or
what is deemed to lie beyond it, acquires a negative status which for Laclau
and Mouffe functions as a threat which constitutes the positive expression of
commonality: it is not possible to threaten the existence of something
without simultaneously affirming it (Laclau, 1990: 27). This dialectical synthesis of the logical and the empirical, derived from Althussers account of
overdetermination and condensation (1979), is summarized by the principle
that: True limits are always antagonistic (Laclau, 1996: 37). In which case,
antagonism remains thought within the logic of real contradiction and not
within the logic of contingency.
This conclusion is the result of a performative at the explanatory level
which seeks to verify the occurrence of a pedagogic object, or verify the
object as such: namely, hegemony. Through this double writing the formal
negative other becomes the content of a threat in order to verify an empirical interior/exterior relation as antagonistic. Whether the negative other is
threatening because it is that which must be excluded in order to constitute
positivity, or whether negativity is threatening to a pre-constituted positivity, is undecidable from within the terms of Laclau and Mouffes explanation.
Presumably, this is what cannot be represented in the social. In the following
section we examine how political modernity is reduced to a structural
support of this logic.

THE STRUCTURE OF POLITICAL MODERNITY

The importance of political modernity in Laclau and Mouffes theory is
reinforced by their reliance on Leforts observation that modernity is

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characterized by the absence of a transcendental guarantor that would

ground a totally unified society (1985: 186). In Leforts terms, modern society
is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of the markers of certainty
(Lefort, 1988: 19; original emphasis). The critical dimension of this observation concerns the fate of what the transcendental dimension formerly
guaranteed. For Lefort this is explained in terms of Kantorowiczs thesis of
the Kings Two Bodies as the combination of theological and earthly rule
(Kantorowicz, 1957). The body of the King occupies the place of an absent
centre, God as transcendental cause of the world and external origin of order,
and in so doing grounds the authority of earthly rule. With the inauguration
of political modernity through the revolutionary execution of the King, the
necessary link between the two dimensions of this ontotheologicalpolitical
structure is undone and the objectivity of order is dissolved.
The question that arises from this is: what happens to these two dimensions within political modernity? For Lefort the theological structure persists
in its role of centring the representation of the social on the ground of something absent. As there is no necessary content that would fill this absence the
theological becomes purely symbolic, and this absence is made present as an
empty place of power (Lefort, 1986: 304). Politics takes the form of a competition to occupy this place in order to exercise rule, democratic or authoritarian. As occupation can only be measured with respect to a fullness alien to
mortality, the filling of power is contingent, and thus the emptiness of the
symbolic structure guarantees politics. Hence whatever objectivity the social
enjoys is limited by an absence of grounds. Whatever grounds are established
are constitutively open to dispute.
Laclau and Mouffe reduce Leforts historical description of the origin of
political modernity to the structural support of the hegemonic subject
through the following equivalencies. The particular notion of contingency
that modernity makes visible is equated with a logical notion of contingency.
The notion of the symbolic as a pre-modern theological leftover becomes the
Lacanian notion of the symbolic as a universal anthropological fact. A particular relation that produces the distinction between the subject and the
symbolic becomes a relation between all subjects and the symbolic that
secures their totality. All subjects are inscribed in this structure through a
mimetic correspondence between the failure of the discursive subject and the
failure of the subject that grounds the totality in its unity, or its empty place,
as if the execution of the monarch is the execution of everyone. The absent
centre acts as the mark of universality on the basis of its theological determination. As objectivity is derived from the symbolic representation of the
social, a negative other is required to secure its limit. In short, the structure
of political modernity is doubled as particular and universal, hegemonized as
the form of hegemony.
This is confirmed by Laclau and Mouffes representation of antagonism as

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a structural component of modernity in which the logical and the empirical

are condensed. Here the theoretical leap backward to antagonism as the
relation to the negative other is mirrored by a historical leap backward to a
pre-modern political model inscribed within theology namely, millenarianism. On this model, antagonism takes place in relation to an exterior, real
or imagined, that threatens and thus confirms society as a closed space where
each differential position is fixed as a specific and irreplaceable moment in
relation to a frontier with a negative other, on the model peasant-versus-city
(1985: 127). This is performed by a popular subject that occupies the empty
place of power by bridging the gap between political space and society as
an empirical referent (ibid.: 133) through deciding on the negative other that
secures it, thus completing the fullness of the symbolic from which objectivity is derived. The other threatens the subject as well as guaranteeing its
universe of meaning. The popular is thus the same thing as the hegemonic
subject.
The solidarity of this structure of equivalencies is weakened if we consider
Leforts subsequent recognition of the fact that his account left an important
matter unaccounted for. This concerns the fate of the indeterminacy of revolutionary rupture in which a relation with a ground is posed as a question, the
temporality of antagonism itself, and which is effaced by the persistence of
an ontotheologicalpolitical structure.9 Thus, the form of the ground remains.
For Lefort, this renders his own account subject to the criticism that it is ideological within the terms in which he himself explains the genesis of this category (Lefort, 1986: 181236). Structure and event would be inscribed within
the same discursive space. The problem arises from the alternative solution,
as without the symbolic dimension of the ontotheologicalpolitical, indeterminacy sinks into the empiricism of discrete differential subjects. Rupture
becomes completely objective and order ceases to be a political question.
Consequently, Lefort concedes that he is unable to think the indeterminacy
of rupture within modernity without falling back on a dialectic which denies
the contingency of the political. The compromise Lefort settles for is the
relegation of the efficacy of the symbolic to the weak points of the social in
the face of the multiplicity and heterogeneity of modernity (1988: 255).
Although Laclau and Mouffe do not acknowledge Leforts doubts, a
similar problem is present in the description of the event in which the popular
subject emerges, wherein frontier effects cease to be grounded upon an
evident and given separation, in a referential framework acquired once and
for all through the constant disruption of modernity (1985: 134; original
emphasis). Yet at the same time, this event in which the limit of objectivity is
present also names the democratic subject (ibid.: 131). Does this mean that
the democratic subject is the simple, speculative contrary of the popular
subject, located as the absolute exteriority of a negative other? Given that
Laclau and Mouffe predicted that democracy would enjoy a greater political

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presence as the dislocatory effects of modernity escalated, while at the same

time the conditions of hegemony would persist, such a conclusion would
appear to follow. Hegemony would persist as the negative contradictory
other of indeterminacy, and democratic struggle would be constrained by,
and thus partially determined by, its negotiation with hegemonic logics (1985:
139). Thus, the indeterminacy of the social would expand the field of hegemony.
Such a scenario is unlikely. As antagonism poses the question of the limit
through which a positive/negative relation could be decided, the democratic
subject subverts its objectivity. The negative other of the popular subject can
only ever be another popular subject, real or imagined. The relation between
antagonism and democracy is not one of equivalence or opposition, as
antagonism poses the question of the demos as such. In the last section of this
article we will address this question in terms of the indeterminacy of the
subject that would enunciate the demos. Before doing so, we will consider
Laclaus confrontation with the failure of his prediction in response to the
hegemonic objectivity of complexity, the social form in which indeterminacy becomes dominant through the immanent genetic or autopoietic evolution of modernity (Laclau, 1990). The cause of complexity is a plurality of
dislocations that increasingly dominate the terrain of an absent structural
determination with no place available from which to designate the frontier
with a negative other (1990: 62). As this place marked its own absence in the
form of an empty place that a subject would occupy, the ontotheologicalpolitical condition of hegemony collapses. In which case, what is the fate of
the subject and the structure which supports it?

COMPLEXITY AND MYTH

For Laclau, complexity determines the subject as mythic. Popular or not,
this emerges as the reaction to an insufficiency of structure formerly secured
by an empty place, and thus an insufficiency of the symbolic with which to
make sense of complexity. Thus: The mythical space is constituted as a
critique of the lack of structuration accompanying the dominant order (1990:
62). The labour of subjects is to produce the structure through which this
domination becomes meaningful; that is to say, to make indeterminacy mythical. At the same time myth is doubled in that it is ascribed a universal status
that entails that any mythic enunciation is split by its particular content and
the universal form of myth itself. Hence myth is a surface of inscription for
an equivalence between an increasingly wide range of demands (1990: 80),
or what Balibar would call a fictional universality (1995: 58). The positivity
of the subject exists insofar as the subject absorbs the myth of the structure
which would support it within itself. By the same token negativity is the

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mythical form of indeterminacy, as in the popular myth of complexity as the

global logic of capital, where complexity simply means difficult to understand figured as an autopoietic ground (Thrift, 1999). As the essence of the
subject as myth coincides with its existence as myth, contingency is eliminated. Everything simply becomes hegemonic, including indeterminacy.
The decisive issue here concerns the discursive status of myth. Against the
possible accusation that the reference to myth simply licenses irrationalism,
Laclau derives its universality from the assertion that myth is constitutive of
any possible society. Myth and objectivity are the same thing (1990: 61). As
universal, the objectivity of myth is infinite and without limit, the everpresent ground of any enunciation. The consequences of this are extremely
felicitous: the classical problem of knowledge as the adequation between
knowing and being disappears in that myth constitutes the subject and being
of objects at the same time . . . thus transcending the division from which
epistemological discourse emerges (ibid.: 68). Conveniently, the justification
for this homogenization of discourse is displaced to the horizon of contemporary political-critical thought, which is exactly where the subject of the
enunciation elects to position itself (ibid.). Laclaus own enunciation is selfdetermined as mythic, thus guaranteeing its objectivity. In other words, the
subject of the enunciation and its referent are inscribed within the same discursive space. In which case, the subject of the enunciation is itself mythical,
coinciding with the history it describes as its ground. Or rather, history is
mythical for it. There is no exception to the totality of myth. As judge in its
own case this hardly does justice to the subject.
Is this inscription of ground and existence within the same discursive space
successful? In fact, on closer inspection it appears that the non-coincidence
of myth as object is present within the enunciation of myth itself. This is
because it participates in what Nancy refers to as the myth of myth in which
two senses of myth are conflated (1991: 52). These are, first, that myth both
provides and functions as a ground or inaugural point. By being universalized the myth of a ground is reinscribed such that any ground is understood
as myth in which being engenders itself by figuring itself (ibid.: 54; original
emphasis). In the form of an onto-poetico-logical affirmation, objectivity is
thus fictional and mimetic. Second, as myth enjoys an objective existence
which can be positively described, it is not a fiction, even if its form determines all speech as recital and all action as heroic. Through the conflation of
both senses of myth, the being that myth engenders implodes in its own
fiction and thus confronts its limit (ibid.: 56). Nancy refers to this antagonism within myth in terms of an interruption of myth by the myth of myth.
Here: Myth is cut off from its own meaning, on its own meaning, by its
own meaning. If it even still has a proper meaning (1991: 52; original emphasis). This antagonism interrupts the opening of a mouth immediately adequate to the closure of a universe (ibid.: 50).

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Does this mean that the subject remains mythical within the ground of its
failure? Such a conclusion would concede that which is pre-supposed;
namely, the hegemonic status of myth or, more broadly, the adequacy of the
model of the modern political subject as a relation between positivity and
negativity. This model is not overcome by the notion of the mythic subject
absorbing these two dimensions within itself, and thus in and for itself.
Neither is it overcome by the claim that myth overcomes the division from
which epistemological discourse emerges. Rather, it is overcome by considering how, and why, epistemological discourse became the model of the
modern political subject from which the distinction between subject and
subject-position is derived.

S U B J E C T I V I T Y: E P I S T E M O L O G I C A L O R
POLITICAL?
Both Laclau and Mouffe, and Z izek derive the necessity of the positive and
negative form of the subject from Lacans assimilation of the Cartesian to the
Freudian ego in which the modern philosophical determination of the subject
acquires a universal anthropological status. Lacan argues that the Cartesian
response to hyperbolic doubt is the paradigm of failed subjectivity, as certainty is sought in the substance of the res cogitans, whereas in reality no such
thing is available that would ground the cogito. Hence the Cartesian failure
to ground the certainty of thought in itself corresponds to a universal lack in
the subject. Through this, psychoanalysis acquires the status of the critique
of modernity, or, in Lacans phrase, the egos era (Lacan, 1977: 165, 296, and
passim). Whether Lacan poses a form of the subject exterior to modernity as
the basis of his critique, or whether Lacans critique constitutes a continuation of the modern subject by other means, is a controversial issue which
has given rise to many heated polemics. For example, Zizek has recently reiterated the necessity of the Cartesian subject in order to demonstrate the
relevance of its failure (1999), while Laclau has recently distanced his work
from its Lacanian assumptions, although this has not as yet resulted in any
revision of its basic theoretical components (1997: 11).
Instead of engaging with these arguments, we can recast their terms with
reference to Balibars analysis of the mechanisms of Descartes philosophical
proof (1991, 1994). This agrees with Lacans view that Descartes fails to
secure the certainty of what the ego thinks about, its existence, by grounding it in the certainty of thought itself, its essence. Consequently, the ego
remains within the realm of deceptive appearances. Yet the significance of
Lacans critique is deflated because, as Balibar shows, Descartes had already
reached this conclusion in the course of his demonstration. The dimension of
proof is dependent upon the so-called ontological proof of Gods existence,

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where God is characterized in terms of infinite perfection. Certainty is provided through an analogy which determines the subject as the subjectus of a
divine sovereign, or God, a political and juridical term, which refers to subjection or submission (1994: 8; original emphasis). On this condition, my
subjection to God is the origin of my mastery over and possession of nature
(1991: 36) insofar as the subject is less than perfect. The subject is secured in
an ontotheologicalpolitical relation, rather than an epistemological relation of
adequation.
If this is the case, from where does antagonism arise? At the basis of
Descartes analogy is a principle of resemblance or mimetic relation between
human and divine action. Yet as free will is attributed to both God and the
subject, the terms of the Cartesian analogy are undermined insofar as there
is no basis on which to determine perfection and the authority that is derived
from it. This renders the ground of freedom indeterminate. From which
Balibar concludes that the subject constitutes the internal limit of Descartes
demonstration as both originary freedom and the intrinsic limit of freedom
(1994: 8). Balibar expresses this as the paradox that the subject necessarily
subjects himself to himself or, if you like, performs his own subjection (ibid.:
10; original emphasis). In other words, the indeterminacy of freedom is the
limit of the objectivity of the subject, or of the order which it secures. The
freedom of the subject cannot be measured by an external measure of positivity or negativity, or fullness or lack. As Derrida summarizes this conclusion in relation to Kants subsequent development of the God/man
analogy: How can mans freedom (in a liberal economy) resemble Gods
freedom which resembles itself and reassemble itself in it. It resembles it precisely by not imitating it, the only way one freedom can resemble another
(1981: 10).
This means that the modern political subject is not grounded in a relation
of identification or recognition that subsequently fails. Freedom has no
ground. Action is constitutively antagonistic. In Balibars view, Foucaults
work is best seen as an interrogation of this indeterminacy in the form of a
materialist phenomenology of the transmutation of subjection (1991: 55).
This is confirmed by Foucaults insistence that the object of his analysis is the
subject as a mode of power which acts on the actions of others, and which
therefore requires that the other must be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the end as a person who acts (1982: 220). The subject is determined,
but not dominated, in a relation of power. Not only does Foucault represent
antagonism as a limit attitude or critical ontology of the present which
reveals the impurity of contingency within universality (1984: 45). More
importantly, Foucault insists that modernity is not something which need be
overcome insofar as freedom arises from indeterminacy. Antagonism is a
relation in which authority is subverted precisely because it has no ground at
the same time as authority attempts to establish an objective order of social

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relations, and which elsewhere Foucault summarizes as the problematic of

governmentality (1991).
Does this mean that antagonism can be equated with a democratic subject?
The problem with a positive response to this question is that it tends to lead
to the production of a list of subjects ordered on the basis of some alleged
democratic property. That is to say, democracy becomes the basis of an
authoritative ordering. From the perspective of an affirmation of what he
calls fugitive democracy, Wolin (1996) has criticized this tendency, especially as it forms the basis of what he calls identity politics. The problem is
not so much the ideological effect of this form of politics, but the perverse
consequence of denying the relational nature of power which makes such a
politics possible. Power becomes a thing to possess, and the list becomes
something to hegemonize. This is why Wolin emphasizes the fugitive dimension. This does not draw attention only to mobility, but also to the indeterminacy of the enunciation of the demos itself, ensuring that it remains in
question. In other words, the democratic subject has no proper name. It is
anonymous. It emerges within relations of power wherein an authoritative
ordering is brought in question. Arguing along similar lines, Rancire has
criticized the reduction of the demos to what he calls the distribution of
appearances, or what Laclau and Mouffe call a hegemonic chain of equivalence. To name the anonymous subject which brings the authority of this
distribution into question, Rancire has resurrected an archaic name, the proletarii, the Latin word for prolific people people who make children, who
merely live and reproduce without a name, without being counted as part of
the symbolic order of the city (1995: 67). Rather than listing subjects we can
use this name for the relation between democracy and antagonism, if only in
the interest of economy.

NOTES
1 The category of the subject is derived from modern philosophy, politics and
grammar. In the first case the term refers to the ground of thought in the activity
of thinking established by Descartes and Kant. In the second case the term refers
to a relation of subjection with respect to a higher authority or power. In the third
case the term refers to the subject of a sentence. In all cases the term denotes a
dimension of agency that is lost in behaviourist or deterministic accounts of action.
The problems arise when all three terms are used simultaneously, a practice associated with Lacan and his followers. Critics of the category assert either that the
subject exercises an intellectual dominance to be resisted in view of its epistemologial, political and grammatical effects, or that the category does not correspond to
the ways in which action takes place. Again, sometimes both positions are asserted
simultaneously. For discussions of these issues see the collections edited by Cadava
et al. (1991), Copjec (1994), and Critchley and Dews (1996), and the paper by Venn

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3
4
5
6
7

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(1997). The method of this paper is to segment the coincidence of these different
senses of the subject in the theory of hegemony. The purpose of doing so is to retain
the importance of the political sense in a context characterized by the dissolution
of the philosophical and grammatical senses. Hence the critique of Laclau and
Mouffes dependence on Lacan.
Originally the category of hegemony described military relations between states and
it still carries this function in contemporary international relations theory, although
the situation is changing. The application of the term to internal political relations is
often credited to Lenins analysis of the class war. However, it is from the work of
Gramsci that contemporary uses of the term in the human and social sciences are
derived. Within Marxism, Gramsci argued that relations of domination are not based
on force and dull compulsion but entail the consent of the governed which arises
from the material and symbolic practices of the subaltern classes. Subsequently
adopted by Italian Euro-communism, Althusser and Poulantzsas, albeit without any
rigorous theoretical integration, the generalization of the term owes much to the
work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1970s, and especially
its explanation of popular working-class support for Thatcherism. Laclau and
Mouffe (1985) provided a definitive theoretical elaboration of the category and work
in cultural studies has carried it into all corners of the human and social sciences.
See Brint et al. (1995).
Luhmann (e.g. 1998) provides a very different account of the relation between
modernity and contingency.
See also Doty (1996), and Shapiro (1999: 46).
Here we cannot consider the adequacy of Lacans theoretical terms. For a powerful
critique of Lacans distinction between the symbolic and the Real, see Cornell (1995).
Bellamy regards the presence of a Lacanian element in their theory as an unnecessary drag on its otherwise innovative account of the subject (1993: 34). Schrift believes
that a Foucauldian notion of the subject is implicit but undeveloped in Laclau and
Mouffe (1996). On the other hand, according to Miklitsch, Z izeks critique resolves
the contradiction and shows what the theory is really about (1998: 4834). It is
worth pointing out that Zizeks critique is an appendix to Laclau (1990).
In her discussion of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler makes a similar distinction between
the logical and the social, arguing that the former can only be a sedimented form of
the latter (1993: 9).
These are mostly found in the essay The Permanence of the Theological Political?
in Lefort (1988). The question-mark of the title is decisive. For an excellent analysis
of this problem, see Dallmayr (1993).

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE:
JEREMY VALENTINE works in the Department of Media and Communication,
Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh. He has published works on
Hobbess political thought, ideology and governmentality, and cultural
governance. He is the co-author (with Benjamin Arditi) of Polemicization:
The Contingency of the Commonplace, and co-editor (with Alan Finlayson)
of Poststructuralism and Politics: An Introduction, both published by Edinburgh University Press.

Address: Department of Media and Communication, Queen Margaret University College, Clerwood Terrace, Edinburgh EH12 8TS, Scotland. [email:
JValentine@QMUC.ac.uk]

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