Laclau: A Critical Reader (review)

The specific importance of the work of Ernesto Laclau may lie in its intention to reformulate the basic concepts of political thought at a time when they are in a process of disintegration, as a broad effect both of post-structuralist discourses of suspicion, and of the very movement of history. This reformulation embraces the challenge of rethinking the political in a way informed by the post-structuralist critique of the ground on which a political theory might rest, or of notions of totality (of the end of politics, or of the resolution of conflict). Thus, for Laclau, the idea of the universal (of reason, for example, as a universal category) is to be corrected by the idea that the universal is precisely a lack, that it is empty of content. Gramsci's notion of hegemony, coupled with the quasi-Foucauldian concept of discourse, and a Lacanian account of how discourses are 'upholstered' into social contents, is revitalized by Laclau as a way of accounting for the juncture between the social and the political. This is part of a critique of what are seen as overly determinist versions of Marxism; since no single political element is determinative, the social becomes a general field of antagonism, a contest of discourses. The concept of hegemony describes the way that certain discourses become pre-eminent, by stitching themselves into the social fabric, as particular contents which provisionally occupy the place of the empty universal. Laclau's thought thus implies a rethinking of political theory which views this field as riddled with contingency, but for all that does not abandon universalism, without which the political becomes merely 'what happens.' Laclau: A Critical Reader is the first full-length critical assessment of Laclau's thought. It is usefully divided into sections which address the key concepts of the work: universalism, democracy, hegemony. A final section continues the exchange between Laclau and Judith Butler begun in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, but without Žižek. Each essay offers a substantial and dense engagement with Laclau's thought and considers its impact and its potential. This is not, then, an introduction to Laclau, but will be of most interest to those generally or perhaps even vaguely familiar with his work, who seek to think how it engages with other philosophical and theoretical projects. Of specific interest to scholars of French thought will be Critchley's confrontation of Laclau's version of democracy with Levinas's ethics, or Glynos and Stavrakakis's articulation of Laclau's theory with key concepts in Lacan, or Sumic's questioning of the ethical dimensions of Laclau's radical democracy with reference to Badiou's concept of 'fidelity'. But this particular angle has no specific claim to prominence in the book, which is useful and interesting in its general impetus to reinvigorate the arguably tired body of 'theory' with some political intensity and urgency.