Foucault, Politics, and Violence

3. Dangerous Animals

51 3 Dangerous Animals Agonism is generally understood as a conception of politics that places dissent, rather than the search for consensus, at its heart. It is often defined in opposition to deliberative democratic theories. William Connolly , Bonnie Honig, and Chantal Mouffe, most notably, have argued for an agonistic account of the political against the deliberative models of thinkers such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. They have challenged the deep-rooted belief that the legitimacy of a political regime relies on a consensus among rational citizens, and have attempted to show that deliberative models cannot adequately theorize the constitutive role of agonism in political life. The political space must be understood as essentially plural, conflictual, and contentious rather than as always ultimately aiming at consensus.1 While agonism has thus become a theoretically influential paradigm in contemporary political thought, it has remained divided on the crucial question of its grounds.2 Connolly’s and Honig’s conceptions of the agonistic dimension of politics are influenced by Nietzsche and Arendt , for example, whereas Mouffe relies on the thought of Schmitt and Girard. The supporters of agonism have tended to focus on its strategic and political importance: the affirmation of dissent and difference is crucial for securing the future of liberal-democratic institutions against forms of fundamentalism, extreme individualism, and political apathy. Thomas Fossen (2008) argues that in order to understand why political theorists advocate agonism we have to uncover their normative commitments . As he points out, the attempt to ground agonistic accounts simply on the normative commitment to pluralism encounters obvious difficulties , however. This argument would appear to be viciously circular: dissent and contestation are valuable and therefore society is irreducibly agonistic . Second, the normative commitment to pluralism in itself does not necessarily distinguish agonistic theorists from deliberative thinkers. The adherents of both positions readily recognize the value of pluralism in modern society, but seem to disagree on the most conducive means by which to achieve it: whether we should always strive for reasonable consensus or, alternatively, accept the irreducibility of dissent. The difference between them would thus not concern normative commitments, 52 C H A P T E R 3 but would be merely a practical question of the most effective strategy. Fossen ends up arguing that agonism is defended primarily because of its emancipatory potential.3 He cites Bonnie Honig, for example, who has noted that her affirmation of agonism is animated by the conviction that “the displacement of politics with law or administration engenders remainders that could disempower and perhaps even undermine institutions and citizens” (Honig 1993, 14). It is my contention that the defense of agonistic conceptions of politics has to be ultimately grounded on an explication of the ontological and not only the normative commitments underlying it. While we have to accept that the ontological and the normative cannot be neatly separated, agonism should not be read as a prescriptive theory. I will therefore critically examine the ontological commitments that inform it by focusing on Chantal Mouffe’s thought. Mouffe has explicitly contended that while her main focus is on the empirical field of current political practice, more fundamentally, for her, it is the lack of ontological understanding that lies at the heart of our current incapacity to think politically.4 I will show that Mouffe’s agonistic theory is based on two contradictory ontological frameworks in her recent work, however. It is grounded both on an anti-essentialist political ontology derived from poststructuralism and on a vaguely formulated essentialist ontological presupposition about the irreducible role of violence in human affairs. The latter is based upon two influential accounts of violence: Réne Girard’s work on generative violence and Carl Schmitt’s theory of the political. In her early work with Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), agonism was related to the Marxist idea of class antagonism, but in her subsequent books she has moved away from explicit engagement with Marxism. The turn to thinkers such as Schmitt and Girard has led her to adopt an ontologized conception of violence as well as an understanding of the political that is essentially tied to it. Mouffe—like Girard and Schmitt—is continuing a Hobbesian legacy that sees containing the violent capacities of others as the ultimate purpose of political order. In exposing this legacy I aim to argue for a consistently anti-essentialist approach to the political that refuses to accept violence as a pre-given ontological constant. While the pervasiveness of violence...