Chantal Mouffe

If politics is ultimately about our deepest fears and desires rather than about, say, tax policy or better health care, then what place is there for a Left whose raison d’être will always be tied to improving the economic fortunes of the least fortunate? One answer is to begin to outline an “economics of meaning,” where economic or class critiques are a means to channel anger, create meaning, and build solidarity rather than to implement better policy outcomes (although, of course, policy changes would be good on their own, for moral rather than necessarily electoral reasons). This requires changing standard conceptions of what elections are for and what it means to win.

This practice-based doctoral research explores the nature of the feral, as manifested in an object-based installation practice of contemporary art that scavenges - physically, socially and metaphorically - in the gap between defined spaces. My conception of the feral draws out the political promise of this indeterminacy: the state of being partly wild and partly civilised. The page is also constructed materially, as a space where
heterogeneous elements meet: different voices expressed through the writing and images of my practice.

In claiming the feral as a critical concept, I reject its more common, derogatory, usage. In particular, during the 2011 London riots, the former British Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke labelled the rioters a “feral
underclass”, seeking to fix them in this uncivilised, abject position. I unfix this separation, through a feral interpretation of my objects, as they interpenetrate domestic, institutional, and civilised public spheres.
Mother’s milk solidifies as plaster-filled condom bombs, at once phallic and breast-like, poised to ignite a pyre of social theory texts in a gallery project space, a former factory; haphazard conglomerations of plant matter and urban debris are strung together in bunting on an inner-city community hall.

The feral becomes here a rival concept to Julia Kristeva’s formulation of abjection, as the seeping bodily organs evoked by my objects are not defined in terms of the individual, but reflected on through the formless
mass of the social body, the displaced undercommons of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the wild of Jack Halberstam, the rioters of Joshua Clover.
The feral has an antagonistic quality, but it cannot fit the relational models of art put forward by Chantal Mouffe and Claire Bishop that seek to civilise this antagonism. Neither can the positivity of Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman new materialism extract the hybridity of materials I use from the precariousness of the social conditions from which they are drawn. My practice, like the feral, resists these separations.

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

PREVIEW BOOK CHAPTER - The chapter engages with mainstream explanations of the electoral growth of the xenophobic and separatist Flemish far-right party, Vlaams Blok, in Belgium from the late 1980s onward. The issue of right-wing populism in Flanders is introduced by briefly outlining the genesis of the current political situation, and subsequently explaining the two dominant political positions held by the Vlaams Blok, separatist nationalism and authoritarian xenophobic populism, as they were articulated in Party manifestos and electoral platforms. Thereupon it summarizes and problematizes the two foremost types of analysis that have been put forward to account for the electoral upsurge of the Vlaams Blok, and relate them to strategies employed by the mainstream democratic elites to marginalize this party. From this, it is argued that the current dominant frame of thinking is missing a crucial point. The rise of an ultra-nationalist and authoritarian-populist party in Flanders, as elsewhere in Europe, can be better understood in the context of a hegemonic consensus around the political centre, resulting from an ideological convergence between the established political parties, characterized by the disappearance of antagonism. Such an alternative account has been developed over the years by Chantai Mouffe, and I shall first summarize and expound her thesis, and explain how and why it is applicable to the case of the Vlaams Blok.

The rapid rise of "fake news" as a ubiquitous term in global politics has caused widespread debate in democratic societies concerning the distinction between true and false. A number of scholars and journalists have argued that we might be entering a post-truth or post-factual era. 1 In 2016, post-truth was even named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries, defining the concept as "circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Based on this societal diagnosis, analysts have concluded that facts are moving to the background of contemporary politics. Politicians no longer concern themselves with the distinction between fake and real, making democracy shift from a rational to an emotional political system. 2 If we consider this characterization of the post-truth era, one aspect of contemporary politics appears paradoxical: rather than neglecting facts, it seems that democracy is increasingly saturated with disputes over what counts as "true," "real," "false," and "fake." Political actors routinely label their opponents as frauds, while claiming to be the bearers of truth themselves. As US President, Donald Trump, exemplifies, terms such as "fake news" have become a means of bolstering authority and attacking perceived enemies. It has become a way of obtaining and enforcing dominance in the political landscape. Facts are not simply dismissed. As part of a much more complex development, the very meaning or interpretation of the term "facts" seems to have become the epicenter of political struggles. If this is the case, we might consider whether the notions of the "post-truth" or "post-factual" era truly encapsulate the current state of democratic politics. This chapter argues that there is more to the story than what is often told: that facts are not becoming obsolete, but rather highly politicized. The term "fake news" has become a rhetorical weapon, increasingly mobilized by political actors to attack their opponents. As a consequence, the notion of "fake" shifts from a question of information validity to a question of political control: who gets to draw the line between "fake" and "real"?

Right-wing populism in its relationship with the refugee movement was the topic of the roundtable organized by the UTE in the context of the Conflict Zones network programme. The attempt was to focus on the reactions registered all around Europe in response to the recent massive migration of the refugees. This direction was forced to encounter a moral and civil urgency: the whole debate had to be contextualized in the light of the horrible attacks that had taken place in Paris just the night before.

The tone of the conversation was set on a highly (though solid) theoretical level, rather than on a practical line of work. I tried to further investigate some aspects interviewing Chantal Mouffe, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Westminster, London.

Putting climate neutrality on the urban agenda inevitably requires a re-imagination and delineation of the boundaries of the city, both at the geographical level, with regard to its inscription in history and concerning the social groups it is composed of. Such an exercise of (re-)imagination or representation is a profoundly political act. It is on the level of this symbolic representation that the (de)politicised nature of sustainability projects must be assessed. LKN2030, a project which aims to make the city of Leuven (Belgium) carbon neutral by 2030, is a case in point. The way it delineates its spatial boundaries, inscribes itself in time and conceives of the main actors representing the city generates profound forms of depoliticisation. Our contention is that these can explain some of the obstacles the project currently faces, whereas it initially triggered a lot of enthusiasm. Though mechanisms of in-and exclusion and agenda-setting inevitably take place in every sustainability project, in LKN2030 these choices tend to be neutralised behind a technical, managerial and scientific discourse. As a result, the project risks to translate potentially interesting dynamics into a consensual project for urban renewal and city marketing, whereby sustainability goals are reframed into marketing objectives and economic opportunities. Drawing on post-foundational political theory, this paper assesses this evolution, but also explores the potential of forms of repoliticisation that are emerging in its wake. 'Rather than seeing the climate challenge only as a burden, Leuven has all interest in considering it as a unique opportunity.'

From the mid-1990’s on, contingency developed into one of the leading
key concepts of the social science and achieved an axiomatic status in leftist political and social theory, first and foremost through the central postmarxist thesis of the “Lack of Foundations in the Social”. That the Renaissance of contingency is embedded in the historical parallel rise of decisionistic theories, which helped make the concept popular again, is the historical situation from where the argument in the article starts and which provoked the following research question: are the historical parallel renaissances of contingency and decision based theories coincidental or is their logical relation necessary? The goal of the first chapter is to outline the semantic complexity of contingency and its context-dependent varieties. Two extremes of the concept will be separated from each other. One of those extremes, today’s popular one, will be identified as decisionisms corresponding contingency. The discussion of why decisionistic arguments are a problem within theories with progressive intentions, will conclude the article.

The Social and Economical Bases of Evolution in the Hegemonic Political Discourses of the Islamic Republic of Iran


مبانی اجتماعی و اقتصادی تحول در گفتمان های سیاسی مسلط در جمهوری اسلامی ایران

Abstract:
Iran's revolution was a prelude to the rise of a modern system in the world's contemporary political history. This new system emerged without having any sample or version. This article in addition to identifying the sub-discourses of this system, is trying to find the roots of their rise and fall. In fact this research has focused on this question that what is the main reason of the hegemonic discourses' becoming and evolution in the political system of Iran's Islamic Republic area? The research's hypothesis, to answer this question, searches the root of these becoming and evolutions in the social and economical fields and shows that the society's social and economical evolutions, cause the evolutions in its political discourses. From the other hand, it shows that in the shade of the international interactions, these processes have been affected and reinforced. The research's hypothesis has been investigated in the framework of Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mouffe's discourse theory with some roots of Fairclough's discursive reading.



Key words:
Hegemonic political discourse, Islamic Revolution, Islamic Republic, social bases, economical bases

Can we understand someone with a different political ideology? In the age of populism and ‘identity politics’ is there any way for non-antagonistic politics? In this talk I defend such a possibility, building on the works of Chantal Mouffe and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Der Wiener Philosoph und Politiktheoretiker Oliver Marchart legt mit »Conflictual Aesthetics – Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere« ein ergiebiges Konfliktkunstkonzept vor. Diese Ästhetik gilt nicht dem Schönen, Sinnlichen oder Ambivalenten, sondern den Dynamiken einer Politik der Positionierung. /// auf Skug MUSIKKULTUR – Upload 19.8.2020 /// https://skug.at/die-feindlichen-unterschiede/

America’s Army is a freely distributed simulation that aims to accurately represent the U.S. army’s presence abroad and their actions in the war on terror. First released on 4 July, 2002 it was designed in the wake of the War on Terror as both a didactic tool and as recruitment platform.
I will argue that these functions result in two formal aspects of the game’s simulation of conflict. Firstly, the ‘swapping paradigm’ which  disables playing from the opponents’ perspective. Secondly, the game’s use of the first-person perspective, which structures singular identification by directly addressing its subject using the first person perspective, thereby casting the player as actively performing the American soldier. This singular identification with the American army turns the second person address of the ‘I want you’ on traditional recruitment  posters into the first-person experience of the ‘I,’ already simulating the player’s contribution to the war effort.
My argument draws firstly on Marxist theories of interpellation and its subsequent development into other media by media scholar John Fiske, who develops the mechanism of interpellation to mediatized expression. Secondly, I employ politicologist Chantal Mouffe’s multifocal agonistic model of politics and the Political – arguing against the consequences of silencing political antagonists.

Chantal Mouffe’s conceptualization of a deliberatively forged consensus as a hegemony and her assertion that adversarial politics best nurtures the conditions of freedom have had a profound influence on contemporary democratic thought. This article takes a critical view of this trend, arguing that a norm of consensus is a very precondition, rather than impediment, for the kind of pluralistic democracy Mouffe and other agonists wish to promote. It is asserted that Mouffe’s dehistoricized refutation of consensus lacks causal or explanatory relevance to how concrete actors embedded in empirical situations relate to one another and that the very preparedness to find something acceptable about another is at the heart of what it means to treat others justly.

The way in which societies institutionalize “collective memory” is one of the most important aspects of contemporary politics, feeding directly into the constitution of individual and communal identities, and creating sources of discord and dialogue. This essay explores some of the most significant issues at stake in debates over the political uses of the past. I suggest that it is important to distinguish between three modes of historical consciousness, memory, mythology, and critical history. I then offer a critique of Avishai Margalit’s "The Ethics of Memory" (2002), arguing that in failing to allow space for “acknowledging” the plurality of communal myths his strong communitarian conception of mnemonic ethics leaves room for the perpetuation of asymmetric power relations and the imposition of hegemonic identities. Developing this line of thought, the essay then explores some of the ways in which agonistic democratic theorists might think through the relationship between past and present, myth and history. I argue that it is necessary to avoid procedures and institutions that entrench diverse identities while simultaneously establishing conditions in which different communities can freely propound their historical identity-constitutive claims.

In the theoretical discussion of populism, two main options can be identified: a perspective conceives the populism as a thin-centered ideology; a second perspective believes that populism is a set of rhetorical, stylistic and organizational tools, which can be used by any political force. With respect to these two perspectives, Ernesto Laclau's proposal outlines a further strategy. This article examines the merits and limitations of Laclau's proposal. This paper highlights two problematic aspects: for Laclau, populism is not only a logic of political discourse, but also a political proposal; furthermore, 'populism', in his perspective, is not a specific phenomenon, because it is the mechanism by which every political identity is produced. The paper suggests that a solution consists in recovering the distinction between the logic of equivalence and the logic of difference, which was advanced by Laclau and Mouffe during the 1980s.

Desde una óptica semiótico-discursiva, reflexionamos sobre los enlaces entre los temas de
la nación y del populismo en Brasil y Perú. Tres son nuestras hipótesis: (1) en ambos países, el discurso sobre la nación está vinculado al surgimiento de un nuevo discurso populista de matriz no sólo política, sino también mediática; (2) tal populismo se funda sobre una doble función discursiva de la nación, la cual recubre el rol de “Destinador” (Greimas) y, al mismo tiempo, de “significante vacío” (Laclau); (3) esta imagen de nación emerge, en Brasil, a partir de la relación entre el discurso futbolístico y el discurso político-mediático y, en Perú, aquella entre el discurso político-mediático y el discurso publicitario sobre la Marca Perú.

In December 2008, Athens saw an eruption of violent protests that followed the murder of a teenager by a policeman. Initially reacting to police violence, the protestors did not articulate a specific agenda. The rallies, which mobilised a substantial part of the population – particularly the youth – dissipated a few weeks later. Similar outbreaks have taken place in other European cities in recent years (e.g. the Paris banlieues) and warrant a number of questions with regards to the capacity of our states and our cities to nurture a strong democratic life, acknowledging the role of conflict and preventing its violent expression.

Das, was Carl Schmitt für eine Theorie des Pluralismus zu bieten hat, ist überschaubar. Hingegen hätte Mouffe alles, was sie meint, aus Schmitt herausdestillieren zu müssen, einsatzbereit bei Fraenkel finden können.
Mouffes souveräne Schmitt-Rezeption führt zu einer Reihe von Inkonsis­tenzen, die Zweifel daran aufkommen lassen, wie pluralistisch der agonistische Pluralismus tatsächlich (gemeint) ist.
Der Mehrwert von Schmitt für Mouffes politisches Denken liegt weniger daran, dass er eine scharfsinnige Kritik der liberalen Demokratie vorgelegt hat, als vielmehr darin, dass sein Begriff des Politischen und dessen Semantik des Ernstfalls attraktiv ist für eine postmarxistische Linke, die sich von der Revolution verabschiedet hat. Der emphatische Begriff des Politischen wirkt in diesem Kontext auch als ein Mythos.

Lors du Séminaire de philosophie politique et sociale co-organisé par F. Cayemaex et E. Delruelle, 2016-2017, ULiège (thématique : « Politiques de la guerre »), nous avons eu l'opportunité de poser une question à Chantal Mouffe sur son ouvrage "Agonistique. Penser politiquement le monde".

Plan du travail : Nous reviendrons dans ce travail, dans un premier temps, sur quelques éléments généraux d'"Agonistique", et plus longuement sur les pratiques artistiques, afin d'aider à la compréhension de la question sur l'efficacité de l'art, qui viendra dans un deuxième temps, et de la réponse de Chantal Mouffe, dans un troisième temps. Dans un quatrième et dernier temps, nous proposerons un avis critique par rapport à l’art comme participant concrètement des luttes hégémoniques et nous nous interrogerons sur la « nature » des pratiques artistiques pensées par Chantal Mouffe. Les développements sur Rancière, en toile de fond, s’ajouteront à ces trois moments. Finalement, on remarquera que ce travail pose beaucoup de questions, lesquelles sont souvent sans réponses, parce que problématiques et complexes : la réflexion sur l’art participant, ou pas, de la politique n’est bien entendu pas clôturée.

Une polémique a eu lieu récemment au Brésil, selon laquelle le nazisme serait une théorie politique de gauche. Contre cette polémique issue de "cercles de droite brésiliens" , l'opinion commune des "historiens sérieux" est que le nazisme n'est rien d'autre qu'une théorie d'extrême-droite. On peut considérer au moins deux analyses de cette polémique : factuelle, et morale. La seconde va être privilégiée et inclure un cas de reductio ad hitlerum, conduisant ainsi à une analyse aléthico-morale du discours politique. De façon générale, gauche et droite sont définis en termes de relations inférentielles entre des concepts politiques, ou sous-valeurs. Les conditions d'attribution de valeurs morales et les relations d'inférence entre des sous-valeurs vont produire une approche semi-formelle ou opérationnelle de la politique.

Due to its electoral performance in the 2012 general elections, SYRIZA, a previously unknown Greek political formation of the radical left, gained unprecedented visibility within the European public sphere. How is this strong showing and the political message articulated by SYRIZA to be interpreted? Utilizing a discursive methodology, this paper puts to test the two assumptions predominating in most available analyses, namely that SYRIZA articulates a populist rhetoric, that it constitutes a predominantly populist force; and, given the near-exclusive association of populism with extreme right-wing movements, that SYRIZA constitutes a populist danger for Europe. Our analysis concludes that SYRIZA’s discourse is indeed a distinct articulation of left-wing populism. However, this by no means vindicates the second part of the prevailing wisdom: SYRIZA’s portrayal as a dangerous force threatening fundamental European values. If, however, this is the case, then mainstream research orientations in the study of European populism may have to be reviewed.

Inhalt:
     
1. Der Wert des Staates und die Bedeutung des Einzelnen
1.1 Recht und Macht
1.2 Der Staat
1.3 Der Einzelne oder „‘stirb und werde‘“

2. Der Begriff des Politischen
2.1 Bonapartistische Politik
2.2 Aporien des Feindbegriffs
2.3 Die Bejahung des Naturzustandes
2.4 Der Ernst des Lebens
2.5 Die Ewigkeit personaler Herrschaft

3. Substanzieller Dezisionismus – Verfassung, Verfassungssubstanz und Volkssouveränität
3.1 Existentieller Verfassungsbegriff
3.2 Faschistische ‚Demokratie‘
3.3 Kommissarische als souveräne Diktatur
3.4 Repräsentation und Identität
3.5 Naturrecht des Stärkeren

4. Resümee

In this chapter I give an overview of “Post-Marxism.” Primary attention is paid to what should be considered the core of Post-Marxism in relation to Marxist and Non- Marxist critical theory, namely, its conception of the social. This shift is of importance for the overall post-Marxist philosophical vision of society, theory, and politics. Theorists discussed include Badiou, Honneth, Ranciere, Laclau/Mouffe, Foucault, Gorz, and Hardt/Negri.

In this paper I compare political theories of Carl Schmitt and Chantal Mouffe in three important aspects - the conceptualization of the political, their attitude towards liberal democracy and the conception of political process - and point to significant discrepancies. Schmitt's concept of the political is deeply existential and essentially involves real possibility of death, whereas Mouffe's is more domesticated, centered around the struggle, not physical elimination. Schmitt sees liberal democracy as inherently contradictory, because it is grounded on contradictory principles: democratic equality and particularism, and liberal freedom and universalism. Mouffe perceives this contradiction as a locus of tension with emancipatory potential. I trace these differences to their different perception of history. Schmitt's vision of history is marked with ruptures created by the political emergencies, which correlates with his eventual, decisionistic conception of politics. Mouffe's processual conception of politics corresponds rather with the conception of the end of history.

This paper considers the radical democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau with reference to the recent rise of Right-wing populism. I argue that even as Mouffe and Laclau develop a critical political ontology that regards democracy as an end in itself, they surreptitiously delimit the proper composition of the demos to coincide with particular political aims. In other words, they appeal to formal categories but decide the political content in advance, disqualifying Right-wing movements and discourses without justification. This ambivalence between form and content reveals the limits of Mouffe and Laclau's brand of radical democracy for understanding and critiquing the present political conjuncture.

Chantal Mouffes gemeinsam mit Ernesto Laclau erarbeitete ‚postmarxistische‘ Theorie des Politischen ist derzeit der wohl meistdiskutierte Beitrag zum Thema Populismus. Mouffes und Laclaus Theorie stellt ein sowohl für den akademischen als auch den politischen und feuilletonistischen Diskurs attraktives Angebot dar: Sie gibt dem stets nach ‚Paradigmenwechseln‘ und Neologismen hungernden akademischen Betrieb eine neue ‚Beschreibung‘ der gesellschaftlichen Wirklichkeit; sie gibt der politischen Verunsicherung angesichts des vermeintlichen Scheiterns bürgerlicher wie kommunistischer Emanzipations- und Fortschrittsideen sowie des Untergangs ihrer Träger (des rationalen Individuums bzw. der proletarischen ‚Klasse für sich‘) einen ‚kontingenztheoretischen‘ Ausdruck; sie bietet aber zugleich das Versprechen neuer politischer Handlungsfähigkeit, indem sie die mit Ohnmacht assoziierbare Kontingenz und ‚Intransparenz des Sozialen‘ sowie das Fehlen des einen adressierbaren, politisch gestaltenden Subjekts als Möglichkeit neuer ‚hegemonialer Projekte‘ und sozialer Bündnisse begreift. Dieses Versprechen politischer Handlungsfähigkeit ist besonders für eine Linke attraktiv, die sich von der pluralen Version einer neoliberalen Einheitspartei in den Metropolen abwenden und sich zugleich das Erstarken nationalistischer, autoritärer und faschistischer Kräfte erklären will, das unter dem Label des ‚Aufstiegs des Rechtspopulismus‘ gerade in aller Munde ist. Beide Tendenzen – die ‚There is no Alternative-Politik‘ von Sozialdemokratie und klassischen Neokonservativen und das Erstarken der populistischen Rechten – werden insbesondere von Mouffe in einen ursächlichen Zusammenhang gebracht. Als Heilmittel empfiehlt sie eine ‚antiessentialistische‘ linkspopulistische Strategie, die gegen ‚die neoliberalen Eliten‘ und die völkische Rechte zugleich gerichtet sein soll.
Im Folgenden werde ich diesen postmarxistischen Zugang zum Phänomen des Populismus darstellen und einige seiner Grundannahmen einer Kritik unterziehen. Die Grundthese lautet, dass der postmarxistische Ansatz eine irrationalistische Sozialontologie und ‚essentialistische‘ Massenpsychologie impliziert, die es nicht gestatten, den gegenwärtigen Populismus zu begreifen. Stattdessen bewegt sich Mouffe reflexionslos in populistischen Denkformen und Carl-Schmitt’schen Ideologemen, deren rationale Erklärung einer analytischen Sozialpsychologie in der Tradition der Kritischen Theorie obliegt. Es handelt sich dabei um eine Querfront von linken Theoretikern und Rechtsradikalen auf der Ebene der grundlegenden Beschreibung gesellschaftlicher Verhältnisse, die mit einer Ablehnung von Vernunft und moralischem Universalismus einhergeht und auf der politischen Ebene im Ressentiment gegen den Westen im allgemeinen, gegen die USA im Besonderen, besteht.

El articulo se propone indagar en la categoria de antagonismo desarrollada en el enfoque posestructuralista, posmarxista y posfundacional de Ernesto Laclau. Se sostiene que dicha nocion opera en tres campos analiticos que en la obra del autor se desplazan e incluso superponen, provocando algunos equivocos en relacion a su estatus y alcance teorico. Estos registros —el ontologico, el ontico y el identitario— dan cuenta de diferentes fenomenos: la institucion del orden social, la multiplicidad de conflictos en la sociedad y la constitucion de las identidades politicas. En este sentido, este articulo contribuye a identificar las potencialidades y limitaciones de la categoria de antagonismo para el analisis politico de las sociedades contemporaneas.

Texto de la presentación realizada en el SEMINARIO CRISIS DE REPRESENTACIÓN Y POPULISMO (UNED, 14 de diciembre de 2017). Se trata de la versión en castellano del artículo “The outraged people. Laclau, Mouffe and the Podemos hypothesis”, Constellations. An International Journal of Democratic and Critical Theory, vol 24, issue 3, 2017, pp. 296–309.

Este trabajo se centra en el intercambio intelectual entre el grupo impulsor del partido político Podemos y la teoría democrática radical de la hegemonía desarrollada por Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe. Entre el enfoque de Mouffe y Laclau sobre la democracia radical y su uso por parte de Podemos existe un movimiento bidireccional. Por un lado, la teoría se utiliza para explicar e influir en el proceso de cambio político en España; por otro lado, la teoría choca con este uso particular y sus intérpretes políticos discrepan sobre la cuestión de cómo construir un pueblo democrático. Para examinar este concurso entre teoría y práctica, primero, se considera brevemente el contexto en el que Podemos surgió. A partir de ahí, se explica el proyecto de Podemos de acuerdo con la teoría del populismo de Laclau y la llamada “hipótesis Podemos”. Luego, abordamos una serie de desafíos que surgen del caso de Podemos con respecto al proyecto democrático radical de Laclau y Mouffe, dado su fundamento en el enfoque populista.

In this paper, we offer a contribution to the ideational approach to populism. Considering populism as a ‘thin’ ideology in whose conceptual core lie the notions of the good ‘people’, the evil ‘elite’ and popular sovereignty, we propose a theoretical articulation of populism that, in our view, encompasses two hitherto inadequately articulated dimensions of the populist phenomenon – reactivity and elitism. To this end, we draw from Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogical account of Slave morality, Vilfredo Pareto’s theory of elite cycles, as well as from John Higley and Michael Burton’s notion of ‘elite configuration’ to construct a descriptive elite- theoretical model which we then apply in our interpretation of the populist phenomenon. According to our proposed model, populism can be understood as the ideological expression of an ‘outsider-elite’ whose aim is to renegotiate the ‘thickened’ ideological consensus of a consensually united political elite.

Çeviren: Murat Erşen

Fransız filozof Etienne Balibar Yurttaşlık kitabında Batı'daki anayasa kuramının ve demokrasi kavramının gelişiminin izlerini sürüyor. "İhtilaflı demokrasi" olarak adlandırdığı yeni bir demokratik anlayış çerçevesinde sosyal demokrasiden ulus-devlete, sivil direnişten ayaklanmaya kadar uzanan yeni bir siyasi-devrimci hattın olanağını araştırıyor. Hem devlet, hem kamu hem de halk düzlemlerinde demokrasinin demokratikleştirilmesi ve demokrasiden kopuş süreçlerini ayrıntılandırıyor.

"Demokrasinin demokratikleştirilmesi sürekli bir dönüşümü anlatır ve fiili siyasi pratiklere göre bir farkı belirtir. Siyasi pratikleri, mevcut kurumlardaki demokrasi eksikliği ile açıkça yüz yüze gelecek ve onları az çok kökten dönüştürecek şekilde yerinden eden bir "diferansiyel"dir [farklılaştırıcıdır]. Etkin yurttaş bu dönüşümün failidir. İşte bu nedenle her zaman ayaklanma ve devrim kavramlarıyla bir bağı muhafaza eder, sadece kurumsal sürekliliği kesintiye uğratan şiddetli ya da barışçıl basit bir "olay" anlamında değil ama biçimleri ve hedefleri değişken tarihsel koşullara bağlı durmadan yeniden başlayan bir süreç anlamında böyledir bu. Sürekli bir dönüşüm olmaksızın, anı, mit ya da propoganda aracı olmak dışında, öylece hakiki bir demokrasi yoktur. Ama böyle bir dönüşüm de sınırları ve tanınan kurumsal biçimleri ihlal etmelidir. Claude Lefort'un (1981) ifadesiyle bir "demokratik icat" barındırmalıdır.

Bir toplumun ya da (kapitalizm gibi) bir ekonomik sistemin, kendileri demokratik olmayan, hatta anti-demokratik olan yollarla ya da usullerle demokratik dönüşümü kökten biçimde imkânsızdır. 20. yüzyılda komünizmin ve sosyalizmin trajik tarihinin (ve dolayısıyla, siyasi ihtilafın "devlet" karşısında bir "karşı-devlet" kurduğu bir örgütlenme teorisi ve pratiği sayesinde yeniden simetri kazandığı "proletarya diktatörlüğü" üzerine tartışmaların) ve de anti-emperyalist ulusal özgürlük hareketlerinin verdiği ders budur. Böylece şu fikir yeniden kendini dayatır: Siyasi bir güç ya da hareketin toplumu demokratikleştirebilmesinin koşulu, bunların kendilerinin hem hedefleri hem de içsel işleyişleri bakımından, karşı çıktıkları sistemden daha demokratik olmalarıdır.teslim olması ve nihayetinde kendine karşı dönmesidir..."