Chantal Mouffe

What role does, or can, art play in politics? More specifically, what can we learn from the effect of populism on art, and why? Chantal Mouffe has been exploring these questions with a specific focus on the intersection of art, hegemony, and populism,  and this chapter aims to understand Mouffe’s definition of political art, the effect of populism on art, and her current assessment on the state of performing arts, as she explained on 24 October 2020 during an online presentation entitled “Science. Art. Society.” The chapter will complement Mouffe’s presentation by including references to her other works in order to provide a more comprehensive background to her answers to the abovementioned questions as well as her approaches toward art, hegemony, and populism, in general, and the relationship between these concepts.

Desde la aparición de Podemos en las elecciones europeas de 2014, se ha abierto un intenso y rico debate acerca de los tipos de acción política y la forma de articulación de un sujeto colectivo con capacidad de transformar nuestras sociedades neoliberales. En este contexto, los trabajos del filósofo Ernesto Laclau y su propuesta de articulación populista han centrado los términos del debate. El presente trabajo pretende analizar la causa de algunas críticas a la teoría de este autor, sus debilidades en este punto y las implicaciones asociadas a las mismas. Como consecuencia, se propone la necesidad de “complementar” en el ámbito de lo social en la teoría laclauiana con categorías de otros autores como Pierre Bourdieu o Slavoj Žižek.

On Friday 26th November I presented the paper 'Wittgenstein, Justice, and Liberalism' at the Language and Communication conference - organised by the Slovenian Philosophical Society (Slovensko filozofsko društvo, Ljubljana, Slovenia), Institute for Philosophical Studies of SRC Koper and supported by MKL Ljubljana and AMEU-ECM.
The book chapter of mine on which the presentation was based is available to download for free here - https://ubibliorum.ubi.pt/handle/10400.6/12231

Nas últimas décadas, Chantal Mouffe vem apresentando a sua potente proposta de radicalização da democracia a partir de uma perspectiva agonística plural e adversarial. Argumenta-se que, embora o projeto teórico de Mouffe, ainda em construção, possua algumas lacunas normativas, sobretudo no que diz respeito ao conflito, ele não deve ser rejeitado. Com o artigo que se apresenta a seguir, busca-se apresentar contribuições normativas de Jeremy Waldron para o projeto de Mouffe. Na primeira parte do texto, objetiva-se apresentar os principais aspectos da democracia radical proposta por Chantal Mouffe. Na segunda parte, busca-se apontar algumas das possíveis lacunas normativas desse projeto teórico, principalmente no que diz respeito à questão do conflito. Na terceira parte do texto, pretende-se apresentar algumas possíveis contribuições normativas de Jeremy Waldron para o projeto de Mouffe. Trata-se de uma tentativa de demonstrar que esses autores compartilham alguns pressupostos teóricos muito importantes, como a inerradicabilidade do conflito, a ênfase no poder legislativo enquanto representante da pluralidade de concepções sociais em conflito ou desacordo e a possibilidade de “domesticar” esses conflitos no âmbito institucional, entre outros aspectos. Em síntese, conclui-se que a proposta de Mouffe alcança mais solidez se considerar as concepções teóricas normativas de Waldron, sobretudo os princípios que ele estabelece para nortear o legislativo, embora esse projeto esteja longe de esgotar as possibilidades de uma democracia agonística.

In the immediate aftermath of the recent Irish general election, journalists and commentators around the world invoked that slippery term ‘populism’ to make sense of an electoral outcome that few had anticipated.

According to an article in The Atlantic that was widely panned on Twitter, Sinn Féin’s success in winning the highest percentage of first preference votes under Ireland’s proportional representational system confirmed that the “global populist wave” has now arrived in a country where it has heretofore been “conspicuously absent”

This paper examines feminist arguments in radical democracy and Japanese responses to them. Although feminist insights are significant intellectual sources of radical democracy, recent political theorists have tended to exclusively consider radical democracy as agonistic pluralism. The radical democratic thinker Chantal Mouffe, who is very popular among Japanese political theorists and philosophers, criticizes the ‘essentialist’ tendency of two feminist political theorists, namely Carole Pateman and Iris Marion Young. This paper first examines Mouffe’s critique of the two theorists. Next, it evaluates the relevance of Mouffe’s criticism of Pateman and Young by reconsidering their ideas on democracy and citizenship. Then, it engages the works of a few Japanese political theorists who respond to the issue of essentialism, and then points out the problems involved in the introduction of radical democracy in Japan and in Japanese feminist political theory. This paper concludes that we are still in the early stages of introducing and absorbing foreign feminist political theories into Japan as opposed to developing original Japanese feminist political theory to share with the world.

Centro Studi Piero Gobetti
“La politica per il XXI secolo" - III ciclo "Élite e popolo"

Per partecipare è necessario iscriversi a [email protected].
Poco prima dell'incontro, si riceverà il link per il collegamento online.

https://www.facebook.com/events/262184861798103/

Negli ultimi anni gli studi gramsciani hanno raggiunto notevoli progressi nell’analisi di categorie come egemonia e società civile. Queste stesse categorie gramsciane, nel frattempo, hanno conosciuto una riarticolazione separata e spesso contrastante all’interno della politologia internazionale, che ne ha amplificato tuttavia la portata globale. La diffusione delle idee gramsciane sul piano della politica globale ha coinvolto diversi nomi: Norberto Bobbio, Perry Anderson, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Andrew Arato, Mary Kaldor, Giovanni Arrighi fra i più noti.
Il percorso partirà da una definizione della concettualizzazione gramsciana di egemonia, popolo e società civile, per poi proporre una panoramica della radice comune delle diverse letture politiche. Da questo dialogo fra Gramsci e le sue interpretazioni si tenterà, infine, di estrarre nuovi spunti di riflessione riguardanti la crisi e i populismi attuali.

Por um Populismo de Esquerda é uma intervenção na conjuntura de uma das mais importantes pensadoras políticas vivas, muito presente nos debates desde o clás-sico Hegemonia e Estratégia Socialista (1985), escrito com seu parceiro intelectual, político e amoroso, Ernesto Laclau (a quem esse livro é dedicado). Redigido a partir da situação europeia, o livro é importante para nossas reflexões e ações no Brasil e na região, para pensar-lutar hoje em dia. "Momento Populista" Um dos pontos fortes deste livro é sua perspectiva do político como conflito, a partir de Maquiavel, mas tam-bém de Carl Schmitt. Mouffe ativa uma linhagem que o compreende como tensão e confronto: a democracia não é um regime de governo-desde Atenas, quatrocentos anos antes de Cristo, está em pauta seu entendimento como 1 Doutor em Sociologia (Unicamp) e mestre em Relações Internacionais (IRI/PUC-Rio), é professor de Ciência Política na Universidade de São Paulo (USP) e autor do livro Marx Selvagem (Autonomia Literária, 2017).

This chapter addresses the issue of plurality and complexity in contemporary,globalized society through the lens of discourse theory (Laclau & Mouffe,1985; Mouffe, 1993/2005; Laclau, 2005). It explains plurality in discourse
theoretical terms of difference and antagonism. It explains emerging populismin the EU as a result of increased instrumentalization and universalization
of modern politics. It leads to the insight that Hannah Arendt’s warningsconcerning the importance of maintaining plurality in the public realm are
relevant today.

Modern discussion of political representation which regularly restrict the focus to technical question of election and accountability. Political representation explores the way in which people are present in governmental action even though they do not literally act for themselves. Within this content, I will examine the Carl Schmitt’s solution to this political representation which suggests that representation can bring about the political unity of the state but only if the state itself properly “represented” by the figure or person of soverign. Carl Schmitt’s general idea of political thought is based on the political concept, the question of soverignty and his views on parliamentary democracy. Then within this study I will look at the main arguements of the democracy interpretation in Chantal Mouffe’s approach because her approach allows us to rethink the question of political representation. Whereas I will assess the both Carl Smith and Chantal Mouffes’s approaches to the political representation I will evaluate the western Balkan countries understanding of political leadership and representation on the formation of their independece in the case of Bosnia and Kosovo.

In de kunstwereld is zij inmiddels een veel gevraagd spreker. De Waalse, in Londen werkende politiek filosoof Chantal Mouffe toont zich in haar denken niet bepaald een voorstander van het poldermodel. Haar stelling: durf gepassioneerd van mening te verschillen, want juist daar is democratie bij gebaat. Mouffe’s politieke theorie wordt meer en meer gezien als een bruikbaar model om de politiek uit de wurggreep van consensusdenken te bevrijden. Ook kunstenaars voelen zich tot Mouffe's agonistische denken aangetrokken. Maar of haar intenties in de kunst tot hun recht komen, is de vraag.

“This is what democracy looks like!” has been a popular refrain in Trump-era political movements and protests such as the 2017 Women’s March and the 2018 March to Save Our Lives. But what exactly does democracy look like? Is democracy a practice of participatory government or a system of representation? Does democracy involve citizens rationally deliberating with one another about public policy or disruptively taking charge of social, political, and economic institutions? Is democracy best described as a revolutionary, reformist, tyrannical, liberal, or conservative form of government? What is the relationship between democracy and contemporary capitalism and racial and gender politics?

This speaking-intensive course investigates these and other questions by exploring classical and contemporary theories of democracy. The course proceeds in five thematic units. We begin in Unit 1 (“Democratic Theory – The Ancients”) by reading some of the foundational texts in classical political thought concerning democracy as a form of government. Unit 2 (“Liberalism and the Tyranny of the Majority”) explores the fraught relationship between modern liberal and democratic modes of government, paying particular attention to the issue of the “tyranny of the majority.” Unit 3 (“Representation vs. Participation”) investigates competing conceptions of democracy as an institutional arrangement or practice of political participation. Unit 4 (“Deliberative vs. Radical Democracy”) studies the tradition of deliberative democratic theory alongside critics who conceive of democracy in more radical terms. Unit 5 (“Neoliberalism, Race, and Democracy”) concludes by exploring the relationship between democracy, white supremacy, and neoliberal capitalism.

In the post-political period, the Kurdish-led Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) has offered a radical democratic political project by adopting a left-leaning populism to challenge the political establishment (elites) through the construction of a new concept of ‘the People’ (underdog) in a new political grammar. This article outlines the feasibility of applying Laclau’s populist discursive in analysing the notion of radical democracy, which is conceptualized in terms of Mouffe’s agonistic approach, as a ‘real’ alternative in the organic crisis of the ‘new Turkey’. The inclusive populism of the HDP mobilizes the collective passion in politics, with its common affects, in order to create a counter-hegemonic bloc. This left-wing populist ontology aims to reform the existing democratic institutions in terms of an egalitarian and libertarian rhetoric to challenge the Justice and Development Party's(AKP) right-wing conservative populism that has recently transformed into authoritarianism, majoritarianism and illiberalism in the post-democracy era.

In this article, Chantal Mouffe, philosopher, professor at the University of Westminster, and theoretician of left-wing populism, proffers an analysis of the strategy of Jeremy Corbyn, a strategy which seeks to transform the internal dynamics of the Labour Party and to revitalise British Social Democracy. This article is translated and reprinted here with permission from the author and our partners at Le Vent Se Lève. Translation by Liam Farrell.

This article combines theatre history and performance analysis with contemporary agonistic theory to re-conceptualize Greek tragedy's contested spaces as key to the political potentials of the form. It focuses on Athenian tragedy's competitive and conflictual negotiation of performance space, understood in relation to the cultural trope of the agon. Drawing on David Wiles's structuralist analysis of Greek drama, which envisages tragedy's spatial confrontations as a theatrical correlative of democratic politics, performed tragedy is here re-framed as a site of embodied contest and struggle – as agonistic spatial practice. This historical model is then applied to a recent case study, Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women as co-produced by Actors Touring Company and the Lyceum, Edinburgh, in 2016–17, proposing that the frictious effects, encounters, and confrontations generated by this production (re-staged and re-articulated across multiple venues and contexts) exemplify some of the potentials of agonistic spatial practice in contemporary re-performance of Greek tragedy. It is contended that re-imagining tragic theatre, both ancient and modern, as (in Chantal Mouffe's terms) ‘agonistic public space’ represents an important new approach to interpreting and creatively re-imagining, interactions between Athenian tragedy and democratic politics.

Das Seminar wendet sich zwei aktuellen und lebhaft geführten Debatten der Sozialtheorie und politischen Theorie der letzten Jahrzehnte zu: den Diskussionen um einen "neuen Materialismus" , die vor allen Dingen – aber nicht nur – in der feministischen Theorie geführt werden ei-nerseits und den vielfältigen Beiträgen zur radikalen Demokratietheorie andererseits. Das Seminar beruht auf der Ausgangsbeobachtung, dass in Arbeiten zum "neuen Materialismus" , die es sich zum Ziel gesetzt haben nicht-menschliche Handlungsmacht in die Theoriebildung einzubeziehen, politisch-ethische Fragen tendenziell in Richtung einer Ethik aufgelöst werden. Radikaldemokratische Ansätze machen demgegenüber einen Fokus auf das Politische stark, der sich jenseits institutionalisierter Praktiken und Settings verortet. Die Annahme ist, dass eine Beschäftigung mit beiden Debatten dabei helfen kann, das spezifische Verhältnis von Ethik und Politik näher zu bestimmen. Darüber hinaus wird das Seminar aber auch danach fragen, ob sich die bei-den Perspektiven produktiv in ein Gespräch bringen lassen. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden wir uns zunächst mit zentralen Beiträgen beider "Strömungen" beschäftigen, wobei u.a. die Arbeiten von Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Claude Lefort und Chantal Mouffe aufgegriffen werden. Darauf aufbauend werden wir Fluchtlinien ausloten: Hier werden wir kritische Auseinandersetzungen mit "Neuen Materialismen" ebenso zur Kenntnis nehmen, wie Versuche einer radikaldemokratischen Deutung oder Anreicherung dieser Perspektiven.

Am Beispiel der beiden – privatwirtschaftlich initiierten Master-planned Communities Milano 2 (Italien) und Celebration (USA) geht Lidia Monza in ihrer Untersuchung der Frage nach, inwiefern solche neuen Formen von Urbanität als Antworten auf die ortsspezifische Krise der Stadt gesehen werden können und welche neuen Formen des Zusammenlebens sie anbieten können. Darüber hinaus wird sich der Fokus der Forschung auf die Regulationsstrukturen verschieben, um zu zeigen, wie die gewünschte Sozialordnung alltäglich durch das Management (re)produziert wird.

Die Untersuchung von Milano 2 und Celebration ist sehr aktuell für die Stadtentwicklungsprozesse, die die Gesellschaften weltweit erleben.

BOOK CHAPTER that was initially written as a prologue for the keynote lecture given by Chantal Mouffe at the 2009 edition of the Studium Generale at the Ghent University College in Belgium. The seventh edition of this Studium Generale addresses the theme of "Limits of Ethics?" The text below is an elaborated version of the prologue. It intends to offer a brief introduction to the political thinking of Chantal Mouffe and relates some of her ideas to the subject matter of the Studium. It also provides some key references for further reading.
see: http://bit.ly/2nfLSHR

Von Momcilo Nikolic

Spätestens seit Norbert Hofer wissen wir alle, dass NLP existiert. Reizworte und subversive Aussagen sind in politischen TV-Duellen gang und gäbe. Wir haben mit einer Expertin über diese Methoden gesprochen.

https://www.vice.com/de_at/article/wje3vx/wie-uns-die-worte-von-politikern-manipulieren

This paper analyses the construction of an Alevi political identity in terms of cultural, social and religious values at a time when the role of religion is increasing in the political life of Turkey. It indicates the emergence of a new form of conflict and hegemonic articulation between Sunnism and Alevism that offers an alternative means of conflict resolution by the Alevi political agents within a radical pluralism and agonistic democracy. It also argues that the social construction of Alevi political identity is both a political project and an ontological question as this identity focuses on religious discourses in establishing a counter-hegemonic culture through mobilizing political ‘collective passion’.

The eprint link is now ready to use and is:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6YJFmsS7CnX3JxApysfZ/full

Cytowanie: Baranowski M. (2014). W stronę konfliktowego modelu polityczności [w:]  Demokracja i rola obywatela: o napięciu pomiędzy państwem, społeczeństwem i procesami globalizacyjnymi, Baranowski M. (red.), Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Wydziału Nauk Społecznych UAM.

"The Violence of Legitimacy. Democracy, Power, Antagonism" offers a deconstructive reading of the articulation between violence and legitimacy, with a focus on democratic politics and critical IR theory.

The violence-legitimacy "couple" is a traditional staple in dominant strands of political theory, relying as they do on the possibility to distinguish rigorously between legitimate violence (power) and illegitimate violence. By contrast, and drawing on Derrida's deconstructive approach to performativity, I argue that violence and legitimacy are co-constitutive, both originating from the violence of an "originary performativity." This originary force implies a redefinition of the articulation between violence and legitimacy, now exceeding hermeneutics of power and metaphysics of presence.
The bulk of my thesis consists in contrasting this deconstructive reading of performativity to critical strands of political theory which posited the partition between legitimate power and illegitimate violence in the context of democratic politics: Marx & Engels' theory of ideology, Weber's sociology of legitimacy, Schmitt's onto-theological politics, Foucault's critical epistemology, Mouffe's radical democracy, and Balibar's dialectics of Gewalt.

One of the most intriguing questions in political philosophy has long been the following: how to organize politics in a way that not only appeases the conflict between groups and individuals but also allows to express even irrational beliefs. The answer that this article has dealt with is a proposition by Chantal Mouffe, called ‘agonistic democracy’. The concept is based on an claim that the exclusion of an emotional component from the public sphere can only lead to a political conflict. An example that confirms Mouffe’s assumptions is the expansion of European populism, which, according to the theory discussed in the article, may only be contained through recognizing the positive value of conflict in politics.

After a long period of suspicion towards universalism, the notion of cosmopolitanism has received a renewed interest from critical theorists in the early 2000s. In this lecture, I expose and compare Marx's and Schmitt's critiques of cosmopolitanism, as well as their legacies in critical theory. Then, I turn to Balibar’s and Derrida’s accounts of cosmopolitics and analyse their divergence on the articulation between universality, violence, and political ontology.

What it is that makes an action or an institution political is difficult to grasp, and the contemporary situation in politics seems to mirror the difficulty of succesfully theorizing politics. This essay investigates the concept of the political in Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe through a comparative reading. These three thinkers are connected, especially in the relation of the two latter to the groundbreaking work of Arendt. But this essay also tries to augment the lack of comparative readings of Rancière and Mouffe. The author believes that this can further a deeper understanding of what questions a theory of the political needs to answer. The essay is concluded with a discussion of three aspects of the political that a theory needs to engage with: the excess of politics, the self-referring quality of the political and the normativity of the political.

2015, January 12th. I have decided to post this piece following the recent events in Paris, in reaction to the general media coverage, but also to many scholars’ and politicians’ comments — in reaction, notably, to a certain use of language, and in particular this omnipresent lexicon, “barbarians”, “barbarism”, that I still fail to fully understand…

This text was initially established as a chapter for my PhD thesis, “Violence and legitimacy: an articulation beyond power”. It had to be left out from the final version, because of word-limit constraints. I haven’t modified it in view of this publication. It is a very much unfinished draft, including a lot of rambling, absurdly long footnotes, and sometimes telegraphic notes. It is also a dense, adventurous, and certainly arduous piece of political philosophy, going from Balibar to Derrida and Hegel, Marx & Engels, with references to Foucault, Schmitt, Agamben and Mouffe ; but here it is. I hope this work will trigger comments and reflections. If you have any remarks, questions or criticism, please message me. I am very much looking forward to pursuing this analysis further through any sort of discussion.

While extremism of the Islamic Jihad movement is on one side of the global power wheel, bashing away at the fabric of democratic societies, constant pounding of Jihadist ideology through the media equally punishes participants of these societies.

Media viewers are often forced to fight back the only way they can, and often as a means of self-preservation, by turning the media off or switching media outlets. Many people resort to letters to the editor, Web blogs, and political rallies to try to change their world.

Somehow, things always seem to maintain balance. That is, until the next global blows come from a radical Islamist and the media carrying his message. Baudrillard said correctly in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place that there is no war without the media, echoing Marshall McLuhan as McLuhan’s ideas meld into the fabric of digital culture.

The irony of the situation is that with each new bludgeoning media message comes the masochistic urge to want to hear more, get hit more, be more and more astonished. Each polarizing moment comes through the television or video screen with new compelling horrors, promises that predict no end to destruction, and a devastating impact on those persons helplessly caught between the media and its terrorists.

Slavoj Zïzek in The Plague of Fantasies contends that our experiences in cyberspace are making us psychotic because we don’t have “the Master,” or ordering of the symbolic, to tell us what we really want. For Zïzek, with the limitless options available in cyberspace, and without this Master, which offers “protection,” we move out of freedom to the only available alternative, the realm of the psychotic.

Since, for Zïzek -- and Guy Debord, borrowing from Georg Hegel -- resistance must operate within the symbolic order, there is nothing outside but psychosis. So where is the person caught between the media and its terrorists to go for safety? What can the spectator do to protect her/himself and those who are part of his inner circle? Is turning off the radio or television akin to stepping outside the symbolic order? Is the only alternative the lifestyle and destiny of the Unibomber? Is the televised place of symbolic order between the media and its terrorists actually one of safety?

People are not free to shut themselves off from the media, not without consequences. Yet the consequences of being caught in the middle of the psychological war waged equally by terrorists as our enemies and the media as our allies is surely not being conducted without taking its toll, perhaps in the form of neuroses. For Zïzek, participating in cyberspace leads to psychosis, yet there are no psychosocial definitions for participating in electronic media of radio and television, no known adverse effects.

The space occupied by the global media as multinational conglomerates is the binary opposite of the space occupied by terrorists as rogue, rhizomic wanderers, and the rest of the globe’s inhabitants are caught in between the two. We are caught between their oppositional ideologies, between their tactical methods, and also between an extreme suggestion that the two are in a collusion, between their symbiotic relationship, between their dependence upon one another.

The extreme stance by the media to participate in every terrorist declaration buys into the extreme stance by terrorists whereby they expect such participation, and since there is little to no balance from the only side which is capable of exerting balance, we are caught in the middle, shutting off our televisions for the Internet, and, at the risk of sounding extreme, nursing a global neurosis with the pleasures of impending psychosis.

This paper examines the use of the notion of the Lacanian Real by certain contemporary political theorists i.e. Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek. By going through their approaches to two core topics, that is to say on the one hand, the ways of the articulation of the subject and on the other the theorists' estimations for the political future of the West, important contradictions emerge. Do these "internal" contradictions reflect the case of the contemporary society as well? Accordingly, is the Lacanian Real embedded dramatically in our socio-political reality? By trying to figure out these questions, this paper wonders about the use of the Lacanian Real in Political Theory as well as about the potential of its enhancement.

Opinion Piece

Do think tanks simply become the mouthpieces of their sponsors? Or do they have a high calling?

I locate the function of think tanks in a "post-political" era and argue that they are designed to produce "political enthusiasm" for a given hegemony.