From lundimatin #524, 16/06/2026
To Forget Laclau (and Mouffe)?
by Erwan Sommerer
It was Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe who conceived and popularised “left-wing populism”, which now serves as a strategy for La France Insoumise after having won over the hearts and minds of other European political movements such as Podemos and Syriza. Whilst the concept has been widely discussed and criticised because it appears, historically speaking, to be an oxymoron, Erwan Sommerer suggests here that its inventors did not dare to take it through to its logical conclusions: “to conceive of the people as rupture and as negativity, to acknowledge the intensity of living violence of which it is the site, to recall that the very condition of its existence is the decisionist endeavour to abolish the state and capitalism”.
The case of Ernesto Laclau may seem settled. After all, the concrete applications of “left-wing populism”, with which his name is associated, have been catastrophic enough to discourage any inclination to revisit this author. From Podemos to Syriza via Jeremy Corbyn – not forgetting, of course, its vague use in Mélenchon’s strategy for seizing power – we know that this idea has served only to fuel electoral careerism and the crudest partisan manoeuvres. We should therefore be able to turn the page without too many qualms. And yet… When Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (co-authored with Chantal Mouffe) was published in 1985, followed by On Populist Reason in 2005,[1] certain arguments and concepts seemed to hold far greater potential for theoretical and strategic radicalism than what ultimately came to be recognised. Beyond the initial “post-Marxist” label – linked to a critique of Marxist essentialism, the removal of the working class from its status as the exclusive revolutionary subject, and the rejection of the fiction of scientific laws of history – the contribution lay above all in post-structuralist formalism: the aim was to conceptualise socio-political antagonism at its deepest level—not that of superficial, conjunctural and shifting struggles, but that which engages the mechanisms of the formation or destruction of social order. To use Laclau’s Heidegger-inspired vocabulary, the aim was to focus on the ontological plane rather than merely the ontic one.
I shall argue here that something can be salvaged from all this. Laclau did not fully embrace the radical nature of his own concepts, any more than he embraced the uncompromising, destructive “people” to whom his thinking led him and from whom he recoiled. Setting aside this timidity, I shall show that revisiting his conception of hegemony and antagonism not only enables us to diagnose Laclau’s self-betrayal but also to restore the people to their rightful place as a force of living violence and negativity.
The War of the Two Hegemonies
The pivotal argument of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which is often overlooked, is as follows: there is a primary, foundational conflict concerning the very possibility of taking up the struggle against dominant institutions, norms and values, and so on—in other words, the regime. This conflict runs through all exploited and oppressed groups, whose demands and aims are necessarily divided. Indeed, this divide exists within every collective identity, which consequently experiences an intrinsic split, a tension that pulls it – or rather tears it apart – between two irreconcilable directions, which are also two camps taking the form of two contradictory hegemonic logics.
The first is differential hegemony. This is what occurs when a group negotiates its entry into a larger whole: the nation, the republic, and so on. Whilst Laclau and Mouffe cite the example of Disraeli’s paternalistic policy of social management of the workers’ protest movement in nineteenth-century England, it is, more broadly, the model of political liberalism that is at work here.[2] By granting rights (the right to vote, the right to strike, etc.), the state ensures the submission of the populations concerned, divides them, deals with them separately, defuses their subversive potential and integrates them into a hierarchical system in which every group and every identity is assigned a place. Beyond the example of workers’ subordination, it is therefore the very fate of the “new social movements” – lured by recognition, by the acquisition of rights, by material comfort – and thus by the promise of the emergence of an endogenous bourgeoisie – that is called into question. But whilst Laclau and Mouffe are primarily concerned with the risk of a liberal co-optation of feminist, anti-racist and other struggles, the strength of their approach lies in not forgetting that the origins of this subjugation are to be found in the grand Marxist revolutionary project, which here loses much of its splendour.
There is, however, resistance to this co-optation. This is the other hegemonic direction, the other camp – that of the struggle against the systematic nature of the system – where the refusal to be assigned a place prevails: through an effort at horizontal solidarity, oppressed sectors enter into a logic of equivalence in the face of a common enemy. The idea may seem naïve or trivial. It undoubtedly is if one understands it merely as a half-hearted theory of the “convergence of struggles”, where the sole strategy consists of piling up demands. It is less so if one considers the need, for the groups concerned, to accept a degree of self-sacrifice and to engage in the struggle with a more ambitious goal than the mere granting of a stable identity and legal or material benefits. For them, it is a matter of blurring their differences and understanding that their specific aim – putting an end to patriarchal or heterocentric domination, racial inequalities, class exploitation, etc. – whilst not being denied or abandoned, can only be achieved through a broader objective: the formation of an equivalential [équivalentielle] hegemony occurs when everyone realises that the fulfilment of their particular demands requires collectively confronting the entire system.
For this confrontation to begin, a preliminary struggle of crucial importance must therefore take place. It is here that the very possibility of the coming struggle is at stake. Within each group, within each subaltern social sector, the illusion of a false internal homogeneity or solidarity must be abandoned, and the conflict between two irreconcilable camps must be engaged: on the one hand, the supporters of assimilation, who aspire only to be docile components of the system, to gentrification [embourgeoisement]– and are already on the side of oppression – and, on the other hand, the supporters of the overthrow of the regime. And it is only when the latter prevail, and this initial conflict is resolved in favour of the logic of equivalence, that the “internal frontier”[3]—which is antagonism—can then open up at the heart of the system.
The Return to Living Violence
In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, antagonism is the limit beyond which the norms, values and identities deployed to establish differential hegemony and consolidate it as a systemic whole are thwarted. Beyond this limit, assimilation is countered by the refusal of mobilised groups to have meaning and a place bestowed upon them: this is the point of convergence between the regime and that which negates it, when the very foundations of social objectivity – which stem from the capacity of institutions to impose a definition of things, actors and events – are confronted with an unassimilable counter-project that carries within it their destruction. This is why antagonism is a marker of negation, the encounter between the oppressors and the heralding of their end. Better still, it is also the marker of the failure of society as a system of differences, of the impossibility of its “closure”[4] as a stable totality: the logic of equivalence, far from being reduced to the hollow slogan of the “convergence of struggles”, opens up a fissure, an insurmountable negativity at the very heart of the existing order.[5] To borrow Laclau and Mouffe’s slogan, antagonism confirms that society is an impossible object.[6]
Beyond the ontic, conjunctural contents, antagonism is the mechanism through which conflict extends to the ontological level. Borrowing from Husserlian language, Laclau describes the antagonistic rupture as the moment of the reactivation of the political in the face of the sedimentation of institutions.[7] If we consider these institutions to be fixed power relations—the result of victory and defeat—where order has been established with its hierarchies, discipline and morality, then antagonism is the reopening of the original conflict. It is a process of denaturalising the social, of dismantling taken-for-granted assumptions, which takes the struggle back to a stage prior to the regime itself. In other words, this rupture forces the protagonists to abandon the ontic for the ontological, to return to a state prior to the victory of a specific order – which would have us believe it is the only possible one – over its alternatives. Since every institution, every norm and every identity is a form of dead, petrified violence – the trace of a past struggle – then antagonism, by reopening the inaugural battlefield, is the site of a return to living violence – that which characterises the primordial struggle for the regime.
From a Laclauian perspective, antagonism dismantles social objectivity in favour of a return to original contingency: everything that society took for granted is called into question and may once again become the subject of a confrontation. Consequently, this regression to the originary—prior to the pacification inherent in institutionalised domination—this return to living violence, is also a leap into the void. This is what Laclau—influenced by Derrida’s Force of Law—refers to as the passage through the undecidable, when the resurgence of contingency imposes a new decision upon the structure of the world. Thrown into the unknown, into a “moment of madness” that is also a creative “fiat”, individuals can once again struggle to decide what they want to be, according to which norms and values.[8] To put it more simply: antagonism paves the way for a radical decisionism which is the expression of the full ontological unfolding of the emancipatory violence of the dominated.
The People as a Structural Procedure
We were more or less at this stage when On Populist Reason was published. Admittedly, the “people” had already featured in earlier texts as a possible mode of structuring the logic of equivalence: the idea was that, in certain historical contexts, opposition to those in power could lead to the formation of a broad “popular” camp uniting all oppressed groups. But everything changed in 2005 when Laclau set out not only to rehabilitate the notion of “populism” – and this is all that many have taken away from it – but also to elevate the people to the ontological level by deciding to make it the exclusive expression of antagonism. It is a gesture as simple as it is decisive: the “people” become at once the name for resistance to systemic assimilation, for the negation of the regime, and for the reactivation of living violence. To put it simply, one might say that the people become the structural modality of the impossibility of society.
This is Laclau’s way of asserting that populist logic is the only means of countering the differential co-optation of the oppressed. But “populism” is then no longer so much a style of mobilisation as the unique form taken by the establishment of equivalence between groups that resist assimilation. This implies several crucial points. Firstly, that the people are no longer a social actor with a predetermined content, locatable a priori within society, endowed with fixed sociological characteristics or, worse still, a predefined essence. We can set aside here any plebeian romanticism or any essentialist and exclusionary definition. The people become a form rather than a substance: as a procedural mechanism, they no longer even need to be named as such in ontological struggles. It is enough for the antagonism to emerge for their existence to be acknowledged.[9]
This also allows us to dispel the fiction of a “people” as the bearer of a truth or a will deemed infallible, which self-proclaimed spokespeople invent from scratch to justify their seizure of power. Ontological populism here undermines ontic populism—that is to say, political leaders or parties who, as mere ventriloquists, construct the people in their own image in order to put their own project of seizing power and domination into its mouth. All this is merely superficial agitation, one manifestation amongst many of the social system’s assimilationist strategies, where true popular sovereignty, devoid of any positive content, is a negativity that opens onto the void of the original battlefield.
The ontic cage
But it was too good to be true, for one of the fascinating aspects of Laclau and Mouffe’s work is the way in which these authors have carefully defused the radical potential of their own concepts. Laclau’s entire approach has thus consisted of confining the people to the ontic level by refraining from defining them in terms of a genuine antagonism. It is as though his most daring ideas were a sort of intellectual game, an exercise in style, and that their political implications needed to be toned down.
This self-tempering is evident as early as Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, when, towards the end of the book and under the influence of Lefort, the notion of “radical democracy”[10] emerges – a concept that Mouffe subsequently developed. All the mechanisms described in the book – equivalence, antagonism, the confrontation between social objectivity and its negation – are re-framed within the strict framework of liberal democracy, which must then simply be “radicalised”; that is to say, to put it simply, made more egalitarian. Thus, the action of the “new social movements” must lead to the formation of a sort of open, flexible regime, capable of self-reflection and able to accommodate the demands of various groups. Conflict is certainly present but, in the grand tradition of the clichés of Lefort’s “savage democracy” (and one could go back as far as Machiavelli’s “tumulto”, which plays the same role), it serves only a regulatory function. It is merely a safety valve that ensures the system is occasionally shaken up and renewed. The disheartening “agonistic democracy”, Mouffe’s trademark concept, at least had the merit of subsequently openly rejecting antagonism and fully embracing this conception of conflict as a regulator of social order.[11]
On a conceptual level, Laclau, for his part, has consistently emphasised that differential and equivalential hegemonies are in fact two contradictory yet complementary tendencies within the social system. Neither complete closure (when the system achieves total assimilation) nor complete rupture (when antagonism reaches its maximum intensity) is, in his view, possible. These are two poles that keep the social structure in a state of tension, with negativity being merely a stage in the maintenance of a broader political-institutional order. The promises of undecidability, the opening up of the void, and the entrenchment of conflict at its most fundamental level are a long way off here.
This is quite logical when one considers that neither Laclau nor Mouffe managed to do full justice to the idea of “closure”. Marxists have been quick to point this out, but it is the essential point: whilst Hegemony and Socialist Strategy still contains a few references to the abolition of “capitalist relations of production”[12]—a vague concession to anti-capitalism—this aspect subsequently disappears from their work. But what, then, is an antagonistic rupture that does not challenge the socio-economic system whose grip now extends to all relations, norms and identities? And what is a reactivation of conflict over institutions when the very heart of capitalist domination – its most entrenched, consolidated and powerful centre, namely the state, that unshakeable point of convergence between liberalism and authoritarianism – is not called into question? This is the stark reality of Laclau’s model: by claiming to lift the veil on the political in its most fundamental, quasi-tectonic form, he has merely disguised the ontic as the ontological. He has obscured the level at which enclosure truly takes place and reduced antagonism to its most superficial and futile expression. Betrayed, locked away in its ontic cage, the people no longer had any choice but to revert to being a mere instrument of legitimation or, worse still, an electorate.
It is therefore hardly surprising that all this effort to conceal antagonism – reduced to its most lukewarm parody – has resulted in the disastrous “left-wing populism”. Of course, this is more Mouffe’s territory than Laclau’s: for her, the mobilisation of the people becomes a mere rhetorical and programmatic strategy for mobilising the voters of the partisan left with a view to victory at the ballot box. But Laclau himself never concealed his fascination with the Argentine Peronist model, and his belated alignment with Kirchnerism revealed the compatibility of his theoretical views with the Latin American tradition of invoking the people for the purposes of institutional domination. All of this was therefore very much a matter of charismatic leaders and the seizure of power, and the disastrous experiences of Podemos and Syriza – not to mention the opportunistic alliance between “left-wing populism” and Mélenchonism – have laid bare the deception.
Totalising Antagonism
Laclau’s trajectory is thus unique in that it deploys concepts and lines of reasoning whose scope has been almost systematically neutralised by Laclau himself, greatly aided in this by Mouffe. The ideas are nonetheless there: the initial struggle between differential capture and antagonistic rupture, the reactivation of primal violence prior to the petrification of institutions, the confrontation of society with its own impossibility, and the designation of the people as the ontological procedure for negating the existing order—these are all milestones that allow us to gauge the intensity to which socio-political conflict must be brought in order to undermine the foundations of domination. And if all this has ultimately served only to mask an ontic confinement—and to justify the neo-caudillist manoeuvres of the most trivial electoral left—it remains true that something can be salvaged from it.
To do so, we must return to the definition of antagonism and take it more seriously than its author. Laclau, in fact, regularly insists that a true rupture, marking the limit of social objectivity, is only possible in the absence of any common ground: there is no real, fully established antagonism unless the transcendence of the two camps into a higher whole, into an all-encompassing synthesis, is strictly impossible. No dialectical process, no Hegelian “ruse of reason”[13] should be able to act as a vector of reconciliation. The people, in other words, are what emerges when no sharing, no agreement, no middle ground with the rulers and institutions is conceivable. This definition, if one pushes the reasoning to its logical conclusion, implies two things.
The first is that the conflict thus enacted must leave nothing untouched. Nothing in common with the enemy must remain: the closure—the system’s self-enclosure and the absorption of all existence as an internal component of that system—must be countered at its deepest level. For this to happen, the overthrow of the existing order must be total, complete, and without reservation. And this includes, of course, as an absolute priority, the immediate, joint, and inseparable dismantling of the two pillars of domination: the State and capitalism—the two blind spots of Laclau’s thought. Without this totalisation of the antagonism, a complicity, a tacit agreement, will always remain between the protagonists. And prioritising this objective is not just another goal, an “empty signifier”[14] that could be replaced by other slogans capable of generating anti-systemic hegemony. In an era where all social relations are structured by market logic, anti-capitalism is not just another ontic ingredient to be added to a list of demands. By contaminating the ontological, capitalism has become the sole, exclusive source of the petrification of institutions and the fixation of socio-economic, gender, racial, and other hierarchies. The struggle for its abolition, therefore, is the only possible means of achieving an equivalential scission of identities.
The second point is that real antagonism is thus a conflict without a third party. If all common ground between the protagonists is destroyed, if equivalence is total—each group, each social or moral position being compelled to align itself with one of the two opposing camps—then no exteriority remains. There can be no neutral, detached observer who could placidly encompass the enemies within the same perspective or the same theoretical framework. This means that the moment of antagonistic rupture is also the moment of the drastic reduction of the field of possibilities: when petrified violence is revived and the relationship between enemies tolerates neither neutrality nor indifference, only two alternatives remain. And this is the site of the people. Not the ontic people of opportunistic populists and electoral manoeuvres, but the people-form in all its ontological purity, in its structural plenitude. The people who act as the instance of negativity that destroys all social objectivity, eliminates hierarchies, dismantles institutions, and prevents their reformation. For this, too, is the lesson of antagonism: the people is the name of the absolute impossibility of a return to order that haunts all ontic revolutions. It is the guardian of negativity that makes possible the ontological persistence of contingency.
One might wonder whether the exercise of rescuing Laclau from the clutches of Laclau (and Mouffe) is not somewhat futile. But on the contrary, we must grasp what is at stake here: if “left-wing populism” has resonated to some extent in concrete struggles, producing a few electoral results, it is because the ontic confinement of antagonism, and thus the distancing from the ontological purity of the people, is one of the privileged forms of liberal capture and assimilation. To think of the people as rupture and as negativity, to embrace the intensity of living violence of which they are the site, to recall that the very condition of their existence is the decisionist undertaking of abolishing the State and capitalism, is therefore also to unmask the partisan and parliamentary agitations whose sole function is to neutralise them.
Erwan Sommerer
[1] Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London, Verso, 1985; Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London, Verso, 2005. In the subsequent footnotes, I will refer to the two works with the following acronyms: HSS et OPR.
[2] HSS p. 130.
[3] HSS p. 133 or 144; Cf. also OPR p. 74-78.
[4] HSS p. 122 and 136.
[5] HSS p. 128-129 ; Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London, Verso, 1990, p. 4 and 18. (here on, NRRT).
[6] Ibid. p. 112 and 122. Cf. also “The Impossibility of Society”, in NRRT p. 89-92.
[7] NRRT p. 33-34.
[8] NRRT p. 30. Cf. also the fundamental text “Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony”, in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, London, Routledge, 1996, p. 47-67.
[9] See for example p. 74, 89, 116-117.
[10] HSS p. 176-193.
[11] It is worth recalling that, according to Mouffe, the most intense, radical, and extreme form of agonistic democracy is the regular alternation of majorities within parliaments.
[12] HSS. p. 178.
[13] HSS p. 126, OPR p. 148-149 and NRRT p. 16-18.
[14] The empty signifier is the concept through which Laclau describes the interchangeability of political demands or goals that act as a rallying point for sectoral struggles and allow them to become equivalent (see, for example, OPR pp. 214-221). But this interchangeability only functions against the backdrop of a prior division, namely the acceptance of state-capitalist domination, which defuses in advance any possibility of implementing a real antagonism.
The left-wing populists who are afraid of the people
From lundimatin #524, 16/06/2026
To Forget Laclau (and Mouffe)?
by Erwan Sommerer
It was Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe who conceived and popularised “left-wing populism”, which now serves as a strategy for La France Insoumise after having won over the hearts and minds of other European political movements such as Podemos and Syriza. Whilst the concept has been widely discussed and criticised because it appears, historically speaking, to be an oxymoron, Erwan Sommerer suggests here that its inventors did not dare to take it through to its logical conclusions: “to conceive of the people as rupture and as negativity, to acknowledge the intensity of living violence of which it is the site, to recall that the very condition of its existence is the decisionist endeavour to abolish the state and capitalism”.
The case of Ernesto Laclau may seem settled. After all, the concrete applications of “left-wing populism”, with which his name is associated, have been catastrophic enough to discourage any inclination to revisit this author. From Podemos to Syriza via Jeremy Corbyn – not forgetting, of course, its vague use in Mélenchon’s strategy for seizing power – we know that this idea has served only to fuel electoral careerism and the crudest partisan manoeuvres. We should therefore be able to turn the page without too many qualms. And yet… When Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (co-authored with Chantal Mouffe) was published in 1985, followed by On Populist Reason in 2005,[1] certain arguments and concepts seemed to hold far greater potential for theoretical and strategic radicalism than what ultimately came to be recognised. Beyond the initial “post-Marxist” label – linked to a critique of Marxist essentialism, the removal of the working class from its status as the exclusive revolutionary subject, and the rejection of the fiction of scientific laws of history – the contribution lay above all in post-structuralist formalism: the aim was to conceptualise socio-political antagonism at its deepest level—not that of superficial, conjunctural and shifting struggles, but that which engages the mechanisms of the formation or destruction of social order. To use Laclau’s Heidegger-inspired vocabulary, the aim was to focus on the ontological plane rather than merely the ontic one.
I shall argue here that something can be salvaged from all this. Laclau did not fully embrace the radical nature of his own concepts, any more than he embraced the uncompromising, destructive “people” to whom his thinking led him and from whom he recoiled. Setting aside this timidity, I shall show that revisiting his conception of hegemony and antagonism not only enables us to diagnose Laclau’s self-betrayal but also to restore the people to their rightful place as a force of living violence and negativity.
The War of the Two Hegemonies
The pivotal argument of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which is often overlooked, is as follows: there is a primary, foundational conflict concerning the very possibility of taking up the struggle against dominant institutions, norms and values, and so on—in other words, the regime. This conflict runs through all exploited and oppressed groups, whose demands and aims are necessarily divided. Indeed, this divide exists within every collective identity, which consequently experiences an intrinsic split, a tension that pulls it – or rather tears it apart – between two irreconcilable directions, which are also two camps taking the form of two contradictory hegemonic logics.
The first is differential hegemony. This is what occurs when a group negotiates its entry into a larger whole: the nation, the republic, and so on. Whilst Laclau and Mouffe cite the example of Disraeli’s paternalistic policy of social management of the workers’ protest movement in nineteenth-century England, it is, more broadly, the model of political liberalism that is at work here.[2] By granting rights (the right to vote, the right to strike, etc.), the state ensures the submission of the populations concerned, divides them, deals with them separately, defuses their subversive potential and integrates them into a hierarchical system in which every group and every identity is assigned a place. Beyond the example of workers’ subordination, it is therefore the very fate of the “new social movements” – lured by recognition, by the acquisition of rights, by material comfort – and thus by the promise of the emergence of an endogenous bourgeoisie – that is called into question. But whilst Laclau and Mouffe are primarily concerned with the risk of a liberal co-optation of feminist, anti-racist and other struggles, the strength of their approach lies in not forgetting that the origins of this subjugation are to be found in the grand Marxist revolutionary project, which here loses much of its splendour.
There is, however, resistance to this co-optation. This is the other hegemonic direction, the other camp – that of the struggle against the systematic nature of the system – where the refusal to be assigned a place prevails: through an effort at horizontal solidarity, oppressed sectors enter into a logic of equivalence in the face of a common enemy. The idea may seem naïve or trivial. It undoubtedly is if one understands it merely as a half-hearted theory of the “convergence of struggles”, where the sole strategy consists of piling up demands. It is less so if one considers the need, for the groups concerned, to accept a degree of self-sacrifice and to engage in the struggle with a more ambitious goal than the mere granting of a stable identity and legal or material benefits. For them, it is a matter of blurring their differences and understanding that their specific aim – putting an end to patriarchal or heterocentric domination, racial inequalities, class exploitation, etc. – whilst not being denied or abandoned, can only be achieved through a broader objective: the formation of an equivalential [équivalentielle] hegemony occurs when everyone realises that the fulfilment of their particular demands requires collectively confronting the entire system.
For this confrontation to begin, a preliminary struggle of crucial importance must therefore take place. It is here that the very possibility of the coming struggle is at stake. Within each group, within each subaltern social sector, the illusion of a false internal homogeneity or solidarity must be abandoned, and the conflict between two irreconcilable camps must be engaged: on the one hand, the supporters of assimilation, who aspire only to be docile components of the system, to gentrification [embourgeoisement]– and are already on the side of oppression – and, on the other hand, the supporters of the overthrow of the regime. And it is only when the latter prevail, and this initial conflict is resolved in favour of the logic of equivalence, that the “internal frontier”[3]—which is antagonism—can then open up at the heart of the system.
The Return to Living Violence
In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, antagonism is the limit beyond which the norms, values and identities deployed to establish differential hegemony and consolidate it as a systemic whole are thwarted. Beyond this limit, assimilation is countered by the refusal of mobilised groups to have meaning and a place bestowed upon them: this is the point of convergence between the regime and that which negates it, when the very foundations of social objectivity – which stem from the capacity of institutions to impose a definition of things, actors and events – are confronted with an unassimilable counter-project that carries within it their destruction. This is why antagonism is a marker of negation, the encounter between the oppressors and the heralding of their end. Better still, it is also the marker of the failure of society as a system of differences, of the impossibility of its “closure”[4] as a stable totality: the logic of equivalence, far from being reduced to the hollow slogan of the “convergence of struggles”, opens up a fissure, an insurmountable negativity at the very heart of the existing order.[5] To borrow Laclau and Mouffe’s slogan, antagonism confirms that society is an impossible object.[6]
Beyond the ontic, conjunctural contents, antagonism is the mechanism through which conflict extends to the ontological level. Borrowing from Husserlian language, Laclau describes the antagonistic rupture as the moment of the reactivation of the political in the face of the sedimentation of institutions.[7] If we consider these institutions to be fixed power relations—the result of victory and defeat—where order has been established with its hierarchies, discipline and morality, then antagonism is the reopening of the original conflict. It is a process of denaturalising the social, of dismantling taken-for-granted assumptions, which takes the struggle back to a stage prior to the regime itself. In other words, this rupture forces the protagonists to abandon the ontic for the ontological, to return to a state prior to the victory of a specific order – which would have us believe it is the only possible one – over its alternatives. Since every institution, every norm and every identity is a form of dead, petrified violence – the trace of a past struggle – then antagonism, by reopening the inaugural battlefield, is the site of a return to living violence – that which characterises the primordial struggle for the regime.
From a Laclauian perspective, antagonism dismantles social objectivity in favour of a return to original contingency: everything that society took for granted is called into question and may once again become the subject of a confrontation. Consequently, this regression to the originary—prior to the pacification inherent in institutionalised domination—this return to living violence, is also a leap into the void. This is what Laclau—influenced by Derrida’s Force of Law—refers to as the passage through the undecidable, when the resurgence of contingency imposes a new decision upon the structure of the world. Thrown into the unknown, into a “moment of madness” that is also a creative “fiat”, individuals can once again struggle to decide what they want to be, according to which norms and values.[8] To put it more simply: antagonism paves the way for a radical decisionism which is the expression of the full ontological unfolding of the emancipatory violence of the dominated.
The People as a Structural Procedure
We were more or less at this stage when On Populist Reason was published. Admittedly, the “people” had already featured in earlier texts as a possible mode of structuring the logic of equivalence: the idea was that, in certain historical contexts, opposition to those in power could lead to the formation of a broad “popular” camp uniting all oppressed groups. But everything changed in 2005 when Laclau set out not only to rehabilitate the notion of “populism” – and this is all that many have taken away from it – but also to elevate the people to the ontological level by deciding to make it the exclusive expression of antagonism. It is a gesture as simple as it is decisive: the “people” become at once the name for resistance to systemic assimilation, for the negation of the regime, and for the reactivation of living violence. To put it simply, one might say that the people become the structural modality of the impossibility of society.
This is Laclau’s way of asserting that populist logic is the only means of countering the differential co-optation of the oppressed. But “populism” is then no longer so much a style of mobilisation as the unique form taken by the establishment of equivalence between groups that resist assimilation. This implies several crucial points. Firstly, that the people are no longer a social actor with a predetermined content, locatable a priori within society, endowed with fixed sociological characteristics or, worse still, a predefined essence. We can set aside here any plebeian romanticism or any essentialist and exclusionary definition. The people become a form rather than a substance: as a procedural mechanism, they no longer even need to be named as such in ontological struggles. It is enough for the antagonism to emerge for their existence to be acknowledged.[9]
This also allows us to dispel the fiction of a “people” as the bearer of a truth or a will deemed infallible, which self-proclaimed spokespeople invent from scratch to justify their seizure of power. Ontological populism here undermines ontic populism—that is to say, political leaders or parties who, as mere ventriloquists, construct the people in their own image in order to put their own project of seizing power and domination into its mouth. All this is merely superficial agitation, one manifestation amongst many of the social system’s assimilationist strategies, where true popular sovereignty, devoid of any positive content, is a negativity that opens onto the void of the original battlefield.
The ontic cage
But it was too good to be true, for one of the fascinating aspects of Laclau and Mouffe’s work is the way in which these authors have carefully defused the radical potential of their own concepts. Laclau’s entire approach has thus consisted of confining the people to the ontic level by refraining from defining them in terms of a genuine antagonism. It is as though his most daring ideas were a sort of intellectual game, an exercise in style, and that their political implications needed to be toned down.
This self-tempering is evident as early as Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, when, towards the end of the book and under the influence of Lefort, the notion of “radical democracy”[10] emerges – a concept that Mouffe subsequently developed. All the mechanisms described in the book – equivalence, antagonism, the confrontation between social objectivity and its negation – are re-framed within the strict framework of liberal democracy, which must then simply be “radicalised”; that is to say, to put it simply, made more egalitarian. Thus, the action of the “new social movements” must lead to the formation of a sort of open, flexible regime, capable of self-reflection and able to accommodate the demands of various groups. Conflict is certainly present but, in the grand tradition of the clichés of Lefort’s “savage democracy” (and one could go back as far as Machiavelli’s “tumulto”, which plays the same role), it serves only a regulatory function. It is merely a safety valve that ensures the system is occasionally shaken up and renewed. The disheartening “agonistic democracy”, Mouffe’s trademark concept, at least had the merit of subsequently openly rejecting antagonism and fully embracing this conception of conflict as a regulator of social order.[11]
On a conceptual level, Laclau, for his part, has consistently emphasised that differential and equivalential hegemonies are in fact two contradictory yet complementary tendencies within the social system. Neither complete closure (when the system achieves total assimilation) nor complete rupture (when antagonism reaches its maximum intensity) is, in his view, possible. These are two poles that keep the social structure in a state of tension, with negativity being merely a stage in the maintenance of a broader political-institutional order. The promises of undecidability, the opening up of the void, and the entrenchment of conflict at its most fundamental level are a long way off here.
This is quite logical when one considers that neither Laclau nor Mouffe managed to do full justice to the idea of “closure”. Marxists have been quick to point this out, but it is the essential point: whilst Hegemony and Socialist Strategy still contains a few references to the abolition of “capitalist relations of production”[12]—a vague concession to anti-capitalism—this aspect subsequently disappears from their work. But what, then, is an antagonistic rupture that does not challenge the socio-economic system whose grip now extends to all relations, norms and identities? And what is a reactivation of conflict over institutions when the very heart of capitalist domination – its most entrenched, consolidated and powerful centre, namely the state, that unshakeable point of convergence between liberalism and authoritarianism – is not called into question? This is the stark reality of Laclau’s model: by claiming to lift the veil on the political in its most fundamental, quasi-tectonic form, he has merely disguised the ontic as the ontological. He has obscured the level at which enclosure truly takes place and reduced antagonism to its most superficial and futile expression. Betrayed, locked away in its ontic cage, the people no longer had any choice but to revert to being a mere instrument of legitimation or, worse still, an electorate.
It is therefore hardly surprising that all this effort to conceal antagonism – reduced to its most lukewarm parody – has resulted in the disastrous “left-wing populism”. Of course, this is more Mouffe’s territory than Laclau’s: for her, the mobilisation of the people becomes a mere rhetorical and programmatic strategy for mobilising the voters of the partisan left with a view to victory at the ballot box. But Laclau himself never concealed his fascination with the Argentine Peronist model, and his belated alignment with Kirchnerism revealed the compatibility of his theoretical views with the Latin American tradition of invoking the people for the purposes of institutional domination. All of this was therefore very much a matter of charismatic leaders and the seizure of power, and the disastrous experiences of Podemos and Syriza – not to mention the opportunistic alliance between “left-wing populism” and Mélenchonism – have laid bare the deception.
Totalising Antagonism
Laclau’s trajectory is thus unique in that it deploys concepts and lines of reasoning whose scope has been almost systematically neutralised by Laclau himself, greatly aided in this by Mouffe. The ideas are nonetheless there: the initial struggle between differential capture and antagonistic rupture, the reactivation of primal violence prior to the petrification of institutions, the confrontation of society with its own impossibility, and the designation of the people as the ontological procedure for negating the existing order—these are all milestones that allow us to gauge the intensity to which socio-political conflict must be brought in order to undermine the foundations of domination. And if all this has ultimately served only to mask an ontic confinement—and to justify the neo-caudillist manoeuvres of the most trivial electoral left—it remains true that something can be salvaged from it.
To do so, we must return to the definition of antagonism and take it more seriously than its author. Laclau, in fact, regularly insists that a true rupture, marking the limit of social objectivity, is only possible in the absence of any common ground: there is no real, fully established antagonism unless the transcendence of the two camps into a higher whole, into an all-encompassing synthesis, is strictly impossible. No dialectical process, no Hegelian “ruse of reason”[13] should be able to act as a vector of reconciliation. The people, in other words, are what emerges when no sharing, no agreement, no middle ground with the rulers and institutions is conceivable. This definition, if one pushes the reasoning to its logical conclusion, implies two things.
The first is that the conflict thus enacted must leave nothing untouched. Nothing in common with the enemy must remain: the closure—the system’s self-enclosure and the absorption of all existence as an internal component of that system—must be countered at its deepest level. For this to happen, the overthrow of the existing order must be total, complete, and without reservation. And this includes, of course, as an absolute priority, the immediate, joint, and inseparable dismantling of the two pillars of domination: the State and capitalism—the two blind spots of Laclau’s thought. Without this totalisation of the antagonism, a complicity, a tacit agreement, will always remain between the protagonists. And prioritising this objective is not just another goal, an “empty signifier”[14] that could be replaced by other slogans capable of generating anti-systemic hegemony. In an era where all social relations are structured by market logic, anti-capitalism is not just another ontic ingredient to be added to a list of demands. By contaminating the ontological, capitalism has become the sole, exclusive source of the petrification of institutions and the fixation of socio-economic, gender, racial, and other hierarchies. The struggle for its abolition, therefore, is the only possible means of achieving an equivalential scission of identities.
The second point is that real antagonism is thus a conflict without a third party. If all common ground between the protagonists is destroyed, if equivalence is total—each group, each social or moral position being compelled to align itself with one of the two opposing camps—then no exteriority remains. There can be no neutral, detached observer who could placidly encompass the enemies within the same perspective or the same theoretical framework. This means that the moment of antagonistic rupture is also the moment of the drastic reduction of the field of possibilities: when petrified violence is revived and the relationship between enemies tolerates neither neutrality nor indifference, only two alternatives remain. And this is the site of the people. Not the ontic people of opportunistic populists and electoral manoeuvres, but the people-form in all its ontological purity, in its structural plenitude. The people who act as the instance of negativity that destroys all social objectivity, eliminates hierarchies, dismantles institutions, and prevents their reformation. For this, too, is the lesson of antagonism: the people is the name of the absolute impossibility of a return to order that haunts all ontic revolutions. It is the guardian of negativity that makes possible the ontological persistence of contingency.
One might wonder whether the exercise of rescuing Laclau from the clutches of Laclau (and Mouffe) is not somewhat futile. But on the contrary, we must grasp what is at stake here: if “left-wing populism” has resonated to some extent in concrete struggles, producing a few electoral results, it is because the ontic confinement of antagonism, and thus the distancing from the ontological purity of the people, is one of the privileged forms of liberal capture and assimilation. To think of the people as rupture and as negativity, to embrace the intensity of living violence of which they are the site, to recall that the very condition of their existence is the decisionist undertaking of abolishing the State and capitalism, is therefore also to unmask the partisan and parliamentary agitations whose sole function is to neutralise them.
Erwan Sommerer
[1] Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London, Verso, 1985; Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, London, Verso, 2005. In the subsequent footnotes, I will refer to the two works with the following acronyms: HSS et OPR.
[2] HSS p. 130.
[3] HSS p. 133 or 144; Cf. also OPR p. 74-78.
[4] HSS p. 122 and 136.
[5] HSS p. 128-129 ; Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London, Verso, 1990, p. 4 and 18. (here on, NRRT).
[6] Ibid. p. 112 and 122. Cf. also “The Impossibility of Society”, in NRRT p. 89-92.
[7] NRRT p. 33-34.
[8] NRRT p. 30. Cf. also the fundamental text “Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Hegemony”, in Chantal Mouffe (ed.), Deconstruction and Pragmatism, London, Routledge, 1996, p. 47-67.
[9] See for example p. 74, 89, 116-117.
[10] HSS p. 176-193.
[11] It is worth recalling that, according to Mouffe, the most intense, radical, and extreme form of agonistic democracy is the regular alternation of majorities within parliaments.
[12] HSS. p. 178.
[13] HSS p. 126, OPR p. 148-149 and NRRT p. 16-18.
[14] The empty signifier is the concept through which Laclau describes the interchangeability of political demands or goals that act as a rallying point for sectoral struggles and allow them to become equivalent (see, for example, OPR pp. 214-221). But this interchangeability only functions against the backdrop of a prior division, namely the acceptance of state-capitalist domination, which defuses in advance any possibility of implementing a real antagonism.