Agonistics

Thinking the World Politically

Chantal Mouffe

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781781681039
• eBook ISBN: 9781781684917
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Political conflict in our society is inevitable, and the results are often far from negative. How then should we deal with the intractable differences arising from complex modern culture?
In Agonistics, Mouffe develops her philosophy, taking particular interest in international relations, strategies for radical politics and the politics of artistic practices. In a series of coruscating essays, she engages with cosmopolitanism, post-operaism, and theories of multiple modernities to argue in favor of a multipolar world with a real cultural and political pluralism.

Chapter 1

What Is Agonistic Politics?

In recent years, agonistic approaches to politics have become increasingly influential. However, they exist in a variety of forms, which has often created some confusion. Since this book intends to examine the relevance of my conception of agonism to several fields, it is necessary to clarify the specificity of my approach and the way it differs from other agonistic theories. I will begin by recalling the basic tenets of the theoretical framework that informs my reflections on the political as it was elaborated in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, co-written with Ernesto Laclau.¹

In this book, we argued that two key concepts – ‘antagonism’ and ‘hegemony’ – are necessary to grasp the nature of the political. Both pointed to the importance of acknowledging the dimension of radical negativity that manifests itself in the ever-present possibility of antagonism. This dimension, we proposed, impedes the full totalization of society and forecloses the possibility of a society beyond division and power. This, in turn, requires coming to terms with the lack of a final ground and the undecidability that pervades every order. In our vocabulary, this means recognizing the ‘hegemonic’ nature of every kind of social order and envisaging society as the product of a series of practices whose aim is to establish order in a context of contingency. We call ‘hegemonic practices’ the practices of articulation through which a given order is created and the meaning of social institutions is fixed. According to this approach, every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices. Things could always be otherwise and every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities. Any order is always the expression of a particular configuration of power relations. What is at a given moment accepted as the ‘natural’ order, jointly with the common sense that accompanies it, is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices. It is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity that is exterior to the practices that brought it into being. Every order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices that attempt to disarticulate it in an effort to install another form of hegemony.

In The Return of the Political, The Democratic Paradox and On the Political I have developed these reflections on ‘the political’, understood as the antagonistic dimension which is inherent to all human societies.² To that effect, I have proposed the distinction between ‘the political’ and ‘politics’. ‘The political’ refers to this dimension of antagonism which can take many forms and can emerge in diverse social relations. It is a dimension that can never be eradicated. ‘Politics’, on the other hand, refers to the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that seeks to establish a certain order and to organize human coexistence in conditions which are always potentially conflicting, since they are affected by the dimension of ‘the political’.

As I have repeatedly emphasized in my writings, political questions are not mere technical issues to be solved by experts. Proper political questions always involve decisions that require making a choice between conflicting alternatives. This is something that cannot be grasped by the dominant tendency in liberal thought, which is characterized by a rationalist and individualist approach. This is why liberalism is unable to adequately envisage the pluralistic nature of the social world, with the conflicts that pluralism entails. These are conflicts for which no rational solution could ever exist, hence the dimension of antagonism that characterizes human societies.

The typical understanding of pluralism is as follows: we live in a world in which there are indeed many perspectives and values, but due to empirical limitations, we will never be able to adopt them all; however, when put together, they could constitute an harmonious and non-conflictual ensemble. I have shown that this type of perspective, which is dominant in liberal political theory, has to negate the political in its antagonistic dimension in order to thrive. Indeed, one of the main tenets of this kind of liberalism is the rationalist belief in the availability of a universal consensus based on reason. No wonder, therefore, that the political constitutes liberalism’s blind spot. By bringing to the fore the inescapable moment of decision – in the strong sense of having to decide within an undecidable terrain – what antagonism reveals is the very limit of any rational consensus.

The denial of ‘the political’ in its antagonistic dimension is, I have argued, what prevents liberal theory from envisaging politics in an adequate way. The political in its antagonistic dimension cannot be made to disappear by simply denying it or wishing it away. This is the typical liberal gesture, and such negation only leads to the impotence that characterizes liberal thought when confronted with the emergence of antagonisms and forms of violence that, according to its theory, belong to a bygone age when reason had not yet managed to control the supposedly archaic passions. This is at the root of liberalism’s current incapacity to grasp the nature and causes of new antagonisms that have emerged since the Cold War.

Liberal thought is also blind to the political because of its individualism, which makes it unable to understand the formation of collective identities. Yet the political is from the outset concerned with collective forms of identification, since in this field we are always dealing with the formation of ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’. Here the main problem with liberal rationalism is that it deploys a logic of the social based on an essentialist conception of ‘being as presence’, and that it conceives objectivity as being inherent to things themselves. It cannot recognize that there can only be an identity when it is constructed as difference, and that any social objectivity is constituted through acts of power. What it refuses to admit is that any form of social objectivity is ultimately political and that it must bear the traces of the acts of exclusion that govern its constitution.

In several of my books I have used the notion of the ‘constitutive outside’ to explain this thesis, and since it plays a crucial role in my argumentation, I think it is necessary to explain it again here.

This term was originally proposed by Henry Staten to refer to a number of themes developed by Jacques Derrida through notions like ‘supplement’, ‘trace’ and ‘difference’.³ Staten’s objective was to highlight the fact that the creation of an identity always implies the establishment of a difference. To be sure, Derrida developed this reflection at a very abstract level, refering to any form of objectivity. I have, for my part, been interested in bringing to the fore the consequences of such a reflection in the field of politics and to show its relevance for the constitution of political identities. I argue that once we understand that every identity is relational and that the affirmation of a difference is a precondition for the existence of any identity – i.e. the perception of something ‘other’ which constitutes its ‘exterior’ – we can understand why politics, which always deals with collective identities, is about the constitution of a ‘we’ which requires as its very condition of possibility the demarcation of a ‘they’.

This does not mean, of course, that such a relation is by necessity antagonistic. Indeed, many us/them relations are merely a question of recognizing differences. But it means that there is always the possibility that this ‘us/them’ relation might become one of friend/enemy. This happens when the others, who up to now were considered as simply different, start to be perceived as putting into question our identity and threatening our existence. From that moment on, as Carl Schmitt has pointed out, any form of us/them relation – be it religious, ethnic or economic – becomes the locus of an antagonism.

What is important to acknowledge here is that the very condition of possibility of the formation of political identities is at the same time the condition of impossibility of a society from which antagonism can be eliminated.

AN AGONISTIC MODEL

It is in the context of this ever-present possibility of antagonism that I have elaborated what I call an ‘agonistic’ model of democracy. My original intention was to provide a ‘metaphoric redescription’ of liberal democratic institutions – a redescription that could grasp what was at stake in pluralist democratic politics. I have argued that in order to understand the nature of democratic politics and the challenge that it faces, we needed an alternative to the two main approaches in democratic political theory.

One of those approaches, the aggregative model, sees political actors as being moved by the pursuit of their interests. The other model, the deliberative one, stresses the role of reason and moral considerations. What both of these models leave aside is the centrality of collective identities and the crucial role played by affects in their constitution.

My claim is that it is impossible to understand democratic politics without acknowledging ‘passions’ as the driving force in the political field. The agonistic model of democracy aims to tackle all the issues that cannot be properly addressed by the other two models because of their rationalist, individualistic frameworks.

Let me briefly recall the argument I elaborated in The Democratic Paradox. I asserted that when we acknowledge the dimension of ‘the political’, we begin to realize that one of the main challenges for pluralist liberal democratic politics consists in trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations. In my view, the fundamental question is not how to arrive at a consensus reached without exclusion, because this would require the construction of an ‘us’ that would not have a corresponding ‘them’. This is impossible because, as I have just noted, the very condition for the constitution of an ‘us’ is the demarcation of a ‘them’.

The crucial issue then is how to establish this us/them distinction, which is constitutive of politics, in a way that is compatible with the recognition of pluralism. Conflict in liberal democratic societies cannot and should not be eradicated, since the specificity of pluralist democracy is precisely the recognition and the legitimation of conflict. What liberal democratic politics requires is that the others are not seen as enemies to be destroyed, but as adversaries whose ideas might be fought, even fiercely, but whose right to defend those ideas is not to be questioned. To put it in another way, what is important is that conflict does not take the form of an ‘antagonism’ (struggle between enemies) but the form of an ‘agonism’ (struggle between adversaries).

For the agonistic perspective, the central category of democratic politics is the category of the ‘adversary’, the opponent with whom one shares a common allegiance to the democratic principles of ‘liberty and equality for all’, while disagreeing about their interpretation. Adversaries fight against each other because they want their interpretation of the principles to become hegemonic, but they do not put into question the legitimacy of their opponent’s right to fight for the victory of their position. This confrontation between adversaries is what constitutes the ‘agonistic struggle’ that is the very condition of a vibrant democracy.⁴

A well-functioning democracy calls for a confrontation of democratic political positions. If this is missing, there is always the danger that this democratic confrontation will be replaced by a confrontation between non-negotiable moral values or essentialist forms of identifications. Too much emphasis on consensus, together with aversion towards confrontations, leads to apathy and to a disaffection with political participation. This is why a liberal democratic society requires a debate about possible alternatives. It must provide political forms of identifications around clearly differentiated democratic positions.

While consensus is no doubt necessary, it must be accompanied by dissent. Consensus is needed on the institutions that are constitutive of liberal democracy and on the ethico-political values that should inform political association. But there will always be disagreement concerning the meaning of those values and the way they should be implemented. This consensus will therefore always be a ‘conflictual consensus’.

In a pluralist democracy, disagreements about how to interpret the shared ethico-political principles are not only legitimate but also necessary. They allow for different forms of citizenship identification and are the stuff of democratic politics. When the agonistic dynamics of pluralism are hindered because of a lack of democratic forms of identifications, then passions cannot be given a democratic outlet. The ground is therefore laid for various forms of politics articulated around essentialist identities of a nationalist, religious or ethnic type, and for the multiplication of confrontations over non-negotiable moral values, with all the manifestations of violence that such confrontations entail.

In order to avoid any misunderstanding, let me stress once again that this notion of ‘the adversary’ needs to be distinguished sharply from the understanding of that term found in liberal discourse. According to the understanding of ‘adversary’ proposed here, and contrary to the liberal view, the presence of antagonism is not eliminated, but ‘sublimated’. In fact, what liberals call an ‘adversary’ is merely a ‘competitor’. Liberal theorists envisage the field of politics as a neutral terrain in which different groups compete to occupy the positions of power, their objective being to dislodge others in order to occupy their place, without putting into question the dominant hegemony and profoundly transforming the relations of power. It is simply a competition among elites.

In an agonistic politics, however, the antagonistic dimension is always present, since what is at stake is the struggle between opposing hegemonic projects which can never be reconciled rationally, one of them needing to be defeated. It is a real confrontation, but one that is played out under conditions regulated by a set of democratic procedures accepted by the adversaries.

I contend that it is only when we acknowledge ‘the political’ in its antagonistic dimension that can we pose the central question for democratic politics. This question, pace liberal theorists, is not how to negotiate a compromise among competing interests, nor is it how to reach a ‘rational’, i.e. fully inclusive, consensus without any exclusion. Despite what many liberals want to believe, the specificity of democratic politics is not the overcoming of the we/they opposition, but the different way in which it is established. The prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions or to relegate them to the private sphere in order to establish a rational consensus in the public sphere. Rather, it is to ‘sublimate’ those passions by mobilizing them towards democratic designs, by creating collective forms of identification around democratic objectives.

AGONISM AND ANTAGONISM

Having clarified the way in which agonism and antagonism are intimately related in my approach, I can now turn to examining what distinguishes my specific understanding of agonistic politics from several other conceptions of it....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. What Is Agonistic Politics?
• 2. Which Democracy for a Multipolar Agonistic World?
• 3. An Agonistic Approach to the Future of Europe
• 4. Radical Politics Today
• 5. Agonistic Politics and Artistic Practices
• 6. Conclusion
• Interview with Chantal Mouffe