The Grip of Ideology A Lacanian Approach To The Theory of Ideology
The Grip of Ideology A Lacanian Approach To The Theory of Ideology
The Grip of Ideology A Lacanian Approach To The Theory of Ideology
Jason Glynos
To cite this article: Jason Glynos (2001) The grip of ideology: A Lacanian approach to the theory
of ideology, Journal of Political Ideologies, 6:2, 191-214, DOI: 10.1080/13569310120053858
The Lacanian intervention into the eld of ideological analysis and critique can
be seen as a special version of a more general hegemonic approach to ideology.
And both can be understood against the background of a question that has come
to dominate contemporary normative political theory in general, and post-struc -
tural political theory in particular. Given a context in which an emphasis on
contingency has dealt a severe blow to the credibility of moral and political
claims to ‘universal and objective truth’, is it still credible to speak of ideological
critique?
A hegemonic approach suggests that ideology can, and should, be retained as
a potentially fruitful political category with considerable analytical and critical
value. It relies, however, upon a suitably revamped understandin g of ideological
misrecognition , a revamped understandin g shared by post-structura l approaches
to ideology. Here contingency is taken as constitutiv e of the process of
discursive construction , thereby making the invisibility of contingency constitu-
tive of ideologica l misrecognition . Rendering contingency visible, therefore,
grounds the process of ideological critique.
ISSN 1356-931 7 print; 1469-9613 online/01/020191–24 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1356931012005385 8
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in ideologica l analysis, I will canvass the works of Michael Freeden and Michel
Foucault in order better to place into context the intervention s of Ernesto Laclau
and Slavoj ZÏ izÏ ek.
Michael Freeden has been led to investigate not ideology as such but
(political) ideologies, in the plural. ‘[I]n opposition to traditional studies of
political thought which focus on “truth and epistemology , ethical richness,
logical clarity, origins and causes”, and aim to direct or recommend political
action, [Freeden suggests the need] to develop a form of conceptual analysis of
ideologie s that is sensitive to concrete political language and debate.’5 Here,
‘[t]he focus is not simply on logical and abstract conceptual permutations; rather,
it is on the location of political concepts in terms of the patterns in which they
actually appear’,6 thereby generating complex conceptual morphologies that are
delimited through decontestatio n and that are sensitive to concrete, historically -
situated ideologies.
In this way Freeden is able to establish a powerful demarcation criterion with
which to identify those discursive formations that qualify as ideologies. Never-
theless, as Aletta Norval points out, Freeden’s demarcation criterion relies very
heavily on the fact that ideological formations need to exhibit both sedimented
stability and a fairly high degree of conceptual complexity.7 This is because
Freeden’s approach, though post-positivis t in spirit, focuses on, and generalizes
from, the positive features of candidate ideologies.
One consequence of this focus is to exclude discursive formations which
exert power over subjects but which are not recognized as ideological because
they do not possess the requisite degree of conceptual complexity or sedimen-
tation. And yet if one were to relax his demarcation criterion and simultaneousl y
make it applicable not simply to the domain of political meanings but to
meaning systems generally, we would no doubt nd that a myriad of
other discursive formations would suddenly qualify as ideological. We would be
faced with an ideological ubiquity that would threaten the speci city of
the ideological, thereby putting into question its analytical value. Indeed, it is
this enlarged scope of ideology, conceived as a function of meaning
systems generally, that led Foucault to abandon the category of ideology.8 It
appeared to him of greater analytical promise to adopt the model of war and
battle rather than that of language and signs. As he put it, ‘[t]he history which
bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of language:
relations of power, not of meaning’.9 It was crucial to Foucault, therefore, that
he supplement his archaeological studies of discourse with genealogical studies
of extra-discursiv e power, the generation of truth regimes (rather than the
discovery of an objective Truth), and the correlative production of subject
positions.
In contrast to traditional Marxist analyses of ideology (conducted in terms of
struggles between well-de ned class agents and objective laws governing the
historical evolution of social totalities) , and Althusserian structuralist analyses of
ideology (conducted in terms of ‘overdetermined contradictions’ and the ‘inter-
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In this view, the objective laws of history can be known with the certainty of
natural science. These laws make possible the prediction of positively describ-
able stages of history (communism follows capitalism follows feudalism, etc.)
and determine the necessary relations between revolutionary tasks and positively
identi able agents (only workers can bring about the overthrow of capitalism).
This particular view is sustained by an epistemologica l infallibilism which
suggests that anything that denies the true essence of society embodied in such
scienti c knowledge is ideological. Here, ideological critique involves an episte-
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postulate . This means that any signi er that claims to close off this eld will
never be adequate to the task, and will play the role of an impostor. Ideology
describes the situation in which the social subject misrecognizes the lack in the
symbolic Other by identifying a particular concrete content with what Laclau
calls an empty signi er (in Lacanian terms, the ‘master’ signi er). A social
subject identi es with, for example, the signi er ‘Justice for All’ insofar as the
latter carries a content that appears to promise a fullness, insofar as it promises
to resolve issues that are perceived as directly affecting the social subject. I
conclude this section with Laclau’s description of the hegemonic logic:
Let us consider the extreme situation of radical disorganization of the social fabric. In such
conditions—which are not far away from Hobbes’s state of nature—people need an order,
and the actual content of it becomes a secondary consideration. ‘Order’ as such has no
content, because it only exists in the various forms in which it is actually realized, but in
a situation of radical disorder ‘order’ is present as that which is absent; it becomes an
empty signi er, as the signi er of that absence. In this sense, various political forces can
compete in their efforts to present their particular objectives as those which carry out the
lling of that lack. To hegemonize something, i.e., exactly to carry out this lling function.
(We have spoken about ‘order’, but obviously ‘unity’, ‘liberation’, ‘revolution’, etcetera
belong to the same order of things. Any term which, in a certain political context becomes
the signi er of the lack, plays the same role. Politics is possible because the constitutive
impossibility of society can only represent itself through the production of empty
signi ers.)16
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will bear no necessary relation to it. In this sense the link between concrete
content (ecological concerns) and empty signi er (‘Justice for All’) is contin-
gent. This means that ideology persists so long as this contingency remains
invisible to the social subject.
From this perspective, the study of ideology involves theorizing the ways in
which contingency is made invisible; while ideologica l critique involves ways in
which contingency can be made visible. In his most recent work, Ernesto Laclau
considers a particular species of the general hegemonic approach to ideology. He
suggests we explore this avenue through the development of different forms of
hegemonic identi cation in terms of a typology of tropes—a kind of ontological
‘tropology’.18 Such a tropologica l approach would begin with catachresis, a trope
which describes the process in which a word or signi er is improperly used in
the sense that the gure it evokes does not correspond to anything in the literal
world. Consider, for example, the metaphor ‘the inexhaustibl e smile of the sea’.
Here, the gural smile corresponds to something positively identi able: the
literal wave. On the other hand, when I speak of ‘the wings of the building’, ‘the
difference with a proper metaphor which fully operates as a gure, is that there
is no proper designation of the referent. I am not free to call the “wing” in any
other way’.19 In a similar way, then, the empty master signi er does not
correspond to anything positive ; and insofar as a positive content does hegemo-
nize this empty signi er, this is strictly contingent. The master signi er is empty
because it corresponds to something that has no positive content: the ‘lack in the
symbolic Other’. A tropological approach, therefore, seeks to develop a typology
of tropes which describe the mechanisms with which this irreducibly contingent–
catechretic moment is arrested, xed, all the way from the metaphoric pole to the
metonymic pole.20 It suggests not only that different mechanisms of closure are
possible, but also that at least one kind of tropological xation could be regarded
as more authentic or ethical than others—those, in other words, that register
contingency as constitutive .
The central question that both Laclau and ZÏ izÏ ek attempt to answer is the
following: what accounts for the power with which a hegemonic (ideological)
formation exercises its hold over a subject? Crucially, any such theory, in order
to be considered adequate, must be theoretically differentiated enough to furnish
us with the tools to explain the resistance encountered in any attempt to conduct
a critique of ideology. Let us assume that contingency is constitutiv e of the
hegemonic process. Let us accept, in other words, that identities are contingentl y
constituted and partially- xed by the historically-speci c traditions enveloping
the subject. The question then becomes: what accounts for the resistance
encountered in making this contingency visible? Why is it that patterns of
(oppressive) behaviour persist even when the contingency that underlies sedi-
mented power relations has been pointed out? As we have seen, in his approach
to this question Ernesto Laclau takes hegemony as a central category and
attempts to esh out a theory of ideology in terms that are structurally modelled
upon rhetorical tropes. ZÏ izÏ ek’s Lacanian approach also takes hegemony as
central. Instead of taking the tropological route, however, he attempts to esh out
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this person arouses our desire, we can answer: because he or she possesses the
positive features occurring within our fantasmatic frame.22
Lacan’s formula for fantasy is $e a, where the lozenge can be taken to denote
a relation of impossibility . It tells us that fantasy stages the impossible relation
between subject as lack, as desiring,23 on the one hand, and fantasmatic object
of desire on the other. We know that there is no subject without the empty
master signi er, without the symbolic order. It is on condition that a subject
identi es with an empty signi er that its desire can be aroused in trying to give
it content. The positing of fantasy as fundamental to the subject suggests that,
in addition, ‘there is no symbolic representation without fantasy, that is, the
subject ($) is constitutivel y split between S1 [master signi er] and a [fantasmatic
object]; it can represent itself in S1, in a signi er, only in so far as the
phantasmatic consistency of the signifying network is guaranteed by a reference
to [the fantasmatic object]’.24 This means that if fantasy is disturbed or radically
put into question, this will have repercussions for the consistency of our
symbolic reality; at the extreme, this means that the disintegratio n of one’s
fantasmatic frame will coincide with the feeling of a ‘loss of reality’.25 In short,
we have the idea that fantasy supports our symbolically-constitute d reality. But
how exactly? In order to explain this, we need to put into question an aspect of
fantasy that I passed over fairly quickly: why does the fantasmatic narrative
stage an impossible relation?
The impossibilit y is linked directly to the paradox of the subject conceived as
a subject of desire. For what can it mean to be a subject of desire? What can
such a subject actually desire? The only possible answer to this question, if the
subject is to retain its status as desiring, is not to satisfy its desire and, in this
sense, to remain empty: we desire not to satisfy our desire. In other words,
desire’s very existence relies on its being forever dis-satis ed. The point is that
the subject of desire can never encounter its truly desirous (i.e., lacking) object
because this is what, by its very extraction from our symbolically constituted
reality, grounds the subject as desiring; indeed this necessarily extracted object
is the subject in its objectal form—the subject is divided between itself as
represented in a master signi er and itself in the form of an objectal remainder.
As ZÏ izÏ ek puts it, ‘fantasy, at its most elementary, is inaccessible to the subject,
and it is this very inaccessibilit y which makes the subject “empty”’.26 If the
subject were ever to come too close to realizing its fantasy, it would experience
an unbearable anxiety as a result of suddenly being confronted not with lack
(since it is upon this very lack that desire is founded), but with the lack of a lack.
In ZÏ izÏ ek’s words, ‘I become a desiring subject only in so far as I am deprived
of “what matters to me most” ’.27 This is the paradox fantasy is designed to
sustain, a paradox that also accounts for the stabilizing function of fantasy. It
sustains the subject as a desiring subject by providing it with a way of enjoying,
a mode of jouissance. Jouissance is the enjoyment a subject experiences in
sustaining his or her desire. And since sustaining desire ultimately involves
sustaining desire as unsatis ed, this jouissance is often experienced as a
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public identi cation. In short, ‘[w]hat “holds together” a community most deeply
is not so much identi cation with the Law that regulates the community’s
“normal” everyday circuit, but rather identi cation with a speci c form of
transgressio n of the Law, of the law’s suspension (in psychoanalytic terms, with
a speci c form of enjoyment)’.30
It is clear that fantasy and desire are governed by a paradoxical logic.
Nevertheless, desire’s constitutiv e paradox is a theoreticall y productive one, for
it explains why the subject must be prevented from gaining access to what it
desires most. This conceptual framework gives a rationale to what is a not
uncommon observation, namely, the intimate link between the prohibition s
articulated by of cial public law and the emergence of objects of desire. In
addition it might explain why, invariably, once we are given full legal, political,
and technological access to our objects of desire we either recoil in horror, or
postpone –procrastinate, or systematically arrange things so as never to approach
them too closely. Our commonsense view predicts that the removal of social and
technological barriers will result in a healthy burgeoning of pleasurable experi-
ences. This is what a permissive liberal-capitalis t ideal might be seen to promise.
But, due to the impossibilit y inherent to desire, we have an alternative and
plausible model with which to explain why the removal of obstacles may lead
to a far more oppressive state of affairs in which we are threatened with the very
extinction of our desire, and therefore of ourselves as subjects of desire. This
occurs precisely when we are suddenly presented with the real possibilit y of
actually ful lling our fantasy. The prediction is that the kind of actings-out this
type of threat elicits is of a potentially much more violent sort than one in which
our self image or public ideal is blocked or under threat.31 Why? Because what
is at stake is our very being, that which sustains us as fundamentally desiring.
Pursuing this line of thought can generate further plausible hypotheses. The
articulation of these theoretical categories (fantasy and desire) to the social might
suggest, for example, that today’s rise of racist violence in Western societies
does not signal a regression to primitive forms of violence etched in our genes
or latent in our tribal cultural traditions. Maybe it is a speci cally modern
racism, in the sense of being a direct product, symptom even, of a liberal-capi-
talist permissive polity.
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cultural artefacts, ‘trashy’ magazines, the yellow press, etc., would constitute
legitimate sources in generating a picture of social fantasies. Though theoretical
articulations do not dictate one’s research orientation, we can see in what sense
it can guide it.
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In this way, then, criticisms aimed at Laclau and ZÏ izÏ ek’s apparent ahistoricity,
acontextuality, metaphysics, etc., miss the mark.43 Indeed, such criticisms
threaten to sti e developments in the theory of ideology. While one can
understand the impetus driving such criticisms (how, for instance, certain
metaphysical notions enabled and sustained Western colonial urges or the
subordinatio n of women, blacks, gays, lesbians, etc.), they nevertheless risk
overtaking themselves to the point of transforming the critique of metaphysical
formalisms into an end in itself. It is far more productive, it seems to me, to
engage in a debate over speci c problems facing theories of ideology, rather than
attempting to dismiss social ontologies simply because they are formal. After all,
many theories of discourse and ideology today aim precisely to give a formal
account of the process by which universal claims are always contaminated by
remainders of particularity. Many debates concerning the nature of ideology
these days are, in effect, about which theory provides a more productive and
satisfying account of such a process. In this sense these ‘metaphysical’ theories
are more accurately quali ed as post-metaphysical : they are not simply post-
metaphysical, they are also post-metaphysical. Of course, the formal nature of
theoretical speculation implies its own remainder of particularity. But recogniz-
ing this cannot serve as an excuse to sti e theoretical elaboration. One cannot
disqualif y theoretical formalization in advance. The only way that the contours
of a theory’s remainder of particularity will eventually become visible is
retrospectively . As Hegel puts it, ‘[t]he owl of Minerva spreads its wings only
with the falling of the dusk’.44
Instead of pointing to Laclau’s and ZÏ izÏ ek’s recognition of the importance of
historical particularity one should fully assume the (post-)metaphysicall y formal
nature of theory—an insight shared by a strand of philosopher s and historians of
science stretching from Bachelard, Meyerson, and Koyre, all the way to Kuhn.
Attention to concrete contexts is important and crucial for ideological analysis,
but it is the business of theory both to guide systematically our observations by
highlightin g what in any concrete situation counts as relevant evidence in our
analysis, and to explain ideological phenomena. In this view, ideological
analysis involves the painstaking articulation of concrete content to the formally
empty variables of theory, thereby generating not only a more sophisticate d
understandin g of both, but also a host of anomalies that may force a re-articula-
tion of the theory itself.
I will now return to my exposition of the Lacanian approach to the theory of
ideology.
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tion of the notorious African-American single mother, as if, in the last resort, social welfare
is a programme for black single mothers—the particular case of the ‘single black mother’
is silently conceived as ‘typical’ of social welfare and of what is wrong with it …. This
speci c twist, a particular content which is promulgated as ‘typical’ of the universal
notion, is the element of fantasy, of the phantasmatic background/support of the universal
ideological notion …. As such, this phantasmatic speci cation is by no means an in-
signi cant illustration or exempli cation: it is at this level that ideological battles are won
or lost …46
In the terms we have been using, the universal ideological notion (the welfare
system as inef cient) acts as the concrete meaning which lls in the empty
signi er of ‘Justice for All’. The idea that the welfare system is inef cient is
taken for granted in any serious discussion of possible policies offered in
furtherance of ‘Justice for All’. Within this framework, policies are offered in an
attempt either to reduce the welfare state apparatus or to eliminate it. Different
policies compete against the background of an accepted universal ideological
notion. It is ideological insofar as its meaning (the welfare system is inef cient)
is viewed as necessary to ‘Justice for All’, rather than contingent. However,
ZÏ izÏ ek wants to argue that the invisibilit y of this contingenc y is sustained by an
underlying fantasmatic content, which cannot be acknowledged as such by
of cial spokesperson s of the New Right. This might be, for example, the idea
that single African-American mothers drain the welfare resources that we pay for
through our taxes.
The crucial point, here, is that it is immaterial whether such fantasmatic
content is ‘true’, at least within the con nes of traditional correspondence
theories of truth. It is suf cient that such an image is secretly accepted as
‘typical’ of the situation in a way that enables it to play a fantasmatic role.
Ultimately, it is this fantasmatic content (corresponding to the objet petit a in
formal psychoanalytic terms) that must be displaced–disturbed in any attempt to
conduct a successful ideologica l critique. ZÏ izÏ ek implies that an ideological
critique that aims to displace the fantasmatic element is far more effective than
any attempt directly to demonstrate how a particular and contingent ideological
notion (‘welfare system is inef cient’) masquerades as a necessary constituent of
the universal (‘Justice for All’). The effect of this displacement, he suggests, is
nothing less than a transformation of the very terms of the debate. The universal
ideological notion that the welfare system is inef cient dissolve s to reveal its
contingent link to the empty master signi er ‘Justice for All’, opening up the
possibilit y of introducing new terms to structure the debate over ‘Justice for All’.
This does not mean, of course, that the displacement of the background
ideological fantasy is any easier than displacing ideological meaning. All a
Lacanian approach to ideological analysis can suggest is that the former acts as
a condition for the hegemonic sway of the latter. In addition, however, it offers
up a reason for the resistance to any such displacement. And this explanation
comes in the form of the psychoanalyti c category of jouissance . In this view,
what sustains ideologica l meaning is not simply symbolic identi cation with the
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empty master signi er but, most importantly, identi cation with the jouissance
procured through collective transgression of publicly accepted norms. It cannot
be of cially admitted that single African-American mothers are believed to be
the cause of the injustice we suffer even though it is unof cially sustained; and
so we procure a certain enjoyment in secretly taking part in this common
transgression.
In this view, the social subject’s position is sustained by its jouissance, by its
own form of transgression —a form of transgression or enjoyment whose
paradoxical (but highly signi cant) effect is the maintenance, even buttressin g,
of the (potentially oppressive ) order it transgresses.47 Psychoanalytic theory
therefore puts the lie to the idea that transgression is intrinsically subversive. The
idea here is that the social bond, the glue binding society together, at its most
fundamental, is to be located at this level, at the level of jouissance–trans-
gression. 48 This is what constitute s the ultimate support–grip—of a public order,
of our symbolic identi cation with a master signi er and the universal ideologi-
cal meaning that hegemonizes it. ZÏ izÏ ek makes explicit the potential contributio n
of psychoanalysis in this respect:
What psychoanalysis can do to help the critique of ideology is precisely to clarify the status
of this paradoxical jouissance as the payment that the exploited, the servant, receives for
serving the Master.49 This jouissance, of course, always emerges within a certain phantas-
mic eld; the crucial precondition for breaking the chains of servitude is thus to ‘traverse
the fantasy’ which structures our jouissance in a way which keeps us attached to the
Master—makes us accept the framework of the social relationship of domination.50
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although no clear line of demarcation separates ideology from reality, although ideology is
already at work in everything we experience as ‘reality’, we must none the less maintain
the tension that keeps the critique of ideology alive … ideology is not all; it is possible to
assume a place that enables us to maintain a distance from it, but this place from which one
can denounce ideology must remain empty, it cannot be occupied by any positively
determined reality—the moment we yield to this temptation, we are back in ideology.52
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nisms: social antagonism comes rst, and the “Jew” merely gives body to this
obstacle’.53
Conclusion
In this paper I have sought to present a basic exposition of the aim and elements
of a Lacanian approach to the theory of ideology. Central in ZÏ izÏ ek’s Lacanian
approach to ideology is his effort to develop a theoretically differentiated
account of socio-politica l ontology. Within the context of this framework I have
argued that what does most work in explaining the grip of ideology—the power
it exercises over the social subject—is the elements of a formal theory of
ideology: social fantasy and the jouissance the social subject procures therefrom.
The crucial insight that emerges from this formulation is how the social subject
is responsible for this enjoyment and thus for the power an ideology holds not
only over others but over itself. The critique of ideology, therefore, becomes a
question of social ethics and involves what ZÏ izÏ ek calls the ‘crossing of the social
fantasy’.
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Louis-Claude De Tracy (1754–1836), ‘didn’t use [the term ‘ideology’] in order to describe false ideas. For
De Tracy ideology was a science that formed the basis for the critique of false irrational ideas. Ideology
in De Tracy’s vocabulary is identical with what we call today critique of ideology or theory of ideology.
Nevertheless the schema remains the same. His distinction between ideology as a “critical” science and
false ideas is analogous to the dominant modern distinction between theory and critique of ideology and
false ideas’: Y. Stavrakakis, ‘Ambiguous ideology and the Lacanian twist’, Journal of the Centre for
Freudian Analysis and Research, 8/9 (1997), pp. 117–130, at p. 120, n. 108. See also E. Kennedy, The
Origins of Ideology (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1978). For a recent account of the
genealogy of ideology, see Y. Stavrakakis, op. cit., Ref. 3.
5. A. Norval, op. cit., Ref. 4, p. 4.
6. Norval, ibid., p. 8.
7. Norval, ibid., p. 15.
8. The notion of ideology appears to me to be dif cult to make use of, for three reasons. The rst is that,
like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else which is supposed to count as truth.
Now I believe that the problem does not consist in drawing the line between that in a discourse which falls
under the category of scienti city or truth, and that which comes under some other category, but in seeing
historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor
false. The second drawback is that the concept of ideology refers, I think necessarily, to something of the
order of a subject. Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something which functions
as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant, etc. For these three reasons, I think that this
is a notion that cannot be used without circumspection . See M. Foucault, The Foucault Reader, edited by
P. Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 60.
9. M. Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, edited by C. Gordon
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 114.
10. L. Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1993 [1971–1973]). See also G. Elliott (Ed.), Althusser:
A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); and E. A. Kaplan and M. Sprinker (Eds), The Althusserian
Legacy (London: Verso, 1993). For a brief but excellent overview of Marx’s thought, see E. Balibar, The
Philosophy of Marx, translated by C. Turner (London: Verso, 1995 [1993]).
11. On this point, see E. Laclau, ‘Discourse’, in R. A. Goodin and P. Pettit (Eds), A Companion to
Contemporar y Political Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), p. 431.
12. E. Laclau, ‘The impossibility of society’, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Science, 15, 1/3 (1991),
pp. 24–27, at p. 27.
13. Laclau, ibid., p. 27.
14. On the way this tension is played out within the Marxist tradition, see E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony
and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), chapters 1 and 2;
and E. Laclau, New Re ections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), especially pp. 1–59.
15. R. C. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx–Engels Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 4–5. Emphasis added.
16. E. Laclau, ‘Why do empty signi ers matter to politics?’, in his Emancipation(s) (London: Verso 1996),
p. 44.
17. For a more elaborate discussion of the link between the Lacanian master signi er and ecology, see Y.
Stavrakakis, ‘Green ideology: a discursive reading’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 2/3 (1997), pp. 259–
279. See also J. Glynos, ‘From identity to identi cation: discourse theory and psychoanalysi s in context’,
Essex Papers in Politics and Government: Sub-series in Ideology and Discourse Analysis, 11 (1999).
18. E. Laclau, ‘The politics of rhetoric’, Essex Papers in Politics and Government : Sub-series in Ideology and
Discourse Analysis, 9 (1998).
19. Laclau, ibid., p. 12.
20. Laclau, ibid., pp. 25–26.
21. J. Lacan, ‘The direction of treatment and the principles of its power’, in his Ecrits: A Selection (New York:
Norton, 1977), p. 263.
22. See also S. ZÏ izÏ ek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), p. 7.
23. The subject of desire is equivalent to the subject as lack in the sense that it is a lacking subject that desires
(what it lacks).
24. S. ZÏ izÏ ek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996),
p. 79.
25. See also ZÏ izÏ ek, op. cit., Ref. 22, p. 66.
26. ZÏ izÏ ek, op. cit., Ref. 22, p. 122 (emphasis added) .
27. ZÏ izÏ ek, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 178, note 37.
28. For a more detailed elaboration of the concept of jouissance, see D. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary
of Lacanian Psychoanalysi s (London: Routledge, 1996), under ‘Jouissance ’; D. Evans, ‘From Kantian
ethics to mystical experience: an exploration of jouissance’, in D. Nobus (Ed.), Key Concepts of Lacanian
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Psychoanalysis (London: Rebus Press, 1998), pp. 1–28; and B. Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between
Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), especially chapters 3 and 7.
29. ZÏ izÏ ek, op. cit., Ref. 22, p. 18; ‘[F]ar from undermining the rule of the Law, its “transgression” in fact
serves as its ultimate support. So it is not only that transgression relies on, presupposes , the Law it
transgresses; rather, the reverse case is much more pertinent: Law itself relies on its inherent transgression,
so that when we suspend this transgression, the Law itself disintegrates’, ZÏ izÏ ek, op. cit., Ref. 22, p. 77.
30. S. ZÏ izÏ ek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), p. 55.
On the relation between the written Law and unwritten fantasmatic rules, see ZÏ izÏ ek, op. cit., Ref. 22,
pp. 28–29. For cultural and political illustrations of the category jouissance, see G. Daly, ‘Ideology and
its paradoxes : dimensions of fantasy and enjoyment’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 4/2 (1999),
pp. 219–238.
31. On this theme, see R. Salecl, (Per)Versions of Love and Hate (London: Verso, 1998), especially chapter 7.
32. On this point, see also E. Laclau, ‘Identity and hegemony : the role of universality in the constitution of
political logics’, in J. Butler, E. Laclau, and S. ZÏ izÏ ek, Contingency , Hegemony, Universality (London:
Verso, 2000), part II, pp. 44–89, at p. 64.
33. J. Butler, ‘Restaging the universal: hegemony and the limits of the universal’, in J. Butler, E. Laclau, and
S. ZÏ izÏ ek, Contingency , Hegemony, Universality (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 11–43, at p. 29. See also J.
Butler, ‘Interview: gender as performative’, Radical Philosophy, 68 (1994), pp. 32–39; J. Butler, ‘Post-
structuralism and postmarxism’, Diacritics 23/4 (1993), pp. 3–11; and J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On
the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), especially chapter 7.
34. J. Butler, ‘Restaging the universal’, op. cit., Ref. 33, p. 34.
35. A. M. Smith, Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 76.
36. Smith, ibid., pp. 75–76. For other similar reservations and critiques, see E. J. Bellamy, ‘Discourses of
impossibility: can psychoanalysi s be political?’, Diacritics, 23/1 (1993), pp. 24–38. See also L. M. G.
Zerilli, ‘Review of Ernesto Laclau’s Emancipations: this universalism which is not one’, Diacritics, 28/2
(1998), pp. 3–20.
37. A. M. Smith, Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 76.
38. Smith, ibid., p. 79.
39. Smith, ibid., pp. 80–81.
40. E. Laclau, ‘Building a new Left: an interview with E. Laclau’, Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture, and
Politics, 1 (1998), pp. 10–28, at p. 24. As concerns the very status of his own theory, Laclau is clear that
‘it is only through a multitude of concrete studies that we will be able to move towards an increasingly
sophisticated theory of hegemony and social antagonisms’: ‘Theory, democracy, and socialism: an
interview’, in his New Re ections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), p. 235. For a
detailed discussion of the relation between historicism and historicity by ZÏ izÏ ek, see his ‘Class struggle or
postmodernism ? Yes please’, in J. Butler, E. Laclau, and S. ZÏ izÏ ek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality
(London: Verso, 2000), pp. 90–135 especially parts 3 and 4.
41. On this point, see E. Laclau, Ref. 32, p. 64.
42. J. Derrida, Positions, translated by A. Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 12.
43. For a debate that covers this theme in detail, see J. Butler, E. Laclau, and S. ZÏ izÏ ek, Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality (London: Verso, 2000).
44. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, translated by T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952),
p. 13.
45. ZÏ izÏ ek, op. cit., Ref. 30, p. 56 (emphasis added).
46. S. ZÏ izÏ ek, ‘Multiculturalism, or, the cultural logic of multinational capitalism’, New Left Review, 225
(1997), pp. 28–51, at p. 29 (emphasis added).
47. On the relation between the psychoanalyti c notion of transgression and Foucault’s elaboration of it in
terms of power and resistance, see ZÏ izÏ ek, op. cit., Ref. 22, pp. 26–27. On Foucault’s notion of power from
a Lacanian perspective, see also M. Dolar, ‘Where does power come from?’, New Formations, 35 (1998),
pp. 79–92.
48. See also ZÏ izÏ ek, op. cit., Ref. 30, p. 55, for an example in relation to the Ku Klux Klan.
49. On this point, see ZÏ izÏ ek’s discussion of the opposition Fool/Knave: ZÏ izÏ ek, op. cit., Ref. 22, pp. 46–48.
50. ZÏ izÏ ek, op. cit., Ref. 22, p. 48.
51. S. ZÏ izÏ ek, ‘The spectre of ideology’, in his edited volume, Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994),
pp. 1–33, at p. 4.
52. ZÏ izÏ ek, ibid., p. 17.
53. ZÏ izÏ ek, op. cit., Ref. 22, pp. 75–76.
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