In the Name of the People Populist Reason and the Subject of the Political

IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE POPULIST REASON AND THE SUBJECT OF THE POLITICAL

OLIVER MARCHART

Ernesto Laclau. ON POPULIST REASON. London: Verso, 2005. [PR]

The Stumbling Block

James Joyce, as Ernesto Laclau once remarked in an interview, continually returned to his native experience in Dublin, and in similar manner Laclau has returned to his experience of populism in Argentina. It was the experience of Peronism that served as the main historical background for Laclau's later theorization of hegemony and politics, universalism and particularism, representation and the "empty signifier." Yet although Laclau made himself a name as one of the foremost theorists of populism with a chapter of his first book, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977), one could have had the impression that Laclau never returned, in an explicit way, to his early project of developing a

theory of populism. Now, almost thirty years later, this work is resumed with On Populist Reason. But it is resumed in an ambiguous political and theoretical conjuncture where it is less clear than ever how to conceive of the very nature and subject of politics. On the one hand, a resurgence of neopopulist politics in many Latin American countries can be witnessed (not to mention the many right-wing populists in Europe or populist versions of religious fundamentalism), together with a renewed interest in the theoretical category of "the people," not only in Laclau's work but also, for instance, in the work of Jacques Rancibre. Yet on the other hand, it seems that the antiglobalization movement and other "dispersed" forms of political action cannot so easily be subsumed under the rubric of populism. And hasn't "the people," as a theoretical category, come under attack by other quarters of political thought? In the eyes of Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt the concept of "multitude," linked to alternative forms of political existence, had long been subdued by political thought to the identitarian concept of "the people" and has to be liberated today.

What is at stake in these debates is not only politics in the regional or "ontic" meaning of a functional system of society or a certain form of human action linked to a certain social agent. What is at stake is, I suspect, the very name of the political subject. Does a political subject exist beyond the field of passive subject-positions, or independent of sys- temic functions? And if yes, what is the name of this subject? The "party," the "people," the "multitude," the "movement"? The consequences of these questions are much more far-reaching than one would imagine, for what is at stake in the debate over the name of the subject is, simultaneously, the name of the political as ontological "ground" of the social and of society. Put differently, the way in which we conceive political subjectivity has

consequences for the way in which the nature of politics as such is envisaged vis-A-vis the sedimented realm of social processes. For instance, a name like "multitude," as Laclau perceptively argues, is not only theoretically malconceived but also politically debilitat-

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ing as it implies the "complete eclipse of politics" [PR 242]. For if political subjectivity, as in Hardt and Negri's approach, consisted only of a pure dispersion of singularities, there would be no need for political strategies of equivalential reaggregation, and we will in the end deliver ourselves to an antipolitical, eschatological "politics of awaiting."

Against antipolitical trends in contemporary political thought, of which the theory of multitude is but an example, Laclau articulates in his new book a staunch defense of the name of the people and of populism as the very logic of the political. For what is at issue in a theory of populism, as much as in any political theory, is the "nature and logics of the formation of collective identities" [ix], of identities whose existence cannot be taken for granted as long as they are not politically constructed. On Populist Reason, as Laclau remarks, grew out of a basic dissatisfaction with sociological perspectives that either take the "group" as a basic unit whose social existence precedes its political construction or dissolve the political subject altogether by locating the latter within wider functionalist or structuralist paradigms (that is to say, within society and the social). In so doing, the social sciences participate in the antipolitical tradition of Western thought which, since Plato, has been complicit in the effort at rejecting the political in favor of the managerial administration of a well-ordered "good" or "just" society. The name of the people, far from serving-as Virno or Negri suggest-as an identitarian principle of social closure, has in this tradition been considered a major obstacle to the achievement of a well-ordered society. As Laclau shows in his analysis of nineteenth-century "crowd psychology," the masses have constituted the grande peur of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Where the name of the people was associated with crowd behavior it was considered an "aberrant" political phenomenon, emotional and irrational. Gustave Le Bon perceived crowd action as a contagious disease bordering on madness and brain disorders (which were also considered contagious). Within the paradigm established by Le Bon and continued by Hippolyte Taine and the earlier Gabriel Tarde, the behavior of crowds cannot have any rationality or logic of its own, as it is triggered by nothing other than the pathological absence of rationality - a deficiency shared by the crowd with wom- en, "madmen," "savages," children, and alcoholics. In such manner, a more or less stable frontier was erected between the normal and the pathological, even as the latter-given its contagious nature--always threatened to destabilize the former.

Later theories of populism will inherit this dubious legacy of, as Laclau calls it, "the denigration of the masses." As a political phenomenon, populism, Laclau holds, "was always linked to a dangerous excess, which puts the clear-cut moulds of a rational community into question" [x]. An exemplary form of irrational collective behavior, populism was dismissed and, in turn, put in use for "the discursive construction of a certain normal- ity, of an ascetic political universe from which its dangerous logics had to be excluded" [19]. But even where in mainstream political science approaches populism is not depicted as threat, what will nonetheless be stressed is "its vagueness, its ideological emptiness, its anti-intellectualism, its transitory character" [13].

These mainstream theories of populism -crowd psychology of the nineteenth centu-

ry and the social theories of populism of the twentieth century - are subjected by Laclau to a symptomatological reading. It is as if something in the phenomenon of populism constantly escaped the grasp of any positive description and theorization. Research in the social sciences produces incoherent lists of supposed empirical features of populist movements, resulting in arbitrary enumerations that already in his article of the 1970s reminded Laclau of surrealist poetry. These classificatory efforts can only give rise to arbitrary typologies and cannot provide us with coherent criteria that would help to define the phenomenon. Thus, populism emerges as the "locus of a theoretical stumbling block" [4]. Since empiricist analyses are not in possession of the ontological tools necessary to uncover the significance of the phenomenon and to decipher the name and true role of

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its subject, populism and the people constitute an inherent limit to political analysis and

political theory. Laclau, taking seriously this symptom of an inherent limit, resolves the problem that

positive science encounters when faced with populism by a bold and radical move. By inverting the role usually assigned to populism, the latter is turned from an aberrant and irrational phenomenon at the margins of the social into the central feature and specific rationality of the political: "populism is the royal road to understanding something about the ontological constitution of the political as such" [67]. Laclau discovers that the dichotomic simplification of the political space, a common feature of populist mobilization, must not be considered a mere by-product of populist politics. It is the very condition of all political action, the actual form of political rationality. For if political rationality is

encapsulated in the logic of antagonization, then the trademark of populism is "just the

special emphasis on a political logic which, as such, is a necessary ingredient of politics tout court." Similarly, the vagueness typically associated with populist symbols functions as a constant dimension of social rationality, "a precondition to constructing relevant

political meanings" [18]. What is more, antagonism and the phenomenon of vagueness or emptiness are mutually related by Laclau within a general theory of politics developed under the name of hegemony. Ideological emptiness is a direct result of the social rationality expressed by populist mobilization: the emptying of the signifier results from the dichotomization of the social into chains of equivalence (at the expense of the differential content of the signifiers that enter the equivalential chain).

This logic of the empty signifier has been developed by Laclau before, and we will return to his theory of signification, but in his new book it is extended into a general theory of naming that bears radical implications for the way we envisage political action. While for mainstream social sciences the "group" is an entity that preexists the process of

naming, in the hegemony theory approach a social agent exists only to the extent that s/he is named. Politics is not the expression of pregiven interests or the will of a certain group, but politics is to be understood as the very process by which a group assumes its name.

Hegemony theory is thus reformulated by Laclau as a theory of naming: if the identity of a given social group cannot be derived from a stable ground within the social (the position within the relations of production, for instance), it can only be the result of a process of hegemonic signification/articulation. The only thing that holds together the group will be the name emerging from this process. The name, consequently, "does not express the

unity of the group, but becomes its ground" [231 ].

A Theory of Everything? -Tracing Out the Problem

The two main aspects of this Laclauian intervention, which are strictly correlative, hence- forth amount to (a) his "inversion" of populism from a marginalized phenomenon into the very logic of the political, and, implicated in this move, (b) the return of the people as a name for political subjectivity. Now, these radical moves are obviously bound to encounter resistance from the positive sciences and from rival theories. The line of criticism, in both cases, can easily be imagined. In the case of (a) it will be argued that the notion of populism loses any specificity if the term is supposed to designate not only a specific form of political agitation but political action as such. And this might immediately lead to the question: why then call it populism at all (and not simply "politics")? Laclau himself tries to anticipate this line of criticism when he writes in the preface:

One consequence of this intervention is that the referent of "populism" becomes blurred, because many phenomena which were not traditionally considered pop-

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ulist come under that umbrella in our analysis. Here there is a potential criticism

of my approach, to which I can only respond that the referent of "populism" in social analysis has always been ambiguous and vague. A brief glance at the literature on populism [. . .] suffices to show that it is full of references to the evanescence of the concept and the imprecision of its limits. My attempt has not been to find the true referent of populism, but to do the opposite: to show that

populism has no referential unity because it is ascribed not to a delimitable

phenomenon but to a social logic whose effects cut across many phenomena. Populism is, quite simply, a way of constructing the political. [xi]

The first part of this answer seems rather defensive, at least if one forgets that Laclau's intervention does consist in unraveling the symptomatic character of the ambiguity and

vagueness usually associated with populism in order to invert the latter's status. It is the last sentence where the real answer is hidden, yet remains formulated in a--surpris- ingly-undecided fashion. At first sight, this answer does not seem to successfully refute the criticism. For what does it mean to say that populism is a way of constructing the political when earlier it was claimed that populism is synonymous with politics tout court?' If populism is only one of many (or some? or two?2) possible ways of constructing the

political, how can populism be the logic or rationality of politics eo ipso? In the following I will try to demonstrate that this impression of apparent incoherence can be avoided by introducing a much more explicit differentiation between "politics" and the "political," or the "ontic" and the "ontological." But in order to solve the riddle of why for Laclau populism is the name of politics tout court, we will have to apply, if we want to remain within Laclau's argumentative framework, the logic of naming - outlined by Laclau himself--to his own naming effort, that is, to his theoretico-political intervention to find a name for the

political, and to (re)name the political "populism." One may sense already how this relates to the criticism toward Laclau's second main

intervention, which consists in naming the subject of the political "the people." In his book, Laclau seems to argue that while, on the one hand, populism is the name for politics tout court in the sense that every politics is populist to some degree, on the other hand chains of equivalence can be constructed around many different empty signifiers, not only around the name of the people--which implies the hypothetical possibility of

populism without "the people." Hence, a "shift in his position concerning the location of the signifier 'the people"' has been observed with respect to Laclau's earlier formulations of the 1970s. As Yannis Stavrakakis wondered:

[I]f populism becomes synonymous with politics, and if any signifier can poten- tially become the nodal point of a populist discourse, how can we conceptually account for the difference between an equivalential discourse articulated around "the people" [. . .] and any other equivalential discourse? While, according to Laclau's earlier position only the first one would be truly populist, now both

1. Correspondingly, Laclau holds at some point that the people are only "one way of constitut-

ing the unity of the group," and goes on explaining: "Obviously, it is not the only way of doing so. There are other logics operating within the social, and making possible types of identity different from the populist one" [73].

2. One explanation would be to say, as will be outlined in a moment, that the second, nonpopu- list way of constructing the political consists in a differential and institutionalized form of politics (what Gramsci would have called "passive revolution"). Such politics would not be politics in the strict sense, however, since the field of differences is, in Laclau's theory, equivalent to the social and not to the political (which consists in the equivalential ordering of differences). So a certain

ambiguity remains.

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are populist, possibly to the same extent (if both follow an equally equivalential logic). In other words, the risk here is to lose the conceptual particularity of populism as a tool for concrete political analysis. [263]

Stavrakakis sees a danger of sacrificing the benefits of Laclau's empirically more productive earlier notion of populism and opts for "a concept of populism capable of me-

diating between the ontological/formal level and the ontic level of the signifying reality of concrete political struggles; serving as an interface between theoretical analysis and the reality of political practice. In that sense, reference to the structural location of 'the

people' remains crucial as a defining criterion in the analysis of populism, together with the criterion of equivalence" [264]. I would suspect that such an approach, while it seems reasonable and productive for empirical analysis, runs the risk of missing the very radi-

cality of Laclau's intervention, which precisely consists in the bold move--on the ontological level--to give a name to the subject of the political and to turn what before was considered the stumbling block of political analysis into the very foundation of political thought. Again, potential confusion could be avoided if the different levels of argumen- tation-the ontic and the ontological-are kept apart as neatly as possible (if only to be rearticulated in a second step). That is to say, one clearly has to differentiate between two "names" of the people: the "people" as an actor of politics, or signifier within political discourse, and the people as the subject of the political. And once more we have to ask what is at stake in giving this name to the subject of the political: "the people."

How to Name Naming

Let us recapitulate the problem we have encountered in our initial reading, the problem that relates to a certain indecision or ambiguity with respect to the status of both populism and the name of the people. On the one hand, populism describes a particular social logic, and "the people" is simply the signifier/name--or one of the possible signifiers/names- that guarantees the unity of popular identities. On the other hand, populism becomes synonymous with politics tout court (or at least a necessary dimension of all politics), and the name of the people seems to point at the more radical instance of political subjectivity (rather than specific forms of political agency or identity). In order to answer this twofold

problem--regarding the name of the political and the name of its subject-we will have to reconstruct Laclau's theory of naming in more detail.

For a starting point to his theory of naming Laclau turns to the debate between descriptivists and antidescriptivists in analytic philosophy. In a nutshell, descriptivists (like Bertrand Russell) argue that proper names are related to their objects by way of one or a cluster of descriptive features. A traditional example would be the name "Aristotle" as an abbreviated description for "pupil of Plato"; Laclau gives the example of "George W. Bush" as an abbreviated description of "the US President who invaded Iraq" [PR 101]. The antidescriptivists, spearheaded by Saul Kripke, argue against this idea, since even if in another world Bush had not invaded Iraq and Aristotle had become a painter instead of a philosopher, the name "Bush" and the name "Aristotle" would still apply to them. Instead, Kripke famously argues in Naming and Necessity that names (and this holds not only for proper names but also for common names such as "gold") are rigid designators that refer to one and the same object in all possible worlds. They designate their object not through one or a bundle of descriptions but through an initial and founding act of naming, that is, to use Kripke's term, of "primal baptism". While this solution is more convincing than the descriptivist solution, it encounters problems of its own, and here Laclau refers to Slavoj Zifek's discussion of the debate. According to Zifek [89-97], antidescriptivists




cannot provide an answer to the problem of what makes the object of "rigid designation" identical to itself in all possible worlds and beyond all descriptive changes. The Lacanian solution, proposed by Zifek, is that this "X" which guarantees the identity of the object in all counterfactual situations is nothing else than "the retroactive effect of naming itself: it is the name itself, the signifier, which supports the identity of the object" [95]. Laclau

basically concurs: the identity of any object, in Laclau's case the identity of "the people," is not "expressed" by the name "the people" but is the retroactive result of the very process of naming. Naming hence becomes productive in a new sense, because it is no longer restricted to the moment of pure designation, as in Kripke's primal baptism, but assumes a dimension of performativity. Yet although Laclau grants the antidescriptivist camp the merit of having liberated, to a significant degree, the function of the name and of nam-

ing, it was only with Lacan that the name, that is, the signifier, became truly emancipated from any enthrallment to the signified. Laclau detects a progressive emancipation of the order of the signifier (vis-A-vis the signified and, of course, the referent) and, thus, of the

autonomy of naming:

For descriptivism, the operations that naming can perform are strictly limited by the straitjacket within which they take place: the descriptive features inhabiting any name reduce the order of the signifier to the transparent medium through which a purely conceptual overlapping between name and thing (the concept being their common nature) expresses itself. With anti-descriptivism we have the

beginning of an autonomization of the signifier (of the name). This parting of the ways between naming and description, however, does not lead to any increase in the complexity of the operations that 'naming'can perform, for although des-

ignation is no longer ancillary to description, the identity of what is designated is ensured before and quite independently of the process of its being named. It is

only with the Lacanian approach that we have a real breakthrough: the identity and unity of the object result from the very operation of naming. [PR 104]

The name "becomes the ground of the thing," but in order to perform this role the name has to become empty: naming has to be conceptualized along the lines of the logic of the empty signifier, elaborated by Laclau in an important earlier work ["Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?" 36-46]. I have already hinted at the fact that the emptying of the signifier is, in Laclau's theory, a direct result of the equivalential extension of demands for which the empty signifier functions as a nodal point. To take one of Laclau's preferred examples, the name "Solidarnosc" initially functioned as a signifier for particular demands in the particular situation of dockers in Gdansk. If it had signified a certain demand of these workers only, this demand could have been accommodated by the institutional setting of the Polish system, it could have been integrated into a system of differences. To the extent that it connected with other demands by other discontented sectors of society, however, a chain of equivalence was erected that the system could no

longer handle in a differential way. From the perspective of this chain of equivalence, the communist system functioned as the antagonistic other, which, in purely negative terms, served as the ground for the equivalential linking of the most diverse antisystemic demands. "Solidarnosc" now turned from the slogan of a local group of workers into a name for opposition as such. At the same time, though, it had to be emptied of its specific content in order to function as a name for a much wider counterhegemonic equivalential chain. It turned into an empty signifier increasingly devoid of particular signifieds.

It would be hard to overlook how strongly Laclau is inspired by the Lacanian logic of the signifier, yet at the same time it must be stressed that at a certain point Laclau's theory takes a different route. The empty signifier is not a "pure" signifier or "signifier

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without signified." The latter notion, for Laclau, would be self-defeating, since a signifier without any signified could only produce noise and the process of signification would break down completely. Consequently, the empty signifier is not located outside the realm of signification, but "is a place, within the system of signification which is constitutively irrepresentable; in that sense it remains empty, but this is an emptiness which I can sig- nify, because we are dealing with a void within signification" [PR 105]. Put differently, there will always be a remainder, a "rest" of signifieds--we will return to the question of remainder--and hence the empty signifier will always only be tendentially empty (the longer the chain of equivalence, the "emptier" the signifier that serves as a nodal point for this chain will be). Nevertheless, Laclau adheres to the Lacanian "breakthrough" of

theorizing the name, as nodal or "quilting" point, as the ground of the thing, since, as he

repeatedly states, "the identity and unity of the object results from the very operation of

naming" [104]. But the crucial expansion of the Lacanian logic of the signifier, of course, consists in the political turn given to the naming process, which is now explained by the social "dialectics" of difference and equivalence. The hegemonic struggle over the ex-

pansion of a chain of equivalence at the expense of the field of difference, and concomi-

tantly over the emptying of the signifier, is exactly what politics is about. The "primal baptism" of a political agent or popular identity, by which the agent or identity comes into existence, amounts to nothing else than a hegemonic intervention.

If we now apply these instruments to Laclau's own "primal baptism" of politics, that is to say, to his surprising intervention of naming politics "populism," then the political aspect of this very move should by now be apparent. First of all, if by populism we understand a political strategy which aims at the dichotomization of the social and the

emptying of the signifier, then it is evident, given the theory of politics just outlined, that there is no politics that is not populist to some extent. Yet the puzzling question remains

why a political strategy that aims at the dichotomization of the social and the emptying of the signifier should be dubbed "populism" at all, if it is a feature of every politics. Doesn't the term "populism" become redundant? I suppose that this question can only be given a

satisfactory answer, within the Laclauian framework, if it is understood that "populism" for Laclau is not so much a concept of the political than that it serves as the name of the

political. To substantiate this claim it is crucial to remember Laclau's differentiation between concept and name, which neatly follows from his theory of naming.

For Laclau, the conceptual order is structured according to the logic of difference -a

particular "content" is assigned to the concept through its very differential position vis-ai- vis all other differential positions - while the nominal order works on the basis of equivalence: a name emerges as a nodal point around which differences are structured into an equivalential chain. In the second case, it is this single name that takes over the task of representing the totality of a signifying system without expressing "any conceptual unity that precedes it" [108]. There exists no conceptual correlate (no signified) to which the name (or the signifier) could refer. Naming does not occur within a transparent medium but on an uneven and opaque terrain where the name will always search in vain for the concept.3 Now, a social science approach to populism will always remain within the

3. In descriptivism, for instance, the role of descriptive features is to "reduce the order of the signifier to the transparent medium through which a purely conceptual overlapping between name and thing (the concept being their common nature) expresses itself' [104].This points to the further aspect of a "concept," apart from its differential aspect, which should not go unnoticed: the "concept" is what is supposed as the transparent correlate to the name. In traditionally Marxist discourse, for instance, a conceptual content of "working class" is supposed by which the object "working class" can be recognized within the objective world of the relations of production. In this case, the name "is the transparent medium through which something which is conceptually fully apprehensible shows itself" [183].




conceptual order. By developing classificatory systems and enumerations of supposed descriptive features of populism, as arbitrary and surrealist as they appear, such an approach will always seek to conceptually grasp the phenomenon of populism by delimit-

ing it vis-ha-vis other forms of politics. For Laclau, on the other hand, populism ceases to be a regional phenomenon and becomes the name for politics tout court; this means

"populism" now designates the equivalential unity of all things political. We see how this operation, far from being only an operation of conceptual determination or classification, involves the truly political intervention of naming. To frame it in the Laclauian terms of

hegemony theory: an ontic concept of politics (populism) takes over the task of representing the ontological nature of the political, that is to say, of the quasi-transcendental condition of politics tout court. Now we realize why it is crucial to distinguish a strong notion of "the political" from "politics," or the "ontological" dimension from the "ontic," if we want to determine the seemingly ambivalent status of Laclau's notion of populism.4 In a certain regard, the latter remains a particular (ontic) form of politics, and yet it assumes a universal representative function as the name for the political.

Hence, Laclau's theory of populism in itself involves a moment of the political, a

performative dimension of naming. And wasn't this precisely, as I mentioned in the be-

ginning, the ultimate aim of Laclau's attempt to unravel the marginalized and denigrated notion of populism (and of "the people") as a symptom of the negation or disavowal of the political in political thought? Isn't this disavowal of the political as the instituting moment of the social and as index (in the form of antagonism) of the impossibility of society-as-totality, that is, as an ontological dimension, the reason why any effective

politicization of mainstream social theory -in all its empiricist, functionalist, sociologist, or systems-theoretical variants--is always already blocked from the outset? It is by giving the name of "populism" to the political, and thus inverting the very terms of debate, that Laclau changes from the register of difference (the conceptual order) to the register of equivalence (the nominal order), thus contributing not only to the theorization of the

political but also to the politicization of theory.5

The Two Names of the People

After having outlined some of the political stakes involved in Laclau's theorization of populism, I would now like to approach the second problem encapsulated in the double appearance of "the people" in Laclau's book. On the one hand, to recapitulate, "the people" is the empty signifier or name which holds together popular identities (and hypothet- ically every signifier could assume this function). In this sense it can be equated with a

particular social agent or identity. On the other hand, "the people" seems to fulfill a more fundamental role as the inherent limit or "stumbling block" encountered by most variants

4. Concerning the genealogy and current use of this "political difference" between "politics" and "the political," I refer the reader to a monograph I have devoted to the topic. The political difference, as I claim there, has to be understood as a politicized version of the ontological difference and as the actual "ground" -a ground that simultaneously is an abyss-of postfoundational social

thought [Marchart, Post-foundational Political Thought]. 5. It goes without saying that Laclau, of course, does not leave the conceptual order of theory

as such, hence we will still find a Laclauian concept of "the political" as elaborated in a differential way vis-a-vis his concepts of the social (the realm of sedimented practices) or society. The point is that, apart from his theoretical work, which to some degree-simply by being theoretical--will remain within the conceptual order, Laclau's theory of naming-when applied to his own theoretical intervention-allows us to exactly determine the moment of the political (of equivalence) in his work. And this is the moment of populism.

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of political theory. Here "the people" seems to become, through Laclau's inversion of the

very terms of debate, the name for the political subject tout court; in other words it points at the more radical instance of political subjectivity as such. Before proposing an answer

analogous to the one we found with respect to the double appearance of "populism," it should be underlined that the implications in this case are different, since it is not only the ontological nature of politics (that is, the name of the political) which is at stake, but the existence and name of the subject of the political. Put differently, Laclau's subtle

yet permanent shift between the two names of the people does not involve two "ontic" versions of agency but constitutes something of the order of a wager with respect to the

"ontological" existence of a subject of the political. Nothing could be less self-evident', for we never encounter "the subject" in political reality--what we encounter are always particular political agents, organized in form of groups, parties, movements, networks, or as Laclau would prefer, discursive identities. While the category of subject had been rel-

egated to the dustbin of intellectual history by most strands of the social sciences- which on this account find themselves in rare agreement with many strands of postmodernism and poststructuralism (including Laclau and Mouffe's own approach of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, where they provided a Foucauldian theory of subject positions only)- it found itself repatriated, at the core of political thought, by approaches influenced by psychoanalysis (including Laclau's own work from New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time onward). So, before anything else, Laclau's decision of naming the subject of the political amounts to the wager that a subject of the political exists to begin with (that is, it exists apart from subject positions on the ontic plane of the social).

Yet if we decide to theorize the subject of the political in analogy to the Lacanian

concept of the subject, we also have to agree that the existence -or ek-sistence rather-of the latter is nothing that could be determined by a logical or empirical proof; it can only be supposed. Supposing the political subject then means giving a name to what, in the last

instance, must remain nameless-and still we feel the political exigency to find such a name. This will obviously be a difficult, perhaps paradoxical task inasmuch as the subject in Lacan does not have a name. The subject--no matter whether we designate it as sub-

ject-of-lack or sujet barrd--is first of all a theoretical concept rather than a name (in the sense in which a theory of the latter is elaborated by Laclau). So what is involved, then, in Laclau's decision to give a name to the subject and to name it "the people"?

It was said before that by "name" one must not understand a mere "tag" put on some

entity that in itself preexisted the very process of naming, but rather that which constitutes the ground of an entity, which is why the very existence of something will depend on a

process of naming and not simply of predication ("the moment of unity of popular subjects is given at the nominal, not at the conceptual, level" [118]). By once again applying this

theory of naming to Laclau's own primal baptism of the political subject as "the people," we will observe that for Laclau the name of the people becomes the ground of the political subject, of political subjectivity per se. One may object that this is a rather peculiar claim, for how can an ontic signifier of politics ("the people") turn into the ground of the

ontological instance of the subject? But this relation of chiasmatic reversibility between ontic beings and ontological ground is precisely the point of the radical Heideggerian notion of the onto-ontological difference. For Heidegger this difference has to be thought as difference, as the evental play of "being" between the ontological "Being" and ontic "beings," a play (between ground and abyss) that makes impossible an ultimate foundation-which on the other side does not dispense us of laying some ground, if only in an always provisional and historically contingent fashion. If we relate this Heideggerian and postfoundational insight to the political difference between "politics" and "the political," it will become evident that every name, every contingent yet ontological ground, can be provided only from within the ontic realm of names, that is, of the reservoir of available




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political signifiers. A particular name from the ontic sphere of politics will have to take up the task of becoming the name for the ontological subject of the political.

If the double appearance of "the people" in Laclau is explained along the lines of the ontological difference (as difference between politics and the political), it must be concluded that while the subject (as lack) does not exist as an ontic entity and remains an ontological "concept," it has to assume an ontic name in order to be politically grounded. Laclau's intervention-- and therein, I hold, lies precisely the political aspect of the theory developed in On Populist Reason--consists in the grounding of the concept of subject by way of a primal baptism, that is, by naming it "the people." The resulting chiasm between "subject" and hegemonic "agent" can best be illustrated by the famous Lacanian formula, rephrased in Laclauian terms: "the people" (as an empty signifier) is the signifier which represents "the people" (the subject) to all other signifiers (of a chain of equivalence). It is precisely because the subject as such is nameless and remains absent, that it has to be represented. And it can only be represented by assuming a name, which by necessity will be both provisional and politically binding. "Binding," because other signifiers will be bound together in a chain of equivalence by this name. Yet the representative function of the name remains twofold: the name represents what could be called the identity principle of this chain within the ontic continuum of politics, but it also represents the absent ontological instance of the subject of the political within the ontic realm of the social.

The People and the Democratic Horizon

What is not fully answered by the above account, however, is the question: why is it this ontic name-"the people"--which as an empty signifier assumes the role of representing the ontological subject for the other signifiers? Why this central role of the name of the people--and not of any other name? Obviously, the Laclauian intervention would be rather unconvincing if it was based in pure voluntarism. The choice to assign such a central function to the name of the people cannot be an arbitrary one, even if on the other hand it is accepted that a stable conceptual ground for this decision will never be reached. Laclau's own outline of the conditions that made possible the emergence and expansion of popular identities is rather cursory and consists in the diagnosis that "we inhabit a historical terrain where the proliferation of heterogeneous points of rupture and

antagonisms require increasingly political forms of social reaggregation" [PR 230]. The interrelated historical conditions behind this phenomenon of increasing social dislocation are subsumed by Laclau under the label of globalized capitalism.6 But as Laclau himself knows very well, the dislocations produced by globalized capitalism cannot explain why it was the name of "the people" which came to occupy such a central role within our imaginary. It could have been any other signifier, since the potential "content" of political reaggregation is not predetermined by the pure fact or "form" of dislocation. We thus have to descend to the ontic plane of discourse and analyze the emergence of the Western political imaginary in order to explain the predominance of the name of the people.

So, although Laclau himself does not provide an explicit historical explanation, the symptomatic function ascribed to the "people" may provide some hint regarding the latter's centrality. Could it not be that the denigration of the people must be read not as

6. This label ofglobalized capitalism requires some specification. By capitalism, Laclau holds, "we should no longer understand a self-closed totality governed by movements derived from the contradictions of commodity as an elementary form. We can no longer understand capitalism as a purely economic reality, but as a complex in which economic, political, military, technological and other determinations-each endowed with its own logic and a certain autonomy-enter into the determination of the movement of the whole" [PR 230].




an indication of their marginal status, but exactly as an indicator of their--hidden or dis-

avowed--foundational role for contemporary politics? Marginality alone would not explain the symptomatic status attributed to the people. On the contrary, it is not due to their marginal status that the people found themselves denigrated by (anti)political thought; it is because of their central role in what Claude Lefort calls the symbolic dispositive of democracy [see Democracy; The Political Forms]. If this is the case, the antipolitical denigration of the people would have to be understood as part of an antidemocratic coun- terattack aiming at the remarginalization of those who, historically, have already assumed the subject role of politics.7

This assumption is based on the Lefortian insight that with the democratic revolution the role of the people radically changed. The democratic revolution instigates a caesura within Western political history, an irreversible symbolic shift. With the decapitation of the King, as Lefort famously claims, the umbilical cord between society and its transcendent instance of legitimation was cut off. The place of power was emptied and from then on could only temporarily be reoccupied by political forces. Simultaneously, the democratic dispositive was installed through the separation of the registers of power: law and knowledge. A "dissolution of the markers of certainty" occurred by which the very ground of society became irresolvably destabilized. Laclau to a large extent accepts this historic depiction of the democratic revolution and its symbolic consequences while also criticizing Lefort's analysis of democracy for being concentrated exclusively on liberal-democratic regimes, and not on the construction of popular-democratic subjects [PR 166]. I would claim, however, that Lefort's account of the democratic revolution as an irreversible event could step in as a historical explanation for the centrality of the empty signifier of the people. When Laclau [169] holds that the construction of a "people" "is the sine qua non of democratic functioning," since without "production of emptiness there is no 'people,' no populism, but no democracy either," then this relation is reversible: without the democratic revolution there is no expansion of the name of the people into the imaginary horizon of all politics. Hence, the caesura of the democratic revolution is the historical sine qua non for the logic of populism assuming the quasi-ontological role of politics tout court. Again we see how the (quasi-)transcendental conditions of

possibility of politics (the ontological level) relate, in a chiasmatic and reversible way, to their very own historical (ontic) conditions. Conditions of possibility and possibility of conditions are inseparably intertwined.

To reflect on the implications of Lefort's account of the democratic revolution will furthermore allow us to better determine the "ambivalent" status of the name of the people-this time with respect to the democratic horizon. For if the empty signifier of the

"people" had assumed its centrality because any retreat to more ancient notions of the people was cut off, given the irreversible nature of the democratic revolution, a certain

price had to be paid for it. According to Lefort, after the disincorporation of the King and the emptying of the place of power, sovereignty could no longer resort to a transcendent instance of legitimation. The very instance of sovereignty did not disappear, though; it was filled out by the name of the people (this is what "sovereignty of the people" is all about). Yet since the link to a transcendent place of legitimation was severed without

remedy, nobody who will take up the role of the sovereign will ever reach, after the democratic revolution, an ultimate legitimatory ground. It follows that the people will be constitutively split: on the one hand, the people have to take up the classical function of sovereignty, and on the other hand this function will be more than precarious, since they cannot resort to any transcendent ground of legitimation. The people as sovereign necessarily remain absent in democracy and still have to assume some sort of sovereign

7. This would explain, by the way, why antipolitical resentment often goes together with an antidemocratic ideology.

14



presence. Herein the ontic or historical reason for the vague and ambivalent appearance of the people and of populism can be found. Populism, in other words, presupposes the democratic revolution as a historical event by which the name of the people assumed the function of a sovereignty without sovereign.

Can the Heterogeneous Be Named?

So the empty signifier of the people managed to play the role of a nodal point with respect to all other political signifiers because it has expanded historically, to employ Laclau's

terminology, from the "myth" of the democratic revolution into the "imaginary horizon" of politics as such [New Reflections 63-67]. To rearticulate Laclauian hegemony theory with Lefort's theory of the democratic revolution -despite some of Laclau's reservations

vis-ia-vis the latter-helps to understand why, after the democratic revolution, there is no politics that would not be attached to the name of the people. This doesn't mean, of course, that the signifier of "the people" will literally be present in all political discourse. Yet it implies that political action will necessarily have to take place in the name of the

people--no matter what particular signifier comes to be attached to this action. Politics after the democratic revolution will be enacted in the name of a sovereign who will and must remain absent in the last instance. The lonely hour of sovereignty never occurs, except in the actions of a representative that are always less than sovereign.

The story, however, does not end here, as Laclau is well aware. It was Georges Ba- taille who had pointed out the dual nature of sovereignty: sovereign is not only s/he who is in possession of the power of domination ("imperative sovereignty"), but the notion of sovereignty also refers to the absolutely useless, incalculable, excessive, and incommen- surable [see "Psychological Structure"]. This radical other to the homogenizing forces of social order now emerges, in our argument, as a necessary Doppelgdnger of the people as subject of sovereignty. Laclau follows Bataille in calling the "other side" of the homogeneous order of differences heterogeneity. The heterogeneous, in Laclau's definition, is something that cannot be integrated in the hegemonic play between difference and equivalence. It does not belong to the homogenous order of differences, because then it could obviously not be heterogeneous; nor does it belong to the order of antagonistic equivalence, for then it would have acquired a name and would again belong to the order of signification. Social heterogeneity is a kind of outside that "presupposes exteriority not just to something within a space of representation, but to the space of representation as such" [PR 140]. It follows that "the field of representation is a broken and murky mirror, constantly interrupted by a heterogeneous 'Real' which it cannot symbolically master" [141].

A way to grasp this instance of social heterogeneity as something that does not have access to the space of representation would be to think of it not as antagonistic negativity (for example, the "enemy of the people" who serves as "negative reverse of a popular identity" [139]), but as a pure remainder or leftover which does not contribute to the shape of a given identity. (Laclau refers to the Lacanian example of the caput mortuum as the pure abject which remains in the tube after a chemical experiment.) On these prem- ises, it appears to me that the key question from the perspective of a political theory of naming would be how something that falls outside any logic of representation, something that cannot represent the subject of the political for the other signifiers, can nevertheless be named. To be sure, the question is not how the category of heterogeneity, as what resists symbolization, can be conceptualized theoretically-from Kant to Lacan one can find a variety of theoretical approaches. Rather, the question imposes itself how what is heterogeneous can assume a name politically. Is there a politics of those who have no name, a politics in the name of namelessness?




Laclau seems to argue that there is something within a given name--the materiality of the signifier-which is heterogeneous vis-?a-vis that name and the naming process in general. To take the central case of the people: "The 'people' will always be something more than the pure opposite of power. There is a Real of the 'people' which resists symbolic integration" [PR 152]. One way of reading this claim would be along the lines of the traditional difference between the populus (all citizens) and the plebs (the under-

privileged). Giorgio Agamben [Means without End] has observed--in comparable fashion-that in the history of political thought what we call people is not a unified subject but something that oscillates between the two opposite poles of the integral political body of the People (Popolo) and the excluded rest (popolo, defined by Agamben also as one of the forms of bare life). Once more, we encounter a constitutive split at the very core of the people. The people is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is part, and cannot be part of the whole in which it is included. This internal splitting of the people found itself legally instituted in the distinction between populus and plebs in ancient Rome, or between popolo minuto and popolo grasso in medieval times. Likewise, for Jacques Ran-

cibre, "the people are always more or less than the people" [Disagreement 10].8 There is

politics because there is a part of those who have no part in the whole of a well-ordered

community. Ranciere's approach is informative because he at one point exemplifies his case with

a fable of self-naming. His source is a version of Livy's account of the secession of the

plebeians on Aventine Hill retold by the French nineteenth-century writer Pierre-Simon Ballanche. In this version of the story the plebeians on the Aventine constructed a coun-

teridentity vis-.-vis

the patricians through a process of self-naming:

[T]hey give themselves representatives by rebaptizing them. In a word, they con- duct themselves like beings with names. Through transgression, they find that

they too, just like speaking beings, are endowed with speech that does not simply express want, suffering, or rage, but intelligence. They write, Ballanche tells us, "a name in the sky": a place in the symbolic order of the community of speaking beings, in a community that does not yet have any effective power in the city of Rome. [.. ..] [T]he plebeians have actually violated the order of the city. They have given themselves names. [Disagreement 24-25]

Those who are not considered speaking beings by the homogeneous order ("Whoever is nameless cannot speak" [23]), will be heard only when writing "a name in the sky" of the symbolic order.9 Thereby, politics is presented as a process that evidently resembles the Laclauian process of hegemony. To translate Ranciere's example into "Laclauese": what the plebeians do is to construct an antagonism vis-a-vis the patricians, thus assum-

8. Rancibre's general approach is explicitly discussed and-sympathetically-criticized by Laclau [PR 244-49].

9. An obvious analogy can be observed between Ranciere's point and Spivak's famous question: Can the subaltern speak? It would be interesting to learn how, in Laclau's view, the category of heterogeneity relates to Gramsci's notion of the "subaltern," as it is in use today in postcolonial and subaltern studies. As Spivak claims, the "colonized subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogeneous" [270], and the notion of the "subaltern" should be reserved today "for the sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space" [310]. Spivak even speaks out clearly for-in our terms-a hegemonic effort at assuming a name or becoming inscribed into the realm of the nameable, as there is nothing desirable in being relegated to the realm of namelessness: "When a link of communication is established between a member of subaltern groups and the circuits of citizenship or institutionality, the subaltern has been inserted into the long road to hegemony. Unless we want to be romantic purists or primitivists about 'preserving subalternity'-a contradiction in terms-this is absolute to be desired" [310].

16



ing a name (or a chain of names) which serves as the empty signifier that holds together plebeian identity. But where do we find the heterogeneous in this example? It is crucial to understand that the heterogeneous, in its most radical aspect, is not identical with the

particularity that seeks to fill out the space of an absent universality. When Laclau, on his

part, differentiates between plebs and populus, we must not confuse the former with the category of heterogeneity. For Laclau, the "people" of populism is a plebs who claims to be the only legitimate populus, since populism "requires the dichotomic division of so-

ciety into two camps--one presenting itself as a part which claims to be the whole" [PR 83]. But the heterogeneous is that which falls outside this very game, which is not part of the dialectics between difference and equivalence, between the plebs and the populus. The heterogeneous is not, in Rancibrian terms, a part of those who have no part in the whole; it is not even a part (without being the negation of a part), because the term "part" makes sense only in relation to other parts or to a whole. The heterogeneous, in its most radical aspect, escapes any relation between part, no-part, and whole. Laclau gives the

example of the unpoliticizable Lumpenproletariat in Marxian thought. Marx differentiates between proletariat--the plebs who aspires to be the populus--and "the lumpenproletariat" [144], a pure outsider not involved in the production process and thus expelled from the field of history and class struggle. A similar example can be found in Hegel's notion of the "peoples without history," that is, of those non-Europeans who stand, in

Hegel's eyes, outside the realm of historicity eo ipso.

The Shadow of a Name

In these examples of the Lumpenproletariat and the "peoples without history" we encounter an obvious problem. What is the status of these names? Is Lumpenproletariat a name for the heterogeneous? If yes, this name - by virtue of being a name- would have to be the result of a political process of naming, an assumption excluded from the outset (since in this case it would not be a name for the heterogeneous but for a particularity representing the subject for other particularities: the Lumpenproletariat would already be the Proletariat). On the other hand, however, it cannot be a concept either, for then it would already be inscribed into a symbolic order of differences as just another difference (and not as the heterogeneous). It seems that we have discovered in the signifier Lumpen- proletariat a third and truly impossible "category," a signifier or "name" that is neither a name nor a concept, as it is located both beyond the realm of equivalence and the realm of difference.

What makes the Lumpenproletariat an impossible or paradoxical signifier is the fact that every signifier, by definition, emerges from the interplay between equivalence and difference. Yet in this case, access to the field of signification as such seems to be barred. Are we touching here on what Laclau refers to as the materiality of the signifier, on that within a name or naming process which resists symbolic integration? If this was the case, a signifier like Lumpenproletariat would not be a name but the necessary by-product of naming, the leftover produced with necessity by any process of hegemonization. We can thus define the heterogenous as that which cannot be named directly within a given hegemonic constellation. The heterogeneous has no name of its own; it is the shadow of a name. For whenever a name, in a process of hegemonic conflict, is "written in the sky," this name-like a cloud-will cast a shadow upon some area. Every name will necessarily produce something of the order of a blind spot. Hence, from the perspective of the subject of naming, the shadow of the subject's name cannot but be devoid of meaning, since a signifier in its pure materiality, separated from every signified, amounts to nothing more than noise. At best, the heterogeneous could be experienced as a nuisance, as a




disturbance and dislocation of the naming process.'0 One is tempted to explain this fact with what would be a typically Luhmannian, systems-theoretical formula: one cannot name what one cannot name. Within our own political struggle, within our own naming process, we cannot see and cannot name what, by definition, cannot be seen and cannot be named: our blind spot, the obverse side of our own name.

To say, however, that the heterogeneous cannot be named directly within a given hegemonic constellation does not preclude the possibility of signifying it from without that situation. Only by stepping out of, for instance, the Marxian framework can we determine the role of the Lumpenproletariat as the role of the heterogeneous with respect to the hegemonic struggle of the proletariat. We have to step outside the shadow cast by our own name, but this would force us to give up on our name. It would mean to enter a

process of un-naming. How can such a process be imagined? Would we have to abandon our name? But such abandonment of the very dimension of naming, and hence equivalence, would be conceivable only if we were prepared to leave the realm of the political altogether. If we are not, then perhaps the only political form of un-naming will be to assume more than a single name. For the only way to glimpse the shadow of our own name

might be to look at it from the perspective of somebody else's name. Assuming the name of the other might be the very precondition for naming the shadow of heterogeneity cast

by our name. I would claim that this is not only the very ontological condition of everything that goes "under the name" of solidarity. I also suppose that, eventually, the name of the people-as the nodal point within the unsurpassable horizon of democracy-will be affected, since what such a strategy of un-naming would imply is the pluralization of names, the pluri-perspectivity (in an Arendtian sense) of the sphere of politics, where we will encounter not a single name of "the people" but a plurality of names. This plurality, though, is not another variant of liberal "pluralism," but a plurality whose very condition of possibility lies in the fact that the name of the people is never one, that it is always split, and nevertheless remains the single unsurpassable horizon of democratic politics.

WORKS CITED

Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.

Arendt, Hannah. Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy. Ed. Ronald Beiner. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.

Bataille, Georges. "The Psychological Structure of Fascism." The Bataille Reader. Ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Heidegger, Martin. Identitdit und Differenz. Stuttgart: Neske, 1957.

Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1980. Laclau, Ernesto. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso, 1990.

. Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism. London: Verso, 1977.

. "Why Do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?" Emancipation(s). London: Verso, 1996. 36-46.

Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso, 1985.

10. Nevertheless, one would have wished that Laclau had elaborated more explicitly on the status of his category of heterogeneity in relation to the category of dislocation as developed in New Reflections.

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Lefort, Claude. Democracy and Political Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

--. The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarian- ism. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1986.

Marchart, Oliver. Post-foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Le- fort, Badiou, and Laclau. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2007 (forthcoming).

Negri, Antonio. "Pour une d6finition ontologique de la multitude." Multitudes 9 (May- June 2002): 36-48.

Rancibre, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.

Stavrakakis, Yannis. "Antinomies of Formalism: Laclau's Theory of Populism and the Lessons from Religious Populism in Greece." Journal of Political Ideologies 9(3) (Oct. 2004): 253-67.

Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude. New York: Semiotext(e), 2004. Zifek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.




Documents

In the Name of the People Populist Reason and the Subject of the Political