villacañas - the liberal roots of populism, a critique of laclau

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Jos Luis Villacaas Berlanga, Jorge Ledo

CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 10, Number 2, Fall 2010,pp. 151-182 (Article)

DOI: 10.1353/ncr.2010.0017

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CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2010, pp. 151182, issn 1532-687x. Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.

The Liberal Roots of PopulismA Critique of Laclau

J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a

Universidad Complutense, Madrid

T r a n s l a t e d b y J o r g e L e d o

What is Liberalism?, wondered Foucault at the beginning of The

Birth of Biopolitics. Th e question was urgent. Beginning with Society Must Be

Defended and Security, Territory, Population, his references to this issue in his

seminars were constant. My argument will take the same point of departure,

with the aim of revealing the liberal conditions of populism and, more con-

cretely, what Laclau calls populist reason.

Although we are not in a position to extract a precise reply from Fou-

caults texts, we can at least find a good point of departure for the definition

of liberalism, and this will be my first step. Foucault was destined to continue

his investigation into the current neoliberalism. And that was precisely what

he did in Th e Birth of Biopolitics. I will talk about this in the second part

of my lecture, along with the link between Foucault and Lacan. Th irdly, I

will develop Laclaus progression from the notion of hegemony to populist

reason. Fourthly, I will identify Laclaus liberal position in the very core of his

T h e L i b e r a l R o o t s o f P o p u l i s m152

populist reason. Finally, I will identify the weak points in Laclaus arguments,

his faith in rhetoric, and his obsession with the concept of hegemony.

1 . F o u c a u l t o n L i b e r a l i s m

In Foucault, liberalism introduces the framework of political rationality

to the state mechanisms based on disciplineright and biopoliticswhere

biopolitics is understood as a technology of populations (2008a). Th is func-

tion is very complex since it determines the crucial tasks of the system,

challenging the aforementioned apparatuses and defining their own limits.

Th is question, when brought to an adequate level of theoretical radicalness,

can identify the existing mediation between liberty and governmental ap-

paratuses. Between a system concerned about respect for legal subjects and

individual free enterprise (2008, 317), on the one hand, and the disciplin-

ary and biopolitical apparatuses that consider population en masse, on the

other, adequate mediations should be established. We can see that Foucault

addresses the classic problem of the tensions between the massive and

individualistic dimensions of democratic society. In liberalism, the former

constitute the framework of political rationality and the latter concentrate

on the action of government as biopower.

In Foucaults analysis, as in the rest of conventional analyses, such ten-

sions cannot be completely resolved. For that reason, critique appears as

the only appropriate practice for liberalism, that is to say, the continuous

reflection, the aspiration to rationalize the government. Liberalism requires

the governmentwith all its apparatusesnot to be an end in and of it-

self. Government cannot become absolute. Th is rationalization humiliates

the old raison dtat and reduces the central role of police.1 For liberalism,

Foucault recalls, governments always govern too much. Th e liberal attitude

imposes even the need to legitimize anything that could be an aim of the

government. For liberalism, government will no longer have its own aims

because it is no longer considered a natural institution. Now Foucault must

respond to the question, Why must one govern? (2008a, 319).

In the summary of his 197879 seminar, Foucault spoke about a liberal

technology of government, employing Franklins phrase, a technology of

J o s L u i s V i l l a c a a s B e r l a n g a 153

frugal government (2008a, 322), as a general expedient to establish the me-

diation we are talking about. In his opinionforged in the perception of the

diff erences between the physiocrats and the liberalsthe said technology re-

quired social regulation.2 He described it in classic fashion, as participation

of the governed in drawing up the law in a parliamentary system (2008a, 321).

Th is was the technique that seemed most rational and compatible with the

governmental economy, or with a rationalization of the government. Here, a

historical synthesis that was neither necessary nor typical took place. Liber-

alism has not always been linked to democratic parliamentarianism, just as

democracy, always endowed with technical and disciplinary biopolitics, has

not always been linked to liberalism. In fact, liberalism can drastically limit

its criticism, reducing it to its economic aspects. Th e state can even eliminate

criticism, as occurs in authoritarian states.

Th e most interesting part of Foucaults descriptionfor it cannot be said

he is off ering a theoryin his identification of natural structures as the basis

for the development of liberalism. Logically, he identified those structures

surrounding the idea of civil society. Even without referring to Adam Smiths

canonical analysesas he would in Th e Birth of Biopoliticsit was also clear

for Foucault that the points of departure for liberalism are those scenarios

of natural freedom. Th ese marked moments unconnected with the state, but

it is precisely to these moments that the state should accredit its rationality.

Th us, Foucault considers the market to be a tool by which to measure gov-

ernmental excesses, and shows that an optimal development in economy is

incompatible with the maximization of the government.3 In a certain sense,

natural freedom found one of its expressions in the market, but was not ex-

hausted in it. It can be said that a completely liberal civil society is a place of

natural freedom. Civil society maintains a complex relation with the state: it

is outside and inside at the same time, and it is itself the basis for mediation.4

It embodies liberty, but it is in need of rational government.

Foucault made explicit the decisive and paradoxical argument for this

issue. Since it seems clear that natural freedom should be as such (free)

because of its capacity to self-govern, Foucault cleverly observed that this

order does not arise from a political society founded on a contractual bond

(2008a, 321). On the contrary, there was already a need for government in


the natural order. Adam Smith would have focused his argument by saying

that the results of natural freedom have to be regular to guarantee their own

perpetuation. Long before Marx, the Scottish philosopher found a contra-

diction in the economic system. Th us, the need of the government had to

do with the regulation of natural liberty itself and aspired to maintain it in

that naturalness. For instance, this was the purpose of antimonopoly laws,

one of the inevitable and unacceptable results of liberty. Th us, government

guarantees natural liberty: its ethical-legal regulation of the market tries

to guarantee the equality of opportunities, free competition, the liberty of

pricesthat is, the natural free market. Only by the ethical-legal regulation

of the government, then, does natural freedom regulate itself. Th e adequate

relation between the state and civil society is configured inside and out

through synthesis of natural and political regulation, of legal positivism and

iusnaturalism. Foucault is familiar with this phenomenon and he describes

it adequately, although without quoting Smiths category of natural freedom.5

Th e notion of regulation is here the decisive one. As such, it reproduces

the paradox of an intervention that opens to the possibility for things to run

under the guidance of their nature. Th ere will be regulation for that which

can maintain its natural attributes through regulation. Th at is the reason

liberal government neither consists in discipliningits aims are not to forbid

or to order (2000b, 47)nor in imagining the negative. Rather, it is linked

to security apparatuses, although Foucault did not clarify this point.6 He

defended these positions in his previous seminarSecurity, Territory, Popu-

lationwhere we find this powerful passage: Th e game of liberalismnot

interfering, allowing free movement, letting things follow their course; lais-

ser faire, passer et allerbasically and fundamentally means acting so that

reality develops, goes its way, and follows its own course according to the

laws, principles, and mechanisms of reality itself (2008b, 48). Some ethical-

political laws are proper and adequate to natural reality. Th is is the paradox

and it can only be reduced because, in both society and government, we

speak about laws of freedom. Regulation is justified only if it off ers securities

to preserve freedom naturally as it is. Th e security mechanisms only make

sense through the link they establish with freedom, as its framework and

playground.7


From all this we can draw a conclusion: freedom is integrated into the

core of the technologies of power. Liberal government is the aftermath of this

mutation. In this new technique, government must think about the nature

of things, and the nature of things in this context is nothing other than the

liberty of human beings. Liberal government technique takes into account

what [people] want to do, what are they interested in doing, what they think

about doing (Foucault 2008b, 49). Th e being-together of human beings has

a specific naturalness of the relations of the men among themselves, that

has to do with living together, working together, and producing together.

Only at the end of Security, Territory, Population does Foucault arrive upon

the naturalness of society and tackle the notion of regulation (343). Finally, in

Th e Birth of Biopolitics, liberalism finds its basis in a naturalism, and it is only

at this point that he is dealing with human nature (2008a, 61). Th ese natural

relations, if they are to be respected by the government, must translate into

scientific knowledge.8 Liberal government and the knowledge of the nature

of things, as they refer to the coexistence of human beings, are thus inex-

tricable. So we have a scientific knowledge indispensable to government,

concludes Foucault, that also characterizes liberal government as a specific

correlation between power and knowledge now identified as government

and science. Government must mold its decisions from science. Th is would

be its procedure of rationalization.

2 . N e o - L i b e r a l i s m a n d t h e

l i n k w i t h L a c a n

Th e topic laid out by Foucault in these seminars aimed at presenting the

problem of the relations between truth and subject in the core of liberalism

understood as an art of government.9 Th e seminars that followed should

have dealt with the problem, but what we read in Th e Hermeneutics of the

Subject is disappointing: all we find is that liberalism is not the right attitude

with which to approach the teckn tou biou (art of living) of the ancients

(2005, 48587). With regard to contemporary liberalism, his best approach is

found in Th e Birth of Biopolitics, and even it is not very substantial. Th ere, he

clarified that liberalism was an art of governing according to the rationality


of economic agents and, more generally, according to the rationality of the

governed themselves (2008a, 313). From the point of view of liberalism, he

clearly suggested that the issue of the relations between truth and subject

was to be found in the market. Here the revelation of what is right in gov-

ernmental sense, as lieu de vridiction (place of verification), took place.10

Th erefore, it is the market where we find the key for the verification or for

the falsification of the governmental practice. Th e practice based on this

assumption has a nature similar to that of scientific praxis.

To accomplish that mission, some type of relation among truth, reason,

and freedom of the governed had to be established. Th e expression and rev-

elation of that relation was permeated by the market. Foucault proposed

utility as a center for the synthesis of these elements. From the point of view

of the population that finds its rhetoric in the idea of utility, Foucault talked

about a rpublique phnomnale des intrts (the phenomenal republic of

interests, 2008a, 46). Th is governmental needed freedom, as only through

it does the subject find its truth, define its interest, and calculate its utility

in the market. Th erefore, to consume in the market one must first consume

freedom, and to do this, freedom has to be produced and organized (2008a,

65), the phenomena that tend to destroy it must be regulated, and its circula-

tion within a space must be assured. We have, away from any kind of uni-

lateralism, the market looking after the state and the state looking after the

market (Zanini 2006, 136). Th e institution of a panopticon is thus unfeasible.

Th e set of problems raised by the human natural order as a fundamental

premise of neoliberalism is enormous. It is odd that the seminar on Th e Birth

of Biopolitics does not tackle them. Th e course was devoted to demonstrating

that the crisis of liberalism, and the collapse of its confidence in the rational-

ity of the governed, led to Nazism and the fascist state,11 to which neoliberal-

ism off ered an alternative solution. Foucaults annotations on neoliberalism

are quite scattered but important. Th e key question lays in the fact that, if the

market is the place for truth, then it should not be understood as a place for

trading, but rather as a place for competition. Th e action of the government

is related to this question, and it should recreate it continuously. Th is is es-

sentially the transformation of neoliberalism (2008a, 14546). Th erefore, the

government does not intervene in the market, but rather in society itself and


in the social environment. Th ere, liberty should be produced and human na-

ture should be approached. And it must be done not only by assuring market

homogeneity and its equivalence, but its heterogeneity, diff erentiation, and

multiplicity as well. Th e human being considered by neoliberalism is not the

one that makes demands of the marketas if he had a core of fixed needs

but the one that produces diff erence by means of his own enterprise. Th e

homo conomicus is not lhomme de lchange, but lhomme de lenterprise.

Th is is the true power of society, and it is for this reason that society needs

to assume, to consume, and to renew freedom. Th is homo conomicus is

the interface of government and the free individual (253). Th e neoliberal

government technique procures diff erentiation, inequality, and competi-

tion. Th erefore, the sovereign loses his function: he cannot control the set of

phenomena that, from freedom, promotes enterprise (173).12

I am not interested in the need for continuous arbitration on liberty and

competition; Foucault himself wrote many pages on this question. More im-

portant is the transformation of labor into human capital, of the worker into

an enterprise in and of herself. I cannot unfold this argument either. Th ere is

no doubt about the prominence of these problems and their conformation

of the rhetoric of the present (Foucault 2008a, 22225). Otherwise, I can only

point out Foucaults flirtation with the Th eory of Systems, that is, with the

intervention of the government in the environment or scenario of the

economic system as a social system of freedom. Th e decisive aspect is that

the intervention in this environment should produce a continuous diff er-

entiation, a systematic modification (270), and a perpetual displacement of

equivalences, since the notion of competition between enterprises can only

find its place there. Foucault did not investigate what upholds this continu-

ous displacement of freedom, nor this productivity of diff erences that renders

the market more plural and incapable of establishing equivalences, more

uneven and therefore more competitive. Th us, inequality is the condition for

competition. Th e play resides in the necessity of providing heterogeneity that

can be continuously reduced to equivalencethe game of multiculturalism.

Foucault suggested that the crucial test for all of this is to be found in

economic growth, and that this is the only test that can deal with the rhetoric

that transforms the worker into a businessman who capitalizes himself.13 But


this final process has to do with the definition of a market completely mobi-

lized by competition, and this definition is related to the ability to regenerate

economic freedom continuously and to introduce new heterogeneities. Fou-

cault does not go beyond these questions. Adelino Zanini, who has studied

Th e Birth of Biopolitics in depth, said that with this problematic question we

meet with an abrupt end. Moreover, he said that this seminar sembra a tratti

sfuggire dalle mani del suo autore (seems to occasionally slip out from the

hands of his author) (2006, 147, 145).14 If the premise was that neoliberalism

was a naturalism, an assumption about human nature that knows its own

truth in the market via its conversion into enterprise, Foucault did not want

to develop this idea. As we know, he took refuge in the aesthetic elitism of

the artist in and of himself, so alien to democratic society.

I believe this is just one of two problems, and that both of them under-

score the extent of Foucaults voluntary disassociation from theory. At one

point in Th e Hermeneutics of the Subject, somebody in the audience raises a

hand and asks: Can we not see some genuinely Lacanian concepts coming

up, as operators [oprateurs] in what you are saying? (2005, 187). Foucault

demands some additional explanation, clearly puzzled by the question, to

affirm eventually that he is working out the relationships between the sub-

ject and truth. Th e questioner confirms that this is exactly what he is talking

about. Here we can see Foucault doubtful, on the defensive. He concludes by

maintaining that, on the topic of the subject and truth, I see only Heidegger

and Lacan. Personally, myself, you must have heard this, I have tried to reflect

all this from the side of Heidegger and starting from Heidegger. Th ere you

are. However, certainly you cannot avoid Lacan when you pose these kinds

of questions (189).

It was certainly a bad moment. Th e daring questioner had suggested the

possibility that Foucault employed theoretical concepts. Foucault, smirking,

confirmed that what he did was Heideggerian philology, and if he had some-

thing to say about the truth of the subject, it would have to be drawn from

a new beginning. As Heidegger went to the physis of the pre-Socratics, so

Foucault went to the Alcibiades, an apocryphal Platonic dialogue. Of course,

he recognized that the topic was linked to Lacan, but he did not take the next

step. In the end, he got rid of the situation with a pet phrase we all know: Any


other questions? (2005, 189). Actually, nobody got anything beyond what

he had said at the beginning of the seminar: Lacans analyses are powerful

insofar they renew the question of the relationships between the subject

and the truth (30). In that case, it would have been necessary to address the

question of what happened to the market as a place of verification. A similar

situation to that found in Th e Birth of Biopolitics reappeared now as a refusal

to confront Lacan.

3 . L a c l a u s M e l a n c h o l i c P o s i t i o n

I should recognize that the work of Laclau has not been discussed in Spain

as much as it deserves, even if it was translated some time ago. Nobody will

deny that his central work is Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, presented as

an introduction to radical democratic politics. In this book, the dominant

presence is not Lacan, nor Foucault, but rather Gramsci. Actually, Lacan ap-

pears in an endnotemuch more focused on Miller, by the wayin a passage

that stresses the importance of the nodal point (point de capiton),15 and in the

Spanish introduction of 1987, where he quotes Lacan, along with Heidegger

and Derrida, precisely to underscore the connection between language and

the social world (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 21). Th ere, Laclau employs terms

similar to those of Foucault at the moment of being questioned, and mani-

fests his interest about the problem of the subject. Assuming criticism on

every kind of essentialism about the subject, either Man or Class, Laclau

mediates in the crisis of Marxism, eff ecting a review inspired by Gramsci

that affirmed the importance of the concept of hegemony. Th is concept was

separated from every necessary law of history; it affirmed the contingency

and the autonomy of the political, was centered on a naked historicity, and

encouraged play in the field of concrete factuality. In short, hegemony could

be articulated in the historical present by means of an adequate administra-

tion of social antagonisms, of force fields. Th e political subject abandoned its

essentiality to the occupation of the space only by objects that can be con-

structed. In this seminal book, Laclau explains that this can only be carried

out via a radicalization of democracy, destined to articulate the struggles

against subordination, arbitrary domination, and illegitimate power (xv).


In 1985, Laclau and Mouff e found themselves continuing in two tradi-

tions: the Enlightenment and the modern democratic revolution. They

mainly spoke to the countries on the periphery of capitalism, where the

popular and collective identities can arise from the fringes of class. Neverthe-

less, this fight must recognize the end of the Jacobin and Leninist imaginary,

the political-conceptual world that arises from the Sattelzeit of Reinhart

Koselleck: the universal subjects, the history as singular, the civil society like

homogeneous structure (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 2), or the autonomous

logic of the productive forces. Th e concept of hegemony was not presented

as the political complement of a deep objective logicthe equivalent of

what ideology was to bourgeoisieor a political supplement derived from

the forms of concurrence through productive objectivity which is imposed

against all-too-human resistances.

On the contrary, hegemony implied the existence of a logic proper to

the social. For Laclau this logic harbored a center of contingency that must

be deciphered. Hegemony did not aim to produce the sense of truth in a

society, but rather to carry out or decide it. If this notion was labeled as

Marxist, it was simply because Marxism constitutes our own past (Laclau

and Mouff e 2001, 4). Th us, it was a post-Marxist confession. Actually, Gramsci

and Foucault were in agreement in their defense of contingency, reversibility,

the war of positions, and their interest in relations of power mediated only

by the logic of subjectivity.

But this was not merely a matter of post-Marxism. Laclaus analysis was

rooted in a certain melancholic confession that can be found in a central

chapter of Hegemony titled Beyond the Positivity of the Social: Antagonisms

and Hegemony. I will show that the paradoxes in this passage reveal Laclaus

avoidance of the ramifications of Foucaults eff orts to define neoliberalism. In

this sense, his analysis failed to disengage from a point of departure that is in-

ternal to the liberal regime model. I am talking about a liberal presupposition

in Laclau insofar as he does not support a theory of neoliberal government,

but shares assumptions with the situation that institutes liberal government.

Th us, Laclau talks about global capitalism as if it were still being governed in

the first steps of liberal government, without identifying neoliberalism as a

specific form of government. To consider neoliberalism seriously in 1987 was


impossible, mainly because Foucaults papers had not yet been published. As

we will see, this fact resulted in a limited use of Foucault and consequently a

still more limited use of Lacan. In any case, Laclau worked with the tools he

had prior to Th e Birth of Biopolitics, and this explains why his analysis gives

the impression of being old fashioned.

Th e decisive fact in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was that, in the ad-

vanced capitalist countries, there was an important scissors eff ect: the more

democracy they had, the less unity around a popular pole (2001, 133). Global

capitalism, Laclau asserted in the final comments to On Populist Reason, rep-

resents a qualitatively new moment in the history of capitalism, because it

becomes more difficult to determine the force against which we are fighting

(2005, 9899). Th e complex categorial displacement led by Laclau unveils its

final mechanism: in democratic society the friend/enemy distinction, the

dualism, the frontier eff ects, cease thus to be grounded upon an evident

and given separation, in a referential framework acquired once and for all

(Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 134). Th us the present comes to be characterized by

a democratic subject position, and Laclau was melancholiac about a popular

subject position. Th e latter is constituted from the division of the political

arena in a friend/enemy antagonism. Th e former does not divide society in

dualisms. In essence, both possibilities come from the social structure itself,

and both are based in the liberal diff erentiation between civil society and

political society. Perhaps the more important theoretical affirmation is the

following onean assertion, by the way, related to Foucault: if society is

never transparent to itself because it is unable to constitute itself as an objec-

tive field, neither is antagonism entirely transparent, as it does not manage

totally to dissolve the objectivity of the social (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 129).

In reality, Foucault knew that this was the case as he knew it was the key to

contemporary government: neoliberalism permits neither a sovereign nor a

dualistic antagonism, but rather circulations of competition that emanate

from the civil society and that demand plural arbitration. Laclau accepts the

liberal premise, and his aspiration is to transform competition, the antago-

nism dislocated and in continual proliferation, into a visible and dualistic

antagonism.

His theory is complex and, to my knowledge, it is constitutedin


Hegemony and Socialist Strategyby the following elements: Th e point of

departure in every kind of politics is to be found in civil society.16 Th is civil

society is unavoidably permeated by proliferating diff erences. Any of these

diff erences can create antagonisms if their rights are denied.17 Nevertheless,

the specificity of neoliberal government consists in the impossibility of le-

gitimately denying any free demand. Laclau asserts, as Foucault could have

asserted, that the outside of civil society and its diff erences consists in a

relation with political power as intelligible and instituted forms of a soci-

ety. Th ese forms rationalize their own power, as we have seen in Foucault,

inasmuch as they recognize that these diff erences are expressed as liberties

that must be guaranteed.

But Laclau has diff erent scenarios in mind. When he cites Disraeli and

his program to make one city from the two cities, he is expressing a regula-

tory idea from which the classical liberal government arises. Its logic con-

sists in avoiding diff erence as much as possible, in producing homogeneity

and equivalences, whose truth is expressed in the national market. Laclau

describes this far-reaching processa liberal government strengthener, in

Foucaultian termsas the disruption of the liberal pole and the absorp-

tion of particular free demands into positivities recognized as rational and

manageable.18 Th e melancholic moment consists in accepting as given both

that a popular pole exists and that civil society is the social origin. Th e ra-

tionalization of liberal government would imply identification and isolation

of demands, attending to them in their specificity, dismantling them from a

conception of the worldwhat Laclau calls a system of equivalencesand

a neutralizing of the possibility of the dualistic and native antagonism. Th is

use of civil society as origin and, at the same time, assertion of the mel-

ancholic position of people can only generate a singular movement: the

way for civil society to become people again is to see how the premise of

liberalism fails in its pretension of homogeneity and produces its opposite,

the people.

Actually, Laclau does not show a clear path for liberal civil society to

become people again. At least one thing is clear: this movement implies

considering the notion of civil society as ductile. Laclaus rejection of so-

ciology is, in this case, a good alibi. Perhaps this is the reason why he feels


comfortable talking about societies of limited modernitylike Hispanic

societieswhere the liberal form of civil society has not taken root. In any

case, the civil society that allows liberal government to exist is that which ar-

ticulates the clearly defined system of diff erences that Weber called spheres

of social action and Luhman social systems. Th e actions of freedom are not

free from the beginning, but ordered and diff erentiated at the core of those

systems. Th ey are scientific, economic, religious, erotic, ethical, aesthetic,

moral demands, among many others. Laclau admits, the more unstable the

social relations, the less successful will be any definite system of diff erences

and the more the points of antagonism will proliferate (Laclau and Mouff e

2001, 131). Th at is true. But perhaps Laclau does not measure the efficacy

that the diff erentiation between the spheres of social action produces for a

liberal government; this efficacy impedes exactly what he demands: a logic

of equivalences that allows a unification of all the demands in a common

denominator and, thus, founds a duality. Laclau also does not measure the

diff erences introduced by the neoliberal phase in the old liberal government,

and subsequently, we find a diff erent way to understand these spheres of

social actionnot as zones of demand, but as zones of enterprise.

At its core, Laclaus melancholy finds its origin in the works of Jacques

Rancire, emerging from his studies on nineteen-century France. Undoubt-

edly, it is in this period that Laclaus categories find their historical parallel.

If Laclau had used Foucault and his notion of liberal government, he would

perhaps have been freed of his tendency toward melancholy. If he had used

Foucaults ideas on neoliberalism, then he would have had to renounce this

facet of this work. In any case, his ideas concerning the reversibility of the his-

torical process are perhaps too sweeping. Laclaus perennial problem is how

a civil society can bring about a new people as a political subject capable of

making the friend/enemy distinction and put a new logic of hegemony into

circulation. Just like the nineteenth century, but in the twenty-first.

Here, the argument of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was rather rudi-

mentary and circular. What hindered the absorption of free demands was

their inclusion outside the systems of social diff erentiation. To achieve this,

and to avoid a diff erentiating political framework, demands had to be pre-

sented not alone, but rather as a part of a logic of equivalences where they


would be included and addressed. Th us the variety of demands that is,

positivity would not be presented as various and individual, but rather

as organically integrated, as a complete and alternative set that cannot be

analyzed or rationalized by the framework of power. In Hegemony and Social-

ist Strategy, Laclau states that this is the only way to create an antagonistic

situation, but at the same time, circularly, he defends the notion that only

negativity in the moment of addressing the demandto transform the

unaddressed demand from a partial entity to a symptom of a more radical

lackcan create that equivalence in the basis of antagonism and the friend/

enemy diff erence.19

Th e only way to break this circle would be to maintain that antagonism

can be already found in society. Th is was evident for Disraeli, and it is the

point of departure for liberal government as well. Laclau stated clearly in

2001 what he meant in 1987: we must suppose that antagonism is already

present in the society because oppressive forces have created it.20 Th at is

to say, current society functions like a threshold that opens to the age that

gives birth to liberal government. When we employ Foucaults analytical

materials, we cannot sustain this x-ray of the relation between the social

and the political. As Laclau states, that which constitutes the antagonism

is a set of negated diff erences considered as equivalents, not the diff erences

themselves. Th e oppressive forces that he presupposes are no longer the

forms adopted by the liberal technique of government, nor by the neoliberal

techniques. Lets accept that the liberal government strategy consists of at-

tending to the demand in a state of diff erence; that is to say, as a secondary

struggle. If we are right, by no means is it possible to discern the oppressive

forces. Affirming them constitutes a circle in Laclau: there exists a certain

required delimited interiority.21 If this is the case, then the diff erences be-

tween the unaddressed demands will be negated, a symptomatic equivalence

between those negations will arise, along with a concentrated antagonism

and the friend/enemy distinction. Th e fractured social space will produce a

coincidence with the political space, a hegemony will arise, and with it the

new political subject, a people.

This is just what liberal government avoids by mediating demands

through the institution of diff erent spheres of actionwhich concretizes the


nature of things and human social actionand thus off ers them, analyzed,

to a rational government. In contrast to this, if we suppose the existence of

a delimited interiority, we already assume that there exists a broken civil

society, inefficient systems of diff erentiation, and a possible friend/enemy

diff erentiation.22 If this diff erence arises, it is because it is placed in the base.

It is a circle. If our point of departure is an ontology of the social that encloses

reppresive forces, or an excluding interiority, then antagonism is served,

and politics, considered as an hegemony that works to achieve its position

by destroying the enemy, is always possible. But this social ontology is not

accredited in a proper analysis of liberal or neoliberal societies. Th e obstacles

to freedom are connatural with civil society, and they make the conflict

unavoidable. But this is neither an antagonism nor a friend/enemy distinc-

tion (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 181). On the contrary, neoliberalism centers

on juridical regulation according to a market based on the enterpreneurial

production of equivalences that necessarily integrate demandsbecause

they are anticipatedand thus the negative equivalence of their refusal

is diluted. Neoliberalism, as we have seen, is devoted to the regulation of

the market, understood as free competition of enterprises and diff erences,

of heterogeneities supported by the proliferation of the sense of freedom,

which produces as supply and yet is received as demand. Laclaus prevision,

a concentration of the conflict in the antagonism, does not seem to happen.

Following Laclaus presuppositions, his trajectory toward a populist logic

can be easily understood. His argument fundamentally consists in affirming

that the more global capitalism resists the presence of that concentrated

antagonism, the more functional populist reason becomes (2005, 231), be-

cause it takes the nature of things, human nature, and the true structure

of liberty into account. In advanced capitalism, the production of dualistic

eff ects, border eff ects, and the friend/enemy distinction constitutes the main

political problem. It was thus in Hegemony and Social Strategy. What in the

past seemed to be a natural processpolitical dualizationnow must be

governed and produced in the face of neoliberal regulation. Populist reason,

in opposition to Foucault, would be the form of government that would

regulate the intended nature of the res politica, the production of the friend/

enemy dichotomy. Th is implies that the very identities which will have to


confront one another antagonistically (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 134) must

be constituted.

Undoubtedly, this suggests the true problem, which Foucault did not

wish to undertake: the hegemonic link transforms the identity of hegemonic

subjects (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, xii) by its influence on the psyches of the

political agents. Th e hegemonic link implies a transformation of the notion of

liberty, a hermeneutic of the subject that abandons that other hermeneutic

that off ers its evidence to neoliberal government, that demands a new truth.

However, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy these constitutive processesof

both the collective and individual subjectsdid not become visible. Perhaps

this explains why in the prologue of the 2001 edition, Laclau reminds us that

the visibility of the acts of originary institutionin their specific contin-

gencyis, in this respect, the requirement of any hegemonic formation (xii).

To make visible the originary institution of the subjectivity of the historical

actors was the political agenda. In Hegemony everything was subordinated

to the identification of the enemy, who operated as an excluding represen-

tative that rejected demands and established equivalences among them.

Th e enemy negatively propelled the formation of the people. Th e priority

of negativity was the premise in his analysis. But if global capitalism and

neoliberal government had to be taken seriously, then such a thing could not

be assumed. Populist reason would have to tackle things ab integro.

4 . A L i b e r a l P r e m i s e f o r P o p u l i s t R e a s o n

In Hegemony and Social Strategy, Laclau and Mouff e appealed to Foucault

and Lacan, but in a faulty way. Nevertheless, Lacans contribution as re-

viewed by iek was decisive for On Populist Reason. In spite of this, in this

book, Laclau could still not avoid the logic of equivalence of demands, a sort

of market of unaddressed demands, a political countermarket that could

call into question the market of liberal government. In principle, the argu-

ment was similar. As Laclau himself recognized in his polemic with iek, his

entire analysis started from the concept of demand.23 In Laclaus words: Th e

smallest unit from which we will start corresponds to the category of social

demand (2005, 73). Th e liberal basis of his approach is obvious. For Laclau


the political subject is above all a liberal subject and, to a certain extent, is

seen as a consumer of certain goods. When Laclau has to justify why social

actions are demands, he withdraws into liberalist certainties about human

nature: the subject is always the subject of lack (2006, 655). Similarly to

Lacan, this lack always encourages the need for a new desire, because it is

based on the disproportion between the fullness of the community and the

particularism of a place of enunciation: in Lacans words, on the dispropor-

tion between the enunciated desire and the unconscious as social language

and as the desire of the other.

Th us, Laclau, in what I consider an intelligent gesture, shows the an-

thropological base of the liberal regime through Lacan, and explains why

demands are continuously renewed, why they never end, why the human

being is permeated by a political economy of desire that cannot be closed. In

eff ect, as with the modern Hobbesian subject, that which provides meaning

to desire is its infinite dimension, tending toward a totality that can never

be reached. Th is infinite desire unveils something impossible to obtain, an

irreparable loss, an emptiness that cannot be filled by any desire. In this way,

the libido appears as the key category explaining the nature of the social

bond (Laclau 2005, 53). Demand, destined only partially to fill the gap be-

tween lack and desire, receives its meaning from the whole society, from the

unconscious, from the language, and naturally, from the others, and here

finds its link with human beings. What we have here is a version of the nature

of things that is the point of departure for liberalism, now illuminated by

the Freudian and Lacanian analysis. Th e thesis is that individual psychol-

ogy is simultaneously social psychology,24 something that Weber already

understood to be the key to liberalismmarginal utility as key to the market.

Demands proceed from identifications as ways of expressing aff ective bonds

to others, whose desire is now our desire. Th ey configure spaces of emotional

mimesis that we use to fill the distances between the unconscious and soci-

ety as a whole. Th erefore, demands cannot be either completely addressed or

completely filled. Laclau was not blocked where Foucault was.

But Laclau does not seem to assume the approach of Lacanwho shows

the anthropological roots of capitalismin an adequate form. From my

point of view, this is the situation: Demand has as its premise the linguistic


activation of desire from the unconscious, the identification of a desire

through the desire of others (supply). Given its finite character, it presents

the impossibility of exhausting the unconscious or the whole social, a con-

quest of the infinite object that would be able to fill the constitutive lack.

Demand cannot build a stable psychical order; only repetition, variation,

and discursiveness can achieve this. Libertys claim pertains to this. Every-

thing comes from the interpretation of the desire of others and from the

linguistic strategies to express it. All that has been said about the market and

business has to do with the interpretation of the desire of others. When we

interpret the desire of otherswhen we activate our aff ectionwe present

products that fill the demands of others, that are at the same time founded

in their interpretation of the desire of others. Th e interpretation of the de-

sire from within the social core is the originary. Th e aff ective supply proper

to entrepreneurial labor precedes the demand. Here would be the point of

departure for understanding the game of neoliberalism: implying a trans-

formation of labor at the moment it discovers its own aff ective character

and understanding economic success as an enterprise that produces objects

capable of fulfilling drives. Th at is the reason why work has transformed the

notion of merchandise: it has passed from being the inert object conceived

by Marx to being the material support of supply that addresses drives. Here,

power merely regulates the environment to make heterogeneities appear,

besides all the hermeneutical statements of the subject, and maintains the

dynamism of the symbolic loaded with aff ective elements acting as new

supply to satisfy drives capable of generating demand, which expands by

way of the market.

Liberalism serves as Laclaus point of departure because it allows him to

speak in terms of demand, the nature of things, and emotional-social bonds,

but he does not want to accept the existing play between civil society and

neoliberal power. He does not want to assume neoliberalism just to ignore

what he is confronting. He accepts liberalism because otherwise his analysis

would not find its ground, but he does not think the specificity and novelty

of neoliberalism because it is easier to construct a populist logic upon the

old liberal government at its first stages, with its logic of demands, than upon

neoliberalism and its logic of supply. For him, demand does not respond to


the market-business supply, but rather it responds to power. In reality, the

beginning of demand is a request. Power, understood as liberal government,

could articulate, identify, and distribute this request. Neoliberal government

would claim that it does not receive demands, but instead that it is regulat-

ing competition to maintain social dynamism, enterprise, the capitalization

of society, and market supply. Laclau must assume this is not the case. Order,

he says, cannot fully absorb the demand, it cannot constitute itself as a co-

herent totality (2005, ix).

But we already know all too well that there is no demand for what does

not previously appear as supply. Our desire is the desire of the other. Naturally,

we do not tackle a problem on the order of power, but rather on all order, on

all subjectivity. Neoliberal power knows this and refers to productivity as a

totality in fieri, where demand unfolds following supply. Th is fact guarantees

the continuity of liberty, the repetition and feeding of the homo oeconomicus

as a premise of neoliberal government. For Laclau, the constitutive unad-

dressed demands of the liberal power produce something diff erent. Requests

become claims. For this to happen, the instance to what exigences are ad-

dressed must be identified. One has to discursively construct the enemy.

Our doubts about the circular reasoning of Hegemony and Social Strategy

reappear again. Knowing the enemy would be the same as identifying the

space of the people, the space of the friend. Th ey are equivalent.

If there is some relation between On Populist Reason and Hegemony

and Socialist Strategy, this would be the will to show the process by which

people emerges without the necessity of a given enemy. Laclau is not as-

suming that it is constituted by repressive forces. He is focused on its con-

struction from the popular friends perspective. Th is step is decisive, since

it would allow an explanation of the emergence of antagonism, even when

power wants to be liberal. In reality, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy already

allowed the ordering of the existing diff erences in the demands in a logic

of equivalences by means of certain discursive forms (Laclau and Mouff e

2001, 122). Upon assuming the social and linguistic dimension of the subject,

Laclau did not see any possibility besides that of constructing a hegemony

with the construction of a discursive space. In Hegemony and Socialist Strat-

egy, Foucaults Archeology of Knowledge (1982) was useful in supporting this


argument. If discourse is regular in the dissemination of enunciations, such

regularity comes neither from a conceptual constancy nor from an identity

in the object, but rather from configurative rules that supply that dissemina-

tion with its unifying principle. Th ese rules were not defined. For Foucault

these were practical, but for Laclau these implied a discursive dissemina-

tion that embodied a configuration of equivalence among the diff erential

discursive positions understood as demands (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 106).

Certainly, the process of discursive dissemination that implied something

similar to the Deleuzian logic of diff erence and repetition, a typical causa

sui logic that would not allow the emergence of a totality as equivalence.

Th is logicas that of neoliberal capitalismis interested in productivity, not

in equivalence. Laclaus concern, on the contrary, is to understand how an

exteriority to dissemination can be established to calculate the equivalence

between various enunciations and demands. His problem is classic: how can

a form be produced through dissemination? Th e question is unavoidable;

Carl Schmitt understood this when he established that the friend/enemy

distinction resides in the production of gestalt. Actually, Laclaus argument

is only a review of the technical facet of the construction of the enemy un-

dertaken by Schmitt.

Laclau spoke of certain logics interested not in dissemination, but rather

in equality, form, the eff ect of totality, limits, and identity (Laclau and Mouff e

2001, 131). In fact, his most interesting approach to this can be found in the

fourth chapter of Populist Reason, titled Th e People and the Discursive

Production of Emptiness. Th ere he identified these logics, interested in the

production of equivalences, as rhetorical devices (2005, 12). He positioned

an ontological constitution of the social that permits understanding the

place of the political in the rhetorical play that creates demands. Th ere he

began with a structuralist thesistotality is the condition of signification

as such (69)which is as powerful his next thesistotality is an object

which is both impossible and necessary (70). It is like the constitutive lack:

the concept, the desire, the demand, cannot cross the abyss that separates

it from the unconscious as such, even though it can only be desire insofar

it is connected with the subconscious. As we have seen, liberty funds the

human constitution as long as it lives on the negativeness produced in that


relation. Liberty implies, therefore, a perseverance within desire, because

only there does the possibility remain of connecting with the totality of the

unconscious, even if it is a continuous lack. Th e logic of freedom remains in

this disequilibrium. Nevertheless, Laclau has a diff erent point of view, which

he embraces without considering to what extent neoliberalism responds bet-

ter to the necessities of his own Lacanian premises.

Laclaus procedure can be summarized as follows: In considering the lack

that is constitutive of human naturea constitutive emptinessit becomes

necessary to explore the possibilities this lack off ers politics. Undoubtedly,

liberalism and neoliberalism are anchored to this breach, working to keep

discursive equivalence fluid by means of a continuous production of supply

that punctually interprets desire, although consciously renouncing totality.

Against this circulation of significations dedicated to feeding the consumer-

subject imaginary, Laclau asks himself what would happen if the same con-

stitutive lack that created the emptiness would become an object of desire itself.

Th is is what he means when he asserts that the category of totality cannot

be eradicated (2005, 71). It is, of course, understood in this way by the neolib-

eral regime, which as a substitute of totality invigorates the interpretations

of desire in the truth of the market; but Laclau demands the transformation

of the lost totality into an object of desire in and of itself. If we introduce

this category, the demands addressed would become worthless. In light of

the recovery of the constitutive lack, all demand would become equivalent,

but with a value approximating nothing. In turn, every unaddressed demand

would become a scheme, a verification of what we truly desire, the one thing,

the Real. Th e regime of the truth of the subject would not change. Laclau

could therefore say, what we have, ultimately, is a failed totality, the place

of an irretrievable fullness (70).

Now, when this failed totality becomes a foreground of desire, an alterna-

tive possibility opens up for Laclau. He asserts that it is possible that a partic-

ular realitya demandassumes the representation of that incommensurable

totality (2005, 70). We are now faced with the Hobbesian problem of how an

invisible reality can render itself visible.25 For Hobbes, this happens by assign-

ing sovereignty, will, and the action of totality to a visible reality. Actually, this

is related to the way in whichthinking at the level of individualsthe unity


of the people becomes visible. It can be achieved through the investiture

of a monarch. Th e procedure transforms one partial being into a sovereign,

and she is converted in turn into a unity that makes visible what would

otherwise be invisible: the people. For Laclau, this investiture is similar in

its structure to the hegemonic formation: something particular represents

totality, something visible makes present the invisible, and something par-

tial signifies the universal. Th e emptiness behind many particular desires

is fulfilled in one. Laclau has affirmed the necessity of a radical investiture

of the significant in order for this to occur (71). Undoubtedly, it is an action

analogous to a contract, a decision, an extreme nominalist action, and its

only truth is constitutive lack. Because the constitutive lack does not have a

proper name, it can only achieve this by investiture, by that figurative name.

Th is rhetorical operation is a catachresis: there is no proper name, it is but

feigned to serve the totality. Hobbes would say that the sovereign is a Per-

sona, an agent. But it cannot be otherwise. Th e Leviathan is a catachresis. It

is the same in Laclau: the political construction of the people is, for that

reason, essentially catachrestical (72).

We have here evidently reintroduced the link between totality, plenitude,

the sovereign representative, and the promise of total aff ectivityeverything

that was represented by the Weberian notion of charisma, except that now

it is illuminated in its formative mechanism, as a radical investiture in the

Freudian sense. If this instance becomes operative, then it is always possible

to reject addressable demands and to establish an equivalent among the

unaddressedall on condition that the constitutive lack (compared to which

the rest is insignificant) becomes present by way of a symbolic representa-

tive (Laclau 2005, 100). It contains the impossible totality that negatively

unifies all the unaddressed demands and rejects all those that are addressed,

because they impede adherence to the totality anticipated by the symbol

and promised in it. He who does not join this symbolic totality is excluded

within the common space it creates (106). He who has configured a subli-

mated value refuses the equivalent values in the market, finds any attention

to demands to be insignificant, and wishes only to possess the visible reality

that has been invested with the capacity for representing the only real thing:

totality. Th is would be the name of the people.


Th is radical investiture cannot be conceptually represented. It escapes

every concept and takes us back to mystical belonging, examined by Laclau

in another book.26 Th erein, aff ection, disillusioned by market equivalences

supplies and demandsis now satisfied. He who supplies simple objects and

desires, when what is desired is the Real and the Total thing, is an enemy.

Th ose who are responsible for this cannot be a legitimate part of the com-

munity; the chasm between them is irretrievable (Laclau 2005, 86). Th us

we have the Schmitt eff ect: one isolated from every truth, from every

notion of endangered life-form, from every existential dimension, created

only from the rhetorical construction that foments sublimation. It has been

possible thus for rhetoric to build a social division (87). Schmitt was never a

nominalist: the enemy is an other with real existence. Th e very most rhetoric

can do is intensify strangeness, but it never creates it. Laclau seems to say

that, in the age of neoliberalism, rhetoric creates ex nihilo. In the meantime,

neoliberalism continues to operate because its eccentric, heterogeneous,

supply-producing rhetoric involved in the work of the culture industry is

more accurate than the technified rhetoric that aspires to produce the crys-

tallization of hegemony.

What has been forged here is explicitly related to the process of conden-

sation in dreams (Laclau 2005, 97). Of course, the same dreamed character

can maintain an aff ective link with the function of leadership (97). Th is is

coherent since, in Kantian terms, if the thing in itself has no concept, then it

can have any name. Laclaus extreme nominalism, sustained both in Kripke

and in ieks Th e Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), eliminates any question

about the truth of the radical investiture. Th e originary baptism imposes

a name, defines an identity supported only by the signifier.27 It makes no

diff erence whether there are rejected demands elevated to equivalent conse-

quences of a constitutive lack, or the imposition of the sense of a constitutive

lack that rejects any of the demands addressed by the system as equivalents.

We obtain the same from a melancholic fundamentalism as we do from an

articulated system of demands. Th e radical investiture is nominalist, and it

can be called Allah, Yahweh, originary ethnicity, or people. Th e central issue

does not reside in demands that may be resolved, but rather in those who

resolve them.


5 . T h e F a i t h i n R h e t o r i c

Laclau deals with the theoretical verisimilitude of the investiture by which

a signifier identifies constitutive lackthe radical lossby employing a

Lacanian argument, the object a theory proposed by Joan Copjec. As we

know, Lacan understands the Real as something that cannot be symbolized.

It thus constitutes a dimension heterogenous to the order of the symbolic.

Th is order is that which can circulate by means of metaphors, identities, and

displacements. Th e subject that embarks on these symbolical displacements

is like the shipwrecked mariner on a raft who hopes to make it, mysteri-

ously, to the coast of the Real, but who knows that the Real resides in neither

a coast nor the sea, but rather in a star. Th is relation with the absence of

the Real is the permanent Gnostic trace in Western culture. Contemporary

political scienceas wrote Eric Vgelinappeals to this absence. As such,

the anxiety of the Real continues to encourage displacement, metonymies,

analogies, metaphors. Th e subject, so as not to completely withdraw aff ec-

tion for that activity, but to maintain and to repeat it, has to connect indi-

rectly the symbolic to the Real. With these connectionsdisplacements and

symbolical operationsthe shipwrecked mariner has to construct the raft

as she goesquoting Blumenbergs metaphornot with logs, but with the

foam of the sea, so it will sink when accelerating toward the fulfillment of

the death drive. Th ose elements in the discursive work of the symbolwhich,

for a moment, produce juissance and permit connection with the realare

called object a by Lacan. Blumenberg could call them the work on the

myth. Laclau reproduces this theory and identifies object a with the radical

investiture of the hegemonic agenda.28 Th e partial objects transforms itself

into a totality (Laclau 2005). Th us we can quote the fundamental text of his

theoretical approach:

Th e aspiration to that fullness or wholeness . . . is transferred to partial ob-

jects which are the objects of the drives. In political terms, that is exactly

what I have called a hegemonic relation: a certain particularity which as-

sumes the role of an impossible universality. Because the partial character

of these objects does not result from a particular story but is inherent in the


very structure of signification, Lacans objet petit a is the key element in a

social ontology. (115)

We hold then that populist politics are based on the nature of things in

the deep anthropology and in the social ontology. Th e consequence can be

easily observed: by radical investiture both an individual and collective

omnes et singulatimjouissance will be achieved, a symbolical rhetoric will

be provided, inside of which would be an object a that could establish the

aff ect of a community and maintain the appearance of an enjoyment of the

originary possession. In this case, the rhetorically elaborated symbol would

be the embodiment of a mythical fullness (Laclau 2005, 115), and its eff ect

would be collective enjoyment. If we remember the name that Lacan uses for

that constitutive lack, the primordial mother, mythical plenitude would be

the socially joyful equivalence of the primordial mother. Here we could recall

Carlo Ginzburgs reflections on Dumezil (1994) and the myth of matriarchate

during Nazism, and Furio Jesis (1979) parallel reflections on the work of the

Nazi-technified myth to confirm the structural similitudes of the rhetorical

construction of the collective identity.

Th e strangest aspect in Laclaus statement can be found in the fact that

a category explicitly characterized for the explanation of the untransferable

enjoyment that permits us to livethe object a, Blumenbergs personal work

on the myth, Warburgs Pathosformelnwhich maintains us as subjects, in-

dividualizes us in our shared and transmitted cultural horizon, and that we

will never be able to produce ex nihilo (a category as such, I repeat), can

be built and fixed by means of a rhetorical structure, to the extent of being

capable of constituting a collective identity. Th e object a is what suddenly,

indomitably, unexpectedly, emerges beyond its particularity, the concrete

trace that, for an instant, allows us to escape from the shipwreck of the sym-

bol and anchor ourselves in the enjoyment of the real. Th e fact that symbols

maintain, produce, and reproduce performances of object a is something

that is not within the power of human beings; its emergence does not depend

on any kind of rhetorical procedure; it cant be produced or created. Laclau,

whose anthropology is very limited, believes on the contrary that building a

radical investiture can off er a symbol that works obediently as object a for


a collective, a symbol that produces an aff ection and enjoyment as though

the Real were submitted to that community that he calls people. At one

point he assures us that the Freudian concept of overdetermination points

in the same direction. Other times he calls it sublimation. All this suggests

that Laclau, even more than Foucault, pictures a governmental technique

that shares its premises with liberalism, as long as it starts from a loss, from

a lack, from aff ection, from the unsustainable solitude of human beings,

from demands. Th is technique can explain the basic problem of classical

liberalism, how the individuals form a people. To be constituted by rhetori-

cal procedures, to produce controlled eff ects, suggests a technification in

the production of the people. In conclusion, it is necessary to maintain

blind faith in technified rhetoric, which as Carlo Michelstaedter (1995) has

explained, nobody can sustain without sharing in the nihilistic premise that

makes it possible.

Laclau has identified this radical investiture, this productivity of the

symbol that satisfies drives, this capacity to represent an empty universal

in a particular, with a passage lact, and for this reason has located in its

origin the Aktus der Freiheit (2005, 228). He has forgotten that in Lacan this

is a genuine act, prepared as the basis for the relation between the human

being and the Real, and the key for the ordering of its death drive. When

these kinds of actsoriginally planned to constitute a space for individual

identityare projected toward a sociology of the masses and introduced

rhetorically, they produce, for Laclau, a political use and configure a collec-

tive identity. Undoubtedly, this is possible and cannot be denied. Propaganda

and coercion can achieve it in a nihilistic universe. But with this, unavoidably

hallucinatory elements are introduced into political life, and consequently,

it specializes in the ordering of the death drive as well. Laclau cannot evade

these consequences. Th e entire arsenal of the sacrificial logic is implemented

through it. When in the last pages of his book, Laclau talks about the rela-

tion with contemporary political thinking, he recognizesafter nodding

to Rancires influencethat in the face of Negri and Hardt the moment of

articulation should not be forgotten. Laclau has spoken of the relevance and

centrality of this moment (2005, 249). In it Laclau identifies a partisan me-

diation. Explicitly, he talks about the people, but he conceals the political


party or the future avant garde by which it is supposed to be surpassed.

Th en, distinctly, what Foucault already understood arises: the specific form

of aff ective, totalitarian, sublime, sacrificial governability was the partisan

government. Th is, with its rhetorical powerits power for investiture, its

power of over-determination, its power to articulate demandsis what is

revealed at the end of Laclaus book.

But Laclau, in his analysis, fails to recognize the verisimilitude of neo-

liberalism as a more coherent direction for his own Lacanian premises, as a

social organization that is governed by an anthropological base quite similar

to the one he wants to provide for the political construction of the people.

Th erefore, if we concede that the present work arises from a discursive and

symbolic elaboration where we place affections, desires, processes, and

images that can increase the probability of a circulation of objects aem-

ployedin conjunction with them for the resolution of drives; if we accept

this indissoluble synthesis of work and cultural industry, in which elements of

the work of the myth are embedded, proposing supplies increasingly diverse

and useful for the prediction of demands; then we must admit that there is a

closer institution of the truth of the subject in market-enterprise than in the

technification of a rhetoric directed to off er a disciplined and sublimated

object a, governable in its social performance. Th e psychic demands of plea-

sure can be more easily found at the core of the work and self-capitalitization

than in the formation of a hegemonic rhetoric. Th ere is already a market to

articulate these demands, one that relies on the supposition of liberty as the

only means for the provision of a suitable meaning to libidinal work.

By limiting liberalism to facilitate authenticication of his populist rea-

son, Laclau cannot see that neoliberalism is thereby made more coherent.

And that is why subscription to a market-enterprise system where symbols

circulate appears more credible than the subscription to a friend/enemy

dynamic, where but one symbol concentrates all libidinal elements. In a

way, the contradiction can only be resolved by way of something that Laclau

understands: he speaking to nonliberal societies, closer to the nineteenth-

century oligarchical constructs. In these, Leftist and Rightist populist

rhetoric can even constitute a regime of drives, of aff ections, of dualist

identifications. Th is technology of populist government should not be an


object of hopesomething that could provide a solution to oligarchical soci-

etiesin the face of a true alternative to the neoliberal forms of government.

[

n o t e s

translators note: Th is lecture was originally written in Spanish under the title La raz

liberal del populismo: Crtica a Laclau, and delivered in New Paths in Political Philosophy,

an International Conference celebrated in March 2008 at the University of Buff alo (NY). I have

tried to remain loyal to the text when possible, only adapting expressions and concepts widely

known to the informed reader. Since Professor Villacaas employed mainly Spanish and Italian

translations of primary sources, I have used their equivalent English, with the aim of providing

the non-Spanish reader the access to the original texts discussed in it. I want to thank Gabriel

Horowitz for his help with the final draft of this translation.

1. It constitutes . . . a tool for the criticism of reality: criticism of a previous governmental-

ity from which one is trying to get free; of a present governmentality that one is trying

to reform and rationalize by scaling it down; or of a governmentality to which one is

opposed and whose abuses one wants to limit (Foucault 2008a, 320).

2. Quoting Foucault: Whereas economic regulation takes place spontaneously, through

the formal properties of competition, the social regulation of conflicts, irregularities of

behavior, nuissance caused by some to others, and so forth, calls for a judicial inter-

ventionism which has to operate as arbitration within the framework of the rules of the

game (2008a, 175). On the concept of regulation and its relation to Kantian thought,

see Gangemi (2006, 36 et seq.). Regulation tries to limit governmental excesses. It must

intervene only when the situation is not calmed in the market, as well as in the right

or in the administration.

3. Th e markets role in the liberal critique has been that of a test, of a privileged site of

experiment in which one can pinpoint the eff ects of excessive governmentality and take

their measure (Foucault 2008a, 320).

4. Liberal thought does not start from the existence of the state, finding in government

the means for achieving that end that the state would be of itself; it starts instead from

society, which exists in a complex relation of exteriority and interiority vis--vis the

state (Foucault 2008a, 319).

5. Working on the fundamental themes of the liberal technology of government, ordolib-

eralism tried to define what a market economy could be, organized (but not planned or

directed) within an institutional and legal framework, which, on the one hand, would

off er the guarantees and limitations of the law, and, on the other, would ensure that the

freedom of economic processes did not produce any social distortion (Foucault 2008a,

32223).


6. Indeed, in Security, Territoty, Population, the security apparatus seems to be much more

connected to the problem of sovereignity, discipline, and biopolitics: sovereignty, dis-

cipline, and governmental management, which has population as its main target and

apparatuses of security as its essential mechanism (2008b, 107). Th is was undoubtedly

not yet the moment for the liberal governmental technique, but rather it was much

more grounded in the general conception of governmentality as the ensemble of

institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow

the exercise of . . . power that has the population as its target, political economy as its

major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instru-

ment (108). As it can be seen, here the apparatuses of security are the heirs of police,

not the ancestors of liberal government. Governmentality is not merely raison dtat,

but rather the means that has allowed the state to survive (116). Here, the notion of

freedom does not arise, since society is controlled by apparatuses of security. It cannot

be denied that in Security, Territory, Population, it was impossible to identify liberal

government, because there was nothing outside of the state, which is considered as a

totalizing institution (11819). For sure, the notion of civil society only appears at the

end of the seminar (350), a weak presence when compared to that of the society of

security (11, 378). In this seminar, biopolitics is merely the external technique to medi-

cal institutions, and it is of little interest because of the in fieri statute that characterizes

Foucaults works. But it seems evident that his security apparatus and his definition of

police are the necessary conditions for the natural freedom of economy as spontane-

ous regulation of the course of things (344), which makes police regulations useless

and even harmful. Th e economy and the market will be the first major breach in the

system of police (343), the second being the relative value of population (345), no more

an absolute value as in Botero and the raison dtat. In Security, Territory, Population,

economists will be first in questioning police, first in raising their critique to the State,

and first in reflecting upon their role. Th is will be the new sect to question the power of

jurists or politiques (348).

7. More precisely and particularly, freedom is nothing else but the correlative of the de-

ployment of apparatuses of security. An apparatus of security . . . cannot operate well

except on condition that it is given freedom (Foucault 2008b, 48).

8. What are we actually dealing with in these natural phenomena the conomistes were

talking about? We are dealing with processes that can be known by methods of the

same type as any scientific knowledge. Th e claim to scientific rationality . . . is assumed

however by the eighteenth century conomistes (Foucault 2008b, 350).

9. Th e topic has been studied by A. Zanini (2006). Th e bibliography in English is already

important; see G. Burchell (1991, 1996), in French see M. Bonnafous-Boucher (2004).

10. In this sense, inasmuch as it [the market] enables production, need, supply, demand,

value, and price, et cetera, to be together through exchange, the market constitutes a

site of veridiction. I mean a site of verification-falsification for governmental practice.

Consequently, the market determines that good government is no longer quite simply

one that is just. Th e market now means that to be good government, government has to

function according to truth. In this history and formation of a new art of government,


political economy does not therefore owe its privileged role to the fact that it will dictate

a good type of conduct to government. Political economy was important, even in its

theoretical formulation inasmuch as (and only inasmuch as, but this is clearly a big

deal) it pointed out to government where it had to go to find the principle of truth of

its own governmental practice (Foucault 2008a, 32).

11. Foucault defended the idea that the Nazi state was not a result of the bureaucratization

of the state, but the development of a form of governmentality without a state. Undoubt-

edly, it was for him the governmentality of a political party (2008a, 191), a governmental-

ity alien to any inner political regulation.

12. In a way, this was predicted by liberalism with Adam Smiths idea of the invisible hand.

Th e whole process remains completely unknown because of its opacity (Foucault 2008a,

281).

13. Economic growth and only economic growth should enable all individuals to achieve a

level of income that will allow them the individual insurance, access to private property,

and individual or familial capitalization with which to absorb risks (Foucault 2008a,

144).

14. Zanini adds that Foucault falls into mille semplificazioni dottrinali e molte omissioni

(a thousand doctrinal simplifications and a big number of omissions) (2006, 148).

15. Th e problems in constructing a hegemonic language are already connected in this book

to the dominion of discursiveness, to the cessation of the flow of diff erences, to the

constitution of a center: We will call the privileged discursive points of this partial

fixation, nodal points. Lacan has insisted on these partial fixations through his concept

of points de capiton, that is, of privileged signifiers that fix the meaning of a signifying

chain (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 112). With respect to the note on Jacques-Alain Miller,

see 88 n.1, where Laclau notes that hegemonic practices are suturing because they try

to fill in that original lack. We will see that this happens through object a in section 5,

below.

16. He clearly states it in the preface, hegemonic rearticulations start at the level of civic

society (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, xii).

17. Any position in a system of diff erences, insofar as it is negated, can become the locus

of an antagonism (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 131).

18. Th e method of this rupture: the diff erential absorption of demands, which segregated

them from their chains of equivalence in the popular chain and transformed them into

objective diff erences within the systemthat is, transformed them into positivities and

thus displaced the frontier of antagonism to the periphery of the social. Th is constitu-

tion of a pure space of diff erences would be a tendential line, which was later expanded

and affirmed with the development of the Welfare State. Th is is the moment of the

positivist illusion that the ensemble of the social can be absorbed in the intelligible and

ordered framework of a society (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 130).

19. As the social is penetrated by negativitythat is, by antagonismit does not attain

the status of transparency, of full presence, and the objectivity of its identities is perma-

nently subverted. From here onward, the impossible relation between objectivity and

negativity has become constitutive of the social (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 129).


20. On the other hand, there are social antagonisms creating internal frontiers within

society. Vis--vis oppressive forces, for instance, a set of particularities establish rela-

tions of equivalence between themselves (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, xiii).

21. Th e delimitation of a certain interiority is required to construct a totality permitting

the division of this space into two camps (Laclau and Mouff e 2001, 132).

22. Laclau discards too easily Lyotards position, who postulates the inevitability of dam-

agestortbetween social agents. First, Laclau does not consider it as strong, and

second, he assumes that it makes any political rearticulation impossible (Laclau and

Mouff e 2001, xiii). Th ere is no doubt of the fact that it complicates the emergence of the

friend/enemy diff erence. Ultimately, it allows a policy of dissent, as it is understood by

Jacques Rancire.

23. Th e first path is to split the unity of the group into smaller unities that we have called

demands (Laclau 2005, ix).

24. Compare Freud (1997).

25. For the explicit relation with Leviathan, see Laclau (2005, 88).

26. I am referring to Misticismo, retrica y politica (2002). Th is book is the intermediate step

between Hegemony and Populist Reason. Unfortunately we cannot deal with it now.

27. Kripke (1980) partially supported Kantian analytic judgements and responded to

Quines works. His book supposed the foundation of a Leibnitzianism that understood

identity as naming. Laclau affirms that the identity and the unity of the object are a

result of the proper process of naming. Th is theory, however, works only in relation to

the objects that can be presented to intuition, to which the nameon the outside

of every possible descriptionwill impose on them a rigid designator. On the con-

trary, naming something that cannot be presented to intuition cannot impose a rigid

designator. Th e key aspect of this rigid designator is that it is the same for all the

possible worlds. Th at is the reason why it establishes an identity. And this is precisely

the the decisive point: that which Laclau wants to name is an emptiness or a chasm, the

thing-in-itself or the Real, and for that same reason it cannot have the same designation

in all the possible worlds. In reality, that which designates the unity of the community

as something complete and perfect can have, and has, many names: Church, Umma,

nation, class, race, people, among them. Th at is precisely why these designations do not

establish an identity as Kripke understands it. Kripkes nominalism is absolute because

it does not recognize anything alien in the act of investing for the emergence of the

object. Laclaus nominalism, on the other hand, cannot be absolute, since its point of

departure is an ontological affirmation of the primacy of the absence.

28. Th e logic of the object petit a and the hegemonic logic are not just similar: they are

simply identical (Laclau 2005, 116).

r e f e r e n c e s

Bonnafous-Boucher, M. 2004. Un libralisme sans libert. Du terme liberalisme dans la pense

de Michel Foucault. Paris: LHartmattan.

Burchell, G. 1991. Peculiar Interest: Civil Society and Governing Th e System of Natural Liberty.


In Th e Foucault Eff ect: Studies

villacañas - the liberal roots of populism, a critique of laclau

Documents

i b e r

s b e r

u i s v i

r o o t s o f p o p

i s m152 populist reason

t e d b y j o r g e

th e question

th e birth of biopolitics