The Concept of the Subject in Laclau
2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02589340601122919
ISSN1470-1014
Autores Tópico(s)Philosophy, Science, and History
ResumoAbstract Abstract In this article Laclau's conception of the subject as ‘the distance from undecidability to the decision’ is explained, defended and criticised. The starting point of Laclau's intervention, namely the impasse of both the transcendental and structuralist conceptions of the subject, is sketched and the conception of the subject in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (HSS) is examined and its shortcoming pointed out. Laclau's post-HSS conception of the subject stricto sensu, that is, as distinct from the ‘full ego subject’ or subject qua ‘subject-position’, is then presented and contrasted with the theories of the subject advanced by Sartre and Zizek. In conclusion, Laclau's conception is itself criticised on the ground that it excludes the subject's own contribution to its emergence – the subject cannot be reduced to ‘the distance from undecidability to the decision’, but must also refer to the distance from antagonism to undecidability. Notes 1. See Williams (2001) Williams, Caroline. 2001. Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistance of the Subject, New York: Athlone. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] and Balibar (1972 Balibar, Étienne. 1972. Self Criticism. Theoretical Practice, 8/9: 56–72. [Google Scholar], 1975 Balibar, Étienne. 1975. Cinq Études du Matérialisme Historique, Paris: Maspero. [Google Scholar]) on structuralism and its difficulties with the subject. 2. See Balibar (1972 Balibar, Étienne. 1972. Self Criticism. Theoretical Practice, 8/9: 56–72. [Google Scholar], 1975 Balibar, Étienne. 1975. Cinq Études du Matérialisme Historique, Paris: Maspero. [Google Scholar]) on the incoherence of the concept ‘a transitional mode of production’ which he introduced in Reading Capital. 3. ‘Whenever we use the category of “subject” in the text, we will do so in the sense of “subject-positions” within a discursive structure. Subjects cannot be the origin of social relations – not even in the limited sense of being endowed with powers that render an experience possible – as all “experience” depends on “precise discursive conditions of possibility” (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985 Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso. [Google Scholar], p. 115) 4. See Laclau (1996 Laclau, Ernesto. 1996. Emancipatio, London: Verso. [Google Scholar], pp. 20, 21) on conceptions of the subject in structuralist and post-structuralist thought. 5. See Laclau (1990 Laclau, Ernesto. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London: Verso. [Google Scholar], p. 30; 2000, pp. 58, 78, 82–5) on how articulation itself entails the intervention of the subject. 6. See Pecheux (1975 Pecheux, Michel. 1975. Les Verites de la Palice, Paris: Maspero. [Google Scholar], pp. 144, 146) on the concept of a discursive formation as the ‘matrix’ of meaning determining ‘what can and should be done’. 7. The Laclauian subject is thus both ‘thrown into the structure’ (Laclau, 1990 Laclau, Ernesto. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London: Verso. [Google Scholar], p.50) – a condition of it being a subject at all – and ‘thrown up’ (1990, p. 44) by a failed structure, i.e. it always ‘depends’ on the signifier even in as ‘the locus of a decision not determined by the structure’ (1990, p. 30). 8. The Laclauian subject stricto sensu is thus a ‘weak’ subject-position – one that is barred ($) and faltering because lacking the support of a master-signifier (S1) which, in providing it with the identification – support it requires, eclipses it (S1/$): see Miller (1987) Miller, Jacques-Alain. 1987. “Microscopia: An Introduction to the Reading of Television”. In Television:, Edited by: Jacques, Lacan and Joan, Copjec. New York: W.W. Norton. A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment [Google Scholar]. 9. The existentialist theory of Sartre refers to the ‘early’ Sartre, i.e. to The Transcendence of the Ego (1936), Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1937), The Imaginary (1940), and Being and Nothingness (1943). 10. The spontaneity of the Sartrean subject goes all the way down. The ‘for-itself’ can nihiliate the facticity of any situation as ‘tis being in the world…is a choice’ (Sartre, 1956 Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomeological Ontology., Edited by: Hazel, E. Barnes. London: Methuen. Translated by [Google Scholar], p. 57) and ‘there is no situation in which the given would crush beneath its weight the freedom which constitutes it as such – conversely there is no situation in which the for-itself would be more free than others’ (Sartre, 1956 Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomeological Ontology., Edited by: Hazel, E. Barnes. London: Methuen. Translated by [Google Scholar], p. 549). For Sartre's existentialist theory, to allow the object to penetrate and limit the subject in any way is to deny the subject any freedom at all. For Sartre (1956 Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomeological Ontology., Edited by: Hazel, E. Barnes. London: Methuen. Translated by [Google Scholar], p. 617), ‘… nothing foreign has decided what we feel, what we live, what we are’. For Laclau, on the other hand, ‘I am a subject precisely because I cannot be an absolute consciousness, because something constitutively alien penetrates me’ (Laclau, 1996 Laclau, Ernesto. 1996. Emancipatio, London: Verso. [Google Scholar], p. 21). In Adventures of the Dialectic Merleau-Ponty (1973 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1973. Adventures of the Dialectic, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. [Google Scholar], pp. 124, 132) famously drew attention to the ‘ultra-bolshevism’ lodged within the Sartrean subject with its ‘vertiginous freedom’ and magic power to make ourselves whatever we want'. 11. For Laclau (1990 Laclau, Ernesto. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London: Verso. [Google Scholar], p. 61), on the other hand, the subject is at the extremity of the structure – the limit point beyond which meaning and identity dissolve; it is ‘constituted on the structure's uneven edges’. 12. See Hampshire (1965 Hampshire, Stuart. 1965. Thought and Action, London: Viking. [Google Scholar], p. 190) on the subject's ‘backward-stepping’ or adoption of the recessive attitude (p. 124) as a condition of possibility of reflection on its own possibilities. 13. ‘…we must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher's task was well compared by Newath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea’ (Quine, 1980 Quine, Willard van Orman. 1980. From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], pp. 78, 79). See also Hookway (1988) Hookway, Christopher. 1988. Quine, London: Polity Press. [Google Scholar]. 14. ‘Our thesis is that antagonism has a revelatory function, in that it shows the ultimately contingent nature of all objectivity’. And ‘The moment of antagonism where the undecidable nature of the alternatives…becomes fully visible constitutes the filed of the political’ (Laclau, 1990 Laclau, Ernesto. 1990. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London: Verso. [Google Scholar], pp. 18, 35).
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