Ernesto Laclau

Ernesto Laclau ( born October 6, 1935 in Buenos Aires ) is an Argentine political theorist who impute themselves to the Post-Marxism and core theoretical positions of post-structuralism and the Postfundationalismus.

Life

Laclau is Emeritus Professor of Political Theory at the University of Essex where he also served as director of the doctoral program of ideology and discourse analysis. The Argentine-born scientist has taught at numerous universities in the Americas, Europe, Australia, North America and South Africa.

In 1958, Laclau was a member of the Partido Socialista Argentino (PSA). In 1963 he joined the Partido Socialista de la Izquierda Nacional, which emerged as a splinter group from the PSA. By 1968, Laclau worked in the political leadership of that party. As an editor he was a long time involved in the party's weekly newspaper Lucha Obrera.

Art and theory

Together with Chantal Mouffe 1985 he published his most important work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. For deconstruction of Marxism, which first appeared in 1991 in German. The reception of this work is limited because of its criticism of the Marxist economism often on his post- Marxist line of argument. But Laclau and Mouffe develop therein for a theory of hegemony Antonio Gramsci further and formulate the other hand the project of radical and plural democracy. This means that the work is divided into a hegemonic and a democratic theory part, finally devoted mainly Mouffe, the further development of the democracy concept. Laclau suggests a different path: in New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time, among others, he systematized his theory of cultural hegemony and takes strong reference to Jacques Lacan. This influence is particularly attributable to the meeting with the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. In addition to the hegemony theory and the concept of radical democracy in the work of Laclau is also the theory of discourse analysis of meaning which goes beyond a purely linguistic analysis and the political Signifikationslogik describes.

Starting from the general question of the production of the relationship of discursive formations, it is the central concern Laclau, expose the cultural techniques, which are responsible for the equivalence of a complex political system, which itself can no longer rely on essentialist arguments, but rather as an ensemble differential positions presented. Laclau asks about the conditions under which a stabilizing importance of internal discursive differences, which is responsible for the formation of modern social systems, may be possible.

These Laclau first describes the ambivalent mechanism underlying any political identity formation based on:

As well as the positioning of the individual system element is thus guaranteed two times, traces the political formation dynamics of a double movement by determining their identity both as a game of their internal differences and these differences on the other hand flattens in the moment in which they antagonistic to that of an external Community defining and thus ensures the equivalence of the system.

The question of an inner identity of the political is indistinguishable from that of the longer edges of the discourse. The self- description of such differentially authored identity, however, is only possible under the conditions that the excluded of the system (that yes its equivalence just guaranteed) articulated and always differential act of signification itself is undermined:

If everyone wants discourse constitute itself as an attempt " to dominate the field of discursive to stop the flow of differences, to construct a center ", then there are, according to Laclau such - got rid of any shortcut to individual signifieds and thus - empty signifiers that the can result in unrepresentable Differential of political identity in physical intuition. Delete the internal differences of the system by making them equivalent to face an outside of discourse, whose name - which also represents the " limits of Bezeichenbarkeit " - is indistinguishable from the self-description of the system.

Reception

Laclau's work has been rezipiert in the last two decades increasingly in the cultural studies theory. His theory of empty signifiers that conceives in an antagonistic relationship with the logics of equivalence and difference as opposite to each other and at the same conditional forces the discursive, was named recently as a general ontology of being.

Selected Publications

  • Emancipation and difference. ( " Emancipation ( s )"). Verlag Turia & Kant, Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-85132-244-6.
  • On Populist Reason. Verso Books, London, 2005.
  • Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. For deconstruction of Marxism. ( " Hegemony and socialist strategy" ). Translated from English and edited by Michael Hintz and Gerd Vorwallner. 4th edition. Passages - Verlag, Wien 2012, ISBN 978-3-7092-0035-3.
  • New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time. ( Phronesis ). Verso Books, London, 1990, ISBN 0-86091-202-7.
  • Politics and Ideology in Marxism. Capitalism, Fascism, Populism. ( "Politics and ideology in Marxist theory" 1977). Argument- Verlag, Berlin 1981, ISBN 3-88619-028-5.
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